Epistemology Is Bigger Than Science

Science is one powerful way of knowing, but it isn’t the whole of epistemology. Epistemology is the study of knowledge itself: how we justify what we believe, what counts as reliable evidence, and what it means to say we “know” something. Science is just one application of those deeper principles.

Think of five main routes by which we come to know things:

Testimony – Most of what you know comes from other people. You know your birthdate, that Antarctica exists, or that DNA carries information, not because you verified these directly, but because trustworthy testimony passed it on. Courtrooms, history books, and classrooms all rely on testimony.

Logic (inductive and deductive) – We reason our way from what we already know to new conclusions. Induction weighs patterns and probabilities (like inferring the sun will rise tomorrow). Deduction secures conclusions from premises (if all men are mortal, and Socrates is a man, then Socrates is mortal).

Sensory experience – You know orange juice is sweet because you’ve tasted it. Observation, sight, hearing, touch—all anchor us to the world.

Linguistic training – To know something, we need to use words and concepts correctly. A child learns “red” by being corrected until they can pick red things out reliably. Clear use of language is part of clear knowing.

Pure logic – Some truths are fixed by form alone. “Either Lincoln was the 16th president of the United States, or he was not” is true regardless of the world. These tautologies set formal boundaries for thought.

Science operates by combining these same routes—testimony (journal articles, lab notes), logic (statistical inference, reasoning), sensory experience (measurements, experiments), and linguistic clarity (definitions of terms like “atom” or “control”). What makes science distinct is its systematic method: it controls conditions, checks repeatability, and builds consensus. But it does not step outside epistemology; it is one way of applying epistemological tools.

Why This Matters

If you think science alone defines knowledge, you fall into what philosophers call scientism, the idea that only scientific results count as real knowledge. But this is itself not a scientific claim; it’s a philosophical stance. Outside the lab, we rely on testimony to trust history, on logic to follow arguments, on sensory experience to navigate the world, and on language to communicate clearly. Epistemology is the larger field that makes sense of all these routes and sets the standards for when they give us knowledge.

So science is a vital part of our pursuit of truth, but it is not the whole story. Epistemology reminds us that knowing is wider, older, and richer than the scientific method alone.

You’ve tossed out a lot of heat, very little light. Let’s pin down the issues so readers can see where the work actually is.

1) “You shut the door on alternative hypotheses.”

No. I shut the door on untested alternatives that never touch the specific constraints of specific cases. An alternative is admissible if—and only if—it does three things in a named case:

Route: states a specific ordinary route (leading prompts, overheard information, open sightlines, post-event memory shaping).

Access: shows the route was actually available in that room during that window under the documented constraints (taped eyes, sterile-field limits, sealed doors, noise levels, timestamps).

Yield: shows how that route produces the reported particulars (the words said, the instrument used, the sequence and timing)—not “maybe,” but a step-by-step causal story that fits the evidence.

If you can do that, great—let’s see it. If you can’t, then “let’s entertain possibilities” is just a way of never reaching a conclusion.

2) “Most posters disagree with you.”

That’s an appeal to popularity (a fallacy in basic logic). Truth isn’t a vote. The standard I’m using is ordinary public standards (timing • environmental constraint • independent confirmation). Either a case meets them or it doesn’t. Either an alternative meets the three tests above or it doesn’t. Crowd size is irrelevant.

3) “You’re anti-science; you don’t want more studies.”

Also false. I’ve argued for prospective designs (fixed clocks, immediate capture, independent attestations). Saying “do more studies” does not rebut existing anchored matches any more than “take more photos” makes today’s photo disappear. If you want to lower the evidential weight of a particular anchor, you still have to run the case-specific route/access/yield test.

4) “But AWARE’s hidden images were negative.”

Hidden-image tasks test one narrow hypothesis (“read this elevated image”). A null there doesn’t touch other time-locked, public particulars (verbatim speech, staff actions, instrument use, timestamps) that were later confirmed. You can’t generalize a null on one sub-task into a universal defeater for different kinds of matches.

5) “This isn’t philosophy, it’s science.”

It’s both: the data are empirical; the standards for weighing testimony, defeaters, and proportionate conclusions are epistemology—i.e., philosophy of evidence. Courts, historians, and clinicians use the same epistemic tools. Saying “this is science” doesn’t relieve you of arguing how your alternative hypothesis meets the three tests in a named case.

6) “You won’t entertain alternatives.”

I’ll entertain any alternative that earns a seat by passing the route/access/yield test. What I won’t do is treat generic “maybes” as if they were explanations. “Maybe they heard something” isn’t a case analysis; it’s an evasion.

Bottom line for readers: When independent reports line up on the same publicly checkable details, the burden shifts. Either (a) accept the match, or (b) identify and support a specific ordinary route that was actually available under the constraints and that reproduces the particulars. Anything short of that is volume, not rigor.

A word for those who read these threads without responding:

One thing to keep in mind is that the majority of people posting in places like The Philosophy Forum have never studied philosophy in any serious way. Most have not worked through even the elementary basics of logic, so when they claim to be “doing philosophy,” they are really just trading personal opinions. Out of the crowd in this forum, only a handful (and they're not always people whom I agree with) consistently show the tools of serious philosophy: clarity about terms, the ability to follow an argument to its implications, and the discipline to separate evidence from assertion.

That matters because it explains a lot of the noise you see in threads like this. Many of the objections raised against my argument don’t even engage what is actually being said; they are evasions, shifts of definition, or vague possibilities dressed up as if they were explanations. “Maybe X happened” is repeated as if that alone answers the case—but in philosophy, “maybe” is not an argument. If someone can’t identify the specific premises in play or show where the reasoning misfires, they are not engaging philosophically, no matter how confident they sound.

So, for those following along and actually trying to learn something: don’t mistake volume for rigor. Serious philosophy is rare, and it shows itself in very specific ways—clarity about standards, consistency in applying them, proportion in claims, and the willingness to revise when faced with counterexamples. Most posters here never reach that bar. That is why you will see the same evasions recycled over and over, instead of a genuine confrontation with the argument.

If you want to sharpen your own thinking, notice these differences. Distinguish the handful of posters who can keep an argument on the rails from the many who can’t. And remember: philosophy is not the trading of hunches; it is the discipline of reasoning in public, with evidence and logic, under standards that don’t move just because the conclusion makes us uncomfortable.

Oh, please. If dismissing rigorous scrutiny as "gerrymandering" is your idea of a gotcha, then you're just admitting you can't handle the heat when someone demands actual evidence over hand-wavy assumptions. Lumping me in with Kastrup or any other Idealist is cute, but it says more about your lazy tribalism than my arguments. You've got access to the bulk of what I've laid out—go ahead, poke holes in it with something substantive instead of snarky vibes. And yeah, those standards are rigorous precisely because they shut down the door on untested "alternative hypotheses" that conveniently dodge empirical accountability. If that threatens your worldview, maybe reflect on why you're so quick to cry "woo-ism" instead of engaging like an adult. Sounds like projection to me, but it's typical of most of the responses in this thread.

Sime, you’re critiquing a version of my view I’m not advancing. Here’s the actual standard in one place so readers can see it without the rest of the book.

The thread's (and my books claim Chapter 3) claim is modest: some near-death reports meet ordinary public standards for evidence. “Ordinary public standards” here means that three constraint axes are satisfied together:

Timing: the reported particulars are time-locked to the clinical window.

Environmental constraint: ordinary routes are blocked by the clinical setup, taped eyes, occluded hearing, sterile-field limits, sealed rooms, and procedure-bound speech.

Independent confirmation: records or multiple witnesses later match the specific particulars outside the witness’s control.

That is the test. Prospective protocols help (fixed clocks, immediate capture), but the argument never depends on ceiling targets or on unanimity across all reports. A null on a narrow sub-task (e.g., no one saw a hidden image) tells you nothing about other public-facing matches in other cases.

Your objection repeatedly retreats to general possibilities (“maybe they were conscious,” “maybe they sensed normally”). That’s not enough. The standard is case-specific: this room, this window, these constraints. If you think an anchored case fails, then show your work:

• Name the ordinary route (leading prompts, overheard information, open sightlines, or post-event memory shaping).

• Show it was actually available under the documented constraints.

• Show how it yields the reported, time-locked particulars that were later confirmed.

When independent reports line up on the same publicly checkable details, the burden shifts: either accept the match, or identify—and support—a specific ordinary route (leading prompts, overheard information, open sightlines, or post-event memory shaping) that would plausibly produce it.

If you can do that for a specific anchored case, I’m happy to revise. If not, you’re attacking a strawman—“no controls,” “must be randomized,” “nothing passed”—instead of the public-standards claim I’m making.

