The discussion moved on,. It happens. Please pick up a program in the lobby.

You may infer that, but I certainly never implied it.

Or their cognitive processes are working a lot better than we thought and they drew sound conclusions from hearing and touch. or any of a number of other perfectly rational things things.

FTFY

*I* *HAVE* *NOT* *EVEN* *ONCE* *EVEN* *HINTED* *THAT* *A* *SUPERNATURAL* *HYPOTHESIS* *WAS* *IN* *ORDER*.

Got it?

The correct conclusion is NO CONCLUSION. That is distinctly different that wild speculation. It could be any sort of natural occurrence. We do not (and often cannot) know that hallucination was the answer.

Yeah, ever so much better to let a vastly overpaid CEO make that decision.

I have no doubt it was an improvement over the potentially dull axe.

You could Google it or see my other reply. The reports are out there, everywhere. I make no warranty as to the accuracy of the interpretations nor even that they have not been embellished deliberately or unintentionally.

I'm calling it out because it seems to be a common fallacy that mainstream science falls in to a lot these days. The difference between unknown and non-existent. We cannot assume the existence of something without evidence, but we also cannot just dismiss any contrary evidence post-hoc.

And Aristotle explained the trajectory of a projectile as well. he, like the poster I replied to had no evidence or even a single measurement to back it up. He explained quite sensibly that the projectile travels in a strait line from the launcher until it runs out of impetus and drops to the ground.

In other words he offered 3 speculations (good ones at that) with not a single shred of evidence. That is not science any more than the claims that the reports prove an everlasting soul.

I have heard more, but it would take a while to sort them out from th more general cases where no claim is made to knowledge that the patient wasn't expected to have.

Keep in mind, I am making NO CLAIM WHATSOEVER as to the cause or nature of the cause for this. I am not even claiming that the accounts or the perceptions of the people giving the accounts are accurate.

If real, that would be actual evidence to narrow potential conclusions down.

There *IS* an event. The event is the patient reporting an experience.

I once thought I saw a bobcat even though I couldn't have seen it in the dark. It was actually there. It turns out that I HEARD the bobcat. I hypothesize that my subconscious filled in the rest but have no good way to prove it.

Sure.I'll go further and say that without more and better evidence there cannot be a verifiable explaination. I'm calling out the people who claim that hallucination is that explanation that cannot be.

I make no such claim, you are putting words in my mouth. I said there is *SOME* explanation. You are the one jumping to conclusions as to what that explanation is. Further, you are jumping to conclusions as to what I might think the answer is.

I'm not stuck anywhere. I offer no hypothesis. You are stuck at 2 but think you're at 4 even though you never did 3.

My answer to your underpants gnome theory would be the same as my answer to your hallucination/self-deception/lie theory, where is your evidence? Possibly (if you insisted) that I am simply not convinced of the existence of underpants gnomes and won't be just because you claim it is the only rational answer.

No, I did not make any claim that the person was out of body. I claimed that they reported an experience that they interpreted as being out of body (an objective fact). I further claimed that there *IS* an explanation for that but that we don't know what it is. It *COULD* be as simple as making reasonable inferences of what they would see based on prior knowledge and what they could hear or feel. It could be that the person they told inadvertently disclosed enough information for them to enlarge upon. We don't know.

You're the one insisting on a particular class of explanation with no evidence for it. I am the one who is drawing no conclusion at all.

It is still presentation. I agree, JSON isn't the right tool to store presentation, that's what HTML/CSS is for. XML is a superfluous superset of HTML in that case (or if you prefer, HTML is a more pertinent subset of XML).

Evidence please? If you have none, then the current correct answer is "we have no idea". If it makes you feel better, you can GUESS that it MIGHT be coincidence, faulty memory, or deception. You haven't explained anything, you have simply made something up in the tradition of Aristotle.

Nah, it's gotta be mass hysteria.

And I never said the explanation is supernatural, just that there *IS* an explanation and denying the observation doesn't get us there. It's OK to just say we have no idea when that's the case. It's not OK to pretend there is nothing to explain any more than it is to say God must have done it to warn the wicked.