131–140 of 165 posts
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religious beliefs aside, there’s something pleasing about living a good life and facing a decent death: closure.
except without religious beliefs you cannot objectively define good and bad, it's all just moral relativism.
I've told only a few people about my near death experience, and most of them were polite, but obviously didn't believe a word I was saying. To be honest, I wouldn't believe it either if I had not experienced it myself. I did not "see" anything other than a bright light, but I was overcome with an incredible feeling that I was in the presence of, and communicating with somebody who was conveying a message of absolute…
If you anticipated that others would find this hard to believe, why not write down those visions in detail at the time? That would have provided evidence others could have used to later evaluate whether your visions were accurate.
As a skeptic, and without knowing more details, I am leaning towards self-fulfilling prophecy (you did the things in the visions because you had the visions) or confirmation bias (similar to how horoscopes feel accurate because they're vague enough to map many situations).
I hope you're right though.
I've told only a few people about my near death experience, and most of them were polite, but obviously didn't believe a word I was saying. To be honest, I wouldn't believe it either if I had not experienced it myself. I did not "see" anything other than a bright light, but I was overcome with an incredible feeling that I was in the presence of, and communicating with somebody who was conveying a message of absolute…
My memory is a bit hazy, but I thought what you are describing is very common with people who flatline and come back? I have vague memories that a new anesthetic drug was developed and used on soldiers undergoing surgery in the Vietnam war, and there was something about it that caused the same kind of reaction in those who were put under. Again, my memory is very hazy on the subject. I should go do some research and…
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Yes. Actionable: To Consider the significance of kindness, compassion, love to and for each other, which world, at large, is missing owing to many factors. And to consider one's own superficiality and have profound thoughts for others.
Why is that tied to some notion of an afterlife? If anything, it seems to me that the reality that this one life is all any of us have should make one care way more for their fragile peers, and for making it the one life they have count. As The Doors once put it, "no eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn".
It's like you got a drop of a somewhat muddy water that is the center of your life. The drop will remain in the afterlife. Everything you do either makes is muddier or cleanses it a bit. This change is what stays.
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No, this is a very bad misunderstanding of the term. https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05551b.htm Eternity in its proper sense belongs to God alone; human beings sharing in "eternal life" will experience time differently. Even the angels experience "aeviternity" which is unique to their kind. https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1010.htm#article5
Could be; I'm not too literate on this, I'm only retelling what I understood directly and this could be very limited. I just wanted to point out that "eternal life" is not going to be the same life we have now, only endless. It is very different and, speaking of boredom, definitely not boring. Boredom is an invention of mind.
Yes? Are you saying in the afterlife we'll be mindless?
Being familiar with Ayer from his Epistemology works, this writeup was unexpected. How could an empiricist write "My recent experiences have slightly weakened my conviction that my genuine death, which is due fairly soon, will be the end of me". It also directly contradicted his stance about metaphycal claims.
An empiricist could write that with no contradiction if he experienced it, which Ayer did. I think his conclusion is very reasonable. It's highly likely that NDEs are minds sputtering to a stop. But if you experience one (while your heart has stopped for 4 minutes no less), it seems rational to "slightly" update your priors towards the possibility of some kind of afterlife. At the very least, it may indicate some kin…
A "slight indication", which if I read correctly leads to "slightly weakened my conviction that my genuine death...". Isn't this kind of reasoning common for metaphysics but is met with skepticism by empiricists?
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I never remotely believed this because I don't even believe in a "me" really. One hard hit in the head can literally change your personality entirely, then you have alzheimers and all the other degenerative brain diseases that will erase "you". Even if you avoid all that "you" will be wildly different every 15-20 years. Christianity gets through this by saying you will return to your prime. That just seems kind of ch…
Basically if the base reality that we experience through a holographic world/emergent reality has no concept of time, consequence, etc, you have to create a simulation/game with rules that can allow free will to happen, that has a timeline, has consequences. Once setup, those rules apply even if they ruin the simulation experience for some, they are a necessary part of the holographic world/emergent reality serving i…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Basically if the base reality that we experience through a holographic world/emergent reality has no concept of time, consequence, etc, you have to create a simulation/game with rules that can allow free will to happen, that has a timeline, has consequences. Once setup, those rules apply even if they ruin the simulation experience for some, they are a necessary part of the holographic world/emergent reality serving i…
Nope. Everything decays. So does any substrate which reality may run on whichever way. So there will be errors in the great plan of whichever nature. Some of them may get caught by error correction codes, some others not. These uncaught exceptions are enabling deviations from the great plan :-)
In our limited experiential world things appear to decay. If our spacetime experience is emergent from something else (in which time doesn't exist), or is holographic, we have no idea what's really going on at the fundamental (lower/higher?) level. How can you have decay in the base reality that doesn't have time? Is decay not an artifact of time? If time is emergent not fundamental, so is decay.
