I've told only a few people about my near death experience, and most of them were polite, but obviously didn't believe a word I was saying. To be honest, I wouldn't believe it either if I had not experienced it myself.
I did not "see" anything other than a bright light, but I was overcome with an incredible feeling that I was in the presence of, and communicating with somebody who was conveying a message of absolute love for, and total understanding of everything that I was. The feeling of euphoria is impossible to fully describe, because of the absoluteness of it.
I wanted to stay where I was. It was the best feeling I'd ever experienced, and I was content. Somehow, I was "shown" some bits of what I had to live for -- people I had not yet met, and amazing places and things that I had not yet seen or done. I don't really remember making a choice to return, but I woke up in a hospital with a broken back and other injuries. I later learned that I had been hit by a car while riding my bicycle, and was given CPR by a passing stranger.
It makes me uncomfortable to talk about this because it's all just so unbelievable, but there it is.
As the years have gone by, I've met the friends and family that I had in my visions, and I've also been to the places and done the things that I saw myself doing in the vision.
My whole perspective on life was changed by this event, and I have no fear of death whatsoever.
This is HN so I'm not trying to evangelize you or anyone here, but what you described is 100% in line with Spiritism [1], a French-founded doctrine that's very popular both in France and Brazil [2]. I'm a believer.
My memory is a bit hazy, but I thought what you are describing is very common with people who flatline and come back? I have vague memories that a new anesthetic drug was developed and used on soldiers undergoing surgery in the Vietnam war, and there was something about it that caused the same kind of reaction in those who were put under. Again, my memory is very hazy on the subject. I should go do some research and update this comment (and I just might).
EDIT
I did a little searching. I think it might have been an old report about Ketamine before it became more wide known. Apparently it was used during the Vietnam War.
I was going to mention ketamine. Famous for this type of effect. I don't want to belittle the meaningful experience, but the mind is a really powerful organ and it's a safer bet to treat these experiences as arising from mind rather than beyond it. Shrug.
Lots to say there. The last few centuries have shown that many things which previously seemed inexplicable have been convincingly explained without resort to the supernatural. So a material basis of conscious experience seems a good bet.
Related, and hinted at by my original comment: the brain is capable of generating truly profound experiences. There is a tendency to ascribe them to something 'beyond ourselves' but again, advances in medicine and neuroscience have shown that these are explicable, subject to manipulation by chemical and electrical signals, which again suggests a material basis for conscious experience.
It's true that many things have yielded to science. And yet, what we discuss (the "hard problem of consciousness") hasn't. In my opinion, the burden is on you to prove that progress in other questions implies inevitable progress on an unrelated question that hasn't budged at all.
I said this in my other comment but, when you say the brain generates truly profound experiences, you beg the question (in the philosophical sense of the phrase). It's all in the word "experience." For in order for an experience to happen, some entity has to be experiencing. For there to be an illusion, there has to be an entity being deceived. And then how do you explain that entity? It can't be illusory experiences all the way down..
Any honest person has to see the connection between experience and the material brain. But I don't think it's honest to say it's obvious that experience is entirely material. The connection is deeply mysterious and may never be understood. I personally would rather accept that than claim that I don't really exist just so that everything can be explained.
The evidence is abundant and continues to chip away at the "hard problem". For example, we can through anesthesia turn on and off conscious experience. Through various drugs we can manipulate the character of conscious awareness, inducing ecstasy, visions, abiding serenity, terror, pain, grief... all states that were previously described as ineffable.
To say we haven't made progress on understanding consciousness is to move the post; we continue narrowing the 'hard problem' and eventually it seems like there will be nothing left other than a misunderstanding, something like the resolution of Xeno's paradox.
I don't mean to be insulting but, you don't seem to understand what the hard problem is. It is not "is the brain intimately linked with conscious experience?" I would agree we've made progress on that question. It is the harder question of "why is there conscious experience at all? Why does it feel the way it does?" I would argue no progress has been made on this whatsoever, and possibly can't be done.
You can try to claim that this question is meaningless, but that doesn't seem principled to me, not to mention that it completely ignores the fact that gestures broadly all this is happening.
In light of the fact that the entire universe is perceptible only through conscious awareness, the 'hard' question is equivalent to the question "why is there anything instead of nothing?" When asked this way, it's clearly not answerable. Everything short of that seems to have a material answer.
Edit: happy to chat more about this, as it's deeply interesting to me and I do want to understand your perspective. It may need a longer form than this thread allows. I've added a link to get in contact with me on my about page.
I'd be happy to talk more as I am passionate about this. I think the idea that there is no soul is actually extremely dehumanizing, and involves someone essentially saying "I don't really exist" (even if they redefine "I exist" to mean something more Materialist, it is, in my view, still saying that). I'll ping you on bluesky.
>>it's a safer bet to treat these experiences as arising from mind rather than beyond it
Your brain has to be alive and exist normally for it to have these experiences. So its quite obvious, nothing is coming from outside of it.
I do feel like its some kind of brain rebooting itself or something like that.
Its sad babies can't tell us if they experience the same during childbirth, but I have a guess that they experience something similar as well.
Its just that the brain is starting up and checking if there is a OxDEADBEEF or a fresh boot. And giving you the primal, brain not initialising any other interface(like eyes, ears, limbs etc). You experience what life would be if only brain existed on its own without everything else apart from it.
Amazing recommendation! I was hooked by that most powerful New York Times Bestseller endorsement but in 1600s. "Many say: I wanted to learn, but only found madness. But those who seek wisdom will not find it elsewhere."
> To be honest, I wouldn't believe it either if I had not experienced it myself.
If you anticipated that others would find this hard to believe, why not write down those visions in detail at the time? That would have provided evidence others could have used to later evaluate whether your visions were accurate.
As a skeptic, and without knowing more details, I am leaning towards self-fulfilling prophecy (you did the things in the visions because you had the visions) or confirmation bias (similar to how horoscopes feel accurate because they're vague enough to map many situations).
I was 15 years old at the time, and not much of a writer.
Most of my visions did not stay in my consciousness. Over the years, when I would meet somebody new or be in a place that I had seen, it would trigger the memory of the vision. You can attribute this to Déjà vu if you like, but in this case I knew exactly where/when I had seen the vision beforehand, and it sometimes triggered more memories of not-yet-happened events.
I'm old now, and I haven't had any experiences related to my visions for over a decade. I'm pretty sure that all of my visions have now been lived.
It matches what I briefly experienced when I felt ill staying alone in a hotel. (E. g. I understood that the events of the few recent days were sort of preparing me for that; I could ask questions.)
BTW there's a book "The night of fire" by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt that describes a similar experience he got staying alone in a desert. And, of course, countless other descriptions, e.g. "The varieties of religious experience" by W. James. You cannot convince anyone, of course; but there's also no way to fake it.
I don't know, this sounds like your subjective experience, I have no reason to disbelieve it. If you had said that your experience showed you the future, and X Y and Z were going to happen, then I might not believe that, but why wouldn't I believe you experienced what you say you did? Why would you lie?
Probably the contrarian take, but an informed one.
Near death experiences are probably the best way we have to assess the nature of reality.
Now, it's almost impossible to reach people who aren't ready with any arguments, but I'll outline some possible steps for anyone who's on the verge.
- Go to youtube, type in NDE and listen to a few
- Try to come up with a "rational" explanation (hallucinations, the brain dumping DMT, preconceived notions from Hollywood, the general culture and so on)
- Assess whether these make any sense under the conditions that NDEs occur, and scratch the ones that don't. Then watch a few more and you'll have to reject more still.
In particular, what was convincing to me, is how very very similar the cases are and that they happen to tribes living at a stone age technological level with no contact to Hollywood, and that there is a described case from Plato from over 2000 years ago that is identical to modern cases.
In the end, my conclusion is that objective reality has to be partially rejected, and all experience is the combination of some "nature of reality" as interpreted by each individual. This leads to clear contradictions if one assumes that there is one objective reality. Case in point, in NDEs there are a couple of common stages, and experiencers go through some or all of these, most often only some. One is traveling from the location of death to a heavenly realm. For westerners this often is flying through a star trek like hyperspace tunnel, while for stone age people they might be in a canoe that travels by itself to a distant island. So the nature of it is something like being pulled silently without effort towards a point in a manner that isn't part of the experiencer's notion of what's possible, and it is then realized and interpreted by each individual in the closest way that they can relate to.
If multiple people independently report the same experience (across time and space), isn't this actually evidence of objective reality rather than a refutation of it? It points to some underlying universal structure of our experience as constructed by our brains, which suggests that our brains are part of a mechanistic, external, and therefore objective reality instead of a subjective one (where our own ideas constitute reality).
I never remotely believed this because I don't even believe in a "me" really.
One hard hit in the head can literally change your personality entirely, then you have alzheimers and all the other degenerative brain diseases that will erase "you". Even if you avoid all that "you" will be wildly different every 15-20 years.
Christianity gets through this by saying you will return to your prime. That just seems kind of childish to me though, like "yeah when you die you and all your friends and family are gonna be 25 and you live in paradise together forever".
How do you resolve the idea of an eternal consciousness with the very real and common occurence of people losing their consciousness while they are still alive?
The brain is like a sail thats catching the wind of the soul. The wind pushes and shapes the sail, and the sail limits the shape of the wind inside it. If the sail is in bad condition, it changes how the wind catches it, or prevents it from catching altogether.
So the brain is animated by the soul, and also limits and shapes its experience. When we're affected by anesthetic, or we're badly injured, or have a stroke, our conscious experience is impacted, while we're here on this plane. Eventually we leave this form and experience reality more truly. This could be one reason why NDEs happen - the brain is so badly damaged that it fails to even contain the soul and we approach a more death-like state.
It is a nice thought, but still has a pre-requisite that there are "souls" floating around that get ensnared by human bodies. If that is true then life is a kind of prison we endure before being liberated by death.
Even if we assume those giant leaps of faith are true, it still means "I" go away when I die. My soul will only remember "me" as a brief torture where I was forced into a human shell and had to endure being "me" before being released once more to be a higher being. All my struggles, battles, self-improvement, etc. will be meaningless and my kids will be a cruel trick I played that imprisoned other souls.
I won't deny it takes giant leaps of faith. I think the questions are inherently unanswerable so any theory that's not in conflict with things we can know scientifically, and which doesn't lead to harming others, is as good as it can get. We can't really do better than thoughtful faith in this domain (and indeed I would (controversially) argue that the notion of inevitable scientific progress in this area is also a sort of faith, since there hasn't been any progress on the "hard problem" of consciousness..).
To your points, I would say that
> life is a kind of prison we endure before being liberated by death
Not exactly. More like a journey that we go through for mysterious reasons. Maybe so our soul can grow by learning lessons and having challenges that can only be when the stakes are real.
> "I" go away when I die
Not necessarily. Certain aspects of you, which are more contingent on brain traits, e.g. intelligence, some temperament. But the deepest self wouldn't disappear.
> All my struggles, battles, self-improvement, etc. will be meaningless
I see what you mean, but I wouldn't call it meaningless just because it wasn't "completely real." Also, I do believe that lessons learned here are learned for good. The soul is here to grow.
> my kids will be a cruel trick I played that imprisoned other souls.
I don't really see how you got here. In this theory, your kids are also here for their own purpose. Relationships and love are still meaningful and real. Life is cruel and involves a great deal of suffering, but that doesn't mean that existence is inherently bad.
I have a fondness for the idea that the brain is like a radio reciever for a greater flow of the universe. Thus brain damage is like a broken antenna. The radio can die but the signal continues.
That said, we do then to attribute a lot of thinking to the technology of the time. Buddhists had their wheel of time, folks today think we live in a computer simulation. Things like that, so best not to take the idea too seriously.
Remember, life is too important to take seriously.
I think Christian resurrection at prime usually means having the body of a 25-year old, not the mind. Maybe they'd say the physical brain can corrupt the eternal consciousness's expression while in this life, but it does still raise questions like how will you even recognize the eternal "you" when you've been trapped in a corruptible brain for all that you can remember, and what is the eternal part's worth if it can be corrupted by the brain. (Perhaps Mormonism addresses some of this, saying you lived as "you" unembodied before birth, but are not able to remember for now.)
