You never know Sam. Well, maybe never is too strong a word. :)

IE, if most people do not experience a specific NDE event (like love or disembodiment, in the list of 15) given that they have had an NDE and that they have almost died, then there's grounds for doubting the veridicality of the experience. 15% of people have had an NDE in those conditions in America according to a Gallup poll, of these 9% reported the classic out of body experience, 11% said they had entered another realm and 8% had encountered otherworldly beings. Assuming these categories are independent and exhaustive, you can obtain that 72% of people who had an NDE experienced nothing contained in the list or nothing at all. I'd be surprised if they were exhaustive, but it still looks like the majority of people who had an NDE couldn't categorise it according to listed tropes in the poll OR alternatively they nearly died and experienced nothing. — fdrake

It's true that most people who are near death, or have had some experience that brings them near death don't experience any of the listed testimonial reports. However, I don't see how this negates the millions of consistent reports of those that have. All of us have experiences that most people haven't had, that doesn't mean that my experiences are any less real, or that my reports of those experiences are doubtful in the same sense you're doubting NDEs. You seem to be concluding that because more people haven't had the experience that that somehow makes the millions of experiences of those who have had the experience doubtful. It does raise questions, I agree, but I don't see that it means that what people are experiencing in these NDEs is any less veridical.

For example, less take our experiences in everyday life, if I'm at a party with 100 other people and 15 of these people claim that X happened, and that those closest to the experience or who claim to have had the same experience agree that X happened, then your claim is that X probably didn't happen. Your claim is based not on counter-evidence, but on the fact that the 85 other people at the party didn't report those same experiences, or that they have no recollection of X happening. But all they are saying is that they didn't have the experience. If they had the experience and reported completely different reports, then I would say that you have an argument, but that's not what their saying. Their saying, I was at the party but didn't experience what those 15 people experienced.

Being near death doesn't always bring on the experience. I think that's the most you can say about your argument. Besides being near death is not a near death experience. What I mean is this, an NDE is defined as having, for one thing, an out-of-body experience. If your near death and don't experience the out-of-body experience, then you haven't had an NDE in the sense I'm talking about. All of the reports are about OBEs, not just being near death. It's like my example, they were at the party, but weren't in the living room to experience what the 15 experienced.

Your using the term NDE to refer to any experience that bring one close to death, or even brings one to the place where there is no measurable brain or heart activity. This is definitely one of the uses of this term. However, there is another use of the term that includes an out-of-body experience, and this is the way I'm using the term NDE.

I appreciate you taking the time to respond fdrake.

Have you seen this, Sam? About consciousness, death and brain activity. I'm only skimming, but I think you might find it interesting.

Have you seen this, Sam? About consciousness, death and brain activity. I'm only skimming, but I think you might find it interesting. — MikeL

I have listened to him before, but didn't see that video. Thanks MikeL. I'm going to post this link in another thread too.

It's true that most people who are near death, or have had some experience that brings them near death don't experience any of the listed testimonial reports. However, I don't see how this negates the millions of consistent reports of those that have. All of us have experiences that most people haven't had, that doesn't mean that my experiences are any less real, or that my reports of those experiences are doubtful in the same sense you're doubting NDEs. You seem to be concluding that because more people haven't had the experience that that somehow makes the millions of experiences of those who have had the experience doubtful. It does raise questions, I agree, but I don't see that it means that what people are experiencing in these NDEs is any less veridical.

I agree that a raw proportion of people not having NDEs isn't good evidence that NDEs content is non-veridical. I'm glad of your example because it picked up on several ambiguities in my response.

For example, less take our experiences in everyday life, if I'm at a party with 100 other people and 15 of these people claim that X happened, and that those closest to the experience or who claim to have had the same experience agree that X happened, then your claim is that X probably didn't happen. Your claim is based not on counter-evidence, but on the fact that the 85 other people at the party didn't report those same experiences, or that they have no recollection of X happening. But all they are saying is that they didn't have the experience. If they had the experience and reported completely different reports, then I would say that you have an argument, but that's not what their saying. Their saying, I was at the party but didn't experience what those 15 people experienced.

I'm not referring to the raw proportion of people who have had NDEs vs those who have not had NDEs, I'm referring specifically to the people who have had NDEs and then self report content given the Gallup poll results. If you look at the numbers in my response, you'll see that the % reports from the subjects who have had NDEs (otherworldly experiences etc) sum to more than the % of people in the general population that have had NDEs in the first place. This is 28% vs 15% from the same poll.

The relevant situation to consider is the conditional event: what are the people reporting given that they self identify as having had an NDE. In your party example, 15 people claiming that X happened is ok - since if we want to learn about the event X, we are considering self report of people who have already seen X, not the 85 people in the party who didn't.

My argument turns on this idea of conditional reports. I can state it more precisely now, with reference to the previous 'door seeing' example. Say there are 200 people in my door seeing study. I only expose 100 of them to the door. I then record self reports of whether they see the door or not. I think if this experiment was conducted, close to 100% of the people who saw the door would say that there was a door then, this makes the condition probability of seeing the door given being exposed to the door close to 100%. I am claiming this is good evidence because of high consistency in the reports of people who have been exposed to the door. It is irrelevant that 50% of the people in the study didn't see the door.

