A. J. Ayer – ‘What I Saw When I Was Dead’ (1988)
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I did not "see" anything other than a bright light, but I was overcome with an incredible feeling that I was in the presence of, and communicating with somebody who was conveying a message of absolute love for, and total understanding of everything that I was. The feeling of euphoria is impossible to fully describe, because of the absoluteness of it.
I wanted to stay where I was. It was the best feeling I'd ever experienced, and I was content. Somehow, I was "shown" some bits of what I had to live for -- people I had not yet met, and amazing places and things that I had not yet seen or done. I don't really remember making a choice to return, but I woke up in a hospital with a broken back and other injuries. I later learned that I had been hit by a car while riding my bicycle, and was given CPR by a passing stranger.
It makes me uncomfortable to talk about this because it's all just so unbelievable, but there it is.
As the years have gone by, I've met the friends and family that I had in my visions, and I've also been to the places and done the things that I saw myself doing in the vision.
My whole perspective on life was changed by this event, and I have no fear of death whatsoever.
EDIT I did a little searching. I think it might have been an old report about Ketamine before it became more wide known. Apparently it was used during the Vietnam War.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketamine#Near-death_experience
Your brain has to be alive and exist normally for it to have these experiences. So its quite obvious, nothing is coming from outside of it.
I do feel like its some kind of brain rebooting itself or something like that.
Its sad babies can't tell us if they experience the same during childbirth, but I have a guess that they experience something similar as well.
Its just that the brain is starting up and checking if there is a OxDEADBEEF or a fresh boot. And giving you the primal, brain not initialising any other interface(like eyes, ears, limbs etc). You experience what life would be if only brain existed on its own without everything else apart from it.
Related, and hinted at by my original comment: the brain is capable of generating truly profound experiences. There is a tendency to ascribe them to something 'beyond ourselves' but again, advances in medicine and neuroscience have shown that these are explicable, subject to manipulation by chemical and electrical signals, which again suggests a material basis for conscious experience.
I said this in my other comment but, when you say the brain generates truly profound experiences, you beg the question (in the philosophical sense of the phrase). It's all in the word "experience." For in order for an experience to happen, some entity has to be experiencing. For there to be an illusion, there has to be an entity being deceived. And then how do you explain that entity? It can't be illusory experiences all the way down..
Any honest person has to see the connection between experience and the material brain. But I don't think it's honest to say it's obvious that experience is entirely material. The connection is deeply mysterious and may never be understood. I personally would rather accept that than claim that I don't really exist just so that everything can be explained.
To say we haven't made progress on understanding consciousness is to move the post; we continue narrowing the 'hard problem' and eventually it seems like there will be nothing left other than a misunderstanding, something like the resolution of Xeno's paradox.
You can try to claim that this question is meaningless, but that doesn't seem principled to me, not to mention that it completely ignores the fact that gestures broadly all this is happening.
Edit: happy to chat more about this, as it's deeply interesting to me and I do want to understand your perspective. It may need a longer form than this thread allows. I've added a link to get in contact with me on my about page.
I'd be happy to talk more as I am passionate about this. I think the idea that there is no soul is actually extremely dehumanizing, and involves someone essentially saying "I don't really exist" (even if they redefine "I exist" to mean something more Materialist, it is, in my view, still saying that). I'll ping you on bluesky.
BTW there's a book "The night of fire" by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt that describes a similar experience he got staying alone in a desert. And, of course, countless other descriptions, e.g. "The varieties of religious experience" by W. James. You cannot convince anyone, of course; but there's also no way to fake it.
https://www.nderf.org/Experiences/1kevin_p_nde.html
Which isn't my real name btw. They pseudonymized that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardecist_spiritism
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardecist_spiritism#cite_note-...
If you anticipated that others would find this hard to believe, why not write down those visions in detail at the time? That would have provided evidence others could have used to later evaluate whether your visions were accurate.
As a skeptic, and without knowing more details, I am leaning towards self-fulfilling prophecy (you did the things in the visions because you had the visions) or confirmation bias (similar to how horoscopes feel accurate because they're vague enough to map many situations).
