You actually gave a pretty good example of what I mean here:
> She didn't actually do it, or at least she didn't do it to the degree that you
think she did. Instead, you had an intense enough experience that your memories
of the tone, cadence, and choice of words of your voice, were altered after the
fact.
(Human) memory is extremely unreliable.
This is obviously an inadequate explanation for the parent's complex ongoing saga so it doesn't add much while it's also rather insulting to the author of the original comment.
The way I see it, the problem is not that you are skeptical, but that you seek to explain away one piece so that you can dismiss the whole thing. I see it as starting with what you already believe (that the parent's experiences are invalid) and working backwards from there, instead of starting with what you're given (that the parent claims to have experienced some incredible things) and then trying to build the best explanation. We will likely have a compelling explanation for experiences like the parent's someday, perhaps centuries in the future, but such knowledge will only be discovered people who do not immediately dismiss evidence that sits wholly outside existing scientific understanding (even if it ends up being a purely mechanistic brain circuitry phenomenon).
> She didn't actually do it, or at least she didn't do it to the degree that you think she did. Instead, you had an intense enough experience that your memories of the tone, cadence, and choice of words of your voice, were altered after the fact.
This is obviously an inadequate explanation for the parent's complex ongoing saga so it doesn't add much while it's also rather insulting to the author of the original comment.The way I see it, the problem is not that you are skeptical, but that you seek to explain away one piece so that you can dismiss the whole thing. I see it as starting with what you already believe (that the parent's experiences are invalid) and working backwards from there, instead of starting with what you're given (that the parent claims to have experienced some incredible things) and then trying to build the best explanation. We will likely have a compelling explanation for experiences like the parent's someday, perhaps centuries in the future, but such knowledge will only be discovered people who do not immediately dismiss evidence that sits wholly outside existing scientific understanding (even if it ends up being a purely mechanistic brain circuitry phenomenon).