[S]ince objective reductionist science has served us so well, so unbelievable well, it's become an addiction we can't let go of when it fails. Rather than blame objectivity itself, we instead say that anything that cannot be objectively verified is false. Which is why it comes as no surprise that many leading thinkers in the fields of cognitive and neuro-science actually believe that the inner experience is an illusionary falsity that doesn't exist!

This is where most often any further dialog on the subject comes to a grinding screeching halt. Because now they are resting on dogma. And once dogma enters the picture, there is no way to have a reasonable disucssion going forward. The basic assumptions are so different (i.e those who say they have an inner experience, and those saying it is doesn't exist), that dialog going forward becomes almost impossible. The same as if you were to argue about if God exists or not with an fundamentalist Christian. For those of you who've tried, you will understand what I mean by this.

It is kind of a weird situation: arguing with people who believe they don't really exist, but that they nevertheless are right. To me, practices such as science and reasoning have to be based on a firm foundation of what you irrefutably can know by personal observation. Just about the only thing I know for sure is that I exist and that I perceive and think. The rest is guesswork which always will build on those primary factors, but it might be very useful guesswork if you don't lose your way. If somebody else decides to instead start off with some abstract theory, and they end up concluding that I don't exist, then I'd say they've done a bad job of reasoning, largely by starting in some arbitrary place, with data that they can't prove.

Fundamaterialism is so deeply ingrained in the academic establishment that most researchers on the NDE fall prey to it. For, after presenting case after case which would satisfy any reasonable standard of empirical evidence against materialism, even sympathetic researchers almost always deem it necessary to add the disclaimer that their research does not prove that there is life after death. But no scientific hypothesis is ever proven in this sense. Theorems in logic and mathematics can be proved. In science, hypotheses are not proved; rather, empirical evidence renders a given hypothesis more or less probable. There is no such thing as logical, or mathematical certainty in science. The fundamaterialists are correct in that the hypothesis that consciousness exists independently of the body cannot be proven with mathematical certainty. But neither can any other scientific hypothesis, because empirical science deals with evidence, not proof. Evidence never "proves" a hypothesis, it just makes it more probable. And, when evidence for a given hypothesis accumulates to a certain degree, we accept the hypothesis as true. But "true" in this scientific sense never means "proven"; it means very very probable. In science there is always the possibility that a given hypothesis may turn out to be false. The fundamaterialist will not accept the hypothesis of an afterlife until it is "proven" beyond a logical possibility of being false. That is, he is using a concept of proof which belongs in logic and mathematics, not in science. And NDE researchers are playing the fundamaterialist's game when they utter caveats that their research does not prove the hypothesis of an afterlife. What researches should say, in my opinion, is simply that they have amassed sufficient evidence to render the hypothesis of an afterlife very probable, and the hypothesis of materialism very improbable.

In the above paragraphs, I have been using the terms "science" and "scientific" in its epistemological sense. Science is a methodological process of discovering truths about reality. Insofar as science is an objective process of discovery, it is, and must be, metaphysically neutral. Insofar as science is not metaphysically neutral, but instead weds itself to a particular metaphysical theory, such as materialism, it cannot be an objective process for discovery. There is much confusion on this point, because many people equate science with materialist metaphysics, and phenomena which fall outside the scope of such metaphysics, and hence cannot be explained in physical terms, are called "unscientific". This is a most unfortunate usage of the term. For if souls and spirits are in fact a part of reality, and science is conceived epistemologically as a systematic investigation of reality, then there is no reason why science cannot devise appropriate methods to investigate souls and spirits. But if science is defined in terms of materialist metaphysics, then, if souls and spirits are real, science, thus defined, will not be able to deal with them. But this would be, not because souls and spirits are unreal, but rather because this definition of science (in terms of materialist metaphysics) has semantically excluded nonphysical realities from it scope.

"If four basic conditions are met, a crowd's ‘collective intelligence’ will produce better outcomes than a small group of experts, Surowiecki says, even if members of the crowd don't know all the facts or choose, individually, to act irrationally. ‘Wise crowds’ need (1) diversity of opinion; (2) independence of members from one another; (3) decentralization; and (4) a good method for aggregating opinions.”