I hope you're right though.
I was 15 years old at the time, and not much of a writer.
Most of my visions did not stay in my consciousness. Over the years, when I would meet somebody new or be in a place that I had seen, it would trigger the memory of the vision. You can attribute this to Déjà vu if you like, but in this case I knew exactly where/when I had seen the vision beforehand, and it sometimes triggered more memories of not-yet-happened events.
I'm old now, and I haven't had any experiences related to my visions for over a decade. I'm pretty sure that all of my visions have now been lived.
Near death experiences are probably the best way we have to assess the nature of reality.
Now, it's almost impossible to reach people who aren't ready with any arguments, but I'll outline some possible steps for anyone who's on the verge.
- Go to youtube, type in NDE and listen to a few
- Try to come up with a "rational" explanation (hallucinations, the brain dumping DMT, preconceived notions from Hollywood, the general culture and so on)
- Assess whether these make any sense under the conditions that NDEs occur, and scratch the ones that don't. Then watch a few more and you'll have to reject more still.
In particular, what was convincing to me, is how very very similar the cases are and that they happen to tribes living at a stone age technological level with no contact to Hollywood, and that there is a described case from Plato from over 2000 years ago that is identical to modern cases.
In the end, my conclusion is that objective reality has to be partially rejected, and all experience is the combination of some "nature of reality" as interpreted by each individual. This leads to clear contradictions if one assumes that there is one objective reality. Case in point, in NDEs there are a couple of common stages, and experiencers go through some or all of these, most often only some. One is traveling from the location of death to a heavenly realm. For westerners this often is flying through a star trek like hyperspace tunnel, while for stone age people they might be in a canoe that travels by itself to a distant island. So the nature of it is something like being pulled silently without effort towards a point in a manner that isn't part of the experiencer's notion of what's possible, and it is then realized and interpreted by each individual in the closest way that they can relate to.
This claim from Ayer -- how do we make the leap from these experiences existing to being evidence of a life after consciousness?
> On the face of it, these experiences, on the assumption that the last one was veridical, are rather strong evidence that death does not put an end to consciousness
Besides the clear possibility that the memory forms later, the brains of people who report NDEs have never stopped - there is no report of anyone ever recovering from brain death (as in, from a basically flat EEG).
Some cells are still technically alive after 1 hour mark in the sense that there is no necrosis and cell membrane is still operating. This depends on cell type and nourishment - for example cells that have high amount of CoQ10 can live longer etc.
In any case, brain is definitely NOT 100% dead in a sense that ALL of its cells are necrotic which might explain why it is in a dream like state.
Also, I doubt 1 hour mark is regular thing in NDE.
I think it's cute how hardcore materialists believe it is even in theory possible to distinguish their position from ideological simulationism. Maybe in a thousand years. Not now. But phenomenology is the name of the philosophical discipline that you are now struggling to recapitulate.
I had general anesthesia 10 days ago. There was no NDE, felt like they flicked an off switch then turned me back on a few hours later.
They wheeled me from the prep room towards the OR, opened the big door, and then I was in a different room waking up from anesthesia. That’s it.
I also once semi-fainted while standing up. Felt unusually calm and care free as my head bashed against a nearby object. Fortunately it wasn’t serious.
I also regularly experience sleep paralysis. That took a lot of work to get used to.
So, I'm not sure what you mean by "out of oxygen and energy according to any phsysical mechanism" - for any patient who has ever recovered to tell a tale of an NDE, we know for a fact that their brain was constantly producing measurable electrical signals for the entire time.
https://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_my_stroke_of_ins...
> And I look down at my arm and I realize that I can no longer define the boundaries of my body. I can't define where I begin and where I end, because the atoms and the molecules of my arm blended with the atoms and molecules of the wall.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_Er
What are the unaccountably unlikely commonalities that I should be noticing? Between this and the article, I see only: some kind of colored light, some kind of officiating beings, and a river (A.J.Ayer says he presumably had the Styx in mind, though amusingly in the actual ancient Greek account it's a different river and there's no need to cross it).
I've never heard of life reviews for example outside of NDEs, most of these things are not in the collective unconscious.
