Is there anything after death?
I was on Reddit today, and I came across (this link)[http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/eyiat/for_those_of_you_who_have_died_and_been/]. One of the things I’ve seen on this site that’s bothered me is the exclusion of personal experiences in deciding what a person should or should not believe. I know that less wrong is mostly atheist, and I wanted to hear less wrong’s reaction to descriptions of experiences like these.
For example, my dad was in the hospital 5 or 6 years ago when a truck came across an icy road and hit him head-on. His most vivid memory from this is a dream he had when he was in the hospital. He was in a pool of water with my mom, and they were both naked (they were underwater, but didn’t need to breathe). He remembers that at the end of this pool, there was a bright light that he wanted to head towards. He began to swim that way...and here, I don’t remember what happened, but he was unable to reach the light for some reason.
Such stories seem to be common for people who come close to death, and for a community based around rationality which seems to consider the likelihood of life after death as slim, I just wondered what your reactions are. My reaction is that such experiences are explainable in terms of neural activity, but that doesn’t necessarily exclude the possibility that these are descriptions of experiences of an afterlife. I’m not convinced by them, but I do consider it to be possible.
In general, personal observation by humans is not strong evidence.
Personally speaking, I myself suffer from sleep paralysis with occasional accompanying hallucinations. I’ve seen ghosts, demons, aliens and sometime the Borg standing over me. And when it is happening it almost always feels very real and very scary (even when there’s no hallucinatory aspect). Human observational data for anything other than possibly locating a hypothesis is not at all reliable.
Furthermore, even if you do accept that the stereotypical bright light and tunnel is evidence of an afterlife, why assume there’s anything beyond that? Maybe the entire afterlife consists of a few seconds of bright light. And when you reach the light, the result is oblivion. There’s nothing in the evidence that rules that out.
It would be really nice if there were an afterlife, but the vast majority of evidence is against it. Indeed, given human desire for an afterlife, the fact that the best evidence is weak claims like NDEs, that itself becomes evidence against an afterlife, because with that much motivated cognition if there was strong evidence for an afterlife, it seems unlikely someone would not have hit on it by now.
Given the existence of an afterlife, what other sort of evidence would you expect to be forthcoming though?
The kind of evidence would depend upon the kind of afterlife. One notion of an afterlife that ought to get at least a little respect around here is this:
We exist within a simulation.
Within our simulated universe, reductionism works—our minds can be reduced to a computational process taking place within our brains.
When our brains deteriorate after death, our minds disappear—at least within our simulated universe.
Nevertheless, Omega, the dude who runs the simulation, is in the habit of making copies of the information in the simulation, including the brain information of certain favored simulated entities.
When people die in our (simulated) universe, Omega creates ‘reincarnated’ NPCs into a different simulated universe—using the copies of our brains as the information source. Therefore, these NPCs have our personalities, and our memories (up to the point in time when our brains were ‘backed up’). But they get new (immortal?) bodies. A completely naturalistic afterlife.
However, whatever “near death experiences” really are, they are not evidence for an afterlife as speculatively described here. Information about Omega’s activities doesn’t flow into our naturalistic universe. Instead, information about our universe flows out. The kind of afterlife I have described leaves no evidence.
So, what kind of afterlife does leave evidence? I find it hard to imagine an afterlife scenario in which the Omega in question is so sloppy as to allow information to leak back into his simulation.
ETA: Hmmm. Now that I think about it, my speculation described two universes—a completely naturalistic ‘first-life’ universe, and a less naturalistic ‘after-life’ universe. Information clearly does flow into the after-life universe. The origin of each reincarnated mind requires a miracle. So, I guess what I am saying is that I doubt the existence of evidence that there will be an afterlife. But I suspect that evidence for an prior life should be pretty overwhelming once you get to the afterlife. So, I’m pretty much ruling out Hinduism—at least as I understand it.
