The Natural Afterlife / Never-Ending Experience Model

Hi, all,

The afterlife is fascinating to me. I believe that Bryan Ehlmann proposes a model here that merges the various lines of evidence quite nicely:

https://philarchive.org/archive/EHLTTO

A more user-friendly summary here:

https://owlcation.com/humanities/Perhaps-Heaven-Is-in-Our-Never-Ending-Dream-and-Natural-Afterlife

My take?
Consider the overwhelming evidence of NDEs. Experiencers all seem to say the same thing, which is "It felt realer than real," as though they were in an entirely new reality.

Reality is, of course, a construct of one's mind. My reality right now is my small bungalow....four walls, a sofa, a television, etc. You could tell me that anything in the world outside of my bungalow is real, but my reality at this very moment is contained within my bungalow.

Thus, I am simulating a reality.

Time is also a construct. Time does not exist as a principal law or function of the universe. At the risk of sounding too "Quantum Woo," time does not exist outside of our ability to measure or observe it.

Consider the Many Worlds interpretation of the Double Slit Experiment. Also, consider Simulation Theory (Elon Musk is convinced that the chances of us not living in a simulation is billions against one).

When we "die" and enter into the new reality of the NDE, perhaps at some point our brain will finally die, the last neuron will fire across synapses (this ought to satisfy materialists). But, it does not matter: we are-- quite literally-- in a new reality of our mind's "construction" and on a different plane of consciousness. You could be "dead" right now, for all you know, and just living in a reality, simulated either by your consciousness, by a collective consciousness, or by some higher-ordered future being.

So, you will never consciously know that you have "died" while in this new reality. Ehlmann argues that you could exist within this new reality indefinitely, time being a construct of consciousness and all. But....

....we know from many NDEs that the experiencer is offered reincarnation, and also have the wealth of Jim Tucker and Ian Stevenson's research into children's past life memories. These children-- occasionally-- speak about a time "between lives," when they pick new parents or families. They are quite literally simulating a new reality, a new universe of which we all just happen to be a part.

But there are infinite universes out there, if the Many Worlds interpretation is to be believed. They may exist simultaneously to our own. They "spawn" as a function of Quantum Mechanics. They are all simulations, in a way.

This theory has been helpful to me. It has managed to align so many competing theories of the universe and consciousness and avoids much of the mess.

Just some CatDad thoughts for the day.
 
I don't believe the evidence we have, mostly from personal testimony of experiencers, is strong enough evidence to make a conclusion.

As an analogy, do you believe in remote viewing? There is objective data that something that should not happen, does happen.

One might try to draw the same relationship with medium research. Accept we only know they are conscious in the afterlife because the conscious medium says so! So, back to experiencer only, Perhaps skill learning is a contrary example. Like the chess game with the dead. Supposedly Ed. May claims the moves were available in a library...but now that's more of an historical claim of fraud.

And so it goes, back and forth.

I know 3 people who could convince me to conclude in the affirmative 'there is an after life': Raymond Moody, Sam Parnia (maybe) and Gary Schwartz (with lots of external review and validation).
 
I hate not knowing, and I suppose I would not purport that I do know any better than anybody else. I think the preponderance of evidence favors something like what I've described. But can studies be replicated in a controlled way? Not really. Is the mechanism by which NDEers have the experiences explicable? No, not really.

As an analogy, do you believe in remote viewing? There is objective data that something that should not happen, does happen.

One might try to draw the same relationship with medium research. Accept we only know they are conscious in the afterlife because the conscious medium says so! So, back to experiencer only, Perhaps skill learning is a contrary example. Like the chess game with the dead. Supposedly Ed. May claims the moves were available in a library...but now that's more of an historical claim of fraud.

I don't know anything about remote viewing, outside of the PEAR studies, I suppose. Our first question should be if there is "objective data that something that should not happen, does happen," then how large is that data set?

Between Moody, Greyson, and now Parnia, we have thousands upon thousands of testimonials of NDEs. At a certain point, that strays beyond the realm of anecdotal evidence. Statistically speaking, the experiencers are almost certainly "correct," in that they are accurately describing the experiences. The remaining research ought to describe whether the experiences are ascertained through material means, or not. I will admit that I don't know. If Ehlmann's theory is correct, though, that seems to render the point moot.

So many mediums have been so thoroughly exposed as frauds and charlatans in the past that we now would need an awful lot of them being "genuine" in order to create a compelling data set.

And so it goes, back and forth.

I know 3 people who could convince me to conclude in the affirmative 'there is an after life': Raymond Moody, Sam Parnia (maybe) and Gary Schwartz (with lots of external review and validation).

They are all correct to remain agnostic, at this point.
 
Ah I think the remote viewing from the government was reviewed in so called "AIR' data, an acronym for something by I believe Jessica Utts, a statistician. Vaguely remember it only being a small fraction of the data.

We have people like Stephen Schwartz claiming it requires frontloading, which means saying what the target is for it to work. Then their is the farsight institute, claiming to make money off bitcoin. And many other claims if proven, would probably convince me, eg finding the lost ark of the covenant or alien bases on the moon.

I no longer ignore anecdotal data for realllly weird stuff. But I cannot draw firm conclusions either.
 
Back
Top