Yeah, look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_flood_myths . This does not mean that at some point there was a global flood brought about by a deity in retribution. It just means people throughout time knew the same stories or invented the same stories, and often thought about deities and floods. Similarly with your afterlife tropes. Memes are the freaky thing here.
https://avesselofhonour.com/2023/06/28/48-hours-in-hell/
Some of those features show up there too. Of course, this comes from a Christian background, and draws on that. But it does have a river, and there's no river in hell in the bible.
This sounds intriguing.
> Case in point, in NDEs there are a couple of common stages, and experiencers go through some or all of these, most often only some. One is traveling from the location of death to a heavenly realm. For westerners this often is flying through a star trek like hyperspace tunnel, while for stone age people they might be in a canoe that travels by itself to a distant island.
Ah, so the similarity is all enitrely in your interpretation of these clearly dissimilar visions.
So, bright lights and tunnels. Shared human visual neurological glitches. Heard of "tunnel vision"? That's a real medical condition, which can be caused by blood loss, adrenaline, or low oxygen.
The tunnel vision you experience during hypovolemia is nothing like the "tunnel of light" reported in NDEs. It's just that you lose your visual field gradually, from periphery to fovea, as your visual cortex loses perfusion. In theory, a well-perfused brain dying for some other reason, such as a sudden complete loss of oxygen supply secondary to circulatory collapse secondary to fine VF or asystole, would retain the ability to "fill in" with something, the way our brains in normal operation cover the many gaps and lacks in our visual perception. (This is part of why I asked the other fellow not to bother me again about this at least until he knows what "ATP" means and why that is relevant here.)
It is strikingly absurd to imagine any of this does or can support a radically materialist conception of the universe. As I said before, materialism is exactly as religious as simulationism - exactly so, inasmuch as I expect to see a "solution" for the "mind-body problem" [1] around the same time as we solve the halting problem or constructively prove P=NP.
[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dualism/#DuaMinBodPro
Tunnel vision is a tunnel, in your vision, associated with death. Since I'm talking to people who will latch on to anything at all similar to a tunnel in reports of experiences, and say "See! Commonalities!", this is sufficient to explain why a lot of the nearly-dead throughout world history have involved something tunnel-like somewhere in their reports.
I don't know who is reporting a "tunnel of light" specifically. I would expect that belongs to a post-1970s culture of near death experiences that's part of the rest of the culture of Forteana and the Mysteries of the Unexplained.
When talking about what evidence supports, really we're talking about the opposite: which theories evidence falsifies, and which surviving, falsifiable theory is the most parsimonious. Falsifiability matters, and parsimony matters. Otherwise, you can imagine what you like, but it carries no weight as an explanation.
But, luckily for me, I'm not among those here who have arrogated unto themselves the requirement, with its implicit assumption of the necessary capacity, to explain all or indeed any of this. I'm just here to counsel those who do persist in such insistence, much in the manner of that fellow whose job it used to be to murmur memento mori.
One hard hit in the head can literally change your personality entirely, then you have alzheimers and all the other degenerative brain diseases that will erase "you". Even if you avoid all that "you" will be wildly different every 15-20 years.
Christianity gets through this by saying you will return to your prime. That just seems kind of childish to me though, like "yeah when you die you and all your friends and family are gonna be 25 and you live in paradise together forever".
How do you resolve the idea of an eternal consciousness with the very real and common occurence of people losing their consciousness while they are still alive?
It’s rare for me to remember -aspects of my daily life in dreams.
I would think being dead would be a significant hinderance.
That said, we do then to attribute a lot of thinking to the technology of the time. Buddhists had their wheel of time, folks today think we live in a computer simulation. Things like that, so best not to take the idea too seriously.
Remember, life is too important to take seriously.
