Scientific evidence proves life after death?

Yeah we had to read Julian Jaynes for a graduate class I took. I thought and still think the book is a bit sophmoric. It's interesting but he's blatantly wrong. I mean look at the Bushmen healing culture -- that's where spirituality really comes from -- 90% of human history! haha.



reply to post by Lilitu

Originally posted by Aislin
What are your thoughts on why your great grandfather renounced Buddhism after experiencing Satori?

He died before I was born so it's hard to say. I can tell you however that Zen Buddhism like Taoism is a non-theistic religion, e.g. there is no god in Buddhism. So the cognitive chasm between atheism and buddhism isn't so great in that respect.

Originally posted by drew hempel
Yeah we had to read Julian Jaynes for a graduate class I took. I thought and still think the book is a bit sophmoric.

Dr. Julian Jaynes, a graduate from both Harvard and Yale, who lectured at Princeton University from 1966 to 1990? Sophomoric?

Originally posted by drew hempel
It's interesting but he's blatantly wrong.

Which hypotheses (name it) of Jaynes theory is wrong, how was it disproven and by whom?

reply to post by Kandinsky


Read the post of mine that you replied to ans see how you missed how I actually said that the dude who investigated into the weight of the soul was not following sound scientific research principles and drew his conclusions too soon. And you continued to call the doctor mentioned in the OP was biased, since he refered to religion, and that's just you showing incredible bias. I suppose that in your world anyone with religious preferances are biased and should therefore be ommitted in the Hall of Fame, where only humanists are allowed to attend? Well, guesswhat. Nearly all the brightest minds were then biased.

[edit on 24/1/2010 by Neo Christian Mystic]

reply to post by Neo Christian Mystic
Your signal to noise ratio is weak.

I'll explain just one more time about my criticism of the Doc.

His sample is skewed. It's anecdotal. Plural of anecdote is not data. The sample is English-speaking. If the sample was from the Middle-East, his conclusion would reflect Moslem values.

The Doc is therefore offering an opinion based on the posts he read on his site. In no way is that scientific or conclusive. You or I could post anything we want on there. It has the validity of the comments on You Tube.

Does any of that make sense? I can't make it much clearer than that. It isn't an observation based on whether Jesus is great or not. It's an accurate observation that his conclusion is ill-founded.

As far as I'm concerned the sentiments attributed to the historical Jesus are just fine. If he existed, he was a seminal humanist with good ideas.

reply to post by Kandinsky


Have you even read the Good Book and ever related yourself to what the Doctor is refering to when he says, "hey they have been saying stuff like this for thousands of years!"? Nearly all modern branches of science have it's roots in ancient religious schools of mysticism like alchemy and Kabalah etc. The dude simply said that after evaluating his findings, he saw hints of something religious, something fundamentally religious. He doesn't say "Jesus was right, frekk the results". No he said "here are some results, is it just me who hear Jesus giggling here?"

Let's get Back on Topic, shall we?

Originally posted by Kandinsky
His sample is skewed. It's anecdotal. Plural of anecdote is not data. The sample is English-speaking. If the sample was from the Middle-East, his conclusion would reflect Moslem values.

Being of far east asian origin I can confirm that for example people of Japanese ancestry who have reported NDE's claim the experience is buddhist or shinto themed. The NDEs will always be colored by the dominant religion of the culture the patient hails from even if they have changed their religious affiliation. For example the Sumatrans and Jawanese converted to islam hundreds of years ago but even after many generations they are still psychologically Hindu-Buddhist. The dominant religions from many ages in the past have left a near indelible imprint which is passed on from one generation to the next. We also see the same phenomenon in Central and S. America where most have converted to some form of christianity which has been blended with superstition and ritual from their pagan past. Indeed all of christiandom is a blend of old pagan practices salted with a few of Jesus' teachings. Modern christianity doesn't even remotely resemble the following Jesus had before the day he died.

This brings up an important point. The religious like to think that they have accepted their given religion on faith or a mixture of faith and reason but nothing could be further from the truth. No, those who turn to religion will almost always migrate to the religion which is the dominant one in their culture. They might like to think it was a "quality decision" which they made, that they chose the proverbial "right path" but the fact is they were driven by sociocultural forces operating below the threshold of consciousness. It has always been this way. Now I do realize there are exceptions like when someone has become disillusioned with the dominant religion or when entire peoples have been brute-forced into conversion. For the majority it doesn't happen that way.



[edit on 24-1-2010 by Lilitu]

Life and death is about conciousness. Conciousness which still after billions of years baffles us. What is conciousness and does our spirit need a body to work?Upon death, will our soul be set free, or will we be judged? Will we reunite with other dead people, and will we see their impression and hear their voice? In ancient Egypt the afterlife was a journey and a quest. In ancient Tibet the afterlife is expressed as a further venture which ends with rebirth. In Hebrew tradition the dead'd go to Sje'ol, or Hades, translated Hell i KJV, but is far from it, where we will meet with Allfather Abraham, and sit and prepare ourself for the ressurection and the judgement and the new world.

reply to post by Lilitu


Well actually "preposterous" is the term more commonly used to describe Jaynes' Origins of Consciousness book.

pubpages.unh.edu...

As for his background -- yes it does explain a lot:

[7] Jaynes had an excellent behaviorist heritage, going back to Watson via Lashley and Beach. Yale, where he worked on his Ph.D. was also the home of Hull -inspired symbolic behaviorism, e.g. Osgood, 1953.

