Near death experience and life after death

[MysticPhD]

Originally Posted by ocpaul20

Has ANYONE got a handle on reality? They might think they have but they are kidding themselves. If an experience is more real than waking reality, then who is to say it is not real? Certainly not someone else. Maybe the dream state is a reality too? Some people say that since the fantastic and unlikely happen regularly in dreams, it is not 'real' but if our waking reality is just energy then who is to say that is real either?

[mordant]

Originally Posted by ocpaul20

Has ANYONE got a handle on reality? They might think they have but they are kidding themselves. If an experience is more real than waking reality, then who is to say it is not real? Certainly not someone else. Maybe the dream state is a reality too? Some people say that since the fantastic and unlikely happen regularly in dreams, it is not 'real' but if our waking reality is just energy then who is to say that is real either?

Well that's a reductio absurdum IMO. I mean no one has an absolute 110% grip on reality but it's pretty clear that some sources of info are better than others at accurately describing / explaining / predicting reality and it seems to me that we know enough about dream states to know that they aren't veridical. I mean I had a dream last night where my late / prior wife was being a hypochondriac, which is about 100% the polar opposite of what she was. The explanation is simple: I had just been on a lengthy phone conversation with my brother, who is coping with a wife who IS a hypochondriac, extremely needy and dependent, and has other mental health issues. The dream was just imagining myself and my late wife in those roles because I more or less went to bed feeling empathy for my brother's situation. There's no reason to think that this was veridical: that my late wife was a hypochondriac even though she never acted that way, or that I ever had a hypochondriac I was in a relationship with, or, IDK, that I'm a hypochondriac. And I already know my brother's wife is a hypochondriac by the much more reliable means of him describing his situation to me on the phone, plus my own personal experience of her in the past.

And so there's every reason to think my dream wasn't veridical. Does this mean all dreams aren't veridical? No, but it's a data point, and most of us, if we're honest have a lot of those kinds of data points.

Sure anything is possible (which says zero about how likely it is) and in principle any given dream could somehow be an outlier and information rich about the real world, etc. But just because you want that to be the case so that you can apply that reasoning to NDEs doesn't mean you're making a good argument for it.

[MysticPhD]

Originally Posted by mordant

Well that's a reductio absurdum IMO. I mean no one has an absolute 110% grip on reality but it's pretty clear that some sources of info are better than others at accurately describing / explaining / predicting reality and it seems to me that we know enough about dream states to know that they aren't veridical. I mean I had a dream last night where my late / prior wife was being a hypochondriac, which is about 100% the polar opposite of what she was. The explanation is simple: I had just been on a lengthy phone conversation with my brother, who is coping with a wife who IS a hypochondriac, extremely needy and dependent, and has other mental health issues. The dream was just imagining myself and my late wife in those roles because I more or less went to bed feeling empathy for my brother's situation. There's no reason to think that this was veridical: that my late wife was a hypochondriac even though she never acted that way, or that I ever had a hypochondriac I was in a relationship with, or, IDK, that I'm a hypochondriac. And I already know my brother's wife is a hypochondriac by the much more reliable means of him describing his situation to me on the phone, plus my own personal experience of her in the past.

And so there's every reason to think my dream wasn't veridical. Does this mean all dreams aren't veridical? No, but it's a data point, and most of us, if we're honest have a lot of those kinds of data points.

Sure anything is possible (which says zero about how likely it is) and in principle any given dream could somehow be an outlier and information rich about the real world, etc. But just because you want that to be the case so that you can apply that reasoning to NDEs doesn't mean you're making a good argument for it.

This is all true according to the Reality that we experience by the "user interface" of our interpreted actual reality. Since that actual reality is inaccessible or uninterpretable without the "user interface" we ARE down that reductio absurdum rabbit hole, mordant! My "nightmare" would be that the reverse is true and our "dream state" is the actual reality and we are living in God's dreams (nightmares).

The fact that our dreams solve our daily "real life" aggravations, frustrations, and discontents to maintain cognitive functions is suggestive of "Heaven" as the fact that our worst fears seem to be realized in our nightmares suggests "Hell." Now that is a scary thought. So glad I had the encounter to dispel any such notions.