Debate: That veridical NDEs are a myth [split: A splendid video about evolution]

I'm curious to know a couple of things:

Firstly, are you at all embarrassed to publicly present (or at least imply) such pathetically specious arguments?

Secondly, can you even conceive of what a potentially sound argument against the existing evidence would look like?

Firstly, you should be aware that you are debating with a non-native English speaker. I cannot match the depth of your rhetoric in English, nor can I always fully grasp the tone of your comments.
That said, I am certainly not embarrassed to point out the wild exaggerations about a supposed hidden spiritual realm, built on nothing more than a few anecdotal accounts. It strongly reminds me of the UFO craze two years ago, sparked by the fanciful testimonies of self-styled “gurus” in the US Congress. So I have to ask: do you still believe in secret UFO crashes in the American desert, despite the complete lack of objective evidence?
As for your second question, I strongly believe that further research into near-death experiences in the context of cardiac arrest will show that they correlate entirely with brain activity associated with conscious states (now that the “the brain flatlines within seconds” myth has been dispelled). Of course, anecdotal reports cannot be disproven, just as one cannot “disprove” the gospels in the Bible, to make a comparison.

[Laird]

That said, I am certainly not embarrassed to point out the wild exaggerations about a supposed hidden spiritual realm

That's not what you should be embarrassed about. What you should be embarrassed about is the (utter lack of) quality of the argument you make to support that "point", namely:

built on nothing more than a few anecdotal accounts

It's 2019. Sbu is director of the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission. A hospital director comes in to discuss a concerning pattern of patients reporting common symptoms not seen before.

"Meh", says sbu. "Have you performed a controlled study?"

"No, sir", replies the hospital director, "but these patient reports have been corroborated by our doctors. They are genuine."

"Puh-lease", scoffs sbu. "Mere anecdotes? How could you expect me to take this seriously? Quit wasting my time."

"But sir", the hospital director replies urgently, "Other hospital directors in the area are receiving the same reports from their doctors regarding their own patients. We can't just ignore this. The reports are definitive and the pattern is undeniable."

"Get out of here, and do not repeat this nonsense!" snaps back sbu. "Anecdotal evidence is inherently unreliable!"

And we all lived happily ever after.

anecdotal reports cannot be disproven, just as one cannot “disprove” the gospels in the Bible, to make a comparison.

This is a disingenuous comparison. The events in the Gospels occurred over two millenia ago. None of the primary and corroborating witnesses can be contacted any longer, nor was there an attempt to systematically investigate and carefully write down details at the time: those books were written decades later based on an oral tradition, and contradict one another.

[Laird]

I'm posting this as a separate response in case it develops into a strand of conversation that can and should be split into its own separate thread. Please likewise keep your own responses (if any) separate in case of that eventuality.

It strongly reminds me of the UFO craze two years ago, sparked by the fanciful testimonies of self-styled “gurus” in the US Congress.

A respectable stance would be: "This testimony is strange and seems likely to me to be fabricated. Maybe it will turn out to be true in the end, but I don't expect so, and I will otherwise withhold judgement until we have decisive reasons to conclude either way."

Instead, your approach is to dismiss it out of hand. That's not a serious approach. It's the approach of a dogmatist.

So I have to ask: do you still believe in secret UFO crashes in the American desert, despite the complete lack of objective evidence?

It does seem very likely to me that extraterrestrial craft, and probably biological extraterrestrials, have come into the possession of humans, probably through crashes, yes, whether that's in the American desert, elsewhere, or both.

Of course, I can't be certain, but "this is a giant hoax perpetrated by a network of professionals and ex-professionals" seems to me to be more of the conspiracy theory (in the pejorative sense).

despite the complete lack of objective evidence?

There is so much objective evidence that UFOs exist that it's undeniable. That they might at times crash is plausible. That humans would come into possession of craft (and the bodies of any pilots) once they have crashed is almost inevitable.

I have no solid evidence that the people reporting that such a thing has in fact occurred are lying, confabulating, or deceived. If you do, then go ahead and share it.

