Sam, name one reproducible experiment under controlled laboratory conditions that confirms that NDEs entail either clairvoyance or disembodied cognition.

Intersubjective reproducibility of stimulus-responses of subjects undergoing NDEs is critical for the intersubjective interpretation of NDE testimonies, for otherwise we merely have a set of cryptic testimonies expressed in the private languages of NDE subjects.

I wonder if you even read what I posted. This is one of the reasons I don't reply to many of the posts.

Sam, name one reproducible experiment under controlled laboratory conditions that confirms that NDEs entail either clairvoyance or disembodied cognition. — sime

Oh, come on—demanding a "reproducible experiment under controlled laboratory conditions" for NDEs is the epitome of scientistic absurdity, as if knowledge were confined to what we can bottle up in a petri dish or replicate like a high school chem lab demo. News flash: epistemology isn't that narrow, and my thread and book hammer this home across chapters. Knowledge as justified true belief (JTB) draws from multiple paths, including testimonial evidence, which is how we know most things anyway (your birth date, Antarctica's existence, DNA's structure, all pure testimony meeting rigorous criteria). You're ignoring that NDEs manifest unpredictably during real clinical death, and contrived simulations (like ketamine trips) produce nothing like the structured, veridical perceptions in actual cases, think Pam Reynolds nailing surgical details during flat EEGs, confirmed by her neurosurgeon, or blind folks "seeing" verified scenes for the first time. It's inductive reasoning based on massive converging evidence: millions of accounts vetted by volume, variety (cross-cultural and spanning all ages), consistency (75-85% OBEs and 70-80% life reviews per Greyson's scale), corroboration (medical staff verifications), and firsthand reports.

But let's cut the crap: your lab-only fetish reeks of selective skepticism and blatant disregard for real epistemology, testimonial evidence, when it stacks up like this, is robust knowledge, just as in history (Caesar's Rubicon from converging accounts, no lab needed), law (convictions on corroborated witness testimony), or science itself (black holes inferred from patterns, not reproducible explosions; quantum mechanics from unreplicable setups). If you applied this absurd standard consistently, you'd trash epidemiology (inductive correlations from patient testimonies, not causal proofs) or even your own scientific beliefs (peer papers are testimony, buddy). Face it: naturalism's explanations (anoxia in just 10-20% of cases, seizures failing veridical tests) crumble holistically against the data, but you wave it away with a self-sealing "not lab enough" fallacy. That's not rigor—it's dogmatic avoidance of evidence threatening your unexamined hinge that consciousness must be brain-bound (Wittgenstein would call this a classic assumption trap, as in Chapter 6). Knowledge isn't about lab reproducibility; it's about probabilistic inference from the best evidence we have, and dismissing testimonials that meet courtroom-level standards while accepting them elsewhere is just hypocritical scientism. Read the thread before demanding more; otherwise, you're proving my point about epistemic double standards.

But it can't. — Wayfarer

But physics, biology, machine learning explains how we can learn things about the world and interact with it efficaciously, including words and symbols. Where is the mystery? You're aiming at the wrong thing. Meaning isn't problematic in these arguments, phenomenal experience is the big target.

Why doesn't phenomenal experience bother me either? As you would agree, we only perceive the world experientially. My engagement with scientific facts is through my experience, and people can only engage with what science predicts through experience. Using science requires people doing stuff, reading, talking, etc, which they experience. Science is embedded and enacted in the informational structure of out experiences. Science doesn't deal with or characterize something like an intrinsic way the physical world is.

At the same time, no one can give any non-primitive, fundamental characterization of their own experiences or what elucidate further description /explanation of what exactly the phenomenal aspect of experience is. There is absolutely nothing more to experience than direct aquaintance. Science then also just deals with descriptions of structure grapsable in terms of directly aquainted information of our own experiences, like any description or explanation does.

Science represents us our knowledge of the natural world and gives strong evidence of the relationship (or even isomorphism in Chalmer's words) between our experience we are directly aquainted with and at least aspects of information in brains. There is no scientific evidence for phenomenal experience as an independent stand-alone structure in the universe.

There is simply no evidence for dualism, simply put, that phenomenal experience meaningfully represents any kind of independent causal structures or powers that we are not already probing in the sciences of physics, brains, cognition, machine learning. I am no better able to characterize an intrinsic nature of experience as I am some putative intrinsic nature of scientific structures that should be the case under physicalism / naturalism / materialism / whatever your preferred label. There is simply nothing here of fundamental incompatibility between physical science and experiences unless maybe you look at what science says about the physical in the kind of hyper-naive realist, hyper-reductive sense which is just not a plausible way of looking at anything. At the same time, it seems evident to me that part of our perplexity about our own experience could be, should be, plausibly explainable through science itself as a consequence of natural limitations to what brains and machine learning can do. There's no reason to think our opinions about experiences come from anywhere else. Other than that, the perplexity of there being anything that it is like to be a macroscopic thing is not addressed by any perspective on the hard problem of consciousness; but such a question jumps the gun because imo it presupposes a way the world is that is fundamentally incompatible with that, a presupposition that is unjustified because science doesn't actually talk about that. The notion of an intrinsic fundamental nature of the world isn't graspable scientically; nor can I grasp anything meaningful about my own experiences other than I have them, that I see stuff.

