[LeoM]

Hello I recently have been discussing a topic on another forum [infidels forum] call does consciousness survive death?

I made this response to another skeptic

Originally Posted by LeoM View Post
Now you can lead me to Keith Augustine's article on hallucinatory near death experiences but the ones he mentions are not cases of people who have been flatlined. Also it's possible that some ndes are hallunicating however taking things out of context makes me skeptical.

Now here's Keith Augustine


Sigh... I am so sick of hearing this tired objection, Leo. I assume you are claiming that I quote near-death researchers out of context or something, right? Or that the NDE cases I quote are out of context, right?

I would appreciate it if survivalists like yourself and "ETESponge" would actually support your assertions with evidence instead of just inventing them out of thin air. All of the NDE cases I cite occur in books or articles you can check for yourself, if only you would make so minimal an effort when attempting to rebut someone. I went out of my way to quote rather than paraphrase NDE cases precisely because I anticipated that otherwise die-hard survivalists would claim that I had distorted the cases somehow. Evidently whenever someone disagrees with your favorite position, he must be using a trick or committing a fallacy. Might it be that the evidence itself is open to interpretations other than yours, or is that pushing things too far?

As anyone can see, citing actual near-death experiences as NDErs reported them, in their words, was not enough to preempt such false charges.

So please, feel free to show the actual context that the cases were supposedly taken out of, so that all here can see the original context and how I allegedly distorted it. Can you do it, or not? Can you back up your accusation by showing what, specifically, I took out of these sources that was not in context, or are you just full of hot air?

If you had actually checked those sources instead of throwing out your knee-jerk "he's a skeptic, I wonder what fallacy he committed today" reaction, you would see that I did not quote anyone out of context. How foolish would I have to be to quote near-death researchers out of context (i.e., to change the meaning of their words by selectively quoting them) and then give them to opportunity to point out exactly where I quoted them out of context in the Journal of Near-Death Studies?

Let's see how some of them actually responded.

From a letter to the editor from Raymond Moody, who essentially founded near-death studies: "Can veridical perception experiments prove or disprove the reality of out-of-body experiences? Keith Augustine seemed to think so, in his excellent, critical paper on the subject and his subsequent response to the accompanying commentaries. So let me say first how much I admire his fine contribution. I especially appreciate his incisive analyses of stock tales like 'Maria’s Shoe' and 'Pam Reynolds’s Story.' Overall, however, I do not think his skeptical probing went deep enough."

In a commentary on my third and last lead paper, Allan Kellehear wrote: "Keith Augustine's arguments in favor of physiological explanations of the near-death experience (NDE) are a strong, critical, and welcome addition to the ongoing debate about how to explain NDEs.... I welcomed several of his arguments and insights: for example, his rejection of the continually recycled sociological myth that children somehow escape from cultural conditioning and so represent socially 'uncontaminated' NDEs."

On my supposed quotation of near-death researchers out of context, what does Mark Fox say? He writes:

Quote:
Keith Augustine has done a fine job of drawing together a large amount of existing material in pursuit of his thesis that near-death experiences (NDEs) are essentially hallucinatory in nature. I am delighted that he has made use of extracts from my own work to further his case and with one possible exception--a point at which he appears to misunderstand what I was trying to argue--he has reproduced what I wrote fairly and accurately.

...

Apart from that one small gripe, I feel that Augustine has used my work fairly and accurately.
These are not members of the Center for Skeptical Inquiry, Leo. They are near-death researchers. (Though I suppose I could have still managed to quote them out of context above!) It would be nice if you and your survivalist brethren would acknowledge once in awhile that it is possible to be skeptical of survival or the paranormal without being a member of the Flat Earth Society--just as it is possible to believe in such things without such a membership. Can we move away from the childish rhetoric implying that whoever agrees with one's own point of view is a careful researcher, and whoever disagrees with it is a dogmatist? Maybe things aren't that black and white because the evidence isn't as strong as you take it to be. If you only read one side of the issue, of course you'll come away with the impression that survival after death is a virtual scientific fact (which seems to be your position given your earlier comments here).

Your "those are not flatlined NDEs" objection is also made up out of thin air because in the vast majority of NDE cases there is no documentation that NDErs have or have not flatlined, and for those that have flat EEGs we have no evidence that the NDE occurred during the period of flatline. We could have such evidence--the Pam Reynolds case is often claimed to be such evidence but demonstrably is not--but it does not exist.

At the end of the day, these issues can be resolved by evidence, but I seriously doubt that 150 years from now our psychology textbooks will have chapters on how souls work, how they interact with the brain, or on what happens to souls once the body dies. And the reason that I doubt this is because I suspect that the evidence favoring survival will never be more than ambiguous. It could be, in principle, but previous direct tests of the survival hypothesis (like Robert Thouless' and Ian Stevenson's experiments with cryptographic or combination lock keys to be opened after their deaths once they gave the "passwords" to unlock them to mediums after their deaths) have failed to yield such clear evidence.

If survival were a reality, then there is no reason why there couldn't be unambiguous evidence that it happens--just like there is no reason why alien spaceships couldn't crash and be recovered, land on the White House lawn, or leave behind extraterrestrial artifacts--but the evidence is never that good. And the fact that when it comes to UFOs or survival after death, there is always room for doubt, severely undermines the idea that there is something to the ambiguous evidence that does remain. Maybe there is something to it, but a betting man wouldn't put any money on it. A betting man would ask why it is that the evidence always seems incapable of crossing that "clear evidence" threshold that other things that really exist are able to cross. Believers often like to point out that skeptics of meteors falling from the sky were proven wrong, but of course in time they were proven wrong. This hasn't happened with survival, and I doubt it ever will--though I would love to be proven wrong since I have no love affair with being permanently annihilated upon my own death. But not liking the alternative to survival doesn't make survival real. It either happens or it doesn't, regardless of what you or I or anyone else believes, and our job is to figure out which. As it stands, the best evidence seems to indicate that we do not survive death. That's simply where the evidence stands, and if current evidence reflects the reality of the situation, there will never be clear-cut evidence that survival occurs. We might not wish it to be so, but reality is what it is.