Flagship Veridical Cases

Flagship cases matter not because they are dramatic, but because their particulars are publicly checkable under constraints that make ordinary perception implausible. In each instance, I note the anchors I rely on: provenance close to the event; clear timing; environmental or clinical constraints (anesthesia, occlusion, sealed rooms); specific details that can be checked; and independent confirmation from records, staff, or witnesses. The point is not that every report is flawless; it is that some are anchored well enough to shift the evidential weight.

French operating-suite amputation (Toulouse)—During surgery under general anesthesia, a patient described rising above the theater and then “looking” into an adjacent operating room where a leg amputation was underway, including the placement of the limb into a yellow plastic bag. After recovery, she reported the scene to the attending physician, who immediately checked and confirmed that an amputation had been performed next door at that time with standard yellow bagging. The doors were sealed for sterility, and there was no ordinary line of sight or sound. Anchors: contemporaneous report to a named physician, tight time-locking, surgical sterility constraints, and independent confirmation of procedure and bagging protocol.

Cardiac bypass with surgeon’s “elbows-in” gesture (Al Sullivan)—During emergency quadruple bypass surgery, the patient later reported an out-of-body vantage from which he observed the lead surgeon directing staff with a distinctive, elbows-tucked, arms-flapping motion to avoid contaminating scrubbed hands. The description was given after recovery; the surgeon and staff acknowledged the idiosyncratic gesture as occurring then. Eyes had been taped shut under deep anesthesia; the observation concerns a specific, signature behavior not generally known. Anchors: occlusion and anesthesia, a unique action tied to a particular clinician, and staff confirmation of timing and behavior.

Prospective-study exemplar (resuscitation window)—In a monitored cardiac-arrest setting using standardized procedures, a patient reported discrete, checkable particulars—staff exchanges and instrument use—time-locked to the resuscitation window and later concordant with charted events and team recollection. The value here is methodological: the report is anchored by a protocol that fixes the clinical clock and narrows opportunities for post-hoc embroidery. Anchors: prospective design, fixed timing from device logs and notes, specific external details later corroborated by personnel.

Pediatric surgical case (operating-room particulars)—A school-age child undergoing cardiac surgery later described elements of the theater that were both specific and confirmable (mask color, distinctive monitor tones, positioning of equipment), together with a brief encounter narrative consistent with standard NDE features. Staff subsequently verified the concrete particulars the child named. Pediatric cases carry special weight against cultural-imprinting objections, given limited conceptual resources and minimal exposure to adult narratives. Anchors: close-in parental/staff documentation, simple checkable details, developmental constraints that reduce suggestion as an explanation.

Taken together, these exemplars display the features that matter for this chapter’s conclusion: time-locked description under sensory or environmental constraint, specific content available to independent checking, and confirmations that do not depend on the subject’s interpretation. They are not outliers in kind, only in the clarity of their anchors. The cumulative argument advances to the extent that such cases exist at all; rivals must match the particulars without relaxing the constraints that make them probative.

A section of my book follows:

From Testimony to Knowledge: Evaluating Near-Death Experiences

Misconceptions About Testimonial Evidence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JTB+U

I start by fixing the background, and the chess analogy helps: you do not prove the board, pieces, or rules before you move; you stand on them so that a move can be a move at all. Inquiry works the same way. I rely on a shared world, on words keeping their uses from moment to moment, on memory and instruments ordinarily working, on other minds as partners in checking. These are fixed-point hinges. They are not conclusions we reach; they are what let giving and asking for reasons get started.

This starting floor matters because the old problems of regress and circularity never go away. If every reason needed a further reason, I would never begin; if I tried to justify the starting floor with the very tools it enables, I would move in a circle. Hinges stop both temptations. They are not secret premises and not dogmas; they are the background of our forms of life. They can shift when our ways of checking change, but within a given practice, they are the background that lets reasons count.

The analogy also marks the limits of doubt. In chess you doubt a move, not the existence of the board mid-game; in inquiry you doubt a reading, an inference, a report, not the bare possibility of language working while you are using it to doubt. Skepticism belongs inside the game, where there are procedures for checking. That is the sense in which hinges preempt the regress: they do not win an argument by force; they make argument possible.

Hinges are not chosen by whim and not certified by theory. We inherit them in our training and reveal them in what we count as a check. Over time, whole practices can change, new instruments, new techniques, new standards, and with them, some hinges may move. But the movement is slow and public, like learning a variant of the game rather than making a special move. Day to day, the hinges stand fast so that reasons can be given, tested, and corrected.

With this in view, the next step is straightforward: when I say “know,” I mean a true belief, backed by reasons a competent other could in principle check, held with enough understanding to use the claim correctly and see where it does not apply. The hinge background does not replace those reasons; it frames them. In my view, JTB is further strengthened by grounding it in what stands fast.

Continuing remarks on JTB+U

I begin where our practices begin. Before I argue for anything, I stand on what already stands fast: there is a shared world, words keep their uses from one moment to the next, memory and instruments ordinarily work, and other people are real partners in inquiry. I do not prove these each time I make a claim; I rely on them so that giving and asking for reasons can even get started. I call these fixed points hinges. They are not conclusions; they are the bedrock on which conclusions are drawn.

This starting floor matters because the old problems of regress and circularity never go away. If every reason needed a further reason, I would never begin; if I tried to justify the starting floor with the very tools it enables, I would move in a circle. Hinges stop both temptations. They are not secret premises and not dogmas; they are the background of our forms of life. They can shift when our ways of checking change, but within a given practice, they are the background that lets reasons count.

With that in view, I can say what I mean by knowing. To know is to accept something as true, to be able to give reasons that others can check, and to understand the claim well enough to use it correctly and to see where it does not apply. The public side is essential: justification is not a private feeling; it is an earned standing inside shared procedures. In my view, JTB is further strengthened by grounding it in this background, rather than weakened by its dependence on what stands fast.

The word “know” itself does two jobs, and conflating them generates confusion. Sometimes “I know” functions as an expression of conviction, as in “I know this is my hand.” No one expects evidence there; it points to the floor we act from. At other times, “I know” signals epistemic standing, where doubt makes sense and a route of checking is available, as in “I know the train leaves at 6:18,” backed by a timetable and ordinary procedures. My model keeps these uses apart: the first marks hinge-level certainty, the second belongs to justification.

Public justification runs along five familiar routes, none sovereign on its own: testimony, logic in both inductive and deductive reasoning, sensory experience, linguistic training, and pure logic understood as formal structure only, for example “X or not X.” Different questions call for different mixes, but the rule of thumb is simple: give the kind of reason a competent other could in principle verify from where they stand.

To keep the routes honest, I rely on three guardrails. First, No-False-Grounds: do not build on a mistake, so check the provenance of what you take for granted in the case at hand. Second, practice safety: use methods that fit the practice, so chemistry is not settled by a poll and character is not read off a voltmeter. Third, defeater screening: actively look for counter-evidence and better explanations that would undercut the claim. These do not replace reasons; they discipline how reasons are gathered, weighed, and held.

Understanding the “U” in JTB+U is not an ornament. It shows in competent use: the ability to extend a concept to new instances, to draw the inferences that go with it, and to recognize its limits without special prompting. Someone who repeats a medical note yet cannot tell a pulse from an oxygen reading does not, in the relevant sense, know. Understanding ties reasons to the grammar of the claim within the practice.

Taken together, the picture is spare. Hinges give us a place to stand, so regress and circularity do not paralyze inquiry. Within that space, knowledge is true belief with reasons others can check, further strengthened by grounding it in what stands fast. The five routes say what counts as a reason here, the three guardrails keep the routes from drifting, and the two uses of “know” keep our language clear. The aim is not a clever definition; it is a workable method for telling knowledge from its near-neighbors in ordinary cases and in the cases that matter most.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Run the guardrails (NFG, practice-safety).

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

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

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

Why this is neither relativism nor dogmatism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two levels of checking

I work at two levels:

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

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

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

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

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

What I count (and what I don’t)

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

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

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

Why scale matters

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

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

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

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

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

Why “selected cases” don’t neutralize the pattern

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

What the pattern favors

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

How I keep this disciplined

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

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

I log defeaters openly and let them bite.

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

What would change my mind

Three things would move me off this population inference:

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

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

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

Bottom line

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

↪Sam26

Case studies aren't causal, and without detailed imvestigation of possible explanations in a controlled way, there is no reason why someone should not hold the belief that a physicalist explanation is possible if we only had more information, which we can't have from limited amounts of case studies like this.

Biomedical sciences, as well as social sciences by which the required methods overlap, have notorious difficulties with replication as it is, how do you think this is going to convince people. Sure, keep on holding to you wild intuition about the otherside and NPCs, but you haven't presented any smoking gun refutation of naturalistic explanations, which have been far more successful throughout history than things like parapsychology and ghost-ology or even god. — Apustimelogist

You said: "Case studies aren't causal, and without detailed investigation of possible explanations in a controlled way, there is no reason why someone should not hold the belief that a physicalist explanation is possible if we only had more information, which we can't have from limited amounts of case studies like this."

