If you ever need any confirmation about the pathetic and academically shallow debunking that goes on within the establishment, you only have to check out any article on psi, on psi researchers and scholars, on afterlife research, mind and consciousness theory in science, the Anthropic principle in cosmology... The list goes on. Rational Wiki is a good example in which the reputations of serious scholars and the quality of their work is routinely dismissed by the shallowest arguments and selective picking of evidence. This trend in the academic mind control of dogma is so entrenched that any capacity to formulate new lines of enquiry are routinely frustrated and dismissed. The science establishment (as opposed to the scientific community broadly speaking) exercises firmer control of unscientific (not evidence based) dogma (materialism/physicalism) than the R. C Church managed to impose in the past.
I keep getting messages from Jimmy Wales to contribute to Wiki. Actually I did it in the past but after metaphorical puking over scores of Rational Wiki entries and other materialistic ally doctored articles my enthusiasm for his ideologically partisan fact monster has waned. I'll use it but I won't donate, any more than I'd donate to Putin's Peace Fund (I was joking, there isn't one) or Trump's Mexican Wall fund (I am not joking a out that one, a public fundraiser exists!)
Wikipedia remains a very useful source of information but it's dominance in the free web is worrying. Firstly, there are not many other comprehensive sources of factual information that are free on the web with a reach as Big as Wiki. Secondly, Wiki, despite claiming to be open source information, is in fact dominated by academic cliques or more broadly, trends and lines of established thinking. At the Frontier of science and metaphysics, a controversial area, this dogmatic control is most deplorable demonstrated in the sadly named Rational Wiki (I'd call it Ignorant Fundamaterialist Wiki) whose articles - if you can call them that - are at best casual and throwaway commentaries and at worst dangerously tendentious and libellous.
The overall tendency of the academic establishment over factual enquiry is to promote and consolidate a popular view that scientific knowledge is consistent and cumulative, reinforcing its fundamental viewpoint with the accretion of new knowledge every day. That was true till about 1900 and has been untrue since Max Planck discovered the quantum and had been diverging wildly ever since. The suppression of antimaterialist thinking in science and the intensifying assault on neodarwinist ideology from the increasingly solid accumulation of data on ID is capable of being compared to gathering the priestly pedophiles under the ample skirts of the Pope and pretending that the problem isn't happening.
There is a war being fought out there as to what constitutes rational thinking. The dogmatic materialists established dominance by about 1770 and are in no mood go give it up to the advance of anomalous data - any more than the RC was prepared to let in modern science.
In all this, independent enquiry into a bigger view of what constitutes reality is precarious. Most people who haven't read the research or the survey books are convinced of the materialist dogma and believe anything else is nonsense. But they have no more studied the material than an old style religious person.
Social psychology studies help us to understand that belief systems are wired into our psyches through social conditioning at a very early age. After that the fundamental position a person maintains is usually not amenable to any evidence.
Some people do not get a firm grounding in a fundamental viewpoint of one sort or another before the age of ten. These undecided people are more capable of independent enquiry - if they have the stomach for ridicule and a great deal of indirect es study. Only a minority seem to able to hold fast to an independent line of enquiry and reap its rewards. If this were not so, the old mechanistic paradigm would not be holding firm for so long as they are doing.
Two famous examples in philosophy are Anthony Flew and A J Ayer. Flew shifted position to deism abandoning a lifetime of atheism under the weight of new evidence. Ayer did not, despite having an NDE in which he "met God."
If even the big guys wobble when faced with the challenge of a shift in paradigm viewpoint how would most people who haven't read a single psi research paper fare?
They'll stick with the materialist paradigm, the price of which is that whatever you get in life will never be enough.