So let's apply this to NDEs, do we observe very consistent regularity in the reported content of people who have experienced NDEs? No, there are many different stories. This means that exposure to an NDE doesn't (probabilistically) entail having a particular experience. Whereas exposure to the door does (probabilistically) entail seeing the door.

This is where my analogy of 'the dress' comes in. Exposure to the dress generates disjoint perceptions - the dress is really blue vs the dress is really white. What we can say about the evidence here is that of the people seeing the dress, people will see a blue OR white dress - a disjunctive event -
with high probability. Similarly, of those who have self reported mystical content of NDEs, we can say there is a high probability of a disjunctive event - namely at least one of the things on your list.

As an aside, that the % of people who responded who had NDEs with self reported content categorised by the poll was only 28%, this is evidence that being exposed to a near death scenario will not necessarily generate a near death experience. This would be similar to being exposed to 'the dress' and seeing no colour, but that is absurd.

So what we can conclude from the testimony is that people who identify as having NDEs and who self report mystical experiences will have at least one of 15 mystical themes in it. Evidence for the disjunctive event isn't evidence for the veridicality of experiencing any disjunct, rather like in the dress example. This leads me to conclude that:

1) There are general themes within NDEs for those who self report content.
2) There is no evidence that exposure to near death generates a particular NDE.
3) From 2), there is no evidence that the perception of a given NDE type is veridical.

You can also conclude from the similarity of the experiences of NDEs and certain psychoactive drugs that there are unobserved factors mediating the relationship between the mystical experience being near death. We are in the same situation with regards to the dress, there is an unobserved perceptual/mental/neuro-chemical event that gives rise to the disjunction blue/white rather than any of the specific disjuncts. IE it is more likely that an unobserved factor drives the appearance of the disjunction than the truth of any disjunct. In stark contrast to the door situation.

My argument turns on this idea of conditional reports. I can state it more precisely now, with reference to the previous 'door seeing' example. Say there are 200 people in my door seeing study. I only expose 100 of them to the door. I then record self reports of whether they see the door or not. I think if this experiment was conducted, close to 100% of the people who saw the door would say that there was a door then, this makes the condition probability of seeing the door given being exposed to the door close to 100%. I am claiming this is good evidence because of high consistency in the reports of people who have been exposed to the door. It is irrelevant that 50% of the people in the study didn't see the door.

So let's apply this to NDEs, do we observe very consistent regularity in the reported content of people who have experienced NDEs? No, there are many different stories. This means that exposure to an NDE doesn't (probabilistically) entail having a particular experience. Whereas exposure to the door does (probabilistically) entail seeing the door. — fdrake

So to sum up your position, if I understand it correctly, you're basically saying that the reports are not consistent enough to make the claim that they are seeing X. I would say that your analogy is not quite the same kind of experience. First, the experience is much more complex than seeing a door. The experience is more akin to the following: Let's assume we have a 100k sq. ft. building, and let us further assume that we interviewed 100 people who just left the building, people exiting from different doors, and some exiting from the same doors. As in any complex experience, where we are observing things from a variety of positions and perspectives, we are going to get a variety of reports and experiences. The question arises, how do we know based on so many different experiences and reports that all 100 people were in the same building? The only way to know would be the consistency of the reports, that is, a large number of people would have to be reporting some of the same things. It would be like putting the pieces of a puzzle together. As each report is made we begin to see that a particular picture of the building emerges, and based on the consistency of the reports we can draw conclusions about the building based on that picture.

My own studies have included between 3500 and 4000 reports, which is a fairly large sampling. It has also included talking with people who have had the experience. I have found that although there are differences in the reports, there are also enough similarities to give credence to what people are reporting. Not only have I concluded based on these studies that there are enough consistent reporting to warrant my conclusions, but others who have studied the same material have also concluded the same thing.

Fdrake, if you have time, watch the video that MikeL provided a link to in the post above, and tell me what you think. Your responses are the kind of responses I was looking for.

In summary: I think the veridicality of NDEs turns on their aggregate properties, rather than the accounts of NDEs made by specific individuals. I don't have the data, so I don't want to make any quantitative conclusions - but I can give you the thrust of the argument I'd examine with the data.

I'm reminded of Gettier - what are the chances that someone's NDE contains information they 'could not have known without an out of body experience' by accident? IE, what are the chances that an NDE can be judged as veridical purely through sample size effects?

So I think it's appropriate to look at phenomena which would allow an NDE to be judged as veridical. Namely, if someone provides a description of the NDE and if this description matches a video record. What properties of a description make this likely, without reference to the causal mechanism of being out of body? Well, there are a few things that can increase the probability that a description matches some things in the videos.

(1) The NDE experience contains vague rather than precise descriptions of events. This is the case for the woman in the video's NDE-perception of a 'tooth-brush like device' in the room, which could fit any tool with a mechanical base and rotating upper part. This could describe lots of surgical tools. I'm not saying this is necessarily the case for every report as I'm sure there are very precisely described events in some NDE accounts that match the videos quite faithfully.

I think it would be fair to remove these cases from the veridical NDEs, since a trained liar could produce these statements. Such as 'there were at least 15 people in the room', 'there was a scalpel used by a woman to make an incision around my head". This may account for the woman in the video's 'there are 20 doctors' in the room statement, but we cannot obtain information one way or the other without access to her first description of the event [which was articulated with the doctor, so there is confounding].

