continuation from theist zone_souls and death

[tackattack]

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 ;-)

I don't recall all of the references to this but we'll just take it from here:
1- There are lots of well documented cases of brain trauma giving rise to dramatic personality, mood, emotional changes. A fact I'm not disputing and have already shown that the material brain does directly affect the mind. I never disputed that, I'm postulating that something else can also inform the mind that is insubstantial. There are also cases that cite people having experiences while in a "brain dead" state which I have cited in the other thread several places and instances. I'm not sure on the numbers but the people who survive brain death is probably a similar ratio to that reported experiences postmortem. When the sample availability is small you can't take a typical scientific sampling. However, I also cited that with about 50 studies (across various religious backgrounds) elements of NDE's were similar enough to at lead to the feasibility of the premise and certainly not delusional by default. Frankly I think it's ignoring evidence to be so dismissive and say they were all a misdiagnosis.
2- Ok so abstract concepts (like math) can inform and be useful and productive with regard to reality and are "real" and justifiable within their framework. What if your framework were outside of causality and were necessary logically for the abstract to exist?
3-Let's just start over and I'll define what I refer to as a soul
soul –supranatural aspect of humans that is imparted by God and informs the consciousness, survives death and is used in the final judgment by God.

Poke away