Thanks Alex. Now I know what you're referring to, and have reviewed three NIH papers on it as a refresher.
One includes Radin as the author, another is by
D. Samuel Schwarzkopf, and the
third by four other researchers.
Like I was getting at in a previous post someplace, statistical evidence might represent something, or it might not. Given the stats we're talking about, it certainly doesn't constitute "proof" to me. I agree with
Schwarzkopf when he says, "To me this interpretation betrays a deep-seated misapprehension of the scientific method. Statistical inference, regardless of whatever form it takes, only assigns probabilities. It cannot ever prove or disprove a theory."-
LINK
Perhaps more relevant is the assumption that the neurological sensor readings correlate to the stimulus in question. However they do not provide that data. At best they indicate that the subject is expecting something unspecified but vaguely related to the stimulus in question to happen, which is understandable given the nature of the experiment, and after enough times, we'd expect to see that reflected in the readings.
Regardless of the results, I like that Radin actually tries these experiments. For the sake of discussion, let's suppose that such experiments, along with others, like the Delayed Choice Quantum Eraser experiment, produce results sufficient to question our common view of time and space. What are the most reasonable conclusions we might be able to draw from them for the case of afterlives?
It is in this territory that we find one of the loopholes that almost allows us to infer that afterlives are possible. Notice I use the word "almost". I use it because continuity of personhood following the death of the body is still not possible. However it does imply that existence itself is quantized, and therefore, there is no continuity of anything.
In this model, reality is more like a filmstrip, where every moment is a completely new frame of existence, and what we perceive as the flow of time, is purely an illusion, and by extension so are any notions of continuity, which nullifies the premise of the hypothesis — and neither of us get our way. Is this the actual state of affairs? I don't know.
I suppose it's possible if the universe on the grandest scale is a multilayered construct of universes within universes where our reality is not the base layer. But for that, we have had others here invoke Occam's Razor ( not that I think we should always defer to Occam's Razor - we shouldn't ).
The point is that no matter how we look at it, even if we accept the assumptions Radin's experiments purport to provide evidence for, we still end-up with afterlives being something very different from the standard notion that they represent a continuity of personhood following the death of the body.