(2) There is some prior knowledge about the procedure. This is usually the case, since participants will have a rough description of the procedure's goals, risks and benefits before deciding whether to have the procedure. I don't think testimony could distinguish a mental event stimulated by memory of the procedure's description causing a 'recollection' or 'NDE observation' during the procedure. This could account for the woman's perception of someone saying 'the veins are too small' [the video doesn't say that a specific woman actually said this, only that they had difficulty cutting some of the veins due to the size]. 'The veins are too small' might also be a likely phenomenon when doing vascular surgery on the small veins in the brain!

This should be used to rule out descriptions of events that can be accounted for through memory rather than through NDE since testimony cannot allow us to observe the causal mechanism (I think this point was made obtusely by Jeramiah earlier in the thread). The causal mechanism being 'this person is having a veridical NDE'. This wouldn't rule out all descriptions of things in the procedure - for example a doctor who entered's hairstyle could be a part of the perceptions in the NDE, and the hair-style is unlikely to be part of the priming. I know there are cases of things like this.

(3) A veridical NDE should be treated like a test for confusion/awareness. Someone is asked to recall various facts about themselves and their immediate environment. If someone, say, could tell there was a tree in the window but forgot their name they would be judged as experiencing confusion. Multiple correct answers to the right questions (a temporal order) are required for an NDE to be judged as veridical.

Applying these filters to your data should give you candidates for veridical NDE assessment. After applying these filters, I believe a very small number of cases will remain.

So, how about a positive criterion? For an NDE to be considered veridical, it should contain multiple correct observations of documented events in the correct order. I believe this is a fair criterion, since veridical perception usually occurs along with a temporal order of events. There are numerous things to control for:

(A) Whether an observation is correct or incorrect should be judged from a written version of the NDE experience made independently from discourse with another observer of the event. This prevents priming effects.

(B) The subject should be in deep anaesthesia to prevent non-NDE perceptual events.

When these have been removed, there should be a small proportion of people who have experienced things which can be used to make a case for veridicality. But - a small proportion is exactly what is expected purely through chance. I'd make a ballpark estimate (asspull) that 1 in 5000 NDE descriptions would have at least two correct precise ordered descriptive elements in them that cannot be accounted for by any of the above filters.

And we would be left with the conclusion that the vast majority of NDE events are not connected in some way post-filtering to the real world. By the previous argument I made, I believe this would show that NDE perceptions are not veridical.

A summary of the argument: if the sampling behaviour of supposedly veridical NDE experiences matches the sampling behaviour without reference to NDE, there's no reason to conclude there is an NDE-veridicality mechanism from the data.

Edit: I wrote the previous post with reference to videos as independent observers, but other sources of independent verification would suffice.

I'm not sure how evidence for a 'subtle body' could ever imply that consciousness could exist without a body. A contradiction, surely.

Even if NDE reports were universally consistent and produced successful remote viewing, that would only imply that the laws of physics and the body were more complicated than we previously thought them to be.

But how could even that possibility entail a leap to the conclusion that consciousness is now transcendental and independent of the body under it's revised definition?

The definition of a "dead" person would still remain the same, namely a person who doesn't wake up from an NDE to give remote viewing reports. "Dead" people would therefore still fail to produce successful remote viewing accounts as they always have done, while only the "living" who returned from an NDE would share their veridical and consistent accounts of remote viewing.

NDEs whether consistent, inconsistent, "hallucinatory" or "veridical" cannot have metaphysical implication for consciousness to become detached from the body, because behaviourism always revises its definitions so that "consciousness" and "body" coincide.

I believe this is analogous - there is no majority consensus on 'what happens during an NDE', and no experiential consensus (a long list of alternatives) on what the contents of the NDE are. I therefore believe it's likely that NDEs are the result of some currently not understood mental or perceptual event that need not correspond with anything 'out there'. — fdrake

Your first three paragraphs provided the level of detail I was talking about in my posts. You articulated it much better than I did. I appreciate that.

Part of the problem is that people are so invested in a particular world view that they are not willing to consider non-materialist views, or even evidence that goes against their conclusions. — Sam26

Fair enough, we should all be open to revising our world views as the arguments and evidence support doing so. However In this case, there is a huge conceptual hurdle to overcome.

What would it mean for consciousness to be disembodied? You mention that people report having seen their bodies while experiencing an NDE, overhearing conversations and what not. That is very interesting.

But let's think about it. If your consciousness becomes disembodied, then you no longer experience the world through your sensory organs. So what does it mean for a disembodied consciousness to "see" or "hear"?

Let's say for sake of argument that you can see and hear without a body. Okay, but what is that like? Do the NDEs report seeing their body as if they have two normal human eyes, with all the limitations that go with that? Or do they report having a 360 degree vision that can see into the microscopic and across the EM spectrum?

Is their hearing similarly unlimited? Because if they see and hear just like normal embodied people, then my guess would be that they're still embodied, but are experiencing a form of psychological dissociation where it seems like they've become separated from their bodies.

I don't know how the brain would produce the experience of seeing one's body lying in a hospital bed or what not, but then again, it's possible that sort of thing happens in dreams on occasion. I can't specifically remember having that exact dream experience, but I have experienced flying and other things my body can't actually perform.

Seems more likely than some entirely new form of existence (one without a body).

So I think the first thing you would need to do in support of our position is to lay out what it would mean to actually be disembodied. Then the next thing would be to show how NDEs can't be embodied in some abnormal psychological state due to the brain being close to death.

