Near Death Experience (NDE)

Ohh, what to do. Half my opponent's response is in the comment section. I myself have been penalized before on this sight for trying just such a thing, though to a smaller extent. http://www.debate.org... I could legitimately play the card that none of his response in the comment section should considered by the voters except when considering the conduct point…. But not all come here on DDO to debate with such legalistic rules about how to debate. They simply wish to have an intelligent discussion about a topic they are invigorated about in an adversarial way. Theirs nothing particularly wrong with that. So it would make me kind of a stuck-up pencil pusher if I so strictly decide to ignore his points in the comment section. And I would hate to be one of those. So I will compromise. I will attempt to refute all of my opponents case, even those in the comment section; but I myself will refrain from giving any of my case in the Comment Section. This wont be as hard as it sounds because though my opponent ran out of so much space that he needed to put half his argument in the comment section, that was largely because he used most of his character space quoting me, paragraph for paragraph. So to begin: (Yes, in our limited time, the experience having ceased…) Let me explain something about PLC's. if its hard-drive is so low-tech that it is only capable of using data the length of 1 bit (exp: 1010) but you give it a word length input (10101111) the low tech PLC will only be able to show the data 1111, and cut of info to large for it to handle. And the bit 1111 is all it will send out. That PLC cannot ‘understand' word size data even if by luck it receives it. Likewise if you admit the human mind is not capable of reasoning things of eternity, briefly being able to understand is not going to work for once back in the human body it loses that storage capacity and thus the information. How could one ever say their memory ‘truly' (though contrary to their claim) learned what they knew while in eternity? After all, if by divine intervention I were to gain knowledge of a mass of German vocabulary, yet I still don't actually understand German; I could never teach this new vocabulary to others right cause even I don't understand it. I am no better off than those who never got divine knowledge of German. At best I could only know what sounds like German. (in the sense that we don't know where we have come…. True, the soul is neither made of the matter and…) I'm not sure you understand what I am saying about the soul. When I say "Me" what do you think I refer to? What are you thinking of when you say "Me"? All the things that define "Me" as opposed to what "Me" would mean if I were you, what are they? Where did they come from? Part of ‘Me' may be a man who believes in supporting the Boy Scouts, part of ‘Me' may be a man who tries to avoid ever running into the unexpected, part of ‘Me' may be a man who puts his eggs in the basket that is his family. How would I gain this character? From life's experiences. It would be from choosing to go to scouts and it changes my life, I could have 1 too many bad run-in's with the unexpected and let it get me too far down, I could have grown up in a close family, ect. Everyday when you or I make choices it affects who we are going to be in the future. In fact anything I can come to think of at all that defines whatever I could mean when I say "Me" or "I" was forged from choices after I was born. I ask you this, if you strip away all that which defines what you call "I" when you say "I" that did not come as a result of something done after your birth, what could possibly be left to still define "you" before you gained all the self-impositions that make up your character? I can think of nothing, all that can make you what you are happens after you are born. So you could not have existed before and ‘fallen asleep and forgot' when you gained a body, because no part of what you are was formed yet. Even if some ‘spiritual' material was used to make the soul in your body that would grow into you with your life experiences that spiritual material can not be called your ‘soul' even if it had an eternal character of its own. Whatever defined it was lost when it was destroyed to make room for you. And we know it was destroyed because none of it is left that defines what you think of as "Me" or "I". The only things you think of came from this carnal life. So anyway, because that establishes you came from ‘nothingness' it shows you could one day return to nothingness your maker willing it. (Powerful hallucinations and delusions exist in some, and mildly in many, but that has no effect upon True Conscious which must be experienced…) How could you know this though without some of the examples of those who experience ‘True Conscious' being also recipients of false experiences? To us who have experienced neither can say that both descriptions of the experiences sound near the same, sometimes an individual is simply more poetic in there descriptions. And that would be expected no matter what the case because some people are more articulate than others. So logically if you experience one and not the other you not be able to determine that other is not like yours simply because they did not articulate themselves as poetically as you did your experience. You would have to had experienced both the madness or false experiences and experience the True Conscious to be qualified to make a distinction. And the Sad vicious circle that makes is that if you can honestly admit you experienced the madness at some point in your life; then HOW can you ever feel secure that your new experience is not just a more fantastic episode of that? You after all do have a history of madness and false experiences. I do think that circle is an unfair one to have my opponent argue against; I would be satisfied to consider it refuted if he could just source an example of someone who ‘knows' what its like to be mad and have false experiences for him/herself and has recovered since then and had the real "True Conscious" experience for him/herself after that recovery at some point. (If the reasoning faculties refused to doubt anything at any time, both they and the body would be become totally unbalanced and be seriously injured one way or another. If the reasoning faculties lose the faith they depend upon, they will mentally stagger forward in a kind of drunken fashion, losing all drive and momentum to understand anything outside their self-constricted limited parameters, and fall into an even deeper more complicated 'sleep'.) So you are saying doubt is a rather a necessary presence of any rational person? I of course agree it's presence is not inherently bad. But if it is indeed present, then doesn't that make the proof ‘shakable'? For sure though it may be very IMPROBABLE that the doubt will amount to anything in particular cases, it is possible, right? If its possible, though admittedly improbable, the proof can be said to be ‘shakable.' If it were ‘Unshakable' it would not just be improbable, it would be outright impossible.