2018-01-18, 07:11 PM
This to-and-fro about scientific proof of the NDE is, to my mind, pretty pointless. While it is encouraging to have some scientists on board with the concept of an afterlife, I don't believe that science can tell us too much about it. Science demands objective observation and precise repeatability, neither of which you are going to get from an NDE.There may be some significant similarities but the experience is essentially subjective and personal.
Whether a person is met by Auntie Iris or Jesus is a subjective and personal thing dependent on deeply held beliefs and expectations which determine how such a meeting is interpreted by the personality having the experience. Science can add some clarity to the condition of the physical body at the time of the experience. It can say that these profound experiences happened at a time when, by any scientific measure, no mental experiences should have been taking place. But it can't pronounce on the subjective nature of these experiences.
Witnesses can also confirm the veridical aspects of the experience - such as out of body observations of things happening or conversations taking place while the subject was immobilised and - by measurable criteria - unconscious. Science doesn't have a theory to accommodate such observations so sceptics will always attempt to fudge one.
The NDE constitutes very important evidence in favour of the afterlife but it is one of many in the entire canon of evidence going back to pre-history. There are accounts in the Tibetan and Egyptian Books of the Dead which correspond closely to modern NDE accounts. There's evidence from mediums. There are anomalous personal experiences in probably every family on earth describing encounters with the dead. There's a wealth of evidence for reincarnation not least of which was the series of meticulous studies done by Ian Stevenson.
All of this evidence, if approached as individual cases, comprises of a story of a subjective experience with, perhaps, some aspects which might be considered objective and which science can investigate. But in reducing the whole experience to that which science can approach we lose the context and the essence. It becomes fodder for the nit-pickers and there will always be alternative explanations such as delusion, hallucination, coincidence or fraud. But for the skeptics to be right, every single one of those multitude of cases must be assumed to be due to one of those alternatives and that is a huge assumption which is based on an ideology, not science.
Whether a person is met by Auntie Iris or Jesus is a subjective and personal thing dependent on deeply held beliefs and expectations which determine how such a meeting is interpreted by the personality having the experience. Science can add some clarity to the condition of the physical body at the time of the experience. It can say that these profound experiences happened at a time when, by any scientific measure, no mental experiences should have been taking place. But it can't pronounce on the subjective nature of these experiences.
Witnesses can also confirm the veridical aspects of the experience - such as out of body observations of things happening or conversations taking place while the subject was immobilised and - by measurable criteria - unconscious. Science doesn't have a theory to accommodate such observations so sceptics will always attempt to fudge one.
The NDE constitutes very important evidence in favour of the afterlife but it is one of many in the entire canon of evidence going back to pre-history. There are accounts in the Tibetan and Egyptian Books of the Dead which correspond closely to modern NDE accounts. There's evidence from mediums. There are anomalous personal experiences in probably every family on earth describing encounters with the dead. There's a wealth of evidence for reincarnation not least of which was the series of meticulous studies done by Ian Stevenson.
All of this evidence, if approached as individual cases, comprises of a story of a subjective experience with, perhaps, some aspects which might be considered objective and which science can investigate. But in reducing the whole experience to that which science can approach we lose the context and the essence. It becomes fodder for the nit-pickers and there will always be alternative explanations such as delusion, hallucination, coincidence or fraud. But for the skeptics to be right, every single one of those multitude of cases must be assumed to be due to one of those alternatives and that is a huge assumption which is based on an ideology, not science.