Greta wrote:
You are exceptionally defensive.
That's just an opinion you're entitled to, but there's hardly any substance for you to develop a case, so it stays like that.
Greta wrote:
The very moment an idea that is not orthodox crops up, you immediately move into "Critic of Religion" mode, which is such very old news. If it makes you feel better, you can tell me that Santa isn't real and I'll pretend to be surprised and praise you for putting me straight. An alternative is to consider the actual nature of reality and the limits of our perspective effects, you know, like philosophy.
Critique of religion is actually just a part of a broader philosophical category: critique of idealism. While religions arise, disappear or change, their foundational idealist base keeps more or less the same and fuels the diverse supernatural approaches to reality. Yes, the myths of traditional, orthodox religions, get a big share of the pounding in the critique of idealism, and the history of the argumentative practices of the religious advocates certainly enlighten us about the bank of argumentative resources that other less institutionalized philosophical movements have at their hand (such as the epistemological agnosticism to which you resort every time one takes a shot at the supposedly unorthodox ideas that you endorse), but we are not to be fooled by the apparent estrangement and distancing of these movements from the grand religious narratives. Has anyone heard of New Age? What's the difference between those other narratives and NDE narratives? There's none that is relevant, as we can directly verify in the links that I have submitted before:
https://www.nderf.org/Archives/exceptional.html
https://www.adcrf.org/archives_2015_2016.html
The mild difference, of course, is the ecumenical character of NDE narratives: it doesn't matter what orthodox religion you happen to embrace, and there's even no need to embrace a particular religion at all. We are postmodernists, why conform with just one narrative, let's have them all. Don't like pastors and priests? Astrologists and psychics don't suffice? Let's get some Michio Kaku. Has anyone looked at Kaku's official website?, it doesn't look much different than your regular astrologist's. Meanwhile, another international association related to NDE, which publishes a supposedly "scientific" NDE journal, also endorses a publication like this:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1567184855/re ... ive=380549
Of course, it would be of the most valuable benefit to our knowledge to set the record straight about NDE, using rational philosophical arguments and empirical naturalistic methods of research, but as it has been made patent in this thread, there's little hope some will show up soon.
Greta wrote:
I am not convinced that:
1) consciousness is quite what we think it is
I'm not convinced either that we know everything about consciousness, in fact we may know very little, and I don't think anyone claims differently. But we know that consciousness is embodied in living organisms, and we know a lot about what living organisms are and what are they made of. So that narrows the scope of our speculations about consciousness to the standard problems of the philosophy of mind and cognitive sciences.
Greta wrote:
2) that we have considered that consciousness might come in variant forms, as opposed to just our type of consciousness,
Other than speculations of the most vague kind, there is very little concrete evidence to impel us to consider consciousness outside the predominant positions in philosophy and science. It might happen that you want to reframe the whole concept to mean something else than the agential, mental aspects of living subjects, and so that even the concept of life itself is redefined, but that's another problem related to challenging pretty stable scientific conventions, which could be welcomed if it did something more than pure resemantization by means of metaphors.
Greta wrote:
3) that we perceive space and time as is, rather just an efficacious summary.
But you acknowledge we perceive it as something and that this certainty works for many practical matters in quite an effective way (your efficacious summary). While more research is done, there's no reason to abandon completely this certainty, actually you need it as the base for launching inquiries.
Greta wrote:Thus, I see a case for keeping an open mind about this one.
"Open mind" seems like a nice term, shielded from any criticism, but it has become patent that when you say "open mind" you're actually advocating epistemological agnosticism. It's the fallacy of "anything goes".
Greta wrote:
It seems logical, like the many logical things assumed by scientists in the past later found to be completely wrong. When I was a child it was common knowledge that other species were not at all conscious and thus did not feel pain as we do; it was said to be "just nerves twitching".
Yet, the fact that scientists have been wrong in the past, and that they can be wrong in the present, is absolutely no indication that they are actually wrong about a particular affirmation in the present, nor that a new, current unsubstantiated claim has any merits for replacing a mainstream notion. Hypothesis shouldn't be dismissed summarily, but you have to actually get in the business of giving merits to the new claim. Arguments in the vicinity of "it sounds logical" will not suffice. I think I dealt extensively with this issue in my previous posts about the jigsaw puzzle analogy.
Greta wrote:
That was mid last century - not so long ago - and the mistake was monstrously huge
Actually, that was long ago, much more than my lifetime.