undeather

Okay. Science denies nothing. Science is the systematic study of structure and behaviour. It doesn't have a will on it's own. It's a method. Scientists who interpret scientific data deny stuff. Some scientists deny "the absolute"/"god", others don't. There are enlightened scientists. Many scientists living in the past and present (Schrödinger, Leibnitz, DaVinci, Bohr, Heisenberg, Pauli..) are more or less mystics. I am a scientist. I have authored/co-authored dozens of scientific studies. I am deeply spiritual. I have experienced "god" under 5-MeO. I have had multiple enlightenemt experiences with and without psychodelics. I am an ontological idealist, meaning that I am convinced that conciousness = god = one = me. Saying that science will progress through less rigor as a leading principle is like saying that the Ikea shelf will look better if we don't look at the assembly plan and just start building it. The premise itself is just stupid because it's self defeating. You will not improve science by being less rigorous towards it's own principles. Do you get what I want to say? Being enlightened doesn't change shit about your engangement with the scientific process. It might change the way you interpret the results, but the process itself stays the same. You will still need a hammer to build a house - even if you are the most enlightened person on earth. The rules of reality don't change just because you have had an enlightenemt experience. And please, again - PLEASE-,just give us ONE example. Don't talk around it. Just write down what's wrong with rigor in plain and simple english. I don't care how integral/enlightened your perspective is. I don't care about puzzle pieces and assumptions. Just tell us what's wrong with the concept and we can then further discuss the implications. We have provided many examples so far (previous posts) that show a clear increase of scientific quality through being more rigorous. The last 200 years of scientific history is one huge case report of how a better and more rigorous scientific process leads to better outcomes and true results. It's always the same with this community. People talk with such an entitled sense of confidence, as if some enlightenment-expereicnes gave them some sort of occult insights into everything. In reality, this is just pure ignorance.

Dr. Sam Parnia is a British-American physician known for his work in the field of resuscitation science and near-death experiences. He has focused much of his research on the exploration of consciousness after clinical death and the effects of resuscitation methods on outcomes in cardiac arrest patients. Parnia has been a big player in studies examining the experiences of people who have been clinically dead and then resuscitated, aiming to understand what happens to the human mind and consciousness during and after death. Enjoy:

Oh my sweet summer child.... @zurew is correct. We are not denying the greater reality of being, god and the absolute. All that is great and I agree for the most part. I have been here for 8+ years, what do you think my ontological paradigm is? Yet sometimes, you just have to engange with the argument at hand and not deflect with vacuous sophistry that doesn't add anything substantial to the conversation. If you have a problem with the concept of rigor in scientific resreach - the please, for gods sake, just give us ONE consistent argument why you think this way. Please enlighten us with your persepctive.

So fucking what, dude? The stories of the interviewees are older - and therefore what? uninteresting/irrelevenat? Maybe not everyone watching the video is familiar with all the classical accounts of NDE's? Ever thought about that? What about the first 20 minutes which give sa pretty interesting insight on our current scientific paradigm surrounding death-resreach. This video is a bit more than "compiled old NDE stories", isn't it? Also, what constitutes a documentary in your world? Something novel you have never heard of, a certain length, format? WEll, at least you just deleted that part from your initial respoinse. If you didn't get anything out of the video - that's fine. I also don't mind you sharing your interpretation of such experiences, which you did.

lol

I think what you are failing to understand is that rigor and exactitude is what makes the scientific process much more resistent to bias and discrepancies. It litearlly leads you closer to relative truths. Through applying the principle of scientific rigor, data derived through experiments becomes clearer, more reliable, more consistent and more coherent. This is why shitty experiments with bad study design (=low amount of scientific rigor) do not replicate, while better ones do. The replication crisis was YOUR point against science just earlier and now you are dismissing the one principle that has shown to significantly alter the quality of experiemnts. I mean, just take a look at the world - better science just works better. This is not about dogma in science, which is obviously there. This is not about absolute truth, God or enlightenment. We are talking about the relative domain and a particular niche thereof. Science will always do better if an adquate amount of rigor is added to the mix. If science isn’t rigorous, it’s reckless If you think this is not the case, please just provide ONE example.

