Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to Philosophy on the Fringes, a podcast that explores the philosophical dimensions of the strange and the mundane.
Speaker: We're your hosts, Megan Fritz and Frank Cabrera.
Speaker: On today's episode, we're talking about near-death experiences.
Speaker: Are they evidence that the mind is separate from the body?
Speaker: Can a skeptical explanation prove plausible?
Speaker: And what might these experiences tell us about our deepest hopes and fears?
Speaker: Welcome back to Philosophy on the Fringes.
Speaker: Today we're talking about near-death experiences, which is an episode that we... It's another one of those episodes that we plan to do since kind of the inception of this podcast, one that I've been really excited about.
Speaker: And we have a lot of stuff to talk about today, so I'm pretty pumped to jump into it.
Speaker: Yeah, me too.
Speaker: We've been watching the X-Files, so near-death experiences come up in the X-Files, that show from the 90s, so...
Speaker: really been on our minds recently.
Speaker: We also watch I think we watched that thing with William Shatner where he he talks about a bunch of weird stuff, including this.
Speaker: So, Frank, why don't you just start us off by saying what is a near death experience?
Speaker: Also, we might probably throughout the episode, I will abbreviate this as an NDE.
Speaker: Yeah, let's let's start that convention now.
Speaker: NDE.
Speaker: NDEs.
Speaker: What are NDEs?
Speaker: Yeah, so first I'll describe the experience and then Megan will say a bit about what sorts of events tend to trigger this experience.
Speaker: It's a bit tricky there.
Speaker: So first things first, when people have a near-death experience, they tend to be near death, right, obviously, but somehow they have this sort of sense that they are dead.
Speaker: They, you know, feel peaceful and painless.
Speaker: They see a white light, you know, they're traveling down a tunnel.
Speaker: Maybe they meet the spirits of deceased relatives or they meet spiritual beings or maybe angels or something like that.
Speaker: Often there is a review of their life.
Speaker: Their life flashes before their eyes and they think about everything they've done, the good things, the bad things.
Speaker: Often they have the experience of being able to cross over the threshold, some threshold, some boundary to another world or the afterlife or something like that.
Speaker: But typically, they are pushed back by the spiritual beings.
Speaker: The spiritual beings will say, no, it's not your time.
Speaker: And they're begrudgingly consigned to go back to their body.
Speaker: And then they wake up.
Speaker: And then typically also they have personality changes or other life transformations.
Speaker: Maybe they decide to be a morally better person or something like that.
Speaker: So these are familiar markers of a near-death experience.
Speaker: That's more or less like how it goes.
Speaker: Obviously, there's variation.
Speaker: There's definitely cultural variation.
Speaker: But this is a very common sort of experience.
Speaker: I think it's pretty familiar to our listeners.
Speaker: Yeah, a lot of people who have NDEs don't, they don't want to be resuscitated.
Speaker: I saw a description of someone who said that being pushed back into the world of the living was like being thrown into ice water.
Speaker: So like really jarring, unpleasant.
Speaker: They don't want to be, although we should say that there are negative things.
Speaker: and yeah most of them are positive positive experience you see a bright light you see the spiritual beings you feel love you feel at peace but some of them are negative those sound really scary i guess you you meet the the creatures of darkness
Speaker: Yeah, I saw a nurse describing or she was talking about people who had negative NDEs and she said, yeah, they're a lot more rare.
Speaker: Almost all the time people come out of them like being really religious, feeling like, oh, like I messed up in.
Speaker: I got to get my act together.
Speaker: Yeah, I got a second chance.
Speaker: Right, exactly.
Speaker: So thankfully, those are not nearly as common, but they do happen.
Speaker: So one big question I had when we started doing research for this episode, as Frank knows, I have a hard time with ambiguity.
Speaker: And one thing that is ambiguous is near death.
Speaker: What does it mean to be near death?
Speaker: You know, are we all near death?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So certain paradigmatic cases come to mind.
Speaker: It's hard to talk about the near-death experience without talking a little bit about the triggering causes.
Speaker: Or when people are, they suffer cardiac arrest or the brain flat lines, they have a flat EEG.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Or just the conditions for falling into this category.
Speaker: Like we have all these statistics on NDEs, but what makes someone fall into this category?
Speaker: And so I was looking at a bunch of studies.
Speaker: And trying to see how they define near death.
Speaker: And the fact is that they differ quite a lot.
Speaker: So one study I looked at had a really broad definition.
Speaker: It said individuals were considered to be near death if they were so physically compromised that if their condition did not improve, they would be expected to irreversibly die.
Speaker: So like, I mean, that could be a lot of things.
Speaker: Yeah, so this discussion is complicated by the fact that there have been reports of near-death experiences when the person was not in an objectively life-threatening situation.
Speaker: So they merely perceive their death to be close, but they actually weren't.
Speaker: They were mistaken.
Speaker: Like midair falling off a big cliff.
Speaker: Yeah, like you thought you were falling, but you actually weren't.
Speaker: And also, to complicate the story, there have been reports of, I guess this is an instance of what I just said, reports of people falling, like mountain climbers or something like that.
Speaker: And in midair, they have a near-death experience, but they survive.
Speaker: So that's a lot different than someone who stopped her cardiac arrest, right?
Speaker: Or someone who has a flat EGG.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: So that really complicates things.
Speaker: So then another study I looked at, it said people having NDEs are unconscious, lack of heartbeat or respiration, and have a flat electroencephalogram, which is more what we think of when we think of NDEs.
Speaker: And I think the interesting cases are going to fall into that more narrow category.
Speaker: We'll put aside those weird outlier cases I just mentioned.
Speaker: Maybe we'll come back to them in the case of the mountain climber falling.
Speaker: But most of them are going to be the paramedic is working on you because you're about to die.
Speaker: Right, right.
Speaker: So this is certainly a fringe topic, or this is a topic for philosophy on the fringes, like, without a doubt.
Speaker: But we should say a bit about, like, why there's resistance, or at least no interest really in talking about this in academic philosophy.
Speaker: So Megan, you have some thoughts.
Speaker: Why is this a weird topic?
Speaker: Why don't you see a lot of academic philosophers talking about this issue?
Speaker: It is of interest to medical researchers and doctors, certain aspects of this.
Speaker: But you don't really see too much discussion of this in academic philosophy.
Speaker: So why is that?
Speaker: Well, I mean, so I mean, one reason that you don't see a lot of discussion of this in academic philosophy is just that the data is just all over the place.
Speaker: And really hard to get a grip on.