The traditional concept of an 'embodied' resurrection (as opposed to ghosts playing harps) makes me lean towards: yes (eg the gut is part of the body). Who knows though, it's a fun question!
yeah it is :) Like, do we eat in heaven? If not, then all our little passengers must also be immortal in their resurrected form. But part of the biome is the dead bodies of those critters, and those dead bodies also affect our mood (chemistry doing its thing). So how does this work? Does heaven automatically maintain the correct chemistry in our guts to maintain our emotional and hormonal stability with needing the actual biome? Or does it maintain the biome at the correct chemistry without needing the actual ecosystem?
And other parts - do the bugs that live on our hair follicles come with us? Does hair even grow in heaven?
John's vision of heaven in the book of Revelation includes both the wedding feast of the Lamb and the trees of life that will bear 12 different fruits in season. Jesus also ate fish a few times after his resurrection to demonstrate the physicality of his resurrected body. So there is the concept of eating in the resurrected paradise of the new heavens and the new earth.
Surely Islam does too? Being stuck with 72 young women for eternity as an old man with incontinence, bowel cancer, a bad back and a broken dick sounds a lot more like hell than heaven.
Basically if the base reality that we experience through a holographic world/emergent reality has no concept of time, consequence, etc, you have to create a simulation/game with rules that can allow free will to happen, that has a timeline, has consequences. Once setup, those rules apply even if they ruin the simulation experience for some, they are a necessary part of the holographic world/emergent reality serving it's purpose. Sadly, to create an emergent reality that allows free will you have to create a reality that allows suffering and children dying of cancer and Alzheimer's and consequences if you hit someone in the head. But the blow to the head/Alzheimers is nothing different than an alcohol haze one night that goes away in the morning. The you in the underlying lower (higher?) real dimensions doesn't change just because you got drunk/alzheimers/hit on the head in the emergent dimensions/reality/holographic world.
Read CS Lewis 'The Problem of Pain' then think about emergent dimensions/holographic worlds being the only way to have our kind of consciousness/self determination/free will/experiential identity if one exists in a underlying dimensional state with no linear time, no physical limitations, etc, and so forth. The emergent reality/holographic world is the 'chess board with clear rules' needed for us to have/experience/pretend to free will from the underlying reality without time or rules. In CS Lewis 'The Problem of Pain', pain sucks, but is needed for this world to do whatever it is supposed to do. Alzheimers, consequences of blows to the head, etc aren't themselves needed but they themselves are emergent from the rules that are needed for 'here' to exist and serve it's purpose. But they are also just part of (or structure for) the holographic/emergent reality, not the true base lower (higher?) reality.
Not manic. Just not great at communicating these thoughts. Don't lock me up please.
Nope. It would be very convenient for the modern American/Western nihilistic religion called atheism, but nope. Science doesn't support it.
In our limited experiential world things appear to decay. If our spacetime experience is emergent from something else (in which time doesn't exist), or is holographic, we have no idea what's really going on at the fundamental (lower/higher?) level. How can you have decay in the base reality that doesn't have time? Is decay not an artifact of time? If time is emergent not fundamental, so is decay.
Check out some Susskind and CS Lewis The Problem of Pain. It makes for a fun thought game.
Start with 'what reality/rules would we need in order to exercise truly free will' (the concepts from The Problem of Pain). We need time (action/consequence). We need to be able to impact ourselves/others. I need to be able to hurt you/myself. Kill you/myself. Need the mechanisms that are then used/abused by things like Alzheimer's. But if we bring in Susskind, that is all just happening in the emergent space/time (my emergent free will reality) not in the base reality (my lower/higher? reality that doesn't have things like time). There is no reason that what impacts us in the 'free will reality' that enables us to have free will/experience time also impacts whatever we might be in the base reality (my lower/higher? reality). In that reality without time we are the child just born and the body turned to dust. We are forever in the moments when our loved ones held us. That is heaven. Not some new experiential timeline to reflect. We ARE ALL THE MOMENTS, not a reflection on the moments after the fact.
Hell IS repeating every bad thing, forever. Heaven is experiencing love from your loved ones, forever. But not in some cloud world we exist in after death thinking back. But in the same one that everything happened, only at the non-emergent level not the emergent spacetime level. Me in the non-emergent reality is already in heaven/hell, is already experiencing it all, because it exists in a space without emergent linear time. I will be in heaven, because I will have hugs from my mom and hugs for my children, forever. That is where lower (higher?) level me will dwell.
To be fair, this is the point I worked back from after my mom died. How do I deal with loosing her (as an ex-Catholic). In what reality are her hugs for me forever? This is what I gamed out. We are all the moments, forever, in the non-emergent reality without linear time.
How else can the non-emergent true reality contain our emergent linear space time reality?
As for myself, I try to do a thought experiment. Imagine that I could travel back in time and meet myself at 18-20 years old. I could most likely convince myself that I was me from the future. But I don't think I could convince myself of the thing I've learned that are outside of what is imaginable for my younger self. So we could never be angry with other people for not understanding. Even so, with everything that you get right compared to the people downvoting you, I think you have a too simplistic view of reality, and frankly, not optimistic enough.
Hrm. I've thought about this a lot and came to the conclusion that we, or rather our brains are just an antenna, 'receiving stuff' from another plane of existence.
If you change/destroy parts of the antenna or the 'bioelectronic circuits' the channel fades out, and you get more and more noise, until there is no signal anymore.
No more resonance with the frequency of your station.
That equals death on this plane.
What lead me to this apart from NDE/OOBE are the cases of so called Terminal Lucidity, when old or very sick people die, but regain conciousness in their last moments. In a timeframe from sometimes two to three days before exitus, but mostly just a few dozen seconds to minutes before exitus.
The thing is that some of these brains are so rotten and degenerated, that it is impossible according to our current understanding, that these people are even able to do anything coordinated, not to mention speak, and recognizing their loved ones/family, telling them things.
And yet this happens again and again, not that often, but it does. While their brains are absolute mush.
In a similar vein, there are stories of lost animals like cats and dogs finding their way back to the humans they once lived with. Over long distances like several hundred miles, often after years.
That can't happen by random chance. So either they can read signs, and understand our words better than we think, or there are other mechanisms at play.
What that is telling about this otherplaneness is uncertain, just that it exists.
Probably impossible to gain any certain insights about that, because of wrong cabling, interface, modulation, format, whatever.
At best we can just hope to skim the interface, membrane and get a few hazy views from the other side near that membrane, but not that far through it.
Maybe there are even other interfaces, membranes, from up there, going on and on, and/or recursing into others.
There's this mushroom Lanmaoa asiatica that causes people to hallucinate hundreds of tiny people running around interacting with the environment. Consistently, across cultures and regions. You eat this mushroom and you're pretty likely to have a very similar hallucination to everybody else who eats this mushroom. Now is there some objective reality of hidden little elves everywhere that only this mushroom unlocks? Or is it a specific physical trigger that when people go through it they have the same sort of experience.
You can have the same question about the near death experiences. Are they experiences of an objective reality somewhere or is it a common physical situation triggering similar experiences across people and cultures.
> In particular, what was convincing to me, is how very very similar the cases are and that they happen to tribes living at a stone age technological level with no contact to Hollywood, and that there is a described case from Plato from over 2000 years ago that is identical to modern cases.
This sounds intriguing.
> Case in point, in NDEs there are a couple of common stages, and experiencers go through some or all of these, most often only some. One is traveling from the location of death to a heavenly realm. For westerners this often is flying through a star trek like hyperspace tunnel, while for stone age people they might be in a canoe that travels by itself to a distant island.
Ah, so the similarity is all enitrely in your interpretation of these clearly dissimilar visions.
If I listen to 100 NDEs and in 50 they travel through a tunnel like this or somehow go through space, and in 2 from stone age cultures they travel in a manner apt to their everyday experience and it has those things in common I think it's a fine hypothesis that what they have in common is the nature of what's happening. And in 48 they didn't experience this stage.
Have you read any pop neuroscience book? There are common experiences that can be generated by one or another kind of brain-wrong. You sort of acknowledged this already when you mentioned DMT. If you poke somebody in specific parts of the brain you can get illusions of changing size, shadowy figures, mirth, and other delightful errors. We also interpret things very eagerly, like the "night hag" phenomenon where being unable to sense one's own breathing turns into an illusion of something sitting on your chest. That's another worldwide cross-cultural concept, by the way, but there is no night hag, there's just human physiology.
So, bright lights and tunnels. Shared human visual neurological glitches. Heard of "tunnel vision"? That's a real medical condition, which can be caused by blood loss, adrenaline, or low oxygen.
I would be seriously uncomfortable to discover myself making authoritative reference to anything out of a "pop neuroscience" book, unless I had myself validated the claim - at least as far as making sure there is a paper that says what is claimed of it, by whatever failed academic turned mountebank I am reading. (If those guys were comfortable being held to what they say, why did they stop writing for peer reviewers? I'm hardly an academic chauvinist, God knows, but if you want to be safe here in the 2030s, you really need to learn to spot a grifter...)
The tunnel vision you experience during hypovolemia is nothing like the "tunnel of light" reported in NDEs. It's just that you lose your visual field gradually, from periphery to fovea, as your visual cortex loses perfusion. In theory, a well-perfused brain dying for some other reason, such as a sudden complete loss of oxygen supply secondary to circulatory collapse secondary to fine VF or asystole, would retain the ability to "fill in" with something, the way our brains in normal operation cover the many gaps and lacks in our visual perception. (This is part of why I asked the other fellow not to bother me again about this at least until he knows what "ATP" means and why that is relevant here.)
It is strikingly absurd to imagine any of this does or can support a radically materialist conception of the universe. As I said before, materialism is exactly as religious as simulationism - exactly so, inasmuch as I expect to see a "solution" for the "mind-body problem" [1] around the same time as we solve the halting problem or constructively prove P=NP.
OK, you could also read a serious neuroscience textbook, but that seemed a less reasonable thing to expect of anyone. The basic point remains true though.
Tunnel vision is a tunnel, in your vision, associated with death. Since I'm talking to people who will latch on to anything at all similar to a tunnel in reports of experiences, and say "See! Commonalities!", this is sufficient to explain why a lot of the nearly-dead throughout world history have involved something tunnel-like somewhere in their reports.
I don't know who is reporting a "tunnel of light" specifically. I would expect that belongs to a post-1970s culture of near death experiences that's part of the rest of the culture of Forteana and the Mysteries of the Unexplained.
When talking about what evidence supports, really we're talking about the opposite: which theories evidence falsifies, and which surviving, falsifiable theory is the most parsimonious. Falsifiability matters, and parsimony matters. Otherwise, you can imagine what you like, but it carries no weight as an explanation.
Why is that unreasonable to expect? How can someone participate in a discussion of neuroscience without the requisite knowledge?
But, luckily for me, I'm not among those here who have arrogated unto themselves the requirement, with its implicit assumption of the necessary capacity, to explain all or indeed any of this. I'm just here to counsel those who do persist in such insistence, much in the manner of that fellow whose job it used to be to murmur memento mori.
A materialist would argue that nothing you describe rules out malfunction in a brain failing rapidly due to oxygen starvation, and that the commonality of experiences is explicable in terms of common failure modes in effectively identical brain architecture. (Just about everyone's visual cortex works about the same, etc.)
I think it's cute how hardcore materialists believe it is even in theory possible to distinguish their position from ideological simulationism. Maybe in a thousand years. Not now. But phenomenology is the name of the philosophical discipline that you are now struggling to recapitulate.
You think it's cute, do you? But there are endless unfalsifiable and silly alternative explanations for everything. They're distinguished only by being silly. The observation that everything could be a simulation deserves a "so what". Maybe you're the cutie pie.
It means something to you that I should be, eh? I don't really take a position in the matter, but one can't spend all day reading - though feel free to continue flattering my looks here while I do so, of course! Being called cute is a rare pleasure indeed for me, these decades.
So we agree but one point: There are tens of thousands of NDEs happening under monitored conditions (operating tables) when we know for a fact that the brain is out of oxygen and energy according to any know physical (not to mention evolutionary) mechanism, and that has to be explained.
If the brain is ever completely inactive (as seen in EEGs) for any length of time, there is no chance of recovery from that state. The body can be kept alive, but the brain is gone and will never have any other activity again.