-Facebook entry, 31 August 2018
"Those readers who suppose that the evidence and arguments presented in these books can be used to change the minds of the “skeptics” would be wise to consider the words of surgeon and anthropologist Paul Broca. A new truth contrary to the prejudices of our teachers has no means wherewith to overcome their hostility, for they are open neither to facts nor to reasoning; it is necessary to wait for their death.1 Those words were written in the nineteenth century, and did not specifically refer to what was then called psychical research. But they are every bit as applicable today, to the continuing struggle of parapsychology for recognition and legitimacy. There is somethiIf you ever need any confirmation about the pathetic and academically shallow debunking that goes on within the establishment, you only have to check out any article on psi, on psi researchers and scholars, on afterlife research, mind and consciousness theory in science, the Anthropic principle in cosmology... The list goes on. Rational Wiki is a good example in which the reputations of serious scholars and the quality of their work is routinely dismissed by the shallowest arguments and selective picking of evidence. This triend in the academic mind control of dogma is so entrenched that any capacity to formulate new lines of enquiry are routinely frustrated and dismissed. The science establishment (as opposed to the scientific community broadly speaking) exercises firmer control of unscientific (not evidence based) dogma (materialism/physicalism) than the R. C Church managed to impose in the past.
I keep getting messages from Jimmy Wales to contribute to Wiki. Actually I did it in the past but after metaphorical puking over scores of Rational Wiki entries and other materialistic ally doctored articles my enthusiasm for his ideologically partisan fact monster has waned. I'll use it but I won't donate, any more than I'd donate to Putin's Peace Fund (I was joking, there isn't one) or Trump's Mexican Wall fund (I am not joking a out that one, a public fundraiser exists!)
Wikipedia remains a very useful source of information but it's dominance in the free web is worrying. Firstly, there are not many other comprehensive sources of factual information that are free on the web with a reach as Big as Wiki. Secondly, Wiki, despite claiming to be open source information, is in fact dominated by academic cliques or more broadly, trends and lines of established thinking. At the Frontier of science and metaphysics, a controversial area, this dogmatic control is most deplorable demonstrated in the sadly named Rational Wiki (I'd call it Ignorant Fundamaterialist Wiki) whose articles - if you can call them that - are at best casual and throwaway commentaries and at worst dangerously tendentious and libellous.
The overall tendency of the academic establishment over factual enquiry is to promote and consolidate a popular view that scientific knowledge is consistent and cumulative, reinforcing its fundamental viewpoint with the accretion of new knowledge every day. That was true till about 1900 and has been untrue since Max Planck discovered the quantum and had been diverging wildly ever since. The suppression of antimaterialist thinking in science and the intensifying assault on neodarwinist ideology from the increasingly solid accumulation of data on ID is capable of being compared to gathering the priestly pedophiles under the ample skirts of the Pope and pretending that the problem isn't happening.
There is a war being fought out there as to what constitutes rational thinking. The dogmatic materialists established dominance by about 1770 and are in no mood go give it up to the advance of anomalous data - any more than the RC was prepared to let in modern science.
In all this, independent enquiry into a bigger view of what constitutes reality is precarious. Most people who haven't read the research or the survey books are convinced of the materialist dogma and believe anything else is nonsense. But they have no more studied the material than an old style religious person.
Social psychology studies help us to understand that belief systems are wired into our psyches through social conditioning at a very early age. After that the fundamental position a person maintains is usually not amenable to any evidence.
Some people do not get a firm grounding in a fundamental viewpoint of one sort or another before the age of ten. These undecided people are more capable of independent enquiry - if they have the stomach for ridicule and a great deal of indirect es study. Only a minority seem to able to hold fast to an independent line of enquiry and reap its rewards. If this were not so, the old mechanistic paradigm would not be holding firm for so long as they are doing.
Two famous examples in philosophy are Anthony Flew and A J Ayer. Flew shifted position to deism abandoning a lifetime of atheism under the weight of new evidence. Ayer did not, despite having an NDE in which he "met God."
If even the big guys wobble when faced with the challenge of a shift in paradigm viewpoint how would most people who haven't read a single psi research paper fare?
They'll stick with the materialist paradigm, the price of which is that whatever you get in life will never be enough.ng in our nature that resists new ideas that run contrary to our entrenched opinions. Perhaps we all share this characteristic to some degree. And perhaps it is good that we do not drop our opinions at the first sign of contrary evidence, without first putting up a vigorous defense. But the so-called skeptics of parapsychology seem to have cultivated this characteristic to an absurd degree."
- Chris Carter,, Science and the Afterlife Experience'. Kindle Loc 5442.
