Can you believe in certain things without being religious?

[luckyme]

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The scientist's conducting this research are skeptical, but want to seek the truth about reality without letting any presuppositions affect their judgement.

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yep, sticking to the presumptions is why we know nothing about relativity and evolution and anatomy and ...
you seem to confuse science and scientists with mechanics. Are they spending all the money on atom smashers because they think they already know and just need a job? or are they trying to test claims that may or may not be 'true'.

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It isn't to disprove any scientific fact

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why not? that would be a basic reason, if we can skip over what it means to ' ..disprove scientific FACT' . ( there's some good food for thought for you in that skipped part).

luckyme

[GaSSPaNiCC]

Ok, since we don't let our presuppositions effect our judgment, then why is it most skeptics/scientists won't even consider research done in the paranormal, re-incarnation, or NDE's? We know nothing about consciousness, and these phenomena may be the most crucial in understanding who we are as human beings. Sure as of right now, they might be hard to investigate, but that doesn't mean they should be ignored. Why don't they even consider? We have nothing to lose, but everything to gain.

[luckyme]

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We know nothing about consciousness ..

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Nothing's not as large as it used to be ( or WE is smaller).

It's worthwhile reading a couple books, articles, or googling sites dealing with consciousness research.

Just reading 'Consciousness Explained' :-) will give you a taste of one corner of the field. But get into neuroscience relating to it perhaps by Damasio or Ramachandran.

Sure, it's one of the last frontiers but 'nothing known' is false and 'being ignored' is worse.

luckyme

[GaSSPaNiCC]

I'm familiar with some research on consciousness (koch, dennet, hameroff), sure our understanding is increasing and will continue to increase, but my point is we have no idea how the brain if at all can create consciousness, and we have to accomodate for all phenomena if we truely are going to understand this dilemna.

[madnak]

You keep talking about the research being done, but you're unwilling to link to the research itself or to the journals in which it's published. You do realize that science isn't just going out and talking to people who claim to have experiences?

[luckyme]

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but my point is we have no idea how the brain if at all can create consciousness,

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If you insist on "no idea" and "if at all" then you are ignoring what they knew even 20,000 years ago from empirical testing ( konking on head rather than on foot). Are you going to stay adamant that we know Nothing about it? You make it difficult to go forward if you brush aside everything we find out and start each morning from zero.
Are you suggesting that if you go in for an operation you may suggest they put your elbow in butter rather than use any new-fangled 'make me unconscious' crap on you because, hey, we know nothing about how the brain makes consciousness - if at all. Would you stick to your claim of our state of knowledge?

luckyme

[GaSSPaNiCC]

There is plenty of literature on the subject of the paranormal, look up books such as Irreducible Mind, The Afterlife Experiments, Entangled Minds...there are many more, and are serious and scientific and present evidence for their claims, their evidence is not anecdotal either. For example here is an excerpt about NDE's from the book Irreducible Mind.

http://michaelprescott.typepad.com/m...cible_min.html

http://www.deanradin.com/NewWeb/EMindex.html
If you want me to post more i shall.

[vhawk01]

[ QUOTE ]
There is plenty of literature on the subject of the paranormal, look up books such as Irreducible Mind, The Afterlife Experiments, Entangled Minds...there are many more, and are serious and scientific and present evidence for their claims, their evidence is not anecdotal either. For example here is an excerpt about NDE's from the book Irreducible Mind.

http://michaelprescott.typepad.com/m...cible_min.html

http://www.deanradin.com/NewWeb/EMindex.html
If you want me to post more i shall.

[/ QUOTE ]

We want you to post what parts of your search you've found interesting and then attempt to defend them from criticism and answer questions to the best of your ability. This really is like Splendour II.

[madnak]

This stuff isn't science, man. It sounds like you don't know what science is. I don't know the subject, maybe some of these books make some valid points, but they don't constitute research. They're largely editorial. Is that a bad thing? Not necessarily, I mean "The Selfish Gene" falls into the same category. But Dawkins wouldn't be convincing if he didn't have solid experimental data to back up his claims, and if his claims weren't falsifiable.

Either show me the research itself (that should be a paper with an abstract and sections explaining how the research was conducted), or link me to a reference in a scholarly journal, preferably peer reviewed.