Scientific dogma and scientific rigor are two completely different things.... The first is about a certain kind of closed-mindedness in the context of a metaphysical/epistemological assumptions - the other is about a strict adherence/not being sloppy with the method defining the scientific process. You can be a rigorous scientist who doesn't fall into the dogmatic traps and vice versa. This is a half-truth. There is an overton window in science which kind of describes the range of acceptable ideas you are allowed to play around with publically wihtout bumping into scorn and derision by your peers. You can damage your reputition/career by just believing that there is something to the idea of parapsychlogical reserach and yes, thats a huge problem based on the ugly face of scientifc dogmatism. But, as we have seen in the history of science, if there is sufficient evidence for a certain new theory - paradigm shifts tend to happen as well! One of my favourite examples is the story of Barry Marshall. He is an australian MD who hypothesized back in the 80s that a certain strain of bacteria (H. pylori) is one of the major contributors to gastritis is humans. The theory was initially rejected by many scientists who believed that bacteria could not survive in the acidic environment of stomach acid. To prove otherwise, in 1984, Marshall conducted an experiment on himself and drank a test tube of the bacteria. Shortly thereafter, he developed severe gastritis, which he cured with antibiotics. He got the nobel prize for that. I can also tell you - as a practicing scientist myself - that behind the wall of science discourse - people talk about all sorts of stuff. I have had th wildest discussions with other doctors and even phycisists about all sorts of fringe topics. There is the public persona of the scientist and the person behind it.

50% replication rate is only true for certain study fields like psychology or social sciences. And even then, it's usually for a subset of not optimally designed studies without preregistration and other flaws. Better practices tend to push down the replication error below 10% or even close to zero. The harder the science, the better the replication rate. There is no replication crisis in material chemistry. The reality of a base-rate-fallacy in scientific hypothesis making also strongly influences what we perceive as a replication crisis. I think Veritasium made a pretty interesting video on that whole thing: The problem is that most "skeptics" don't even look at the paranormal literature with nearly the same amount of rigor as would with "acceptable" science. And if they do, they go in with a strong ontological bias, which they are mostly unaware of. "Precognition can't be true because it violates the laws of science/because there is no possible mechanism" - is one of this dumb, unqualified statements you would read as response. Of course, anyone with the slightest idea of epistemology would see the absurdity of such argument. The fact of the matter is that there are many experiments in parapsychology which would be considered "great science" if it was published in a genreally accepted field of inquiry. I disagree with string theory. I disagree with all the many worlds interpretations of QM I disagree with pilot wave theory (Bohmian mechanics) I disagree with hidden variables. I disagree with Supersymmetry. I disagree with dark matter as a building block of the universe. While I disagree, I would never call it "BS" because theory modelling and experimentation is exactly how science progresses. Also one has to show some humility because those TOE-topics("TOEpics" hehe) are extremely complicated and take years to grasp deeply. You don't really understand string theory and the mathematical basis behind it - and neither do I. We have a superficial understanding of it and any string theorist/phycisist would wreck us in a debate. I don't know which model of the universe will come out as the correct one and neither do you. It doesn't really matter since conciousness/God stays untouched and primary anyway. I can't believe that you argue against the scientifc virtue of rigor.- An increased rigor in the scientific process will get us less human bias, less replication-crisis, higher standards, more structure, better experimental design and all in all - more truth in the relative domain. If we lack anything in science, then it's MORE rigor! This also includes epistemic rigor towards our preconceived notions of what's possible. A lack of rigor in medical science led to so many unncessary atrocities and bullshit therapies. And it still does!

Yeah, I agree! If this actually worked well, it would be everywhere right now!