- Facebook entry, 31 August 2018
"Several times in my life, I had thought I was about to die; several times I had resigned myself with the best will I could muster to ceasing to be. The idea of B.R. no longer inhabiting the world did not trouble me unduly. I felt the world had had enough of me, and certainly I had had enough of the world. Now, here I was, still same I, with capacities to think and observe sharpened to an incredible degree. I felt earth-life suddenly very unreal almost as though it had never happened. It took me quite a long time to understand this feeling until I realized at last that matter is certainly illusory although it does exist in actuality; the material world seemed now nothing more than a seething, changing, restless sea of indeterminable density and volume. How could I have thought that that was reality, that last word of Creation to mankind? Yet it is completely understandable that the state in which a man exists, however temporary, constitutes the passing reality which is no longer reality when it has passed."
- Bertrand Russell's communication through psychic facilitator Rosemary Brown, quoted in Chris Carter, op.cit. Bertrand Russell was an arch skeptic and dismissed the Afterlife Hypothesis. He was a pillar of positivist philosophy in the era when that thinking was dominant (1880-1945). Since then, advances in Quantum physics, cosmology, the increasing failure of chance--based evolution as adequately explanatory in biology and the substantial explosion of NDE/OBE evidence have caused philosophers and more enquiring scientists to review the Afterlife Hypothesis including a more careful scrutiny of the value of psi research going back well over 150 years and of which a substantial minority component is of solid evidential value. Carter's book surveys the considerable evidence for the Afterlife Hypothesis from these multiple lines of evidence which all point to the best hypothesis available today : that despite majority opinión to the contrary in science. The prevailing paradigm is backward : the Afterlife Hypothesis is more plausible than the Materialist-Reductionist Hypothesis. Since evidence about the fundamental nature of Reality can only be indicative, not proven, it is ultimately a matter of opinion, which is why some top scientists continue stoutly with materialism and others are open to an expanded view of existence.
To my thinking, one interesting epistemological fact remains : Descartes' seventeenth century solipsistic assertion 'cogito ergo sum I think therefore I am' remains tantalizingly valid today. Is the whole of material reality an illusion, (Hindus would call it Maya), or in more modern parlance, a matrix illusion? Or is it real? Can one talk about 'levels of reality' rather than reality versus unreality or illusion? It is interesting that at the level of quanta experiments conflate the subject object divide hitherto deemed essential for scientific verification of facts.
Carter's book shows that in this life and in terms of scientific enquiry, it is important to distinguish between logical possibilities (almost endless) and evidence based probabilities. Most objections to the Afterlife Hypothesis today are merely logical whereas the evidence and the principle of parsimony in science supports the hypothesis. In effect, the logical objections are unscientific when unsupported by any strong evidence. An analogy could be drawn to the Many Worlds Hypothesis in cosmology: in order get out of the disconcerting implications of the Copenhagen Interpretation (quantum possibility wave function is collapsed by consciousness which means consciousness is immortal because it is independent of spacetime) they hypothesis an infinite number of worlds to get around it - for which there is no evidence in addition to outrageously flouting the principle of parsimony on science - in order to try and keep the materialist axiom afloat. Even on its own terms it still fails to explain wave function collapse, it just postpones the problem. Whereas Von Neumann’s equations as early as 1955 demonstrated the independence of consciousness from matter in photon experiments and Aspect's experiments demonstrated that even photon behavior implies consciousness, let alone of the consciousness of humans and, say, rabbits, which opens the interrogation of the Reality question to the possibility of holistic consciousness encompassing all matter as ancient Hindu thought would suggest (Shankara's Advaita Vedanta...
....... (continued from previous post)... For example. Returning to the issue of the subject object divide in conventional science and its collapse in Quantum Mechanics, and the tantalizing hints in the extraordinary arrangements of the Cosmos as explained by the Strong Anthropic Principle evidence based hypothesis, and the Experience of communicators who have passed away conveyed to psychic facilitators who assert that the life of the Mind-body is the fundamental reality and that of the Material-body the temporal and derivative reality (it is not an illusion, it is real but it is derivative of Consciousness, thus reversing the classical materialist mechanistic view of the Universe)... All the lines of evidence and converging New Paradigm evidence based hypotheses are making the Afterlife Hypothesis far more plausible today., I am convinced that within a hundred years, possibly less, most science and evidence based convictions around the world will be based on New Paradigm Afterlife Hypothesis, not the Positivist-Materialist-Reductionist-Mechamistic Hypothesis which has dominated educated thinking by convention since at least 1900.
