{"id":11963,"date":"2014-05-09T07:51:19","date_gmt":"2014-05-09T14:51:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/?p=11963"},"modified":"2014-05-09T15:04:22","modified_gmt":"2014-05-09T22:04:22","slug":"afterlife-aftermath","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2014\/05\/09\/afterlife-aftermath\/","title":{"rendered":"Afterlife Aftermath"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Video from <a href=\"https:\/\/www.preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2014\/05\/07\/is-there-life-after-death-a-debate\/\">Wednesday&#8217;s debate over &#8220;Death Is Not Final&#8221;<\/a> is <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=h0YtL5eiBYw\">now up<\/a>.<\/p>\n<div class=\"lyte-wrapper\" title=\"Death Is Not Final\" style=\"width:640px;max-width:100%;margin:5px;\"><div class=\"lyMe\" id=\"WYL_h0YtL5eiBYw\" itemprop=\"video\" itemscope itemtype=\"https:\/\/schema.org\/VideoObject\"><div><meta itemprop=\"thumbnailUrl\" content=\"https:\/\/i.ytimg.com\/vi\/h0YtL5eiBYw\/hqdefault.jpg\" \/><meta itemprop=\"embedURL\" content=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/h0YtL5eiBYw\" \/><meta itemprop=\"duration\" content=\"PT1H43M6S\" \/><meta itemprop=\"uploadDate\" content=\"2014-05-08T15:29:59Z\" \/><\/div><div id=\"lyte_h0YtL5eiBYw\" data-src=\"https:\/\/i.ytimg.com\/vi\/h0YtL5eiBYw\/hqdefault.jpg\" class=\"pL\"><div class=\"tC\"><div class=\"tT\" itemprop=\"name\">Death Is Not Final<\/div><\/div><div class=\"play\"><\/div><div class=\"ctrl\"><div class=\"Lctrl\"><\/div><div class=\"Rctrl\"><\/div><\/div><\/div><noscript><a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/h0YtL5eiBYw\" rel=\"nofollow\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.ytimg.com\/vi\/h0YtL5eiBYw\/0.jpg\" alt=\"Death Is Not Final\" width=\"640\" height=\"340\" \/><br \/>Watch this video on YouTube<\/a><\/noscript><meta itemprop=\"description\" content=\"If consciousness is just the workings of neurons and synapses, how do we explain the phenomenon of near-death experience? By some accounts, about 3% of the U.S. population has had one: an out-of-body experience often characterized by remarkable visions and feelings of peace and joy, all while the physical body is close to death. To skeptics, there are more plausible, natural explanations, like oxygen deprivation. Is the prospect of an existence after death &quot;real&quot; and provable by science, or a construct of wishful thinking about our own mortality? =================================== Subscribe on Substack: https:\/\/opentodebate.substack.com\/ Official site: https:\/\/opentodebate.org\/ X: https:\/\/twitter.com\/OpentoDebateOrg Facebook: https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/BeOpentoDebate\/ LinkedIn: https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/company\/opentodebate\/ Instagram: https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/opentodebateorg\/ TikTok: https:\/\/www.tiktok.com\/@opentodebateorg Open to Debate Apple Podcasts: https:\/\/tinyurl.com\/bdzmz5xt Open to Debate Spotify Podcasts: https:\/\/tinyurl.com\/22tuxu7h ===================================\"><\/div><\/div><div class=\"lL\" style=\"max-width:100%;width:640px;margin:5px;\"><\/div><\/p>\n<p>You&#8217;ll be happy to hear that the good guys &#8220;won.&#8221; In scare quotes because helping the world&#8217;s population understand that naturalism is the right way to view the universe is a long-term project that won&#8217;t be settled with a single debate. But <a href=\"http:\/\/intelligencesquaredus.org\/debates\/upcoming-debates\/item\/1020-death-is-not-final\">Intelligence Squared<\/a> does a fun thing where they ask people to vote before the debate starts, and then again afterward. We started out the night slightly behind in the polls, and by the time we were done we were slightly ahead. Mostly by peeling away the undecideds, as any savvy politician strives to do. [<strong>Update<\/strong>: oops, not right. See below.] So that counts as a victory &#8212; especially when the topic is one where many people (not all!) have fairly fixed opinions.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/death-results.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/death-results.jpg\" alt=\"death-results\" width=\"599\" height=\"375\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-11964\" srcset=\"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/death-results.jpg 599w, https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/death-results-300x187.