It depends on the nature of the afterlife. In that regard “afterlife” is like “God” in that there are so many different versions of what the term means that making the belief pay rent in any reasonable amount of time can be difficult. But if one looks at most traditional afterlife claims, then those which pay rent fail pretty miserably. at their expectations Take for example classical Spiritualism or Roman Catholicism as useful examples.
Could you expand on how they fail in their expectations? I’m not sure what exactly it is you’re referring to.
Honestly, I would say that the idea of an afterlife is much harder to assail than one of God. Definitions of God that excuse it from providing evidence we don’t observe tend to be incoherent, unsatisfying, or morally reprehensible, whereas it’s not clear that the definitions that excuse an afterlife from providing evidence make it any less satisfying.
To use the example of Spiritualism the entire claim revolved around the ability to talk to the dead and for the dead to easily manifest themselves through mediums. That fails miserably (hence the very long history of mediums being caught engaging in fraudulent behavior often involving cheap magic tricks.) But, just as with God, the solution has been to move to less and less testable hypotheses, so that instead of forming actual entities that speak and interact many modern mediums claim only to be able to get vague feelings and images.
That seems like a valid point. There’s a difference in degree here. I’m not convinced that it is a difference in kind.
I agree. I also appreciate that you did not exclude it as evidence entirely.
I do not expect my personal experiences to be very convincing to anyone other than myself (Daniel Dennett wrote a very eloquent description of why this is true, it’s in my room, I may post it here later). However, I am very convinced by my own experiences. I understand that my personal experiences with what I believe to have been God could be explained by neural anomalies, but until I have convincing reasons to believe that, or convincing reasons to believe there isn’t a God outside my personal experiences, or convincing reasons to believe that my experiences are evidence of something else entirely, my personal experiences are sufficient to convince me that there is probably a God. [edited for clarification; I previously concluded that I would assume that there is a God, which was wrong]
Additionally, while one personal experience is not very convincing, many similar personal experiences can be. You can say that it is possibly group hallucination or something of that sort (a large prank, confused people, etc.), but until I have extra reason to believe that these people are wrong, I won’t assume that.
An interesting point. Not sure what my response to that is.
What evidence against the afterlife is there?
Weak evidence like NDEs still requires an explanation. The obvious recourses are hallucination, neural anomalies, etc., but until I have extra evidence to support them, I won’t believe them. If studies have been done to show that they are hallucinations, etc., then that would be sufficient. I don’t know of any.
What evidence might convince you? Simply curious, I can’t think of any. Similarly, life could come from invisible unicorns prancing around our galaxy, but I can’t think of any evidence for that. My reaction is different, though: I simply say “if it is, I can’t know” not “there can’t be, because we haven’t seen evidence for it.” I really don’t like saying that God can’t exist, there can’t be an afterlife, etc., because we don’t have evidence for which isn’t the same thing as evidence against. My reaction is make no beliefs, not update my beliefs against.
It would be interesting for you to consider why you give the afterlife weight in light of “absence of evidence.” By that, I mean that it might be helpful to consider where the “seed” got planted in the first place. Do things like NDEs and OBEs alone lead you to think that there is a possible afterlife, or was the idea/half-belief already present and NDEs/OBEs only make it slightly more likely or difficult to rule out entirely?
I only ask because I would presume that in many, many cases (Xenu, thetans, fairies, the Loch Ness monster, aliens, and many conspiracy theories) you absolutely do treat absence of evidence as evidence of absence.
Without a significant difference in the quantity or quality of evidence between these various cases, and without a reason to think that an NDE/OBE implies an immaterial self rather than simply an unexplained phenomenon… I suspect that the belief or concept of the afterlife hypothesis originated somewhere else and your current grounds for clinging to it (OBEs/NDEs needing to be explained and absence of evidence isn’t...) aren’t really real.
To say it one more way: you might be discussing this topic as if a certain set of evidence matters, when it really has nothing to do with why you deal delicately with the afterlife idea while harshly with the other unsupported hypotheses I listed above.
That is almost certainly true. But it doesn’t make the first part of your statement false.
I’m trying to objectively decide the answer to this question. It’s difficult because of your other point.
