I don't understand the hostility. I, like Kas, am making an attempt to understand.
Scientists, then, if not science, definitely exclude some categories of phenomena from consideration on the basis that their reality is not tenable within their overall picture of the world.
Bertrand Russell said, in the concluding sections of History of Western Philosophy, something to the effect that while we (analytical philosophers) recognise there are questions which the intellect cannot answer, we refuse to accept that there are hidden or higher ways of knowledge not available to the intellect or to science.
The 'scientific worldview' has been normalised within Western society to such an extent that many don't realise it is a worldview. Irrespective of the effecitiveness of the scientific method, the worldview that accompanies it posits certain fundamentals, such as that, for example, the realm of ordinary perception and objective measurement is the sole reality, no other dimension or modes of reality can be perceived; that matter and energy are the fundamental constituents of reality and that mind is the product of the brain.
If you propose there are alternative ways of understanding the human condition or modes of perception which illuminate a separate reality, you will not be accorded any respect by science.
And that is what I mean when I say that 'science is dogmatic'. It will explore any route of enquiry, within certain bounds.
The one thing that is true across all science is how empirical it is; that is, the only scientifically admissible things are those which are physically observable--and repeatable. For the afterlife to become 'scientific' shades that exist after death or some such thing must be thus both observable and repeatable.
Until it is you cannot enter it into the realm of science.
Science is not driven by our imagination, it's driven by reality!
Note here the implicit assumption about the nature of reality. Not necessarily an incorrect assumption, but an assumption that science must make, and philosophy can question.
I agree with that. Incidentally have you ever read The Sleepwalkersby Arthur Koeslter? Very germane to the discussion.
"The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe" is a 1959 book by Arthur Koestler, and one of the main accounts of the history of cosmology and astronomy in the Western World, beginning in ancient Mesopotamia and ending with Isaac Newton.
From the cover: The history of cosmic theories can be called, without exaggeration, a history of collective obsessions and controlled schizophrenias, and the manner in which some discoveries have been made resemble the conduct of a sleepwalker, rather than the performance of an electronic brain."
I am often sceptical about the 'science rules' attitude (which is very much in keeping with the spirit of the times of course.) However you acknowledge that philosophy and science are concerned with different types of questions, while there are others who say that if the question cannot be answered by scientific means, then it is not a real question. And that is a vital distinction.
I'll answer one more time, I have posted my mothers experience and i asked you to comment. To save you searching i will briefly tell the story again.
In the late sixties , it was reported a train crash had happened and four passengers had died. The names of those killed would not be published till the next of kin had bee informed. My mother, that night, dreamed one of the passengers, a certain major in the army had left home without saying goodbye to his wife. In my mothers dream he told her of his name and requested she contact his wife telling her he loved her and to say good bye. My mother told my daughter in the morning , me later on in the day, she was visible shaken by the dream. The next day this major was reported in the news papers as one of the dead. My mother refused to contact the wife as she thought the wife might think her cranky. I rang the police and the BBC to see if the names had been announced prematurely, assuming my mother might had overheard this subconsciously, they assured me they had not.
I have an anecdote of my own. One morning in May this year I signed up for the free online New York Times because I wanted to read an article. . .
Thanks, xris, and apologies for not getting back sooner. . . with the Fall/Winter semester just having kicked in (from last Monday) I've had more than my usual share of things to do (as well as other thread matters on Philforum).
I see. I do recall you had once mentioned about your mother's having had a dream or two, but it was the choking experience that I had had in mind there (I was unaware of this dream detail). One contention, however, is that was not your experience, most precisely, but rather your mother's experience. You had mentioned in this thread, that YOU, XRIS, had had an experience (as in firsthand). If you had only been talking of your mother's experience herein, it would have been better to have been more correct with your wording.
Of the details to consider here one is time lapses. At what time had the train wreck occurred, at what time had the 'time of death' been put at (there may be a chance of having died some time after the actual accident impact), and after how long a lapse of time did any surviving family members, who knew of family members having been on that train, find out about the accident, AND/OR OTHERWISE were informed of a family member having died? When was the name released to the newspaper company, and by whom; when was the paper layout made, and the actual pressing done? (in the 60's it was still mostly type-based layout, rather than film--if my understanding is correct.)
