Three stages

[Sriram]

Absolutely - skepticism isn't about refusing to accept that something isn't possible, it is about not accepting that something is true without reasonable evidence.

Now I might be wrong but I think pretty well (perhaps all) the atheists on this MB also describe themselves as agnostic on knowledge. So I (and I suspect others here) am atheist as I do not believe that god exists but agnostic because I do not know for certain that god does not exist. Hence I (and I suspect others here) accept the possibility that god could exist but due to the lack of any credible evidence I do not believe that to be the case.

So if skepticism is as Sriram describes (it isn't by the way), then none of the atheist here are skeptics as we accept that god could exist, albeit we do not believe god exists.

And again using Sriram's (wrong) definition of skepticism as someone who refused to accept the possibility of something, then it isn't the atheists here that are habitual skeptics and have a skeptical mindset. Nope it is the likes of AB and Vlad. While Sriram focusses on the possibility that god exists, there is an equally valid alternative - that god does not exist. And while I and others who are atheist seem to accept the possibility that god exists, it seems to me that Vlad and AB (as examples) seem to completely reject the possibility that god does not exist.

Then I am sure, all of you will be happy to accept the possibility of an after-life based on NDE cases and the possibility of reincarnation based on cases studied by Jim Tucker.   I am fine with that!

Thanks.

[Stranger]

Then I am sure, all of you will be happy to accept the possibility of an after-life based on NDE cases and the possibility of reincarnation based on cases studied by Jim Tucker.   I am fine with that!

That went right over you head, then. I'll accept the possibility of an afterlife (it can't be falsified) but not on the basis of this deeply flawed 'evidence'.

[Maeght]

Then I am sure, all of you will be happy to accept the possibility of an after-life based on NDE cases and the possibility of reincarnation based on cases studied by Jim Tucker.   I am fine with that!

Thanks.

I would accept the possibility of an after-life but wouldn't say that NDEs are evidence for it as we don't actually know what NDEs are.

[bluehillside Retd.]

Sriram,

Then I am sure, all of you will be happy to accept the possibility of an after-life based on NDE cases and the possibility of reincarnation based on cases studied by Jim Tucker.   I am fine with that!

You don't understand the term "skepticism". In everyday parlance it just means critical thinking, and it doesn't therefore entail the rejection of possibilities about anything. Yes I accept the possibility of life after death, but only in the same way that I accept the possibility of leprechauns too. I have no way to disprove either claim (assuming for now anyone could even frame them coherently) so I have no basis definitively to eliminate their possibility.   

What I also know though is that claiming that near death experiences tell us something about actual death is stupid. They tell us something about dying, but claiming they tell us about death too is like claiming that sex tells us something about pregnancy. They're qualitatively different states of being (or not being), so eliding them is a category error.

It's disappointing to have to explain this to you given that I've done so several times already without reply.     

[ProfessorDavey]

Then I am sure, all of you will be happy to accept the possibility of an after-life based on NDE cases and the possibility of reincarnation based on cases studied by Jim Tucker.   I am fine with that!

Thanks.

I most certainly accept the 'possibility' of an after life and reincarnation, albeit I've not seen any credible evidence in support those possibilities to actually be true.

Certainly so-called NDE (which are neither necessarily near death as they can be replicated in circumstances that aren't close to death, nor do they tell us anything about what happens after death) don't provide any support for an after life. Firstly because even in the case of circumstances that are near to death, at best they tell us something about the process of dying (in the living) and nothing about what actually happens after death. Moreover, we know a load about the physiology of these phenomena through neuroscientific techniques and we can induce them/they are replicated in circumstances that aren't close to death at all - so this tells us we are dealing with a more fundamental interplay of physiology and neurophysiology that isn't necessarily associate withe the process of death.

Tucker's 'research' is laughably weak - full of suggestion, confirmation bias, potential for hoax with loads of stuff in the public domain and lack of any kind of proper control. That someone claiming that in his past life he wore a hat and smoked somehow provides strong evidence for reincarnation is for the most gullible of gullible people.

But the lack of credible evidence isn't proof that an after life or reincarnation don't exist - they remain as possibilities however implausible. However that lack of evidence leads me not to believe in them as being true and certainly not to alter my life on the basis that they might be true.

[Bramble]

Whilst I'm sure we'd all like to think of ourselves as open minded, does it even make sense 'to accept the possibility of an after-life' without first knowing clearly what this might actually mean?

We all know what it's like to go to sleep on Monday night and then wake up on Tuesday morning, apparently the same person, albeit not exactly the same person. It all seems fairly obvious, though it becomes rather less so if we start to think about it. Maybe that's why people generally don't.