Read CS Lewis 'The Problem of Pain' then think about emergent dimensions/holographic worlds being the only way to have our kind of consciousness/self determination/free will/experiential identity if one exists in a underlying dimensional state with no linear time, no physical limitations, etc, and so forth. The emergent reality/holographic world is the 'chess board with clear rules' needed for us to have/experience/pretend to free will from the underlying reality without time or rules. In CS Lewis 'The Problem of Pain', pain sucks, but is needed for this world to do whatever it is supposed to do. Alzheimers, consequences of blows to the head, etc aren't themselves needed but they themselves are emergent from the rules that are needed for 'here' to exist and serve it's purpose. But they are also just part of (or structure for) the holographic/emergent reality, not the true base lower (higher?) reality.
Not manic. Just not great at communicating these thoughts. Don't lock me up please.
So there will be errors in the great plan of whichever nature. Some of them may get caught by error correction codes, some others not.
These uncaught exceptions are enabling deviations from the great plan :-)
In our limited experiential world things appear to decay. If our spacetime experience is emergent from something else (in which time doesn't exist), or is holographic, we have no idea what's really going on at the fundamental (lower/higher?) level. How can you have decay in the base reality that doesn't have time? Is decay not an artifact of time? If time is emergent not fundamental, so is decay.
Check out some Susskind and CS Lewis The Problem of Pain. It makes for a fun thought game.
Start with 'what reality/rules would we need in order to exercise truly free will' (the concepts from The Problem of Pain). We need time (action/consequence). We need to be able to impact ourselves/others. I need to be able to hurt you/myself. Kill you/myself. Need the mechanisms that are then used/abused by things like Alzheimer's. But if we bring in Susskind, that is all just happening in the emergent space/time (my emergent free will reality) not in the base reality (my lower/higher? reality that doesn't have things like time). There is no reason that what impacts us in the 'free will reality' that enables us to have free will/experience time also impacts whatever we might be in the base reality (my lower/higher? reality). In that reality without time we are the child just born and the body turned to dust. We are forever in the moments when our loved ones held us. That is heaven. Not some new experiential timeline to reflect. We ARE ALL THE MOMENTS, not a reflection on the moments after the fact.
Hell IS repeating every bad thing, forever. Heaven is experiencing love from your loved ones, forever. But not in some cloud world we exist in after death thinking back. But in the same one that everything happened, only at the non-emergent level not the emergent spacetime level. Me in the non-emergent reality is already in heaven/hell, is already experiencing it all, because it exists in a space without emergent linear time. I will be in heaven, because I will have hugs from my mom and hugs for my children, forever. That is where lower (higher?) level me will dwell.
To be fair, this is the point I worked back from after my mom died. How do I deal with loosing her (as an ex-Catholic). In what reality are her hugs for me forever? This is what I gamed out. We are all the moments, forever, in the non-emergent reality without linear time.
How else can the non-emergent true reality contain our emergent linear space time reality?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Susskind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Problem_of_Pain
I have questions...
If you change/destroy parts of the antenna or the 'bioelectronic circuits' the channel fades out, and you get more and more noise, until there is no signal anymore.
No more resonance with the frequency of your station.
That equals death on this plane.
What lead me to this apart from NDE/OOBE are the cases of so called Terminal Lucidity, when old or very sick people die, but regain conciousness in their last moments. In a timeframe from sometimes two to three days before exitus, but mostly just a few dozen seconds to minutes before exitus.
The thing is that some of these brains are so rotten and degenerated, that it is impossible according to our current understanding, that these people are even able to do anything coordinated, not to mention speak, and recognizing their loved ones/family, telling them things.
And yet this happens again and again, not that often, but it does. While their brains are absolute mush.
In a similar vein, there are stories of lost animals like cats and dogs finding their way back to the humans they once lived with. Over long distances like several hundred miles, often after years.
That can't happen by random chance. So either they can read signs, and understand our words better than we think, or there are other mechanisms at play.
What that is telling about this otherplaneness is uncertain, just that it exists.
Probably impossible to gain any certain insights about that, because of wrong cabling, interface, modulation, format, whatever.
At best we can just hope to skim the interface, membrane and get a few hazy views from the other side near that membrane, but not that far through it.
Maybe there are even other interfaces, membranes, from up there, going on and on, and/or recursing into others.