Yes, but I mentioned brains without activity in the sentence directly before. An example suggesting the plausibility that a flatlined brain can still be responsive to external stimuli. — Apustimelogist

I think the brain is responsive to external stimuli until its cells die to a certain extent. We are, however, talking about a case of NDE in which the person does not have any brain activity.

I mean you could give an explanation for this that is completely physical; a physicalist would explain spiritual experiences from psychedelics completely physically too. — Apustimelogist

And what is the physical explanation for NDE?

The problem here imo is presupposing dualism and presupposing some fundamental ontological divide between what happens when we perceive and have experiences, and everything else we know about. I don't believe we need to make this presupposition. — Apustimelogist

We need them. Experience is an accepted phenomenon in the domain of materialism. Materialists claim that matter also exists and behaves according to the laws of physics. Materialism also claims that matter does not have any experience in most forms, but in the brain. They claim that experience is the result of neural processes in the brain. We are dealing with a kind of strong emergence, as experience is something more than just neural processes in the brain. Granting that such an emergence is possible, we are still dealing with a problem. To demonstrate the problem, we need to note that the experience cannot be causally efficacious in the world for two reasons, as I demonstrated in my former post to you, yet we observe that there is a correlation between our experiences and how we change reality in the form that pleases us.

This seems like a strawman wrapped in speculation. My argument/book isn't relying on "limited amounts of case studies" as isolated anecdotes; it's drawing on millions (100's of millions worldwide) NDE reports worldwide, corroborated by thousands of verified accounts in peer-reviewed studies (e.g., via IANDS, Greyson's NDE Scale, and prospective hospital research like the Dutch study I mention). These aren't cherry-picked "case studies"; they're a massive, diverse dataset of testimonial evidence spanning cultures, eras, ages, and medical contexts. I'm not claiming causality in the narrow experimental sense (e.g., "NDEs cause afterlife belief"); I'm making an inductive argument that the patterns in this evidence (veridical perceptions during flat EEGs, cross-cultural consistency, transformative effects) make consciousness persistence beyond brain activity the most probable explanation. — Sam26

But again, the fact that people report experiences doesn't entail an interpretation unless you can rule out alternatives, doesn't matter how many people report them, and I strongly suspect the great majority of reports nowhere near make claims that are strong enough to make any conceivable challengr to naturalistic explanation: i.e. its probably very rare in the scheme of things where people have near death experiences that involve verifiable claims about things that happened while they were not in a normal awake conscious state. The fact that your instinct is to say that these reflect something supernatural is itself speculation because the studies that rule out alternative explanations or explain what actually is happening during these reports has not been done. Your induction is ignoring the possibility that if more detailed scientific exploration was done, we might find naturalistic explanations.

Your speculation that a "physicalist explanation is possible if we only had more information" isn't evidence; it's a defeater that could be applied to anything to avoid confronting data. Imagine applying this to historical knowledge: "Sure, eyewitness accounts say Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon, but without controlled experiments, a physicalist explanation (like mass hallucination or forged documents) is possible if we had more info." We'd dismiss all history! Or in medicine: "Patient testimonies correlate smoking with cancer, but without infinite data, an unknown physical factor might explain it away." This is epistemic paralysis, not rigor. — Sam26

No, you are confused. My arguments are nothing to do with skepticism. My arguments are is that naturalism is very successful at explaining. The supernatural is not successful. The degree to which I am skeptical that Caesar crossed the Rubicon depends on whether I have reason to think him doing so is not likely.

This is not epistemic paralysis, its epistemic confidence, and it makes any skepticism of these supernatural claims very reasonable.

already confronts physicalist alternatives, hallucinations, anoxia, endorphins, temporal lobe seizures, DMT surges, and shows where they fail: they don't account for veridical elements (e.g., Pam Reynolds' accurate description of the Midas Rex bone saw and arterial issues during no brain activity), consistency across non-hypoxic cases, or reports from blind individuals gaining "vision" that's later verified. — Sam26

The problem is that it is widely acknowledge that we don't actually have huge scientific mastery over how the brain works compared to say physics. The fact that these explanations may be limited does not necessarily rule out explanation if we were to gain more knowledge about what is actually happening. Retroactively trying to fit explanations to case studies is not the way to resolve this either. The way to rwsolve this is controlled experiments where you can account for confounding variables, account for statistical "luck", all sorts of things. As I said before, I can find controlled experimental studies that show that brains are still responsive when they are "isoelectric" which is the criteria used to characterize a brain as having no activity. Again, the problem with case studies with verifiable information is that they are extremely rare, and even in the studies like Parnia's where they try to actually do controlled experiments with verifiable information, they couldn't actually get anything from it because reports which contain that kind of information are very rare. These reports come under the realm of anecdotal case studies.

we accept quantum mechanics based on unreplicable (in everyday terms) experiments, black holes from indirect inference, and the Magna Carta's signing from testimonial convergence. — Sam26

Again, this depends on what yoy are studying. Quantum mechanics isn't based on unreplicable experiment.