So, I'm not sure what you mean by "out of oxygen and energy according to any phsysical mechanism" - for any patient who has ever recovered to tell a tale of an NDE, we know for a fact that their brain was constantly producing measurable electrical signals for the entire time.
That’s been my exact experience in each of my 5 occasions.
I also once semi-fainted while standing up. Felt unusually calm and care free as my head bashed against a nearby object. Fortunately it wasn’t serious.
What are the unaccountably unlikely commonalities that I should be noticing? Between this and the article, I see only: some kind of colored light, some kind of officiating beings, and a river (A.J.Ayer says he presumably had the Styx in mind, though amusingly in the actual ancient Greek account it's a different river and there's no need to cross it).
So it has the same stages as modern NDEs:
- Out of body experience
- Journey through realms
- Bright/universal light
- Life review
- Encounters with spiritual beings
- Reincarnation / life selection
- A message of peace, well-being, and survival of consciousness
I've never heard of life reviews for example outside of NDEs, most of these things are not in the collective unconscious.
These things are not really present, unless you do a lot of generalizing, squinting your eyes, and wishing. Besides which the ancient Egyptians influenced many of our shared tropes. There's that whole bit with weighing the heart while a monster (the Eater of the Dead) sits and watches. The Sumerians have a lot to answer for, too. You may now point to Amazonian tribes, but why shouldn't our tropes go all the way back to a shared past in Africa? Not to mention the convergent evolution of obvious ideas. South America (Maya? I forget) had flood myths of its own, and a world tree.
Yeah, look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_flood_myths . This does not mean that at some point there was a global flood brought about by a deity in retribution. It just means people throughout time knew the same stories or invented the same stories, and often thought about deities and floods. Similarly with your afterlife tropes. Memes are the freaky thing here.
Where is the pressing need to help repair space itself that Ayer reports as such a big part of his own experience? And where in Ayer's experience is this life review, reincarnation, or message of peace?
You're the one who claimed that we should believe NDEs represent more than hallucinations because they all contain the same elements. I was pointing out that I can see major differences between two of these NDEs we are just discussing, instead of the consistency you were claiming.
Some of those features show up there too. Of course, this comes from a Christian background, and draws on that. But it does have a river, and there's no river in hell in the bible.
Of course not, it’s proselytizing material, the sort of stories that might be illustrated in Chick Tracts, down to the admonition to repent and pray at the end - a ‘Ticket to Heaven’
> And I look down at my arm and I realize that I can no longer define the boundaries of my body. I can't define where I begin and where I end, because the atoms and the molecules of my arm blended with the atoms and molecules of the wall.
Why do those experiences indicate the presence or non-presence of an afterlife?
This claim from Ayer -- how do we make the leap from these experiences existing to being evidence of a life after consciousness?
> On the face of it, these experiences, on the assumption that the last one was veridical, are rather strong evidence that death does not put an end to consciousness
for some it's impossible to witness death. We get forced to sometimes see someone else's lifeless cask, but our own becomes impossible, as our very own worldline/probability trees branch before witnessing what others see as their objective reality; someone else's death. and this won't make any sense to anyone that doesn't already see this occurring, so it's just like an ouroborus of a string of jokes, each punchline becomes the begining of the next joke.
I have two data points thet I ponder occasionally:
1. I have met three identical twins so far. Each of them has reported having some kind of communication with the other twin that could not be explained by conventional means. I have no reason to think any of them lied.
2. My sister used to be very into astrology. She could predict someone's star sign within a few minutes of meeting them to much better than 1 in 12 accuracy.
I do not present these as proof of anything. I do not expect anyone else to believe them or give them any credence. This is just anecdata. I haven't worked out any rational explanation for them.
But I'm inclined to believe two things from them:
1. Brains are weird. Human psychology is complex and fascinating and does things that we do not understand.
2. That there are well-conceived, well-constructed scientific experiments that show there is no scientific basis for telekinesis or astrology, that these are not "real" things, does not necessarily contradict the human experience of them as "real" things. We do not inhabit a well-constructed scientific experiment so our lived experience of life may be different from the actual truth.
Why do you exclude this hypothesis? It's well known that some drugs such as DMT do cause very similar hallucinations among people, even across cultures (as is the case with NDE).
Because they aren't very similar in a lot of respects. If someone told you about their DMT/NDE experience you could determine which one it was with far greater than 90% accuracy. For example, in NDEs people express that they are outside of linear time, things happen in parallel (I can't imagine it but one person said they arrived at the bottom of a stair, and the moment he decided to climb it he was at the top, but could remember every single step on the way - that's the best explanation I have got of it) and in NDEs people meet relatives that tell them what is happening in a very pedagogic and honest way. In DMT trips there are foreign machine elves or other entities that accept you but don't really have that much connection to you. In NDEs you meet the light a lot and get flooded with love in a way you couldn't imagine before. So even though DMT have similarities to NDEs when compared to our normal reality, they are also not that similar. If anything DMT trips are more similar to UFO abductions than NDEs. It's just weirder than I can expect anyone to accept.
Sure, I didn't mean that the brain was releasing literal DMT.
You said what convinced you was how similar NDEs are, but we have evidence that similar experiences can arise from known brain chemistry changes (e.g., DMT-induced hallucinations) without requiring supernatural explanations. Death could simply be another case where a shift in brain chemistry produces consistent hallucinations across humans.
Yeah I didn't want to burst anyone's spiritual bubble earlier, but I had a very similar experience one time when I smoked salvia divinorum: there was an eerie and overwhelming purple light, sort of like a "fluorescent" UV bulb, and the Ministers of The Universe pulled my life history in front of me, something something ALL OF SPACE AND TIME WAS-
I wasn't speaking to God. I was high on salvia. And I'm quite certain A.J. Ayer was high on oxygen deprivation.
I disagree that the materialistic/scientistic view can be characterized as a "bubble". Unlike the spiritual camp, almost no one in that camp wishes it were true or fantasizes about it. I'm personally in the materialistic camp but wish the "spiritual" view was true.
No, us scientific folks shouldn't go around needlessly poking people's spiritual bubbles. It's rude and disrespectful, and it almost never actually matters. Who cares if someone thinks they spoke to Jesus when they had a heart attack? Leave them alone.
Incredibly easy to explain this without trying hard. The subject has some sense of movement forwards, and the brain rationalises it, like we do in dreams, imagining a tunnel or a canoe or whatever familiar thing is associated with that feeling of drifting or flying. So we can conclude that maybe near death experiences cause a feeling of falling or drifting, and is a bit like dreaming - not that objective reality should be rejected.
We're talking past each other. The problem isn't coming up with a hypothesis of why experiences differ according to experiences. Start by explaining how there can be any experience at all after an hour without oxygen to the brain. But after that we come to a stage where experiences differ so much that they aren't reconcilable in one objective reality and that's what I tried to address.
> Start by explaining how there can be any experience at all after an hour without oxygen to the brain.
Some cells are still technically alive after 1 hour mark in the sense that there is no necrosis and cell membrane is still operating. This depends on cell type and nourishment - for example cells that have high amount of CoQ10 can live longer etc.
In any case, brain is definitely NOT 100% dead in a sense that ALL of its cells are necrotic which might explain why it is in a dream like state.
Also, I doubt 1 hour mark is regular thing in NDE.
How would we determine that the experience happened during that time and not as a memory created when oxygen reached the brain after, or so on? If you assume that narrative memory is a little bit hallucinated (which I think is pretty observable, try dissociating a little and you can experience it) then many options are on the table.
> Start by explaining how there can be any experience at all after an hour without oxygen to the brain.
Besides the clear possibility that the memory forms later, the brains of people who report NDEs have never stopped - there is no report of anyone ever recovering from brain death (as in, from a basically flat EEG).
Taking it to another level, there are several cases where people who weren't dying experienced the NDE (ex: Nurses, loved ones at someones bedside, etc). They actually witness what the dying person might have been experiencing when dying.
Note: Atheism, agnosticism are all religions ( or religious thinking disguised as reasoning ); no less fanatic than the ones their adherents so fervently ridicule.
No, you’re wrong - Atheism is the opposite of religion - it’s disbelief, not belief.
This whole “well actually atheism is just another kind of religion” thing is why I begrudgingly have started to prefer describing myself as ‘irreligious,’ just so that there is absolutely no opportunity for equivocation.
As Mikhail_Edoshin pointed out precisely in the comment below. Religious thinking has certain common characteristics. For example, you go to length to defend Atheism is a sort of X negating a Y etc, that's emotional investment indicating religious adherence and sincere belief in being right.
I, from time to time, suffer from this too. It's very indication that I'm likely being misguided by myself or ideas.
Here's something I don't understand about the argument that all conscious experience is some kind of illusion.
An illusion necessarily implies an entity experiencing the illusion. So what's that entity? It can't be illusions all the way down.
I think some people would rather claim that they themselves don't exist rather than admit that there might be something spiritual or unexplainable about existence. And I find that very strange.
The most striking thing to me is that Ayer hopes there isn't life after death.
> My recent experiences have 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. (italics mine)
I do get the sense that many atheists not only reject God & the afterlife but actually don't want there to be a God or an afterlife. (I think Thomas Nagel wrote something along those lines.) I sort of get it but regardless I think it's very interesting.
I'm just 40, and while I won't go into it, I've lived a very long life so far. An incredible amount of joy, but also grief and pain. Memory for me, when I'm drinking my coffee in the morning, is warm and cozy in a numbing sort of way, but I have to be careful where I walk in it.
I certainly don't wish for death, I still find so much beauty and joy in life, and I still find and experience love. But I don't wish for an afterlife, or prolonged life. If I'm fortunate to live until my natural death, I will welcome it.
Humanity will go on, there are billions of threads of consciousness right now, and I feel so much gratitude that I was and am one of those. I have a lot of comfort in being wrapped and surrounded by those threads, and that they will continue around me when mine frays and ends.
My cannon view is that we're just the universe experiencing itself, and that while my consciousness will end, that universe will go on, my atoms part of it.
One thing I sometimes hope is true, in my materialistic atheistic way, is to do with the problem of sci-fi teleportation. See, if you go through a transporter on Star Trek, you're taken apart and reassembled. This makes people worry, ludicrously, that the reassembled version "isn't really me". You could after all refrain from taking the original apart, and simply duplicate people. Both copies of some guy called Bernard would claim "I am Bernard", and both would be right.
So this makes me think that from moment to moment, as we pass through time at one second per second, it's as if we're being sent through a transporter. That is to say, if in the far future after my death I am reassembled, or even if just a close imitation of me is assembled from whatever data they can get hold of, then that would be no different from me, or Bernard, being brought back to life. "I am Bernard", he would say, and he'd still be right. Of course other Bernard wouldn't get to share his experiences, but so what. My former self can't share my present experiences.
So, why hope for this to happen at all? It has to be that what we're emotionally invested in is not really "continuity of experience", which is a myth, but continuity of ideas. It's nice if those ideas can sit together in the coherent context of a mind. The Woody Allen quote is "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying." But perhaps in fact through your work is good enough, really? Like a close second.
What I mean to say is, I don't so much hope for an afterlife, as to discover that it philosophically doesn't matter anyway. Though I prefer people not dead.
> I do get the sense that many atheists not only reject God & the afterlife but actually don't want there to be a God or an afterlife.
I feel that eternity in Heaven would actually be Hell, because nothing would matter. No danger, no failure, no challenge, no goals, no purpose. What gives life meaning are mortality, limitations, beginnings and endings, progress.
I recently watched the film "Eternity" on Apple TV, starring Elizabeth Olsen, in which everyone after they die has to choose their own form of afterlife and then stick with it forever. All I could think about was how bored I would eventually get. (The film itself was pretty good, not boring. That's because it had an ending!)
Fiction is ideal for playing out these scenarios. Think also of the film "Highlander", in which the ultimate "prize" of the immortals turns out to be mortality. MacLeod's life had become repetitive, and he couldn't fully invest in it, because he kept losing everyone he loved. They grew old and died, while he lived on and had to keep changing identities. For a while it's a grand adventure... until it isn't anymore.
I can certainly understand wanting to live longer, but eternity is unimaginably long, way too long. I don't think that's something to be desired.
