Quote from: 1aguar on September 26, 2015, 08:45:19 AM

Quote from: cryptodevil on September 26, 2015, 08:17:38 AM

Trouble is, you have no basis for asserting such a thing when there is long recorded history of recognising and understanding the medical condition, 'hypergraphia' in humans, many of whom claim to be writing some sort of 'secret knowledge' and there is absolutely no recorded history of it being found, instead, to be a case of a human being channelling information from time-travelling space beings.

It matters not what you think about anything else, what is relevant in our discussion is the Phoenix Journals--are they based on hypergraphia? WHY? What evidence supports this? Who has read them all (or even a substantial amount) and evaluated that they are delusional writings, and for what reason?

Quote from: Robert Almeder, A Critique of Arguments Offered Against Reincarnation

philosophers will recognize the type of argument offered in the last of the above quotes. It is not unlike the Bayesian move made by David Hume offered in one of his arguments against the existence of miracles. The argument in question is that because, apart from evidence at hand, there is no prior probability for such an extraordinary event as a miracle, and because there is indeed a fairly high probability of error based on simple sense perception and human fallibility, then it is obviously more probable that miracles do not exist.

One need not believe in miracles to notice that Hume's argument is as nice a case of question-begging as one could ever find in any introductory logic book. The structure of the argument strategy proceeds as follows: whenever anybody offers an argument that challenges the paradigm position of materialistic monism, argue that it has no real probability in its favor because it conflicts with those theses that have a prior probability of being correct because they are consistent with what we already know, namely, what is asserted in the paradigm position. In such a case, then any probability in favor of human error and deceit in these matters will show that the evidence offered against the paradigm is defective. There is a great deal of epistemological voodoo in this particular Bayesian move, apart from the implicit claim that any adequate explanation of anything must be consistent with the current paradigm.

Quote from: cryptodevil on September 25, 2015, 11:38:19 AM

Other citations, such as articles from plosone.org, are also not immune from criticism:

What is your criticism of the science in these papers from PLOS ONE and Elsevier? I am willing to look at anyone's criticism of these two papers!