If this is true, how do I know? If I’m biased to believe in an afterlife and evidence that would otherwise not applicable becomes convincing to me because of my bias, how would I be able to tell this is true rather than the alternative? (which is that I’m unbiased and that the evidence really is convincing)
That’s a great question… I’m not sure I know! One idea is to consider (if possible) some equally difficult-to-explain phenomenon and potential explanations offered up which defy naturalism. Would you be prone to believe in miracle reports of various religions if they truly could not be explained? Like this?
The only thing I can think of right now is to look at other evidence that is 1) in the same class (inexplicable at present, equally documented) and 2) believed to imply some belief by some set of people. If you agree that the evidence for whatever it is in #1 is on par with that for OBE/NDEs and currently inexplicable but deny whatever belief is held by those in #2… you may have a bias on your hands.
Off the top of my head, I can’t think of anything right now in this category, exactly. I’ll keep thinking, though.
[I’m going to leave this comment like it is, but I’m adding this edit for clarification. After a second read-through, I do agree that the quote I posted proves that NDE’s aren’t compelling evidence in the sense that they aren’t definite proof of God/the afterlife/whatever. But I don’t think they proved that NDE’s aren’t valid evidence, which it seemed to me at first they tried to do, and I then realized that they hadn’t. So take this comment with a grain of salt, and see what you can make of it]
DreadedAnomaly gave two good articles to read in his post below*, which could possibly explain OBE/NDEs as completely natural. These are pretty good articles, but they highlight a problem I have with the whole discussion: that the anti-afterlife side seems biased, too. For example, a quote from this article:
This (to me) certainly does not prove that NDE’s are not compelling evidence, it proved that it was not necessarily compelling evidence. It suggested that NDE’s were not compelling evidence and further argument might have convinced me, but it seemed a bit too soon to call it a “proof” to me. (and there was no further argument, because they thought they had proved it)
Things like this cause me to question whether there is anyone who has published unbiased arguments for or against God or the afterlife. Responses to this post don’t seem to escape bias, and while we can account for bias, it’s particularly difficult to do so for a topic where I’m questioning whether I’m biased myself.
*http://lesswrong.com/lw/3ok/is_there_anything_after_death/3bgr
Well, the most obvious one is dying and finding myself in an apparent afterlife. But that’s a bit flippant. Any of the following would make assign the idea of an afterlife a high probability:
1) A collection of mediums who are able to talk to the dead and can demonstrate that they are actually talking to the dead. Evidence that they can actually do so would a) correctly passing on pass-phrases to living people that were agreed upon before people died b) access to large amounts of information that the individual should not otherwise have (e.g. give them a simple number theory problem and they should be able to get a solution from say Erdos. And physics problems from Feynman, etc. c) the systematic production of information known to no living individuals which is subsequently confirmed by archaeology (the exact location of certain lost cities and ships would be the most obvious result). d) the production of new results in multiple areas of learning (again, people like Erdos and Feynman presumably have been working since their deaths). Any single one of these would be strong evidence and at least 2 of them would be convincing. (There are more likely hypotheses to explain any single one of these four by itself. For example c could be by itself explained by access to something like an Akashic record which seems unlikely but about as likely as an afterlife. )
2) This one has two parts a) There exist prophets who demonstrate repeatedly the ability to engage in miracles (and not silly miracles like making a congealed goo become liquidy when you shake it once a year. Miracles means repeated, testable examples of serious violations of the laws of physics in a variety of different ways) and the ability to prophesy. b) those prophets assert there is an afterlife and give a coherent description of it.
3) Any evidence that we are in a simulation drastically increases my estimate that there’s an afterlife because keeping back up copies is a natural thing to do. That by itself isn’t enough to assign a high probability because the entities running the simulation may not care enough about intelligent life (Tangent: We could have a Singularity, start modifying stars and building Dyson spheres and all that fun stuff. Then some higher-level equivalent of a grad student gets annoyed because its simulation of a what a universe with only 3 spatial dimensions would look like has developed some sort of self-organizing gunk that’s messing with the macroscopic behavior. That’s going to push its PhD back a while. Don’t worry, it will keep the copy running long enough to figure out which parameters to tweak to prevent the self-organizing junk from showing up again.)
