ageedizzle

@ageedizzle@piefed.ca

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can a reasonable person genuinely believe in ghosts?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  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.

  So do I.

  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.

  Being able to accurately describe the location of objects (in or outside the room) or describe specialized medical equipment, the appearance of the doctors in the room (even if the patient hadn’t met them before or after), and so on. This is all very strange stuff. To have hallucinated this stuff perfectly would be remarkable. Forget about being dead, some of these stories would be impressive even if the patient just had their eyes closed (or, in some cases, even if their eyes were wide open). In comparison, someone changing their toy or food preferences to more closely align with those of a particular stranger is, really, not that shocking. So I don’t think this is a fair comparison at all.

  Again, we are running into the same issues we had before regarding your statistical noise hypothesis. We don’t know how many NDEs occur, or what percentage of them are reported to have components that require supernatural explanations. So to assert that it’s all just statistical noise is to assume, without any data, that these numbers are going to match what you’re looking for. Despite our data being constrained here, I actually think the absence of certain kinds of data counts strongly against the statistical noise hypothesis.

  Because, if the statistical noise hypothesis were correct, it would be extremely common for patients to hallucinate what was going on in the hospital room inaccurately. But all the reports I get are of one of two categories:

  • [1] reports of visiting another realm (these are the most common types of cases) or
  • [2] reports of staying in the hospital and observing what is going on with surprising accuracy (these are the most interesting cases).

  But I am not aware of even a single report of a third category of case,

  • [3] reports of staying in the hospital and observing what is going wrong with total inaccuracy.

  And I get that cases in the third category would be less likely to be reported on because those cases are less interesting. I see that concern. But we have to appreciate how, given your hypothesis, just how thoroughly these inaccurate accounts would dwarf all these seemingly supernatural ones. Cases in the third category would outnumber cases in the first category by the thousands at least (realistically, it would be more like the millions, due to the sheer level of detail in some cases in the first category, and just how unlikely it would be to hallucinate that detail accurately). If it really were the case that cases in the first category were so common then I would expect at minimum at least one or two of these inaccurate hallucinations to be reported in the medical literature. But I am not aware of a single case like this (is there really not one doctor that would write in their notes, “patient reported this and that occurred in the operating room, but he was wrong”?). So I have a challenge for you: can you identify even a single case that matches the description in (3)? After all, if you’re right, then these types of cases would be extremely plentiful so even if only 0.01% of these cases in the third category are reported on, it should still be fairly easy for you to identify at least one.

  So, to sum it up, you’re making a number of assumptions here. The first assumption is that these NDE cases are banal enough that they could be ‘statistical noise’ (which, I think, is demonstrable false; these are not cases where someone changes their food preferences, they are cases where someone has detailed information that they should not have). Then you are assuming that there are an extraordinarily large number of NDE cases where people inaccurately report on what is going on in the hospital when they are going through an NDE (though this second assumption isn’t demonstrably false, it is at least extremely suspect since there doesn’t seem to be any cases like this reported in the medical literature, despite the extreme frequency of their occurrence). So your statistical noise hypothesis relies on these two assumptions, and both of them seem to collapse under scrutiny.

  On top of that there are other things going on, too, such as preterminal lucidity, that also point to the possibility that we ‘survive’ our death. If you recall from my earlier comments, I was using NDE as an example from a particular book (Surviving Death by Leslie Kane). I chose NDEs because they are an example that is familiar to a lot of people. But it was only one chapter from the book, and it was one of the least interesting chapters. I’m not saying this because I think this book is the ultimate source of truth on this topic, I’m just saying that there is more than just NDEs to suggest that death is not the end. Unfortunately this stuff is so thoroughly stigmatized that people can’t even bring themselves to look at this data. But any honest person that did would realize, at the very least, that this stigma is unwarranted.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨NVIDIA could enter the desktop CPU market with performance equal to AMD and Intel⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  What’s wrong with Nvidia? Genuine question

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Musk fails to block California data disclosure law he fears will ruin xAI⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Elon Musk’s xAI has lost its bid for a preliminary injunction that would have temporarily blocked California from enforcing a law that requires AI firms to publicly share information about their training data.

  How do you actually enforce this? What’s stopping these companies from just lying about what training data they use?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How to I prove to someone that the U.S. moon landing wasn't staged?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The strongest evidence is the fact that modern equipment can see the actual tracks the A11 astronauts left while hiking and driving on the moon.

  The problem with this is that if you’re someone who thinks the moon landing is fake then you’re simply just going to dismiss this as yet another example of NASA propaganda. Because though those tracks are there, no one can actually see it for themselves (unless you happen to have a really high powered telescope, which is unlikely). The moon dust thing though, that’s something you can reason through and examine for yourself

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How to I prove to someone that the U.S. moon landing wasn't staged?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I think the most convincing evidence that we did go to the moon has to do with the dynamics of the moon dust in the original Apollo footage. If you look at the footage you’ll see the dust gets kicked up pretty high, higher than what you’d expect given Earth’s gravity, and it falls at a slower rate too.