- Facebook entry, 29 August 2018
"It is a stupid presumption to go about despising and condemning as false anything that seems to us improbable; this is a common fault among those who think they have more intelligence than the crowd. I used to be like that once, and if I heard talk of ghosts walking or prognostications of future events, of enchantments or sorceries, or some other tale I could not swallow, I would pity the poor people who were taken in by such nonsense. And now I find that I was at least as much to be pitied myself. " - MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE, Essays. - quoted in Chris Carter, Science and the Afterlife.
MY observation: Montaigne, d. 1592, was one of the most influential philosophers in modern history and remains a tour de force through his development of Renaissance skepticism. Curiously, since the eighteenth century, the French Enlightenment philosophers took us down the path of materialist Reductionism, following a set of a priori assumptions about a fundamentally dead, mechanical universe, which had backed the current scientific paradigm - already out of date because of big bang cosmology and the philosophical interpretation of quantum mechanics - but still dominant. The vast and accumulated corpus of anomalous psi data and the growing evidence for ID which is widening the cracks of neodarwinism in biology has opened wide the door for a Mentalist interpretation of Reality over the current physicaist paradigm.
Which is what the Renaissance sceptic Montaigne was trying to say over 400 years ago, even before Newton, but during the time of Galileo.
It seems clear that while some great minds in science are pushing at the boundaries in the quest for truth and some philosophers are as well, you can scarcely beat this apposite attitude from Montaigne in the era of the dawn of modern science. How prescient!
Most minds of even clever men seem to be banal: they search for control, for dogmatic certainties. Whereas one who climbs the mataphorical mountain of Truth does so in a spirit of humility and adventure at once, knowing he must follow the path up to where it leads, and knowing that me might fall along the way. Anthony Flew, Britain's top atheist philosopher for fifty years, changed his mind in the face of the evidence pointing to a Mentalist hypothesis and faced down enormous approbrium from the atheist block. Others didn't have the courage. An example is AJ Ayer, top Wittgensteinian philosopher in Britain. Following a serious illness in 1986 in which Ayer had a stunning NDE in which he encountered evidence of his own life after death.he admitted it to his medical consultant and then recanted publicly to avoid overturning a lifetime of work in positivist philosophy. It was too much for his ego to bear. We should not be scathing about this but understand how much emotion and work is invested in the physicalist paradigm by the science and philosophy establishment today, how much stand to lose if they give up building their monumental sandcastle to physicalism and face the truth : the evidence suggests that Matter proceeds from Mind, that Mind, which is outside of spacetime, is the only state that always was, that is the ground of all Being (which is all phenomena, all Becoming in spacetime) and which BY DEFINITION is the only Uncreated. Those of us who ask the question 'What came before the universe was born' ask a good question supported by our current knowledge of science. Those who ask 'what came before "God" or Mind' are philosophically incoherent. The nature of Mind partakes essentially in non creation outside of spacetime that gives rise to Being, everything that is and that we study from science. It is our knowledge of science today, of conventional science (Newtonian), quantum science, cosmological origins and psi data.that points in this direction and what makes my foregoing philosophical assertions shift from the realm of the obscure to the broadly comprehensible and convincing. And increasingly, the more adventurous minds, curious about Truth, are moving along the same path I am taking here, a path beaten for me by much greater minds than mine, the ones that did the original research and the deductive and inductive thinking, who are still doing it and clearing the path of understanding for the likes of myself. I truly have to thank these pioneers of discovery of the Empire of the Mind from Max Planck. Niels Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli and Heisenberg to William James, FWH Myers, Carl Jung, John Von Neumann, Schrödinger, Alain Aspect, Anthony Flew, Matti Leisola, Yogananda Paramahansa, J B Rhine, Frances Greaves, Geraldine Cummins, Anthony Borgia, Jalaluddin Rumi, Sheikh Nizamuddin Aliya, Sheikh Sadi and many others from a huge variety of specialist fields from Sufism to Hindu mediation to quantum Physics to Psi metaphysics to ID in biology ...