In the Q&A, Surowiecki says: “the people in the crowd need to be independent, so that they pay attention mostly to their own information, and not worrying about what everyone around them thinks.” The examples he gives are:

“On the one hand, big organizations--like a company or a government agency--count as crowds. And so do small groups, like a team of scientists working on a problem. But just as interested--maybe even more interested--in groups that aren't really aware themselves as groups, like bettors on a horse race or investors in the stock market.”

That raises an interesting questions. Can collective intelligence really be created from individuals acting at their the common denominator of greed and personal gain at the expense of others?

Lela: "When I was 15 years old,I was on a bus to my dads,who lived 2200 miles away.I had no money and was getting pretty hungry. A lady on the bus asked me if I was hungry and I admitted I had not eaten for two days. She proceeded to feed me at every meal stop. At the end of her journey,she gave me $5 and told me.."always remember this time,if you see someone in need..help when you can". I am now pushing 60 and have never forgotten her or her words. I have never passed someone who was in need without helping them if I was able to do so. I have tried to instill this in my family as well and we are ALL ..great believers in paying it forward."

Sarah: "I noticed that there aren't any stories about kids in college doing this movement. Recently, at Southwestern College in Winfield Kansas, our Mind/Body/Universe class watched the movie Pay it Foward. The class has about 50 students in it and the teacher, Julie Conrade, decided to make Paying it Forward an assignment. We split up into about 10 groups and were instructed to find some way to Pay it Foward to our community and then present our projects to the class a month later. Some of the things the groups did included: visiting nursing homes, helping a working family renovate their house, helping a man who had a stroke clean his house because his wife was getting treatment for leukimia out of state, and recycling thousands of bottles and cans. I am in the class and noticed that all of the students took the assignment seriously and got a lot out of the experience!"

Geoff: "I was living in Buffalo, New York, last year, in a section of town that everyone called the ghetto. I was 21 years old, and every day I had to walk for half an hour through the worst streets just to get to work. I usually got stares for being one of the few white guys you'd see on the street. It made me really nervous, despite the fact that I'm 6'2 and a weightlifter. I've always been a pacifist, and haven't been in a fight since 9th grade. One day, I was heading down Bailey Avenue, and five black teenagers started following me, yelling insults and laughing at me. I was trying to ignore them, but they started circling around me while I walked. I told them to leave me alone, which only got them more riled up. Finally, one shoved me, and another one grabbed my backpack. Right as I was about to get a really bad beating, one of the guys gets clocked in the head with a soup can, and falls over. We all looked, and an old black man was standing at the back of his store about twenty feet away, holding another can. The teens started swearing at him, and he yelled for them to go away, and that he'd called the police. One of the teens started coming towards him, and gets the other can right in the face. The other three looked like they were going to rush him, but he reached behind the door and pulled out a *big* shotgun. He didn't even have to point it at them. They ran for it, practically dragging the first teen that got knocked over with them.

The man came over and checked to be sure I was okay. His name was George, and I waited with him until the police arrived to file a report and give descriptions. In private, George told me that his church, which was going to be closed for lack of funds, had recently received an anonymous donation for $5000 that had "pay it forward" written on the envelope. All the members had decided to do their own PIF's, and I was really glad to have been one of his."

The power of choice. You have it. But you forfeit it when you imagine that you can choose for others. You can't. But you can choose for yourself...

- Harry Browne

The Rosetta Project is a global collaboration of language specialists and native speakers working to develop a contemporary counterpart of the historic Rosetta Stone. In this updated iteration, our goal is a meaningful survey and near permanent archive of 1,000 languages. Our intention is to create a unique platform for comparative linguistic research and education as well as a functional linguistic tool that might help in the recovery or revitalization of lost languages in unknown futures.

We are creating this broad language archive through an open contribution, open review process and we invite you to participate. The resulting archive will be publicly available in three different media: a micro-etched nickel disk with 2,000 year life expectancy; a single-volume monumental reference book; and through this growing online archive.