Nor do I know of a compelling incentive for them to do so, although there might be one. Again, if you know of one, then go ahead and share it.

On the other hand, I do know of a compelling reason for them not to lie: most of them have hard-won reputations to protect, and being seen as "the crazy, delusional UFO weirdo" if it is all a lie would be pretty devastating to their professional credibility.

There are so many independently confirmed veridical NDEs that there is a very strong pattern.

After all, every single damn thing is anecdotal unless there are many of them, in which case there must be a pattern, even if not known or understood.

So the dismissal of NDEs by sbu is entirely ideological ~ sbu has already a priori decided that they cannot happen, so every and any reason will be found to dismiss them.

It does seem very likely to me that extraterrestrial craft, and probably biological extraterrestrials, have come into the possession of humans, probably through crashes, yes, whether that's in the American desert, elsewhere, or both.

After 70+ years of claims, believers have produced exactly zero alien artifacts that can survive basic scientific scrutiny. Every piece of supposed "otherworldly" debris has either disappeared, been revealed as mundane materials, or conveniently remains in the hands of people who won't submit it for independent analysis. What kind of interstellar civilization loses this much hardware yet leaves behind nothing verifiable?

It's remarkably convenient that these "alien crashes" always seem to happen near top-secret military installations during the height of experimental aircraft development. The U-2, stealth bombers, and classified weapons projects were being tested in these exact locations at these exact times. But sure, it must be aliens.

The most dramatic accounts invariably emerge decades after the alleged events, often from people who somehow forgot to mention seeing alien technology until UFO culture made it profitable or famous to do so. Memory doesn't improve with age, especially when contaminated by years of media coverage.

UFO believers simultaneously claim the government is competent enough to orchestrate massive cover-ups involving thousands of people for decades, yet incompetent enough to let the "truth" leak out through blurry photos and dubious witnesses. Which is it?

Any civilization capable of interstellar travel wouldn't crash with the frequency that UFO enthusiasts claim. These aren't teenagers with driver's licenses - they're supposedly advanced beings who mastered physics we can't even comprehend. Yet they crash-land in the desert like amateur pilots?

The same people demanding rigorous proof for conventional scientific claims will accept grainy photos, third-hand testimonies, and government document fragments as iron-clad evidence of the most extraordinary event in human history.

The crashed UFO narrative isn't just unsupported - it's an insult to critical thinking itself.

That's not what you should be embarrassed about. What you should be embarrassed about is the (utter lack of) quality of the argument you make to support that "point", namely:


It's 2019. Sbu is director of the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission. A hospital director comes in to discuss a concerning pattern of patients reporting common symptoms not seen before.

"Meh", says sbu. "Have you performed a controlled study?"

"No, sir", replies the hospital director, "but these patient reports have been corroborated by our doctors. They are genuine."

"Puh-lease", scoffs sbu. "Mere anecdotes? How could you expect me to take this seriously? Quit wasting my time."

"But sir", the hospital director replies urgently, "Other hospital directors in the area are receiving the same reports from their doctors regarding their own patients. We can't just ignore this. The reports are definitive and the pattern is undeniable."

"Get out of here, and do not repeat this nonsense!" snaps back sbu. "Anecdotal evidence is inherently unreliable!"

And we all lived happily ever after.


This is a disingenuous comparison. The events in the Gospels occurred over two millenia ago. None of the primary and corroborating witnesses can be contacted any longer, nor was there an attempt to systematically investigate and carefully write down details at the time: those books were written decades later based on an oral tradition, and contradict one another.

In your mini-essay, I don't think you convincingly managed to explain three critical problems that expose the fundamental weakness of the veridical NDE hypothesis.

First, why do veridical cases systematically disappear when we raise the evidentiary bar from anecdotal reports to rigorous investigation? This isn't a minor methodological quirk - it's the signature of a phenomenon that can't withstand scrutiny. Real phenomena become more evident under closer examination, not less. The vanishing evidence problem should be deeply troubling to anyone genuinely interested in understanding these experiences rather than simply defending a predetermined conclusion.