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, 599px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/death-pies.jpeg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/death-pies-1024x570.jpeg\" alt=\"death-pies\" width=\"640\" height=\"356\" class=\"aligncenter size-large wp-image-11965\" srcset=\"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/death-pies-1024x570.jpeg 1024w, https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/death-pies-300x167.jpeg 300w, https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/death-pies.jpeg 1238w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>It was a pleasure to have Steve Novella as a partner. The man knows his neuroscience, as well as his debating. He did a great job making the single most important point for an issue like this: the mind is the brain, full stop. It&#8217;s hard to hear the case he makes and hold on to any contrary view.<\/p>\n<p>I was slightly disappointed in the folks on the other side. Eben Alexander basically relied on two things. One was his personal story of having a Near-Death Experience while in a coma. Anyone who accepts that people can experience dreams or hallucinations will not be overly persuaded by that alone. The other was to throw up ideas like &#8220;quantum mechanics&#8221; and &#8220;the hard problem of consciousness&#8221; in an obfuscatory way, to give people license to believe that science doesn&#8217;t understand everything. Which is true! Science doesn&#8217;t understand everything. Which doesn&#8217;t change the fact that no serious researcher in quantum mechanics or the hard problem thinks that those ideas provide an excuse for believing in life after death.<\/p>\n<p>Ray Moody was a very pleasant gentleman, someone you&#8217;d be happy to have a beer with and talk philosophy. But he did almost nothing to defend the proposition. I was expecting him to broaden the evidence from Alexander&#8217;s own case to many others, but instead he spoke in generalities about science and philosophy and logic, concluding essentially that it&#8217;s &#8220;conceivable&#8221; that a realm exists where souls can persist after death. Indeed it is. Many things are conceivable.<\/p>\n<p>At the end of my opening talk I said that the choice here basically comes down to two options we can believe:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Everything we think we understand about the behavior of matter and energy is wrong, in a way that has somehow escaped notice in every experiment ever done in the history of science. Instead, there are unknown mechanisms allow information in the brain to survive in the form of a blob of spirit energy, which can then go start talking to other blobs of spirit energy, but only after death, except sometimes even before death.<\/li>\n<li>Physics is right. And people under stress sometimes have experiences that seem real but aren\u2019t.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>In the light of the evidence, the choice is pretty clear. We&#8217;ll get there, a couple of percentage points at a time.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Update<\/strong>: I was too hasty in presuming that most of our increase came from swaying undecided voters. Here are the actual data:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/death-crosstabs.jpeg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/death-crosstabs-797x1024.jpeg\" alt=\"death-crosstabs\" width=\"640\" height=\"822\" class=\"aligncenter size-large wp-image-11969\" srcset=\"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/death-crosstabs-797x1024.jpeg 797w, https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/death-crosstabs-233x300.jpeg 233w, https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/death-crosstabs.jpeg 1040w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>As you can see, the undecideds actually broke almost equally for the two sides. Our glorious victory actually came from a combination of factors, including persuading some of the &#8220;For&#8221; voters to switch.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Video from Wednesday&#8217;s debate over &#8220;Death Is Not Final&#8221; is now up. You&#8217;ll be happy to hear that the good guys &#8220;won.&#8221; In scare quotes because helping the world&#8217;s population understand that naturalism is the right way to view the universe is a long-term project that won&#8217;t be settled with a single debate. But Intelligence [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11963","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-philosophy","category-religion"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11963","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11963"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11963\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11971,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11963\/revisions\/11971"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11963"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11963"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11963"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}