The reference to eternity in afterlife doesn't mean "very long time"; it means "no time", a world that has no time. You can briefly feel the difference by being present in the current moment.
Eternity in its proper sense belongs to God alone; human beings sharing in "eternal life" will experience time differently. Even the angels experience "aeviternity" which is unique to their kind.
Could be; I'm not too literate on this, I'm only retelling what I understood directly and this could be very limited. I just wanted to point out that "eternal life" is not going to be the same life we have now, only endless. It is very different and, speaking of boredom, definitely not boring. Boredom is an invention of mind.
Problems, yes. "Biology is going to kill me soon" shouldn't have to be one of those problems, and in fact I think it makes us all slightly crazy in different ways, from not caring about the future to unscrupulously believing in afterlives.
No, I was disputing "mortality" while agreeing with "challenges", which I've written as problems in the nice sense of "please let me finish my problem". That's some historical figure's alleged last words, I think.
(Edit: probably an embellishment of Archimedes, supposedly saying to the Roman soldier who killed him, "do not disturb my circles!" - not exactly a plaintive attitude about mortality, more just being a grumpy geometrist.)
"All I could think about was how bored I would eventually get" I used to wonder this. I read the religious answer to this relies on the concept of infinitude: what if an infinite god can invent an infinite number of exciting new... things to do?
If you have respect for the unique chance of conscious experience of others you get your moral system rather trivially from the first principles. Certainly not worse than an arbitrary religious stick and carrot system.
Being familiar with Ayer from his Epistemology works, this writeup was unexpected. How could an empiricist write "My recent experiences have slightly weakened my conviction that my genuine death, which is due fairly soon, will be the end of me". It also directly contradicted his stance about metaphycal claims.
An empiricist could write that with no contradiction if he experienced it, which Ayer did.
I think his conclusion is very reasonable. It's highly likely that NDEs are minds sputtering to a stop. But if you experience one (while your heart has stopped for 4 minutes no less), it seems rational to "slightly" update your priors towards the possibility of some kind of afterlife. At the very least, it may indicate some kind of conscious experience after you're "dead" but before your brain significantly degrades.
That aside, I will say that his experience sounds a lot like a DMT trip. Particularly the sense that "space, like a badly fitting jigsaw puzzle, was slightly out of joint" and the feeling of being in the presence of "the government of the universe".
His conclusion is based on anecdotal evidence from his French friend's mother: "This experience could well have been delusive. A slight indication that it might have been veridical [objectively real] has been supplied by my French friend, or rather by her mother, who also underwent a heart arrest many years ago. When her daughter asked her what it had been like, she replied that all that she remembered was that she must stay close to the red light."
A "slight indication", which if I read correctly leads to "slightly weakened my conviction that my genuine death...". Isn't this kind of reasoning common for metaphysics but is met with skepticism by empiricists?
His conclusion is based on his own experience first and foremost. But your use of "anecdote" in a derogatory way is misplaced. There's no "rule" in empiricism that says "anecdotes are off limits" -- anecdotes are legitimate data. If you experience X and someone says "I experienced X too" there's no reason to disregard their testimony. Anecdotes are suspect when there's a large amount of evidence that contradicts them. Also, they should only cause you to update your beliefs slightly (which is the case here).
> A "slight indication", which if I read correctly leads to "slightly weakened my conviction that my genuine death...". Isn't this kind of reasoning common for metaphysics but is met with skepticism by empiricists?
Using evidence (experience) to update your degree of belief is in every way empiricist. Metaphysicians have often been criticized for making claims without evidence, or claiming to make deduction from little/no evidence. But that's not happening here.
Clearly he wrote it as an intellectually honest response to something he experienced, which is the very least expected of an empiricist and therefore consistent with the practice; implied contradictions are opportunities for further reflection and investigation, certainly not reasons to immediately reject the evidence.
I don't remember anything like that, but I strongly doubt I was ever in asystole. (I went looking for occurrence rates of spontaneous recovery from that 'flatlined' state, and found only case reports - all nicknaming their subjects "Lazarus...") On the other hand, it sounds like he was a lot better perfused when he lost consciousness than I was by the time I did, so who knows, really?
> McTaggart derived his certainty from his metaphysics, which implied that what we confusedly perceive as material objects, in some cases housing minds, are really souls, eternally viewing one another with something of the order of love.
Maybe I am wrong but isn’t that how shinto perceives the world? That a tree you might chop down will kill a kami who lives there. So our acts of here and now have a much bigger implication on the musubi than on the actual after life.
The thing I don't get about accounts of NDE and what people say about them afterwards is this: if they lived to tell the tale, their near death wasn't actual death. They didn't "peak over to the other side". So whatever they experienced was what the brain experienced well within the realm of the living. And we know it was within the living enough that the person recovered and was able to recount the experience! How can there be any argument about this? How anyone can draw any conclusions about an alleged afterlife from this is beyond me.
Isaac Asimov famously reflected upon this. When he had a close call with death, he didn't see anything. He didn't expect to, and he didn't. It's very likely that our expectations shape what we see, at least partly... that's the brain conjuring imagery and trying to make sense of what it can, I suppose.
Whenever I've been under anesthesia, it was like an on/off switch. I didn't even dream, even though I do remember some of my dreams.
I read a book about this called Life After Life, written in the 1970s. A doctor spoke with hundreds of people who experienced Near Death Experiences, and wrote commonalities / patterns that most experienced. Found this absolutely fascinating. Coming from a non-religious background, I found this book somewhat of a brain breaker.
As others mentioned (including @BoardsOfCanada) - search for "NDE" on a video platform, and watch a few. I make no claims to be a professional assessor of truth/lies, but when you watch many of those videos, ask yourself honestly, is this person lying (or rehearsing a staged story)? Additionally, some mention "impossible" information (like an out-of-body experience, where they are able see something outside of the room, which would be impossible for their body to do; or receive/hear information).
What I appreciate about that book is that the doctor (Raymond Moody) doesn't offer judgements or much of his own opinions, but he tries to faithfully retell what the patient experienced.
What's interesting is some of the discussions the patients have with the "luminous being(s)" and souls/spirits/entities on the other side...
They seem to frequently ask questions like, "What did you learn (while on Earth)?" - and there is the implication that our souls are sent to Earth with a specific mission.
The people who experience these NDEs also often say that this other world (spirit/soul world?) feels MORE REAL than the Earth world, and that they report feeling finally "at home".
Other interesting observations - (1) they rarely smell anything in the other world, (2) many report perfect sight / knowledge (for example, can clearly see infinite detail of a mountain range on the horizon), (3) Often hear musical "chimes", (4) the "luminous beings" have a sense of humor, and are not judgemental during the life-review, (5) During the life review, they often get to see the experience from another perspective - for example, during a fight with a sibling, you can see the fight/feelings from the other siblings' perspective, (6) the people often come back with some sort of "gift" / power - for example, the ability to sense other peoples' emotions at a distance (like extreme empathy), or to heal people with touch. (7) Apparently suicide is a big no-no - the people who attempted to kill themselves were essentially "scolded", told that it was a huge mistake - "We" are not supposed to decide who dies, including ourselves - and that we have a mission to carry out, even if the circumstances are difficult. That was a bit shocking to read...
Pretty fascinating stuff.
I personally have not experienced an NDE, but I have spoken to several trusted friends - including a man who drowned as a child, and was brought back to life. He experienced the common "symptoms" of the NDE described in those videos... just the level of detail he can recall from the conversation he had with the "luminous being", and the extreme feeling of "home" and intense love he experienced - he said that since that point, he's not afraid of death at all, and after that experience, he felt strongly driven to become a teacher and help others....
For Ayer similar near death experiences give more evidence for the afterlife. I admit that it seems better than different, but it's still incredibly weak and not unexpected. Dying brain having similar perceptions is not that unexpected. Just like machine elves are when taking DMT.
Ayer makes good points that evidence of dualism does not imply 'spirit' or soul dualism, or existence of a deity.
1. Restaurants should carry an anti-choking device. Too many elderly risk a stroke without it.
2. People often do have a delusion or vision just before death, one that is a product of their own brain, fitting their understanding of the world. I had an incredible vision when I had taken half an oxycodone prescribed for pain.
3. There are more ways of expressing one's belief or disbelief in god besides atheism and agnosticm. Consider "agnostic theism" which means “I believe god exists, but I do not know that with certainty”, also "agnostic atheism" which means “I don't believe in a god but also say it can’t be known.”
As for any genuine otherworldly vision, no, I don't believe that happened here.
Beyond the usual discussions of atheism and agnosticism, some would maintain none of these positions are possible to hold because they require a prior commitment to realism about ontological questions, and the arguments for realism are uncompelling.
Why is that tied to some notion of an afterlife? If anything, it seems to me that the reality that this one life is all any of us have should make one care way more for their fragile peers, and for making it the one life they have count. As The Doors once put it, "no eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn".
In afterlife certain things are lost; but certain are not. And those that are not are affected by what we do in this life.
It's like you got a drop of a somewhat muddy water that is the center of your life. The drop will remain in the afterlife. Everything you do either makes is muddier or cleanses it a bit. This change is what stays.
It doesn't have to be. But it does indicate accountability, and some people do hope get away without it.
I can't think of a more important idea for a conscious living being than some hope for an afterlife, perhaps a better one than is here.
Most people resorting to and flood the discussion with rational X or Y are simply getting high off of their own sounds and are plain dishonest with themselves and others.
I've told only a few people about my near death experience, and most of them were polite, but obviously didn't believe a word I was saying. To be honest, I wouldn't believe it either if I had not experienced it myself.
I did not "see" anything other than a bright light, but I was overcome with an incredible feeling that I was in the presence of, and communicating with somebody who was conveying a message of absolute love for, and total understanding of everything that I was. The feeling of euphoria is impossible to fully describe, because of the absoluteness of it.
I wanted to stay where I was. It was the best feeling I'd ever experienced, and I was content. Somehow, I was "shown" some bits of what I had to live for -- people I had not yet met, and amazing places and things that I had not yet seen or done. I don't really remember making a choice to return, but I woke up in a hospital with a broken back and other injuries. I later learned that I had been hit by a car while riding my bicycle, and was given CPR by a passing stranger.
It makes me uncomfortable to talk about this because it's all just so unbelievable, but there it is.
As the years have gone by, I've met the friends and family that I had in my visions, and I've also been to the places and done the things that I saw myself doing in the vision.
My whole perspective on life was changed by this event, and I have no fear of death whatsoever.
This is HN so I'm not trying to evangelize you or anyone here, but what you described is 100% in line with Spiritism [1], a French-founded doctrine that's very popular both in France and Brazil [2]. I'm a believer.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardecist_spiritism
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardecist_spiritism#cite_note-...
My memory is a bit hazy, but I thought what you are describing is very common with people who flatline and come back? I have vague memories that a new anesthetic drug was developed and used on soldiers undergoing surgery in the Vietnam war, and there was something about it that caused the same kind of reaction in those who were put under. Again, my memory is very hazy on the subject. I should go do some research and update this comment (and I just might).
EDIT I did a little searching. I think it might have been an old report about Ketamine before it became more wide known. Apparently it was used during the Vietnam War.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketamine#Near-death_experience
I was going to mention ketamine. Famous for this type of effect. I don't want to belittle the meaningful experience, but the mind is a really powerful organ and it's a safer bet to treat these experiences as arising from mind rather than beyond it. Shrug.
Safer why?
Lots to say there. The last few centuries have shown that many things which previously seemed inexplicable have been convincingly explained without resort to the supernatural. So a material basis of conscious experience seems a good bet.
Related, and hinted at by my original comment: the brain is capable of generating truly profound experiences. There is a tendency to ascribe them to something 'beyond ourselves' but again, advances in medicine and neuroscience have shown that these are explicable, subject to manipulation by chemical and electrical signals, which again suggests a material basis for conscious experience.
It's true that many things have yielded to science. And yet, what we discuss (the "hard problem of consciousness") hasn't. In my opinion, the burden is on you to prove that progress in other questions implies inevitable progress on an unrelated question that hasn't budged at all.
I said this in my other comment but, when you say the brain generates truly profound experiences, you beg the question (in the philosophical sense of the phrase). It's all in the word "experience." For in order for an experience to happen, some entity has to be experiencing. For there to be an illusion, there has to be an entity being deceived. And then how do you explain that entity? It can't be illusory experiences all the way down..