To challenge the materialist paradigm today in an educated manner one needs not only to be in sight of useful evidence but to have a great deal of courage. In the seventeenth century, to contradict Church doctrine required great courage. You could lose your life and subject to torture first. Today, to challenge materialist dogma, to propose a mentalist view of Reality based on the insights of psi evidence, one may lose one's career and reputation and through constructive dismissal, one's life also. So courage and a clear mind are necessary to continue to propose the new thinking in defiance of "common knowledge" with uncommon knowledge and uncommon conclusions or hypotheses.
- Facebook entry, 27 August 2018
I keep getting messages from Jimmy Wales to contribute to Wiki. Actually I did it in the past but after metaphorical puking over scores of Rational Wiki entries and other materialistic ally doctored articles my enthusiasm for his ideologically partisan fact monster has waned. I'll use it but I won't donate, any more than I'd donate to Putin's Peace Fund (I was joking, there isn't one) or Trump's Mexican Wall fund (I am not joking a out that one, a public fundraiser exists!)
Wikipedia remains a very useful source of information but it's dominance in the free web is worrying. Firstly, there are not many other comprehensive sources of factual information that are free on the web with a reach as Big as Wiki. Secondly, Wiki, despite claiming to be open source information, is in fact dominated by academic cliques or more broadly, trends and lines of established thinking. At the Frontier of science and metaphysics, a controversial area, this dogmatic control is most deplorable demonstrated in the sadly named Rational Wiki (I'd call it Ignorant Fundamaterialist Wiki) whose articles - if you can call them that - are at best casual and throwaway commentaries and at worst dangerously tendentious and libellous.
The overall tendency of the academic establishment over factual enquiry is to promote and consolidate a popular view that scientific knowledge is consistent and cumulative, reinforcing its fundamental viewpoint with the accretion of new knowledge every day. That was true till about 1900 and has been untrue since Max Planck discovered the quantum and had been diverging wildly ever since. The suppression of antimaterialist thinking in science and the intensifying assault on neodarwinist ideology from the increasingly solid accumulation of data on ID is capable of being compared to gathering the priestly pedophiles under the ample skirts of the Pope and pretending that the problem isn't happening.
There is a war being fought out there as to what constitutes rational thinking. The dogmatic materialists established dominance by about 1770 and are in no mood go give it up to the advance of anomalous data - any more than the RC was prepared to let in modern science.
In all this, independent enquiry into a bigger view of what constitutes reality is precarious. Most people who haven't read the research or the survey books are convinced of the materialist dogma and believe anything else is nonsense. But they have no more studied the material than an old style religious person.
Social psychology studies help us to understand that belief systems are wired into our psyches through social conditioning at a very early age. After that the fundamental position a person maintains is usually not amenable to any evidence.
Some people do not get a firm grounding in a fundamental viewpoint of one sort or another before the age of ten. These undecided people are more capable of independent enquiry - if they have the stomach for ridicule and a great deal of indirect es study. Only a minority seem to able to hold fast to an independent line of enquiry and reap its rewards. If this were not so, the old mechanistic paradigm would not be holding firm for so long as they are doing.
Two famous examples in philosophy are Anthony Flew and A J Ayer. Flew shifted position to deism abandoning a lifetime of atheism under the weight of new evidence. Ayer did not, despite having an NDE in which he "met God."
If even the big guys wobble when faced with the challenge of a shift in paradigm viewpoint how would most people who haven't read a single psi research paper fare?
They'll stick with the materialist paradigm, the price of which is that whatever you get in life will never be enough.
-Facebook entry, 31 August 2018
"Those readers who suppose that the evidence and arguments presented in these books can be used to change the minds of the “skeptics” would be wise to consider the words of surgeon and anthropologist Paul Broca. A new truth contrary to the prejudices of our teachers has no means wherewith to overcome their hostility, for they are open neither to facts nor to reasoning; it is necessary to wait for their death.1 Those words were written in the nineteenth century, and did not specifically refer to what was then called psychical research. But they are every bit as applicable today, to the continuing struggle of parapsychology for recognition and legitimacy. There is somethiIf you ever need any confirmation about the pathetic and academically shallow debunking that goes on within the establishment, you only have to check out any article on psi, on psi researchers and scholars, on afterlife research, mind and consciousness theory in science, the Anthropic principle in cosmology... The list goes on. Rational Wiki is a good example in which the reputations of serious scholars and the quality of their work is routinely dismissed by the shallowest arguments and selective picking of evidence. This triend in the academic mind control of dogma is so entrenched that any capacity to formulate new lines of enquiry are routinely frustrated and dismissed. The science establishment (as opposed to the scientific community broadly speaking) exercises firmer control of unscientific (not evidence based) dogma (materialism/physicalism) than the R. C Church managed to impose in the past.