This was the video I was referring too. Thanks for the replies, I'll give a response a bit later, don't have time right now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8scc2YbXUk

Because if they see and hear just like normal embodied people, then my guess would be that they're still embodied, but are experiencing a form of psychological dissociation where it seems like they've become separated from their bodies. — Marchesk

Agreed! It's too bad we can't intentionally bring these people back to near death, and have their disembodied spirits read some flash cards.

(1) The NDE experience contains vague rather than precise descriptions of events. This is the case for the woman in the video's NDE-perception of a 'tooth-brush like device' in the room, which could fit any tool with a mechanical base and rotating upper part. This could describe lots of surgical tools. I'm not saying this is necessarily the case for every report as I'm sure there are very precisely described events in some NDE accounts that match the videos quite faithfully.

I think it would be fair to remove these cases from the veridical NDEs, since a trained liar could produce these statements. Such as 'there were at least 15 people in the room', 'there was a scalpel used by a woman to make an incision around my head". This may account for the woman in the video's 'there are 20 doctors' in the room statement, but we cannot obtain information one way or the other without access to her first description of the event [which was articulated with the doctor, so there is confounding]. — fdrake

I look at testimony in terms of the whole, and I think it's important to take into account how people with no medical knowledge might describe things they see. If someone without medical knowledge was in the room, it's quite probable that they would describe things imprecisely. Just as people would do in their everyday lives, so I don't think this would necessarily mitigate the testimony. Although it might if we didn't have as many testimonials as we have (literally millions). What I find interesting in Pam's video, is that the doctors were confounded by her description of the experience. The fact that the doctors were baffled doesn't necessarily mean that she had an OBE, but it does suggest that her description was very unusual given her state.

What I mean by taking her experience as a whole, as opposed to picking out one or two things that might be explained in other ways, is the following: Does her description of the events in question match what others have described in terms of her metaphysical experiences. So, not only are we considering what she describes while in surgery, but does what she said match what others claim to have seen in their experiences. We are also considering things that some might find unimportant, but are important in terms of the truthfulness of their statements. For example, remarks that some might skip over like feeling very light while outside the body, which would be in keeping with not having gravitational effects. Also, how they describe their communication experience, viz., mind-to-mind. These are small things that you might find unimportant, but can tell you something about the veracity of their testimony in terms of how it lines up with other testimonials.

I think we can require more than what we would normally require in testimonial evidence. Any piece of testimony can be questioned to the point where we wonder if it's true or not. There are a myriad of ways to dismiss testimonial evidence, or to dismiss experiences that are out of the ordinary. That said, because these testimonials are making fantastic claims they do require more analysis.

Again, as I've said many times I find the consistency of these testimonials remarkable. Whenever you're looking at the testimony of a large number of people, even in normal testimonials we find inconsistencies. This is why testimonial evidence is generally weak, but as in an inductive argument, the conclusion is either strong or weak based on the kind of evidence. This is why my early evaluation of what makes testimonial evidence strong is important.

I will make other comments later.

I look at testimony in terms of the whole, and I think it's important to take into account how people with no medical knowledge might describe things they see. If someone without medical knowledge was in the room, it's quite probable that they would describe things imprecisely. Just as people would do in their everyday lives, so I don't think this would necessarily mitigate the testimony. Although it might if we didn't have as many testimonials as we have (literally millions). What I find interesting in Pam's video, is that the doctors were confounded by her description of the experience. The fact that the doctors were baffled doesn't necessarily mean that she had an OBE, but it does suggest that her description was very unusual given her state.

I don't think we can check if she literally saw the implement, descriptions of experience are all we have to go on. There are plenty of other things she could've noticed and provided a precise description of - I gave a couple of examples in my post. I'm not saying for certain that we can rule out that Pam somehow observed the events in the room via an OBE, I'm saying that there are enough mitigating or problematic points in the video to render it not evidence of the veridicality of NDEs. I attempted to portray what actually would be strong evidence that an NDE was veridical in my post.

What I mean by taking her experience as a whole, as opposed to picking out one or two things that might be explained in other ways, is the following: Does her description of the events in question match what others have described in terms of her metaphysical experiences. So, not only are we considering what she describes while in surgery, but does what she said match what others claim to have seen in their experiences. We are also considering things that some might find unimportant, but are important in terms of the truthfulness of their statements. For example, remarks that some might skip over like feeling very light while outside the body, which would be in keeping with not having gravitational effects. Also, how they describe their communication experience, viz., mind-to-mind. These are small things that you might find unimportant, but can tell you something about the veracity of their testimony in terms of how it lines up with other testimonials.

The fact that there are consistent groups of themes within NDEs is interesting, but is not evidence that the NDEs are observing something 'out there' which is real. You can see the same thing with the many religions which include 'tree of life' imagery; they are incompatible accounts of purportedly real phenomena with common mythopoetic structures. I think it's also plausible that the consistencies observed in NDE and other mystical experiences can be generated by there being an encultured, primordial mythopoetic structure with broad parameters - life/death imagery, revelation, calm/home feelings, out of body experiences, otherworldly visitations...

Again, as I've said many times I find the consistency of these testimonials remarkable. Whenever you're looking at the testimony of a large number of people, even in normal testimonials we find inconsistencies. This is why testimonial evidence is generally weak, but as in an inductive argument, the conclusion is either strong or weak based on the kind of evidence. This is why my early evaluation of what makes testimonial evidence strong is important.