Any honest person has to see the connection between experience and the material brain. But I don't think it's honest to say it's obvious that experience is entirely material. The connection is deeply mysterious and may never be understood. I personally would rather accept that than claim that I don't really exist just so that everything can be explained.
The evidence is abundant and continues to chip away at the "hard problem". For example, we can through anesthesia turn on and off conscious experience. Through various drugs we can manipulate the character of conscious awareness, inducing ecstasy, visions, abiding serenity, terror, pain, grief... all states that were previously described as ineffable.
To say we haven't made progress on understanding consciousness is to move the post; we continue narrowing the 'hard problem' and eventually it seems like there will be nothing left other than a misunderstanding, something like the resolution of Xeno's paradox.
I don't mean to be insulting but, you don't seem to understand what the hard problem is. It is not "is the brain intimately linked with conscious experience?" I would agree we've made progress on that question. It is the harder question of "why is there conscious experience at all? Why does it feel the way it does?" I would argue no progress has been made on this whatsoever, and possibly can't be done.
You can try to claim that this question is meaningless, but that doesn't seem principled to me, not to mention that it completely ignores the fact that gestures broadly all this is happening.
In light of the fact that the entire universe is perceptible only through conscious awareness, the 'hard' question is equivalent to the question "why is there anything instead of nothing?" When asked this way, it's clearly not answerable. Everything short of that seems to have a material answer.
Edit: happy to chat more about this, as it's deeply interesting to me and I do want to understand your perspective. It may need a longer form than this thread allows. I've added a link to get in contact with me on my about page.
Not answerable != immaterial/nonmeaningful.
I'd be happy to talk more as I am passionate about this. I think the idea that there is no soul is actually extremely dehumanizing, and involves someone essentially saying "I don't really exist" (even if they redefine "I exist" to mean something more Materialist, it is, in my view, still saying that). I'll ping you on bluesky.
>>it's a safer bet to treat these experiences as arising from mind rather than beyond it
Your brain has to be alive and exist normally for it to have these experiences. So its quite obvious, nothing is coming from outside of it.
I do feel like its some kind of brain rebooting itself or something like that.
Its sad babies can't tell us if they experience the same during childbirth, but I have a guess that they experience something similar as well.
Its just that the brain is starting up and checking if there is a OxDEADBEEF or a fresh boot. And giving you the primal, brain not initialising any other interface(like eyes, ears, limbs etc). You experience what life would be if only brain existed on its own without everything else apart from it.
Jacob's Ladder is a great movie based on this theme.
I prefer Mullah Nasruddin's experience, which was that death is perfectly OK unless you disturb the camels, at which point they beat you. https://ia800908.us.archive.org/28/items/idries-shah-the-exp...
Amazing recommendation! I was hooked by that most powerful New York Times Bestseller endorsement but in 1600s. "Many say: I wanted to learn, but only found madness. But those who seek wisdom will not find it elsewhere."
> To be honest, I wouldn't believe it either if I had not experienced it myself.
If you anticipated that others would find this hard to believe, why not write down those visions in detail at the time? That would have provided evidence others could have used to later evaluate whether your visions were accurate.
As a skeptic, and without knowing more details, I am leaning towards self-fulfilling prophecy (you did the things in the visions because you had the visions) or confirmation bias (similar to how horoscopes feel accurate because they're vague enough to map many situations).
I hope you're right though.
I'm a skeptic too, so I appreciate your position.
I was 15 years old at the time, and not much of a writer.
Most of my visions did not stay in my consciousness. Over the years, when I would meet somebody new or be in a place that I had seen, it would trigger the memory of the vision. You can attribute this to Déjà vu if you like, but in this case I knew exactly where/when I had seen the vision beforehand, and it sometimes triggered more memories of not-yet-happened events.
I'm old now, and I haven't had any experiences related to my visions for over a decade. I'm pretty sure that all of my visions have now been lived.
It matches what I briefly experienced when I felt ill staying alone in a hotel. (E. g. I understood that the events of the few recent days were sort of preparing me for that; I could ask questions.)
BTW there's a book "The night of fire" by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt that describes a similar experience he got staying alone in a desert. And, of course, countless other descriptions, e.g. "The varieties of religious experience" by W. James. You cannot convince anyone, of course; but there's also no way to fake it.
This is lovely. Thank you for sharing this
I don't know, this sounds like your subjective experience, I have no reason to disbelieve it. If you had said that your experience showed you the future, and X Y and Z were going to happen, then I might not believe that, but why wouldn't I believe you experienced what you say you did? Why would you lie?
I've written this about 20 years ago in haste and bad english:
https://www.nderf.org/Experiences/1kevin_p_nde.html
Which isn't my real name btw. They pseudonymized that.
Probably the contrarian take, but an informed one.
Near death experiences are probably the best way we have to assess the nature of reality.
Now, it's almost impossible to reach people who aren't ready with any arguments, but I'll outline some possible steps for anyone who's on the verge.
- Go to youtube, type in NDE and listen to a few
- Try to come up with a "rational" explanation (hallucinations, the brain dumping DMT, preconceived notions from Hollywood, the general culture and so on)
- Assess whether these make any sense under the conditions that NDEs occur, and scratch the ones that don't. Then watch a few more and you'll have to reject more still.
In particular, what was convincing to me, is how very very similar the cases are and that they happen to tribes living at a stone age technological level with no contact to Hollywood, and that there is a described case from Plato from over 2000 years ago that is identical to modern cases.
In the end, my conclusion is that objective reality has to be partially rejected, and all experience is the combination of some "nature of reality" as interpreted by each individual. This leads to clear contradictions if one assumes that there is one objective reality. Case in point, in NDEs there are a couple of common stages, and experiencers go through some or all of these, most often only some. One is traveling from the location of death to a heavenly realm. For westerners this often is flying through a star trek like hyperspace tunnel, while for stone age people they might be in a canoe that travels by itself to a distant island. So the nature of it is something like being pulled silently without effort towards a point in a manner that isn't part of the experiencer's notion of what's possible, and it is then realized and interpreted by each individual in the closest way that they can relate to.
If multiple people independently report the same experience (across time and space), isn't this actually evidence of objective reality rather than a refutation of it? It points to some underlying universal structure of our experience as constructed by our brains, which suggests that our brains are part of a mechanistic, external, and therefore objective reality instead of a subjective one (where our own ideas constitute reality).
I never remotely believed this because I don't even believe in a "me" really.
One hard hit in the head can literally change your personality entirely, then you have alzheimers and all the other degenerative brain diseases that will erase "you". Even if you avoid all that "you" will be wildly different every 15-20 years.
Christianity gets through this by saying you will return to your prime. That just seems kind of childish to me though, like "yeah when you die you and all your friends and family are gonna be 25 and you live in paradise together forever".
How do you resolve the idea of an eternal consciousness with the very real and common occurence of people losing their consciousness while they are still alive?
The brain is like a sail thats catching the wind of the soul. The wind pushes and shapes the sail, and the sail limits the shape of the wind inside it. If the sail is in bad condition, it changes how the wind catches it, or prevents it from catching altogether.
So the brain is animated by the soul, and also limits and shapes its experience. When we're affected by anesthetic, or we're badly injured, or have a stroke, our conscious experience is impacted, while we're here on this plane. Eventually we leave this form and experience reality more truly. This could be one reason why NDEs happen - the brain is so badly damaged that it fails to even contain the soul and we approach a more death-like state.
It is a nice thought, but still has a pre-requisite that there are "souls" floating around that get ensnared by human bodies. If that is true then life is a kind of prison we endure before being liberated by death.
Even if we assume those giant leaps of faith are true, it still means "I" go away when I die. My soul will only remember "me" as a brief torture where I was forced into a human shell and had to endure being "me" before being released once more to be a higher being. All my struggles, battles, self-improvement, etc. will be meaningless and my kids will be a cruel trick I played that imprisoned other souls.
I won't deny it takes giant leaps of faith. I think the questions are inherently unanswerable so any theory that's not in conflict with things we can know scientifically, and which doesn't lead to harming others, is as good as it can get. We can't really do better than thoughtful faith in this domain (and indeed I would (controversially) argue that the notion of inevitable scientific progress in this area is also a sort of faith, since there hasn't been any progress on the "hard problem" of consciousness..).
To your points, I would say that
> life is a kind of prison we endure before being liberated by death
Not exactly. More like a journey that we go through for mysterious reasons. Maybe so our soul can grow by learning lessons and having challenges that can only be when the stakes are real.
> "I" go away when I die
Not necessarily. Certain aspects of you, which are more contingent on brain traits, e.g. intelligence, some temperament. But the deepest self wouldn't disappear.
> All my struggles, battles, self-improvement, etc. will be meaningless
I see what you mean, but I wouldn't call it meaningless just because it wasn't "completely real." Also, I do believe that lessons learned here are learned for good. The soul is here to grow.
> my kids will be a cruel trick I played that imprisoned other souls.
I don't really see how you got here. In this theory, your kids are also here for their own purpose. Relationships and love are still meaningful and real. Life is cruel and involves a great deal of suffering, but that doesn't mean that existence is inherently bad.
I wonder if there even is such a thing as “eternal consciousness” the way people assume.
It’s rare for me to remember -aspects of my daily life in dreams.
I would think being dead would be a significant hinderance.
I have a fondness for the idea that the brain is like a radio reciever for a greater flow of the universe. Thus brain damage is like a broken antenna. The radio can die but the signal continues.
That said, we do then to attribute a lot of thinking to the technology of the time. Buddhists had their wheel of time, folks today think we live in a computer simulation. Things like that, so best not to take the idea too seriously.
Remember, life is too important to take seriously.
since I have dreams in which I am not in the dream https://medium.com/luminasticity/the-i-g-dream-log-5c3e5de92... it would actually be weird if I remembered aspects of my daily life in those dreams.
I think Christian resurrection at prime usually means having the body of a 25-year old, not the mind. Maybe they'd say the physical brain can corrupt the eternal consciousness's expression while in this life, but it does still raise questions like how will you even recognize the eternal "you" when you've been trapped in a corruptible brain for all that you can remember, and what is the eternal part's worth if it can be corrupted by the brain. (Perhaps Mormonism addresses some of this, saying you lived as "you" unembodied before birth, but are not able to remember for now.)
Also well-known now is that our feelings are affected by things like our gut biome. Do all our little passengers resurrect with us?
The traditional concept of an 'embodied' resurrection (as opposed to ghosts playing harps) makes me lean towards: yes (eg the gut is part of the body). Who knows though, it's a fun question!
yeah it is :) Like, do we eat in heaven? If not, then all our little passengers must also be immortal in their resurrected form. But part of the biome is the dead bodies of those critters, and those dead bodies also affect our mood (chemistry doing its thing). So how does this work? Does heaven automatically maintain the correct chemistry in our guts to maintain our emotional and hormonal stability with needing the actual biome? Or does it maintain the biome at the correct chemistry without needing the actual ecosystem? And other parts - do the bugs that live on our hair follicles come with us? Does hair even grow in heaven?
I have questions...
John's vision of heaven in the book of Revelation includes both the wedding feast of the Lamb and the trees of life that will bear 12 different fruits in season. Jesus also ate fish a few times after his resurrection to demonstrate the physicality of his resurrected body. So there is the concept of eating in the resurrected paradise of the new heavens and the new earth.
Surely Islam does too? Being stuck with 72 young women for eternity as an old man with incontinence, bowel cancer, a bad back and a broken dick sounds a lot more like hell than heaven.
I believe you resolve it by the concept of spirit/body dualism, where your body/soul degenerates but the spirit is still fine.
Basically if the base reality that we experience through a holographic world/emergent reality has no concept of time, consequence, etc, you have to create a simulation/game with rules that can allow free will to happen, that has a timeline, has consequences. Once setup, those rules apply even if they ruin the simulation experience for some, they are a necessary part of the holographic world/emergent reality serving it's purpose. Sadly, to create an emergent reality that allows free will you have to create a reality that allows suffering and children dying of cancer and Alzheimer's and consequences if you hit someone in the head. But the blow to the head/Alzheimers is nothing different than an alcohol haze one night that goes away in the morning. The you in the underlying lower (higher?) real dimensions doesn't change just because you got drunk/alzheimers/hit on the head in the emergent dimensions/reality/holographic world.