But the kind of verification you need dependa on what you are studying. Inferring that Jesus existed or the Magna Carter was signed has a different standard to quantum mechanical experiemnts which has a different standard to biomedical studies. Because these are all very different things making claims of different strengths with different confounds. Applying the kind of standard that warrants belief that Jesus existed to experimental trials in medicine would be frankly ridiculous. The claims of NDEs and supernatural arguably require more rigor than any of these and do demand replication.

But that's an argument against over-relying on "controlled" science as the sole arbiter of truth, not for dismissing testimonial evidence! My book isn't pretending NDEs are lab-replicable; it's evaluating them epistemologically, where replication isn't the benchmark — Sam26

NDE studies use the same kind of methods as biomedical and social sciences. It is exactly these kinds of methods that have issues with replicability. And if they are not in principle replicable then they are limited in saying anything more than a qualitative characterization of what people experienced. Its fine to have studies doing this. You can have qualitative studies in social science examining the opinions of a certain community, of people's recollections of some historical event. Does this allow you to infer something more fundamental about the world? Not necessarily. And if you're studies are trying to make scientific claims about the world, then they require scientific methods to ensure that they can make reliable inferences. You are making a scientific claim about the way the universe is. Just as physics and biology require replicable experiments to show that their theories are empirically adequate, you need to do the same to show there is no possibility that scientific theories can account for the same phenomena.

If you do not have a strong basis to do so, people are justified in not believing you given a confidence in naturalism.

You ignore how my inductive argument mirrors successful scientific inferences: germ theory wasn't "replicated" in one lab but induced from converging testimonies (patient reports, autopsies). — Sam26

Sure, ans maybe they were sufficient for certain claims at the time. Doesn't mean the same necessarily applied to your theory.

NDEs' veridical hits (e.g., the Dutch dentures case, where a revived patient described the nurse's actions and trolley layout) are replicable in pattern, occurring in ~10-20% of documented cases. Dismissing this as non-convincing requires ignoring epistemology. — Sam26

Again, verification doesn't point to why they were verified. Was the verification because of the supernatural or because of naturalistic reasons, maybe a mix of actual sensory information coming into the brain, maybe luck, maybe other confounds. I am.completely entitled to want to know exactly how this happened and rule out naturalistic explanations. Just giving reports does not do this.

The power of corroborated testimonial evidence—your blind spot—is that it's how most knowledge travels (Chapter 1: birth dates, Antarctica, DNA). When it meets my criteria (high volume: millions; variety: global/demographic; consistency: core patterns; corroboration: medical verifications; firsthand: direct reports), it's not "intuition"—it's justified true belief. Speculating "more info might physicalize it" is like a flat-Earther saying "unknown optics explain away satellite photos." It's not engagement; it's evasion. — Sam26

The issue is that you have a prior inclination for the supernatural so you interpret testimonials that way. My inclination is not that way so I demand stronger evidence because this is not the natural way for me to interpret those testimonials. I am happy to except testimonials on other things where their claim seem justified. None of my criticism isn't about some inherent bias toward a specific method for the study of all things. Simply, in this case those methods are warranted.

flat-Earther saying "unknown optics explain away satellite photos." It's not engagement; it's evasion. — Sam26

These testimonials are nowhere near the evidence that earth is not flat. You don't even have a description of what is happening in the other realm of souls and spirits.

In sum, your comment is ridiculous because it demands impossible standards (lab NDEs?) — Sam26

You literally cited authors who have tried to do this. At the same time, so what? Verifying quantum mechanics would have required standards impossible hundreds of years ago. Doesn't mean it is not the case.

Otherwise, it's just a dogmatic defense, exactly what I warn against. — Sam26

Its no more a dogmatic defence than you. The evidence appears to you a certain way because of your inclinations which is not convincing to most others. If I have string confidence in naturalism for good reason, there is nothing unreasonable about demanding more evidence.

Your appeal to life after death is about as handwavey as my appeal to what future science might say because you dont have any model of what happens after death, there is no reliable empirical evidence of any other realm.

