I think the significant philosophical question is, why the controversy? — Wayfarer

And your explanation is to look at what you take to be the motivations of the skeptics in your story.

Is that the discussion you want to have? Everyone chooses up sides and then questions the other side's motives while defending themselves as wholesome, open-minded truth-seekers? That's the philosophical approach, in your mind?

As for the postscript argument: "I've got a whole bunch of rocks here; surely a few of them contain mithril."

I have wondered why a topic like this would be cause frustration, say for people like Richard Dawkins. It just comes down to what you're inclined to believe, which is probably related to your worldview. That's as far as you can go: you reflect the times you live in and that's it.

Is that the discussion you want to have? — Srap Tasmaner

The reason why one might be open to the possibility of a ‘life beyond’, or not, or why one might think it ridiculous, is the philosophical question at issue.

Both the conscious and subconscious minds can create a new idea. — MoK

So, since the subconscious mind is not conscious (by definition) consciousness is not required for the creation of ideas?

I'm going to bow out of this discussion now, and leave you to consider the consistency of the way you are thinking about this.

The reason why one might be open to the possibility of a ‘life beyond’, or not, or why one might think it ridiculous, is the philosophical question at issue. — Wayfarer

I think probabilities (epistemic), not just "possibilities" (speculative), are existential modalities which matter more for flourishing.

It's the possibilities that near-death experiences suggest that are of philosophical interest. It raises the question, in what sense is our being more than or other than physical?

I think probabilities (epistemic), not just "possibilities" (speculative), are existential modalities which matter more for flourishing — 180 Proof

I think flourishing comes from being your authentic self, as opposed to what das Man tells you to be. If being authentic means admitting that you believe in life after death, that's the direction you should take, damn the torpedoes.

Population Note — Why the Big Numbers Matter (and How I Use Them)

This page explains how I treat the scale of NDEs. I do not argue from one striking story. I argue from a pattern that shows up again and again across hospitals, decades, and cultures after public checks are applied.

Two levels of checking

I work at two levels:

Local (case by case): I grade individual cases and only let the Level-3/4 set carry real weight—tight timing windows, early independent notes, later-verified details, explicit defeater screening (what would undercut or rebut this?).

Global (pattern across cases): I then ask whether independent Level-3/4 cases keep appearing across settings. If they do, that recurrence is itself public evidence.

Both levels run with the same guardrails: No-False-Grounds, practice-safety, and a standing search for defeaters.

No-False-Grounds (NFG):
A guardrail requiring that justification not essentially rely on a false step. Example: Correct a wrong timestamp before judging a case.

Practice-Safety:
Within a given practice, the same method in sufficiently similar cases should not easily yield false beliefs. Example: If small variations routinely flip verdicts, the method lacks practice-safety.

What I count (and what I don’t)

I count cases with time-locked details, independence between sources, and verification after the fact.

I down-weight or set aside late recollections, weak timing, and contaminated sources.

I record near-misses and nulls so the picture isn’t cherry-picked.

Why scale matters

There are very many first-person reports worldwide. Let N be that big number (we don’t need to fix it exactly). Let r be a conservative fraction that would pass Level-3/4 checks if we had early notes, synchronized timing, and independent verification for all reports. My claim does not depend on knowing N or r precisely. It depends on two public facts:

Thousands already clear Level-3/4 thresholds in the curated set.

Even if r is tiny, a tiny fraction of a huge base is still many genuine cases.

That is a lower-bound inference: we don’t estimate the whole iceberg; we show that what is already above water is substantial and then note that the ocean is large.

(Illustration, not a proof): If only one in ten thousand reports met Level-3/4 standards, a population measured in the hundreds of millions would still yield many thousands of high-grade cases. The exact figures aren’t the point; the direction of the inference is.

Why “selected cases” don’t neutralize the pattern

Yes, selection bias explains why weak stories are over-told. It does not explain why independent Level-3/4 cases recur after defeater screening across different teams and institutions. Selection can pick from confounds; it cannot turn every independent, high-grade case into a confound every time across decades. At some point, recurrence under controls becomes the thing to explain.

What the pattern favors

Under global materialism (persons are nothing over and above contemporaneous brain activity; no survival when brain support ceases), accurate, time-locked details without ordinary access should be rare noise after we tighten timing, independence, and verification. Under survival, we should expect some such cases—especially in strong setups. When thousands of Level-3/4 cases accumulate across independent settings, the balance of probability moves: survival fits the total pattern better than materialism.

