What a cheery subject! But some on the blog have mentioned this and I thought it deserved a thread. What happens when you die?You rot. Now, what to do with a corpse? My vote is to donate the whole thing to science and those who need organs. I think that’s a pro-life stance.My wife doesn’t quite agree. She’ll donate life-saving organs, but the rest is to be buried. This is one of the few things on which I have acquiesced in our marriage. In other words, some of my body will go to waste — worm food and nothing more. The reason? Jewish religion forbids mutilating a body, and as most of you know my wife is theistic.http://www.apologeticspress.org/articles/2164 This is a pretty decent article from an Aplogetics side. It seems to me that anyone who is pro-life should be vehemently pro-organ-donation.
ROTFLMAO. Tiny Tim had wet dream.
Throw it on the wood pile in the back yard and have a bonfire. That’s it, nothing more. A dead human is equal to a dead cockroach.
Donate organs? When I’m dying the last thing I need is having to worry about some greedy doctor harvesting my organs before I’m dead, or killing me to get the organs sooner.
Bobc,
Are you that worried about living for another 8 minutes?
By all means, do what you want with your organs, but I’ll never agree with you on this.
Tim,
That’s certainly an interesting dream. Had I ever experienced something like that I’d probably feel differently. But, as I stated at the outset, it’s an isolated personal experience. Personal experience is great for reinforcing those who are already convinced, but that’s never going to cut it with me. I mean no offense, but I can’t consider you an objective narrator. That is the root of the problem with personal experiences.
The circumstances certainly throw out any of my previous theories, but there’s still far too much doubt to accept a supernatural explanation as the only viable one. Perhaps your aunt had mentioned this girl to you in passing and you didn’t consciously remember. More simply, perhaps the details weren’t as exact as you remember and Confirmation Bias explains your experience. I know you claimed the details were exact, but I have no way to know this is certain. I’d have to take it on faith. I think you can understand my problem with doing that.
Then again, perhaps there was some supernatural experience involved. But, I can’t conclude that since there is no extraordinary evidence.
If that’s an example of me rejecting that which I am predisposed to reject, then so be it. You’re just as guilty of that for rejecting a natural explanation.
Alatham,
I’m not actually claiming that a supernatural explanation is the only one. I’m waiting for someone here to provide a scientific explanation. You haven’t attempted to provide one, so I’ll keep asking.
I think you may have missed the whole point of my relating the experience. It is obvious you would have to accept what I’m telling you is the truth. Human experience by it’s very nature is not something you reproduce in a lab!
If someone came to you and said they had something wonderful to share, but you would have to travel down the road a little ways to find it what would you say? “Oh no, I’m not budging an inch! You have to prove to me there really is something first!” Would you say, “You sir, are probably lying to me. Show me proof first, so that I will believe you.”
I do appreciate the fact you are at least open to the possibility I presented.
Tim:
& I submit that a commonality of experience is insufficient – no control groups, & anecdotal.
Mostly that fraud Casteneda, but yes. OBE’s are interesting, but did you know the body can be tricked into it?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/6960612.stm
Did you know the RV program was officially defunct decades ago? Why? IT DOESN’T WORK, that’s why.
I’ve had those too. Sadly, these usually end up being pretty mundane moments: sitting on a bench in a park, sitting on the crapper, etc.
The human brain is a computer, constantly churning out possible scenarios. Now, if you were able to say, win the lottery, save 100′s of lives, project your consciousness into an area 100′s of miles away (that you’ve never been to) & be able to describe it in precise detail, well, then I’d be willing to listen.
But of course, under these sort of empirical circumstances, this ‘ability’ mysteriously vanishes.
Every time. Or @ least when an actual skeptic’s about. Some rot about ‘disharmonic convergence’ disrupts the ‘astral ether’.
Odd, how none of these folks who lay claim to these ‘abilities’ are incapable of claiming the Randi prize.
KA,
“Did you know the RV program was officially defunct decades ago? Why? IT DOESN’T WORK, that’s why.”
No that’s not the case. It wasn’t that it wasn’t possible, just not reliable enough for government purposes.
Another explanation for Deja Vu is that you never had that first memory in the first place. For example, if you are in a city where you’ve never been before and see a distinctive building, while writing that data to a memory you might accidentally assign it a date that occurred in the past, even though it just occurred. Then you would access the memory and say “Whoa! I feel like I’ve been here before!” You might even try to figure out how you got this memory and rationalize that it must have been in a dream – a dream that predicted the future, you think!
This is a much less complicated explanation than time travel, supernaturally inspired visions, etc.
http://www.bad-language.com/remote
Chris B,
Yeah, trying to figure out what is actually happening during the experience is difficult.
Yours is an interesting theory.
In my case, the dream was remembered upon waking and the events in the dream were experienced in real life several days later. I knew I had had a dream when I awoke and when the events unfolded days later, they matched the dream exactly, hence the intensity of the Deja Vu.
As I related previously, I had never experienced a Deja Vu lasting more than a few seconds. This one lasted for a lot longer, perhaps minutes. There may have actually been several Deja Vus in succession, but I can’t recall.
Tim:
Real world translation: “Doesn’t work.”
Tim,
Earlier you were claiming this as evidence that supernatural things happen, weren’t you?
In order for it to count as evidence of the supernatural, the explanation has to be supernatural. So either the explanation is supernatural and it can count as evidence or the explanation is unclear and it does not count as evidence.
I’ve mentioned Confirmation Bias twice now and it still fits as a possible explanation. It has the advantage of being well-documented and at least partly understood.
As for the Remote Viewing government program, if they had found it increased their ability to predict even a tiny amount they would not have shut down the program. That kind of advantage would have immense potential. The CIA didn’t say “it didn’t work well enough,” the CIA said it didn’t work.