you say brain chemicals explain all experience that are known to science, therefore you claim that brain chemicals must explain NDEs. when we ask you what do NDEs indicate, you claim they indicate brain chemicals. it's blatantly circular, but you merely assert it isn't.
I never said brain chemicals must explain NDE’s, I literally said we don’t know what causes them. What we are disagreeing on is what is the simplest explanation, a concept you understand very well since you repeatedly make clear that this is your position on NDE’s. Just apply the same thing to my argument and now you understand what I’m saying.
More importantly, it’s not circular. We know brain chemicals exist because we observe them. We can and have taken people’s brains apart and studied its composition. We have hooked people’s brains up to machines and watched as different parts react to different stimuli. It is *from there* that we are able to deduce explanations for various phenomenon and build a model of how the brain works and its capabilities. There is nothing circular about this.
no one is making that claim. i said an afterlife is the simplest solution, because there's no science behind the idea of hallucations, just hunches
This is the classic example of an argument from ignorance. Science is a method of understanding reality. The only thing “there’s no science” supports is a lack of a conclusion. Your argument amounts to nothing more than “we don’t have a link between hallucinations and NDE’s, therefore they are a product of an afterlife”
you assert it's chemicals, but no known chemicals causes people to have such vivid afterlife stories. and it's not uncommon for many people to experience elaborate afterlife stories when they die. complete mystery as to how our body would cause it but you assert it's obvious that that's what's going on.
It’s not a complete mystery, we know the brain can produce visions. We’ve all experienced dreams, and we know the brain can hallucinate. You continue to argue that NDE’s are somehow different, but they’re not. They might (emphasize *might*) be more specific and more life like to those who experience them, but that’s a difference in degree not a difference in type. This is why it remains the simplest explanation.
you go even further and ignore a whole book of evidence about the afterlife and assert there's not a shred of evidence.
Let me start by addressing the semantics behind the word evidence. By definition, it means “that which can make a person believe”. This essentially makes it a tautology; if you believe X because of Y, then X is evidence. So if you believe aliens are visiting earth because the sky is blue, then the sky being blue qualifies as evidence for aliens.
When folks like myself say there is no evidence, that’s because we’re invoking standards as to what qualifies, and the most basic qualifier is validity. Therefore if something is not valid, it’s not evidence.
Your examples do not qualify because they are not valid, for many reasons. First of all because they are all anecdotal, which is to say they are a bunch of scenarios cherry picked because they fit the narrative.
Second, none of them were studied and verified under any type of controlled environment.
Third, because the proposed explanation for them has not yet been shown to itself exist.
Fourth, because none of them point to one explanation *over the alternative*. This is what the term necessity refers to, and it’s probably the most important concept to understand about evidence.
A thousand invalid examples does not amount to one valid example. So no, this does not qualify as evidence.