So the brain is animated by the soul, and also limits and shapes its experience. When we're affected by anesthetic, or we're badly injured, or have a stroke, our conscious experience is impacted, while we're here on this plane. Eventually we leave this form and experience reality more truly. This could be one reason why NDEs happen - the brain is so badly damaged that it fails to even contain the soul and we approach a more death-like state.
Even if we assume those giant leaps of faith are true, it still means "I" go away when I die. My soul will only remember "me" as a brief torture where I was forced into a human shell and had to endure being "me" before being released once more to be a higher being. All my struggles, battles, self-improvement, etc. will be meaningless and my kids will be a cruel trick I played that imprisoned other souls.
To your points, I would say that
> life is a kind of prison we endure before being liberated by death
Not exactly. More like a journey that we go through for mysterious reasons. Maybe so our soul can grow by learning lessons and having challenges that can only be when the stakes are real.
> "I" go away when I die
Not necessarily. Certain aspects of you, which are more contingent on brain traits, e.g. intelligence, some temperament. But the deepest self wouldn't disappear.
> All my struggles, battles, self-improvement, etc. will be meaningless
I see what you mean, but I wouldn't call it meaningless just because it wasn't "completely real." Also, I do believe that lessons learned here are learned for good. The soul is here to grow.
> my kids will be a cruel trick I played that imprisoned other souls.
I don't really see how you got here. In this theory, your kids are also here for their own purpose. Relationships and love are still meaningful and real. Life is cruel and involves a great deal of suffering, but that doesn't mean that existence is inherently bad.
Why do you exclude this hypothesis? It's well known that some drugs such as DMT do cause very similar hallucinations among people, even across cultures (as is the case with NDE).
I wasn't speaking to God. I was high on salvia. And I'm quite certain A.J. Ayer was high on oxygen deprivation.
You said what convinced you was how similar NDEs are, but we have evidence that similar experiences can arise from known brain chemistry changes (e.g., DMT-induced hallucinations) without requiring supernatural explanations. Death could simply be another case where a shift in brain chemistry produces consistent hallucinations across humans.
I've definitely had this exact experience on DMT, as well as the traveling through tunnels experience
You can have the same question about the near death experiences. Are they experiences of an objective reality somewhere or is it a common physical situation triggering similar experiences across people and cultures.
Note: Atheism, agnosticism are all religions ( or religious thinking disguised as reasoning ); no less fanatic than the ones their adherents so fervently ridicule.
This whole “well actually atheism is just another kind of religion” thing is why I begrudgingly have started to prefer describing myself as ‘irreligious,’ just so that there is absolutely no opportunity for equivocation.
I, from time to time, suffer from this too. It's very indication that I'm likely being misguided by myself or ideas.
I didn't know one could downvote.
Anyway, Aggressively downvoting indicates religious/religious-like fanaticism, the problem is pervasive.
1. I have met three identical twins so far. Each of them has reported having some kind of communication with the other twin that could not be explained by conventional means. I have no reason to think any of them lied.
2. My sister used to be very into astrology. She could predict someone's star sign within a few minutes of meeting them to much better than 1 in 12 accuracy.
I do not present these as proof of anything. I do not expect anyone else to believe them or give them any credence. This is just anecdata. I haven't worked out any rational explanation for them.
But I'm inclined to believe two things from them:
1. Brains are weird. Human psychology is complex and fascinating and does things that we do not understand.
2. That there are well-conceived, well-constructed scientific experiments that show there is no scientific basis for telekinesis or astrology, that these are not "real" things, does not necessarily contradict the human experience of them as "real" things. We do not inhabit a well-constructed scientific experiment so our lived experience of life may be different from the actual truth.
Isaac Asimov famously reflected upon this. When he had a close call with death, he didn't see anything. He didn't expect to, and he didn't. It's very likely that our expectations shape what we see, at least partly... that's the brain conjuring imagery and trying to make sense of what it can, I suppose.
Whenever I've been under anesthesia, it was like an on/off switch. I didn't even dream, even though I do remember some of my dreams.
> My recent experiences have slightly weakened my conviction that my genuine death, which is due fairly soon, will be the end of me, though I continue to hope that it will be. (italics mine)
I do get the sense that many atheists not only reject God & the afterlife but actually don't want there to be a God or an afterlife. (I think Thomas Nagel wrote something along those lines.) I sort of get it but regardless I think it's very interesting.