Second, why are veridical NDE rates declining rather than increasing over time? Most of the 112 "spectacular" cases in Rivas and Smit's gospel of NDE fairy tales are decades old. With today's ubiquitous surveillance systems, advanced medical monitoring, and meticulous documentation practices, we should be swimming in fresh, well-documented cases. Instead, proponents keep recycling vintage anecdotes like precious heirlooms. This backwards time machine effect where the evidence gets weaker as our ability to gather evidence improves, is exactly what we'd expect from urban legends, not genuine phenomena.

Third, you completely disregard the inconvenient reality that the "brain flatlines within a couple of seconds" myth might actually be more complex than NDE proponents admit. Consciousness can persist during various phases of cardiac events, but more tellingly, most self-reported NDEs occur in non-cardiac arrest settings entirely. This suggests that being clinically dead has nothing to do with these experiences, demolishing the core premise that NDEs provide evidence for consciousness surviving death.
As an extra curiosity that should give any serious researcher pause: there are no known documented veridical NDE cases in Danish medical literature - ever. Denmark has world-class medical infrastructure, meticulous record-keeping, and a population of 6 million people. If veridical NDEs were a universal human phenomenon, this statistical absence would be impossible to explain. Instead, like UFO sightings, veridical NDEs seem to cherry-pick their occurrence among carefully selected subsets of the population, clustering in communities already primed to interpret ambiguous experiences through a paranormal lens.
The pattern is clear: veridical NDEs exhibit all the hallmarks of culturally constructed phenomena rather than genuine paranormal events. The evidence doesn't support the extraordinary claims - it supports the far more parsimonious explanation that these cases are the product of confirmation bias, post-hoc retrofitting, and the telephone game effect of repeated storytelling within believing communities.

why do veridical cases systematically disappear when we raise the evidentiary bar from anecdotal reports to rigorous investigation?

To date, there have been zero studies even measuring the visual accuracy of the recalled NDE OBE. Researchers have either used hidden secret visual targets (Parnia, Sartori), or haven't bothered using targets (Blanke). The research just hasn't been done yet.

Charlotte Martial (who is pretty punchy that these experiences are not anomalous) has recently proposed the first study to investigate the visual accuracy of NDE OBE's in her hospital's recovery room.

Charlotte Martial (who is pretty punchy that these experiences are not anomalous) has recently proposed the first study to investigate the visual accuracy of NDE OBE's in her hospital's recovery room.

I’m all for gathering more data. However, if this study is carried out and the results are negative, the NDE community will simply cry foul play.

I’m all for gathering more data. However, if this study is carried out and the results are negative, the NDE community will simply cry foul play.

Suppose the NDE community does that. So what? You seem to think that uniquely discredits veridical NDE proponents, but debunkers are no less prone to those kinds of post hoc attempts to rationalize away findings unfavorable to their views, or to ignore them altogether. A good example would be when Helmut Schmidt pretty much obliterated all the methodological complaints about psi research by introducing truly random number generators, especially when paired with precognitive experimental paradigms, and achieved many impressive results contra skeptical expectations. To run damage control, first debunkers speculated (hoped) that his random number generators were biased, hence not actually random, but, as debunker Charles Akers discovered directly, that line of critique was bogus. Then they fell back on the tried-and-true fraud supposition, since Schmidt often did experiments alone. Consequently Schmidt designed and implemented a thoroughly fraud-proofed multi-experimenter method to test retroactive PK (still achieving significant effects), which even James Kennedy, probably the most competent critic of parapsychology (who nonetheless believes in psi given events in his own life), takes to be remarkable, as he noted in his paper "Experimenter Fraud: What are Appropriate Methodological Standards?" (2017): "Special experimental designs with extraordinary measures to prevent fraud have also been described (Palmer, 2016; Schmidt, Morris, & Rudolph, 1986; Schmidt & Stapp, 1993); however, these measures are not practical for most research."

