I understand that my personal experiences with what I believe to have been God could be explained by neural anomalies, but until I have convincing reasons to believe that, or convincing reasons to believe there isn't a God outside my personal experiences, or convincing reasons to believe that my experiences are evidence of something else entirely, I'm going to assume that there is a God.
Personally, I find Occam's Razor convincing. Doesn't it strike you as unlikely that there would be a God, but the only evidence for God would be subjective experiences?
Additionally, while one personal experience is not very convincing, many similar personal experiences can be.
It seems like many similar experiences only indicate that many humans have similar brains.
Weak evidence like NDEs still requires an explanation. The obvious recourses are hallucination, neural anomalies, etc., but until I have extra evidence to support them, I won't believe them. If studies have been done to show that they are hallucinations, etc., then that would be sufficient. I don't know of any.
There have been some studies about inducing NDEs with ketamine, as mentioned earlier. See this page for a few descriptions of various studies. There are also many studies about the brain's reaction to sensory deprivation, such as this recent one which demonstrated hallucinations after only 15 minutes. I wouldn't say any of this constitutes overwhelming evidence, but it's far from worthless.
My reaction is different, though: I simply say "if it is, I can't know" not "there can't be, because we haven't seen evidence for it." I really don't like saying that God can't exist, there can't be an afterlife, etc., because we don't have evidence for which isn't the same thing as evidence against. My reaction is make no beliefs, not update my beliefs against.
I don't think anyone here would say that. Absence of evidence isn't necessarily evidence of absence, but without evidence, the probability of God, the afterlife, etc. is going to come up very low from a Bayesian evaluation.
Personally, I find Occam's Razor convincing. Doesn't it strike you as unlikely that there would be a God, but the only evidence for God would be subjective experiences?
without evidence, the probability of God, the afterlife, etc. is going to come up very low from a Bayesian evaluation.
That's the whole point I'm getting at here. Should I consider these things evidence? How do I objectively decide? I'm obviously biased to believe in an afterlife and in God and in the supernatural so how do I overcome this bias and look at the evidence objectively?...
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.