I have read into this whole god helmet stuff and to me, it seems like a lot of baloney (for the most part). Most of the experiments don't replicate under more controlled conditions and there are fatal flaws in the initial study design. Also, there were experiments with "fake god helmets" and even then, some of the participants reported exceptional experiences. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2153599X.2017.1403952 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0276236617749185 I am also really skeptical about new products like OP reported. Seems like just another way to scam gullible people for their money! There is a far more accessible and direct way to experiencing god, like 5-MeO

You know what other activity increases both the level of oxidative stress and measured reactive oxygen/nitrogen species as well as an tomporary increase in katecholamins and cortisol? Exercise! In fact, the bodies response to cold exposure is really similar in both quality and degree. A holistic perspective would take into account the complex system nature of the body - the benefits of exercise and you could argue potential benefits from cold baths are primarily based on the hormetic/antifragile properties of the human system. Your body builds back broken stuff stronger and with more tenacity in the domain of biological equilibrium. That said, I would side with you that most benefits are propably a bit overblown...

I have no idea what point you are trying to make. I posted this study to show that you previous point is not really correct.

The mechanism of why some diabetes-patients get better under a fasting protocol is weight loss due to caloric restriction. Weight loss is the best predictor of why people reverse their diabetes - and that's really good news! In general, short time fasting like intermitting types are safe for MOST diabetics. Potential problems come into play when there is medication that lowers blood sugar levels. Some might lead to an increased tendency to go hypoglycaemic, which is potentially life threatening. There are also other metabolic diseases which, especially in context of a diabetes diagnosis, could do that as well. So before any diabetic starts fasting, they should contact their healthcare provider to get the green flag.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18382932/

The unwise part is telling someone intermitting fasting is "non-negotiable" for optimal health. How do you know that is correct? You don't - it's an opinion. My guess would be that you fell for the hype that broke out some years ago, but did not follow through with the adequate sensemaking process to find out if this is actually true and why. So did I by the way. The truth is that the process called "cellular autophagy" which is supposed to be triggered by this fasting process, does not occur in humans in such a short window of time. It takes 4-5 days of eating almost nothing to do that. Furthermore, we know now that intermitting fasting tends to reduce lean muscle mass because most people doing it can't get even near the adquate protein intake (which is at least 1mg/kg on the low end). Then, and this has been found quite recently, we know that eating windwos like the 16/8-protocol focused on the later parts of the day (eating from 12-20 for example) are actually terrible for your blood sugar/insulin control in the long run. There is something about eating a lot of food in at the evening which goes against the circadian tendencies of our body. So we have quite significant potential downsides and overblown benefits. Listening to your body has an important place in optimal health, but we should not be naive about it. If people really want to do it, then track protein intake, follow a protocol which focuses on food intake in the earlier parts of the day (skipping dinner), and definitely do some resistance training to fight potential muscle loss. If you look at wisdom traditions from around the world, what they usually mean with fasting are longer protocols of food restriction over days/even weeks. This is the kind of fast that most likely comes with said benefits like autophagy.

The fasting protocols that are most likely to work are longer fasts with very little or no food intake. (at least 4-5 days.) One of the potential downsides is that you might lose a lot of muscle-mass in the process. Time restricted eating/intermittent fasting is, from a scientific perspective, pretty much overrated. There is very little evidence that it really does shit. Most of those "hype studies" were done in rats and not humans. The problem is that rats have a completely different metabolic turnover rate, which makes comparisans pretty much impossible. But seriously - I always tell my patients to just. test. it. for. themselves. The family of my girlfriend does a 4 week fast every year - where they eat very little and only very light foods. They do it because for them, it feels great. If you are going for longer fasts, check in with your healthcare provider first. Also Type 2 diabetes. You can fucking kill someone with a longer fast if their blood sugar is not regulated properly. In general, if you have a chronic medical condition - inform yourself before doing self-experiments. Defintiely check in with your doctor beforehand.

