Survival

[tjssailor]

Idealism attempts to describe formally what becomes obvious:

It’s obvious that what I AM is Consciousness experiencing
It’s obvious that the same Consciousness is experiencing everything
It’s obvious that there is no substance or physical reality
Consciousness is experiencing a self- generated virtual reality
We are all Consciousness seeming to take all forms.
All information describing specific forms is saved.
Death is simply shifting from a time-bound to timeless state.

This fits all the data of human experience.

BK’s essay pulls all this together

Though coming at it from a certain angle BK doesn’t mention important features such as interactions with disincarnate personalities, life reviews, and unconditional love.
Reincarnation being Consciousness picking up on the traits of a previous form also allows for more than form believing they are Napoleon as an example.

Physicalism fails.
Physicalists describe themselves as being individuals.
Yet Physicalists can’t even explain their own existence - as seeming individualized consciousness associated with a specific body/ brain.

Any attempt to do so quickly devolves into incoherence and nonsense.

This bears repeating: Physicalists can’t even explain their own existence.

So Physicalists making any statements about non-existence is nonsensical.

Physicalism can’t explain even normal consciousness, thinking, or memory, much less all the other human experience that occurs regularly but may not be talked about as much. Given that a normal brain can’t be demonstrated to create consciousness, thought, or store memories, the idea that a basically dead brain suddenly does super normal things is totally ludicrous.

Even the Physicalist view of death is nonsensical. There’s no reason to believe death would be an end. If a universe randomly created your existence in some unexplainable way there’s no reason it couldn’t happen again. It might take a thousand universes to come and go.

You’d never experience the time in between and are therefore subjectively immortal.

You’d just show up again as now – wondering where you came from.

[AshvinP]

... and all of the essays which won pale in comparison to Cleric's recent one or two page post on the modern obsession with proof. But he would not have won pointing out the very question is flawed to begin with, especially since BK was one of the judges Mishlove took down $500k for 1st prize... who ever said there was no incentive for people to remain in their chalk circles and demand proof that they can step out of it??

https://www.bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php

Preamble for 1st, 2nd and 3rd prizes
As readers study the top three essays authored by Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove, Dr. Pim van Lommel and Dr. Leo Ruickbie, it will become apparent that there is a great variety of approaches that prove the case for survival of human consciousness after bodily death beyond a reasonable doubt.

One hundred percent of the responsibility for judging of the BICS essay contest lay in the hands of the six judges. There was no influence by either Robert Bigelow or Colm Kelleher on the judging process. The essays were chosen by majority rule with the central criterion being the cumulative evidence for Survival of Human Consciousness beyond permanent bodily death and beyond a reasonable doubt. Because of the very large number of excellent essays that BICS received (204), the judges spent over four months of very intensive work in meticulously evaluating, deliberating, arguing and eventually making their decisions.

Why were these essays chosen by the judges?
The winners were chosen based on the power of the arguments presented and on how persuasively the essays made the case for survival of human consciousness beyond a reasonable doubt. In reading these top three essays some members of the public may disagree that particular essays should have been included in the top three winning group. That opinion is to be expected. Every reader may resonate differently with these and other essays. While the judges were reading and re-reading the two hundred and four submitted essays, they were conscious of the great responsibility of choosing the top three. The judges chose these principal winners with exquisite care.

[Soul_of_Shu]

... and all of the essays which won pale in comparison to Cleric's recent one or two page post on the modern obsession with proof.

As this topic was already started by Mark under the title 'Survival', I'm merging the two.

[tjssailor]

... and all of the essays which won pale in comparison to Cleric's recent one or two page post on the modern obsession with proof. But he would not have won pointing out the very question is flawed to begin with, especially since BK was one of the judges Mishlove took down $500k for 1st prize... who ever said there was no incentive for people to remain in their chalk circles and demand proof that they can step out of it??


Bernardo was not a judge.

[AshvinP]

... and all of the essays which won pale in comparison to Cleric's recent one or two page post on the modern obsession with proof. But he would not have won pointing out the very question is flawed to begin with, especially since BK was one of the judges Mishlove took down $500k for 1st prize... who ever said there was no incentive for people to remain in their chalk circles and demand proof that they can step out of it??


Bernardo was not a judge.

Oh I see now he was one of the 11 runner ups who got $50k... my apologies. That makes me feel no better about his involvement in this debacle... worse, even.

[tjssailor]

"Oh I see now he was one of the 11 runner ups who got $50k... my apologies. That makes me feel no better about his involvement in this debacle... worse, even."

What's the basis of your dismay? Though it's true that once you "know yourself" proof isn't needed every little bit helps to shake alters out of their physicalist stupor. BK's essay is another step in that direction.

[AshvinP]

"Oh I see now he was one of the 11 runner ups who got $50k... my apologies. That makes me feel no better about his involvement in this debacle... worse, even."

What's the basis of your dismay? Though it's true that once you "know yourself" proof isn't needed every little bit helps to shake alters out of their physicalist stupor. BK's essay is another step in that direction.

It isn't a step in that direction... it's a step in the other direction towards more physicalism. BK's idealism has become the exact mirror image of naive realist physicalist ontology. See below.

viewtopic.php?p=14439#p14439

Generally, in critical idealism (Kant-Schop) all that is in the outer world are considered "representations" while all that begins manifesting as we move towards and inside the bodily organization is considered naively real (or at least they must be considered naively real for the arguments to make any sense). That is the exact same flawed reasoning used by Kant and Schop, and of course BK agrees with the latter. It is no coincidence that this happens to mirror the Cartesian mind-matter divide, where everything 'out there' can be studied objectively and is naively real while everything 'in here' is wishy-washy subjective experience. So critical idealism just flips the naive materialist-dualist edifice around without addressing the underlying flaw in its reasoning.