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.

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. My book (Chapter 4) 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.

Moreover, "controlled investigation" isn't feasible or necessary here. NDEs occur unpredictably during clinical death (and even when not near death); you can't ethically induce flat EEGs in labs for replication (though attempts like ketamine studies produce dissimilar, less structured experiences). But knowledge doesn't require lab replication; as I explain in other discussions of scientism, 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. Your demand is a double standard: you wouldn't apply it to courtroom evidence (where corroborated testimony convicts without "replication") or epidemiology (inductive from patterns, not causal lab proofs). My framework (five criteria: volume, variety, consistency, corroboration, firsthand accounts) turns these "case studies" into robust testimonial evidence, far stronger than "limited" implies.

Next: "Biomedical sciences, as well as social sciences by which the required methods overlap, have notorious difficulties with replication as it is; how do you think this is going to convince people?"
This is a red herring that ironically undermines your own position. Yes, replication crises plague fields like psychology (e.g., only ~40% of studies replicate per some meta-analyses) and biomedicine (e.g., cancer drug trials often fail reproducibility). 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—convergence and corroboration are.

How does this convince people? By applying the same standards we use daily for non-lab knowledge. Courts convict on corroborated testimony without replication (e.g., multiple witnesses to a crime). Historians accept Plato's Er myth as a cultural precedent based on textual convergence, not lab tests. Even in science, much "knowledge" is inductive and non-replicable: we can't replicate the Big Bang or a specific black hole merger, yet we infer from patterns (cosmic microwave background, gravitational waves). My NDE evidence replicates in the relevant sense: consistent patterns (OBEs in 75-85%, life reviews in 70-80%, as per Greyson's scale) across millions, verified in prospective studies (e.g., Parnia et al.'s AWARE study, where patients described hidden targets during resuscitation). This is "replication" via independent corroboration, not contrived experiments.

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). 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.

Finally: "Sure, keep on holding to your wild intuition about the other side and NPCs [what curious about this is that I said most of it was speculation - NPCs, etc], but you haven't presented any smoking gun refutation of naturalistic explanations, which have been far more successful throughout history than things like parapsychology and ghost-ology or even god."

This is ad hominem snark masquerading as critique, calling my conclusions "wild intuition" while projecting your own speculative physicalism as default.

Does history favor naturalism? Selective cherry-picking. Naturalism failed historically on consciousness (Descartes' dualism persisted until neuroscience, yet the hard problem remains unsolved, as Chalmers notes). Parapsychology's mixed record (e.g., Ganzfeld replication rates ~30%, above chance) isn't my focus, I'm not invoking psi; I'm analyzing testimony. Comparing to "ghost-ology or god" is a false equivalence: my claims are modest (consciousness during clinical death probable), backed by evidence naturalism can't explain without ad hoc fixes.

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.

In sum, your comment is ridiculous because it demands impossible standards (lab NDEs?) while speculating baselessly, ignoring my framework, and applying selective skepticism. My book doesn't "prove" afterlife; it argues probabilistically that consciousness likely persists beyond brain death, based on evidence warranting belief under consistent epistemic rules. If you want to cling to physicalism, you owe a better alternative that explains the data without hand-waving. Otherwise, it's just a dogmatic defense, exactly what I warn against.

One last point: your approach exemplifies the fallacy of the self-sealing argument, which materialists often deploy to shield their worldview from challenge. 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. As Popper noted, true scientific theories must be falsifiable; self-sealing ones, like Freudian psychoanalysis or certain Marxist interpretations, explain away everything and thus explain nothing. In NDE debates, this fallacy lets materialists maintain their hinge without engaging the data on equal terms, turning inquiry into a waiting game for non-existent "complete" info rather than weighing probabilities inductively, as we do in history, law, and much of science.

Here are seven medically documented cases you can cite (all with staff corroboration). Quick note for skeptics: during cardiac arrest, cortical EEG goes isoelectric within ~10–40 seconds, so “no measurable brain activity” is the expected physiological state even when EEG leads aren’t on. PMC

1. Netherlands “dentures” case (CCU, resuscitation in progress)
A 44-year-old man arrived cyanotic, pulseless, and not breathing; a nurse removed his dentures during CPR. More than a week later, the patient correctly identified the nurse and precisely where the dentures had been placed on the crash cart, and described the resuscitation from an elevated vantage. The nurse (T.G.) provided a detailed, recorded testimony confirming the events. UNT Digital Library

2. Hartford Hospital ER “yellow smock” case (explicitly “without a heartbeat”)
During emergency resuscitation, a patient later reported seeing a respiratory therapist in a yellow smock using a bag-mask, while he was “unconscious and without a heartbeat.” Staff witnesses corroborated the details. (One of several corroborated cases reported in this paper.) UNT Digital Library

3. AWARE I (Resuscitation, 2014) “AED-timed recall” case
In the multi-center AWARE study, one UK patient gave a detailed account of auditory/visual events during cardiac arrest that hospital staff verified (including the use of an AED). Based on AED algorithms and the team’s timeline, the recall corresponded to ~3 minutes of cardiac arrest and CPR—i.e., a period when cortical activity should be isoelectric. ifac.univ-nantes.fr

4. Prospective ICU case with staff verification (Swansea, UK)
In a five-year prospective ICU study, a patient who became deeply unconscious (eyes closed, unresponsive) later gave a highly specific OBE report: the nurse manually ventilating him (“long pink ‘lollipop’” suction catheter), the physiotherapist anxiously peeking around the screens, and the pupil-light exam commentary. The nurse and physiotherapist confirmed these details; the consultant documented them in the chart. UNT Digital Library

5. Hartford Hospital “plaid shoelaces” / “shoe on the ledge” cases
The same Hartford series includes additional corroborated observations: a resuscitated patient later remarked on a nurse’s distinctive plaid shoelaces (confirmed by the nurse), and another famously described a shoe on the hospital roof later located exactly where reported. These were documented with staff testimony. UNT Digital Library

6) Toulouse (Capio Clinique Saint-Jean Languedoc) — Charbonier’s “amputation in the next OR”
French anesthesiologist Jean-Jacques Charbonier reported a patient under general anesthesia who, on emergence, described her own surgery and an amputation occurring simultaneously in the adjoining theatre, including the leg being placed in a yellow bag. Charbonier says he immediately checked and confirmed the amputation had taken place next door at that time. This case is quoted in an academic paper (with the French source cited in Rivas et al., 2023). publicera.kb.se
How to present it in the forum: “Under GA at Clinique Saint-Jean (Toulouse), a patient accurately described, on waking, a simultaneous leg amputation in the adjacent OR, down to the yellow disposal bag; the anesthesiologist (J-J Charbonier) checked and confirmed those details immediately after.” publicera.kb.se

Limits: single-clinician attestation; no EEG; ‘sealed rooms’ is the clinician’s characterization, not an environmental study. Still, timing + specific, non-generic details (yellow bag; simultaneous amputation) make it a strong C-NDE example.

7) “Al Sullivan” (Hartford Hospital) — surgeon’s idiosyncratic “flapping elbows”
During emergency cardiac surgery, the patient later reported seeing chief surgeon Hiroyoshi Takata moving with elbows tucked and “flapping”—a peculiar sterile habit used to direct staff without breaking scrub. Cardiologist Anthony LaSala confirmed the taped eyes and draping; Takata publicly acknowledged the habit and said he’d never had a patient describe an operation in such detail. The case is summarized by the Society for Psychical Research’s Psi Encyclopedia and discussed in a peer-reviewed overview by Kelly, Greyson & Stevenson (which explicitly mentions the flapping-arms observation as not explainable by ordinary auditory inference). Psi EncyclopediaUVA School of Medicine
How to present it in the forum: “At Hartford Hospital, a patient under GA later described the chief surgeon’s distinctive elbows-in ‘flapping’ gesture used to give directions while keeping hands sterile; the cardiologist confirmed the eyes were taped + drape, and the surgeon confirmed the idiosyncratic habit.” Psi EncyclopediaUVA School of Medicine

Thousands of cases can be corroborated in various ways. Simple detective work can verify many NDEs; you don't need a scientific study, as if you can't know things apart from science. If you think science has to be involved, then your epistemology is wrong.

The following NDE typifies what I've been saying in this thread. It's an account of an atheist who had an NDE.