Read CS Lewis 'The Problem of Pain' then think about emergent dimensions/holographic worlds being the only way to have our kind of consciousness/self determination/free will/experiential identity if one exists in a underlying dimensional state with no linear time, no physical limitations, etc, and so forth. The emergent reality/holographic world is the 'chess board with clear rules' needed for us to have/experience/pretend to free will from the underlying reality without time or rules. In CS Lewis 'The Problem of Pain', pain sucks, but is needed for this world to do whatever it is supposed to do. Alzheimers, consequences of blows to the head, etc aren't themselves needed but they themselves are emergent from the rules that are needed for 'here' to exist and serve it's purpose. But they are also just part of (or structure for) the holographic/emergent reality, not the true base lower (higher?) reality.
Not manic. Just not great at communicating these thoughts. Don't lock me up please.
Nope. Everything decays. So does any substrate which reality may run on whichever way.
So there will be errors in the great plan of whichever nature. Some of them may get caught by error correction codes, some others not.
These uncaught exceptions are enabling deviations from the great plan :-)
Nope. It would be very convenient for the modern American/Western nihilistic religion called atheism, but nope. Science doesn't support it.
In our limited experiential world things appear to decay. If our spacetime experience is emergent from something else (in which time doesn't exist), or is holographic, we have no idea what's really going on at the fundamental (lower/higher?) level. How can you have decay in the base reality that doesn't have time? Is decay not an artifact of time? If time is emergent not fundamental, so is decay.
Check out some Susskind and CS Lewis The Problem of Pain. It makes for a fun thought game.
Start with 'what reality/rules would we need in order to exercise truly free will' (the concepts from The Problem of Pain). We need time (action/consequence). We need to be able to impact ourselves/others. I need to be able to hurt you/myself. Kill you/myself. Need the mechanisms that are then used/abused by things like Alzheimer's. But if we bring in Susskind, that is all just happening in the emergent space/time (my emergent free will reality) not in the base reality (my lower/higher? reality that doesn't have things like time). There is no reason that what impacts us in the 'free will reality' that enables us to have free will/experience time also impacts whatever we might be in the base reality (my lower/higher? reality). In that reality without time we are the child just born and the body turned to dust. We are forever in the moments when our loved ones held us. That is heaven. Not some new experiential timeline to reflect. We ARE ALL THE MOMENTS, not a reflection on the moments after the fact.
Hell IS repeating every bad thing, forever. Heaven is experiencing love from your loved ones, forever. But not in some cloud world we exist in after death thinking back. But in the same one that everything happened, only at the non-emergent level not the emergent spacetime level. Me in the non-emergent reality is already in heaven/hell, is already experiencing it all, because it exists in a space without emergent linear time. I will be in heaven, because I will have hugs from my mom and hugs for my children, forever. That is where lower (higher?) level me will dwell.
To be fair, this is the point I worked back from after my mom died. How do I deal with loosing her (as an ex-Catholic). In what reality are her hugs for me forever? This is what I gamed out. We are all the moments, forever, in the non-emergent reality without linear time.
How else can the non-emergent true reality contain our emergent linear space time reality?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Susskind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Problem_of_Pain
As for myself, I try to do a thought experiment. Imagine that I could travel back in time and meet myself at 18-20 years old. I could most likely convince myself that I was me from the future. But I don't think I could convince myself of the thing I've learned that are outside of what is imaginable for my younger self. So we could never be angry with other people for not understanding. Even so, with everything that you get right compared to the people downvoting you, I think you have a too simplistic view of reality, and frankly, not optimistic enough.
Hahaha. Downvoted for posting my random thoughts converging CS Lewis and Susskind. This site really isn't curious.
Hrm. I've thought about this a lot and came to the conclusion that we, or rather our brains are just an antenna, 'receiving stuff' from another plane of existence.
If you change/destroy parts of the antenna or the 'bioelectronic circuits' the channel fades out, and you get more and more noise, until there is no signal anymore.
No more resonance with the frequency of your station.
That equals death on this plane.
What lead me to this apart from NDE/OOBE are the cases of so called Terminal Lucidity, when old or very sick people die, but regain conciousness in their last moments. In a timeframe from sometimes two to three days before exitus, but mostly just a few dozen seconds to minutes before exitus.
The thing is that some of these brains are so rotten and degenerated, that it is impossible according to our current understanding, that these people are even able to do anything coordinated, not to mention speak, and recognizing their loved ones/family, telling them things.
And yet this happens again and again, not that often, but it does. While their brains are absolute mush.
In a similar vein, there are stories of lost animals like cats and dogs finding their way back to the humans they once lived with. Over long distances like several hundred miles, often after years.
That can't happen by random chance. So either they can read signs, and understand our words better than we think, or there are other mechanisms at play.
What that is telling about this otherplaneness is uncertain, just that it exists.
Probably impossible to gain any certain insights about that, because of wrong cabling, interface, modulation, format, whatever.
At best we can just hope to skim the interface, membrane and get a few hazy views from the other side near that membrane, but not that far through it.
Maybe there are even other interfaces, membranes, from up there, going on and on, and/or recursing into others.
There's this mushroom Lanmaoa asiatica that causes people to hallucinate hundreds of tiny people running around interacting with the environment. Consistently, across cultures and regions. You eat this mushroom and you're pretty likely to have a very similar hallucination to everybody else who eats this mushroom. Now is there some objective reality of hidden little elves everywhere that only this mushroom unlocks? Or is it a specific physical trigger that when people go through it they have the same sort of experience.
You can have the same question about the near death experiences. Are they experiences of an objective reality somewhere or is it a common physical situation triggering similar experiences across people and cultures.
> In particular, what was convincing to me, is how very very similar the cases are and that they happen to tribes living at a stone age technological level with no contact to Hollywood, and that there is a described case from Plato from over 2000 years ago that is identical to modern cases.
This sounds intriguing.
> Case in point, in NDEs there are a couple of common stages, and experiencers go through some or all of these, most often only some. One is traveling from the location of death to a heavenly realm. For westerners this often is flying through a star trek like hyperspace tunnel, while for stone age people they might be in a canoe that travels by itself to a distant island.
Ah, so the similarity is all enitrely in your interpretation of these clearly dissimilar visions.
If I listen to 100 NDEs and in 50 they travel through a tunnel like this or somehow go through space, and in 2 from stone age cultures they travel in a manner apt to their everyday experience and it has those things in common I think it's a fine hypothesis that what they have in common is the nature of what's happening. And in 48 they didn't experience this stage.
Have you read any pop neuroscience book? There are common experiences that can be generated by one or another kind of brain-wrong. You sort of acknowledged this already when you mentioned DMT. If you poke somebody in specific parts of the brain you can get illusions of changing size, shadowy figures, mirth, and other delightful errors. We also interpret things very eagerly, like the "night hag" phenomenon where being unable to sense one's own breathing turns into an illusion of something sitting on your chest. That's another worldwide cross-cultural concept, by the way, but there is no night hag, there's just human physiology.
So, bright lights and tunnels. Shared human visual neurological glitches. Heard of "tunnel vision"? That's a real medical condition, which can be caused by blood loss, adrenaline, or low oxygen.
I would be seriously uncomfortable to discover myself making authoritative reference to anything out of a "pop neuroscience" book, unless I had myself validated the claim - at least as far as making sure there is a paper that says what is claimed of it, by whatever failed academic turned mountebank I am reading. (If those guys were comfortable being held to what they say, why did they stop writing for peer reviewers? I'm hardly an academic chauvinist, God knows, but if you want to be safe here in the 2030s, you really need to learn to spot a grifter...)
The tunnel vision you experience during hypovolemia is nothing like the "tunnel of light" reported in NDEs. It's just that you lose your visual field gradually, from periphery to fovea, as your visual cortex loses perfusion. In theory, a well-perfused brain dying for some other reason, such as a sudden complete loss of oxygen supply secondary to circulatory collapse secondary to fine VF or asystole, would retain the ability to "fill in" with something, the way our brains in normal operation cover the many gaps and lacks in our visual perception. (This is part of why I asked the other fellow not to bother me again about this at least until he knows what "ATP" means and why that is relevant here.)
It is strikingly absurd to imagine any of this does or can support a radically materialist conception of the universe. As I said before, materialism is exactly as religious as simulationism - exactly so, inasmuch as I expect to see a "solution" for the "mind-body problem" [1] around the same time as we solve the halting problem or constructively prove P=NP.
[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dualism/#DuaMinBodPro
OK, you could also read a serious neuroscience textbook, but that seemed a less reasonable thing to expect of anyone. The basic point remains true though.
Tunnel vision is a tunnel, in your vision, associated with death. Since I'm talking to people who will latch on to anything at all similar to a tunnel in reports of experiences, and say "See! Commonalities!", this is sufficient to explain why a lot of the nearly-dead throughout world history have involved something tunnel-like somewhere in their reports.
I don't know who is reporting a "tunnel of light" specifically. I would expect that belongs to a post-1970s culture of near death experiences that's part of the rest of the culture of Forteana and the Mysteries of the Unexplained.
When talking about what evidence supports, really we're talking about the opposite: which theories evidence falsifies, and which surviving, falsifiable theory is the most parsimonious. Falsifiability matters, and parsimony matters. Otherwise, you can imagine what you like, but it carries no weight as an explanation.
You'd be hard pressed to find a principled neuroscientist who is as confident as you are that neuroscience can explain consciousness
Why is that unreasonable to expect? How can someone participate in a discussion of neuroscience without the requisite knowledge?
But, luckily for me, I'm not among those here who have arrogated unto themselves the requirement, with its implicit assumption of the necessary capacity, to explain all or indeed any of this. I'm just here to counsel those who do persist in such insistence, much in the manner of that fellow whose job it used to be to murmur memento mori.
Objective reality exists, but nobody can ever perceive it, at least not while they're perceiving things through the filter of their body
What's realer than reality as it's directly experienced?
The raw electromagnetic emissions of uncountable atoms jostling through space and time.
But that's a model and models are of the mind
But outside of what we can model, said atoms exist, and we perceive them. Objective reality is those atoms before we perceive them
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A materialist would argue that nothing you describe rules out malfunction in a brain failing rapidly due to oxygen starvation, and that the commonality of experiences is explicable in terms of common failure modes in effectively identical brain architecture. (Just about everyone's visual cortex works about the same, etc.)
I think it's cute how hardcore materialists believe it is even in theory possible to distinguish their position from ideological simulationism. Maybe in a thousand years. Not now. But phenomenology is the name of the philosophical discipline that you are now struggling to recapitulate.
You think it's cute, do you? But there are endless unfalsifiable and silly alternative explanations for everything. They're distinguished only by being silly. The observation that everything could be a simulation deserves a "so what". Maybe you're the cutie pie.
It means something to you that I should be, eh? I don't really take a position in the matter, but one can't spend all day reading - though feel free to continue flattering my looks here while I do so, of course! Being called cute is a rare pleasure indeed for me, these decades.
So we agree but one point: There are tens of thousands of NDEs happening under monitored conditions (operating tables) when we know for a fact that the brain is out of oxygen and energy according to any know physical (not to mention evolutionary) mechanism, and that has to be explained.
If the brain is ever completely inactive (as seen in EEGs) for any length of time, there is no chance of recovery from that state. The body can be kept alive, but the brain is gone and will never have any other activity again.
So, I'm not sure what you mean by "out of oxygen and energy according to any phsysical mechanism" - for any patient who has ever recovered to tell a tale of an NDE, we know for a fact that their brain was constantly producing measurable electrical signals for the entire time.
> NDEs happening under monitored conditions (operating tables)
I had general anesthesia 10 days ago. There was no NDE, felt like they flicked an off switch then turned me back on a few hours later.
They wheeled me from the prep room towards the OR, opened the big door, and then I was in a different room waking up from anesthesia. That’s it.
That’s been my exact experience in each of my 5 occasions.
I also once semi-fainted while standing up. Felt unusually calm and care free as my head bashed against a nearby object. Fortunately it wasn’t serious.
Yes they don't happen 100% of the time or even 10%.