4) Any end-times scenario which fits in with a major religion that has an afterlife also elevates the chance of an afterlife. Thus, if most of the Evangelical Christians disappear along with every little child I will assign a high probability to the Rapture having just taken place and thus there’s an afterlife.
Note that these are just off the top of my head. They are by no means exhaustive.
Well, by “beliefs against” do you mean certainty that they don’t exist? A good Bayesian won’t do that because assigning probability 0 or 1 to something is a bad idea. But, one can assign the existence of God or the existence of an afterlife a low probability. Both are extremely complicated hypotheses. That means they shouldn’t get assigned a high prior probability, regardless of whether one is assigning priors using Solomonoff induction or some other approach. The fact that people have been searching for evidence of an afterlife and have come up woefully sort adjusts that probability downwards if it goes in any direction.
Personally, I find Occam’s Razor convincing. Doesn’t it strike you as unlikely that there would be a God, but the only evidence for God would be subjective experiences?
It seems like many similar experiences only indicate that many humans have similar brains.
There have been some studies about inducing NDEs with ketamine, as mentioned earlier. See this page for a few descriptions of various studies. There are also many studies about the brain’s reaction to sensory deprivation, such as this recent one which demonstrated hallucinations after only 15 minutes. I wouldn’t say any of this constitutes overwhelming evidence, but it’s far from worthless.
I don’t think anyone here would say that. Absence of evidence isn’t necessarily evidence of absence, but without evidence, the probability of God, the afterlife, etc. is going to come up very low from a Bayesian evaluation.
That’s the whole point I’m getting at here. Should I consider these things evidence? How do I objectively decide? I’m obviously biased to believe in an afterlife and in God and in the supernatural so how do I overcome this bias and look at the evidence objectively? Your former arguments (I’m reading the first article now and it’s exactly what I was looking for) could possibly give me reason to “defy the evidence” as E.Y. would say but I’m not at that point yet. I’m coming from a background of religion, and I’ve denied most of the things I’ve been taught, but should I deny all of them? I’m trying to be objective here, but it’s hard to know whether I am or not (although whether my beliefs are wrong are right is independent of whether I was biased when I decided upon them). by supernatural I mean a universe or some other similar type of thing that has the potential to affect our physical world; Yudkowski would argue that if this exists it isn’t supernatural, but I think it’s a useful term
In general, anecdotes alone should not be considered evidence, if one is trying to be rigorous. NDEs constitute more than just a few anecdotes, but they still often have anecdotal qualities, in that only a small percentage of people report them. I’ll point out again that even if we accept NDEs as evidence, they’re not necessarily evidence for an afterlife or any related concept. Hypothesizing an afterlife based on NDEs requires the idea that consciousness can exist separately from the brain. This doesn’t seem warranted based on NDEs alone, so it constitutes an unnecessary multiplication of entities, i.e. a violation of Occam’s Razor.
I’m glad I could help with articles on this subject.
This is exactly the argument I’m looking for. But I’m not sure if postulating other methods NDEs/ODEs could have happened is convincing that that’s how they happened in all cases. So I’m not sure if the conversation has reached the point at which we can say “ergo, NDEs don’t even suggest that consciousness can exist separately from the brain.”
My hope is that research into the brain and AI will give sufficient evidence that we can come to this conclusion without this discussion. Perhaps it already has and I’m unaware of it, but the research I’ve seen takes this as an assumption, not a conclusion.
I think they suggest it, but very weakly. We’ve never seen consciousness existing without a brain, and we’ve studied how manipulating the brain affects consciousness (see, for example, Rebecca Saxe’s TED talk which discusses using magnetic fields on the brain to alter moral judgments). All of the evidence we have points to a very high probability that consciousness is dependent on the brain.
I’ll check that out. I have yet to watch all of those talks.