Speaker: Like, it's sort of the discussion most of the time, at least when you come to it, it's not like a matter of, well, which explanation is right?
Speaker: It's just like, there's nothing you can say.
Speaker: Like, I think I tweeted something about this.
Speaker: Like, when I read these cases or think about this topic, my brain just kind of shuts down.
Speaker: Like, it's very, very difficult to think about and say something cogent on.
Speaker: And then, of course, there's also been many charlatans.
Speaker: It's quite hard to trust people in this realm unless they're being monitored medically.
Speaker: And that monitoring is being recorded pretty accurately because people just make stuff up.
Speaker: Well, why are they making stuff up?
Speaker: Well, for fame and money.
Speaker: There was a really famous book that got turned into a movie called Hedges.
Speaker: Heaven is for real.
Speaker: And it was by this, you know, cute little kid who supposedly died or almost died, had a near death experience, went to heaven, did all this stuff, you know, met Jesus or something like that, wrote a book and it got turned into a movie.
Speaker: It was a huge bestseller.
Speaker: And then like a decade later, he's like, oh, yeah, I made that all up.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Is his conscience really waiting on him or something or someone found him out?
Speaker: So so you can imagine this kind of thing would be easy to lie about.
Speaker: Who's going to check, you know, your homework on that?
Speaker: If he ever has a real near death experience, he's probably going to have a negative one.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah, he should not look forward to his next near death occasion.
Speaker: So, yeah, I think that there's a lot of distrust because this is, you know, by nature, incredibly difficult to investigate.
Speaker: Yeah, I think that's true.
Speaker: There's a lot of charlatry, a lot of fraud.
Speaker: It's also just a difficult topic to investigate because the key pieces of evidence are
Speaker: are just these testimonies and these anecdotes, some of them from like 40 years ago.
Speaker: There's the handful of like key standard cases that are often discussed in places like the Journal of Near-Death Studies.
Speaker: And sometimes there's a little bit of discussion in academic philosophy.
Speaker: We'll get to that soon.
Speaker: But yeah, there's a handful of key cases, some of these cases from like the 80s.
Speaker: And it's like, all right, this person said this, the nurse or the doctor said this.
Speaker: Like, I don't know what to do with that.
Speaker: It sounds really, really out there.
Speaker: So what do I do with this?
Speaker: How do I proceed?
Speaker: And a lot of the data is gathered by people who you can tell are they already think one thing or another.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Either they're people who have had an NDE and they're like, I need to prove this is real.
Speaker: Or they're people who are like, I need to debunk this.
Speaker: And it's not this isn't a lot of the time with these organizations.
Speaker: It's not data gathered from just like a totally neutral perspective.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So there's some reasons, I guess one reason why, from the perspective, to adopt the perspective of a proponent of the reality of NDEs and their spiritual significance.
Speaker: They might say that, well, of course, in academic philosophy, you're not going to see a lot of discussion of NDEs because in academic philosophy, more or less a kind of naturalism or materialism about the mind is assumed, right?
Speaker: Because what are the most ardent proponents of the reality and significance of NDEs want to say?
Speaker: Well, they want to say that these NDEs show that the human being is not entirely physical.
Speaker: Yeah, mind-body dualism is true.
Speaker: What happens in NDEs is like the mind... Or the soul.
Speaker: Or the soul, right?
Speaker: Separates from the body.
Speaker: And that's why it's able to take this journey to the edges of the afterlife or see things you don't ordinarily see or be conscious in situations where it doesn't really make sense for the human body to be conscious.
Speaker: When the brain... There's no discernible brain activity.
Speaker: So how could it be consciousness?
Speaker: That's what they want to say.
Speaker: Proponents of NDEs want to say that.
Speaker: And you don't see a lot of mind-body dualist in academic philosophy.
Speaker: Yeah, right.
Speaker: So perhaps it's a fringe topic because it sort of goes hand in hand with a kind of mind-body dualism.
Speaker: The mind is immaterial and that sort of view has fallen out of favor in contemporary philosophy, even though it was historically very prominent.
Speaker: And along with that, of the mind-body dualists there are, they also tend to, not all the time, but they tend to be in a particular religious tradition or another.
Speaker: And as we will get to talking about later, these near-death experiences do not seem to vindicate any particular religious tradition.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Okay, so before we get into some of the more interesting details, let's get some data out on the table.
Speaker: Like I was saying earlier, it's kind of actually hard to find data on this stuff because there have not been a lot of controlled studies done on this or research efforts, but I got what I could.
Speaker: So those who have near-death experiences...
Speaker: tend to be extremely accurate when describing their resuscitations.
Speaker: One study put the accuracy of the description of resuscitations for those that have NDEs at around 97%.
Speaker: That's pretty good.
Speaker: I guess I should say what percentage of people have NDEs.
Speaker: So people who nearly die in this more rigid sense, they lack a heartbeat and have a flat electroencephalogram, somewhere between 17% and 19% of those people have an NDE.
Speaker: Hmm.
Speaker: And then of those, when those people were asked to describe their resuscitations, they were accurate about 97% of the time.
Speaker: That's pretty good.
Speaker: People who do not have NDEs were not able to accurately describe their resuscitations with any kind of statistical significance.
Speaker: Between 74% and 83% of people who have NDEs report experiencing more or much more consciousness than normal waking life during the near-death experience.
Speaker: So they have the experience of being more conscious, more alive than they were previously between 74% and 83%.
Speaker: Another like 15% to 20% report about the same level of consciousness, a very small amount, like 4%, report feeling less conscious or aware.
Speaker: The life review that Frank was talking about earlier, where you see, you know, your whole life flash before your eyes and maybe have some kind of general awareness of the things, you know, you did wrong, if you led a bad life or a good life.
Speaker: That does not happen in every NDE case.
Speaker: In fact, it happens from some estimates in about 14% of NDE cases, which is comforting to me because that to me seems like the worst part.
Speaker: I was telling Frank this earlier.
Speaker: That's like the thing I most would not want to happen.
Speaker: Around 4% of people that have NDEs say they, or sorry, around 4% of the people encountered during these experiences.
Speaker: So like you die and then you experience encountering these other beings.
Speaker: So around 4% of those people were people who were actually alive during the near-death experience.
Speaker: So like if I encountered my living mother or something like
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So both living and deceased appear in people's near-death experiences.
Speaker: But massively more deceased.
Speaker: It's about 96% of the people encountered, if they're people you know, they're deceased.
Speaker: Interesting.
Speaker: Even if you don't know they're deceased, there are cases where people encounter others in their NDE and they're like, oh, weird, because they're still alive.