The main criticism of Jaynes would be from anthropology but then that's the only discipline about which other academics can openly call to be destroyed -- questioning why it still exists, etc.

www.danielwhartwig.com...

Originally posted by Neo Christian Mystic
Life and death is about conciousness. Conciousness which still after billions of years baffles us. What is conciousness and does our spirit need a body to work?Upon death, will our soul be set free, or will we be judged? Will we reunite with other dead people, and will we see their impression and hear their voice? In ancient Egypt the afterlife was a journey and a quest. In ancient Tibet the afterlife is expressed as a further venture which ends with rebirth. In Hebrew tradition the dead'd go to Sje'ol, or Hades, translated Hell i KJV, but is far from it, where we will meet with Allfather Abraham, and sit and prepare ourself for the ressurection and the judgement and the new world.

Humans haven't been around billions of years to be baffled by consciousness.

reply to post by drew hempel



Since you ignored the question I'll ask once more. Which hypotheses (name it) of Jaynes theory is wrong, how was it disproven and by whom?

reply to post by hippomchippo


No but conciousness as a phenomenon has been around for quite some time. Humans aren't the only concious lifeforms you know....

Here's a site on the subject from a recent Coast to coast guest that I listened to, the evidence is very compelling. We are more than a product of brain function. People witness events outside their bodies during NDE.

www.nderf.org...

I recently read a book Life After Death on the subject, the evidence is convincing secular researchers. Dinesh keeps it with in the realm of science for 90% of the book and then a brief section on the most well documented and testified case in history.

[edit on 2/21/2010 by Bigwhammy]

reply to post by Lilitu


This is the hypothesis of Jaynes:

"The preposterous hypothesis we have come to … is that human nature was split in two, an executive part called a god, and a follower part called a man. (Jaynes, 1976/1990, p. 84)

This is how it was disproven:

pubpages.unh.edu...

By this fellow:

[email protected]. Julian Jaynes' "Prposterous hypothesis". Paper presented at Cheiron conference, University of Southern Maine, June 27, 2000.

Originally posted by miriam0566
it amazes me that people dont see the general flaw with these "accounts"...


the people who gave them are still alive. their acoount cant really prove anything because they werent really dead. if they were dead then they would be able to tell us about it.

well said Miriam...also nice to see you :-p

been ages

-Kyo

Originally posted by drew hempel
reply to post by Lilitu

 

This is the hypothesis of Jaynes:

"The preposterous hypothesis we have come to … is that human nature was split in two, an executive part called a god, and a follower part called a man. (Jaynes, 1976/1990, p. 84)

This is how it was disproven:

pubpages.unh.edu...

By this fellow:

[email protected]. Julian Jaynes' "Prposterous hypothesis". Paper presented at Cheiron conference, University of Southern Maine, June 27, 2000.

Not so fast! John Limber is a proponent of Jaynes theory of consciousness which he refers to as J-CON. As a matter of fact one of his papers "Language and Consciousness: Jaynes's "Preposterous Idea" Reconsidered" is included in Reflections on the Dawn of Consciousness: Julian Jaynes's Bicameral Mind Theory Revisited which was compiled and edited by Marcel Kuijsten, the founder and executive director of the Julian Jaynes Society.

The essay you linked to in no way disproves Jaynes theory. If anything he repeats the consensus that Jaynes theory is important and deserving of more attention.

Perhaps you shouldn't be so quick to throw around terms like - sophomoric.

reply to post by Lilitu


Sorry but Jaynes' book is silly.

Ilkka Kallio's review of the book you hold up:

www.imprint.co.uk...

I think John Hamilton’s work on auditory hallucinations of congenital quadriplegics who have never spoken in their lives may put a strong constraint on the feasible theories of auditory hallucinations not easily reconcilable with the claim by Peter Bick and Marcel Kinsbourne that auditory hallucinations are silent talking to oneself, the stand embraced even by Dennett, the most Jaynesian of the presently prominent philosophers of mind.

Originally posted by drew hempel
reply to post by Lilitu

 

Sorry but Jaynes' book is silly.

Ilkka Kallio's review of the book you hold up:

www.imprint.co.uk...

I think John Hamilton’s work on auditory hallucinations of congenital quadriplegics who have never spoken in their lives may put a strong constraint on the feasible theories of auditory hallucinations not easily reconcilable with the claim by Peter Bick and Marcel Kinsbourne that auditory hallucinations are silent talking to oneself, the stand embraced even by Dennett, the most Jaynesian of the presently prominent philosophers of mind.

Please stop wasting my time posting documents you didn't read or else failed to comprehend. This document states and I quote

"Jaynes’ theory clearly belongs in the class of higher-order theories
of consciousness. It is essentially about how higher-order mental
states have become possible at all and its mechanism for generating
consciousness is arguably not all that different from the ones usually
suggested, except in the exclusive role given to language. If for no
other reason than its untapped potential to facilitate contemporary
consciousness studies, Jaynes’ theory merits in my view the reassessment
by the scientific community urged in this volume."

reply to post by Lilitu


Higher-Order theory of Consciousness is not valid:

www.nyu.edu...

The problem for the HOT perspective is that it is part of the idea of it that putting together ingredients that are not in themselves conscious (thought, aboutness, and representation) automatically exhibits consciousness. The most neuroscience can do is explain thought, explain aboutness, and explain representation. But there is no reason to expect— and it is not part of any HOT perspective—that neuroscience will find some magic glow that occurs when those things combine.