When there is an afterlife or perhaps even eternity, the problems begin.
Imagine taking sports coaching from one who never played…
If there is an eternity, perhaps everybody that exists, or will exist is already a part of it, and is going through it.
I certainly don't wish for death, I still find so much beauty and joy in life, and I still find and experience love. But I don't wish for an afterlife, or prolonged life. If I'm fortunate to live until my natural death, I will welcome it.
Humanity will go on, there are billions of threads of consciousness right now, and I feel so much gratitude that I was and am one of those. I have a lot of comfort in being wrapped and surrounded by those threads, and that they will continue around me when mine frays and ends.
My cannon view is that we're just the universe experiencing itself, and that while my consciousness will end, that universe will go on, my atoms part of it.
I feel that eternity in Heaven would actually be Hell, because nothing would matter. No danger, no failure, no challenge, no goals, no purpose. What gives life meaning are mortality, limitations, beginnings and endings, progress.
I recently watched the film "Eternity" on Apple TV, starring Elizabeth Olsen, in which everyone after they die has to choose their own form of afterlife and then stick with it forever. All I could think about was how bored I would eventually get. (The film itself was pretty good, not boring. That's because it had an ending!)
Fiction is ideal for playing out these scenarios. Think also of the film "Highlander", in which the ultimate "prize" of the immortals turns out to be mortality. MacLeod's life had become repetitive, and he couldn't fully invest in it, because he kept losing everyone he loved. They grew old and died, while he lived on and had to keep changing identities. For a while it's a grand adventure... until it isn't anymore.
I can certainly understand wanting to live longer, but eternity is unimaginably long, way too long. I don't think that's something to be desired.
(Edit: probably an embellishment of Archimedes, supposedly saying to the Roman soldier who killed him, "do not disturb my circles!" - not exactly a plaintive attitude about mortality, more just being a grumpy geometrist.)
https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05551b.htm
Eternity in its proper sense belongs to God alone; human beings sharing in "eternal life" will experience time differently. Even the angels experience "aeviternity" which is unique to their kind.
Yes? Are you saying in the afterlife we'll be mindless?
So this makes me think that from moment to moment, as we pass through time at one second per second, it's as if we're being sent through a transporter. That is to say, if in the far future after my death I am reassembled, or even if just a close imitation of me is assembled from whatever data they can get hold of, then that would be no different from me, or Bernard, being brought back to life. "I am Bernard", he would say, and he'd still be right. Of course other Bernard wouldn't get to share his experiences, but so what. My former self can't share my present experiences.
So, why hope for this to happen at all? It has to be that what we're emotionally invested in is not really "continuity of experience", which is a myth, but continuity of ideas. It's nice if those ideas can sit together in the coherent context of a mind. The Woody Allen quote is "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying." But perhaps in fact through your work is good enough, really? Like a close second.
What I mean to say is, I don't so much hope for an afterlife, as to discover that it philosophically doesn't matter anyway. Though I prefer people not dead.
I think his conclusion is very reasonable. It's highly likely that NDEs are minds sputtering to a stop. But if you experience one (while your heart has stopped for 4 minutes no less), it seems rational to "slightly" update your priors towards the possibility of some kind of afterlife. At the very least, it may indicate some kind of conscious experience after you're "dead" but before your brain significantly degrades.
That aside, I will say that his experience sounds a lot like a DMT trip. Particularly the sense that "space, like a badly fitting jigsaw puzzle, was slightly out of joint" and the feeling of being in the presence of "the government of the universe".
A "slight indication", which if I read correctly leads to "slightly weakened my conviction that my genuine death...". Isn't this kind of reasoning common for metaphysics but is met with skepticism by empiricists?
> A "slight indication", which if I read correctly leads to "slightly weakened my conviction that my genuine death...". Isn't this kind of reasoning common for metaphysics but is met with skepticism by empiricists?
Using evidence (experience) to update your degree of belief is in every way empiricist. Metaphysicians have often been criticized for making claims without evidence, or claiming to make deduction from little/no evidence. But that's not happening here.