I keep getting messages from Jimmy Wales to contribute to Wiki. Actually I did it in the past but after metaphorical puking over scores of Rational Wiki entries and other materialistic ally doctored articles my enthusiasm for his ideologically partisan fact monster has waned. I'll use it but I won't donate, any more than I'd donate to Putin's Peace Fund (I was joking, there isn't one) or Trump's Mexican Wall fund (I am not joking a out that one, a public fundraiser exists!)
Wikipedia remains a very useful source of information but it's dominance in the free web is worrying. Firstly, there are not many other comprehensive sources of factual information that are free on the web with a reach as Big as Wiki. Secondly, Wiki, despite claiming to be open source information, is in fact dominated by academic cliques or more broadly, trends and lines of established thinking. At the Frontier of science and metaphysics, a controversial area, this dogmatic control is most deplorable demonstrated in the sadly named Rational Wiki (I'd call it Ignorant Fundamaterialist Wiki) whose articles - if you can call them that - are at best casual and throwaway commentaries and at worst dangerously tendentious and libellous.
The overall tendency of the academic establishment over factual enquiry is to promote and consolidate a popular view that scientific knowledge is consistent and cumulative, reinforcing its fundamental viewpoint with the accretion of new knowledge every day. That was true till about 1900 and has been untrue since Max Planck discovered the quantum and had been diverging wildly ever since. The suppression of antimaterialist thinking in science and the intensifying assault on neodarwinist ideology from the increasingly solid accumulation of data on ID is capable of being compared to gathering the priestly pedophiles under the ample skirts of the Pope and pretending that the problem isn't happening.
There is a war being fought out there as to what constitutes rational thinking. The dogmatic materialists established dominance by about 1770 and are in no mood go give it up to the advance of anomalous data - any more than the RC was prepared to let in modern science.
In all this, independent enquiry into a bigger view of what constitutes reality is precarious. Most people who haven't read the research or the survey books are convinced of the materialist dogma and believe anything else is nonsense. But they have no more studied the material than an old style religious person.
Social psychology studies help us to understand that belief systems are wired into our psyches through social conditioning at a very early age. After that the fundamental position a person maintains is usually not amenable to any evidence.
Some people do not get a firm grounding in a fundamental viewpoint of one sort or another before the age of ten. These undecided people are more capable of independent enquiry - if they have the stomach for ridicule and a great deal of indirect es study. Only a minority seem to able to hold fast to an independent line of enquiry and reap its rewards. If this were not so, the old mechanistic paradigm would not be holding firm for so long as they are doing.
Two famous examples in philosophy are Anthony Flew and A J Ayer. Flew shifted position to deism abandoning a lifetime of atheism under the weight of new evidence. Ayer did not, despite having an NDE in which he "met God."
If even the big guys wobble when faced with the challenge of a shift in paradigm viewpoint how would most people who haven't read a single psi research paper fare?
They'll stick with the materialist paradigm, the price of which is that whatever you get in life will never be enough.ng in our nature that resists new ideas that run contrary to our entrenched opinions. Perhaps we all share this characteristic to some degree. And perhaps it is good that we do not drop our opinions at the first sign of contrary evidence, without first putting up a vigorous defense. But the so-called skeptics of parapsychology seem to have cultivated this characteristic to an absurd degree."
- Chris Carter,, Science and the Afterlife Experience'. Kindle Loc 5442.
- Facebook entry, 31 August 2018
"Several times in my life, I had thought I was about to die; several times I had resigned myself with the best will I could muster to ceasing to be. The idea of B.R. no longer inhabiting the world did not trouble me unduly. I felt the world had had enough of me, and certainly I had had enough of the world. Now, here I was, still same I, with capacities to think and observe sharpened to an incredible degree. I felt earth-life suddenly very unreal almost as though it had never happened. It took me quite a long time to understand this feeling until I realized at last that matter is certainly illusory although it does exist in actuality; the material world seemed now nothing more than a seething, changing, restless sea of indeterminable density and volume. How could I have thought that that was reality, that last word of Creation to mankind? Yet it is completely understandable that the state in which a man exists, however temporary, constitutes the passing reality which is no longer reality when it has passed."
