Bored, baby

Lately I find myself bored with all things paranormal. Hence the posts about Mel Gibson, bad TV, and other trivia.

I've discovered that there are only so many accounts of NDEs and mediums I can read before they all start to sound the same. To break the monotony, I tried reading up on evidence that I had always dismissed as relatively weak, such as "between-life" experiences recounted in hypnotic regression. But I found that this evidence still struck me as weak, and therefore boring.

No doubt the mood will pass, but for the moment I'm not very motivated to rehash the same-old same old, and I'm not seeing any new thing under the sun.

One thing that does interest me is the AWARE study. As I've read more about this, I've become impressed by the scope and seriousness of the project. Though the natural tendency is to hedge one's bets (and I've done so in the past), I now think it is more intellectually honest to acknowledge that a study of this magnitude really should yield at least some definite "hits," if out-of-body perceptions during NDEs are truly paranormal. If no hits at all are obtained, it will be hard to defend the proposition that anything is really "leaving the body."

Of course, the other evidence for postmortem survival - primarily mediumship and children's spontaneous past-life memories - will remain. But if AWARE comes up empty on the crucial issue of veridical perception, the evidential value of NDEs will be severely diminished. I know there are many evidential NDE cases that predate AWARE, but most of them are open to critical carping of one type or another. If the best and most comprehensive study fails to replicate the earlier results, the criticisms of earlier, less well-documented cases will be exceedingly difficult to rebut.

But there's no reason to expect a negative result. Given the decent number of carefully investigated NDEs and the much larger number of anecdotal cases, there's every reason to anticipate a positive outcome, with highly consequential implications for the field of psi research in general and afterlife study in particular.

And that won't be boring at all.

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By the way, the image above, which is called "Bored Baby," is something I nicked from another website some time ago, because I thought it was funny. I'm no longer 100% sure where I got it, but I think it was the conservative political site Hot Air.

Comments

[Aftrbrnr]

Tharpa, even in the event the materialist model is correct, it's not like they get the "last laugh" (if you see it that way) anyways. I recall one skeptic saying that if materialism is correct, the "believer" will never know about the afterlife. However, while I'll see that as true, ask yourself if you think the following is possible:

Skeptic (after both him/her and the believer are dead): "Oh my, I can't believe how much of a fool you were! I knew there was no afterlife, haha! I can't believe you wasted your entire life believing it existed, look who's the dumb one now!"

Wait, is that even possible? No, because you can't really tell someone something when you or the other person doesn't exist any more, let alone at that point will you even have the cognitive ability to know you even existed in reality at one point.

So with that, I don't think neither the materialist or believer really "wins" under the materialist model, it just seems to be a stalemate of sorts the way I see it.