We have mixed evidence regarding ice baths/cold water immesion and health outcomes. There seems to be a consistent anti-inflammatory component to it - which could have many benefits down the line. You can find hundreds of case reports from people treating various ailments with ice baths/immersion protocols, sometimes - but not always combined with breathing exercises (like Wim Hof does). I am sure that those people really do objectively better with that kind of routine in their lives. There is even some decent evidence that supports this claim in rheumatologic patients. For treating muscle issues in athletes, cold immesion has shown to drastically improve recovery after the training. It's basically part of the game for high intensity performers like tennis players or martial artists.' Funnily enough, ice baths REDUCE muscle growth/hypertrophy. If you do an intense workout with the aim to develop as much muscle-mass as possible, then you should not take an ice bath afterwards or even in general. This makes sense since you suppress the inflammatory response which is crucual for this process. WE have known for years that you can suppress muscle synthesis by inducing anti-inflammatory processes. If you give a young guy an aspirin or ibuprofen (antiinflammatory drug), they will build less muscles than a control group after a workout. There seems to be an optimal level of inflammation for building muscle. In older people, you see the opposite effect! I guess at the end of the day, you need to find out what's right for you! If cold showers/ice baths make you feel great and you are not wanting to compete in the Mr. Olympia-competiton in the near future, then there is really nothign that should stop you from doing that. I would not expect any magical healing properties as it's often potrayed in the online-health world though.

Indeed! I mean it's in the etymolgy of the word - the prefix "pseudo" defines what comes after by saying it's not genuine or spurious. The word doesn't make sense without the concept (science) it is refering to - therefore it cant be prone to the same criticism. Pseudoscience is an aberration of the scientific method through epistemiological inconsiderations (like the ones you mentioned) That said, there are various critiques of the scientific method as a whole! (Read Paul Feyerabend for example)

I find myself between both perspectives. On the one hand, I do get Daves dismissive nature considering the broad abuse of science in virtually all fields of human endeavour. I mean, if we just take the medical field for example: the amount of charaltans, heterodox sensemakers and health gurus poisoning the well and deluding the public is simply outrageous. Sophists are great at using scientific termonology and cherrypicked "data" to prove a certain point, which in the context of the broader scientific literature is just fallaciously wrong and harmful. Covid-19 was a prime example of this dynamic. Most individuals have no clue what they are talking about - and they usually are not aware that what they actually posess is spoonfed superficial knowledge masquerading as legit scientific inquiry. This whole schtick of "doing your own reserach" is a symptom of this disease. People have no idea what it actually means to do research in order to get to what's true - it's a painstaking, time consuming & above all mentally challenging process. Watching some youtube videos or reading a pop-science book is not doing research - that's gathering information and taking what someone else thinks to be true as truth. People are run by their cognitive biases which lead them down a pre-baked heuristic and a good amount of rationalization after the fact. The problem is that Dave throws the baby out with the bathwater. He doesn't see that hypothesis generation in science generally underlies a certain degree of epistemological conditoning. The scientist and the science done stand in a reciprocal relationship with each other. How scientific data is getting interpreted underlies the cognitive architecture of the person doing it. It's clear to see that for a person like Dave, certain topics are basically off limit - for ontological reaseons. He of course would never agree with that statement (he would say:"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"), but it's a cognitive bias nontheless. It's a fact that there are incredibly well designed and highly statistically significant results int he field of parapsychology, which are getting ignored by the greater public. Mostly materialistic-fundamental reasons. The same goes for the reincarnation literature. Or the healing literature. Or the NDE-literature. Or the UFO-phenomenon. etc... - what I am trying to say, there is a there "there" which can not be explained by the usual suspects like bad experimental design or flawed statistical analysis. But we live a world where even discussing those sorts of things leads you towards mockery and malice by peers and people like Dave. He is what being narrow minded archetypically looks like - and behaving like a derogatory asshole surely doesn't help solving this issues either. I mean, just take a look at his videos about religion - it's literally the most mundane, Dawkin-esque nonsense you can listen to. He would not get very far with this kind of reasoning against a philosopher who has thought about it for a while. I think we need to find a place between the two extremes - where fringe topics can be explored without this baggage - but with a rigorous scientific framework to get to what's actually true. We also need to recognize where science ultimately fails truth-acquisition - like in the study of consciousness (propably) and GOD. That said, science works really works in most areas of life - especially the hard sciences like physics & chemistry! The way forward includes broader education in science and also philsophy. Topics like climate change and collective actions against it are only malleable through the workings of an adquate scientific understanding. Becoming a wiser species entails a greater understanding of both, the relative (what science teaches us about) and absolute (spiritualty) domain of reality. Ciriticism of science should be precise and logically consistent. Thats it!