You seem to think there’s a difference between beliefs and assumptions. That is, you say your reaction is to make no beliefs about things like the existence of God and the afterlife, but you also say that you assume there is a God. Can you clarify what you consider that difference to be?
If a patient happened to be hooked up to an MRI during what they later describe as an NDE, and the MRI recorded patterns characteristic of other events generally considered hallucinatory, would you consider that evidence supporting the explanation that NDEs are hallucinatory events? Would that significantly alter your beliefs about the existence of an afterlife?
If it proved possible to experimentally induce an NDE experience by manipulating a subject’s brain in particular ways, would you consider that evidence supporting the explanation that NDEs are hallucinatory events? Would that significantly alter your beliefs about the existence of an afterlife?
Hmm, what I said was poorly worded. I may edit it. What I meant was that I considered the evidence to be sufficient for me to believe in God. Here’s what I said:
Here’s what I meant:
Is that better?
There is an underlying assumption here that hallucinations aren’t evidence of an afterlife. I don’t believe they are, but I also don’t have any beliefs about them in general, so the fact that it was a hallucination wouldn’t be convincing until I had more knowledge of hallucinations in general. Maybe hallucinations are our gateway to the eternal! (I don’t actually believe this, but I hope it helps you see what I’m saying).
That being said, knowing more about these experiences would only be a good thing, and I have no way of knowing how more knowledge would affect my beliefs, because I have no idea what that knowledge might be.
from this article:
Back to your question:
Possibly. Like I said before, more knowledge is only a good thing, and I have no idea how more knowledge would affect my beliefs. Hope I’m not dodging your questions here, feel free to elaborate on anything I might have missed.
I don’t think further elaboration would get us anywhere useful. Thanks for your reply.
Unless you have good reason to believe that the brain does not completely implement consciousness (or “subjective experience” or whatever you want to call it), the notion that “you” can go on experiencing things after your brain stops working isn’t even coherent. You are your brain (or at least the information contained in it).
At least, that’s my understanding. I’m no domain expert here.
A fine argument. I appreciate that you accept that there could be evidence that the brain does not completely implement consciousness (not that I believe that it doesn’t, I just accept that it might not. I will live as if it does until I have reason to believe that it doesn’t)
Ketamine is sometimes used for surgical anesthesia when people are found after car crashes, and it definitely regularly causes hallucinations of precisely that sort, which is the reason it is not the most favored anesthetic. If your dad indeed received ketamine, I think that’s a very likely explanation. There is also a theory that near death experiences sometimes result from a release of natural DMT.
I am way more inclined to believe in the ultimate benevolence of the universe than most people here (which means that an afterlife or something like FAI resurrecting all dead is not as unlikely as the God of Abraham), but still think that most NDEs are explainable in terms of neural activity.
Not sure I’m parsing your parenthetical statement correctly, but a universe ruled by the Abrahamic God is a universe I definitely wouldn’t label as “ultimately benevolent”, rather the opposite in fact.
The universe with a non-Abrahamic afterlife is both more benevolent and more probable than the type of afterlife preached by modern theists.
I was unfamiliar with ketamine. Here is what Wikipedia says about it’s side effects, which confirms the above re. hallucinations. The wiki article contains several journal references, if interested.
I’ve wondered about this as well, but I’m doubtful as to what they can really show. For one, everyone who has given testimony about such experiences… is alive. Were they “really” dead? Do we understand the limits of the human body for heart and brain stoppages? If it weren’t unethical, could we do something akin to Flatliners and find out, repeatably, what one experiences when “dead”?
Also, can NDEs make any “predictions” about what kind of afterlife might exist? I’ve certainly heard Christians use these as evidence of an afterlife. I’ve even read a book where I’m assuming the point was to make a case for having met Jesus while dead.
In any case, make the belief pay rent: should Christians see anything different than Muslims, Mormons, or Scientologists? Will culture affect the nationality of the “great crowd of witnesses” seen (is heaven coincidentally populated by a sea of your own ethnicity)? Things like this. If predictions cannot be made… why not resort to a default that we simply don’t understand the brain in conditions of either no activity, activity below our levels of detection, oxygen starvation, or the like?
