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? Your former arguments (I'm reading the first article now and it's exactly what I was looking for) could possibly give me reason to "defy the evidence" as E.Y. would say but I'm not at that point yet. I'm coming from a background of religion, and I've denied most of the things I've been taught, but should I deny all of them? I'm trying to be objective here, but it's hard to know whether I am or not (although whether my beliefs are wrong are right is independent of whether I was biased when I decided upon them). by supernatural I mean a universe or some other similar type of thing that has the potential to affect our physical world; Yudkowski would argue that if this exists it isn't supernatural, but I think it's a useful term
In general, anecdotes alone should not be considered evidence, if one is trying to be rigorous. NDEs constitute more than just a few anecdotes, but they still often have anecdotal qualities, in that only a small percentage of people report them. I'll point out again that even if we accept NDEs as evidence, they're not necessarily evidence for an afterlife or any related concept. Hypothesizing an afterlife based on NDEs requires the idea that consciousness can exist separately from the brain. This doesn't seem warranted based on NDEs alone, so it constitutes an unnecessary multiplication of entities, i.e. a violation of Occam's Razor.
I'm glad I could help with articles on this subject.
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.