This fallacy occurs when a position is structured to be unfalsifiable; any counterevidence is automatically reinterpreted or dismissed as incomplete, with the promise that "more information" or some unknown mechanism will eventually confirm the theory. In your case, speculating about possible physicalist explanations "if we only had more information" seals off the argument from refutation; no matter how much converging testimonial evidence piles up (veridical perceptions, cross-cultural patterns, etc.). This isn't rational skepticism; it's a rhetorical move that begs the question, assuming materialism's truth while demanding infinite proof from alternatives. — Sam26

No, this is what happens naturally in all science and eventually when more evidence occurs or people can no longer defend their views, they change their minds. But this happens because the new theories offer new things that the old theories cannot match. You have not met the standard for me to change my views. You need more concrete evidence. Until them I am entitled to be confident in naturalistic explanations.

We are, however, talking about a case of NDE in which the person does not have any brain activity. — MoK

That is what a flatlined brain is. When they say that a brain has no activity, they mean it is flatlined. The point is that clearly the report of a flatlined brain doesn't necessarily mean it actually has no activity.

And what is the physical explanation for NDE? — MoK

Brain activity... like the brain activity that would cause experiences for someone under psychedelics or from a traumatic injury.

We need them. Experience is an accepted phenomenon in the domain of materialism. Materialists claim that matter also exists and behaves according to the laws of physics. Materialism also claims that matter does not have any experience in most forms, but in the brain. They claim that experience is the result of neural processes in the brain. We are dealing with a kind of strong emergence, as experience is something more than just neural processes in the brain. Granting that such an emergence is possible, we are still dealing with a problem. — MoK

You have not justified the presuppositions, just regurgitated them.

including testimonial evidence, which is how we know most things anyway (your birth date, Antarctica's existence, DNA's structure, — Sam26

You're comparing corroborated, empirically verifiable testimonies with NDEs. Many people have been to Antarctica, birthdates are verifiable through official documents, and DNA's structure was ascertained via a falsifiable model that was rigorously tested. NDEs do not benefit from predictive models (e.g. DNA) or external datasets for empirical verification. So what's left to make that comparison sound?

You seem to be appealing to a volume of data while ignoring whether or not the data is even quality data:

think Pam Reynolds nailing surgical details during flat EEGs, confirmed by her neurosurgeon — Sam26

Without getting into the specifics of this, it seems that this can be critiqued from so many angles: we don't know when the memories were formed, possible confabulation, conflating functional shutdown of an organ vs the death of the organ...etc.

consistency (75-85% OBEs and 70-80% life reviews per Greyson's scale) — Sam26

You're basing consistency off of a measurement that employs ZERO rigor..

But let's cut the crap: your lab-only fetish reeks of selective skepticism — Sam26

Ditch the lab. The dichotomy between a lab based experiment and whatever approach you think you're doing is false. The demand is for verifiable evidence. But you've already defined NDE's out of this scope while pretending it's similar to other areas of science.

.

If you applied this absurd standard consistently, you'd trash epidemiology (inductive correlations from patient testimonies, not causal proofs) or even your own scientific beliefs (peer papers are testimony, buddy). — Sam26

Sure both start with testimony. The main difference is that epidemiology is transformative. Patient data is collected in ways that minimize biases (placebos, control groups, double blind spot protocols..etc), confounding factors are explored and findings that persist after attempts to falsify them are presented. This is different than just a collection of uncontested stories.

Knowledge isn't about lab reproducibility; it's about probabilistic inference from the best evidence we have, and dismissing testimonials that meet courtroom-level standards while accepting them elsewhere is just hypocritical scientism. — Sam26

Dismissing anecdotes that don't live up to the scrutiny that science generally thrives on isn't scientism. Also not sure why you mention "courtroom-level standards". In a courtroom, we need a binary verdict to make a practical decision when we have less than perfect information. When we do science we want to approximate the truth beyond an unreasonable doubt.


It sounds like you're making an argument to reduce the standard of evidence for NDE's because you find them conceptually interesting.

You certainly experience, don't you? Are you a materialist?

I am guessing that if EEGs are flatlining when patients are developing memories associated with NDEs, that this is evidence for sparse neural encoding of memories during sleep that does not involve the global electrical activity of millions of neurons that is entailed by denser neural encoding that an EEG would detect.

Which seems ironic, in the sense that Sheldrake proponent's seem to think that apparent brain death during memory formation is evidence for radically holistic encoding of memories extending beyond the brain. But when you think about it for more than a split second, the opposite seems far more likely, namely atomistic, symbol-like memories being formed that slip under the EEG radar.

My arguments are is that naturalism is very successful at explaining. The supernatural is not successful. — Apustimelogist

:up: :up:

You [@Sam26] are making a scientific claim about the way the universe is. Just as physics and biology require replicable experiments to show that their theories are empirically adequate, you need to do the same to show there is no possibility that scientific theories can account for the same phenomena. — Apustimelogist

:100:

If you [@Sam26] do not have a strong basis to do so, people are justified in not believing you given a confidence in naturalism.

