Are NDEs merely hallucinations?

I'm inclined to think there are genuine supernatural NDEs. But this claim just doesn't hold water:

>documenting more than 125 investigated and verified veridical NDEs

There are NDEs in that book that have practically nothing in the way of real evidence going for them. One of the more prima facie astonishing cases involves a hospital patient allegedly memorizing during an OB-NDE and accurately recalling after regaining consciousness a twelve-digit serial number on the top of a piece of medical equipment. Supposedly a hospital worker got a ladder to view the top of this equipment and confirmed that the serial number was accurately recalled.

But we have no reason at all to believe that that actually happened, apart from the say-so of a nurse, recounting the event an unknown number of years after it occurred (it isn't even known, apparently, what year this took place!). The identity of this patient has never been given out. If that is "investigated" and "verified," those terms mean very little.

It's refreshing to read someone who dares to approach NDEs with a skeptical mindset for once. NDE lore is almost as sensitive as religion. I haven't read the aforementioned book as I have always suspected it targets the initiated and not the skeptics.

While I believe there are a small number of true anomalies among the NDE data, they are exceptionally rare, with a reported incidence of less than 0.00002% among cardiac arrests. Another curiosity is that even with thousands of professionals working in resuscitation, there are only a few high-profile advocates for anything extraordinary, like Sam Parnia.

A sensible next step for researchers would be to collect data on how many of Parnia's peers in the Western world have encountered patients reporting NDEs, especially those featuring the OBE component. I do regard him as highly trustworthy, but it's time to broaden his work up.

Like in most skeptic attacks on the spiritual reality of NDEs, this ignores the strong correlation of the time period of NDE consciousness and the time period during which the NDEr's brain was disfunctional, which correlation directly contradicts the physicalist assumption that the mind and consciousness are the physical brain. This existing correlation factor automatically drastically raises the likelihood that at least some number of veridical NDE OBE cases are genuine. And some of the cases in The Self Does Not Die are like the one you cite, but most are much better, and to contend that genuine afterlife-glimpsing NDE OBEs do not exist (presumably because they are impossible under physicalism), it is necessary for the skeptic to plausibly explain away every single one of the over 100 documented cases - even one genuine case would establish the reality of the NDE phenomenon as a glimpse of the afterlife, and cannot remain. This is William James' well-known "one white crow" principle. This mass explain-away means that you are assuming that everybody involved in all the cases and their investigations were completely unreliable as witnesses due to hallucinating or drastically misperceiving or misremembering, or deliberately lying and fabricating stories. This mass denial of human testimony is not remotely plausible, whether the witnesses and experiencers were medical personnel including doctors and nurses, or in other walks of life.

The following portion of your post is so irrelevant to what I wrote that it led me to wrongly suspect that you'd accidentally quoted me and had intended to respond to someone else:

>Like in most skeptic attacks on the spiritual reality of NDEs, this ignores the strong correlation of the time period of NDE consciousness and the time period during which the NDEr's brain was disfunctional, which correlation directly contradicts the physicalist assumption that the mind and consciousness are the physical brain. This existing correlation factor automatically drastically raises the likelihood that at least some number of veridical NDE OBE cases are genuine. 

My post clearly wasn't intended as a wholesale attack on supernatural models of NDEs. I wrote this at the beginning to make that obvious:

>I'm inclined to think there are genuine supernatural NDEs.

You can look through my post history to see that I'm not a debunker, by any stretch.

What I took issue with was your highly exaggerated, inaccurate description of the case collection in The Self does not Die. After opening with your bold "more than 125 investigated and verified veridical NDEs" claim, which I observed was false, you, with no real acknowledgement of error, make recourse to the truly atrocious "one white crow argument." All James' argument tells us is that the standard physicalist or materialist or &c. paradigm would be shattered by even one truly paranormal event. That's true enough, but in the real world, almost never, and perhaps in fact never, can one event provide such strong evidence for one particular theoretical explanation of it, against competing possible explanations, that only that one theory is plausible.

