A friend and I are arguing over ghosts.
I think it’s akin to astrology, homeopathy and palm reading. He says there’s “convincing “ evidence for its existence. He also took up company time to make a meme to illustrate our relative positions. (See image)
(To be fair, I’m also on the clock right now)
What do you think?
I’m not saying “rare data in general is not valuable”.
Not observing hawking radiation in a situation where no theory predicts hawking radiation is neither evidence for nor against the existence of hawking radiation. That would be like taking the lack of NDE in completely healthy people as evidence against NDEs.
I’ll try to state my problem with cherry picking anecdotes about NDE more succinctly.
My hypothesis: These NDE stories are the experience of wacky brain activity arising from near death situations.
Supposed evidence against that hypothesis: Some of these stories involve people knowing stuff they shouldn’t have been able to know.
My hypothesis to explain that “supernatural” knowledge:
The problem with relying on anecdotes is:
Let’s there’s a tik tok trend and 1000 people ask someone to guess the result of 10 coin flips. One of them gets them all correct! Wow that’s amazing that person must have supernatural powers! (Nope it’s just statistics).
Okay thanks for clarifying. I see what you’re saying. I think your stance is basically this: a broken clock is right at least twice a day, so sometimes people might make correct guesses about what happened when they were flatlining, but that’s to be expected. (Please correct me if this is a mischaracterization.)
I’d say, yes, a broken clock is right sometimes, but not very often. You seem to agree with this so you’re trying to show that the total numbers of potentially paranormal NDEs is a small fraction of the total number of NDEs. But I’m very weary of this. Because the way we’re going about it here is very unstructured. Because we don’t know how many NDEs there are total, how many seem potentially supernatural, how many seem mundane, the ratio between them, etc. If we want to crunch the numbers then we would need to look at a particular study, otherwise I don’t think there’s any use. It would all just be guesswork.
You seem to be concerned, here, that people who come back from an NDE may misattribute the source of their information. They may get information from a mundane source then effectively launder it, misattributing it to a supernatural source. (For example a person that is mistakenly labeled as brain-dead might actually only be comatose. This would allow them to hear conversations in the room and recount what happened afterwards. This seems spooky but nothing out of the ordinary is going on here.) This is a perfectly legitimate concern. And it’s a valid hypothesis. We can call it the information laundering hypothesis.
But let me ask you: what would it take for this hypothesis to be disproved? Could you conceive of some scenario where you’d be satisfied that there truly was no physical means for the NDE patient to have accessed that information? For example, what if the patient knew what was going on in another room that was out of earshot? And what if the patient was the only person in Room A who knew what was going on in Room B (so no one could have tipped them off)? Or what if the patient knew about what object(s) were placed in some inaccessible area, even though practically speaking no one could have known this unless they had a unique vantage point? Can you conceive of any scenarios like this that would more-or-less disqualify the information laundering hypothesis?
I don’t think any one anecdote or even a collection of anecdotes would convince me because of the explanations I layed out.
I can think of an experiment, which would be something like to hide a box with a computer that displays one of 3 colors, selected randomly and recorded by the computer so nobody can know what color was displayed until inspecting the computer later. Ask people if they had an out-of-body experience, and if they noticed the box and looked inside. Ask people who answered affirmatively to that what color was in the box, and do a statistical analysis of the results.
Even if you aren’t going to do a controlled experiment, you have to make sure your interviews of patients include every patient who had a near death experience over the course of your study.
Reviews of anecdotes that were only recorded because they are interesting is not a productive way to answer this question.
How do you distinguish between an anecdote snd a case study?
A “case study” is more formal than an anecdote, but still has the same issues.
Here’s a quote from the end of the “Limitations” section of the Wikipedia article on “Case Study”:
Another quote from earlier in that section:
The “Uses” section of that article starts with:
Lower down that section has:
Case studies are used to guide experimental and quantitative research, but are not a replacement for that part of the research process.
Applying that to case studies that appear to involve the supernatural, sufficient convincing case studies should lead to theories about the conditions for supernatural events, which should lead to experiments or quantitative studies to test those theories.
Okay. The distinction doesn’t seem very important to you, so there’s no use for me to waste time quibbling about it here
I agree completely. But there are instances in medicine/psychology where it is genuinely difficult, for practical reasons, to carry out large scale studies (though of course we should still try, to best of your ability). I believe NDEs are in this camp (see this comment here I made about difficulties in performing a study like the one you described in your last comment).
Now, before you completely dismiss NDEs for this, consider other issues with similar practical hurdles to their study. I think the short term results of corpus callosotomy (ie split brain surgery) is a good example here. This is a surgery where you basically severe a large number of connections between the brain’s right and left hemispheres; it used to be a treatment for epilepsy. This surgery is very interesting because it causes the two halves of the brain to basically act independently of one another, which lead to comical scenarios (such as fights breaking out between the right and left hand, for example). However these effects are most pronounced in the months immediately following the surgery. With time the two hemispheres learn compensate and forge new connections, allowing greater cooperation between them (though, granted, they will never return to the level of cooperation they had before).