Another contention is that of this being a dream. We can say with a high degree of certainty that dream content usually occurrs in REM--especially that which can be recalled--and is a matter of brain function. This would mean that since the content of dreams is most clearly seen as the 'free-wheeling'-like combinations of random memory content, that the dream content basis had been in your mother's brain. This does not even nearly adequately demand an interpretation of life after death (meaning that the active consciousness and mind content of a living person remains intact upon somatic death). We are talking about dream content here.
One additional factor in the immediately above understanding would be the question of your mother's degree of accurate recall of the dream content itself. It is not so big a mystery that dreams are not things which always lead to perfect memorized events. Also, why your mother, instead of his wife?
Regarding whether any names had leaked in any way, I'd rather think that we'd have to ask all those involved, instead of just any particular person on the other end of a telephone line (if the major had been in uniform, the chances that there would have been a name tag would be high, as well; and we can assume there were, in fact, other survivors from the accident). However, once again, we need to verify the time lapses raised firstly.
Other random questions which effort should be made to verify, would be of the likes of: Did the major and his wife have any children, and if so, why not say goodbye, and send his love to them? Were the major and his wife on good terms, or even living together? (and if there were not on good terms, or living together, and he had not thought nor cared to say 'good-bye' or 'I love you' to her, then what reason would there be to think that any change of mind would have come with death--if one were to hold that the content of brain does not change at somatic death? There could be more.
All in all, I would conclude that this was just a dream, and leaves us no room to consider that a person's brain content will remain unchanged at all, or in any degree, even, with death of the total of brain cells of that person, and to that degree in no way supports the conclusion that there is life after death.
ps. and as far as dreams go, you see, I've had mine too--a few which have 'come true' (as they say) to a large degree, but which I can yet see as random true negatives (in other words, pure happenstance which quite matched future events.
---------- Post added 09-25-2009 at 04:03 PM ----------
What very often can be deduced to be getting in the way emotionally, in such circumstances, is the natural tendency to associate, patternize, and interpret; and it is very likely due to a lingering of survival instinct that is still operative. (such as when noticing the tall grass moving a little distance away from you on the savannah, or the animals in the jungle suddenly screaming and scampering away . . . it's better to first see it as a predator than just the wind blowing, or a 'by-chance' misidentity by the other animals) It would not be of any real value to question the truthfulness of the story--the report--but we should always be most careful with interpretation, association., and patternizing.
It would have been exactly the same care that should have been taken upon General Patton's having told some of those of his troops that "God" had cleared the weather for that planned push further into Germany. (a report I had read by soilders on a certain advance push when the weather had been bad up until that day). Also, we would best refrain from over patternizing when other random events occur, such as all three beach names having been given in a crossword puzzle not too long before D-day. (if my memory serves me well here on all three names having appeared in that single crossword puzzle)
To turn the question around, what would constitute evidence of 'life after death' that would be regarded seriously by a scientific thinker?
Ian Stevenson, as I indicated previously, went to a lot of trouble to screen out fraud, suggestion, and other types of contamination. There remained a number of cases - I think it was in excess of one hundred - where there seemed to be no better explanation of what these children said than that they really did remember something about their past lives.
Do you think this says anything about the attitude of current science to such questions, generally?
Scientists generally are very clear about what they will consider plausible, possible, worth investigating, and so on. You can bet your boots that most of them will flee with the speed of a thousand frightened gazelles from anything as loopy as re-incarnation. Kill your reputation and your funding in no time flat. Dr Ian Stevenson's unit at the University of Virginia which did all the investigation of children who remembered their past lives was privately funded by a grant from the man that invented Xerography, Chester Carlson. In fact, I don't think old Chester himself was the instigator, from memory it was his wife which was the enthusiast.
To turn the question around, what would constitute evidence of 'life after death' that would be regarded seriously by a scientific thinker?