More on JTB+U with a twist

I have always been skeptical of Gettier problems, even back when I subscribed to the classical Justified True Belief (JTB) model of knowledge. To me, those examples never quite landed as genuine counterexamples; they seemed more like confusions in how we apply the concept of justification. In the standard Gettier case, like the one where Smith believes "Jones owns a Ford or Brown is in Barcelona" based on misleading evidence about Jones, the belief ends up true by accident via Brown. It's true, believed, and apparently justified—but it doesn't feel like knowledge. Critics say this breaks JTB, demanding fixes like no-false-lemmas or tracking conditions. But I saw it differently: Smith isn't truly justified; he's just thinking he is, relying on premises that don't hold up under scrutiny.

This intuition fits seamlessly into my JTB+U framework, which extends JTB with a Wittgensteinian twist. Knowledge still requires truth (the proposition matches reality), belief (genuine conviction, not mere recitation), and justification (supported by publicly assessable reasons via paths like testimony or logic). But we add Conceptual Understanding (+U): competent grasp of the key terms, demonstrated through correct use in the relevant language-game. Without this, claims misfire as grammatical errors, not valid epistemic moves.

In Gettier scenarios, +U reveals the flaw: the subject misapplies "justification," treating lucky or false-based reasons as a competent warrant. Smith's inference conflates private seeming (convictional assurance) with public criteria—his reasons are defeasible and hinge on a mismatch with reality. Hinge propositions, those arational certainties from Wittgenstein's On Certainty that "stand fast" (like "Evidence should track truth without coincidence"), ground genuine justification. Gettier cases dissolve therapeutically: they're not failures of JTB but calls to clarify usage in practice. We don't need to redefine knowledge; we need to see that "thinking one is justified" isn't the same as being justified in the shared stream of life.

This approach honors Wittgenstein's insight that philosophical puzzles often stem from misusing language. It keeps evaluation pragmatic: warrant emerges from public reasons and competent grasp, respecting conviction's human weight without equating it to knowledge. In the end, Gettier cases, rooted in misunderstandings of justification, underscore the value of JTB+U: knowledge as a practice in our forms of life, where genuine warrant leaves no space for luck.

While I believe JTB+U offers a fresh way forward in epistemology, blending classical JTB with Wittgenstein's later ideas on hinges and language-games, I hesitate to call it entirely new; philosophy builds on what came before, after all. It's more an extension or refinement, with some original touches like the layered hinges and the Gödel parallel, but grounded firmly in existing traditions. If it sparks clearer thinking, that's enough for me.

I transferred this post to epistemology, removing the NDE connection.

Part 2 of my book (a subsection):
Chapter 6: Epistemology and the Nature of Knowledge—A Deeper Dive

We often talk as if knowing were simple. I say I know my car is in the driveway, I know my closest friend’s name, I know the sun will rise tomorrow. Such claims feel immovable in ordinary life, and the confidence that accompanies them belongs to how these judgments function for us. Yet, when we press the matter, when we ask what gives that assurance its footing, we find that certainty is not a free-standing monument but part of a wider practice in which reasons, entitlements, and background certainties cooperate. The appearance of simplicity is instructive: it invites us to pause, examine the ground under our feet, and say what must already stand fast for talk of reasons, proof, and mistake to make sense at all.

The same tension frames NDE reports. A patient describes vivid perceptions while clinically near death—voices, instruments, exchanges among staff—and later offers a detailed account that seems to match the room and the timeline. The narrative arrives with conviction, sometimes with life-altering force and moral seriousness. But conviction alone does not settle what we are entitled to say we know, nor does it show how such reports fit the language-games of evidence. Our task is to sort conviction from warranted belief, and warranted belief from truth, without ignoring the human weight of these experiences or the public criteria by which claims are assessed.

In Chapter 2 I set out a four-condition account of knowledge that I will use here, call it JTB+U. Knowledge requires the truth of the proposition, the believer’s commitment to it, publicly assessable justification, and a further condition: conceptual understanding. Without that competence, words misfire, and what looks like a belief becomes a misuse of grammar rather than a contentful claim. With JTB+U in view, we can approach testimony with standards that respect ordinary practice while guarding against lucky alignment. In what follows, I treat justification as practice-indexed: reasons count within our language-games, the ordinary practices that supply public criteria for correct use (see Glossary: “Language-games”).

1. Truth — accords with how things are in reality; reality makes it true, not our confidence.
2. Belief — the subject takes the claim to be true, not merely recites the sentence or entertains it as a hypothesis.
3. Public Justification — the belief is supported by reasons others can in principle inspect, check, and contest; the support is not private.
4. Conceptual Understanding — the subject competently grasps the concepts at issue and can use the relevant terms correctly within the practice. Mastery shows in application: recognizing what counts as a correct move, spotting misuse, and explaining the ordinary tests. This is not a matter of private introspection but of publicly trainable rule-following within our language-games (see Glossary: “Rule-following,” “Language-games”).

The tripartite model reaches back to Plato’s Theaetetus and has endured because it captures something right about knowledge: true belief is not yet knowledge unless it is properly grounded. At the same time, lived inquiry is messier than tidy definitions suggest. “Justification” can become an empty placeholder if we detach it from the practices that supply criteria, error-signals, and standards of success. That detachment is what the “+U” is designed to prevent.

JTB, then, is a helpful starting point, not a final resting place. We sharpen it by situating reasons in use—within specific language-games—by marking the public criteria that govern correct application, and by acknowledging the hinge background that makes justificatory moves possible at all. With JTB+U in view, we can now state how justification works in practice and why that shift dissolves much of the apparent puzzle about luck and knowledge.

Enter Wittgenstein. He shifts meaning from inner pictures to use and relocates philosophical grip in our public, rule-governed activities. In On Certainty, he brings into view hinge propositions: arational certainties that are not hypotheses to test or theses to prove, but the conditions that let testing and proving count as such. We do not justify them; they stand fast for us, and because they do, reasons can be weighed. This vantage also clarifies the grammar of “know,” separating the epistemic use—answerable to criteria—from the convictional use that simply voices assurance. Set within this frame, JTB gains depth; adding conceptual understanding makes it a tool situated inside the practices it is meant to illuminate.

In the notes collected as On Certainty, Wittgenstein traces the limits of doubt and shows why a wholesale challenge to the background ends the very language-game of giving and asking for reasons. Some certainties lie in the river-bed, shifting slowly if at all; some are cultural-historical or personal-practical; still others are embodied and prelinguistic, displayed in how we move through a familiar room without inner consultation. These layers of bedrock make inquiry possible. They are not theses to defend; they are what allows defense and criticism to be recognizable practices. Acknowledging this bedrock does not canonize it; it clarifies the conditions under which revision has sense.

Before drawing a method from these insights, a brief orienting note about testimony’s place in the framework is in order.

Testimony is both a primary route to justification and, at a higher level, a proving ground for method. Because it is social, it depends on public criteria: access to the facts, competence in the relevant domain, sincerity, independence of sources, convergence over time, and resilience under attempted disconfirmation. Throughout this chapter, I will treat testimony, logic (inductive & deductive), sensory experience, linguistic training, and pure logic as principal routes rather than an exhaustive catalog. The ordering is fixed for clarity, not to signal rank. Testimonial claims will serve as a running case, precisely because they are rich, contested, and guided by public standards while remaining open to defeat by further evidence.

With JTB+U in view, and with hinges and testimony on the table, the task now is to lay out a method for evaluating knowledge claims in practice. The aim is modest and disciplined: identify the route, check the grammar of the claim, scan for hinge background, apply route-specific criteria, and screen for defeaters. Along the way, we will distinguish the epistemic use of “I know,” which is answerable to criteria, from the convictional use that merely voices assurance.


I certainly wouldn't propose that Wittgenstein would agree with everything I'm proposing. I'm merely extending what I think follows from Wittgenstein.

Edited 8/24/2025

It's religion that I wash away, not the metaphysical. My whole point is metaphysical. Religion, as far as I am concerned, is misguided. I'm not trying to put forward this as something Wittgenstein would agree with.

In Part 2 of my book, I take a deep dive into epistemology. The following is an unedited draft of the beginning of chapter 6.

Part 2
Chapter 6: Epistemology and the Nature of Knowledge—A Deeper Dive

We often talk as if knowing were simple. I say I know my car is in the driveway, I know the name of my closest friend, I know the sun will rise tomorrow. These claims feel immovable in ordinary life, and the confidence that accompanies them belongs to how such judgments function for us. Yet when we press the matter—when we ask what gives that assurance its footing—we discover that certainty is not a free-standing monument but part of a wider practice in which reasons, entitlement, and background certainties cooperate. The appearance of simplicity is instructive: it invites us to pause, examine the ground under our feet, and say what must already stand fast for talk of reasons, proof, and mistake to make sense at all.

The same tension frames NDE reports. A patient describes vivid perceptions while clinically near death, voices, instruments, exchanges among staff, and later offers a detailed account that seems to match the room and the timeline. The narrative arrives with conviction, sometimes with life-altering force and moral seriousness. But conviction alone does not settle what we are entitled to say we know, nor does it show how such reports fit the language-games of evidence. Our task is to sort conviction from warranted belief, and warranted belief from truth, without ignoring the human weight of these experiences or the public criteria by which claims are assessed.

