Reply #90: Kind of like ball lightning [View All]

We can't repeat them so they can't be believed.

Oh wait, if ENOUGH people claim to have seen ball lightning, then maybe we can take them seriously.

The real question is where do you set your required level of evidence befoire you will believe, and that comes down to what do you already believe?

If you already believe in aliens visiting us in flying saucers then it might not take much evidence to convince you that they are abducting humans. On the other hand if you believe that aliens are impossible then NO amount of evidence will convince you of abductions.

If you believe that ALL consciousness arises from the physical brain then NO amount of evidence will convince you to believe something that contradicts that principle article of faith.

So how much evidence it takes depends on how strong our faith is in the assumptions and axioms we hold dear. Scientists are mostly trained to hold the assumptions of materialistic monism near and dear, and to treat these asumptions as if they are facts. (Indeed, most scientists don't even realiz that they are assumptions, not facts). Thus no amount of evidence will convince them of something which violates that faith. Thus they feel justified in denying the evidence.

But because a thing is not repeatable under laboratory conditions doesn't mean it cannot be studied. For hundreds of years there were anecdotal tales of rocks falling from the sky, yet the best scholars of the day refused to believe that meteorites were possible. That they could not exist was an article of faith that predisposed the finest scientists of the day to deny and overlook the evidence of meteorite falls.

In the same way todays finest scientists, who are no more nor less human than those who could not see meteors, cannot see the evidence of survival of consciousness because they already "know", without any proof, that such a thing must be impossible.

But just as in centuries gone by, science will, eventually, take off their blinders and actually apply the scientific method to the question. Then we will finally start learning something useful about this phenomenon. But that won't happen until the scientists take their fingers out of their ears and stop chanting "Nyah, nyah, I can't hear you" every time evidence is laid before them.