Unfortunately this obvious aspect of the problem is ignored by almost every person I've ever seen employ the "one white crow" argument, and for them it effectively amounts to the idea that we shouldn't care about quality of evidence, we should just gawk at the massiveness of reports and say, "Oh geeeeeeeeeee, there's so many of them! At least one of them must be true!" Nobody who isn't already convinced is impressed by that argument, NO ONE. When is ONE OBSERVATION of some uncertain, let alone controversial, phenomenon or effect EVER taken to be sufficient to establish a theory in science? Everyone who's familiar with the most basic of basics understands that it's virtually impossible for a single case to be strong enough for an entire theory (for example, that NDEs are events in which a non-material soul that is the true seat of consciousness separates from a dying body and continues to have conscious experiences) to hang on it. There's a reason that "replication" is such a fixation in the world of experimental research, especially lately when so many effects apparently "demonstrated" to be "real" sometimes for decades or even a century plus are turning out to be hokum in more rigorous tests that cannot reproduce them (cracks are showing in parapsychology because of this same problem: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/1...sos.191375 https://journalofscientificexploration.o.../view/1903).

Note also that even the most promising and (among all cases so far gathered) thoroughly investigated NDEs have not proven to be watertight--far from it. That isn't to say they've been "debunked," only that enough reasonable doubt about them has been raised that to pretend we have anything like the (almost certainly) mythical and indestructible "one white crow" in NDE research is flat-out delusional. The most impressive NDEs have all been identified in retrospective studies, usually years after they happened. That already is a huge problem for any "one white crow" argument. The burden cannot reasonably be said to be on skeptics to explain away every NDE case when, time and again, they suffer from the same weaknesses that leave room for doubt. It's the proponent's job to find NDE evidence not plagued by the same flaws that give rise to useless, nowhere-going, irresolvable debates about fundamentally ambiguous data.

I've been studying paranormal phenomena for a long time. I feel personally convinced that many authentic paranormal events have happened. But it was not easy to come to that conclusion, largely because proponents of your kind consistently exaggerate the strength of the evidence, an illusion which then dissolves when someone who cares about accuracy presses into the details. Regrettably my impression is that the entire field of parapsychology is dying because it's filled with researchers who have this same basically anti-empirical mindset. They don't want real inquiry that could give even very critically minded people something approaching certainty that the paranormal is real. They want to sit on accumulated cases and experimental evidence, exaggerate the strength and ignore the weaknesses of what they've collected (see studies I linked above to consider efforts to investigate psi without those weaknesses), and, when pushed hard enough on the shortcomings of what they offer, fall back on the "well ... IT ONLY TAKES ONE!" line. These are people who act like they're AFRAID that there really is nothing to what they study and who accordingly don't want to take research as far as it can go. They want to cling to the HOPE that there's something there. And the field is crumbling because of this dogmatist trash that is offensive to any real scientific spirit. Dean Radin is one especially galling case in point. He essentially refuses to do proper confirmatory experimental research. He jumps around from one experimental paradigm to another to rack up an endless array of dubious exploratory effects. And in the face of a major failure of a key psi effect (Bem's experiment 1) to replicate in a proper confirmatory design he gives us this pitiful rationalization that amounts to a statement that scientific rigor is bad if it doesn't get him the results he wants!:

>Obsessively strict pre-registration and detailed recording of all aspects of the study are predicated on two assumptions: (1) observation of a system under study does not affect that system, and (2) exact repeatability establishes if a phenomenon is scientifically "real." These assumptions work quite well for many macroscopic physical systems. They do not work quite as well for living systems. And they work poorly when it comes to the study of subtle psychological effects, including psi. They also sidestep the QM uncertainty principle and QM observational effects, which tells me that while those two assumptions are considered sacrosanct requirements within science today, they are not appropriate for the study of all possible things.