The consistency is interesting, but as above it is not sufficient to get to the veridicality of NDEs. Further, there is a causal element in the argument you've made. Namely, that when descriptions of NDEs contain some independent information the NDE effected person could not have had access to without the NDE, that suggests the NDE is veridical. My point is that enough and the right kind of NDE descriptions with these properties would be evidence that NDE experiences are veridical.

Enough in the sense that people exposed to the NDE are likely to produce the right kind of testimony. The right kind being precise, non-confounded, non-primed, sequentially accurate descriptions being necessary to establish NDEs veridicality in general. I don't think it's appropriate to attempt to establish the veridicality of X using X.

This plays into my previous probabilistic argument, and I'll address your response to it here.

Imagine we have a huge mansion and 50 people are given a photograph of different rooms in the mansion. Each person is then tasked to describe the contents of the photograph. I think this is roughly equivalent to your example of the 100km^2 area. If a person describes elements of the photograph accurately and doesn't describe things which aren't in the photograph, we'll call their description accurate. Now imagine we hide the mansion and the photographs, and give the written descriptions to a third party.

The third party's job is to provide an account of the observations of the people. We'll call this third party Steve: I think it's likely that Steve would describe a large house with decor of a certain colour, descriptions of and numerosity of rooms - a very good description of the real mansion's rooms and general decor. Can Steve conclude from the descriptions alone that the 50 participants were shown photographs of a real mansion or paintings of a fictitious one? I don't think so.

Can Steve derive any evidence from the descriptions that they're descriptions of photographs or paintings? Can Steve claim this on the basis of the consistency of the reports?

Edit: let's further imagine that half of the rooms had a blue decor and half had a red decor. Steve may conclude based on the inconsistency of the decor that the house was unreal. Or alternatively, he could say that the decor changes and derive the 'blue' theme and the 'red' theme from the descriptions - grouping them based on which theme was present.

In this scenario, the veridicality of the experiences of the people was assumed, but Steve still cannot derive any evidence that the descriptions refer to a painting of a mansion with red and blue decor, photographs of a mansion with red and blue decor, or that they come from separate things all together.

________________________

As another experiment, imagine that 100 people are given the same photograph and are tasked to describe it as completely as they can. It is unlikely that pairs of people produce descriptions containing exactly the same propositions, but there will be a high degree of agreement and no contradictions. Steve, again serving as a third party, could conclude that their perceptions were likely to be veridical based on the consistency. Imagine instead that 50 of the people were shown one photograph and 50 were shown another which had the same fixtures but different decor. Steve could not conclude that their perceptions were veridical due to the split. Alternatively, Steve could decide that 50 of the people described a house with blue decor, and 50 of the people described a house with red decor. I think your argument from testimony is essentially this: there are blue and red thematic subgroups, therefore Steve can conclude the descriptions are of photographs.

Agreed! It's too bad we can't intentionally bring these people back to near death, and have their disembodied spirits read some flash cards. — CasKev

This reminds me of the tv show, "The OA", where the main character tells a story of having been abducted by a mad scientist who repeatedly bring her and four other people to near death (or actual death but revival before brain damage) using som device to record their experiences. He wants to provide scientific proof that the afterlife exists.

So, where does all this come from? What is your background? Are you a statistician who helps interpret scientific studies? What is the body of knowledge and experience that leads you to this understanding?

There is a lot of discussion of "what is truth" on this forum. It seems to me that a study of probability and statistics has something to say about that. I bought a book on statistics once just because I liked the title - "Probability, Statistics, and Truth." It turned out to be a pretty standard summary. I am an engineer who has to work with laboratory analytical data, concentrations of chemicals in soil, from time to time. My understanding of statistics is not sophisticated, but I have seen it misused in ways even I recognize as absurd in order to paint the picture that people want to see.

I've enjoyed your explanations in this, and other, threads.

What it's like to be a Ghost:

Your body is nearing death. Your consciousness become disconnected. You are now disembodied. Do you float up, or does gravity still hold you to the ground? Can you walk through walls and jump through floors? Do your visual experiences come from the same height when you had a body? Do you feel the flutter in your heart upon realizing you're a ghost?

Can your mind reach out and touch objects? Maybe your body was holding back your telekinetic powers. Perhaps you can sense the numerous radio waves all around you.

What does reality look like now? You no longer filter it through sense organs, or construct it via brain processes. Do you see things as they really are? Is the world still full of the same colors? Can you meander over to the cafeteria and stick your ghostly tongue inside an apple? Taste the atomic structure?

Maybe you can make yourself subatomic or giant sized. Walk (or float) around like Godzilla. Does that cause any sort of trimmers? Do sound and light waves pass through you as you sample them? Maybe your ghostly existence allows you a kind of camouflage.

And if you really concentrate hard enough, perhaps you can teleport yourself to other places. What about other times? You're not longer a physical being.

Come to think about it, what if Kant was right? Time and space are mental constructs. Are they still constructs without a brain? Can you access your memories stored in that brain?

There's all sorts of things to consider. Perhaps you will criticize the above on the grounds that it assumes the material world.

Okay, let's put it another way. We live a life of bodily experiences. Disembodied consciousness would mean experiences absent a body. So what is that like?

What is it like to be a ghost? Is it possible to provide an account of experience that is not grounded in bodily sensation or perception?

