One possible explanation of your dream is that we live in a world in which people's minds which are perfect for each other enter the dreamworld and find each other. We don't believe that because the world doesn't seem to work that way.
The world doesn't seem to work this way because there has been no reproducible empirical evidence that it works that way. This isn't a case of "The Earth looks flat from here, so it must be flat." You're postulating that there is another realm of existence out there that doesn't intersect with our reality in any detectable way. At this point, you're just arguing for an invisible pink unicorn or a Russel's teapot, but then you say that this undetectable 'dream world', does affect the physical world by altering our minds to act as though it did exist. It's essentially the same argument that the zombie theorists make.
But what if you saw on the news a special of Keira Knightley's crazy dream that she believed was about her true lover; what if she had gone to one of those people who draw faces based on descriptions and the picture drawn was eerily similar to yours? If the dream she explained was really similar to the one you had, would you possibly begin to question your beliefs then? At what point will you accept that your beliefs about there not being an afterlife as possibly worthy of review?
If all that happened, it would be slightly more likely that there was something to this telepathic dream. However, to accept that this was a true manifestation of a psychic phenomenon, one would have to accept that the standard models of physics and neuropsychology are wrong. This is not entirely unknown to happen, but such revolutions were driven by men like Copernicus and Einstein who supported them with evidence, and not revealed to laymen in dreams. There would have to be such a preponderance of psychic evidence that it would be more probable that the standard model were wrong than that the dream were 'real'. So either there is some sort of fifth fundamental force, heretofore undiscovered or suppressed by thousands of scientists across the globe, that is powerful and sensitive enough to affect single neurons from across a continent, and that the human brain has evolved a region for sending and receiving signals via this fifth force, or that someone else had a similar dream to mine. It's not strictly impossible, but its probability approaches zero.
Why aren't dreams allowed to be submitted as evidence? They are experiences we have; if we cannot explain them, we must change our beliefs. The reason we don't usually listen to dreams as explanations of our world is that we understand why they happen; they are perfectly explainable without any need for a supernatural explanation.
Bingo. We can explain dreams with psychology without resorting to 'parapsychology'. When in doubt, consult Occam.
But what if we found that dreams weren't explainable given what we know about our world? We would change our beliefs about the world.
Yes, if that were the case, we would, but it isn't.
So don't just say that dreams aren't evidence. You can say that dreams are poor evidence for an afterlife, but if I postulate that we enter the afterlife in through dreams or some other similarly creative belief system that would explain the dreams, we would test my belief system to see if the predictions it makes correspond to reality better than other belief systems.
And how exactly do you propose to test the existence of an afterlife with reproducibility? Are you volunteering?
And how exactly do you propose to test the existence of an afterlife with reproducibility? Are you volunteering?
JoshuaZ gave good answers in his post below
http://lesswrong.com/lw/3ok/is_there_anything_after_death/3bhr
I was on Reddit today, and I came across (this link)[http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/eyiat/for_those_of_you_who_have_died_and_been/]. One of the things I've seen on this site that's bothered me is the exclusion of personal experiences in deciding what a person should or should not believe. I know that less wrong is mostly atheist, and I wanted to hear less wrong's reaction to descriptions of experiences like these.
For example, my dad was in the hospital 5 or 6 years ago when a truck came across an icy road and hit him head-on. His most vivid memory from this is a dream he had when he was in the hospital. He was in a pool of water with my mom, and they were both naked (they were underwater, but didn't need to breathe). He remembers that at the end of this pool, there was a bright light that he wanted to head towards. He began to swim that way...and here, I don't remember what happened, but he was unable to reach the light for some reason.
Such stories seem to be common for people who come close to death, and for a community based around rationality which seems to consider the likelihood of life after death as slim, I just wondered what your reactions are. My reaction is that such experiences are explainable in terms of neural activity, but that doesn't necessarily exclude the possibility that these are descriptions of experiences of an afterlife. I'm not convinced by them, but I do consider it to be possible.