:up:

:up: :up:

First, that testimonial evidence is a valid way of justifying one's conclusions, and moreover, one's beliefs. Most of what we know comes from the testimony of others. Thus, it's a way of attaining knowledge. — Sam26

Let's talk then about how testimonial evidence is typically accepted as proof of a fact. Testimony is the primary method used in courtrooms for fact finders to consider when determining fairly important matters, like whether a person should have his liberty or life taken from him or whether he should be indebted to another for millions of dollars.

There are all sorts of rules, referred to as rules of evidence that, for our purposes, could be called pragmatic epistimology, meaning the applied ways we consider evidence generally, but testimony specifically, trustworthy. Without getting into all the rules, I'll just focus on a few: (1) hearsay, (2) cross examination, and (3) the weighing of credibility. I'm sure another lawyer out there might think it better to focus on other rules, but these are enough to make my point.

To begin: Hearsay is an out of court statement conveyed by another in order to prove its truth. Think of it as "I heard Bob say [i.e. hear say] that Mike shot Joe." We don't trust that because we need to hear from Bob as to what Bob said, not me. You can't question me on what I witnessed because all I can tell you is what I heard.

So, when you tell me that you read a book that offered testimony from a witness as to their NDE, or even further removed, testimony of testimony from another as to what someone said, I have second and third hand evidence, none of which I can question.

And that brings me to the second issue: Cross examination. I have to be able to seriously question the witness to know what happened. Reading a witness statement without asking all sorts of details, particularly ones like how much familiarity someone might have with operating rooms, who they may have spoken with between the event and the testimony, the very particular thing they said without embellishment at the time of the event, who was present to corroborate the testimony, whether those corroborating witnesses have offered consistent information, and on and on and on.

And then there is the weighing of credibility. All the things I've said have to be considered, and it's perfectly appropriate for someone just not to buy it. To listen to the witnesses and feel like it just doesn't add up, that the speakers seem flaky, motivated, confused, or whatever it might be is a very acceptable to reason just not to beleive what they're saying.

The point here is that you're asking me to believe NDE testimony has been offered in a way that leads to no other conclusion than to admit that our physical laws as we know them have been violated. That's just way too much to ask. I would need a videotaped OR, watching a pronouncement of death, seeing a patient revived and then hearing that patient then tell of his observations he made without using his eyes from a bird's eye view hovering in the operating room.

Since I don't have that, it's very reasonable for me to reject the testimony. In fact, it's fairly unreasonable to read a bunch of books on NDEs and then believe it's possible to see without eyes. Other experiments show that just cannot be done. That there are volumes and volumes of evidence amounts to nothing if that evidence isn't subjected to meaningful scrutiny.

@Sam26

That there are volumes and volumes of evidence amounts to nothing if that evidence isn't subjected to meaningful scrutiny. — Hanover

:100:

See this post

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/1009371

Where is the mystery? — Apustimelogist

The mystery lies precisely in the fact that every scientific explanation presupposes symbolic mediation — concepts, meanings, language — which themselves are not physical properties. The ink marks, sounds, or neural firings are physical events; the meaning they convey is not. That irreducible distinction is what Howard Pattee called the “epistemic cut" which arises precisely with the beginning of organic life and the implicit distinction between self and other, subject and object.

We don’t notice this because we’re always looking through the symbolic, not at it. That’s why meaning is so hard to make the object of analysis — and why newer sciences like biosemiotics and phenomenology are needed. They still fall under the umbrella of science, but they’re worlds away from the hard-edged materialism of earlier generations, precisely because that old framework has proven untenable.

One thing I notice in your posts is the taken-for-granted-ness of many of your responses, and the many arguments you “don’t see the point of.” Since antiquity it has been said that wisdom begins in wonder, and it strikes me that this dimension is absent from your replies, which read more as “business as usual.” No offense intended — it’s just that philosophy, at least for me, is about keeping that sense of wonder alive.

Thanks for laying out your standards. I share the basic orientation: testimony has to earn its way. Where we differ is that I’ve already built those safeguards into how I handle NDE reports, and I’m drawing my conclusion only from the subset that survives them.

On hearsay: I don’t rely on “I heard Bob say…” stories. My core set is firsthand reports documented close to the event, anchored to the medical record, and checkable against named staff and physical particulars. If a report is second- or third-hand, or written long after the fact without anchors, I either exclude it or discount it to near zero. That’s the first filter.

On cross-examination: in hospitals we don’t put witnesses on a stand, but we do the functional equivalent. I align what the patient reports with time-stamped chart entries, device logs, anesthetic records, and independent staff recollections; I separate subjective color from objective particulars; and I re-interview where possible. The questions you’d ask on cross—prior familiarity with ORs, conversations between event and report, exact words recorded at the time, who else was present, whether those witnesses match—are exactly the questions I use to grade a case up or down. Many accounts fall away under that scrutiny; I’m not pressing those. I’m pressing the small, stubborn set that doesn’t fall away.