  So the question is: if they faked this footage then how did they get the dust to behave like this?

  One possible explanation is that the footage was filmed underwater. The issue with this, though, is this is not at all how you’d expect dust to behave underwater. (you can go to the beach, kick up a bunch of sand underneath the water and see for yourself).

  Another possibility is suspension cables. I guess you could explain the astronauts perceived lower gravity with suspension cables, but for pieces of dust? You can’t have suspension cables for individual pieces of dust.

  So the simplest explanation is that this footage really was actually taken on a lower gravity environment, such as the moon.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI Translations Are Adding ‘Hallucinations’ to Wikipedia Articles⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It wasn’t a particularly funny joke

  Well I, for one, thought it was funny

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tech Publications Lost 58% of Google Traffic Since 2024⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  And a lot of it is clearly AI generated

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Introducing Habitat - A Social Platform for Local Communities⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Nice that doesn’t sound too hard

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Introducing Habitat - A Social Platform for Local Communities⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s an interesting idea. I think this would be most successful in a city that prides itself on being high-tech. Maybe somewhere in Japan or somewhere in Silicon Valley or something.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Introducing Habitat - A Social Platform for Local Communities⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m kind of a noob here, so forgive me if this is a silly question, but: what kind of hardware would I need to self-host a server? I’m guessing a raspberry-pi wouldn’t cut it. So would I need to rent server space?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Introducing Habitat - A Social Platform for Local Communities⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Well Godspeed to you. Whatever you end up doing I wish your local virtual community the best, be it on Reddit or the fediverse or wherever

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Introducing Habitat - A Social Platform for Local Communities⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You should give it a shot and ask OP if you have any questions. If you were to set it up, you’d be one of the first, and I’m sure OP would be happy to help you get his/her brain child up and running.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How come in American classrooms they make another language an elective. Why not teach our kids as many languages possible that way if we go somewhere we will kind of have uper hand?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You guys don’t learn geometry either? 

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The only difference between a monster and a decent human being is the privilege of a support network.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Okay. Sorry if I seemed a but harsh in my earlier messages. After I sent those I was thinking about it and realized I probably went a bit too hard.

  I see you’re from lemmy.ca. It’s good to see another Canadian on here. Thanks for contributing to the fediverse. I hope you feel welcome here

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Introducing Habitat - A Social Platform for Local Communities⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  However, it probably will take some local organizing to get it to fire in each area. Getting a critical mass for these is tough by just having randomly distributed global internet users join.

  Maybe one strategy here is to promote it at universities? That’s how Facebook got a critical mass before opening it up to the general public. People would join if other people from their school are on it, and its much easier to achieve critical mass at a university than a city at large.

  You could start with the compsci students, who might appreciate it for the merits of the ActivityPub protocol. From there, you could branch out to other departments. Hopefully this will create enough activity to make it an attractive place to join for the city at large.

  Once you get enough people on there, you could reach out to local politicians (eg city councillors) and ask them to join. If they join then hopefully they promote their account at least once on their mainstream normie social media like X, which will hopefully attract a few users from there.

  Hanging flyers around the city with a QR code is another option. I know in my city people do that to promote a local Discord for cyclists. That Discord is very active.

  Asking for a call out on local email newsletters is also a helpful possibility. I know a separate urbanists Discord group in my city that has got a fair amount of users from their email mailing list, which they’ve picked up just from a signup form on their local website as far as I’m aware.

  Promotion on your local FB group or subreddit is also a very viable option.

  If you live in a small community, then you can’t beat word of mouth.

  Anyway, there are strategies! I have hope. Let’s make this a thing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The only difference between a monster and a decent human being is the privilege of a support network.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Which I characterize as a determinist who really doesn’t want to admit to being one.

  This is not very charitable of you. Its also simply inaccurate. If they didn’t already openly admit to being determinists then they would, by definition, not be compatibilists

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The only difference between a monster and a decent human being is the privilege of a support network.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Dennett openly admits he’s a determinist, you’d know that if you actually read his books. He’s literally the world’s leading proponent of determinism. Determinists believe in free will. 

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The only difference between a monster and a decent human being is the privilege of a support network.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Like I said in my previous comment, I can’t prove anything to you. And if it wasn’t obvious, I’m not trying to prove anything to you. I’m certainly not saying that free will is real because people believe in it. I’m not saying you have the burden of proof. I’m not trying to persuade you and I’m not looking for a debate.

  All I was saying that, in casual conversation, it’s probably fine to speak as if it’s real because very few people will actually take objection to that.