Speaker: And then they get told, oh, no, they died.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So there are some cultural differences, but there's more cultural similarities.
Speaker: So they did one study on near-death experiences on people in Iran, and they have a lot of the same markers as near-death experiences people in the United States.
Speaker: And around 80 percent of people who reported having near-death experiences report that they caused them to make moderate to large changes in their lives.
Speaker: So quite a bit.
Speaker: And that's that's the data that I have for you, Frank.
Speaker: Interesting.
Speaker: I think the discrepancy between the living and deceased featuring and people's experiences is kind of interesting.
Speaker: It is because you would expect.
Speaker: I mean, you would.
Speaker: Because if they were like 50-50, then it'd be like, well, who cares that, you know, your dead grandma showed up when your alive grandma showed up, too.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: And you would expect if it was merely just your brain spitting out memories to you, you have more memories of people who are alive.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Unless you're like 100 years old.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So in Megan's description of the statistic, she already hinted at some of the most puzzling aspects of NDEs, at least from the perspective of those that take them seriously.
Speaker: So why are NDEs supposed to be puzzling?
Speaker: Well, in a lot of cases, it seems as though there's consciousness when there shouldn't be consciousness.
Speaker: From the materialist point of view, where consciousness depends causally on a functioning brain, there shouldn't be consciousness without brain activity.
Speaker: But it seems like, at least if you take the testimony seriously, there's consciousness without brain activity.
Speaker: That's weird.
Speaker: Without detectable brain activity.
Speaker: Without detectable brain activity.
Speaker: That's weird.
Speaker: We should also say, because I forgot to mention this initially, but I think it is important to this discussion.
Speaker: There is no difference in terms of whether they have a near-death experience, whether that near-death experience is good, between different worldviews or religions, right?
Speaker: So someone who is an agnostic or atheist is just as likely to have an NDE and just as likely to have a positively valenced one as someone who is religious and someone who is
Speaker: Christian is just as likely to have a bad NDE as someone who is Muslim or whatever.
Speaker: Yeah, I saw similar statistics that there's really not like variation along socioeconomic lines or anything like that.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: To which you can contrast, if you recall our discussion of alien abduction experiences, there was a lot of effects that were along socioeconomic lines, for instance.
Speaker: So this is not like that right here.
Speaker: They're pretty widespread.
Speaker: So, yeah, so we have why is it puzzling?
Speaker: We have consciousness without brain activity.
Speaker: We have apparently veridical descriptions of what's going on inside the room while the person is suffered cardiac arrest.
Speaker: It is unconscious.
Speaker: It seems as though they can describe the sequences of their resuscitation.
Speaker: It could describe the details of nurses and doctors.
Speaker: Sometimes mundane details, sometimes odd details.
Speaker: So, for instance, I read one report where the patient was undergoing surgery.
Speaker: And when he woke up, he was like, oh, it was weird.
Speaker: There was some kind of like bird-like creature that was flapping its wings.
Speaker: And what that actually was, according to the doctors, was the surgeon would sort of like gesture to get things with his elbows instead of like using his fingers.
Speaker: And that looked like a bird flapping it.
Speaker: So the patient was, by all accounts, in no position to be able to discern that through ordinary perceptual means.
Speaker: So the puzzling question is, how did he know that?
Speaker: So veridical descriptions of what's going on inside the room are,
Speaker: Odd features, ordinary features, the sequence by which they were resuscitated.
Speaker: Perhaps more interestingly, veridical descriptions of what's going on outside the room.
Speaker: So a lot of people that undergo near-death experiences report out-of-body experiences.
Speaker: They report rising up out of their physical body, floating around the room, maybe going to other rooms in the hospital, and allegedly seeing things that they would not be able to see otherwise.
Speaker: So that's supposed to be a really puzzling aspect of NDE reports if we take them seriously.
Speaker: There's also veridical descriptions by blind people.
Speaker: So when blind people have NDEs, it is reported that sometimes they can describe, say, the tie that the nurse or the doctor wore.
Speaker: And these are people who were born blind.
Speaker: Yeah, they're born blind.
Speaker: So if they're getting this information through ordinary visual means, well, how do they know?
Speaker: How do the blind people know what the ties look like?
Speaker: I read a case where someone was accurately described.
Speaker: They said the surgeon was using a surgical saw on them, but for some reason it looked like an electric toothbrush.
Speaker: And I guess that this was just like a brand new kind of surgical saw that they had like just started using in surgeries.
Speaker: It wasn't like normal looking kind.
Speaker: So that was interesting to me.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So there's lots of cases like this.
Speaker: One of my favorite ones I would mention is there's someone who was unconscious and they took his dentures out, put them in the drawer.
Speaker: By all accounts, he shouldn't have been able to know where they were because he was unconscious at the time.
Speaker: When he woke up, the nurses were asking another nurse, like, where is his dentures?
Speaker: And he's like, oh, they're in the drawer.
Speaker: The dentures case.
Speaker: How did he know they were in the drawer?
Speaker: He was unconscious.
Speaker: That's
Speaker: So cases like this where it seems like people know or have information that they shouldn't have because they were unconscious or they knew stuff that was happening outside the room.
Speaker: OK, so that's like the most puzzling aspects of these sorts of experiences.
Speaker: We didn't say the family cooking dinner one.
Speaker: Oh.
Speaker: The girl who drowned Crystal something.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So, I mean, one case that's thrown around a lot is a girl who was... Crystal Merzlach.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: She almost drowned.
Speaker: They were trying to resuscitate her for like 45 minutes.
Speaker: And she was one of those people that when she woke up, she could recount the details by which she was resuscitated.
Speaker: She also is alleged that she saw what her family was doing in their house miles away with extraordinary accuracy.
Speaker: There's cases like this that are often that often cited where you get the idea.
Speaker: How did they know this?
Speaker: Where did this information come from?
Speaker: They were unconscious.
Speaker: They were being resuscitated.
Speaker: How do they know what was going on?
Speaker: So those cases are obviously more compelling than ones where all the report are like totally nonverifiable things like just details about the would be afterlife.
Speaker: Yeah, right.
Speaker: If someone is an open-minded, skeptical inquirer who wants to really analyze these near-death experiences, these are the sorts of cases they should be most interested in.
Speaker: Cases where the person who undergoes the near-death experience comes back with verifiable information that it seems like they shouldn't have.
Speaker: How do they know this?
Speaker: So, yeah.
Speaker: So those are the puzzling aspects.
Speaker: So now let's talk about the explanations here.