Disembodied consciousness would mean experiences absent a body. So what is that like? — Marchesk

Chapter 2? maybe of Strawson's Individuals, the no-space thought experiment. Book also includes the I-have-three-bodies thought experiment, which I wish someone would make into a flash game.

Chapter 2? I skimmed the thread so I might have missed mention of a book. The three-bodies thought experiment sounds intriguing.

Sorry-- Individuals is the book. I just wasn't bothering to check. I have now, and Chapter 2 is the no-space thing and Chapter 3 has the three-bodies thing.

This is ever so barely on-topic because PFS argues that our concept of consciousness is entirely embodied, and a specific "my body", much as you have suggested here.

PFS argues that our concept of consciousness is entirely embodied, and a specific "my body", much as you have suggested here. — Srap Tasmaner

That's what I think. Disembodied consciousness is probably incoherent, at least for human beings, because the only consciousness we know about is an embodied one. Ours is inherently embodied through and through.

So I think it will be really hard for someone to come up with a coherent version of disembodied consciousness which doesn't just borrow from our embodied experiences. That would be strong reason to be really skeptical of NDEs as evidence for out of body experiences.

I don't think we can check if she literally saw the implement, descriptions of experience are all we have to go on. There are plenty of other things she could've noticed and provided a precise description of - I gave a couple of examples in my post. I'm not saying for certain that we can rule out that Pam somehow observed the events in the room via an OBE, I'm saying that there are enough mitigating or problematic points in the video to render it not evidence of the veridicality of NDEs. I attempted to portray what actually would be strong evidence that an NDE was veridical in my post. — fdrake

There are enough other things that she describes to reasonably infer that she saw what she claims to have seen. Furthermore, the doctors and nurses were impressed by what she said she saw and heard. None of this, however, is dependent on any one piece of testimonial evidence, as I'm sure you understand. Most of this boils down to whether one believes the testimonials, and whether they are consistent. There are plenty of studies done by doctors and others who have also concluded that these testimonials have a consistent ring across many cultures.

The fact that there are consistent groups of themes within NDEs is interesting, but is not evidence that the NDEs are observing something 'out there' which is real. You can see the same thing with the many religions which include 'tree of life' imagery; they are incompatible accounts of purportedly real phenomena with common mythopoetic structures. I think it's also plausible that the consistencies observed in NDE and other mystical experiences can be generated by there being an encultured, primordial mythopoetic structure with broad parameters - life/death imagery, revelation, calm/home feelings, out of body experiences, otherworldly visitations... — fdrake

You don't see this with many religions, it's not the same at all. Most religious experiences are totally subjective, that is, there is no way to verify what people are claiming on a subjective level. Many of these testimonials have an objective component to them. For example, one can verify the accuracy of these testimonials by interviewing others who were there (Doctors, nurses, family, and friends). The claims are that while outside their bodies they saw X, these things can be verified. The claims are that they heard X, this can be verified.

What I find is that people reject the evidence not because they have good arguments, but because they have a world view that denies any such belief. The evidence for me is overwhelming. There are just too many of these to deny that consciousness is limited to a physical body.

I don't know how you explain people looking at themselves from a third person perspective when they have no brain activity and no heart beat. The claim is also that the reality they are experiencing is more vivid than what we experience normally. Their sensory experiences are heightened, not lessoned. This is a common theme among many who have had the experience. It's common among a whole host of people, including atheists, religious people, very young people, and across a wide variety of cultures.

Using your criteria fdrake one could explain away almost any experience one finds questionable. Some of your criteria written early on demands too much of testimonial evidence. Most of what we believe and accept is based on testimony - what we read and listen to. However, I'm not saying that one should accept any testimonial evidence, which is why I spent time going over what an argument should look like based on testimonial evidence.

That said, I appreciate your responses even if I disagree. At least you didn't start the conversation by saying this is BS. Moreover, as I said earlier, you did what I wanted someone to do, that is, give a reasoned argument against my argument. I didn't respond to all of your points, but I did read them.

Since you offered a summary post I'll give one too. Saying 'it's BS' wouldn't've let me wrestle with some relevant ideas I recently encountered (causal statistics), also a reasoned argument demands a reasoned response. :)

My view is that the testimonials as you have presented them are not sufficiently strong to conclude that NDE experiences generate veridical perceptions; in the sense that it cannot be said that the person perceived X because of an NDE. This is because the testimonials as you have presented them don't meet the evidential standards I outlined. IE they are possibly confounded, possibly riddled with priming effects and cannot control for unobserved factors. The probabilistic argument for their non-veridicality I outlined I believe is supported by the variability of the reports and their inability to meet the standards of experiences we already know to be veridical.

It is true that to try to infer causal properties from testimonial evidence, a form of observational study, places a lot of constraints on the content of the observations. This isn't a flaw in my argument, rather it speaks to the inappropriateness of testimonial evidence to establish that NDE perceptions are veridical. Further you did not address the the problems of inferring veridicality given sampling effects, or the thought experiment involving the mansion.

It was good fun debating with you though.

It's true that the testimonial evidence for NDEs in terms of their reliability do not meet the terms you've outlined. I recently did a search to find if there have been any statistical analyses done by anyone that would meet the requirements as put forth in your argument. It seems that the University of Virginia is in the process of doing just such an analysis. I do think it's important to consider this kind of research.

