I find it ironic that there are those who, using the fact that we have not completely been able to figure out when someone is dead, can be convinced that that is evidence for no existence after death. But alternately cannot include the possibilty that it may be evidence for life after "death."
I don't think this is the case, or at least it isn't with me.
From my perspective, the two here are the one and the same. Once we define death, then the evidence you have is much more compelling. If a person is truly unable to sense anything (dead or otherwise), and are able to tell you what they could not of sensed, then there is something very exciting there.
The start of it, however, is to make sure that the evidence actually supports that. I'm not convinced that it does. The standard of evidence needs to be very high (that is, we need a narrow mindset if our conclusions are likely to be correct). If it wasn't, a low standard of evidence means that we need to accept a huge amount of things that are unlikely to be true, just because it's possible.
This is nit-picking in return, pt, but what I was saying about the light bulb? I'm saying that anyone who believed that it was impossible for man to create light wouldn't have been the man who worked to create a light bulb. His mind, that it wasn't possible, was already made up. An open-minded person would have been the one who pursued it.
Well... point taken.
(But I wouldn't use the lightbulb as an example of this. Proof of concept for the lightbulb came almost a century before the lightbulb was invented, and was part of working with electricity in general. No one needed to be terribly open minded when it was already invented, so to speak, and especially not since the actual lightbulb design was stolen.)
At the end, I give my stance, and how I think being open minded fits into this.
A man who states categorically that there is no spirit because he can't quantify it, is inconsistent when he then says a person isn't really dead - we just can't quantify it yet.
I have to disagree here - consistency isn't the issue. Using a definition of death that gives evidence of a spirit is consistant, but not necessarily valid. The opposite, however, is to conclude what death is (and in this case, the definition needs to show that they are able to sense something beyond their body's ability to sense it) and then see if there is something beyond it that shows out-of-body possibilities.
But I am certain of this: Keeping my mind open is the best way to discover my truth.
To highlight my concern:
If you believe in everything, then you will have discovered all truths, so why not do that? (And the opposite: If you believe in nothing, then you will never have believed in something untrue.)
It's a question of where you draw a line between these two.
(This is to explain my stance and why I'm critical of the evidence - but I can tell you what I need to see in order to solidify the evidence. To me, that is being open minded. Belief in a conclusion is not open-minded to me... quite the opposite. To accept the challenge of evidence, to test to see if it is valid and to accept the results - that's open minded, to me.)
I think the evidence is sufficient for you, here, but it isn't for me. It's similar with the God argument.