Steiner wrote: The way of thinking here described, known as critical idealism, in contrast to the standpoint of naïve consciousness known as naïve realism, makes the mistake of characterizing the one percept as mental picture while taking the other in the very same sense as does the naïve realism which it apparently refutes. It wants to prove that percepts have the character of mental pictures by naïvely accepting the percepts connected with one's own organism as objectively valid facts; and over and above this, it fails to see that it confuses two spheres of observation, between which it can find no connection.

Critical idealism can refute naïve realism only by itself assuming, in naïve-realistic fashion, that one's own organism has objective existence. As soon as the idealist realizes that the percepts connected with his own organism are exactly of the same nature as those which naïve realism assumes to have objective existence, he can no longer use those percepts as a safe foundation for his theory.

And when people are given $50k to remain oblivious to the fundamentally flawed reasoning in their worldview, chances are they will never awaken to it, no matter how much or how often it is brought to their attention.

[Martin_]

Ashvin. I really would appreciate if you toned down your criticism towards everything which is deemed dualist. It's not healthy for any of the discussions here. I literally imagine you sitting somewhere, waiting to strike, scanning for anything dualist in any posts on this forum.

you know, I think a balanced dose of Dualism can actually be healthy. In terms of this thread, you have already stated your opinion. Now you apparently need to reiiterate it. Please take your "this is Dualism and it's Bad!" down a notch. I undestand that you're passionate about this, and you feel it's realy really important, but please take a serious look at the effects your passion is having on this forum and the flow of ideas.

It has become extrememly one-sided lately.

[AshvinP]

Ashvin. I really would appreciate if you toned down your criticism towards everything which is deemed dualist. It's not healthy for any of the discussions here. I literally imagine you sitting somewhere, waiting to strike, scanning for anything dualist in any posts on this forum.

you know, I think a balanced dose of Dualism can actually be healthy. In terms of this thread, you have already stated your opinion. Now you apparently need to reiiterate it. Please take your "this is Dualism and it's Bad!" down a notch. I undestand that you're passionate about this, and you feel it's realy really important, but please take a serious look at the effects your passion is having on this forum and the flow of ideas.

It has become extrememly one-sided lately.

It's generating discussion, interest, questions, criticisms, and, most importantly, thought, Martin. I was responding directly to a question that was asked of me. That is a sign of people thinking. The reason I need to keep speaking of Cartesian and Kantian dualism is because of people like you who think "a balanced dose of Dualism can actually be healthy", thereby demonstrating exactly why it needs to be brought up even MORE.

When you show me that you can muster one ounce of effort to generate any thoughtful discussion on this forum about issues which should be important to non-dual and idealist thinkers, as opposed to one sentence responses with smiley faces and unwarranted criticisms of me without any reasoning to back them up, I may start taking what you "would appreciate" more seriously. Until then, I won't.

[Freefrommainstream]

What a toxic place this has become almost an anti-BK-forum. I will be a passive reader from now on for the most part.

Well, I would suggest more 'meta' kastrup, as the forum name implies, rather than anti-kastrup—although some occasional facile detractors may be in that category. My own critique, if you can call it a critique, is only that, to my liking, he doesn't venture far enough into the profound implications of idealism—albeit, he just doesn't see that as his role, content to deconstruct the limits of materialism, and offer a cogent, scientifically compatible (or so he claims) counter-materialist argument, while being wary of over-speculating about so-called paranormal experiences, like NDEs, OBEs, psychedelic trips, etc. Very few here would dispute that his endeavour is not without merit. Some just want to take it much further than that.

Odd comments coming after I just credited BK for a better approach than Mishlove's. I would have put BK's paper far above Mishlove's.

Really though. All of this anecdotal life after death stuff that Mishlove's offers has been dealt with in many many other books. So his paper is much less original than BK's.

Most of it has also been debunked. Some people prefer to believe it anyway. But most people don't and certainly most scientists don't. BK's topic was, by the way, about approaching this topic from a mainstream science perspective. Certainly "mainstream" scientists by and large don't believe it now and I doubt the paper would persuade many to change their mind.

The problem is as pointed out by Reber:

In short, parapsychology cannot be true unless the rest of science isn’t. Moreover, if psi effects were real, they would have already fatally disrupted the rest of the body of science. If one’s wishes and hopes were having a psychokinetic impact on the world—including computers and lab equipment—scientists’ findings would be routinely biased by their hopes and beliefs. Results would differ from lab to lab whenever scientists had different aims. The upshot would be empirical chaos, not the (reasonably) ordered coherent picture developed over the past several centuries.

https://skepticalinquirer.org/2019/07/w ... t-be-true/

While Reber is writing about parapsychology in general, the same applies to survival after death. Anybody who wants to use science as an explanation needs to address how the rest of science is such a failure, especially since it generally works well for constructing buildings or atom bombs, predicting eclipses, diagnosing disease, or flying to the moon.

Of course, the little ego thinks it has a right to persist even after death. The brute force of consciousness apparently tricks us into thinking that is all that there is.

Post note: I think most of this comment is relating more to Mark's comment. Shu, I think I am actually somewhat agreeing with you. I think BK is trying to walk a line between mainstream science and the paranormal. That's a hard line to follow without slipping to one side or the other.

Science still can be true but it has to be expanded. If the paranormal gets accepted then we will have an expanded science but that does not mean that the laws of physics do not exist and biology is bullshit. This argument is simply not true.......