Paranormal research deserves better than this.

It's refreshing to read someone who dares to approach NDEs with a skeptical mindset for once. NDE lore is almost as sensitive as religion. I haven't read the aforementioned book as I have always suspected it targets the initiated and not the skeptics.

While I believe there are a small number of true anomalies among the NDE data, they are exceptionally rare, with a reported incidence of less than 0.00002% among cardiac arrests. Another curiosity is that even with thousands of professionals working in resuscitation, there are only a few high-profile advocates for anything extraordinary, like Sam Parnia.

A sensible next step for researchers would be to collect data on how many of Parnia's peers in the Western world have encountered patients reporting NDEs, especially those featuring the OBE component. I do regard him as highly trustworthy, but it's time to broaden his work up.

Thanks. Some points of disagreement:

1. I'm religious myself. I reject the common idea that there is some borderline necessary connection between religiosity and irrational, inflexible, anti-scientific thinking (you didn't explicitly say that there is, but I suspect that notion might be implicit in your unfavorable use of "religion"). There are proponents of religious claims, paranormal NDE claims, &c. who of course don't seem to have any rational process of belief formation. But at this point, having been on just about every part of the spectrum re: theological and metaphysical views in the course of my life, I've concluded that each of those views is blighted by many adherents who have no rational basis for what they believe. Without a doubt, many of the most intelligent and intellectually rigorous people I've ever met have been religious and/or believed in paranormal phenomena (something I would never have imagined I'd eventually say when I was a physicalist). I did find The Self does not Die to be basically disappointing, overselling the case for paranormal NDEs and not exhibiting particularly good reasoning at many points.

2. It seems to me that we can't currently arrive at confident estimates of the frequency of NDEs featuring ostensible paranormal perception. There seems to be (1) an underreporting problem and (2) a paucity of researchers willing and able to competently investigate this aspect of NDEs, thereby creating massive problems for any estimation effort that might be made. A key distinction to keep in mind is that between NDEs in which the claimant reports an experience featuring paranormal perception and NDEs in which claims of paranormal perception have been documented and seriously investigated, and not been satisfactorily explained in mundane terms. You're right that there are many resuscitation experts, but how many are at all interested in or willing to study claims of paranormal perception in NDEs is another matter. Nevertheless, I agree that this would be of great value:

>A sensible next step for researchers would be to collect data on how many of Parnia's peers in the Western world have encountered patients reporting NDEs, especially those featuring the OBE component.

deleted.

I'm inclined to think there are genuine supernatural NDEs. But this claim just doesn't hold water:

>documenting more than 125 investigated and verified veridical NDEs

There are NDEs in that book that have practically nothing in the way of real evidence going for them. One of the more prima facie astonishing cases involves a hospital patient allegedly memorizing during an OB-NDE and accurately recalling after regaining consciousness a twelve-digit serial number on the top of a piece of medical equipment. Supposedly a hospital worker got a ladder to view the top of this equipment and confirmed that the serial number was accurately recalled.

But we have no reason at all to believe that that actually happened, apart from the say-so of a nurse, recounting the event an unknown number of years after it occurred (it isn't even known, apparently, what year this took place!). The identity of this patient has never been given out. If that is "investigated" and "verified," those terms mean very little.

Wouldn't all religious claims be false [or strongly in doubt] then, at least for the ones that took place thousands of years ago or even those that took place before modern recording equipment?