Schmidt conducted a number of these unusually rigorous experiments with collectively highly significant results, completely refuting his critics:

"Alcock (1987, 1988) and Akers (1987) alluded to one RNG-PK experiment conducted by Schmidt that was particularly well-designed to guard against fraud and error, in that certain crucial parts of the procedure (namely, the random assignment of the target directions that participants should aim for, and evaluation of the resulting data) were supervised by independent observers (Schmidt et al., 1986). Although the overall result was significant (z = 2.71, p = .0032), Alcock and Akers both took a cautious 'let’s wait and see' stance, urging that further replications using the same type of design were necessary. It turns out that this particular experiment was the first in a series of five (Schmidt & Braud, 1993; Schmidt et al., 1986; Schmidt et al., 1994; Schmidt & Schlitz, 1989; Schmidt & Stapp, 1993) that Schmidt conducted with independent observers. Three of these five experiments had overall outcomes at or exceeding the conventional level of statistical significance (i.e., z ≥ 1.64, p ≤ .05), and when evaluated altogether their results remained highly significant (Z = 3.67, p = .00012), with an associated odds ratio of about 8,200 to one (H. Schmidt, 1993a). This seemed to indicate that positive PK results were still achievable in Schmidt’s experiments even when the conditions were tightly monitored and controlled."

Unsurprisingly, debunkers don't talk about these studies, preferring to pretend they don't exist. They'd rather repeat stories about flaws in J.B. Rhine's early work so they can keep up the illusion of "definitely nothing to see here."

You make many other doubtful or erroneous claims and arguments.

1. "'the brain flatlines within seconds' myth has been dispelled" "We now know that during cardiac arrest, brain activity can be retained at a certain level"

People who knew what they were talking about were never arguing that there's certainly absolutely no ongoing neurological activity during, for example, cardiac arrest NDEs. The issue has always been about neural activity sufficient to support complex conscious experience. This is apparent, for example, in Kelly et al.'s book Irreducible Mind from way back in 2007:

"the current mainstream doctrine of biological naturalism has coalesced neuroscientifically around the family of 'global workspace' theories. Despite differences of detail and interpretation, all of these theories have in common the view that the essential substrate for conscious experience--the neuroelectric activities that make it possible and that constitute or directly reflect the necessary and sufficient conditions for its occurrence--consist of synchronous or at least coherent high-frequency (gamma-band, roughly 30-70 Hz) EEG oscillations linking widely separated, computationally specialized, regions of the brain. An enormous amount of empirical evidence supports the existence of these mind-brain correlations under normal conditions of mental life, and we do not dispute this evidence. The conventional theoretical interpretation of this correlation, however--that the observed neuroelectric activity itself generates or constitutes the conscious experience--must be incorrect, because in both general anesthesia and cardiac arrest, the specific neuroelectric conditions that are held to be necessary and sufficient for conscious experience are abolished--and yet vivid, even heightened, awareness, thinking, and memory formation can still occur."

"How might scientists intent upon defending the conventional view respond to the challenge presented by cases occurring under conditions like these? First, it will undoubtedly be objected that even in the presence of a flat-lined EEG there still could be undetected brain activity going on. Current scalp-EEG technology detects only activity common to large populations of suitably oriented neurons, mainly in the cerebral cortex; and so perhaps future improvements in technology will allow us to detect additional brain activity not visible to us at present. This objection may seem to have some force, because both experimental and modeling studies show that certain kinds of electrical events in the brain, such as highly localized epileptic spikes, do not appear in scalp recordings (Pacia & Ebersole, 1997). Moreover, recordings carried out under conditions of general anesthesia comparable to those used with Pam Reynolds provide direct evidence that some residual electrical activity can appear subcortically or in the neighborhood of the ventricles, even in combination with an essentially flat scalp EEG (Karasawa et al., 2001).

"This first objection, however, completely misses the mark. The issue is not whether there is brain activity of any kind whatsoever, but whether there is brain activity of the specific form regarded by contemporary neuroscience as the necessary condition of conscious experience. Activity of this form is eminently detectable by current EEG technology, and as we have already shown, it is abolished both by adequate general anesthesia and by cardiac arrest."

Hi InterestedInPsi, did you come across this forum by chance, or were you invited? I’ll be sure to return to your actual post sometime tomorrow, but if you’re genuinely new here, a sincere welcome!