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Comment by _nalply | Hacker News Reader

Out-of-body experiences are real. My wife had one. Because of special circumstances I am convinced that she didn't know about them. It was an unknown and completely new thing for her. When I told her that some people also experienced out-of-body, she was stunned.

I came to the realisation that science has limits. I have the hypothesis that the set of measurable effects is smaller than the set of all true things.

In other words: Scientific experiments about some things are inconclusive or just limited to what is scientifically measurable. The world is larger than that.

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Absolutely no disrespect intended to your beliefs (and I agree with your second two paragraphs) but there mere fact of your brain experiencing something is not proof that it is “real”, if that word means anything at all.

Are dreams not real? We all know that we dream.

My dream from last night of being younger, back in the university, in an an advanced math class, and being unable to write lecture notes except for the one word "grape" does not mean an alternate reality like that exists.

> It was an unknown and completely new thing for her.

My priors tell me that your wife simply had some sort of chemical induced dream or hallucination due to the extreme stress of being near death. Why are you so quick to assume something supernatural occurred?

You answered yourself. You had your priors. GP had theirs.

Russell's teapot says rational people have the hallucination prior.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot

I've had three out of body experiences that I think are completely attributable to things happening in my brain at the time. They were interesting and memorable but I'm not sure they represented some kind of unmeasurable/unknowable para phenomena out of the reach of science. (One while falling asleep sitting up after many hours awake studying for exams in college, one while trying out some lucid dreaming techniques I'd read about, and one after underestimating the potency of some cannabis.)

If you mess up trying to LD you may end up alternating between out-of-body and sleep paralysis :')

To prove your point, in an almost trivial sense, there are things we seem to be unable to study effectively, like nutrition. In principle it could be studied but in practice it's nearly impossible.

I think you're making the bigger point though that there are things that we might not be able to study at all, which I'm not sure I agree is well grounded, despite it seeming impossible given current methods.

We can study it, but won't get scientific results.

I may have experienced an OOBE myself, but I'm not sure. Anyway, what I'm interested in is, let's say your looking down from above. Are you able to accurately describe details behind you? Things that your eyes can't possibly see? Are there cases where someone is with another person, describing information they shouldn't normally be able to sense? What happens when they do?

Now you are starting to use the scientific method: namely asking if people can see things without their own material eyes and trying to find a way to be sure about this subject.

You won't find an answer if this part of OOBE cannot be captured by the scientific method.

The experiments in the article had a tablet computer pointed at the ceiling; nobody could pick which symbol it showed during their "experience". All evidence points toward hallucinations and after the fact imagined detail to fill in blanks.

> I have the hypothesis that the set of measurable effects is smaller than the set of all true things.

This seems to be an indisputable fact, at least for "scientifically measurable" effects that is.

I've been trying to explicitly carve out the phenomena where modern science doesn't cover, and in short, they are the things that are: non-repeatable (on demand) in laboratory settings involving subjective experiences.

Your wife's experiences is a perfect example of that.

It's interesting because one can relax the requirements for evidence and still learn something coherent about the world.

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