There is a peer-reviewed Journal of Near-Death studies that I've been reading, but I haven't read all of the articles, which I would like to do. For what it's worth there are some scientists that have concluded that NDEs do present evidence of consciousness surviving the body. However, just because there are scientists who agree with me or anyone else, that isn't evidence that an argument is well justified.

I'm only interested in the arguments, not whether the argument fits a particular world view. I've criticized Christians because the evidence to support their beliefs is based on very weak testimonial evidence, so I'm not interested in falling into the same trap. My critique of, for example, the resurrection was based on the same analysis used in this thread, so I've applied what I believe are the criteria that should be used to analyze testimonial evidence. This analysis is not a scientific analysis, which is what your analysis would require. It's an analysis based on the logic of an inductive argument, that is, I used the same criteria that makes a strong inductive argument.

Another important point about my argument is that I'm saying that one can know apart from a scientific analysis that testimonial evidence is good evidence based on my criteria. On the other hand, it's extremely important when dealing with subjects of this sort to have such an analysis done.

I've listened to critics of NDEs, and for the most part I find them lacking. Especially after having spent as much time as I have analyzing the testimony. Most of these critics are so disinclined to believe the testimony that they do not spend much time analyzing the data. Actually Fdrake your argument is one of the best I've seen in terms of how we should look at the data. But based on the evidence I've looked at, especially the consistency of the reports, I'm more than inclined to believe the testimonials.

My point would be that a reasonable person can conclude that these testimonials are strong support for consciousness surviving the body. Now if it can be shown that there is another explanation for these NDEs, then that's something that should be considered. However, in my studies I have found nothing that could explain these testimonials.

My next post will address some of the specifics of your argument.

Looking forward to it, it was a fun discussion before, should be again.

Hey Sam.

I'm looking back at the criteria you offered as candidates for judging the strength of an argument based on eyewitness testimony, and there's an issue I'd be interested to hear you address. Here are some snippets:

First, a high number of testimonials gives a better picture of the events in question. So the greater the number the more likely we are to get an accurate report, but not necessarily — Sam26

Second, seeing the event from a variety of perspectives will also help to clear up some of the testimonial reports — Sam26

((Third)) When dealing with a large number of testimonials you will almost certainly have contradictory statements, this happens even when people report on everyday events. Thus, one must weed out the testimony that does not fit the overall picture, and paint a picture based on what the majority of accounts are testifying to. — Sam26

I added some emphasis, from which you might deduce my question…

When we first discussed these criteria as a group, I think most of us assumed we were discussing criteria for assessing the credibility of a description of a single event based on the accounts of multiple witnesses. I made comparison to a close play at second witnessed by tens of thousands of people only one of whom was within ten feet of the play, but who could be in a worse position than the umpire team watching video footage from other angles.

As it turns out, you're not talking about a single event with multiple witnesses, but an event type, and each event has only a single direct witness, though there may be corroboration from medical staff, etc.

You yourself just mentioned accounts of the resurrection of Jesus as a comparison, which again is a single event multiple people give testimony about.

To start with, I think we should look for new comparisons to understand the structure of the argument. Some that come to mind are controversial diagnoses like fibromyalgia or Gulf War syndrome. But the method for judging those issues is relatively clear if difficult, and even if for some time no conclusion can be reached.

I really can't think of a good comparison for your case. It seems we would have to look at other inherently subjective experiences, but maybe you have a clearer sense of this than I do. (I understand there are sometimes arguments-- arguments!-- about whether anyone actually enjoys something, say, the music of Tom Waits.)

I suppose it could be argued something like this is what we do practically all the time. None of us, as the man said, can see the beetle in another's box, but somehow we almost all come to believe we're almost all having broadly similar experiences.

In sum, the issues are:

• One event with multiple witnesses vs. multiple events each with a single witness.
• Establishing the existence of the event type by exemplar when the exemplars themselves are controversial or subjective.

Interested to hear your thoughts.

"My argument turns on this idea of conditional reports. I can state it more precisely now, with reference to the previous 'door seeing' example. Say there are 200 people in my door seeing study. I only expose 100 of them to the door. I then record self reports of whether they see the door or not. I think if this experiment was conducted, close to 100% of the people who saw the door would say that there was a door then, this makes the condition probability of seeing the door given being exposed to the door close to 100%. I am claiming this is good evidence because of high consistency in the reports of people who have been exposed to the door. It is irrelevant that 50% of the people in the study didn't see the door.

"So let's apply this to NDEs, do we observe very consistent regularity in the reported content of people who have experienced NDEs? No, there are many different stories. This means that exposure to an NDE doesn't (probabilistically) entail having a particular experience. Whereas exposure to the door does (probabilistically) entail seeing the door."


I agree with much of this. However, there is a similarity between your door example, and what people are reporting in their NDE. There is one feature that is common to all NDEs, which again is similar to the door example. That feature is the OBE. All of those, or nearly all of those reporting an NDE report from a third person perspective, and it's close to 100%. In fact, if one didn't report this, one would wonder whether the person had an NDE. This would mean that exposure to an NDE would probabilistically entail this specific experience (OBE). In fact this is why my conclusion isn't much broader than it is, namely, because I'm trying to give evidence of consciousness apart from body. The scope of my conclusion is a narrow one given the evidence. Only that people are reporting seeing their bodies and what's happening around them from a place outside their normal sensory experiences.

Let's start here and work our way through the argument.