Check out some Susskind and CS Lewis The Problem of Pain. It makes for a fun thought game.
Start with 'what reality/rules would we need in order to exercise truly free will' (the concepts from The Problem of Pain). We need time (action/consequence). We need to be able to impact ourselves/others. I need to be able to hurt you/myself. Kill you/myself. Need the mechanisms that are then used/abused by things like Alzheimer's. But if we bring in Susskind, that is all just happening in the emergent space/time (my emergent free will reality) not in the base reality (my lower/higher? reality that doesn't have things like time). There is no reason that what impacts us in the 'free will reality' that enables us to have free will/experience time also impacts whatever we might be in the base reality (my lower/higher? reality). In that reality without time we are the child just born and the body turned to dust. We are forever in the moments when our loved ones held us. That is heaven. Not some new experiential timeline to reflect. We ARE ALL THE MOMENTS, not a reflection on the moments after the fact.
Hell IS repeating every bad thing, forever. Heaven is experiencing love from your loved ones, forever. But not in some cloud world we exist in after death thinking back. But in the same one that everything happened, only at the non-emergent level not the emergent spacetime level. Me in the non-emergent reality is already in heaven/hell, is already experiencing it all, because it exists in a space without emergent linear time. I will be in heaven, because I will have hugs from my mom and hugs for my children, forever. That is where lower (higher?) level me will dwell.
To be fair, this is the point I worked back from after my mom died. How do I deal with loosing her (as an ex-Catholic). In what reality are her hugs for me forever? This is what I gamed out. We are all the moments, forever, in the non-emergent reality without linear time.
How else can the non-emergent true reality contain our emergent linear space time reality?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Susskind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Problem_of_Pain
Earlier quoted context omitted.
An empiricist could write that with no contradiction if he experienced it, which Ayer did. I think his conclusion is very reasonable. It's highly likely that NDEs are minds sputtering to a stop. But if you experience one (while your heart has stopped for 4 minutes no less), it seems rational to "slightly" update your priors towards the possibility of some kind of afterlife. At the very least, it may indicate some kin…
His conclusion is based on anecdotal evidence from his French friend's mother: "This experience could well have been delusive. A slight indication that it might have been veridical [objectively real] has been supplied by my French friend, or rather by her mother, who also underwent a heart arrest many years ago. When her daughter asked her what it had been like, she replied that all that she remembered was that she m…
> A "slight indication", which if I read correctly leads to "slightly weakened my conviction that my genuine death...". Isn't this kind of reasoning common for metaphysics but is met with skepticism by empiricists?
Using evidence (experience) to update your degree of belief is in every way empiricist. Metaphysicians have often been criticized for making claims without evidence, or claiming to make deduction from little/no evidence. But that's not happening here.
I've told only a few people about my near death experience, and most of them were polite, but obviously didn't believe a word I was saying. To be honest, I wouldn't believe it either if I had not experienced it myself. I did not "see" anything other than a bright light, but I was overcome with an incredible feeling that I was in the presence of, and communicating with somebody who was conveying a message of absolute…
> To be honest, I wouldn't believe it either if I had not experienced it myself. If you anticipated that others would find this hard to believe, why not write down those visions in detail at the time? That would have provided evidence others could have used to later evaluate whether your visions were accurate. As a skeptic, and without knowing more details, I am leaning towards self-fulfilling prophecy (you did the t…
I was 15 years old at the time, and not much of a writer.
Most of my visions did not stay in my consciousness. Over the years, when I would meet somebody new or be in a place that I had seen, it would trigger the memory of the vision. You can attribute this to Déjà vu if you like, but in this case I knew exactly where/when I had seen the vision beforehand, and it sometimes triggered more memories of not-yet-happened events.
I'm old now, and I haven't had any experiences related to my visions for over a decade. I'm pretty sure that all of my visions have now been lived.