So what exactly is being claimed by those championing the idea of reincarnation? If we think of ourselves as being reborn there is perhaps a tendency to think of this as somewhat analogous to going to sleep on Monday and waking up on Tuesday, though clearly this can't be what happens at all. So in what meaningful sense am 'I' reincarnated?

The common theme in reincarnation claims is the belief that in some meaningful sense the process 'cancels' death. This is precisely why people want to believe it. If death (of the self) wasn't somehow effectively undone, reincarnation and biological death would be practically indistinguishable. Why then would anyone bother to make claims about having past and future lives?

The difficulty for reincarnationists is to construe the reincarnating self as sufficiently similar to the self of this life to remain meaningfully 'me' but sufficiently different from that self to navigate without injury the obvious destructiveness of physical death. I've yet to encounter an explanation of reincarnation that remotely succeeds in doing this. But without such an explanation, reincarnation doesn't even qualify as a coherent idea that can be accepted as a possibility. What exactly are we being asked to accept?

[ProfessorDavey]

Whilst I'm sure we'd all like to think of ourselves as open minded, does it even make sense 'to accept the possibility of an after-life' without first knowing clearly what this might actually mean?

We all know what it's like to go to sleep on Monday night and then wake up on Tuesday morning, apparently the same person, albeit not exactly the same person. It all seems fairly obvious, though it becomes rather less so if we start to think about it. Maybe that's why people generally don't.

So what exactly is being claimed by those championing the idea of reincarnation? If we think of ourselves as being reborn there is perhaps a tendency to think of this as somewhat analogous to going to sleep on Monday and waking up on Tuesday, though clearly this can't be what happens at all. So in what meaningful sense am 'I' reincarnated?

The common theme in reincarnation claims is the belief that in some meaningful sense the process 'cancels' death. This is precisely why people want to believe it. If death (of the self) wasn't somehow effectively undone, reincarnation and biological death would be practically indistinguishable. Why then would anyone bother to make claims about having past and future lives?

The difficulty for reincarnationists is to construe the reincarnating self as sufficiently similar to the self of this life to remain meaningfully 'me' but sufficiently different from that self to navigate without injury the obvious destructiveness of physical death. I've yet to encounter an explanation of reincarnation that remotely succeeds in doing this. But without such an explanation, reincarnation doesn't even qualify as a coherent idea that can be accepted as a possibility. What exactly are we being asked to accept?

Yes I think you are correct to an extent.

Sure when asked about whether an after life is a possibility we might answer 'yes' (albeit there is no credible evidence to support to) on the basis of any kind of after life. If, on the other had, we are asked the same question about a very specific kind of after life, then we might consider the probability to be even less - so an even more implausible suggestion that just any kind of after life. But unless that probability reaches zero (and we cannot really know this) then it still remains a possibility, even if it seems even more implausible than any kind of after life. And as there is no credible evidence for any kind of after life it goes without saying that there is also no credible evidence for any specific kind of after life.

[BeRational]

Then I am sure, all of you will be happy to accept the possibility of an after-life based on NDE cases and the possibility of reincarnation based on cases studied by Jim Tucker.   I am fine with that!

Thanks.

I would not default to accepting that claim. You would have to demonstrate that it is possible first.
Equally, I would not accept that it was impossible for the same reason.

[ProfessorDavey]

I would not default to accepting that claim. You would have to demonstrate that it is possible first.
Equally, I would not accept that it was impossible for the same reason.

So there we go.

Sriram accuses us of having a skeptical mindset on the basis that he thinks we refuse to accept certain things as possibilities.

Yet, here we are - we all seem to have a completely open mindset - prepared to accept the possibility of after life and resurrection, yet (quite reasonably) expecting evidence before we accept that possibility to actually be true.

And all the while Sriram regularly refuses to accept certain things - e.g. evolution being a non-directed process - where there is huge amounts of evidence to be possible. Hmm so who it is that has the closed mindset? And that's before we get onto his complete inability to see beyond a narrow anthropocentric mentality.

[Nearly Sane]

So there we go.

Sriram accuses us of having a skeptical mindset on the basis that he thinks we refuse to accept certain things as possibilities.

Yet, here we are - we all seem to have a completely open mindset - prepared to accept the possibility of after life and resurrection, yet (quite reasonably) expecting evidence before we accept that possibility to actually be true.

And all the while Sriram regularly refuses to accept certain things - e.g. evolution being a non-directed process - where there is huge amounts of evidence to be possible. Hmm so who it is that has the closed mindset? And that's before we get onto his complete inability to see beyond a narrow anthropocentric mentality.