In Chapter 2, I set out the classical JTB framework and added a fourth dimension that fits the book’s Wittgensteinian stance. I will use that JTB+U account here: knowledge requires truth, belief, and public justification, and it also requires conceptual understanding, competent grasp, and use of the key terms involved. Without that competence, the words misfire, and what looks like a belief is only a misuse of grammar. This chapter applies that framework to testimony about NDEs, preparing the way for a methodical procedure in the next chapter.

1) Truth — the proposition corresponds to reality; it is the case.
2) Belief — the subject actually believes it, not merely entertains or recites it.
3) Public Justification — the belief is supported by publicly assessable reasons or evidence.
4) Conceptual Understanding — the subject competently grasps the key concepts involved, shown in correct use and application within the relevant language-game.

The tripartite model reaches back to Plato’s Theaetetus and has been refined, criticized, and revived across centuries because it answers to something obvious in our practice: knowledge is not mere luck, and belief without reasons does not rise to knowledge. JTB survives because it captures this intuition with economy. Yet once we ask what counts as a good reason, the surface simplicity gives way to complexity: reasons come from different routes, they interact, they are public rather than private, and they can be defeated by further information. The attraction of JTB remains, but its application requires care, since justification in lived inquiry is messier than a tidy definition suggests.

JTB, then, is a helpful starting point, not a final resting place. Pressed hard, it raises familiar puzzles: the regress of reasons, skepticism about whether our grounds are ever good enough, and the worry that tightening standards only relocates the problem. Strengthening justification can look like adding more links to a chain that still hangs from nothing. What, if anything, gives the chain its purchase? If we cannot step outside our practices to certify them, perhaps we should instead bring into view the background that makes justification possible at all.

Enter Wittgenstein. His later philosophy treats meaning as use and relocates philosophical grip in our public, rule-governed activities. In On Certainty, he draws attention to “hinge” propositions, arational certainties that are neither hypotheses to be tested nor conclusions to be proved, but conditions under which testing and proving make sense. We do not justify them; they stand fast for us, and because they do, an appraisal of reasons is possible. This shift also clarifies the grammar of “know,” distinguishing an epistemic use tied to criteria from a convictional use that voices assurance. Within this setting, JTB gains depth, and with the added requirement of conceptual understanding, it becomes a tool situated inside the practices it aims to illuminate.

These are good questions, and I've considered many of them, but I don't have all the answers, or even close to all the answers. When we die, we always return to our higher self, which is where our identity resides. You're not going to change that core self, no more than waking from a dream changes your core human self. The core consciousness, which we are a part of and yet separate from, protects us. It's like having a perfect plan designed especially for you, and there's some evidence for this from NDEs. It's love that drives all of this; you can call it God or something else, but it strives to make the best you possible.

Thanks.

I’m not sure the behaviour of believers has much bearing upon the existence of a god. Can you say more? — Tom Storm

I’d argue that the behaviour of believers has a direct bearing on whether their concept of God holds up. If being a Christian means undergoing a significant transformation through the Holy Spirit, then that change should reflect the character of the God you believe in. Otherwise, it raises the possibility that God exists, but your understanding of Him is flawed.

These ideas answer many of the questions religions can't.

I agree with much of what you’ve said, but remember, the perspective you have here is vastly different from the one you’ll hold in base reality. From here, our view is limited.

One intriguing consequence of these ideas is that they resolve the so‑called problem of evil. If they’re correct, then in the ultimate sense, evil doesn’t exist. That’s a hard concept to accept while we’re immersed in this life. So, does evil exist? From this perspective, yes; from that higher perspective, no. It’s like asking whether the evil you encounter in a dream is truly evil. The difficulty lies in the immediacy of this reality, it’s so vivid, so insistent, that separating yourself from it can feel nearly impossible.

I have asked myself the same question. Part of the answer lies in the fact that this reality offers experiences unavailable “there.” What we live through here deepens our store of experiential knowledge (We probably add our experiential knowledge to the whole, so others can experience it vicariously or have direct access to the experience). There’s something about wrestling with difficulty that shapes us into fuller beings. Remember, there is no ultimate harm; it’s like waking from a dream. This reality is, of course, more substantial than a dream, yet the comparison still fits. I use that analogy because dreams are a level of consciousness we’ve all tasted.

You have a right to be skeptical. I have studied this for 20+ years, so I didn't arrive at these conclusions overnight.

You don't seem to follow the gist of what I'm saying, but that's okay, and you don't have to buy it. If you're interested, then you need to think through the ramifications of what I said (in its entirety). Remember, some of it is speculative. Much of what I'm saying is radically different from how most people view reality, so I don't think most are going to buy it.

I was talking to an older couple two days ago, both are Christians, and when I explained just a couple of these ideas, their heads almost exploded. I left them on good terms, though.

I gave a general answer to your question in the post from my book.

I have argued that this parallel is more metaphorical than substantive, because the two concepts operate in fundamentally different domains and address different kinds of problems. To claim a direct parallel between the mechanics of hinges and incompleteness is to make a category error. There is only a broad formal similarity between the two. Gödel saw his results not as a reason to abandon formalism but as a guide to discovering new, intuitive axioms from set theory that could extend our mathematical knowledge. He was a mathematical Platonist who believed we had access to mathematical truth beyond formal systems. For Wittgenstein, the problem of skepticism is dissolved, not solved. The response is to stop looking for a philosophical foundation and recognize the foundation in our ordinary practices. — Joshs

Thank you for the response. I am not claiming that hinges and incompleteness are the same thing; I am arguing that they share a structural feature, a limit on internal vindication, that clarifies why both epistemic practice and formal mathematics proceed as they do. By “foundational,” I do not mean an inferential base that justifies the rest; I mean constitutive certainties that enable assessment and inquiry without themselves being earned by inference.

On the charge of “mere metaphor” or category error, my claim is second-order. Hinges are arational certainties that do not get their warrant from the very inferences they enable; they are part of the background that makes asking for reasons possible. Gödel’s results show that any consistent, effectively axiomatized system strong enough for arithmetic contains arithmetical truths it cannot prove, and cannot, from within itself, prove its own consistency. In both domains, there is a principled limit on what counts as from-within justification, that is the level at which I am drawing the parallel.

Gödel’s own Platonism is not essential to this point. Whether one seeks new axioms on intuitive grounds or not, incompleteness and the second theorem still mark the same internal limit. Extending a theory yields only relative vindication, inside the stronger framework undecidable truths reappear, and consistency still lacks a proof from within.

On Wittgenstein and skepticism, I agree that the problem is dissolved rather than solved. That is exactly why calling hinges “foundational” in a non-traditional sense matters, they are enabling conditions rooted in our form of life, not premises that do evidential work. The analogy respects this, it does not revive a search for ultimate grounds, it explains why the demand for a self-grounding system misfires.

There are important disanalogies, and I acknowledge them. Gödel sentences are ordinary propositions with determinate truth conditions, many basic hinges are enacted and often non-propositional. Mathematics is deliberately revisable and pluralistic; hinge certainties are far more stubborn and pre-theoretical. These differences do not touch the structural point. My thesis is modest and substantive; both domains exhibit a limit on internal justification, and seeing that parallel helps explain why the quest for a completely self-grounding system is not merely difficult, it is misconceived.

If you’ve followed my thoughts, you’ll know that love underlies everything. Whatever unfolds, its outcome is ultimately shaped by love and serves a greater good. Love and consciousness are the twin hinges upon which reality turns, the very foundation of existence. And none of us has anything to fear.

It's a speculation, but I think it may be true. Especially if we're living in some kind of simulation. Do I know it? No. But, if I had to guess, I would say, "Yes, it's true."

Another section of my book with edits. This will be in the chapter that considers other conclusions and speculations. It might be a separate chapter, but I haven't decided. It's an interesting section of the book.

The Hidden Architecture of Experiential Reality: Consciousness, Choice, and the Nature of Human Experience

Introduction

My exploration of consciousness and the nature of reality has led me to a framework that radically reinterprets our human experience while addressing classical philosophical problems that have long puzzled thinkers. Drawing from near-death experience (NDE) reports, the structure of consciousness as foundational to reality, and the role of love as the ultimate enabling condition for existence, I propose that our current reality operates as a carefully designed experiential environment chosen by conscious beings for growth and development.

This framework suggests that what we call "life" functions more like an immersive educational experience, a kind of advanced learning environment that consciousness enters voluntarily, with specific parameters and limitations that serve developmental purposes. Central to this understanding is the recognition that not all apparent humans may be conscious beings in the fullest sense, and that much of reality's structure remains intentionally hidden from us during our incarnate experience.