- Bertrand Russell's communication through psychic facilitator Rosemary Brown, quoted in Chris Carter, op.cit. Bertrand Russell was an arch skeptic and dismissed the Afterlife Hypothesis. He was a pillar of positivist philosophy in the era when that thinking was dominant (1880-1945). Since then, advances in Quantum physics, cosmology, the increasing failure of chance--based evolution as adequately explanatory in biology and the substantial explosion of NDE/OBE evidence have caused philosophers and more enquiring scientists to review the Afterlife Hypothesis including a more careful scrutiny of the value of psi research going back well over 150 years and of which a substantial minority component is of solid evidential value. Carter's book surveys the considerable evidence for the Afterlife Hypothesis from these multiple lines of evidence which all point to the best hypothesis available today : that despite majority opinión to the contrary in science. The prevailing paradigm is backward : the Afterlife Hypothesis is more plausible than the Materialist-Reductionist Hypothesis. Since evidence about the fundamental nature of Reality can only be indicative, not proven, it is ultimately a matter of opinion, which is why some top scientists continue stoutly with materialism and others are open to an expanded view of existence.
To my thinking, one interesting epistemological fact remains : Descartes' seventeenth century solipsistic assertion 'cogito ergo sum I think therefore I am' remains tantalizingly valid today. Is the whole of material reality an illusion, (Hindus would call it Maya), or in more modern parlance, a matrix illusion? Or is it real? Can one talk about 'levels of reality' rather than reality versus unreality or illusion? It is interesting that at the level of quanta experiments conflate the subject object divide hitherto deemed essential for scientific verification of facts.
Carter's book shows that in this life and in terms of scientific enquiry, it is important to distinguish between logical possibilities (almost endless) and evidence based probabilities. Most objections to the Afterlife Hypothesis today are merely logical whereas the evidence and the principle of parsimony in science supports the hypothesis. In effect, the logical objections are unscientific when unsupported by any strong evidence. An analogy could be drawn to the Many Worlds Hypothesis in cosmology: in order get out of the disconcerting implications of the Copenhagen Interpretation (quantum possibility wave function is collapsed by consciousness which means consciousness is immortal because it is independent of spacetime) they hypothesis an infinite number of worlds to get around it - for which there is no evidence in addition to outrageously flouting the principle of parsimony on science - in order to try and keep the materialist axiom afloat. Even on its own terms it still fails to explain wave function collapse, it just postpones the problem. Whereas Von Neumann’s equations as early as 1955 demonstrated the independence of consciousness from matter in photon experiments and Aspect's experiments demonstrated that even photon behavior implies consciousness, let alone of the consciousness of humans and, say, rabbits, which opens the interrogation of the Reality question to the possibility of holistic consciousness encompassing all matter as ancient Hindu thought would suggest (Shankara's Advaita Vedanta...
....... (continued from previous post)... For example. Returning to the issue of the subject object divide in conventional science and its collapse in Quantum Mechanics, and the tantalizing hints in the extraordinary arrangements of the Cosmos as explained by the Strong Anthropic Principle evidence based hypothesis, and the Experience of communicators who have passed away conveyed to psychic facilitators who assert that the life of the Mind-body is the fundamental reality and that of the Material-body the temporal and derivative reality (it is not an illusion, it is real but it is derivative of Consciousness, thus reversing the classical materialist mechanistic view of the Universe)... All the lines of evidence and converging New Paradigm evidence based hypotheses are making the Afterlife Hypothesis far more plausible today., I am convinced that within a hundred years, possibly less, most science and evidence based convictions around the world will be based on New Paradigm Afterlife Hypothesis, not the Positivist-Materialist-Reductionist-Mechamistic Hypothesis which has dominated educated thinking by convention since at least 1900.
- Facebook entry, 29 August 2018
"It is a stupid presumption to go about despising and condemning as false anything that seems to us improbable; this is a common fault among those who think they have more intelligence than the crowd. I used to be like that once, and if I heard talk of ghosts walking or prognostications of future events, of enchantments or sorceries, or some other tale I could not swallow, I would pity the poor people who were taken in by such nonsense. And now I find that I was at least as much to be pitied myself. " - MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE, Essays. - quoted in Chris Carter, Science and the Afterlife.