Isn't BR explicitly saying that he's not ruling out the possibility, rather than accepting that it is a possibility?

[ProfessorDavey]

Isn't BR explicitly saying that he's not ruling out the possibility, rather than accepting that it is a possibility?

Same thing - if you don't rule something out, you therefore accept it to be a possibility - even if that something is ... err ... a possibility.

Actually what he said was:

'I would not accept that it was impossible for the same reason.' - if he isn't accepting that it is impossible, then he must be accepting that it is a possibility.

If I've read this wrong and BR doesn't accept it is a possibility, then I'm sure he will clarify.

[Nearly Sane]

Same thing - if you don't rule something out, you therefore accept it to be a possibility - even if that something is ... err ... a possibility.

Actually what he said was:

'I would not accept that it was impossible for the same reason.' - if he isn't accepting that it is impossible, then he must be accepting that it is a possibility.

If I've read this wrong and BR doesn't accept it is a possibility, then I'm sure he will clarify.

Saying that I cannot say that something is not a possibility is not saying that I am saying that it is a possibility. I don't have sufficient information to say if it is. 

[Bramble]

Yes I think you are correct to an extent.

Sure when asked about whether an after life is a possibility we might answer 'yes' (albeit there is no credible evidence to support to) on the basis of any kind of after life. If, on the other had, we are asked the same question about a very specific kind of after life, then we might consider the probability to be even less - so an even more implausible suggestion that just any kind of after life. But unless that probability reaches zero (and we cannot really know this) then it still remains a possibility, even if it seems even more implausible than any kind of after life. And as there is no credible evidence for any kind of after life it goes without saying that there is also no credible evidence for any specific kind of after life.

For it to make any sense at all to refer to 'my after-life' surely there must be some meaningful continuity of what we normally consider to be the everyday experience of 'my' selfhood. It strikes me as simply incoherent to posit some other 'very specific kind of after-life' that differs from this fundamental requirement. Yet reincarnationists are obliged to recognise that (at least for the vast majority of people) the new being is in no obvious sense recognisably a continuation of the deceased one. Pretty much everything changes - genetics, environment, body, characteristics, personality, even species. Only in a few rare cases is there any claim of past life memories. A sense of selfhood may remain constant but this doesn't mean the new life experiences themselves as a continuation of the previous self. Let's say Jack dies and in dependence on his death Jill is born but has no knowledge of Jack and no sense of ever having existed previously. In what meaningful sense can we say Jill is Jack's after-life? Even if something passed from one life to the other (karma, for example) it clearly wasn't any sense of being a related self.

[ProfessorDavey]

Saying that I cannot say that something is not a possibility is not saying that I am saying that it is a possibility. I don't have sufficient information to say if it is.

If something is impossible, then the probability of it happening is 0. Any probability >0 means something is possible. If we do not know that the probability is 0 and therefore conclude it is impossible then we must accept that the probability may be >0 and therefore it is a possibility.

The only time we can reasonably conclude that something is impossible is where we know probability is 0 - otherwise (and this includes situations where we lack knowledge) we must conclude that something is possible as we cannot conclude that probability is 0.

[Nearly Sane]

If something is impossible, then the probability of it happening is 0. Any probability >0 means something is possible. If we do not know that the probability is 0 and therefore conclude it is impossible then we must accept that the probability may be >0 and therefore it is a possibility.

The only time we can reasonably conclude that something is impossible is where we know probability is 0 - otherwise (and this includes situations where we lack knowledge) we must conclude that something is possible as we cannot conclude that probability is 0.

I am not concluding that it is an impossibility. I am just not accepting the positive claim that it is a possibility. Can you demonstrate the positive claim that the after life is a pissibility?

[ProfessorDavey]

I am not concluding that it is an impossibility. I am just not accepting the positive claim that it is a possibility. Can you demonstrate the positive claim that the after life is a pissibility?

Something being a possibility isn't really a positive claim, though, is it. All it means is that was cannot conclude that it is impossible - i.e. we cannot conclude that probability is 0.

On an afterlife - I do know (and likely cannot know) that it is impossible, therefore I cannot reasonably conclude the probability is 0 and therefore I must conclude it is possible until or unless someone can demonstrate that it is impossible (probability = 0).

Simple logic.

[BeRational]

Isn't BR explicitly saying that he's not ruling out the possibility, rather than accepting that it is a possibility?

Yes my position is that I do not know.

I do not know if it is possible, possiblity would need to be demonstrated.

[Nearly Sane]

Something being a possibility isn't really a positive claim, though, is it. All it means is that was cannot conclude that it is impossible - i.e. we cannot conclude that probability is 0.