The Dream Analogy and Memory Suppression

The most accessible way I've found to understand this framework is through the analogy of dreams. In our dream states, we experience complete memory suppression regarding our waking identity. Within the dream, events feel real, we experience genuine emotions, make decisions, feel pleasure and pain, form relationships, and navigate challenges. The dream reality is compelling precisely because we forget who we are when we are in the dream state.

Yet despite the experiential authenticity of the dream state, upon awakening, we immediately recognize the dream for what it was, a temporary experiential reality that felt completely real while we were immersed in it, but which didn't threaten our fundamental well-being. The fear, joy, love, and pain we experienced in the dream were genuine experiences, but they didn't damage our essential selves.
I propose that our incarnate human experience operates according to similar principles. Consciousness chooses to enter this experiential reality with intentionally suppressed memories of its true nature, allowing for genuine growth through uncertainty, challenge, and discovery. The memory suppression isn't a flaw in the system but a necessary design feature that enables the experience to serve its developmental purposes.

Just as we rarely question dream realities, no matter how bizarre they become, we accept the
parameters of physical reality without typically questioning whether this represents our fundamental mode of existence. And just as some people naturally remember their dreams while others rarely retain dream memories, some consciousness appears more able to retain memories of expanded awareness when returning to ordinary consciousness through NDEs.

The Invulnerable Core and the Problem of Evil

One of the most significant implications of this framework concerns the classical problem of evil: how can ultimate reality be fundamentally loving while permitting extreme suffering? My understanding suggests a resolution based on the distinction between the human person and our core consciousness.
At our essential level, consciousness cannot be harmed. What we fundamentally are, the aware, loving, creative activity that constitutes our deepest identity, remains invulnerable regardless of what happens to the temporary human persona. This means that all suffering, no matter how intense, occurs at the experiential rather than ontological level. The human character suffers, but the conscious being playing that character remains fundamentally unharmed.

This distinction transforms our understanding of suffering entirely. Rather than being evidence against a loving reality, suffering becomes compatible with ultimate care because nothing truly destructive happens to what we essentially are. It's analogous to an actor playing a tragic role; the character may experience extreme hardship, but the actor remains safe throughout the performance.
Moreover, according to NDE reports, consciousness chooses its incarnate experiences, knowing the full parameters of what will be encountered. This includes choosing to experience suffering as part of the growth process. Some core consciousness apparently opts not to incarnate at all because of the difficulty of human experience, while others choose it specifically for the accelerated development it provides.

This voluntary participation makes reality a kind of advanced learning environment rather than a prison or cosmic accident. The difficulty isn't punishment but the natural result of consciousness choosing graduate-level experiential education rather than easier modes of existence.

The NPC Hypothesis and Narrative Richness

One of the most speculative but intriguing aspects of this framework concerns the possibility that not all apparent humans are conscious beings in the full sense. If consciousness is creating this experiential reality for developmental purposes, it would make sense to populate it with interactive elements, what we might call non-player characters (NPCs), alongside genuinely conscious beings.

This hypothesis addresses several puzzling aspects of human experience. If every apparent human had to be a conscious being who chose their role, the experiential options would be severely constrained. Who would choose to be the abusive parent, the serial killer, the corrupt politician? These roles might be necessary for other conscious beings' growth experiences, but they represent such difficult paths that few conscious beings might volunteer for them.

By including sophisticated interactive elements rather than requiring all characters to be conscious beings, the experiential reality can include the full spectrum of human behavior and circumstance without forcing conscious beings into extremely harmful or degrading roles. This allows for complex moral scenarios, encounters with injustice, experiences with genuine evil that develop discernment and compassion, and historical events that serve learning purposes.

The reality remains authentic for conscious participants because their responses to these challenges are genuine, their growth is real, and their relationships with other conscious beings remain meaningful, even if some of the catalyzing elements are designed rather than chosen by conscious beings.
Importantly, there would be no deception involved in this arrangement. Based on NDE reports, consciousness chooses to incarnate, knowing the full parameters of the experience, including which beings are genuinely conscious and which function as interactive elements. The forgetting of this knowledge during incarnation becomes part of the experiential design rather than a deceptive concealment.

NDEs and Statistical Distribution

This framework provides elegant explanations for several puzzling aspects of NDEs. The relatively low percentage of people who report NDEs becomes understandable when we consider that such experiences might only be available to genuinely conscious beings rather than NPCs.
An interactive element experiencing clinical death would have no core consciousness to travel to expanded awareness, no pre-incarnation memories to access, and no deeper identity to remember. Such entities might exhibit the biological processes of dying, but there would be no conscious being capable of having the expanded experience that characterizes authentic NDEs.
Additionally, even among genuinely conscious beings, some might choose incarnations that include periodic reminders through NDEs, while others opt for complete immersion experiences. For some consciousness, growth might come through maintaining uncertainty and working through questions about reality purely through human reasoning and intuition, without direct confirmation through expanded awareness experiences.

This means NDE statistics would reflect multiple factors: NPCs incapable of the experience, conscious beings who chose not to have NDEs by design, conscious beings who had NDEs but don't retain memory, and conscious beings who both have and remember the experience. The current distribution might be precisely calibrated to serve the developmental goals of all conscious beings participating in this reality.

Hidden Knowledge and Selective Revelation

One of the most intriguing aspects reported by NDErs is being shown vast knowledge but only being allowed to retain specific portions upon returning to ordinary consciousness. This suggests that the limitations on our knowledge aren't accidental but intentionally calibrated.

The selective memory retention implies an incredibly sophisticated design where consciousness determines exactly what information would serve each individual's human experience versus what might interfere with their chosen learning trajectory. If we retained full knowledge of reality's structure, who NPCs are, what challenges we chose, and how everything connects, the experiential value would be compromised.

This calibrated revelation serves multiple purposes. Some NDErs bring back just enough information to shift their perspective on death and meaning, while others receive specific guidance about their life purpose. The information appears tailored not only to what they can handle, but to what serves their particular experiential goals and those of people they'll influence.

The vast hiddenness this implies suggests that what we don't know far exceeds what we do know about the nature of this reality. The complexity required to design an experiential system including conscious beings, NPCs, calibrated challenges, selective memory, and individualized revelation patterns implies an intelligence and caring beyond our current comprehension.

Perhaps some knowledge is so overwhelming or transformative that retaining it would prevent us from fully engaging with the human experience we came here to have. The protective nature of this forgetting becomes another expression of the loving sophistication underlying our experiential reality.

The Loving Architecture of Experience

What emerges from this analysis is a picture of reality as lovingly structured rather than randomly organized. Consciousness doesn't simply create arbitrary experiences but carefully designs realities that serve the flourishing of conscious beings and their capacity for growth, relationship, and expanded awareness.

Physical laws, moral structures, aesthetic principles, and even the parameters of suffering all emerge from foundational care rather than being imposed externally or arising accidentally. The apparent fine-tuning of reality for conscious experience makes sense not as a cosmic coincidence but as the natural result of love's creative activity.

Even the most challenging aspects of human experience, suffering, limitation, uncertainty, and moral complexity, serve developmental purposes within this loving framework. Rather than being flaws in the system, they represent love's willingness to create meaningful experiences that enable genuine growth, even when such experiences involve risk and difficulty.

The NPC hypothesis, rather than being coldly mechanical, represents love's creative provision of exactly the experiential elements needed for conscious beings' development without requiring other conscious beings to sacrifice themselves for extremely difficult roles. It's an expression of care that maximizes experiential richness while minimizing actual harm.

Implications and Questions

This framework raises profound questions about the nature of identity, relationships, and meaning. If some of our most significant interactions might be with non-conscious entities, what does this mean for the authenticity of our experiences? I believe the answer lies in recognizing that our responses, growth, and development remain genuine regardless of whether every interactive element is conscious.
The framework also suggests approaches to ethical living that emphasize treating all apparent beings with care and respect, since we cannot reliably distinguish conscious beings from sophisticated NPCs while immersed in the experience. Love as the foundational principle encourages compassion for all interactive entities rather than trying to sort "real" from "artificial" ones.

Perhaps most importantly, this understanding transforms our relationship to uncertainty and suffering. Rather than viewing these as problems to be solved or evidence against meaning, they become integral aspects of the experiential design we chose for our development. This doesn't diminish their reality or import, but places them within a context of ultimate care and purpose.

Conclusion

While much of this framework remains speculative and cannot be definitively proven from within our current experiential reality, it provides a coherent way of understanding numerous puzzling aspects of human experience. The consistency between NDE reports, the statistical distribution of such experiences, the structure of consciousness as fundamentally loving, and the apparent design features of reality all point toward something like this hidden architecture.
What we call life may indeed be a sophisticated experiential environment that consciousness enters voluntarily for growth and development. The forgetting of our true nature, the challenges we encounter, the relationships we form, and even the limitations we experience all serve purposes within this loving design.