On credibility: agreed that “I just don’t buy it” can be reasonable when the story is thin. That’s why I don’t ask anyone to trust vibes. I ask them to weigh concrete, low-chance particulars that can be checked: the specific location of an object the patient could not see from the bed; an idiosyncratic staff behavior noted at the time and later confirmed; a room layout described correctly under occlusion; timing that matches documented procedures. When such particulars line up under independent checks, “flaky” ceases to be an explanation.

You also set a bar—“videotape the OR through pronouncement and revival and then have the patient report bird’s-eye details with no eyes.” For phenomena we can’t ethically stage, what’s reproducible is method, not a movie on cue. Detective work is the right analogy: you build a case by convergence—multiple independent strands that fit the same timeline. Chain of custody for objects; contemporaneous notes; independent witnesses; and a tight timeline that leaves little room for later embroidery. That is how I treat NDE reports. When those controls are present across different hospitals and years, and the same kind of low-chance, checkable details recur, that pattern has probative force even without a camera.

You say “other experiments show that just cannot be done.” Experiments showing that blindfolded subjects can’t see, or that perception typically depends on functioning eyes, don’t decide what to do with time-locked, independently verified reports under deep anesthesia or during arrest. Those lab results set a default expectation; the question is whether the verified particulars in the strongest cases fit any available natural account of residual awareness, leakage, confabulation, or post-hoc contamination better than they fit the hypothesis that some veridical perception occurred. If you have a specific experimental result that maps onto those conditions and explains the same particulars, I’ll examine it and happily downgrade the case.

Finally, on the scope of the conclusion: I’m not asking you to “admit that our physical laws have been violated.” I’m making a modest, probabilistic inference from testimony that has passed the filters you listed. Some NDEs include accurate, independently verified information acquired when ordinary sensory access and integrated cortical function should have been unavailable or severely compromised. That is an evidential mismatch. It doesn’t demand metaphysical fireworks; it demands we either (a) supply a concrete, natural explanation that fits the verified features without ad hoc patches, or (b) accept that, on our current evidence, the survival-friendly hypothesis fits those features at least as well.

If you want to put this to a clean test, pick a single, well-documented case that meets my five standards—volume/diversity/consistency are background, but the decisive screens are firsthand plus independent corroboration, and run your three courtroom filters on it: exclude hearsay, interrogate it as you would on cross, and then weigh credibility in light of the objective traces (records, witnesses, timestamps, objects). If it fails, I’ll strike it from the “strong” column. If it passes, then by your own rules, it deserves evidential weight.

My core set is firsthand reports documented close to the event, anchored to the medical record, and checkable against named staff and physical particulars. — Sam26

Except the video you posted of Nancy Rynes a couple days ago, saying

The following NDE typifies what I've been saying in this thread. — Sam26

fits none of those criteria.

I watched it ― at the maximum allowable speed, but I watched the whole thing. It's a story that by then she had been telling for 8 years, and the bulk of it is about what she claims to remember having experienced during surgery. Not only is there nothing objectively verifiable in her story, if what she says is accurate it is inherently unverifiable and incomparable because she was told that everything she saw was a "construct" just for her. (A couple hundred years ago she wouldn't have had the word "construct" or "simulation" to use, and would have said "dream".)

So how does Nancy Rynes bolster your case? Why did you post her story?

What you fail to understand is that once the core of the NDE reports has been established, and I believe they have, then you don't need to verify every NDE account. So, that video represents what I've uncovered from the over 5000 accounts I've studied. Moreover, I'm not only relying on what I've uncovered, but what many researchers have uncovered. My study is not haphazard; it's systematic and epistemological.

I began this thread to gather as many counterarguments as possible and test whether my reasoning truly holds. Having examined the responses, I’m convinced my conclusion stands. Alongside this, I’ve been working on a book—From Testimony to Knowledge: Evaluating Near-Death Experiences—which is now nearly complete, though it’s taken longer than I expected. At roughly 150 pages, it approaches the subject from a distinctly epistemological angle, setting it apart from many other works in the field. In fact, epistemology forms the book’s backbone: Chapters 6 and 7 are dedicated to an in‑depth exploration of it. The result is a work that leans heavily into philosophy, so I suspect many readers may not make it far past Chapter 5, and if you're a committed materialist, you may not make past the first few sentences.

you're asking me to believe NDE testimony has been offered in a way that leads to no other conclusion than to admit that our physical laws as we know them have been violated. — Hanover

We demand physical evidence that there is anything that is not physical!!

the meaning they convey is not. — Wayfarer

What we call meaning is completely explainable in terms of sciences, even if difficult. Its just anoyher thing brains do.

They still fall under the umbrella of science, but they’re worlds away from the hard-edged materialism of earlier generations, precisely because that old framework has proven untenable. — Wayfarer

Statements like this just make me think you are saying a lot of these things not based in any of your own kind of thought out analysis of these issues but just because you have a deep dislike of certain science-like things for no reason discernible to me. You then just pick someone to quote and parrot off their view.

