Maybe, if you hypothesise its in the 'I die, so others live' space, its like altruistic behaviour and favours the group genome, not the individual
The idea is, in other words, that those who somehow went amok near death perhaps reduced their number of offspring, or damaged the family unit (e.g. destroyed their shelters or food), therefore hindering those genes from spreading, therefore the selection pressure to remove this behaviour.
How do primates die?
Stress is us preparing for fight of flight, which is good for survival. Pain prevents us from further damaging our body. Stress overrides pain because your future well being doesn't matter if your die now.
Now, when you are near death, when you know there is nothing you can do, stress becomes useless, because you can't flee or fight back. So there is no downside to detachment and contentment.
Now the advantage may be that it may be the best response if, by chance, you survive. You don't overwork yourself, you are less likely to suffer mental breakdown afterwards, etc...
Keep in mind that everyone who experienced NDEs survived, obviously. So NDEs are not death experiences, more like survival experiences.
But the bleak argument might work. Keep the young 'uns motivated to breed, it helps in the long term.
We're a long time dead. "Enjoy yourself, its later than you think"
Saying that something doesn't have an evolutionary reason is not the same as saying it's just coincidence. Our bodies (including our brains) are very complex interconnected processes. There's going to be all sorts of effects when those processes break down, and even if those don't have an evolutionary purpose, that doesn't mean they're just coincidence.
This is a factual matter, which has nothing to do with an argument being bleak or not.
http://beckleyfoundation.org/2016/09/15/the-first-study-to-s...
For instance take pain. People view pain as negative but it's of course a great positive from an evolutionary point of view. Not everything (or even everybody) experiences pain, but those that do are going to be vastly more likely to succeed in life than those that don't. Your reaction to recoil from pain is not because the interaction itself is painful but because you have evolved instincts that tell you that what you're feeling is likely detrimental to your health and the situation needs to be resolved instantly, on a subconscious, level.
As your pain receptors shut down it would ostensibly feel pleasant, but in reality it would just be one of the most important, and useful, evolutionary tools we have turning off.
The I experienced when I nearly drowned once. I was very calm and ready to go. You can see it in videos of how to spot a drowning person.
That one second was slow and I was unnervingly calm. Right at the last minute with probably less than 200ms to go, the driver very gently swerved and we must have avoided collision by less than two inches. Quarter inch if we include wing mirrors. My friend, the driver asked later why I didn't say anything. I explained that had I panicked, he would have panicked and we would probably both be dead.
Well dreams are a fairly beneficial things to have especially if you have some epiphany or figure out the solution to a problem you're having.
The near death thing might just be your brain dumping that DMT out of your pineal gland all at once either when your body is shutting down from natural causes or when you are in some kind of traumatic accident.
Can you paraphrase what that means? It's not a Freudian slip due to hunger, I hope. Asking out of prior curiosity for the word.
As for the DMT, there's only one way to find out. One grain of pure DMT in a pipe and get your answers.