"Your life, all of your life, is your path to awakening. By resisting or not dealing with its challenges, you stay asleep to Reality. Pay attention to what life is trying to reveal to you. Say yes to its fierce, ruthless, and loving grace.” - Adyashanti "Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love." - Rainer Maria Rilke "God is a comedian playing to an audience that is too afraid to laugh.” - Voltaire "Love is the blood in the body of the universe" - Christopher Bache "The only real test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life." - Naval "For the hero, fear is a challenge and a task, because only boldness can deliver from fear. And if the risk is not taken, the meaning of life is somehow violated, and the whole future is condemned to hopeless staleness, to a drab grey lit only by will-o’-the-wisps.” ― C.G. Jung "Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it." - Helen Keller "A little learning is a dangerous thing…drink deep, or taste not" - John Keates „Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75.“ -Benjamin Franklin "The strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must" - Thucydides "If your non-dual teaching has no place for duality than you really just have a dualistic teaching.” - A.H Almaas "Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it" - The Talmud „And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not here the music“ -Friedrich Nietzsche „The Last step of reason is to recognize that there are so many things that surpass it“ -Blaise Pascal "If we really face our sadness, we find it speaks with the voice of our deepest longing. And if we face it a little longer we find that it teaches us the way to attain what we long for." - Peter Kingsley „Man's main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is. The most important product of his effort is his own personality.” -Erich Fromm "Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire." - Pierre Teilhard De Chardin “Wisdom tells me I am nothing. Love tells me I am everything. And between the two my life flows.” ― Nisargadatta Maharaj "A nihilist is someone who believes in nothing and does nothing about it" - Chaque Barson "Be like melting snow, wash yourself of yourself" - Rumi “People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive." - Joseph Campbell "An unexamind life is not worth living" - Sokrates "Certainty is a greater barrier to progress than ignorance." - Unknown „Quantity has a quality all of it‘s own“ -Joseph Stalin “Always be suspicious of the news you want to hear." —Francis Everitt "Among the great things which are to be found among us, the being of nothingness is the greatest.” - Leonardo Da Vinci “There is freedom of speech, but I cannot guarantee freedom after speech.” (lol) - Idi Amin (Ugandan dictator) "Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. Throw away the solution and you get the problem back. Sometimes the problem has mutated or disappeared. Often it is still there as strong as it ever was" - Donald Kingsbury "Nobody is smart enough to be wrong 100% of the time" -Ken Wilber Some of my favourites! Not really a quote, but propably my fav. McKenna segment:

Blood potassium looks perfectly normal, propably a diet thing (isn't she vegan?) Increased potassium intake -> increased excretion. Also, this forum is not the right place to as such particular questions. If she is worried, she should contact her doctor, which will propably tell her the same. Her kidneys and everything else looks fine.

agreed!

Great plan!

Start with what feels right for you - you can't really fuck that up - there are no rules in what you are trying to do. (except allergies) Your body knows what to do with the animal product, don't worry about it. The intelligence behind your digestive system has millions of years of experience dealing with food. My one piece of advice is to ease into it - maybe don't go from 8 years+ vegan to a 500g steak in one day. Start small and see how your body responds. And now knock yourself out!

Neither am I! It's really more of a common sense question to be honest. If I were in your situation, all my knowledge about medicine/the human body/nutrition & ethical concerns would be pretty much useless. Sometimes the raw and direct "try and find out"-approach is simply the way to go.