When we first discussed these criteria as a group, I think most of us assumed we were discussing criteria for assessing the credibility of a description of a single event based on the accounts of multiple witnesses. I made comparison to a close play at second witnessed by tens of thousands of people only one of whom was within ten feet of the play, but who could be in a worse position than the umpire team watching video footage from other angles. — Srap Tasmaner

Maybe thinking of it this way might clear some of this up. Let's think of a large building, and within the building are many people doing a variety of things. The building has many different entrance points, and of course each entrance point is going to give you a different view of the events happening within the building. Let's also assume that 1000 people entered the building at different points, and that they did it one at a time. Moreover, as each one came out of the building they reported their sensory experiences. This would give us a large sampling of the events in the building, and we would be able to evaluate the consistency of the reports. In this analogy the building would represent the OBE (out-of-body experience), and the reports would of course be what they saw from the third-person perspective. So it's not exactly like 1000 people all being at an event and reporting what they saw. It's more like a 1000 people witnessing the event one at a time, but it's still the same event reported by the witnesses.

No analogy is probably going to capture the complete picture of what's going on here, but we can come close.

You yourself just mentioned accounts of the resurrection of Jesus as a comparison, which again is a single event multiple people give testimony about. — Srap Tasmaner

I don't want to get into a discussion of the witness accounts of the resurrection, but suffice it to say that most of it is hearsay testimonials, and we only have two or three, maybe, first-hand accounts. I say this to only point out that the testimonial evidence for NDEs is much much larger, and they're all first-hand accounts.

I suppose it could be argued something like this is what we do practically all the time. None of us, as the man said, can see the beetle in another's box, but somehow we almost all come to believe we're almost all having broadly similar experiences.

In sum, the issues are:

One event with multiple witnesses vs. multiple events each with a single witness.
Establishing the existence of the event type by exemplar when the exemplars themselves are controversial or subjective. — Srap Tasmaner

It's not quite like the beetle in the box analogy put forth by Wittgenstein. In the beetle in the box analogy there is no way to confirm what you're looking at. Each of us could be looking at very different things. However, in the NDEs people are reporting things that all of us have seen, that is, if someone reports seeing their dead uncle, then we have pictures of what the dead uncle looks like, or we have others who have seen the uncle. In the beetle in the box example one might say be saying they see X, but there is no way that anyone can see X, or can even relate to what X is. They're pointing to something that has no relation to objective reality at all. People in the NDEs are reporting events that others are confirming. People are claiming to hear conversations of those around their dead body, and these conversations are confirmed by the people who were there. So there is objective verification.

It's multiple witnesses going into the same building at different times. Some of the things are the same, and yet some of the things that are reported are different, in that they happened at different times. Thus, even though I enter the building at a different time, there are still going to be things that are very similar, and still many things that are different. Furthermore, I might even interpret what I see based on my world view, which might account for the different religious interpretations of the experiences.

A large number of the reports are very similar, which is to say that they are not completely subjective. Also one can make the claim that any sensory experience is in some way subjective, but that doesn't discount the experience. The key of course is corroboration.

"So what we can conclude from the testimony is that people who identify as having NDEs and who self report mystical experiences will have at least one of 15 mystical themes in it. Evidence for the disjunctive event isn't evidence for the veridicality of experiencing any disjunct, rather like in the dress example. This leads me to conclude that:

"1) There are general themes within NDEs for those who self report content.
2) There is no evidence that exposure to near death generates a particular NDE.
3) From 2), there is no evidence that the perception of a given NDE type is veridical."

First, my conclusion from reading between 3500 and 4000 accounts is that people who self-report have at least three or more of the things listed on the NDE reports. I'm not sure why you would think that the reports are disjunctive events. The reports are reports of seeing many things, that is, the reports are very much like any testimonial report that one hears from a variety of witnesses of an event or events. It's not like your dress example, that is, that they're seeing either white or blue. They are describing things in chronological order (temporal order), which is very important, and they're describing a variety of things and conversations.

There is an enormous amount of evidence that NDEs generate particular sensory experiences. Again I'm basing this on a close study of the people and the testimony, and I'm basing it on corroborating reports of those who were at the scene. The first thing that almost all of these NDEers report is that of being outside their bodies (OBEs). Each report is going to be different based on what they remember and what's happening around them. Many also report hearing and seeing events just as we would see and hear any normal event. It's also important to point out that each person is having their own NDE, no two of them will be exactly alike. It's like 1000 people going to various places in Alaska and coming back and making a report of what they saw, which is why we need to have many thousands of reports to get 99% reporting W, 30% seeing X, 26% seeing Y, and 2% seeing Z. Thus if we're getting 99% reporting an OBE, that's millions of people reporting the same thing. These reports are exactly what we would expect if 1000 people went to various places in Alaska. They are exactly what we would expect if we went to the places where they claimed to have been, and verified the veracity of their reports by interviewing people who were also there. The main difference is that they're reporting something that doesn't fit a particular world view, or even scientific view. I find that this is what generates the most disdain for the argument.

There is an interesting point that needs to be made, that is, if I didn't believe the people who claimed they went to Alaska, I could make the same claims that people are making about NDEs. They aren't seeing the same things, they hallucinated, they were on drugs, they're lying, their making claims based on faulty memory, or based on what they read somewhere. It's easy to dismiss testimonial evidence, especially given that testimonial evidence is generally weak.