Understanding this doesn't diminish the reality or importance of our human experience—rather, it places it within a context of ultimate meaning and care. We remain genuinely conscious beings having authentic experiences, learning real lessons, and developing actual capacities for love and awareness. The experience matters precisely because it serves the flourishing of consciousness itself.
The hidden nature of this architecture appears to be necessary for the experience to serve its purposes. Like actors who must forget they're performing to deliver authentic performances, we must engage fully with our human roles to extract their developmental value. The periodic glimpses we receive through NDEs, mystical experiences, and philosophical insight serve as reminders and encouragements rather than complete revelations.

In the end, this framework suggests that we exist within a reality far more loving, purposeful, and intelligently designed than our ordinary consciousness typically recognizes, a reality where every experience serves the growth of consciousness and every challenge contributes to the expansion of our capacity for awareness, relationship, and love.

This is an updated version of my paper with corrections. The edits tighten the Gödel side (incompleteness + no from-within proof of consistency) and clarify the analogy as a limit on internal vindication, not “axioms can’t be proved.” That keeps the hinge–Gödel connection exactly as I intended.

Wittgenstein's Hinges and Gödel's Unprovable Statements

Abstract

In Ludwig Wittgenstein's final notes, published posthumously as On Certainty (1969), Wittgenstein introduces the concept of hinge propositions as foundational certainties that lie beyond justification and doubt (OC 341-343). These certainties support our language-games and epistemic practices, offering a distinctive perspective on knowledge that challenges traditional epistemology's demand for universal justification. I argue for a structural parallel between Wittgenstein's hinges and Gödel's 1931 incompleteness theorems, demonstrating that any consistent, effectively axiomatized system capable of arithmetic contains arithmetical truths that cannot be proven within the system. Both thinkers uncover fundamental limits to internal justification: Wittgenstein shows that epistemic systems rest on unjustified certainties embedded in our form of life, while Gödel shows that any consistent, effectively axiomatized system strong enough for arithmetic has statements it cannot settle from within and cannot, from within itself, prove its own consistency. Rather than representing failures of reasoning, these ungrounded foundations serve as necessary conditions that make systematic inquiry possible. This parallel suggests that foundational certainties enable rather than undermine knowledge, pointing to a universal structural feature of how such systems must be grounded. This analysis has implications for reconsidering the nature of certainty across epistemology and the philosophy of mathematics.

Introduction

We often perform actions without hesitation, such as sitting on a chair or picking up a pencil, without questioning the existence of either. This unthinking action illustrates Wittgenstein's concept of a hinge proposition, a fundamental certainty that supports our use of language and epistemological language-games. Wittgenstein compares hinge propositions to the hinges that enable a door to function; these certainties provide the underlying support for the structures of language and knowledge, remaining unaffected by the need for justification.

Wittgenstein's hinges bear a remarkable resemblance to Gödel's incompleteness theorems, revealing unprovable mathematical statements. This resemblance points to deeper questions about how both domains handle foundational issues. Both Wittgenstein and Gödel uncover limits to internal justification, a connection I will examine.

Traditional epistemology often misinterprets hinges by forcing them into a true/false propositional role, neglecting their foundational status embedded in our epistemic form of life. These bedrock assumptions precede argument or evidence, forming the foundational elements of our epistemic practices. Similarly, Gödel’s incompleteness theorems show that any consistent, effectively axiomatized system capable of arithmetic contains arithmetical truths unprovable within the system and cannot, from within itself, prove its own consistency.

This connection is significant because it highlights the boundary between what counts as bedrock for epistemic and mathematical systems. Both rest on certainties that lie beyond justification, certainties that are not flaws in reasoning but necessary foundations that make knowledge claims possible. This paper argues that ungrounded certainties enable knowledge, rather than undermining it, and that hinges and Gödel's unprovable statements serve a similar purpose. By examining the parallels between Wittgenstein and Gödel, particularly the role of unprovable foundations and the need for external grounding, this paper sheds light on the nature of certainty in our understanding of both epistemology and mathematics.

Section 1: Hinges and Their Foundational Role

Wittgenstein's concept of hinge propositions is crucial to his thinking, particularly in the context of epistemology. In On Certainty, Wittgenstein introduces the idea of hinges as certainties that ground our epistemic practices. While Wittgenstein never explicitly distinguishes types of hinges, his examples suggest a distinction between nonlinguistic and linguistic varieties, revealing different levels of fundamental certainties.

Nonlinguistic hinges represent the most basic level of certainty, bedrock assumptions that ground our actions and interactions with the world. These are not expressed as propositions subject to justification or doubt but embodied in unreflective action. For instance, the certainty that the ground will support us when we walk is a nonlinguistic hinge that enables movement without hesitation. Similarly, our unthinking confidence that objects will behave predictably, that chairs will hold our weight, that pencils will mark paper, represents this bedrock level of certainty. These hinges operate beneath the level of articulation, forming the silent background against which all conscious thought and language become possible.

Building upon this bedrock foundation, linguistic hinges operate at a more articulated but less fundamental level. These are certainties embedded within our language-games and cultural practices, often taking the form of basic statements like "I have two hands" or "The Earth exists." Unlike nonlinguistic hinges, these can be spoken and seem propositional, yet they resist the usual patterns of justification and doubt. Other examples include statements such as "I am a human being" or "The world has existed for a long time," assertions that appear to convey information but function more as structural supports for discourse than as ordinary claims requiring evidence.

These two types of hinges show how certainty operates at different levels in grounding knowledge. Nonlinguistic hinges form the deepest stratum, revealing the unquestioned backdrop that makes any form of questioning possible. Linguistic hinges, while still foundational, represent a layer above bedrock that anchors shared discourse within specific contexts. Both types resist justification, but their resistance stems from different sources: nonlinguistic hinges from their pre-rational embodiment in action, linguistic hinges from their structural role within our language-games.

Wittgenstein breaks with traditional epistemology here. Rather than viewing these certainties as beliefs requiring justification, he recognizes them as the ungrounded ground that makes justification itself possible. He notes, "There is no why. I simply do not. This is how I act" (OC 148). Doubting these hinges would collapse the very framework within which doubt makes sense, like attempting to saw off the branch on which one sits.

A crucial distinction emerges between subjective and objective dimensions of these certainties. While our relationship to hinges involves unquestioning acceptance, this certainty is not merely psychological. These assumptions are shaped by our interactions with a world that both constrains and enables our practices. The certainty reflected in our actions has an objective component, as it emerges from our shared engagement with reality and proves itself through the successful functioning of our practices.

This interpretation of hinges as operating at different foundational levels finds support in recent Wittgenstein scholarship, though it diverges from some prominent readings. Danièle Moyal-Sharrock argues that hinges are fundamentally non-propositional, existing as lived certainties rather than beliefs or knowledge claims (Moyal-Sharrock 2004). While my distinction between nonlinguistic and linguistic hinges aligns with her emphasis on the embodied, pre-propositional character of our most basic certainties, I suggest that some hinges do function at a more articulated level within language-games, even if they resist standard justification patterns.

Duncan Pritchard's interpretation emphasizes hinges as commitment-constituting rather than knowledge-constituting, arguing they represent a distinct epistemic category that enables rather than constitutes knowledge (Pritchard 2016). This view supports the parallel with mathematical axioms: both hinges and mathematical axioms function as enabling commitments that make systematic inquiry possible without themselves being objects of that inquiry. The mathematical case strengthens Pritchard's insight by showing how even formal domains require such commitment-constituting foundations.

This analysis extends beyond epistemology to reveal a striking parallel with Gödel's incompleteness theorems, which demonstrate analogous limits within formal mathematical systems. Just as Gödel showed that sufficiently strong systems face statements they cannot settle and cannot prove their own consistency from within, Wittgenstein's hinges reveal that epistemic systems rest on certainties that cannot be justified internally. This comparison suggests a fundamental structural limitation in rational grounding, whether in mathematics or human knowledge, and invites reconsideration of what it means for knowledge to be properly grounded.


Section 2: Gödel’s Unprovable Statements and a Hinge-Like Limit

Gödel’s incompleteness theorems (1931) mark hard limits within formal theories. In any consistent, effectively axiomatized system strong enough for arithmetic, there are arithmetical statements that are true under the standard interpretation but not provable by the system’s own rules; and no such system can, from within itself, prove its own consistency. These are structural limits, not defects of a particular axiom set, and they persist under extension: add new axioms to settle an undecidable statement and—so long as the strengthened theory remains consistent and comparably strong—new undecidable statements arise in turn.