Speaker: What do skeptics of NDEs say?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Because obviously these cases have they've they've failed to convince every single person who's heard them.
Speaker: Of course.
Speaker: That we've been doing our best to, you know, to present them in their most compelling light.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But still, some of you out there are going to say, hmm, I don't know.
Speaker: So what are some possible ways of explaining this without resorting to, well, gosh, I guess, you know, dualism and some kind of like strange spiritual facts are true.
Speaker: And I guess like to the debunking explanation that to me personally seems like most compelling is just like there's like there must be a lot of brain activity that we can't detect.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So this sounds like ad hoc that is just sort of made up to preserve your belief that the mind is like material or whatever.
Speaker: But this is this is something that respectable philosophers say.
Speaker: So I haven't mentioned this person yet, but there is a tiny bit of literature on NDEs in academic philosophy.
Speaker: So John Martin Fisher wrote.
Speaker: who is a very distinguished philosopher who works on free will and philosophy of mind.
Speaker: He has written a few articles on NDEs.
Speaker: He's skeptical of them.
Speaker: He wants to offer these kinds of naturalistic alternative explanations.
Speaker: But I think he does a good job of being open-minded and
Speaker: I'm not like ridiculing the experiences.
Speaker: It's easy to be very dismissive of this.
Speaker: And he doesn't do that.
Speaker: But this is something he says.
Speaker: He says, look, if these people who are unconscious are able to recount the details of their resuscitation, then it must be the case that the brain can encode information that is not like consciously available at the time, but becomes available when they wake up.
Speaker: He says that he's fine with saying that.
Speaker: Like neuroscience is still in its infancy.
Speaker: We don't know a lot about consciousness.
Speaker: Maybe it's the case that there's brain activity that we can't detect with our current scientific instruments.
Speaker: So he opts for one of those kinds of explanations.
Speaker: He also says, like, hey, look, you know, maybe these really rich conscious experiences that people come back with happen right before the lights go out or right after the lights turn back on.
Speaker: It's really hard to pinpoint exactly when the experience was had.
Speaker: The people who have the experience to say,
Speaker: Well, I was, you know, I was unconscious or whatever, right?
Speaker: Or my brain was my brain.
Speaker: That person had no brain activity.
Speaker: But maybe, you know, the experience occurred after the brain activity restarted or right before the brain activity went off.
Speaker: Yeah, I've heard this theory.
Speaker: So the idea is like somehow you're able to absorb information, but you only like phenomenologically experience like all of it at once after your brain restarts.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But because this is information you took in during the time when you were clinically dead or whatever, it's
Speaker: It seems as though you were conscious the whole time.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And that's why it might seem like a very, very rich experience because you'll be flooded with consciousness or whatever when you wake up.
Speaker: Everything at once, right?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So he says that sort of thing.
Speaker: When it comes to cases like the dentures in the drawer case, to quote him, here's what he says.
Speaker: Perhaps he saw other patients' dentures removed and placed in similar locations.
Speaker: Or perhaps while unconscious, he registered the feeling of having his dentures removed and the sound of the drawer being opened and then being placed in it.
Speaker: So obviously, John Martin Fisher wasn't there.
Speaker: He can't verify th is is the correct explanation, but it's a possible, you know, relatively plausible explanation one can give that doesn't require positing immaterial minds that are floating free from the body at the moment of cardiac arrest.
Speaker: Maybe the girl who knew what her family was cooking for dinner while she was being resuscitated, just like deep in her subconscious, she knew like, oh, often on Thursdays we have chicken and rice or something like that.
Speaker: Yeah, if you're relatively creative, you can come up with plausible, you know, naturalistic, you know, explanations for these stories.
Speaker: And I guess that's what the dyed in the wool...
Speaker: naturalist materialist will say they'll say no no no I'm not compelled by these I don't need to become a dualist I can explain these in many many sorts of ways yeah so you have to for the the harder cases you do have to sort of add on some things positive some sort of like what we might call ad hoc explanations but that's not always a bad thing if the alternatives are are worse yeah
Speaker: Yeah, I guess you could also like take like the cynical route and just say like everybody's lying.
Speaker: You know, everyone's afraid of death.
Speaker: They want to, you know, they want to give themselves hope.
Speaker: So they deceive themselves or they just like want fame and want to sell books.
Speaker: So they just make these things up.
Speaker: You could say that, but there's like hundreds of these sorts of things.
Speaker: And like, as we discussed in our Bigfoot episode way back when, you know, a lot of these people are just ordinary people, you know, very sincere.
Speaker: Some of them try to sell books.
Speaker: That's true.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But a lot of them don't.
Speaker: And so, you know.
Speaker: Yeah, you see a lot of in a lot of these cases, the like the attending surgeons or whatever also become like religious afterward because they're so shaken up by what their patient has told them.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: The case of the drowning child who recounted her resuscitation and saw what her family was doing.
Speaker: The pediatrician attending her was very much changed by this experience.
Speaker: He was very much compelled by what she told him.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So maybe the cynical explanation isn't the best one.
Speaker: So what's the alternative explanation?
Speaker: Well, it's the thing we've already said, that the mind is separate from the body.
Speaker: In neodetic experiences, the mind becomes free from the body, can float free, and that's why it can see things that we wouldn't ordinarily be able to see.
Speaker: There's another famous case where...
Speaker: A woman who was having a near-death experience, she reported that she saw a shoe on the roof, right?
Speaker: And it is alleged that they found the shoe exactly where she said.
Speaker: So the other explanation is this dualist explanation where the mind floats free and can see things you couldn't ordinarily see.
Speaker: Yeah, I kind of want to talk a little bit about different theories of mind, because, of course, there are more theories of mind than just pure materialism and mind-body dualism.
Speaker: Yeah, so why should you care about this question as a philosopher, aside from just trying to figure out whether these testimonies should be believed?
Speaker: It does seem to have implications, possible implications for philosophy of mind, like what's the nature of the mind?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So when I was reading these cases, I was like, well, gosh, like if we have sufficient reason to believe them is like the only option to be a dualist.
Speaker: So some other options for theories of mind besides materialism, which is just that, you know, all there is is brain and that somehow gives rise to consciousness.
Speaker: Or you might think, no, some people are illusionists about consciousness.
Speaker: But or dualism, where the mind and the body are two separate things.
Speaker: You want to talk about panpsychism.
Speaker: We chatted about panpsychism.
Speaker: So what were your puzzles about panpsychism?
Speaker: Well, I was wondering if the panpsychism is, is the idea that all matter is conscious.
Speaker: So even electrons, rocks are conscious in a sense.
