Can you have out of body experiences?

[kingius]

So I figure an out of body experience is the result of a particular aspect in our brain not quite working as it normally does.

While that may be true in your particular case - and a good deal others - it cannot be true in all of them because it just does not fit the facts for all reported cases. And that, in a nutshell, is the problem with reductionism to brain activity (a cornerstone of the materialist philosophy) being used as an attempt to explain this type of phenomena. So we are left with two choices; either the explanation is wrong or the people who experience it (for example whilst being clinically dead and then later revived, either through a defibrillator or waking up in a morgue or some other strange circumstance) are wrong despite this being well documented and not being constrained to any particular point in human history.

I side with the theory being wrong, but others may not.

 

[Kramodlog]

Here's how science attempts to deal with this problem. It attempts to reduce it to simply brain activity. However to do this, it has to completely ignore the aspects of the reports which contradict this theory. For example, the reports of people knowing exactly who was in the room while they were unconscious and where they were stood, what they said to each other and so on, details which are confirmed by the people themselves as being true.

Well, there is a burden of proof that has to be met by those who claim that something not "scientific" is happening. Right now it looks like when there is something science can't explain (yet), some people go "I don't know, so magic".

Some people were unconscious and had an idea of what was going on around them. Science doesn't have an explaination (yet). Why should the explaination be beyond science?

 

[Morrus]

Well, there is a burden of proof that has to be met by those who claim that something not "scientific" is happening. Right now it looks like when there is something science can't explain (yet), some people go "I don't know, so magic".

It's a common rhetorical technique known as "God of the Gaps". Find the gaps in scientific knowledge, and fill it with non-falsifiable stuff you made up.

 

[Zombie_Babies]

I guess I just can't accept 'some people said it happened' as enough evidence to completely rule out other explanations - including even coincidence. To me, it's far more likely that the person experienced a dream of sorts that was heavily influenced by what they saw right before the lights went out, so to speak, than it is that their unconscious was actually hovering over their body taking it all in.

 

[kingius]

It's a common rhetorical technique known as "God of the Gaps". Find the gaps in scientific knowledge, and fill it with non-falsifiable stuff you made up.

Utter rubbish. The idea of souls leaving the body predates materialist thinking by many millenia. You have your time line back to front. People are not 'filling in gaps in science'... science is attempting to replace what people already think.

 

[Kramodlog]

Utter rubbish. The idea of souls leaving the body predates materialist thinking by many millenia. You have your time line back to front. People are not 'filling in gaps in science'... science is attempting to replace what people already think.

So you're saying all sort of explainations were used before science was used to explain natural phenomenons?

 

[Kramodlog]

It's a common rhetorical technique known as "God of the Gaps". Find the gaps in scientific knowledge, and fill it with non-falsifiable stuff you made up.

Sounds more like a gay guy who shops a lot at GAP.

Not that there is anything wrong with it.

 

[kingius]

Here is how the establishment pulls the wool over our eyes on these matters...

1. The evidence for the contrary is declared as being anecdotal, ie. non-evidence

2. Theories are created which span the evidence and crucially miss out any contradictory elements which might ruin the underlying world view being posited in the theory itself. To understand how this works, you start with the world view (i.e. the conclusion) and then build the theory to fit it, cherry picking the evidence as you go. [edited for clarity]

3. People are disuaded from looking at the (now non-)evidence and instead are pointed to the theories. If the theory sounds plausible then that is all that is required... because people won't look at the original data that the theory is based on

4. Anyone who does not believe the theory has their thinking criticised, in this case called 'magical' or 'superstitiuous' which are effectively synonyms for ingorance.

5. This further disuades people from looking at the evidence, thinking for themselves and coming to their own conclusions. The end result is that establishment is doing the thinking for people who otherwise think critically about other areas that they examine.

And that in a nutshell, is how it is done.

 

[Kramodlog]

Here is how the establishment pulls the wool over our eyes on these matters...

1. The evidence for the contrary is declared as being anecdotal, ie. non-evidence

2. Theories are created which span the evidence and crucially miss out any contradictory elements which might ruin the theory.

3. People are disuaded from looking at the (now non-)evidence and instead are pointed to the theories. If the theory sounds plausible then that is all that is required... because people won't look at the original data that the theory is based on

4. Anyone who does not believe the theory has their thinking criticised, in this case called 'magical' or 'superstitiuous' which are effectively synonyms for ingorance.

5. This further disusades people from looking at the evidence, thinking for themselves and coming to their own conclusions. The end result is that establishment is doing the thinking for people who otherwise think critically about other areas that they examine.

And that in a nutshell, is how it is done.

Very challenging ideas.

Do you have other examples in other fields?

 

[kingius]

Yes I first noticed it when I started to learn about ancient gods. The academic theories surrounding these broadly state that many gods are equivalents and this is broadly accepted. I accepted it too, because on face value, it sounds correct. However, when I started to actually read the source material that the theories were based upon, the contradictions arose. The more I read the more I realised that the theories were entirely innacurate. Not worthless, but not the truth (as in not what they purported to be). That was my first encounter with how scientific theories were being wielded by people to either spread agendas or make money (or both). Agendas are usually about influencing people and their world views and this ultimately is about control. So in some cases, this is actually going on. Science's war with the supernatural is a thinly disguised war against the church (actually I support this) but somewhere in all of this the truth has been forgotten. Hence people need to, of their own accord, review the source material or data and come to their own conclusions about whether the theories are adequately describing the phenonoma they purport to be.