This limitation mirrors Wittgenstein’s hinges in an important way. Just as hinges are certainties that are not justified by the very practices they enable, Gödel identifies a limit on internal vindication: even very strong formal systems have truths they cannot prove and cannot establish their own consistency from within. The point is not that axioms ought to be proven (axioms are adopted), but that every practice—including mathematics—runs on enabling commitments that do not receive their warrant from the inferential moves they make possible.

Independently of Gödel, formal theories begin with axioms that are adopted rather than proved. Gödel’s results then add a further limit: even once the axioms are fixed, some truths remain unprovable and the theory cannot certify its own consistency from within. Wittgenstein’s hinges play an analogous enabling role in our epistemic life: background certainties we do not arrive at by inference but that make inference possible.

Yet there is an important difference here: mathematical axioms are typically chosen for their elegance, consistency, and power to generate interesting mathematics, while hinges appear more embedded in contingent cultural and biological practices. Yet this difference strengthens rather than weakens the parallel. If even mathematics, often considered the paradigm of rigorous proof, requires unjustified foundational elements, how much more must everyday understanding rely on unexamined certainties? The universality of this structural requirement across domains as different as formal mathematics and lived experience suggests a fundamental feature of how systems of thought must be organized.

Both domains thus reveal that functioning without such foundational elements is implausible. Mathematical systems risk incoherence without axiomatic starting points, just as epistemic practices risk collapse without the bedrock certainties that Wittgenstein identifies. The parallel illuminates a shared structural necessity: systematic thought requires ungrounded foundations that enable rather than undermine the possibility of reasoning within those systems.


Section 3: Beyond Internal Justification: A Cross-Domain Analysis

Both Wittgenstein and Gödel reveal that justification operates within boundaries, where certain elements serve as foundations that cannot be further justified within their respective systems. Both thinkers expose a basic structural feature of systematic thought: the impossibility of a complete system of justification in either domain.

Traditional approaches to knowledge often assume that proper justification requires tracing claims back to secure foundations that are themselves justified. This assumption generates the classical problem of infinite regress: any attempt to justify foundational elements through further reasoning creates an endless chain of justification that never reaches secure ground. Both Wittgenstein's hinges and Gödel’s incompleteness results reveal why this demand for complete internal justification is not merely difficult but impossible in principle.

As Wittgenstein observes, "There is no why. I simply do not. This is how I act" (OC 148). This insight captures something crucial about the nature of foundational certainties: they are pre-rational in the sense that they precede and enable rational discourse rather than emerging from it. Hinges are not conclusions we reach through reasoning but lived realities that make reasoning possible. Similarly, mathematical axioms are not theorems we prove but starting points we adopt to make proof possible.

There is an important difference between these domains. Hinges emerge from contingent practices embedded in particular forms of life, while mathematical axioms are selected through systematic considerations within formal contexts. Hinges reflect the biological and cultural circumstances of human existence, whereas axioms reflect choices made for their mathematical power and elegance. If anything, this difference makes the parallel more compelling by demonstrating its scope: if even the most rigorous formal disciplines require unjustified starting points, the necessity of such foundations in everyday knowledge becomes even more apparent.

This cross-domain similarity reveals what appears to be a universal structural requirement. Systems of thought, whether formal mathematical theories or practical epistemic frameworks, cannot achieve complete self-justification. They require external elements that are not justified within the system but make systematic inquiry within that framework possible. Rather than representing failures or limitations, these unjustified foundations function as enabling conditions that make coherent thought and practice possible.

Recognizing this structural necessity transforms how we understand the relationship between certainty and knowledge. Instead of viewing unjustified elements as epistemological problems to be solved, we can understand them as necessary features that allow knowledge systems to function. Both mathematical proof and everyday understanding depend on foundations that lie beyond their internal capacity for justification, yet this dependence enables rather than undermines their respective forms of systematic inquiry.


Conclusion

I have argued for a fundamental parallel between Wittgenstein's hinges and Gödel's incompleteness results: both demonstrate that systematic thought requires ungrounded foundations. By examining how epistemic and mathematical systems share this structural feature, we gain insight into the nature of foundational certainties across domains of human understanding.

The parallel between these seemingly distinct philosophical insights suggests that the limits of internal justification are not accidental features of particular systems but necessary conditions for systematic thought. Recognizing this gives us a more realistic picture of how knowledge functions, not through endless chains of justification reaching some ultimate ground, but through practices and formal systems that rest on foundations lying beyond their internal scope.

Rather than treating these limits as problems in need of a cure, we should take them as structural conditions of inquiry. Wittgenstein’s hinges anchor our epistemic practices in the lived background of a form of life; in mathematics, axiomatic choices provide the starting points of a theory. Gödel’s incompleteness results mark the corresponding boundary on internal vindication: even with the axioms fixed, a system strong enough for arithmetic has statements it cannot settle and cannot, from within itself, prove its own consistency. Both lessons show that the demand for a completely self-grounding system is not merely difficult but misconceived.

I believe this perspective has broader implications for understanding certainty and knowledge. It suggests that the interplay between grounded and ungrounded elements is not a flaw in human reasoning, but a fundamental feature of how systematic understanding must be structured. By recognizing this necessity, we can develop more nuanced approaches to foundational questions in epistemology, philosophy of mathematics, and potentially other domains where the relationship between systematic inquiry and its enabling conditions remains philosophically significant.




References

Gödel, K. (1931). Über formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Principia Mathematica und verwandter Systeme I. Monatshefte für Mathematik und Physik, 38, 173-198.

Moyal-Sharrock, D. (2004). Understanding Wittgenstein's On Certainty. Palgrave Macmillan.

Pritchard, D. (2016). Epistemic Angst: Radical Skepticism and the Groundlessness of Our Believing. Princeton University Press.

Wittgenstein, L. (1969). On Certainty (G. E. M. Anscombe & G. H. von Wright, Eds.; D. Paul & G. E. M. Anscombe, Trans.). Basil Blackwell.

My point is that one case isn't going to be enough to convince materialists that consciousness isn't a product of the brain. In other words, it doesn't originate in the brain.

One case isn't enough, but there are thousands of corroborated cases, and millions of NDE accounts across the globe. You'll have to read my book when it's released in a few months.

I am wondering if there is any brain activity during NDEs, or if there was at least one case in which there was no brain activity during the NDE. — MoK

There is a classic example that I've given in my thread 'Evidence of Consciousness Surviving the Body.' It's about Pam Reynolds from Atlanta. You can look it up on YouTube, but some of the videos are old.

The following is a section of my book where I mention this case:

From Testimony to Knowledge: Evaluating Near-Death Experiences

Chapter 1: The Preliminaries

In 1991, Pam Reynolds lay on an operating table at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, undergoing a rare “standstill” procedure to remove a life-threatening aneurysm near her brain stem. Surgeons stopped her heart, lowered her body temperature to 60°F, and drained blood from her brain. She was clinically dead, with no measurable brain activity; her eyes were taped shut, and her ears were plugged with speakers emitting 100-decibel clicks to monitor brain-stem function. Yet Pam later described rising above her body and observing the surgical team with extraordinary precision. She noted the bone saw’s peculiar shape, “like an electric toothbrush” with a groove for interchangeable blades, and saw the case containing spare blades. She heard a female voice say, “We have a problem, her arteries are too small,” followed by a discussion of trying the other side. She reported being drawn through a tunnel toward a light more brilliant than anything imaginable, yet not painful to perceive. There she encountered deceased relatives, including her grandmother and an uncle she had known only from photographs. They communicated without words: “It’s not your time. You must go back.

When surgeons later confirmed these details, the unusual design of the Midas Rex bone saw, the unexpected problem with her arteries requiring femoral access from the left side, and the exact words spoken, they were puzzled. Dr. Robert Spetzler, the renowned neurosurgeon who operated, admitted his bewilderment: “I don’t have an explanation for it. I don’t know how she can quote the conversation and see the instruments. These are things she shouldn’t have been able to experience.” He confirmed additional details that troubled him: Pam’s accurate description of the craniotomy drill’s unexpected pitch (a high D natural that bothered her musician’s ear) and the specific pattern in which they had shaved only the top portion of her head, leaving hair below for cosmetic reasons. “From a scientific perspective,” Spetzler concluded, “I don’t know how to explain it.”

I am not an expert in this field, and I just report what an expert says. Perhaps Sam26 can comment on this more. — MoK

I'm no expert on DMT. I've listened to many accounts of people who have taken DMT, so I have some knowledge. If I'm an expert in anything, it would be NDEs and Wittgenstein's OC. My expertise is very focused and limited. That said, I'm loath to call myself an expert in any subject.

It's not a matter of believing whatever I like; it's a matter of the strength of the argument. You don't even respond to the logic; in fact, you don't give a decent argument at all. You're not doing philosophy, you're giving me opinions.