Hmm, what I said was poorly worded. I may edit it. What I meant was that I considered the evidence to be sufficient for me to believe in God. Here's what I said:
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.
Here's what I meant:
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, my personal experiences are sufficient to convince me that there is probably a God.
Is that better?
If a patient happened to be hooked up to an MRI during what they later describe as an NDE, and the MRI recorded patterns characteristic of other events generally considered hallucinatory, would you consider that evidence supporting the explanation that NDEs are hallucinatory events? Would that significantly alter your beliefs about the existence of an afterlife?
There is an underlying assumption here that hallucinations aren't evidence of an afterlife. I don't believe they are, but I also don't have any beliefs about them in general, so the fact that it was a hallucination wouldn't be convincing until I had more knowledge of hallucinations in general. Maybe hallucinations are our gateway to the eternal! (I don't actually believe this, but I hope it helps you see what I'm saying).
That being said, knowing more about these experiences would only be a good thing, and I have no way of knowing how more knowledge would affect my beliefs, because I have no idea what that knowledge might be.
If it proved possible to experimentally induce an NDE experience by manipulating a subject's brain in particular ways, would you consider that evidence supporting the explanation that NDEs are hallucinatory events? Would that significantly alter your beliefs about the existence of an afterlife?
from this article:
According to Dr. Jansen, ketamine can reproduce all the main features of the NDE, including travel through a dark tunnel into the light, the feeling that one is dead, communing with God, hallucinations, out-of-body experiences, strange noises, etc. This does not prove that the NDE is nothing but a set of physical responses, nor does it prove that there is no life after death. It does, however, prove that an NDE is not compelling evidence for belief in either the existence of a separate consciousness or of an afterlife.
Back to your question:
Would that significantly alter your beliefs about the existence of an afterlife?
Possibly. Like I said before, more knowledge is only a good thing, and I have no idea how more knowledge would affect my beliefs. Hope I'm not dodging your questions here, feel free to elaborate on anything I might have missed.
Hope I'm not dodging your questions here, feel free to elaborate on anything I might have missed.
I don't think further elaboration would get us anywhere useful. Thanks for your reply.
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.