  And that has nothing to do with Christianity either. You’ll notice from that survey that the majority of professional philosophers are actually atheists too. In fact, one of the philosophers who is responsible for popularizing atheism in revent decades, Daniel Dennett, someone who is literally one of the founders of the new atheism movement, is a big proponent of free will and has written entire books on it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The only difference between a monster and a decent human being is the privilege of a support network.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I can’t prove that to you. And you can’t prove it’s not real, either. This debate has been at a standstill since the Ancient Greeks started discussing it. I just took it for granted in my previous comment because the vast majority of people, including professional philosophers, see here) believe it to be real.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The only difference between a monster and a decent human being is the privilege of a support network.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  How else can you judge someone’s character if not by their actions?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The only difference between a monster and a decent human being is the privilege of a support network.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  A lot of this comes down to people’s free will. If you could perfectly analyze the reasons for every decision a person makes then those decisions would hardly be free.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Turns out llms also have “artificial hive mind”, top AI models all say very similar sounding things, do you think that we can use this to detect bots?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This makes sense once you consider that the top models all have basically the same training data (i.e. everything ever posted on the internet).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can a reasonable person genuinely believe in ghosts?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The same way you would on with else. You collect data, try to construct theories, test your hypothesis, etc.

  Also, I was just using ‘supernatural’ as a shorthand here. If these phenomena are real then they would be part of nature and therefor natural

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can a reasonable person genuinely believe in ghosts?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think I’m the guy you’re referring to. I don’t think the scientific method is flawed. 

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can a reasonable person genuinely believe in ghosts?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This was a lot of fun to read, thanks for sharing

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can a reasonable person genuinely believe in ghosts?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  A “case study” is more formal than an anecdote, but still has the same issues.

  Okay. The distinction doesn’t seem very important to you, so there’s no use for me to waste time quibbling about it here

  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.

  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. 

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can a reasonable person genuinely believe in ghosts?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Hi. Thanks for your comment. I responded to it here.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can a reasonable person genuinely believe in ghosts?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Hi sorry I saw your other comment and thought it was very interesting. I took a while to reply because I think an experiment was attempted once (I remember learning about the attempt in a university class) and I wanted to find more info about that to send here. But I couldn’t find anything with a superficial search so I was hoping to eventually find the time to do a bit a deep dive and dig it up.

  From what I remember the experiment ran into serious issues with the sample size. It started out with a very large number of participants, but they got filtered out precipitously at several points along the way. To begin with, the researchers couldn’t predict who among the participants was going to eventually flatline. Of the handful of participants who did, the research team couldn’t always control or predict where and when they died, so they couldn’t always set the room up accordingly. And of the participants who did flatline in a somewhat predictable manner, the majority of them just died for good and did not come back to tell the tale. Of the remaining participants, some were further prevented from continuing with the study on the order of their physician, because they were in such bad shape (they did literally just die, after all) that even just being interviewed by the researchers would have been too much. This left the researchers with very few participants to work with.

  I remember there also being criticisms about the experimental set-up, specifically regarding information the participants were quizzed on afterwards. I think the way the experimenters set it up there was a colourful sheet or something on a shelf above their body. This sheet was only visible from the ceiling looking down, so the idea was that if the participants reported its colour correctly then we could verify their claims of leaving their body and looking down at the room. The critique of this though was that, if you literally just died, you’re going to be paying attention to details that are relevant to you, such as what the doctors are doing to your body or how your family is taking the situation. You probably don’t even think that you’re going to come back (and in most cases, you’d be right) and you definitely wouldn’t have the mental wherewithal to scan the room for mundane details so they could accurately report it back to the study participants after they had died.

  I think the way you described things is actually a better setup though, for this reason. We should just give a multiple choice quiz about events that happened in the room when the patient flatline, specifically details that would be relevant / emotionally salient to the patient. This setup would also have the added benefit of meaning that the researchers would not need to setup the room ahead of time, which could play a modest role in mitigating some of the same size issues. Unfortunately this would mean that this information would change from patient to patient, so it can’t be as standardized as we might want it to be. But that’s just the price we’d have to pay to get a study like this off the ground to begin with.

  Despite all these issues though I think studies like this should definitely be conducted, especially with the multiple choice structure you suggested because that seems more practical. The sample size issues are a real obstacle though, and to overcome it we would need to start with a truly large cohort of participants so that we could still have a workable sample by the end of it all. And studies of that scale require funding! Unfortunately, due to the social stigma around this topic (as evidenced by the vitriol being flung my way on this thread) this is a chronically underfunded area of research. But let’s hope thar chances! Because studies like the one you described are too interesting for us not to conduct.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can a reasonable person genuinely believe in ghosts?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  How do you distinguish between an anecdote snd a case study? 

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can a reasonable person genuinely believe in ghosts?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That‘S not what Galileo did. Newton is the one who eventually came up with the new laws is physics that explained Galileo’s findings.