Speaker: If electrons exist.
Speaker: Yeah, right.
Speaker: I'll get into it.
Speaker: Then they're conscious.
Speaker: Every piece of matter is conscious that consciousness is the foundational ontology of all that exists.
Speaker: So that's what panpsychism is.
Speaker: It's gotten some high profile defenders recently.
Speaker: So I was wondering, like, well, does a panpsychist have any recourse to explain these cases better, say, than the materialist would?
Speaker: But I'm not I'm not convinced they do because for the so for the panpsychist, you do have consciousness.
Speaker: But what's conscious is like particular pieces of matter.
Speaker: So like your consciousness would be something like your brain, I guess.
Speaker: Some panpsychist is going to listen to this podcast and just like totally nail me over.
Speaker: So I'm really sorry if I'm doing panpsychism dirty on a
Speaker: on my explanation of it.
Speaker: But it seems like if the matter that is conscious, if the particular piece of matter that's conscious dies or whatever, I mean, I guess, well, I guess it would still be conscious though because it's still matter.
Speaker: But it wouldn't be able to explain stuff like leaving the room.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But I guess it would still be able to explain recounting your resuscitation.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, I guess this is all just like speculative.
Speaker: I don't really know anything about panpsychism.
Speaker: But I guess if all matter is conscious and the brain's not special in being conscious, then I don't know.
Speaker: Even though the brain is not showing any electrical activity on the instruments, the various cells in your body could still be conscious in a rudimentary sense.
Speaker: And that explains why there's still conscious activity.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: I'm not sure what role like electrical activity plays in consciousness for the panpsychist.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: If you're a panpsychist and you're listening to this, please let us know.
Speaker: I would love to know that.
Speaker: Yes, there's various theories of mine.
Speaker: It's unclear to me whether any of them can deal with the these particular cases as well as dualism.
Speaker: Of course, there are reasons to not be a dualist.
Speaker: reasons that some people find decisive.
Speaker: But yeah, so it seems like just on the face of things, it mostly vindicates a dualist theory of mind.
Speaker: But as we've mentioned, it doesn't necessarily vindicate a particular religion.
Speaker: In fact, insofar as one thinks they're real experiences, one might think it's evidence against most or all religious traditions as they currently are understood.
Speaker: Wait, why is that?
Speaker: Well, because, so for example, you know, if you are like a traditional Christian or Muslim, you might think, well, people who are in your religion go to.
Speaker: Oh, right.
Speaker: But people who aren't don't.
Speaker: And near-death experiences are almost entirely positive, no matter what someone's religion or lack of religion is.
Speaker: And people who have negative near-death experiences are sometimes or even often religious.
Speaker: So, so you might think at least that's some evidence against like this traditional kind of like heaven and hell, you know, based on like religious devotion idea that is a pretty big part of like the mainstream versions of a lot of these religions.
Speaker: Oh, I see.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: One other implication that it seems like near-death experiences have, if taken at face value, is that it seems to point to the immortality of the soul.
Speaker: This is a topic that was pretty prominent throughout the history of philosophy.
Speaker: Plato wrote about this in his dialogues.
Speaker: But even here, I think things are not so clear cut.
Speaker: So here's a possible view.
Speaker: I don't think anyone has this view, but it's possible.
Speaker: So imagine dualism is true, right?
Speaker: The mind is not identical to the body.
Speaker: It can separate from the body.
Speaker: But as it happens, it can only last like 10 minutes.
Speaker: away from the body.
Speaker: Like it can float free from the body, but it has a very short lifespan.
Speaker: Like after like 10 minutes, the immaterial mind like just dissipates, it like annihilates itself for whatever reason.
Speaker: Like it really, it needs to be connected to the brain to keep going.
Speaker: It can go free, but only for a little while.
Speaker: And then after 10 minutes, the mind is extinguished.
Speaker: So that is completely consistent.
Speaker: with all with taking the NDEs at face value.
Speaker: Obviously, this is like a view that nobody has, but I'm not sure you can you can jump from from NDEs to immortality of the soul just because you're a dualist.
Speaker: Right, right.
Speaker: It's maybe evidence for life after death, but not evidence for eternal life or something like that.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Although, I mean, obviously, people who have these experiences
Speaker: It doesn't seem to them like they've entered just like another state of mortality.
Speaker: They perceive... They have transcendent experience.
Speaker: So in addition to seeing shoes on the roof and dentures in the drawer and moms at home cooking chicken, they also see the transcendent realm.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker: And people who have died sometimes a long time ago.
Speaker: So you might think, well, those people are still alive.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You know, they've been alive for like 10 years or however long ago they died.
Speaker: Didn't you say someone reported seeing Elvis?
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: So some of these experiences are a bit idiosyncratic.
Speaker: Sometimes people see Elvis because he's dead, allegedly.
Speaker: So the afterlife is at least like, what, like 60 years long or something like that?
Speaker: So, yes.
Speaker: Elvis is there.
Speaker: Another thing I read was that some woman observed spirit beings who weave spirit clothes for us mortals that we need to wear in the spirit realm.
Speaker: Oh, that's lovely.
Speaker: Yeah, that's nice.
Speaker: But that's a little weird.
Speaker: You know, Frank, this might be a good time to tell our listeners about the near-death experience.
Speaker: I'm saving that for the end.
Speaker: No, A.J.
Speaker: Ayer's near-death experience.
Speaker: Oh, yes.
Speaker: The philosopher A.J.
Speaker: Ayer.
Speaker: Yeah, I tweeted this the other day, but I have not mentioned it.
Speaker: So he had this near-death experience like a year before he died.
Speaker: I think he was in the hospital for something like pneumonia.
Speaker: Here's what he said.
Speaker: His is a bit idiosyncratic, too.
Speaker: I was confronted by a red light, exceedingly bright and also very painful, even when I turned away from it.
Speaker: I was aware that this light was responsible for the government of the universe.
Speaker: Among its ministers were two creatures who had been put in charge of space.
Speaker: These ministers periodically inspected space and had recently carried out such an inspection.
Speaker: They had, however, failed to do their work properly, with the result that space, like a badly fitting jigsaw puzzle, was slightly out of joint.
Speaker: A further consequence was that the laws of nature had ceased to function as they should.
Speaker: I felt that it was up to me to put things right.
Speaker: That's a good one.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So it's like he's at the DMV and the government bureaucrats won't respond to him.
Speaker: So here's how he concludes the article.
Speaker: So he says, so there it is.
Speaker: My recent experience, my recent experiences have slid.