Unfortunately this obvious aspect of the problem is ignored by almost every person I've ever seen employ the "one white crow" argument, and for them it effectively amounts to the idea that we shouldn't care about quality of evidence, we should just gawk at the massiveness of reports and say, "Oh geeeeeeeeeee, there's so many of them! At least one of them must be true!" Nobody who isn't already convinced is impressed by that argument, NO ONE. When is ONE OBSERVATION of some uncertain, let alone controversial, phenomenon or effect EVER taken to be sufficient to establish a theory in science? Everyone who's familiar with the most basic of basics understands that it's virtually impossible for a single case to be strong enough for an entire theory (for example, that NDEs are events in which a non-material soul that is the true seat of consciousness separates from a dying body and continues to have conscious experiences) to hang on it. There's a reason that "replication" is such a fixation in the world of experimental research, especially lately when so many effects apparently "demonstrated" to be "real" sometimes for decades or even a century plus are turning out to be hokum in more rigorous tests that cannot reproduce them (cracks are showing in parapsychology because of this same problem: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/1...sos.191375 https://journalofscientificexploration.o.../view/1903).

It's not simply that out of many reports one must be true. It's that there are enough reports where someone has to be lying, prone to mental confusion, or easily tricked. Otherwise, if the story happens as they said, it confirms something I think we should already expect for a prior reasons.

Parnia's gradual warming up to the idea that consciousness persists after death would, I think, be a case of someone who became convinced by the data?

Thanks. Some points of disagreement:

1. I'm religious myself. I reject the common idea that there is some borderline necessary connection between religiosity and irrational, inflexible, anti-scientific thinking (you didn't explicitly say that there is, but I suspect that notion might be implicit in your unfavorable use of "religion"). There are proponents of religious claims, paranormal NDE claims, &c. who of course don't seem to have any rational process of belief formation. But at this point, having been on just about every part of the spectrum re: theological and metaphysical views in the course of my life, I've concluded that each of those views is blighted by many adherents who have no rational basis for what they believe. Without a doubt, many of the most intelligent and intellectually rigorous people I've ever met have been religious and/or believed in paranormal phenomena (something I would never have imagined I'd eventually say when I was a physicalist). I did find The Self does not Die to be basically disappointing, overselling the case for paranormal NDEs and not exhibiting particularly good reasoning at many points.

Actually it was not my intention to speak unfavourable of religion as I'm not an atheist myself. It's out of respect for religion and religious people that I never ever debate religion. It's a sensitive subject and my only point was the NDEs is also becoming a quite sensitive subject.

2. It seems to me that we can't currently arrive at confident estimates of the frequency of NDEs featuring ostensible paranormal perception. There seems to be (1) an underreporting problem and (2) a paucity of researchers willing and able to competently investigate this aspect of NDEs, thereby creating massive problems for any estimation effort that might be made. A key distinction to keep in mind is that between NDEs in which the claimant reports an experience featuring paranormal perception and NDEs in which claims of paranormal perception have been documented and seriously investigated, and not been satisfactorily explained in mundane terms. You're right that there are many resuscitation experts, but how many are at all interested in or willing to study claims of paranormal perception in NDEs is another matter. Nevertheless, I agree that this would be of great value:

From an earlier debate about the icelandic medium Indriði Indriðason I got the impression you were from the Scandinavian region as well. If so, you must be well aware of the culture of straight speaking also on controversial subjects. During the COVID-19 pandemic a number of danish medical professionals went public with opinions that contradicted that of the danish equivalent to the American CDC. It didn't cost them their jobs. I don't buy people experiencing this phenomena from the healthcare site wouldn't come public in Scandinavia.

From an earlier debate about the icelandic medium Indriði Indriðason I got the impression you were from the Scandinavian region as well. If so, you must be well aware of the culture of straight speaking also on controversial subjects. During the COVID-19 pandemic a number of danish medical professionals went public with opinions that contradicted that of the danish equivalent to the American CDC. It didn't cost them their jobs. I don't buy people experiencing this phenomena from the healthcare site wouldn't come public in Scandinavia.

I have lived in Sweden 9 years now and I am not familiar with such here.  Come over here and get a little educational culture shock!  Anything controversial is avoided like the plague and people very much keep themselves to themselves.  I can't speak for the rest of Scandinavia but that is Sweden.  I shrink from bringing up such interests in public since I have been living here.