It’s hard to construct a study on the immediate effects of these surgeries, for a few reason. For one, they are almost never performed anymore, and when they were performed they weren’t performed frequently enough: at any given time, the sample size of people who just had that surgery in the last few months is probably 0, and the highest its ever gotten is probably around 2 or 3. That’s hardly enough to base a study off of. And even if we were to base a study off of that, there are further issues. For one, how do you create an adequate control group (one that accounts for placebo or exaggeration)? Do we pretend to perform this surgery on some people when we actually didn’t? That seems tricky. Leaving fake surgical scars would not pass the ethics review. It would also never pass the ethics board to perform this surgery on people who don’t need it (ie people without epilepsy) but that would be the only way to control for that potentially confounding variable.
Despite these challenges, the case studies we have here are pretty illuminating. They seem to provide us with a genuine understanding of what the near term effects of these surgeries actually are. This is not generally considered to be controversial.
I’m sure you can see the comparison I’m driving at here. I’m curious to hear your thoughts on it.
Yes, there are difficulties in the design of experiments and studies sometimes. Things like control groups and placebos are designed to rule out certain very common confounding variables. If you cannot have a placebo, you might still be able to get useful data by other means. For example, sometimes comparison to an existing drug is used instead of comparison to a placebo.
Ultimately it all comes down to statistics. Typically, you start with “assuming” the “null hypothesis” (basically that you are wrong). For example: that your medicine doesn’t work and/or has bad side effects. Your goal is to find evidence to reject that null hypothesis with sufficient confidence. This can be done by any means, but statistics should be your guide, and you have to be careful about bias and confounding factors, and standard study formats and advice are tried-and-true reliable methods to avoid common issues. But if those don’t work for some reason, it is ok to get creative, as long as your math checks out.
If you can’t run a standard study, you should try coming up with a creative study. If you can’t come up with a way to correct all the issues, you might try studying related topics. If you really can’t gather meaningful information about your topic, that’s tough but I absolutely reject the idea that you should take something as true without true evidence just because it’s too difficult to get that evidence.
In your specific example of corpus callostomy, I would bet that 100% of cases where this surgery was performed were well documented, including follow up visits. That’s fantastic for your statistics, and means you don’t have to worry about a lot of sampling issues that you would otherwise have to correct for. You might not be able to perform experiments or new studies on the topic, but you can certainly learn from the documented cases, and you can look at studies on related topics like brain injuries, or experiment with animals (the ethics of that is a whole other debate).
An example of how this kind of reasoning works (note that I’m making up the specifics here): 100% of people who got this surgery had a post-surgery event where left-and-right hands fought. It seems like this is related to the surgery, but we have to be sure it’s caused by the surgery and not just some confounding factor like the symptoms that cause people to get this surgery in the first place. So we do a study of people who have symptoms that would have qualified them for the surgery, but instead get a different treatment or no treatment. If none or very few of those people have left/right arm fights, then we can say we have sufficient evidence that this symptom is caused by the surgery.
This is very different from the NDE topic, in which a huge number of people suffer near-death situations, and only a tiny fraction of those end up with supernatural experiences. We want to prove these supernatural experiences are real, but the incidence rate is so low it could just be statistical noise. To show evidence of the supernatural you’d need some way to demonstrate that it’s not just statistical noise or other “mundane” / “null hypothesis” explanations.
I want to mention a more science-y topic that fits into this pattern I read about the other day. If you are interested let me know and I’ll try to dig up the sources.
There is a significant amount of neurons throughout the body (outside the brain). One particularly large collection of those is in the heart. This is sometimes called the “brain of the heart” and is in charge of controlling the heart muscles with only high-level instructions from the brain. There was a hypothesis that some other behavior might happen in that heart-brain such as storing memories. This idea came from a couple case studies where a heart transplant recipient would seem to gain memories or personality traits from the donor. These cases sounded a lot like the typical “paranormal knowledge” story. Two particular cases were someone liking a food they didn’t like before but the donor did, and a child avoiding a toy that donor had with them when they died. Personality change is common after transplants in general, presumably because of the immense stress and changing life habits related to the situation. So a study was done, where they interviewed a selection of transplant recipients of both the heart and other organs and recorded any personality changes to see personality changes in general, or if some specific types of personality changes, were more common among heart transplant recipients than others. The results showed that the only statistical difference between the heart and other organs was personality changes related to sports or exercise, which has the much more mundane explanation of being a result of the symptoms of having an y healthy vs healthy heart.
Disproving ideas is just as important as proving them. That’s the whole reason for the scientific process: to make sure what we accept as fact is very likely to be fact.