Now, those who want to say that we never die, want to say the the personality, the consciousness, the knowledge of, and tendency to be aware of the possession of, a body and an individual mind, continue as is, for all eternity . . . life after death (in the sense of a human's memory banks, personality, cognitive function and intelligence, consciousness state, and physical connection to mind and brain elements)
Ian Stevenson, as I indicated previously,
Reduce the question to its most basic form. Is science or religion something that can or cannot agree? I.e. are either sentient? I once had a talk with science, about science, and then with religion about religion. I became so confused and ended up screaming at both of them when I suddenly realized they were eating my pizza.
What is an anthropomorphism? Is a little known song once sung by the frogotten rock group Plato and the Elements. I am seeking a copy if anyone has one. j.c.
Science is a method. People can be dogmatic, not methods. People can stubbornly believe (with little evidence) in some things dealing with science and assert their opinions, but this makes the person dogmatic not the method. It makes no sense to say that science is dogmatic. It's like saying the number three is angry; it's a categorical error.
Once again, a categorical error. Science does not have the capacity to agree or disagree. It's a method and does not have an opinion or will to speak.
Ok, I'll give this a shot here, but it will probably not be nearly complete, because I'm kind of shooting from the hip here. First of all, by saying 'life after death' I am going to hold it that we are saying something along the lines of the following:
Therefore, all the factors which make a human being (a H. sapien) (1) in the state of being alive, are said to continue as are, intact, after somatic death.
What will have to be shown firstly, is that cell death in the brain does not alter any of those above mentioned matters in any way, to any material degree, up to total somatic death of the animal. In the process of doing that, it will have to be demonstrated that functions such as memory maintenance, structure to structure communication, depolarization, among other things, will be functionally sound upon the breakdown of that which makes those very events/functions occur and continue.
While this first hurdle has been most clearly shown to be unclearable, what one would want to see next ( if it were cleared), in applying scientific method-like thinking, is consistency of report and reproducible tests to demonstrate that consistency. There have been, who really knows how many tens of billions of H. sapiens who have lived on the earth over the past, what, thirty something thousand years? All these would have had to have continued living after death, in this model(2), and we'd want the evidence to be consistent with this too, even now. (for example we'd expect evidence for non-modern language, for pre-historic lifestyle expression, and so on). Of course, this also would depend on communicative ability, so we'd have to demonstrate how, what we'd otherwise call non-matter, can effect matter (such as would needed in our hearing a sound, or voice).
Now if we were using a different concept of 'life,' in the phrase, 'life after death,' we'd have to present the hypothesis, and then test for it; and if that 'life' simply meant life as we see it today, from matter which has been 'plowed back into the soil' for reuse, then that should present no real problem to demonstrate. Of course, in that case, we'd have to acquisce that that which was the personality, mental life, and all that that entails (see above) of any and all individuals is no longer in that coherent state again, to that degree, after the decomposition of the elements that make it.
Jeeprs, while I am slightly familiar with Stevenson, I have avoided dealing with that simply because I have no information, neither pro, nor con, on the reports, nor on the details of his studies, so I can really say nothing. However, the concept of reincarnation, that is, 'a soul's' being put into a different body again (as the term basically means) has the same hurdles to clear, and it has failed equally. (because of the concept that the true being of person is not physical at all)
I do recall reading (in linguistic course material) about one case of a girl who could speak some very broken and incomplete German, and who claimed that she had been so-n-so from way back, and whose parents swore she'd never been exposed to German, but which lacked all other ways to verify. (her German was very little and poor, no historical record of that so-n-so, only her parents word to go on, basically) Even if we were to conclude that her German had not been acquired in any fashion during her infancy, we could only conclude that something unexplanable had transpired--because such linguistical memory requires a certain constitution and construction of brain which will have to maintained within the limits of a fixed state over the length of time that the memory of language is to be up and running [and decomposition of brain really destroys that].
1. And again, we do have acknowledge other life forms as well. There is nothing special about the H. sapien which draws any absolute, and uncrossable divide between this species and any other species moving downward from our fellow 'H. species' and primates, onward.
2. And we'd have to keep in mind the sound evidence from burial sites that H. sapien neanderthalensis and earlier huminoids had believed in 'life after death.'