Wouldn't all religious claims be false [or strongly in doubt] then, at least for the ones that took place thousands of years ago or even those that took place before modern recording equipment?


It's not simply that out of many reports one must be true. It's that there are enough reports where someone has to be lying, prone to mental confusion, or easily tricked. Otherwise, if the story happens as they said, it confirms something I think we should already expect for a prior reasons.

Parnia's gradual warming up to the idea that consciousness persists after death would, I think, be a case of someone who became convinced by the data?

>Wouldn't all religious claims be false [or strongly in doubt] then, at least for the ones that took place thousands of years ago or even those that took place before modern recording equipment?

I wasn't addressing what's true or false. I took issue with the "investigated and verified" claim. I don't see how anyone can seriously argue that a case is "investigated and verified" when all we have is a report from a nurse, stating that an unnamed person at an unknown time had a certain experience.

Considering, say, Christian apologetics, quite a bit of effort is expended arguing that the Gospels offer first-hand eyewitness testimony--for example by pointing to the many obscure historical and geographical details accurately reported in them. Evidence is offered that Jesus and the Apostles lived and died in certain times and places. And arguments are made for at least partial independence between the accounts--the idea being that we have more than one first-hand version of the same events. That all seems quite far removed from the poor state of the 12-digit serial number NDE case. If apologists had nothing to say on the Resurrection other than "Simon Peter said that an unknown person rose from the dead in the past," I don't think there'd have been any Christians of impressive caliber in the 17th-21st centuries.

But an important point is that religious claims of the kind you refer to are in the domain of historical research. I assume we all agree that historical evidence is generally weaker, and that the standards for it are lower, compared to what we usually have in mind when we think of scientific evidence. Proponents of transcendent NDE theories typically maintain that NDE research gives us scientific evidence of a supernatural, paranormal, or &c. phenomenon that is doubted irrationally by skeptics. Most of my criticisms would be inapplicable if there were more modesty about what the NDE evidence amounts to. It can be reasonably taken as evidence for a supernatural, paranormal, or &c. phenomenon, but there is nothing irrational in finding the evidence unconvincing because of the considerable weaknesses it has. Similarly, the evidence for my religious beliefs is, in my own estimation, sufficiently ambiguous that one can find it unpersuasive without any failure of rationality. But for that reason, I don't go around claiming that my religious beliefs are established in a scientific way. Crucially, however, I think we could have far better paranormal evidence than we do, especially if proponents were more willing to acknowledge the shortcomings of what's so far been accumulated.

>It's not simply that out of many reports one must be true. It's that there are enough reports where someone has to be lying, prone to mental confusion, or easily tricked. Otherwise, if the story happens as they said, it confirms something I think we should already expect for a prior reasons.

This seems different from the "one white crow argument." That argument, after all, stresses the "one" white crow. And rather than proponents of it working very hard to show how they do have at least one watertight case, they're in the habit of throwing a barrage of cases at the world and saying, "if just one of these holds up, we win." That is just lazy and intellectually unserious. This barrage approach would be completely unnecessary if the "one white crow" were there. It has to be said, to William James' credit, that he was involved in the massive effort to study the mediumistic phenomena of Leonora Piper. After that tremendous work, he was able to declare Piper his "white crow."

With respect to Parnia, he seems to vacillate on NDEs all the time. I don't think it's clear what he believes is the metaphysical truth about NDEs.

Actually it was not my intention to speak unfavourable of religion as I'm not an atheist myself. It's out of respect for religion and religious people that I never ever debate religion. It's a sensitive subject and my only point was the NDEs is also becoming a quite sensitive subject.


From an earlier debate about the icelandic medium Indriði Indriðason I got the impression you were from the Scandinavian region as well. If so, you must be well aware of the culture of straight speaking also on controversial subjects. During the COVID-19 pandemic a number of danish medical professionals went public with opinions that contradicted that of the danish equivalent to the American CDC. It didn't cost them their jobs. I don't buy people experiencing this phenomena from the healthcare site wouldn't come public in Scandinavia.