An illusion necessarily implies an entity experiencing the illusion. So what's that entity? It can't be illusions all the way down.
I think some people would rather claim that they themselves don't exist rather than admit that there might be something spiritual or unexplainable about existence. And I find that very strange.
Maybe I am wrong but isn’t that how shinto perceives the world? That a tree you might chop down will kill a kami who lives there. So our acts of here and now have a much bigger implication on the musubi than on the actual after life.
As others mentioned (including @BoardsOfCanada) - search for "NDE" on a video platform, and watch a few. I make no claims to be a professional assessor of truth/lies, but when you watch many of those videos, ask yourself honestly, is this person lying (or rehearsing a staged story)? Additionally, some mention "impossible" information (like an out-of-body experience, where they are able see something outside of the room, which would be impossible for their body to do; or receive/hear information).
What I appreciate about that book is that the doctor (Raymond Moody) doesn't offer judgements or much of his own opinions, but he tries to faithfully retell what the patient experienced.
What's interesting is some of the discussions the patients have with the "luminous being(s)" and souls/spirits/entities on the other side...
They seem to frequently ask questions like, "What did you learn (while on Earth)?" - and there is the implication that our souls are sent to Earth with a specific mission.
The people who experience these NDEs also often say that this other world (spirit/soul world?) feels MORE REAL than the Earth world, and that they report feeling finally "at home".
Other interesting observations - (1) they rarely smell anything in the other world, (2) many report perfect sight / knowledge (for example, can clearly see infinite detail of a mountain range on the horizon), (3) Often hear musical "chimes", (4) the "luminous beings" have a sense of humor, and are not judgemental during the life-review, (5) During the life review, they often get to see the experience from another perspective - for example, during a fight with a sibling, you can see the fight/feelings from the other siblings' perspective, (6) the people often come back with some sort of "gift" / power - for example, the ability to sense other peoples' emotions at a distance (like extreme empathy), or to heal people with touch. (7) Apparently suicide is a big no-no - the people who attempted to kill themselves were essentially "scolded", told that it was a huge mistake - "We" are not supposed to decide who dies, including ourselves - and that we have a mission to carry out, even if the circumstances are difficult. That was a bit shocking to read...
Pretty fascinating stuff.
I personally have not experienced an NDE, but I have spoken to several trusted friends - including a man who drowned as a child, and was brought back to life. He experienced the common "symptoms" of the NDE described in those videos... just the level of detail he can recall from the conversation he had with the "luminous being", and the extreme feeling of "home" and intense love he experienced - he said that since that point, he's not afraid of death at all, and after that experience, he felt strongly driven to become a teacher and help others....
https://www.amazon.com/Life-After-Bestselling-Investigation-...
Worth checking out, even if just for curiosity / open the mind's sake...
Ayer makes good points that evidence of dualism does not imply 'spirit' or soul dualism, or existence of a deity.
1. Restaurants should carry an anti-choking device. Too many elderly risk a stroke without it.
2. People often do have a delusion or vision just before death, one that is a product of their own brain, fitting their understanding of the world. I had an incredible vision when I had taken half an oxycodone prescribed for pain.
3. There are more ways of expressing one's belief or disbelief in god besides atheism and agnosticm. Consider "agnostic theism" which means “I believe god exists, but I do not know that with certainty”, also "agnostic atheism" which means “I don't believe in a god but also say it can’t be known.”
As for any genuine otherworldly vision, no, I don't believe that happened here.
Actionable: To Consider the significance of kindness, compassion, love to and for each other, which world, at large, is missing owing to many factors.
And to consider one's own superficiality and have profound thoughts for others.
I can't think of a more important idea for a conscious living being than some hope for an afterlife, perhaps a better one than is here.
Most people resorting to and flood the discussion with rational X or Y are simply getting high off of their own sounds and are plain dishonest with themselves and others.
It's like you got a drop of a somewhat muddy water that is the center of your life. The drop will remain in the afterlife. Everything you do either makes is muddier or cleanses it a bit. This change is what stays.