Do you frequently experience and remember dreams?
Yes I even used to do lucid dreaming. These days best I can do is wake up and stop dreams on command.
I also regularly experience sleep paralysis. That took a lot of work to get used to.
Everyone reading this should pull on the sleep paralysis thread if you decide to research this topic. It's a interesting one.
I do remember dreams. The times where I was anesthesized it was that on/off switch, I completely lost time. No NDE or even dreams.
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Ok :D
Here's Plato's thing, the "myth of Er":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_Er
What are the unaccountably unlikely commonalities that I should be noticing? Between this and the article, I see only: some kind of colored light, some kind of officiating beings, and a river (A.J.Ayer says he presumably had the Styx in mind, though amusingly in the actual ancient Greek account it's a different river and there's no need to cross it).
So it has the same stages as modern NDEs: - Out of body experience - Journey through realms - Bright/universal light - Life review - Encounters with spiritual beings - Reincarnation / life selection - A message of peace, well-being, and survival of consciousness
I've never heard of life reviews for example outside of NDEs, most of these things are not in the collective unconscious.
These things are not really present, unless you do a lot of generalizing, squinting your eyes, and wishing. Besides which the ancient Egyptians influenced many of our shared tropes. There's that whole bit with weighing the heart while a monster (the Eater of the Dead) sits and watches. The Sumerians have a lot to answer for, too. You may now point to Amazonian tribes, but why shouldn't our tropes go all the way back to a shared past in Africa? Not to mention the convergent evolution of obvious ideas. South America (Maya? I forget) had flood myths of its own, and a world tree.
Yeah, look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_flood_myths . This does not mean that at some point there was a global flood brought about by a deity in retribution. It just means people throughout time knew the same stories or invented the same stories, and often thought about deities and floods. Similarly with your afterlife tropes. Memes are the freaky thing here.
Where is the pressing need to help repair space itself that Ayer reports as such a big part of his own experience? And where in Ayer's experience is this life review, reincarnation, or message of peace?
It's obviously impossible to say. Why would there be a life review, reincarnation, or message of peace?
You're the one who claimed that we should believe NDEs represent more than hallucinations because they all contain the same elements. I was pointing out that I can see major differences between two of these NDEs we are just discussing, instead of the consistency you were claiming.
Well, the claim is only that several of them contain some of the same elements as others.
Not long ago, a local mad church put a packet of pamphlets through my door, one of which was this magnificent tale:
https://avesselofhonour.com/2023/06/28/48-hours-in-hell/
Some of those features show up there too. Of course, this comes from a Christian background, and draws on that. But it does have a river, and there's no river in hell in the bible.
Where is that story from? Is George Lennox even a real person?
Of course not, it’s proselytizing material, the sort of stories that might be illustrated in Chick Tracts, down to the admonition to repent and pray at the end - a ‘Ticket to Heaven’
Reminded me of this TED talk of a woman who had a stroke and told about the experience:
https://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_my_stroke_of_ins...
> And I look down at my arm and I realize that I can no longer define the boundaries of my body. I can't define where I begin and where I end, because the atoms and the molecules of my arm blended with the atoms and molecules of the wall.
Why do those experiences indicate the presence or non-presence of an afterlife?
This claim from Ayer -- how do we make the leap from these experiences existing to being evidence of a life after consciousness?
> On the face of it, these experiences, on the assumption that the last one was veridical, are rather strong evidence that death does not put an end to consciousness
for some it's impossible to witness death. We get forced to sometimes see someone else's lifeless cask, but our own becomes impossible, as our very own worldline/probability trees branch before witnessing what others see as their objective reality; someone else's death. and this won't make any sense to anyone that doesn't already see this occurring, so it's just like an ouroborus of a string of jokes, each punchline becomes the begining of the next joke.
I have two data points thet I ponder occasionally:
1. I have met three identical twins so far. Each of them has reported having some kind of communication with the other twin that could not be explained by conventional means. I have no reason to think any of them lied.
2. My sister used to be very into astrology. She could predict someone's star sign within a few minutes of meeting them to much better than 1 in 12 accuracy.
I do not present these as proof of anything. I do not expect anyone else to believe them or give them any credence. This is just anecdata. I haven't worked out any rational explanation for them.
But I'm inclined to believe two things from them:
1. Brains are weird. Human psychology is complex and fascinating and does things that we do not understand.
2. That there are well-conceived, well-constructed scientific experiments that show there is no scientific basis for telekinesis or astrology, that these are not "real" things, does not necessarily contradict the human experience of them as "real" things. We do not inhabit a well-constructed scientific experiment so our lived experience of life may be different from the actual truth.
> the brain dumping DMT
Why do you exclude this hypothesis? It's well known that some drugs such as DMT do cause very similar hallucinations among people, even across cultures (as is the case with NDE).
Because they aren't very similar in a lot of respects. If someone told you about their DMT/NDE experience you could determine which one it was with far greater than 90% accuracy. For example, in NDEs people express that they are outside of linear time, things happen in parallel (I can't imagine it but one person said they arrived at the bottom of a stair, and the moment he decided to climb it he was at the top, but could remember every single step on the way - that's the best explanation I have got of it) and in NDEs people meet relatives that tell them what is happening in a very pedagogic and honest way. In DMT trips there are foreign machine elves or other entities that accept you but don't really have that much connection to you. In NDEs you meet the light a lot and get flooded with love in a way you couldn't imagine before. So even though DMT have similarities to NDEs when compared to our normal reality, they are also not that similar. If anything DMT trips are more similar to UFO abductions than NDEs. It's just weirder than I can expect anyone to accept.
Sure, I didn't mean that the brain was releasing literal DMT.
You said what convinced you was how similar NDEs are, but we have evidence that similar experiences can arise from known brain chemistry changes (e.g., DMT-induced hallucinations) without requiring supernatural explanations. Death could simply be another case where a shift in brain chemistry produces consistent hallucinations across humans.
> In NDEs you meet the light a lot and get flooded with love in a way you couldn't imagine before
I've definitely had this exact experience on DMT, as well as the traveling through tunnels experience
Yeah I didn't want to burst anyone's spiritual bubble earlier, but I had a very similar experience one time when I smoked salvia divinorum: there was an eerie and overwhelming purple light, sort of like a "fluorescent" UV bulb, and the Ministers of The Universe pulled my life history in front of me, something something ALL OF SPACE AND TIME WAS-
I wasn't speaking to God. I was high on salvia. And I'm quite certain A.J. Ayer was high on oxygen deprivation.
There is either a spiritual bubble or a materialistic/scientistic bubble, and we shouldn't be afraid to burst either.
I disagree that the materialistic/scientistic view can be characterized as a "bubble". Unlike the spiritual camp, almost no one in that camp wishes it were true or fantasizes about it. I'm personally in the materialistic camp but wish the "spiritual" view was true.
No, us scientific folks shouldn't go around needlessly poking people's spiritual bubbles. It's rude and disrespectful, and it almost never actually matters. Who cares if someone thinks they spoke to Jesus when they had a heart attack? Leave them alone.
No you didn't that's not even what a salvia trip is like why lie about that in HN of all places haha
Incredibly easy to explain this without trying hard. The subject has some sense of movement forwards, and the brain rationalises it, like we do in dreams, imagining a tunnel or a canoe or whatever familiar thing is associated with that feeling of drifting or flying. So we can conclude that maybe near death experiences cause a feeling of falling or drifting, and is a bit like dreaming - not that objective reality should be rejected.
We're talking past each other. The problem isn't coming up with a hypothesis of why experiences differ according to experiences. Start by explaining how there can be any experience at all after an hour without oxygen to the brain. But after that we come to a stage where experiences differ so much that they aren't reconcilable in one objective reality and that's what I tried to address.
> Start by explaining how there can be any experience at all after an hour without oxygen to the brain.
Some cells are still technically alive after 1 hour mark in the sense that there is no necrosis and cell membrane is still operating. This depends on cell type and nourishment - for example cells that have high amount of CoQ10 can live longer etc.
In any case, brain is definitely NOT 100% dead in a sense that ALL of its cells are necrotic which might explain why it is in a dream like state.
Also, I doubt 1 hour mark is regular thing in NDE.
How would we determine that the experience happened during that time and not as a memory created when oxygen reached the brain after, or so on? If you assume that narrative memory is a little bit hallucinated (which I think is pretty observable, try dissociating a little and you can experience it) then many options are on the table.
> Start by explaining how there can be any experience at all after an hour without oxygen to the brain.
Besides the clear possibility that the memory forms later, the brains of people who report NDEs have never stopped - there is no report of anyone ever recovering from brain death (as in, from a basically flat EEG).
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Taking it to another level, there are several cases where people who weren't dying experienced the NDE (ex: Nurses, loved ones at someones bedside, etc). They actually witness what the dying person might have been experiencing when dying.
100% agree with BoardsOfCanada.
Note: Atheism, agnosticism are all religions ( or religious thinking disguised as reasoning ); no less fanatic than the ones their adherents so fervently ridicule.
No, you’re wrong - Atheism is the opposite of religion - it’s disbelief, not belief.
This whole “well actually atheism is just another kind of religion” thing is why I begrudgingly have started to prefer describing myself as ‘irreligious,’ just so that there is absolutely no opportunity for equivocation.
As Mikhail_Edoshin pointed out precisely in the comment below. Religious thinking has certain common characteristics. For example, you go to length to defend Atheism is a sort of X negating a Y etc, that's emotional investment indicating religious adherence and sincere belief in being right.
I, from time to time, suffer from this too. It's very indication that I'm likely being misguided by myself or ideas.
False religions are all fanatic; they are narcissistic pseudo religions, stemming from the desire to be right.
Wear the downvotes as a badge of honor.
Lol, indeed BoardsOfCanada :).
I didn't know one could downvote.
Anyway, Aggressively downvoting indicates religious/religious-like fanaticism, the problem is pervasive.
Here's something I don't understand about the argument that all conscious experience is some kind of illusion.
An illusion necessarily implies an entity experiencing the illusion. So what's that entity? It can't be illusions all the way down.
I think some people would rather claim that they themselves don't exist rather than admit that there might be something spiritual or unexplainable about existence. And I find that very strange.
The most striking thing to me is that Ayer hopes there isn't life after death.
> My recent experiences have 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. (italics mine)
I do get the sense that many atheists not only reject God & the afterlife but actually don't want there to be a God or an afterlife. (I think Thomas Nagel wrote something along those lines.) I sort of get it but regardless I think it's very interesting.
I'm just 40, and while I won't go into it, I've lived a very long life so far. An incredible amount of joy, but also grief and pain. Memory for me, when I'm drinking my coffee in the morning, is warm and cozy in a numbing sort of way, but I have to be careful where I walk in it.
I certainly don't wish for death, I still find so much beauty and joy in life, and I still find and experience love. But I don't wish for an afterlife, or prolonged life. If I'm fortunate to live until my natural death, I will welcome it.
Humanity will go on, there are billions of threads of consciousness right now, and I feel so much gratitude that I was and am one of those. I have a lot of comfort in being wrapped and surrounded by those threads, and that they will continue around me when mine frays and ends.
My cannon view is that we're just the universe experiencing itself, and that while my consciousness will end, that universe will go on, my atoms part of it.
One thing I sometimes hope is true, in my materialistic atheistic way, is to do with the problem of sci-fi teleportation. See, if you go through a transporter on Star Trek, you're taken apart and reassembled. This makes people worry, ludicrously, that the reassembled version "isn't really me". You could after all refrain from taking the original apart, and simply duplicate people. Both copies of some guy called Bernard would claim "I am Bernard", and both would be right.
So this makes me think that from moment to moment, as we pass through time at one second per second, it's as if we're being sent through a transporter. That is to say, if in the far future after my death I am reassembled, or even if just a close imitation of me is assembled from whatever data they can get hold of, then that would be no different from me, or Bernard, being brought back to life. "I am Bernard", he would say, and he'd still be right. Of course other Bernard wouldn't get to share his experiences, but so what. My former self can't share my present experiences.
So, why hope for this to happen at all? It has to be that what we're emotionally invested in is not really "continuity of experience", which is a myth, but continuity of ideas. It's nice if those ideas can sit together in the coherent context of a mind. The Woody Allen quote is "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying." But perhaps in fact through your work is good enough, really? Like a close second.