One thing I notice in your posts is the taken-for-granted-ness of many of your responses, and the many arguments you “don’t see the point of.” — Wayfarer

Explain the mystery. Explain why it can't be explained. I don't understand. You then cite biosemiotics which seems likena contradiction.

I suspect you're trying to critique some kind of explanatory reductionism but thats not really the right target because most physicalists or naturalists would say that in principle these things can be or will be explainable in terms if hard sciences but its just not practically feasible or something like that. No one really takes difficulties in explanatory reductionism as strong argument when it comes to something like the mind-body problem. In fact, I'm sure most don't even think explanatory reductionism is desirable, just that it is in principle possible. Showing that there are things that don't have a drilled in explanation in terms of hard sciences now is not sufficient for your point. You need to argue that in principle these things can never be explained. You need to show something like its in principle impossible to model in terms of things like physics, biology, machine learning, the kinds of behaviors, cognition, interactions with the world associated with what we call meaning. Or at least give a convincing reason why it could never be done that is not contingent on something tangential like technology limits.

we'll pick it up elsewhere, it's not really connected to this topic.

In modern western societies, a testimony that appeals to clairvoyance falls under misrepresentation of evidence, an inevitable outcome under witness cross examination in relation to critical norms of rational enquiry and expert testimony, possibly resulting in accusations of perjury against the witness. I would hazard a guess that the last time an American court accepted 'spectral' evidence was during the Salem witch trials.

The need for expert testimony is even enshrined in the code of Hammurabi of ancient Mesopotamia; not even the ancients accepted unfettered mass testimony.

So much for us "naysaying materialists" refusing to accept courtroom standards of evidence (unless we are talking about courtrooms in a backward or corrupt developing country).

I struggled with the Nancy Rynes video. Is she lying? Is she deluded? Is it all true? Listening to her story, these questions don't really find any purchase. I was reminded of how I feel when I listen to Christians talking about ― whatever they talk about, discerning the gifts of the Spirit and whatnot, or listening to MAGA people talk about the threat that monster Kilmar Abrego-Garcia poses to America or the theft of the 2020 presidential election. We are not in the realm of true-and-false here at all. I cannot enter sympathetically into this way of talking; I'm tempted to say it's like listening to people speaking a foreign language I don't understand, but they're using words I use, so it's more like listening to experts discuss something I don't have the background to understand. I recognize the words; I have no trouble putting the sentences together as they come; their apparent literal meaning is not difficult to work out, even if strange; but I have no feeling for the purpose of these sentences, why these were chosen and not others, why these words and not others, what a natural response to such a sentence would be. To my ear, it's just a sort of word music.

When outsiders like me listen to a MAGAist talk about January 6th, we tend to get stuck halfway between our world and his: the terms of the discussion, we think, come from our own world, the one governed by laws written in our world, with facts established in our way, and we hear the MAGA people take some of the words and ideas from our world and then use them wrong ― again, a little like someone learning a foreign language making mistakes, or a child. So we're inclined to correct them, point out their mistakes, explain the finer points of things like laws and facts, because it sounds to us like they are trying to speak our language and getting it wrong, or even like they are deliberately misusing our language and we ought to stop them. But generally this is all pointless because all of the words and ideas that seem derived from our words and ideas ― maybe they are, maybe they aren't, but they aren't ours anymore at all and there's no way to take them back. They have very different meanings now, among the MAGA, and if you think they're the same as your words and ideas, very little of what they say makes sense ― in the sense that they say things that, if we said them, would be obviously false or inconsistent or reprehensible, but in their world they seem to count as true and just and good.

Wittgenstein seems to offer us two options here: we can say that this is what language-games look like, and this sort of self-referential, untethered-to-reality effect we perceive in the way these other groups talk and think and behave, that's the way everyone is in their own speech community, and we're no different; or we can say that these are genuinely and definably deviant uses of language, language gone "on holiday," the engine no longer hooked up to anything and just spinning idly, that sort of thing.

The complete failure of your project in this thread, @Sam26, is in trying to force together the sort of talk people share at new age gatherings and other sorts of talk that, whatever they are, aren't that.

You're sympathetic to the sorts of things Nancy Rynes says. Many people are. I glanced at the comments on the video at YouTube, and people do find this sort of thing very meaningful. (Interestingly, a number of comments I saw were not related to NDEs as such but simply to the afterlife; people take Nancy to be describing what their departed loved ones are experiencing, for instance.) I can imagine being sympathetic, and I can even manage it for a few seconds at a time if I try, but I can't sustain it.

I don't think you've ever confronted just how different a story like hers is from what you want to present it to us as. She's walking along through her afterlife construct with her teacher, while laying on an operating table, and ― I forget how she puts this exactly ― she glances over her shoulder or turns around and notices that behind her is just a grey void, not the mountain meadows and forests she had just walked through, and this is when her teacher tells her it's not real. Now think about that. How did she notice the grey void? By looking behind her?