I’m far more interested in cases where people supposedly saw a basketball on the roof or witnessed a car crash blocks away, but I haven’t found anything tangible on these other than usage in debate by people like Gary Habermas. These kinds of experiences are at least open to falsifiability.
Also, while not an NDE… James Randi had an Out of Body Experience which is extremely interesting to listen to him recall,
This is a good idea.
Richard Feynman gave himself one on purpose and described it in Surely You’re Joking. It’s also quite interesting.
I need to read this! I’m intrigued!
That whole book is great. He’s amazing in the luminosity department.
Out-of-body experiences are very interesting to me as well. The first response seems to be to ignore them or to assume that they are lying. My response is to cautiously accept that they might be telling the truth, but to wait until we can find out more about what is going on. This could possibly be by using evidence gathered from careful experiments, possibly by using arguments from thought experiments.
A very small minority of these claims have been well-documented but they are likely due to simply the sheer number of NDE experiences. There have been attempts to actually measure systematically if people can see objects while in an NDE (primarily seeing if they can look at a random number generated elsewhere) but those have had little success. There’s a chapter on this in Mary Roach’s book “Spook” which discusses also other investigations of evidence of an afterlife. The book does a very good job of showing how the exact border between pseudoscience and science can be hazy.
Are we allowing dreams into evidence now? As real as your father’s experience may have been, it is still subjective, and thus really doesn’t have any bearing on the rest of us. For instance, say I had a very exciting dream involving myself, Keira Knightley, and few clothes. A rational response would be to write it off as a very good dream. An irrational response would be to become convinced that Ms. Knightley was infatuated with me and start writing her creepy letters. Likewise, if your father simply wrote this off as a dream, perhaps one whose effects were amplified by his compromised physical state, that would be rational. If that leads him to accept as fact the existence of an afterlife, despite the complete lack of any objective evidence, that would be irrational. The difference here is that your father’s dream deals with death and religion, two subjects which cause most people to throw rationality out the window. Had he had the same dream one random night while lying peacefully asleep at home, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. My dream wouldn’t be any more real if it happened on a hospital bed, why should your father’s be?
From my original post:
One possible explanation of your dream is that we live in a world in which people’s minds which are perfect for each other enter the dreamworld and find each other. We don’t believe that because the world doesn’t seem to work that way.
But what if you saw on the news a special of Keira Knightley’s crazy dream that she believed was about her true lover; what if she had gone to one of those people who draw faces based on descriptions and the picture drawn was eerily similar to yours? If the dream she explained was really similar to the one you had, would you possibly begin to question your beliefs then?
At what point will you accept that your beliefs about there not being an afterlife as possibly worthy of review?
Why aren’t dreams allowed to be submitted as evidence? They are experiences we have; if we cannot explain them, we must change our beliefs. The reason we don’t usually listen to dreams as explanations of our world is that we understand why they happen; they are perfectly explainable without any need for a supernatural explanation. But what if we found that dreams weren’t explainable given what we know about our world? We would change our beliefs about the world. So don’t just say that dreams aren’t evidence. You can say that dreams are poor evidence for an afterlife, but if I postulate that we enter the afterlife in through dreams or some other similarly creative belief system that would explain the dreams, we would test my belief system to see if the predictions it makes correspond to reality better than other belief systems.
Also, see Dreaded_Anomaly’s comment:
The world doesn’t seem to work this way because there has been no reproducible empirical evidence that it works that way. This isn’t a case of “The Earth looks flat from here, so it must be flat.” You’re postulating that there is another realm of existence out there that doesn’t intersect with our reality in any detectable way. At this point, you’re just arguing for an invisible pink unicorn or a Russel’s teapot, but then you say that this undetectable ‘dream world’, does affect the physical world by altering our minds to act as though it did exist. It’s essentially the same argument that the zombie theorists make.
