I wouldn't say all. Following that philosophy leads you towards solipsism which amusingly is something that so many live by - if one were to judge based on actions alone. There is always that which you feel resonates with the truth. And your own personal experiences; making sense out of them is a different affair though.
I don't know how you got to solipsism from my comment. Solipsism is the philosophical idea that only one's own mind is sure to exist. I am not denying that people in their own minds perceived the experiences they claimed they experienced. I am pointing out though that those perceptions are just that. They have no factual basis with which to be measured.
I reiterate - all accounts were anecdotal and unverifiable. There is no way to determine if the accounts were drug induced, hallucinated, dreamed, fabricated or a combination of all of the above in small parts. That does not negate the idea of other minds.
You - and most people from the modern era - are measuring the verifiability of such experiences and accounts according to what is known as modern science, logic, solid, palpable facts. There is no (commonly accepted) branch of modern science that deals with near-death experiences or the afterlife; anything beyond what is solid is called 'belief'. In fact I think it's not exaggerated in any way to say that science was developed for the living. So how do you determine the realness of something using tools that were not developed for that particular area? As I said before, there's always what you feel resonates with the truth. Or if you wish to believe there is nothingness beyond death or simply state 'it can't be known' that is fine but you can't tell anyone that daring to use one's own intuition regarding one's own experiences (or those of others) in order to further the understanding in this area, is false from the beginning.
Sure. You can consider afterlife to be a real outer-body experience and accounts thereof to be true. But you cannot claim those accounts are beyond scientific reasoning because they are belief. Or you can but that goes to my point that those accounts are explainable by means other than outer body existence.
Scientifically speaking, people's claims of outer body experience is in the realm of knowledge and not belief because we have accounts from people who testified they went beyond and came back. So we can examine those accounts scientifically and try and explain them using empirical means.
I wouldn't say all. Following that philosophy leads you towards solipsism which amusingly is something that so many live by - if one were to judge based on actions alone. There is always that which you feel resonates with the truth. And your own personal experiences; making sense out of them is a different affair though.
I don't know how you got to solipsism from my comment. Solipsism is the philosophical idea that only one's own mind is sure to exist. I am not denying that people in their own minds perceived the experiences they claimed they experienced. I am pointing out though that those perceptions are just that. They have no factual basis with which to be measured.
I reiterate - all accounts were anecdotal and unverifiable. There is no way to determine if the accounts were drug induced, hallucinated, dreamed, fabricated or a combination of all of the above in small parts. That does not negate the idea of other minds.
You - and most people from the modern era - are measuring the verifiability of such experiences and accounts according to what is known as modern science, logic, solid, palpable facts. There is no (commonly accepted) branch of modern science that deals with near-death experiences or the afterlife; anything beyond what is solid is called 'belief'. In fact I think it's not exaggerated in any way to say that science was developed for the living. So how do you determine the realness of something using tools that were not developed for that particular area? As I said before, there's always what you feel resonates with the truth. Or if you wish to believe there is nothingness beyond death or simply state 'it can't be known' that is fine but you can't tell anyone that daring to use one's own intuition regarding one's own experiences (or those of others) in order to further the understanding in this area, is false from the beginning.
Sure. You can consider afterlife to be a real outer-body experience and accounts thereof to be true. But you cannot claim those accounts are beyond scientific reasoning because they are belief. Or you can but that goes to my point that those accounts are explainable by means other than outer body existence.
Scientifically speaking, people's claims of outer body experience is in the realm of knowledge and not belief because we have accounts from people who testified they went beyond and came back. So we can examine those accounts scientifically and try and explain them using empirical means.