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Comment by nprateem | Hacker News Reader

An impossible position if consciousness is not materialistic, especially since you discount the 3000+ years of cross-cultural claims and documented methods for reaching such states for yourself. It's hard to imagine what else might class as a universal signal there's something to explore here.

Your attitude makes it inherently impossible to prove a non-materialistic position as you refuse to investigate for yourself. Far from strengthening your ability to find the truth you are simply closing your mind to other possibilities.

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How is asking for evidence close-minded? Having 3000+ years of personal accounts is meaningless when compared to hard, physical evidence. Again, personal anecdotes is not evidence.

I know there are studies about the efficacy of meditation in certain scenarios, which is why I do it. But that falls short when you start claiming supernatural states of mind.

> Your attitude makes it inherently impossible to prove a non-materialistic position as you refuse to investigate for yourself

Personal attitude shouldn't be relevant when you're talking about evidence. One of the main attributes of evidence is precisely that it is objective and not personal.

Your requirement for physical evidence is biased and so discounts the possibility that non-physical evidence may be available.

It's like saying "I believe in X. I won't accept any evidence against X. Since Y is against X, Y doesn't exist"

This means you'd never realise X was wrong in the first place.

Except that we've seen plenty of times that "non-physical" evidence doesn't exist and has never been relevant, and usually there's a better physical explanation. So by default, it's fair to assume that non-physical evidence doesn't exist, and if you use that in argument, the burden of proof is yours.

I'm open to accepting non-physical evidence if you can prove it exists. If you can, that would be very interesting, but it's likely that you can't. Again, anecdotes and tradition aren't evidence.

If it's around for 3000 years, show the plentiful "non-physical evidence". If you still need to talk about the "possibility", it's just flim flam BS.

If you think testimonies are evidence, and are making appeals to antiquity/tradition, you just aren't thinking in an educated way. None of that is "evidence".

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