What does that even mean in this context? ― The metaphor she's using here is what we're familiar with from video games. When playing a screen based video game, there are two ways to turn around and look: you can physically turn around, away from the screen, and now you see your room and your stuff; you can turn around in game, and the engine will render new scenery for you in real time. If you're playing a VR game, that distinction is gone and physically turning is turning in game. There are cases when you can glitch into the landscape and get to see some void on your screen, but it's not by design.

The question here is, in what sense did Nancy look behind her? And why was this amazing construct she described so poorly coded that it didn't render when she turned too far?

The point of these questions is to be wrong. They don't matter. Looking behind her is a narrative device, to set up her teacher's explanation. She's telling a story, but it's not the same sort of thing as the story she tells about her accident, which could, up to a point, be verifiably true or false, and make normal sense or not. When she says part of her consciousness split off and was 50 to 75 feet away, it is not the case that we could establish exactly how far away it was, that it could turn out to be exactly 78 feet away and her estimate from memory wrong. ― Where each vehicle was and what happened could be established to a reasonable degree with enough witnesses, cameras, physical traces, all that. That's just not true of almost everything else she says.

Parts of her story could be shown to be true or false in the everyday sense. Parts of her story aren't like that at all, but you keep presenting them as if they are. The task of treating the one like the other is so obviously impossible that you have to cherry pick relentlessly, and just pass right over the 99% of these stories that is clearly not even a candidate for verification in any normal sense. Did Nancy speak with a single teacher or was it three that walked and spoke in unison? What color were the little energy sparkles that came out of the flowers when she touched them? Could she have misremembered? She says the sky was a sort of metallic blue; is that right? Did it have ultraviolet streaks in it? Has she gotten her teacher's exact words right? What if she got a crucial word wrong? Couldn't she have misunderstood the message she was to bring back to the world?

This whole project of treating these stories as testimonial evidence is doomed from the start. The people who find these stories meaningful don't need it. For the rest of us, it's a non-starter.

For me, these stories are a kind of oral wisdom tradition. Nancy's story is symbolically meaningful but not literally. I don't know if the same thing is true of how I usually talk and think, but I hope not. I don't know whether Wittgenstein entitles me to ignore Nancy as speaking "on holiday" or if I should recognize that I'm no different. William James was open to spiritual and religious experience in a way that his science-minded audience finds hard to accept, but for him it was perfectly consistent with his pragmatism. (Relevant here because of Ramsey's influence on Wittgenstein.) Maybe if this is the result, pragmatism and the later Wittgenstein are a disastrous wrong turn after all.

I can't answer any of those questions, but in trying to present these stories as testimonial evidence of anything, I think you're just barking up the wrong tree.

After reading your post, it’s clear that much of what I’ve said hasn’t come through. Very little of your reply engages with the actual points I’ve argued—either here in this thread or in my upcoming book. It feels as though my words are intercepted and dismissed before they even register. I can usually tell from someone’s response whether they’ve truly grasped my argument, and in most cases, they haven’t. Importantly, comprehension is independent of agreement: I’ve had thoughtful exchanges with people who understand my reasoning yet disagree with it, and I’ve also met those who share my conclusion without understanding the argument at all. That gap itself is, to me, an interesting phenomenon.

If you want to put this to a clean test, pick a single, well-documented case that meets my five standards—volume/diversity/consistency are background, but the decisive screens are firsthand plus independent corroboration, and run your three courtroom filters on it: exclude hearsay, interrogate it as you would on cross, and then weigh credibility in light of the objective traces (records, witnesses, timestamps, objects). If it fails, I’ll strike it from the “strong” column. If it passes, then by your own rules, it deserves evidential weight. — Sam26

Well, you have the burden here of proving NDEs exist. It's not upon me to go through the volumes of claims and cross them off the list one by one. So, give me the one that meets the criteria and we'll see if it survives.

You're trying to make an apple pie with strawberries.

@Hanover gamely pointed out that people can't see without using their eyes, and all of the reports you rely on are of people seeing without their eyes and hearing without their ears. So are you using the words "see" and "hear" the way Hanover and I do, or in some other way?

My comment on your argument is that direct experience is inviolate. If you experienced X, you experienced X. If you deny that, you'll end up in the middle of a reality crisis after you've realized you have no criteria for determining what's real and what isn't. To keep your bearings, you hold to your direct experience on pain of being tortured to death.

On the other hand, explanations for your experiences should, at least to some degree, be in flux. You may have your pet theory that explains your experiences, but you should hold out the possibility that new information will appear and revolutionize everything you believe, so direct experience is the center of your universe. Explanations orbit and possibly explode if they're disproved.

You are sure able to type your thoughts. Are you denying that?

Maybe you should type yours rather than silly one-line questions.

My question is not silly. Considering that your thoughts are mental events and have no physical properties, I wonder how they could affect physical processes, such as typing. Do you have an explanation for that?