How I keep this disciplined

I keep claims local (per case) and global (across cases) but public at both levels.

I run the same routes (testimony, records, sensory/logic, linguistic use, form) for each case.

I log defeaters openly and let them bite.

I say probable, not certain. Probability moves with independent, verified, time-locked matches.

What would change my mind

Three things would move me off this population inference:

A credible re-audit showing that the Level-3/4 set collapses into timing errors, leakage, reconstruction, or chance when checked by independent teams.

Prospective, blinded studies that repeatedly fail to exceed chance despite strong adherence to the method.

A single, well-specified materialist mechanism that predicts the whole Level-3/4 pattern without ad hoc patches.

Bottom line

Given the recurring, independently verified, time-locked cases under strong controls, it is very likely that we survive death, and global materialism is very probably false, and I'm probably understating this conclusion.

Since my book relies heavily on epistemology, I'm giving a summary.

My epistemology in one page: classical JTB + understanding in use, further strengthened by grounding it, guarded by NFG and practice-safety, disciplined by defeater work, and executed through a public pipeline inside the practices where knowledge claims are made.

My Epistemology (JTB+U, further strengthened by grounding it)

What counts as knowledge (JTB+U).
I keep the classical spine and make it work in practice. A person knows something when four things come together: the claim matches reality (Truth), the person actually takes it to be so (Belief), there are reasons anyone can check (Public Justification), and the ideas involved are used rightly in the case at hand (Understanding-in-use). I abbreviate this as JTB+U—and I further strengthen it by grounding it.

How Wittgenstein strengthens the classical picture (PI & OC).
My enhancement of JTB draws on several reminders from Wittgenstein:

Meaning as use (PI §43). Words get their grip in use within a practice. This underwrites Understanding-in-use: not reciting a definition, but getting the application right when cases are messy.

Language-games (PI). Giving and asking for reasons is a public game with shared moves and criteria. This backs Public Justification: reasons must be checkable by anyone trained in the practice.

Hinges / what stands fast (OC, incl. §253). Some background certainties are the river-bed that lets checking and doubt even start (e.g., stable meanings, ordinary perception, records as records). Making this background explicit grounds the procedure and stops regress without turning hinges into dogmas; they can shift from within practice, typically slowly and in bulk.

Grammar of “know.” I distinguish the epistemic use (answerable to public criteria) from the convictional use (assurance without that claim). Keeping these apart avoids muddles in testimony.

Guardrails that keep the standard honest.
Two constraints run everywhere. No-False-Grounds (NFG): a load-bearing false step breaks the case. Practice-safety: by the same route, in sufficiently similar cases within the same practice, you shouldn’t easily land on a false belief. Neither demands perfection; they mark ordinary discipline. I also run defeater screening by default: undercutters attack the link from reasons to claim; rebutters supply contrary evidence.

The method (pipeline) I use.
My procedure is public and teachable:

Fix the claim. Say exactly what is alleged to be known.

Choose the justificatory route (always in the same order): (1) Testimony, (2) Logic—inductive & deductive, (3) Sensory experience, (4) Linguistic training (concept use), (5) Pure logic (form only). The first four do evidential work; the fifth sets limits on form.

Apply route-specific checks (e.g., Who said it? How could they know? What could make them wrong? Does the conclusion follow? Are the terms used as the practice teaches?).

Run the guardrails (NFG, practice-safety).

Screen defeaters (name and test undercutters/rebutters; log what would overturn the case).

Record the result (what stands, what is downgraded, what remains open).

What “practice” means for me.
A practice is a trained, public activity with standards—medicine, law, aviation, and so on. Indexing checks to practice stabilizes criteria (they don’t drift with conversational “stakes”) and keeps everything auditable.

Why this is neither relativism nor dogmatism.

Because routes and checks are public, claims aren’t “true for me”; anyone who runs the method should get the same verdict. And because hinges can shift within the practice with better tools and training, nothing is beyond revision in principle.

Gettier, deflated (why the puzzles don’t move me).

Classic Gettier cases are short puzzles where someone has a true belief for respectable-looking reasons, but the truth arrives by luck (e.g., the “job and ten coins” story). In real practices, the very features that make these puzzles “work” are exactly what my method refuses. No-False-Grounds (NFG) disqualifies load-bearing false steps; defeater screening (undercutters/rebutters) hunts the hidden gap between the reasons and the claim; practice-safety asks whether the same route, in similar cases within the same practice, would avoid easy error; and understanding-in-use requires applying the concepts correctly in messy cases (e.g., source independence, timing, provenance). Once those guardrails and route-specific checks are enforced, Gettier setups don’t pass. They are grading artifacts of toy scenarios, not counterexamples to knowledge.