Speaker: slightly weakened my conviction that my genuine death, which is due fairly soon, will be the end of me, though I continue to hope that it will be.
Speaker: So, so Aaron did not have a positive near-death experience.
Speaker: It wasn't like one of the really bad ones where like you feel like you go to hell.
Speaker: It's a very, I mean.
Speaker: It's like being trapped, like being trapped in the DMV and like,
Speaker: Which is so what I would expect from an old 20th century British logical positivist.
Speaker: So Ayer was, I should say a bit about who Ayer was.
Speaker: Because this makes it funny.
Speaker: Yeah, for people who don't know.
Speaker: Ayer is like a really hard-nosed empiricist.
Speaker: He really is skeptical of things that can't be empirically verified.
Speaker: In fact, he would say they're meaningless, that they can't be empirically verified, aside from logical truths and truths that are truth by definition.
Speaker: So, yeah, so you didn't believe in anything, you know, spiritual or spooky or weird or anything like that.
Speaker: And in fact, didn't think anyone could be justified in believing any of these like in principle, unobservable things.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So he says that his experience has not weakened his conviction that there is no God.
Speaker: But he does.
Speaker: I mean, to his credit, he does.
Speaker: He does take his experience seriously.
Speaker: He says, yeah, it did slightly weaken my conviction that my genuine death will be the end of me.
Speaker: Although he hopes it would be.
Speaker: I guess he was a little self-loathing.
Speaker: But yeah, I mean, so for people who are people out there who are super duper dismissive of this phenomenon, I mean, you know, A.J.
Speaker: Ayer, who.
Speaker: The last person you'd expect.
Speaker: To take it seriously, at least took it a little seriously to his credit.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So, yeah, that's that's interesting.
Speaker: Like, that's a nice little little chestnut from the history of 20th century analytic philosophy.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So we've been talking about debunking explanations.
Speaker: We've been talking about how might we explain these experiences if we're assuming that they are at least some of them are veridical.
Speaker: And how do we decide which is the best explanation?
Speaker: Well, there is an argument pattern called inference to the best explanation.
Speaker: I've done a lot of work on it.
Speaker: I published a paper called inference to the best explanation and overview.
Speaker: So I guess I know a bit about this.
Speaker: He's the expert.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So, yeah, I mean, like the way to the way to proceed is to take your two explanations and you assess them with respect to a variety of
Speaker: explanatory virtues.
Speaker: So things like, you know, simplicity, for instance, which one is simpler, which one does better by way of Occam's razor, which one actually accounts for the data more because some proposed explanations don't actually account for the data very well.
Speaker: So let me give you an example.
Speaker: So we talked about this just before.
Speaker: So the great 20th century astronomer and science popularizer Carl Sagan
Speaker: So he proposed an explanation for near-death experiences.
Speaker: So he didn't believe in an afterlife.
Speaker: He didn't believe that near-death experiences were probative of an afterlife.
Speaker: He says we need to watch out for wishful thinking in these sorts of domains.
Speaker: And so he proposes kind of offhand a kind of explanation for why people have these experiences.
Speaker: And he says the near-death experience is the sort of thing you experience when you're about to die and it's supposed to parallel the birth experience.
Speaker: So when you...
Speaker: When you, I guess we are supposed to imagine, you know, newborn, they're leaving the birth canal and what do they see?
Speaker: It's from darkness to light, right?
Speaker: And they're surrounded by love and, and, uh,
Speaker: I find this hysterical.
Speaker: I think like it's just so obvious that Sagan grew up in this like time of like pop psychoanalysis.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So so people have so near death experience defenders have have have really assessed this explanation.
Speaker: They've taken it seriously and they've argued against it.
Speaker: And I think I think their criticisms are apt.
Speaker: I mean, for instance, you know, infants can't really form memories.
Speaker: Like, so how can they have this sort of memory of being born?
Speaker: It's not clear that the experience of NDE-ers really matches up to the experience of being born.
Speaker: I guess I don't really know what it's like.
Speaker: I don't remember.
Speaker: But I don't imagine it's very similar to the markers of the experience that we've already talked about.
Speaker: So this is just an example where your proposed explanation, your debunking explanation, has to actually explain the NDE.
Speaker: You can't just sort of make something up that doesn't actually explain it.
Speaker: Well, like meeting people who have died, like when you're born, you don't you don't know anyone.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So it just seems like it's not even a good explanation of the data.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So a good explanation should like account for the data.
Speaker: It should have explanatory power.
Speaker: It should fit with our background knowledge.
Speaker: It should be unifying.
Speaker: It should, you know, it should.
Speaker: Those sorts of things.
Speaker: So these nice sorts of theoretical qualities, explanatory criteria, perhaps the most famous and maybe important one is simplicity, Occam's razor.
Speaker: I'm trying to explain a lot with the fewest assumptions possible or not making any superfluous assumptions.
Speaker: Sometimes proponents of the dualist explanation of NDEs will say that they're
Speaker: explanation is simpler because it can just explain all the different types of NDEs that we've talked about, whereas the materialist has to come up with a different sort of explanation for the variety of different NDEs that are on offer.
Speaker: And as we've made clear, there's a lot of different ones.
Speaker: So that's one sort of application of explanatory virtues.
Speaker: I mean, often proponents of the materialist explanation will come back and say, well, maybe there's something to that.
Speaker: But the dualist explanation is not so simple when you delve into the details.
Speaker: I mean, if the dualist is right, then there has to be some wholly new force out there that
Speaker: characterizes the interactions between the immaterial mind and the physical world.
Speaker: Like, what's that?
Speaker: I mean, are you violating the law of conservation of energy?
Speaker: That's not very simple, right?
Speaker: That's a big cost.
Speaker: So, yeah, I mean, so really if you want to figure out what the explanation is, we have to assess the explanations with respect to these criteria.
Speaker: And here I think we'll run into a kind of impasse because I think a lot is going to depend on what your pre-existing worldview is.
Speaker: So, for instance, the naturalist materialist is going to say, well,
Speaker: My alternative debunking explanation fits best with the data, fits best with our background knowledge, because we have lots and lots of reason to believe antecedently that the materialist theory of the mind is true.
Speaker: So obviously, someone who is more inclined to take the NDEs as evidence of dualism or the immateriality of the mind, they're probably not going to buy that.
Speaker: They're probably already going to be antecedently skeptical of materialist theories of the mind already.
Speaker: So, yeah, I think this is the challenge here.
Speaker: And this fact that, like, the worldview you come into it in this discussion plays a large role.
Speaker: This has been pointed out by people who have written about NDEs in philosophy, in fact.