If all that happened, it would be slightly more likely that there was something to this telepathic dream. However, to accept that this was a true manifestation of a psychic phenomenon, one would have to accept that the standard models of physics and neuropsychology are wrong. This is not entirely unknown to happen, but such revolutions were driven by men like Copernicus and Einstein who supported them with evidence, and not revealed to laymen in dreams. There would have to be such a preponderance of psychic evidence that it would be more probable that the standard model were wrong than that the dream were ‘real’. So either there is some sort of fifth fundamental force, heretofore undiscovered or suppressed by thousands of scientists across the globe, that is powerful and sensitive enough to affect single neurons from across a continent, and that the human brain has evolved a region for sending and receiving signals via this fifth force, or that someone else had a similar dream to mine. It’s not strictly impossible, but its probability approaches zero.
Bingo. We can explain dreams with psychology without resorting to ‘parapsychology’. When in doubt, consult Occam.
Yes, if that were the case, we would, but it isn’t.
And how exactly do you propose to test the existence of an afterlife with reproducibility? Are you volunteering?
JoshuaZ gave good answers in his post below
http://lesswrong.com/lw/3ok/is_there_anything_after_death/3bhr
If all that happened, it would be slightly more likely that there was something to this telepathic dream. However, to accept that this was a true manifestation of a psychic phenomenon, one would have to accept that the standard models of physics and neuropsychology were wrong. This is not entirely unknown to happen, but such revolutions were driven by men like Copernicus and Einstein, and not revealed to laymen in dreams. There would have to be such a preponderance of psychic evidence that it would be more probable that the standard model were wrong than that the dream were ‘real’. So either there is some sort of fifth fundamental force, heretofore undiscovered or suppressed by thousands of scientists across the globe, that is powerful and sensitive enough to affect single neurons from across a continent, or that someone else had a similar dream to mine. It’s not strictly impossible, but its probability approaches zero.
Obviously, no one can legitimately deny that someone had a subjective experience. However, that doesn’t imply that the person who had the experience is best qualified to explain the experience, just as a patient is usually less qualified than eir doctor to diagnose eir illness. The afterlife is an explanation, and it’s one that multiplies entities beyond necessity, given our current information about the brain (that it can experience a large variety of hallucinations and other misleading perceptions). Nothing indicates that consciousness can survive when the brain is no longer fueled by the body’s metabolic processes. For the afterlife to be a competitive explanation for NDEs and the like, we would need other information suggesting that consciousness could be separate from the brain.
What, really? Ever hear of false memories?
A person still has a subjective experience of a false memory; it’s just that eir proposed explanation (“I remember X, so it must have happened”) isn’t correct. A very similar scenario to NDEs, actually.
They experience remembering—that’s not at all the same thing as having an experience and remembering it.
Remembering is still an experience, though, which is my point. “I remember this because I had the original experience” is an explanation that turns out not to be true in the case of false memories. What we can’t deny is that the person experiences something. With an NDE, someone might say “I was able to have a near-death experience because the afterlife exists”; we can’t deny ey had the experience, but we can evaluate the likelihood of the explanation.
No, that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about someone saying at time 2, “I remember experiencing x at time 1”, when at time 1 they experienced no such thing. Forget misinterpretation of experience—I’m mentioning that not every recalled experience was actually experienced.
I don’t see how that’s different in principle from anyone reporting any subjective experience after the fact. All we ever know is that there’s the memory of an experience; anything else is explanation.
13 years late here, but I think there’s a place for this distinction.
When someone says “I experienced such-and-such when I was near death, and that proves <something spiritual>”, there are 2 places for doubt that RobinZ is distinguishing.
That the best explanation for experiencing such-and-such is <something spiritual>
That the best explantaion for him remembering experiencing such-and-such is that he actually experienced such-and-such
RobinZ is distinguishing between those two avenues of doubt, whereas you’re apparently grouping them together.
There are some theories about continuation of subjective experience “after” objective death—quantum immortality, or extension of quantum immortality to Tegmark’s multiverse (see this Moravec’s essay). I’m not sure if taking them seriously is a good idea, though.