Kurt Gödel, his mother and the argument for life after death

> First of all, the world being rational is a property humans ascribe to it.

Why believe in mainstream science, instead of believing in “creation science”, astrology, crystal woo, whatever? Because there is much stronger evidence for the former than the latter? But what are our standards for judging the strength of evidence? And why should we let those standards have control of our beliefs? Rationality is what gives us those standards, and tells us we are obliged to follow them. Is rationality objective or subjective? Well, if it is subjective, then proponents of those “alternative sciences” can just pick an alternative rationality which supports their own views instead of the mainstream ones, and if rationality is subjective, it ultimately makes the decision between mainstream and “alternative” science subjective too. But, if it is objective, how is it objectively grounded? If we ground its objectivity in empirical science - that is circular, we are grounding it in something which itself depends on it. So, I argue, the objectivity of mainstream empirical science requires the existence of objective rationality external to it. But, for that rationality to truly be objective, it must be an innate feature of reality, not something simply arbitrarily ascribed to it by the human mind. Hence, Gödel‘s premise, that rationality is (in some sense) an objective feature of reality, not just some subjective creation of the human mind, must be true.

Flaws are not proof of non intentional emergence vs intentional design. We design flawed systems all the time.

Besides, it would be a very naïve stance to think the universe as it is today was drawn complete and definitively. There are a lot more nuanced and intricate creationist worldviews and they have been espoused in a clear headed way by some of the most fundamental characters in the history of science.

Is there an amount of concordant eyewitness testimony that should count as evidence?

If your answer to that is "no", you're not being reasonable. The courts of most countries would also disagree with you. This even takes into account the fact that "eyewitness testimony is bad"... Like sure, maybe if it's 10, but if it's 100 people all making extremely similar claims? 1000? 10,000?

The NDE people often use language like "realer than what I thought was real". While some drugs can induce this too, drugs also give quite random experiences, while the NDE thing seems fairly well-structured with few exceptions.

It also seems internally-consistent (as in, within the realm of itself and its claims about reality, it doesn't seem to violate its own rules).

If I was anorgasmic and thousands of people told me that orgasms are real and "you know it when you have one," why should (or shouldn't) I believe them?

Have you heard of the Kalman filter? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalman_filter

Consider that every eyewitness can be mathematically treated as a "noisy sensor" (who might also be a bad actor via lying). What if we applied a Kalman filter to quantized claims made across thousands of self-claimed NDE experiencers? Might this be a way to quantify (and therefore bring into the realm of rationality) eyewitness testimony of this nature?

There are many things we consider "real" that we can't directly measure, btw. Why (from a science or mathematical perspective) is Taylor Swift so popular? How would we determine this without asking people (which puts us right back into "eyewitness testimony" again)?

You very clearly haven't seen a single one, much less a bunch of them as I have. There's no generative AI going on with people on video telling their stories going back years ago. I'm a skeptic and I am pretty convinced at this point that something real is going on, here. They also actually are mostly ANTI-religion (in fact, the ones that seem very religion-slanted also seem false or fail to maintain internal consistency, so I've easily dismissed the vast majority of those). The testimonies in the playlist I put together almost entirely push the notion that most if not all religions are false in small or large part.

> but know enough about our brain to be fairly certain that there is nothing even close to any afterlife

You can't say that for sure. The brain might be a consciousness conduit and not a consciousness generator (which is pretty much what these testimonies are saying). If I step on a garden hose (assuming I can't see beyond it) and the water stops, and I stop stepping on it and the water resumes, you're basically saying the garden hose must be the source of the water, when we know that isn't true (but only because we can see beyond the garden hose). A naïve individual from, say, 10,000 years ago who has never seen seemingly unlimited pressurized water on tap who encounters a garden hose might initially conclude that the hose produces the water...

> it makes humans feel good

There's a large set of things that are broadly agreed to be true which do not make people feel good and a large set of things that are broadly agreed to be true that do. "Feeling good" is therefore orthogonal to veracity so this is a non-argument.

I'm disappointed that you're responding as a person who literally hasn't watched a single one of the videos (because the very things you said prove that). You're just yet another human who prefers to bury their head in the sand than confront evidence against their pre-existing worldviews, like most people. And "with all due respect," that's not rational at all.

Hey that combination is also not found anywhere else in this discussion.