Gettier tends to conflate thinking one is justified with actual justification.

So, since the subconscious mind is not conscious (by definition) consciousness is not required for the creation of ideas? — wonderer1

Thinking is about working with ideas to create new ideas. Thinking, therefore, is a conscious activity. Therefore, the subconscious mind is conscious as well if it can create a new idea since it has to think.

A section of my book follows:

From Testimony to Knowledge: Evaluating Near-Death Experiences

Misconceptions About Testimonial Evidence

A first misconception treats testimony as “mere anecdote,” as if personal reports stood outside ordinary evidential practices. In fact, most of what we know comes from others—pilots, physicians, historians—and we trust such reports when there is provenance, opportunity to verify particulars, and independence among sources. The same standards apply here: when details are time-locked to clinical windows, constrained by occlusion or anesthesia, and later confirmed by records or staff, the testimony is not “just a story”; it is data with public handles.

A second misconception assumes that testimonial error rates void a whole domain. All large testimonial fields contain noise—misremembering, embellishment, secondhand hearsay—yet we do not discard eyewitness law, clinical history-taking, or historical narrative because some reports fail. The question is whether there exists a subset of well-anchored cases that withstands ordinary scrutiny. If so, error elsewhere does not dissolve the signal; it clarifies the standard to which cases must answer.

A third misconception claims “there are no controls,” implying that without randomized trials, testimony cannot carry weight. Prospective hospital protocols supply a different kind of control: fixed clinical clocks, environmental constraints (taped eyes, sealed rooms), hidden-target or procedure-bound particulars, and independent confirmation. These features limit post-hoc embroidery and allow specific claims to be checked. They do not turn testimony into lab instrumentation, but they do make some reports probative under ordinary public standards.

A fourth misconception treats family corroboration as inherently biased. Families can be mistaken, but bias is addressed by triangulation: timing of the report, specificity of details, and independent confirmation by medical staff or records. When an experiencer names a distinctive gesture, device sound, equipment placement, or concurrent procedure that staff later verify, the corroboration does not rest on familial belief; it rests on public particulars.

A fifth misconception appeals to cultural imprinting: people report what their culture primes them to expect. Yet pediatric and congenitally blind cases strain that explanation, as do cross-cultural reports that preserve a shared core while varying surface imagery. Cultural background may shape interpretation and language, but the evidential weight lies in time-locked, checkable details under constraint—features not easily manufactured by prior narrative exposure.

A sixth misconception insists that retrospective contamination explains veridical elements (“they learned it afterward”). Close-in documentation and prospective designs answer this: what was said, when it was said, who heard it, and what the record shows. Where timing is fixed and details are specific, later exposure cannot be the source of those particulars.

A seventh misconception treats negative cases as field-defeaters (“if some reports are wrong, the thesis fails”). The thesis of this chapter is proportionate: it does not depend on unanimity or on universal accuracy. It claims that some anchored cases survive ordinary scrutiny and that these anchors stabilize the larger testimonial field. One counterexample to a weak report does not touch a different case whose particulars were independently confirmed.

An eighth misconception treats the claim of this chapter as “extraordinary” and so attempts to ratchet up the evidential bar. The claim here is modest and common: that some people accurately report specific, time-locked particulars under conditions that make ordinary perception implausible, and that these particulars can be publicly checked. Given their prevalence across cultures and clinical contexts, such reports are not rare; what matters is their anchoring. For a claim of this sort, ordinary standards—provenance, timing, constraint, and independent confirmation—are exactly the right standards. Applied consistently, they show that a subset of cases survives scrutiny; that is what the flagship anchors supply.

Finally, a methodological misconception imagines that testimonial evidence and physiological explanation are competitors at the same level. They are not. Testimony supplies the target phenomena—the what—that any physiological account must explain without relaxing the constraints that made the testimony probative (occlusion, anesthesia, sealed environments, fixed clocks, independent confirmation). A physiological proposal that cannot meet those particulars is not a rival explanation; it is a change of subject.

These clarifications do not settle every dispute, but they set the terms on which objections should proceed. The next section addresses the most common challenges in that spirit: by asking whether alternative accounts can reproduce the anchored particulars under the same constraints.