On an afterlife - I do know (and likely cannot know) that it is impossible, therefore I cannot reasonably conclude the probability is 0 and therefore I must conclude it is possible until or unless someone can demonstrate that it is impossible (probability = 0).

Simple logic.

It's bad logic. The claim that something is a possibilty is by definition a positive one. I don't know if the 'after life' is possible.

[BeRational]

Something being a possibility isn't really a positive claim, though, is it. All it means is that was cannot conclude that it is impossible - i.e. we cannot conclude that probability is 0.

On an afterlife - I do know (and likely cannot know) that it is impossible, therefore I cannot reasonably conclude the probability is 0 and therefore I must conclude it is possible until or unless someone can demonstrate that it is impossible (probability = 0).

Simple logic.

Isn't the default position to just not know, and only accept claims when the evidence is compelling?

Possibility and impossibility are claims that would need to be demonstrated.

[ProfessorDavey]

Yes my position is that I do not know.

I do not know if it is possible, possiblity would need to be demonstrated.

But surely if you do not know it to be impossible, then you lack of knowledge must render the think possible.

Try this example.

Image you are asked to roll a six sided dice and asked whether it is possible that you roll a 7. Now if you know it is a standard dice with sides labelled 1-6, then you cold reasonably conclude that rolling a 7 is impossible and therefore is not a possibility. If on the other hand you don't know what it on one side (lack of knowledge) an assumption that the dice has a standard 1-6 could be wrong (you haven't verified it) and it could be that the dice has sides 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7. Therefore your lack of knowledge that one side might not be a 7, renders rolling a 7 possible. It only ceases to be possible if you can reasonable conclude it to be impossible.

[ProfessorDavey]

Possibility and impossibility are claims that would need to be demonstrated.

Not really - something is either possible or impossible - there are no other categories. Impossible means probability = 0. Possible simply means not impossible, i.e. probability >0. So unless we have demonstrated something to be impossible we must conclude (in the absence of confirmatory evidence) that it is possible because we cannot reasonable conclude that the probability is definitely 0.

[ProfessorDavey]

Isn't the default position to just not know, and only accept claims when the evidence is compelling?

Sure - but that is a different question. Accepting a claim is not the same as accepting a claim to be possible (i.e. not impossible). Typically we'd only accept a claim if there is sufficient evidence so to do - but the absence of that evidence doesn't render that claim impossible, and therefore we should accept it to be possible even if we don't actually accept the claim itself.

[Nearly Sane]

Not really - something is either possible or impossible - there are no other categories. Possible simply means not impossible. So unless we have demonstrated something to be impossible we must conclude (in the absence of confirmatory evidence) that it is possible.

Drivel. If you cannot demonstrate something is possible, you have no reason to accept that as a claim. You have insufficient reason to conclude it is possible. You not being able to demonstrate that it is impossible gives no valudation to the claim that it is possible.

Since you accept the claim that an 'after life' is possible, could you please demonstrate it?

[ProfessorDavey]

Drivel. If you cannot demonstrate something is possible, you have no reason to accept that as a claim. You have insufficient reason to conclude it is possible. You not being able to demonstrate that it is impossible gives no valudation to the claim that it is possible.

Not drivel - basic logic. Something is either demonstrated to have probability of 0, in other words we can conclude that it is impossible. If it hasn't been demonstrated to be impossible (i.e. we cannot conclude that the probability is definitely 0) then the probability lies somewhere greater than 0 all the way up to 1 and we must conclude that it is possible.

Since you accept the claim that an 'after life' is possible, could you please demonstrate it?

I don't have to - all I have to do is state that we cannot conclude the probability of an after life existing is exactly 0 (i.e. it is impossible). I'm not claiming it actually does exist (or I'd be concluding that the probability was 1) - all I am saying is that I cannot conclude (as I don't have the evidence) that the probability is definitely 0.

[Nearly Sane]

Not drivel - basic logic. Something is either demonstrated to have probability of 0, in other words it is impossible. If it hasn't been demonstrated to be impossible (i.e. we cannot conclude that the probability is definitely 0) then is it possible as the probability lies somewhere greater than 0 all the way up to 1.
I don't have to - all I have to do is state that we cannot conclude the probability of an after life existing is exactly 0 (i.e. it is impossible). I'm not claiming it actually does exist (or I'd be concluding that the probability was 1) - all I am saying is that I cannot conclude (as I don't have the evidence) to conclude that the probability is definitely 0.

You're very confused. There is a significant difference between claiming something is a possibility, and that it exists as your second para seems to substitute as the claim.

To state that something is a possibility means you must demonstrate that the possibility is not 0.