>I got the impression you were from the Scandinavian region as well

Sadly I'm not. I have great respect for many Scandinavian intellectuals and scientists, so I wish I had some connection to that part of the world! I've heard claims similar to Brian's, however, that there is a strong expectation of cultural conformity in Scandinavian nations, and also that they're highly secularized. So my sense is that endorsing something like paranormal NDEs there may well entail serious risk of being labeled "strange," "superstitious," and so on.

>Wouldn't all religious claims be false [or strongly in doubt] then, at least for the ones that took place thousands of years ago or even those that took place before modern recording equipment?

I wasn't addressing what's true or false. I took issue with the "investigated and verified" claim. I don't see how anyone can seriously argue that a case is "investigated and verified" when all we have is a report from a nurse, stating that an unnamed person at an unknown time had a certain experience.

Considering, say, Christian apologetics, quite a bit of effort is expended arguing that the Gospels offer first-hand eyewitness testimony--for example by pointing to the many obscure historical and geographical details accurately reported in them. Evidence is offered that Jesus and the Apostles lived and died in certain times and places. And arguments are made for at least partial independence between the accounts--the idea being that we have more than one first-hand version of the same events. That all seems quite far removed from the poor state of the 12-digit serial number NDE case. If apologists had nothing to say on the Resurrection other than "Simon Peter said that an unknown person rose from the dead in the past," I don't think there'd have been any Christians of impressive caliber in the 17th-21st centuries.

But an important point is that religious claims of the kind you refer to are in the domain of historical research. I assume we all agree that historical evidence is generally weaker, and that the standards for it are lower, compared to what we usually have in mind when we think of scientific evidence. Proponents of transcendent NDE theories typically maintain that NDE research gives us scientific evidence of a supernatural, paranormal, or &c. phenomenon that is doubted irrationally by skeptics. Most of my criticisms would be inapplicable if there were more modesty about what the NDE evidence amounts to. It can be reasonably taken as evidence for a supernatural, paranormal, or &c. phenomenon, but there is nothing irrational in finding the evidence unconvincing because of the considerable weaknesses it has. Similarly, the evidence for my religious beliefs is, in my own estimation, sufficiently ambiguous that one can find it unpersuasive without any failure of rationality. But for that reason, I don't go around claiming that my religious beliefs are established in a scientific way.

>It's not simply that out of many reports one must be true. It's that there are enough reports where someone has to be lying, prone to mental confusion, or easily tricked. Otherwise, if the story happens as they said, it confirms something I think we should already expect for a prior reasons.

This seems different from the "one white crow argument." That argument, after all, stresses the "one" white crow. And rather than proponents of it working very hard to show how they do have at least one watertight case, they're in the habit of throwing a barrage of cases at the world and saying, "if just one of these holds up, we win." That is just lazy and intellectually unserious. This barrage approach would be completely unnecessary if the "one white crow" were there.

With respect to Parnia, he seems to vacillate on NDEs all the time. I don't think it's clear what he believes is the metaphysical truth about NDEs.

I agree with you that on its own a single case of a remembered serial number would not be convincing. Though I think this would also depend on my ability to trust the investigator who looked into the case.

I also agree that it is reasonable to simply not have confidence in Survival, especially if one has never had any paranormal experiences of their own.

That said, I think this question of "one white crow" and historical witnesses ties together. Just as you note we can at least get some confidence in the accuracy of historical testimony in context, I would say the same goes for cases we have for Survival. For example I doubt Bruce Greyson has wasted his life for the sake of attention, so at minimum he definitely believes he confirmed an OOBE of a patient that kickstarted his interest in NDEs.

Perhaps a concise way to state the strength of Survival/Psi evidence is that it has met a "legal standard" (Zammit's words IIRC), whereas the scientific standard remains out of reach?