The episode is still rather interesting if you're curious to understand a different perspective.
I might or might not but you can’t possibly imagine that a TV show or anything else would convert me from my deeply held faith, or the billions of people around the world. I think saying “the exact opposite is true actually. None of us will ever experience that” is extremely arrogant and know-nothing. I’m not saying I’m right, I’m just saying you can’t say I’m wrong. Nothing is proven.
You’re putting some words in my mouth.
You don’t see any similarity between my universal claim and yours?
When I was about 5 years old I asked my mom what happens after we die. She thought for a second a said "no one has ever come back and told me." There will always be gaps. While hypotheses, religious or naturalistic, are important, it's also important to be ok not having all the answers.
I work in biotech and as I am sure you know, it is the field where unknown phenomena are the expected norms. So yes, I made peace with not being able to know everything a long time ago. But by the same virtue, it means I can't dismiss anything unless I have concrete evidence against it. It is better to leave rooms for doubts rather than settling with a half-answer and consider it a solved matter. To do so would mean…
Agreed. I'm just confused why so many people are pre-facing their comments with some version of "I'm a life-long atheist but I can relate to this story somehow" as if there is a discrepancy between atheism and the article.
Yeah, me too. Many of us have had dreams that were strangely prophetic, powerful, or both. I often try to think of it as the subconsciousness of the pattern matching brain managing to piece together something that the waking mind missed or too busy or afraid to dig deeper into. But of course, it cannot explain everything. Like you said, there are sometimes dreams preceding events that simply can't be expected or expl…
>> even though the analytical part of my brain consistently shouts this idea down every time I think about it. "shouts it down" sounds like some rebeliousness or anger. Might want to figure out who that's for. ;-)
Well, who else but for me? I make a living by thinking analytically about technical matters with sound logics and clear evidence. But that part of me wants to think about stuff that is completely opposite of what I normally do. So they are mad at each other. Kinda schizophrenic, I know.
But that is just human, right? Frankly, I would be more afraid of someone who never argue or debate an idea within themselves than someone who does so occasionally.
I am getting major psychoanalysis vibes from this article. I am reminded of Sigmund Freud and I think he wrote about dream interpretation. Today, we tend to think about dreams as random thoughts that don’t really mean much, but Freud had a hypothesis that they had something to do with wish fulfillment.
It also reminds me of a recent submission here where I believe it was an article in the WSJ about being able to choose what you dream.
I am as irreverent as you can probably get, in fact, if I have to say what I really think about religions in general, I am probably a blasphemer in every sense of the word. Yet I believe this article. Because even I had a spiritual experience too real for me to discredit or brush aside, and I meant it not just mentally but physically too. It didn't completely change my views about religions, but it did soften my stan…
> Yet I believe this article. Because even I had a spiritual experience too real for me to discredit or brush aside, I've had dreams about things that happened prior to them happening too many times for me to discredit this. For example: Early on the morning of 9/11/01 I had a dream that I was in some kind of large, room-sized elevator (probably some kind of service elevator) in a very tall building. Suddenly the ele…
I have similarly experienced dreams (day dreams even) that seemingly predicted the future. Not discounting a possible spiritual phenomenon, but at least for me I reconciled these situations as being possible "memory falts".
E.g. one time I knew exactly what a friend was going to say before they even said it (phrase was long and unique enough to seem unlikely for me to just be able to predict it). Although it seemed my mind reading powers were happening in real time, experience of the moment only exists in my memory. So it is possible that my brain imagined that experience.
Maybe recording dreams on physical notes is the way to go to account for possible memory shenanigans.
Or indeed it could be that one can recall a dream that happened by chance to be analogous to a real event.
You can easily experience this yourself by doing grounding exercises in a lucid dream. “more real than real” is always the first thing that comes to mind.
I compare the "more real than real" to watching cinematic scenes of nature, color corrected, high frame rate, high resolution recordings of unspoiled nature.
I know what you mean, but the intensity is not comparable
I have an aggressive cerebral garbage collector. I've forgotten all the dreams, visions and miraculous experiences that I thought were personality- and/or life-changing at the time. I've come close to dying a couple times and that's literally all I can say about it.
At some point I concluded that the question of an afterlife is irrelevant. Spirit or no spirit, I want to live this life well. If there's something good on the other side of death, great -- I'll get there. But I see nothing to be gained from worrying about it.
Whatever is happening, it is sad to hear about yet another case where doctors are too arrogant to listen to their patients and try to understand. It might not be a spiritual experience, it might be delirium. But perhaps it is important step in the human mind making peace with death. And it disappoints me greatly that the medical community shuns this phenomenon and anyone who tries to research it. There is nothing wor…
> And it disappoints me greatly that the medical community shuns this phenomenon
The medical community is a joke as a whole. They even brush off side effects because they have never heard about them before. They are as unscientific as you can go.
Nowhere in hard science world do people act like that.
I can somewhat see the internal workings of my dreams' characters. It's fascinating, but also makes it harder to entertain the idea that I'm seeing beyond myself.
It's as if my brain is unable to sandbox their operation from my conscious experience. If I am about to say or do something and then decide not to, the script gets derailed, and they lose momentum. When I'm about to wake up, they tend to lose the ability to speak.
I work in biotech and as I am sure you know, it is the field where unknown phenomena are the expected norms. So yes, I made peace with not being able to know everything a long time ago. But by the same virtue, it means I can't dismiss anything unless I have concrete evidence against it. It is better to leave rooms for doubts rather than settling with a half-answer and consider it a solved matter. To do so would mean…
Agreed. I'm just confused why so many people are pre-facing their comments with some version of "I'm a life-long atheist but I can relate to this story somehow" as if there is a discrepancy between atheism and the article. For the record, I think strong atheism, or the confidence that there is no god or after-life, is just as wrong as being confident that there is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_and_positive_…
Oh, thanks for that! As an atheist I always wondered what annoyed me so much in other more vocal and militant atheists.
I'd love to believe in God, a superior power, benevolent aliens, re-incarnation, anything! The problem is that I just can't, no matter how much I try.