1. Are you conceding there are no viable analogies here then? I'm sorry why do I have to explain NDE? There has been no case recorded where an individual who has claimed such, has ever "come back" with new information. The sense of floating often reported, has never given rise to actual instances where objects hidden in rooms and only observable from elevated positions have ever been reported back upon. Parsimony would lead us to beleive these are hullanactions of a damaged material body that can still sense activity around. Has anyone actually ever recovered from a brain death? From what I understand it can sometimes be hard to disntinguish between deep and severe coma and brain death. Scientifc studies in this area, clearly cite that were brain death was diagnosed the patient was infact dead and there heart stopped around 4 hrs later (naturally). Sure there are 'miraculous' cases where stuff happens that the professionals don't expect, these are hardly evidence of the immaterial, they are evidence of misdiagnosis. All research in this area is consistent with material processes, and there has never been a study across a statistcially significant sample to counter this. On the other hand there are lots of well documented cases of brain trauma giving rise to dramatic personality, mood, emotional changes. A result one would not expect if there was an immaterial self, which survived death.
3. I'm not sure where you are going with the squirrel stuff to be honest. My point was that abstract things are not real things and only exist in their own frameworks and are not physically instantiated in the universe. Thus appealing to them to demonstarte souls is a self defeating appeal. Whether they are human inventions (and I would contend those frameworks are) is not relevant to the argument over the existence of souls.
4. Confirmation bias of confirmation bias. There are also dis-similar experiences and non-experiences that you have just ignored to reach a conclusion.
5. No you did not state this, nor did you state what the soul is. If it doesn't contain us (inc personality) whats the point of it surviving death? Stating you don't know what a soul is would leave you in a position of believing something (you don't know what), which interacts with you (you don't know how), for a purpose (which is not known), that it cannot be evidenced nor proven nor reasoned and is as likely as invisible brain goblins. Not deeply impressive, is it?
7. We'll park Frankensteins experiments for now, it'll probably go nowhere. But we could test them on that squirrel ;-)
3. I'm not sure where you are going with the squirrel stuff to be honest. My point was that abstract things are not real things and only exist in their own frameworks and are not physically instantiated in the universe. Thus appealing to them to demonstarte souls is a self defeating appeal. Whether they are human inventions (and I would contend those frameworks are) is not relevant to the argument over the existence of souls.
4. Confirmation bias of confirmation bias. There are also dis-similar experiences and non-experiences that you have just ignored to reach a conclusion.
5. No you did not state this, nor did you state what the soul is. If it doesn't contain us (inc personality) whats the point of it surviving death? Stating you don't know what a soul is would leave you in a position of believing something (you don't know what), which interacts with you (you don't know how), for a purpose (which is not known), that it cannot be evidenced nor proven nor reasoned and is as likely as invisible brain goblins. Not deeply impressive, is it?
7. We'll park Frankensteins experiments for now, it'll probably go nowhere. But we could test them on that squirrel ;-)
"I still say a church steeple with a lightning rod on top shows a lack of confidence"...Doug McLeod.