Speaker: So another person who's written a bit about NDEs, who's, I guess, philosophy of adjacent, I guess he's primarily a theologian and a New Testament scholar, this is Gary Habermas.
Speaker: So he makes this a perceptive point.
Speaker: So he says, quoting him,
Speaker: If this is accurate, then it seems that even strong evidential considerations are less likely to change minds.
Speaker: So Habermas is one of these people who thinks like, hey, there's so many credible accounts of NDEs that have this evidential aspect where people can describe things that they shouldn't be able to describe otherwise unless the mind was separable from the body.
Speaker: But he recognizes that this is not going to be convincing because a lot really depends on the worldview that you bring into the discussion.
Speaker: And, you know, there's another.
Speaker: So Habermas is a Christian scholar.
Speaker: There's another Christian scholar or he's not a scholar's journalist, Ross Duthott, who wrote about he wrote an article.
Speaker: I mean, I guess it's about just supernatural experiences in general, but he mentions near-death experiences quite a bit in it.
Speaker: And he so he's he's Roman Catholic.
Speaker: He said, look, if I was determining my worldview based just on the evidence from NDEs, I'd probably be something like a pantheist or a polytheist.
Speaker: So obviously for him, like there's some interesting evidence there, but it's not like that's the only thing.
Speaker: going into determining what you think is like, you know, going into determining your worldview or something.
Speaker: And, you know, people want to and there's good reason to have like a kind of like systematic, consistent worldview.
Speaker: And so in those cases, like the other aspects of your worldview that you find like more convincing or overriding to this data, you know, in some in some cases, it can be like the rational thing to do to just kind of write this off as a weird fluke that I can't explain right now.
Speaker: Yeah, this is funny.
Speaker: We've talked about this before.
Speaker: This funny belief that was prominent until like the Renaissance period.
Speaker: The belief was that garlic could negate the attractive power of a magnet.
Speaker: People believe this up until like the Renaissance.
Speaker: Even though it was just so easy to test.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Just test it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So, I mean, why do they believe this?
Speaker: Well, magnets are attractive.
Speaker: Garlic is repellent.
Speaker: The repellent negates the attractive power of the magnet.
Speaker: These are their systematic worldview.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And so, once you hear this, you're just going to discount it.
Speaker: We're not going to go up to the kitchen and test this because from our point of view, there's just a non-starter.
Speaker: And from their point of view, it seemed pretty credible.
Speaker: The pre-modern worldviews, they had this idea of sympathies and antipathies.
Speaker: Some things are attractive, some things are repellent, like begets like, all that sort of stuff.
Speaker: So it seemed pretty credible to them.
Speaker: It didn't really make sense to test it.
Speaker: It just seemed to follow from everything else that they strongly believe was true about the world.
Speaker: And by contrast, the opposite follows for us.
Speaker: So, yeah, I mean, this is the power of worldviews.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: It would be nice if we could do some controlled experiments here, maybe bypass the power of worldviews.
Speaker: We could put some secret hidden numbers or secret hidden objects that only people having out-of-body experiences could see in the hospital rooms and whatever, and then sort of interview them afterwards to see if they've noticed these hidden objects or secret hidden numbers.
Speaker: We've done this.
Speaker: Yeah, so yeah, we've done this, right?
Speaker: I haven't looked at these studies, but I've looked at John Martin Fisher summarizing them, and he says, look, none of these studies have ever shown up anything credible, none of these controlled studies.
Speaker: Now, Habermas, on the other hand, describes it in the opposite sort of way.
Speaker: He's like, oh, no, we have lots and lots of cases like this.
Speaker: So I don't know, but...
Speaker: Did you look at this more?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, I don't really think either of them are right.
Speaker: So the only study on this I could find was by the group AWARE, which is stupidly named.
Speaker: It's an acronym for Awareness of Resuscitation.
Speaker: AWARE could just be the first.
Speaker: Anyway, whatever.
Speaker: AWARE, which means Awareness of Resuscitation, apparently.
Speaker: And they did a study, a several year long study where they would hide cards with particular images or numbers face up on like high shelves around emergency rooms.
Speaker: And I think they had a total of a little over 2000 cases of resuscitating someone back to life.
Speaker: The issue is only one person in that study reported back anything verifiable at all.
Speaker: So like...
Speaker: I guess they're too busy talking to the spirit beings to be looking at the cards.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: Yeah, it's not like you have a group of like dozens of people who were telling you things about the room, but they just didn't see the card.
Speaker: One person reported an experience that had anything to do with the room.
Speaker: So I don't think it debunked or was evidence for or against a single damn thing, to be honest.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Interesting.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, I guess there are people out there trying to do this.
Speaker: I mean, so this this topic, it's a it's an interesting topic because I think there are people inclined to dismiss it out of hand.
Speaker: But then there are also like credible credential, like usually doctors or medical researchers that are really curious about this.
Speaker: I mean,
Speaker: I found, for instance, an arm of the University of Virginia.
Speaker: They have a center called the Division of Perceptual Studies.
Speaker: And like they study this sort of stuff.
Speaker: They study like paranormal phenomena.
Speaker: This is a real group of academics.
Speaker: Like they know statistics, they're credentialed and they study this kind of stuff.
Speaker: So this is, you know, kind of interesting.
Speaker: I mean, Carl Sagan, going back to him, he thought that ESP deserves some study, some scientific scrutiny.
Speaker: I'm not going to dismiss that at hand.
Speaker: It's probably bogus, but I think some of these reports deserve to be investigated.
Speaker: So I at least appreciate him for having an open mind about that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, I guess, you know, I don't know.
Speaker: It does seem like the kind of thing that would be hard to like test.
Speaker: I don't really know why.
Speaker: I guess like what you were saying, like if you're, you know, you're entering the transcendent realm, like what?
Speaker: You're just like looking around for hidden playing cards with pictures on like, I don't know.
Speaker: I can't imagine I'd be doing that, but who knows?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So Fisher, who we've been talking about, John Martin Fisher, he wrote a book on near-death experiences.
Speaker: Frank, remind me of the title.
Speaker: It's called Near-Death Experiences, Understanding Visions of the Afterlife.
Speaker: And he has, thank you, and he has a kind of like, I guess, sort of like a middle of the road way of thinking about these experiences.
Speaker: It's not middle of the road in terms of like, he thinks they're part real and part fake.
Speaker: But he doesn't, he thinks ultimately the best explanation for near-death experiences is that they're not actually experiences with a transcendent afterlife, or at least we don't have enough evidence to say that.
