What makes things unintelligible? What is the structure of nonsense? Experience is ineffable. / Fallacies of reasoning in circles

Present! - Raymond Moody: The Logic of "Life after Death"

"Nonsense is a highly patterned phenomenon."
Raymond Moody


The question: Is there life after death, is not a scientific question, because you can't think of a way to verify that.

"The most intellectually honest thing to say is that something is going on that we don't understand. And that maybe we don't even yet have fully the logic and intellectual tools to begin to understand it."

"What I think of the external world has to do with the recurrent patterns in my consciousness. But it's just an inference to say that there is an external world. [...] We are dealing with matter, space and time with a philosophical or an abstract system of concepts, which are self-consistant. But to make the philosophical judgements beyond that... Physicalism is a philosophy. Scientism: the only rational way of securing truth and searching for knowledge is by scientific method. [...] How would we know if scientific method is the only rational means of securing knowledge and truth? Because I know it by the scientific method (?) or Because I know it by philosophy, by literary theory (?), by the law (?), by History (?). So scientism is something that a lot of people in this society value very deeply but they've never thought it through, because there have to be other rational means of securing knowledge even to know if the scientific method works. [...] I love science, but to make science your ideology of life is an inherently self-defeating move. To me, science is a wonderful method for capturing the truth about certain areas of existence, but not about other areas of existence."

"Medical doctors should take a few philosophy courses before they start fooling around with the afterlife question."

"Even if you could prove that the soul leaves the body, that wouldn't prove that there's life after death."

"The pseudo-science of parapsychology, in my opinion, is one of the main reasons why we're stuck on the afterlife question."

"What we need in this question of the afterlife is an actual skeptic."

"Since I didn't have a religious background, to me the whole notion of an afterlife was just so incredibly bizarre."

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