MY observation: Montaigne, d. 1592, was one of the most influential philosophers in modern history and remains a tour de force through his development of Renaissance skepticism. Curiously, since the eighteenth century, the French Enlightenment philosophers took us down the path of materialist Reductionism, following a set of a priori assumptions about a fundamentally dead, mechanical universe, which had backed the current scientific paradigm - already out of date because of big bang cosmology and the philosophical interpretation of quantum mechanics - but still dominant. The vast and accumulated corpus of anomalous psi data and the growing evidence for ID which is widening the cracks of neodarwinism in biology has opened wide the door for a Mentalist interpretation of Reality over the current physicaist paradigm.
Which is what the Renaissance sceptic Montaigne was trying to say over 400 years ago, even before Newton, but during the time of Galileo.
It seems clear that while some great minds in science are pushing at the boundaries in the quest for truth and some philosophers are as well, you can scarcely beat this apposite attitude from Montaigne in the era of the dawn of modern science. How prescient!
Most minds of even clever men seem to be banal: they search for control, for dogmatic certainties. Whereas one who climbs the mataphorical mountain of Truth does so in a spirit of humility and adventure at once, knowing he must follow the path up to where it leads, and knowing that me might fall along the way. Anthony Flew, Britain's top atheist philosopher for fifty years, changed his mind in the face of the evidence pointing to a Mentalist hypothesis and faced down enormous approbrium from the atheist block. Others didn't have the courage. An example is AJ Ayer, top Wittgensteinian philosopher in Britain. Following a serious illness in 1986 in which Ayer had a stunning NDE in which he encountered evidence of his own life after death.he admitted it to his medical consultant and then recanted publicly to avoid overturning a lifetime of work in positivist philosophy. It was too much for his ego to bear. We should not be scathing about this but understand how much emotion and work is invested in the physicalist paradigm by the science and philosophy establishment today, how much stand to lose if they give up building their monumental sandcastle to physicalism and face the truth : the evidence suggests that Matter proceeds from Mind, that Mind, which is outside of spacetime, is the only state that always was, that is the ground of all Being (which is all phenomena, all Becoming in spacetime) and which BY DEFINITION is the only Uncreated. Those of us who ask the question 'What came before the universe was born' ask a good question supported by our current knowledge of science. Those who ask 'what came before "God" or Mind' are philosophically incoherent. The nature of Mind partakes essentially in non creation outside of spacetime that gives rise to Being, everything that is and that we study from science. It is our knowledge of science today, of conventional science (Newtonian), quantum science, cosmological origins and psi data.that points in this direction and what makes my foregoing philosophical assertions shift from the realm of the obscure to the broadly comprehensible and convincing. And increasingly, the more adventurous minds, curious about Truth, are moving along the same path I am taking here, a path beaten for me by much greater minds than mine, the ones that did the original research and the deductive and inductive thinking, who are still doing it and clearing the path of understanding for the likes of myself. I truly have to thank these pioneers of discovery of the Empire of the Mind from Max Planck. Niels Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli and Heisenberg to William James, FWH Myers, Carl Jung, John Von Neumann, Schrödinger, Alain Aspect, Anthony Flew, Matti Leisola, Yogananda Paramahansa, J B Rhine, Frances Greaves, Geraldine Cummins, Anthony Borgia, Jalaluddin Rumi, Sheikh Nizamuddin Aliya, Sheikh Sadi and many others from a huge variety of specialist fields from Sufism to Hindu mediation to quantum Physics to Psi metaphysics to ID in biology ...
To challenge the materialist paradigm today in an educated manner one needs not only to be in sight of useful evidence but to have a great deal of courage. In the seventeenth century, to contradict Church doctrine required great courage. You could lose your life and subject to torture first. Today, to challenge materialist dogma, to propose a mentalist view of Reality based on the insights of psi evidence, one may lose one's career and reputation and through constructive dismissal, one's life also. So courage and a clear mind are necessary to continue to propose the new thinking in defiance of "common knowledge" with uncommon knowledge and uncommon conclusions or hypotheses.
- Facebook entry, 27 August 2018