What I mean to say is, I don't so much hope for an afterlife, as to discover that it philosophically doesn't matter anyway. Though I prefer people not dead.
> I do get the sense that many atheists not only reject God & the afterlife but actually don't want there to be a God or an afterlife.
I feel that eternity in Heaven would actually be Hell, because nothing would matter. No danger, no failure, no challenge, no goals, no purpose. What gives life meaning are mortality, limitations, beginnings and endings, progress.
I recently watched the film "Eternity" on Apple TV, starring Elizabeth Olsen, in which everyone after they die has to choose their own form of afterlife and then stick with it forever. All I could think about was how bored I would eventually get. (The film itself was pretty good, not boring. That's because it had an ending!)
Fiction is ideal for playing out these scenarios. Think also of the film "Highlander", in which the ultimate "prize" of the immortals turns out to be mortality. MacLeod's life had become repetitive, and he couldn't fully invest in it, because he kept losing everyone he loved. They grew old and died, while he lived on and had to keep changing identities. For a while it's a grand adventure... until it isn't anymore.
I can certainly understand wanting to live longer, but eternity is unimaginably long, way too long. I don't think that's something to be desired.
The reference to eternity in afterlife doesn't mean "very long time"; it means "no time", a world that has no time. You can briefly feel the difference by being present in the current moment.
No, this is a very bad misunderstanding of the term.
https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05551b.htm
Eternity in its proper sense belongs to God alone; human beings sharing in "eternal life" will experience time differently. Even the angels experience "aeviternity" which is unique to their kind.
https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1010.htm#article5
Could be; I'm not too literate on this, I'm only retelling what I understood directly and this could be very limited. I just wanted to point out that "eternal life" is not going to be the same life we have now, only endless. It is very different and, speaking of boredom, definitely not boring. Boredom is an invention of mind.
> Boredom is an invention of mind.
Yes? Are you saying in the afterlife we'll be mindless?
Problems, yes. "Biology is going to kill me soon" shouldn't have to be one of those problems, and in fact I think it makes us all slightly crazy in different ways, from not caring about the future to unscrupulously believing in afterlives.
I suspect you indended to reply to the sibling comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47827905 which contains the word "problems" rather than my comment which does not?
No, I was disputing "mortality" while agreeing with "challenges", which I've written as problems in the nice sense of "please let me finish my problem". That's some historical figure's alleged last words, I think.
(Edit: probably an embellishment of Archimedes, supposedly saying to the Roman soldier who killed him, "do not disturb my circles!" - not exactly a plaintive attitude about mortality, more just being a grumpy geometrist.)
"All I could think about was how bored I would eventually get" I used to wonder this. I read the religious answer to this relies on the concept of infinitude: what if an infinite god can invent an infinite number of exciting new... things to do?
God as Mr. Roarke?
“Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens” for better or worse.
It is the safest and easiest solution. You die, nothing happens.
When there is an afterlife or perhaps even eternity, the problems begin.
Definitely!. Hence people must support religious institutions to guide them to the afterlife…
Imagine taking sports coaching from one who never played…
>>perhaps even eternity
If there is an eternity, perhaps everybody that exists, or will exist is already a part of it, and is going through it.
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religious beliefs aside, there’s something pleasing about living a good life and facing a decent death: closure.
except without religious beliefs you cannot objectively define good and bad, it's all just moral relativism.
If you have respect for the unique chance of conscious experience of others you get your moral system rather trivially from the first principles. Certainly not worse than an arbitrary religious stick and carrot system.
Unless you subscribe to moral objectivism.
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Being familiar with Ayer from his Epistemology works, this writeup was unexpected. How could an empiricist write "My recent experiences have slightly weakened my conviction that my genuine death, which is due fairly soon, will be the end of me". It also directly contradicted his stance about metaphycal claims.
An empiricist could write that with no contradiction if he experienced it, which Ayer did.
I think his conclusion is very reasonable. It's highly likely that NDEs are minds sputtering to a stop. But if you experience one (while your heart has stopped for 4 minutes no less), it seems rational to "slightly" update your priors towards the possibility of some kind of afterlife. At the very least, it may indicate some kind of conscious experience after you're "dead" but before your brain significantly degrades.
That aside, I will say that his experience sounds a lot like a DMT trip. Particularly the sense that "space, like a badly fitting jigsaw puzzle, was slightly out of joint" and the feeling of being in the presence of "the government of the universe".
His conclusion is based on anecdotal evidence from his French friend's mother: "This experience could well have been delusive. A slight indication that it might have been veridical [objectively real] has been supplied by my French friend, or rather by her mother, who also underwent a heart arrest many years ago. When her daughter asked her what it had been like, she replied that all that she remembered was that she must stay close to the red light."
A "slight indication", which if I read correctly leads to "slightly weakened my conviction that my genuine death...". Isn't this kind of reasoning common for metaphysics but is met with skepticism by empiricists?
His conclusion is based on his own experience first and foremost. But your use of "anecdote" in a derogatory way is misplaced. There's no "rule" in empiricism that says "anecdotes are off limits" -- anecdotes are legitimate data. If you experience X and someone says "I experienced X too" there's no reason to disregard their testimony. Anecdotes are suspect when there's a large amount of evidence that contradicts them. Also, they should only cause you to update your beliefs slightly (which is the case here).
> A "slight indication", which if I read correctly leads to "slightly weakened my conviction that my genuine death...". Isn't this kind of reasoning common for metaphysics but is met with skepticism by empiricists?
Using evidence (experience) to update your degree of belief is in every way empiricist. Metaphysicians have often been criticized for making claims without evidence, or claiming to make deduction from little/no evidence. But that's not happening here.
Clearly he wrote it as an intellectually honest response to something he experienced, which is the very least expected of an empiricist and therefore consistent with the practice; implied contradictions are opportunities for further reflection and investigation, certainly not reasons to immediately reject the evidence.
I don't remember anything like that, but I strongly doubt I was ever in asystole. (I went looking for occurrence rates of spontaneous recovery from that 'flatlined' state, and found only case reports - all nicknaming their subjects "Lazarus...") On the other hand, it sounds like he was a lot better perfused when he lost consciousness than I was by the time I did, so who knows, really?
http://archive.today/is0by
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> McTaggart derived his certainty from his metaphysics, which implied that what we confusedly perceive as material objects, in some cases housing minds, are really souls, eternally viewing one another with something of the order of love.
Maybe I am wrong but isn’t that how shinto perceives the world? That a tree you might chop down will kill a kami who lives there. So our acts of here and now have a much bigger implication on the musubi than on the actual after life.
The thing I don't get about accounts of NDE and what people say about them afterwards is this: if they lived to tell the tale, their near death wasn't actual death. They didn't "peak over to the other side". So whatever they experienced was what the brain experienced well within the realm of the living. And we know it was within the living enough that the person recovered and was able to recount the experience! How can there be any argument about this? How anyone can draw any conclusions about an alleged afterlife from this is beyond me.
Isaac Asimov famously reflected upon this. When he had a close call with death, he didn't see anything. He didn't expect to, and he didn't. It's very likely that our expectations shape what we see, at least partly... that's the brain conjuring imagery and trying to make sense of what it can, I suppose.
Whenever I've been under anesthesia, it was like an on/off switch. I didn't even dream, even though I do remember some of my dreams.
Not all of them pass on to the other side but some are allowed to and come back. Search youtube for "atheist dies and sees Hell", for example.
I read a book about this called Life After Life, written in the 1970s. A doctor spoke with hundreds of people who experienced Near Death Experiences, and wrote commonalities / patterns that most experienced. Found this absolutely fascinating. Coming from a non-religious background, I found this book somewhat of a brain breaker.
As others mentioned (including @BoardsOfCanada) - search for "NDE" on a video platform, and watch a few. I make no claims to be a professional assessor of truth/lies, but when you watch many of those videos, ask yourself honestly, is this person lying (or rehearsing a staged story)? Additionally, some mention "impossible" information (like an out-of-body experience, where they are able see something outside of the room, which would be impossible for their body to do; or receive/hear information).
What I appreciate about that book is that the doctor (Raymond Moody) doesn't offer judgements or much of his own opinions, but he tries to faithfully retell what the patient experienced.
What's interesting is some of the discussions the patients have with the "luminous being(s)" and souls/spirits/entities on the other side...
They seem to frequently ask questions like, "What did you learn (while on Earth)?" - and there is the implication that our souls are sent to Earth with a specific mission.
The people who experience these NDEs also often say that this other world (spirit/soul world?) feels MORE REAL than the Earth world, and that they report feeling finally "at home".
Other interesting observations - (1) they rarely smell anything in the other world, (2) many report perfect sight / knowledge (for example, can clearly see infinite detail of a mountain range on the horizon), (3) Often hear musical "chimes", (4) the "luminous beings" have a sense of humor, and are not judgemental during the life-review, (5) During the life review, they often get to see the experience from another perspective - for example, during a fight with a sibling, you can see the fight/feelings from the other siblings' perspective, (6) the people often come back with some sort of "gift" / power - for example, the ability to sense other peoples' emotions at a distance (like extreme empathy), or to heal people with touch. (7) Apparently suicide is a big no-no - the people who attempted to kill themselves were essentially "scolded", told that it was a huge mistake - "We" are not supposed to decide who dies, including ourselves - and that we have a mission to carry out, even if the circumstances are difficult. That was a bit shocking to read...
Pretty fascinating stuff.
I personally have not experienced an NDE, but I have spoken to several trusted friends - including a man who drowned as a child, and was brought back to life. He experienced the common "symptoms" of the NDE described in those videos... just the level of detail he can recall from the conversation he had with the "luminous being", and the extreme feeling of "home" and intense love he experienced - he said that since that point, he's not afraid of death at all, and after that experience, he felt strongly driven to become a teacher and help others....
https://www.amazon.com/Life-After-Bestselling-Investigation-...
Worth checking out, even if just for curiosity / open the mind's sake...
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"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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For Ayer similar near death experiences give more evidence for the afterlife. I admit that it seems better than different, but it's still incredibly weak and not unexpected. Dying brain having similar perceptions is not that unexpected. Just like machine elves are when taking DMT.
Ayer makes good points that evidence of dualism does not imply 'spirit' or soul dualism, or existence of a deity.
Things that are worthy of discussion ( such as one in this posting ) rarely get any attention.
What is of discussion here?:
1. Restaurants should carry an anti-choking device. Too many elderly risk a stroke without it.
2. People often do have a delusion or vision just before death, one that is a product of their own brain, fitting their understanding of the world. I had an incredible vision when I had taken half an oxycodone prescribed for pain.
3. There are more ways of expressing one's belief or disbelief in god besides atheism and agnosticm. Consider "agnostic theism" which means “I believe god exists, but I do not know that with certainty”, also "agnostic atheism" which means “I don't believe in a god but also say it can’t be known.”
As for any genuine otherworldly vision, no, I don't believe that happened here.
Beyond the usual discussions of atheism and agnosticism, some would maintain none of these positions are possible to hold because they require a prior commitment to realism about ontological questions, and the arguments for realism are uncompelling.
2.
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Is it worthy of discussion because there is something actionable in it?
Yes.
Actionable: To Consider the significance of kindness, compassion, love to and for each other, which world, at large, is missing owing to many factors.
And to consider one's own superficiality and have profound thoughts for others.
Why is that tied to some notion of an afterlife? If anything, it seems to me that the reality that this one life is all any of us have should make one care way more for their fragile peers, and for making it the one life they have count. As The Doors once put it, "no eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn".
In afterlife certain things are lost; but certain are not. And those that are not are affected by what we do in this life.
It's like you got a drop of a somewhat muddy water that is the center of your life. The drop will remain in the afterlife. Everything you do either makes is muddier or cleanses it a bit. This change is what stays.
It doesn't have to be. But it does indicate accountability, and some people do hope get away without it.
I can't think of a more important idea for a conscious living being than some hope for an afterlife, perhaps a better one than is here.
Most people resorting to and flood the discussion with rational X or Y are simply getting high off of their own sounds and are plain dishonest with themselves and others.
It would be helpful if the site wasn't down...
I didn't have a problem loading the site. Odd. Try again later or something.