Speaker: But he doesn't want to, like, debunk them in the sense of saying, well, they're insignificant, just like bursts of brain chemicals, you know, before you die.
Speaker: Your brain's messed up.
Speaker: Who cares?
Speaker: He doesn't want to say he thinks that they could definitely mean something and be important, even if they're not what they seem to be.
Speaker: Yeah, so he has this really interesting view.
Speaker: He articulates this in the book and in a shorter paper that I didn't read the book, but I did read some of his papers on this.
Speaker: So the paper I read, let me get the title here.
Speaker: It was called Near-Death Experiences, The Stories They Tell.
Speaker: And so here's the kind of perspective he tries to present.
Speaker: So after offering naturalistic alternative explanations to supernaturalists or dualist explanations of NDEs, he says they can still have significance, even if they are entirely like brain based events, your brain just sort of hallucinating or something like that.
Speaker: And he tries to make the distinction between explanation and storytelling, where explanation leads to cognitive understanding, grasping truths about the world, and storytelling leads to a kind of emotional understanding.
Speaker: And he says, well, look, even if the NDE-er doesn't come out of the experience with grasping a truth about, like, a supernatural realm...
Speaker: they still might grasp, they still might have some emotional understanding of something significant, something important to the human condition.
Speaker: So let me quote a little bit from him just so you can see exactly what he says.
Speaker: Human beings do not want to die alone.
Speaker: We want to be surrounded by loved ones.
Speaker: The
Speaker: Stories told by NDEs capture this important wisdom.
Speaker: They offer the comfort provided by solidarity in the face of daunting challenges and stark uncertainties.
Speaker: NDEs tell stories of love in the face of perhaps the most terrifying challenge, death.
Speaker: These stories resonate with us, comfort us, and transform us.
Speaker: Narratives reach our emotions.
Speaker: Their power does not depend on the literal truth of the events depicted.
Speaker: There's nothing more beautiful, more awesome, more inspiring than love.
Speaker: He says that he concludes the elites to a deeper kind of understanding, one that combines the intellectual and the emotional.
Speaker: So he doesn't want to say that, you know, this shows the mind is immaterial or that people are actually meeting supernatural beings.
Speaker: He often says that this is a kind of metaphor.
Speaker: And these don't tell us where we're going, but they offer kind of comfort on the journey.
Speaker: Et cetera.
Speaker: These are metaphorical narratives.
Speaker: So interesting point of view.
Speaker: I do like how he tries to take the experiences seriously as well as he can, given his sort of worldview and what he thinks is plausibly true from a scientific point of view.
Speaker: But thoughts about this, Megan, this idea of storytelling and emotional understanding and all of that.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, I think he's perfectly right that storytelling has this important significance.
Speaker: And I think that not understanding that leads to a lot of misunderstanding and dismissal of things like ancient literature and mythology.
Speaker: The issue that I have with his work on this, at least from what you've told me about it, is that he doesn't, at least from what you've read and conveyed to me, he doesn't say a lot about what these metaphors are metaphors for or what the symbolic significance is a symbol for.
Speaker: What aspect of reality of our lives is
Speaker: Is it supposed to be meaningfully mirroring or like drawing our attention to?
Speaker: That's the kind of that to me, that's like, well, I mean, if anything, you might think because, you know, people have these experiences and they don't come away thinking like, I mean, primarily their thought isn't like,
Speaker: You know, oh gosh, I learned so much about, you know, how much I need other people and blah, blah.
Speaker: You know, their thought is like, well, great.
Speaker: Death isn't the end.
Speaker: I don't fear death anymore.
Speaker: I'm going to go like this one woman, Sharp, Clark Sharp.
Speaker: She had a near-death experience and she went to be a hospice nurse because she's like, my mission in life is to comfort people.
Speaker: Like they're not fading into oblivion.
Speaker: So if like that's the main impression people are left with, that it seems like if anything, near-death experiences are just deceitful.
Speaker: Yeah, I think you said in our discussion of this that the kind of comfort that John Martin Fisher is talking about, if he's right about, you know, if there is no actual spirit beings guiding people, it's kind of false comfort.
Speaker: And who wants a false comfort?
Speaker: I'm not sure he's OK.
Speaker: Maybe he's OK with a false comfort.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: Maybe.
Speaker: I mean, to me, that doesn't seem good.
Speaker: So some of the stuff he says is a little more doesn't depend on this sort of thing we're talking about.
Speaker: So he does say, oh, they tap into some of our deepest concerns.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So that's just our concerns.
Speaker: I mean, so we learn from near-earth experiences like what we want out of life or what kind of death we want.
Speaker: We want to be surrounded by loved ones or something like that.
Speaker: So there's nothing dodgy about that.
Speaker: Is that true, though?
Speaker: Like when people have NDEs, are they like, I really feel like I know what kind of death I want.
Speaker: I feel like I always just hear people being like, well, I don't care if I die now.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: I mean, I think this is best attempt to like be a naturalist about these NDEs, but also be nice about it.
Speaker: I get.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So you don't want to.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So he's saying, like, well, you certainly don't want to dismiss people and be like, it was meaningless.
Speaker: It was just your brain like burping before you died or something.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You know, it was significant, but but not in the sense that you were that this was like a real experience.
Speaker: But yeah, to me, I just want to be like, well, if it wasn't a real significant or a real experience, then if anything, it's just like a deceitful one.
Speaker: And that's not good.
Speaker: Yeah, I think this is an interesting question to think more about.
Speaker: Like, what if you are a naturalist about the NDEs and you have one?
Speaker: Like, can you still derive meaning or significance from it?
Speaker: I wish Ayer were here.
Speaker: He could maybe tell us something about this.
Speaker: Because he didn't seem the only thing he's changed by it.
Speaker: No, no.
Speaker: The only thing he seemed to take away from it was like, huh, maybe somehow consciousness persists after physical death.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Cool thing.
Speaker: And that right.
Speaker: It was just like like your credence on on dualism or whatever changed a little bit.
Speaker: It wasn't like he seemed to have like a real existential awareness of, I don't know, the human condition or something like that.
Speaker: Yeah, certainly not.
Speaker: Not that I know of, at least.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So I suggested earlier that Megan has had a near-death experience.
Speaker: That's not actually true.
Speaker: She did not.
Speaker: Just to clarify that.
Speaker: No, no.
Speaker: Yeah, fingers crossed.
Speaker: I haven't come close to dying yet.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: That's all we have time for for today's episode.
Speaker: We're keeping our fingers crossed that you'll join us for our next episode where we'll be discussing luck.
