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

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.

Continuing refutation of 1.:

I can only infer that your claim that it's been shown to be a "myth" that brain activity rapidly "flatlines" (after what? I assume you mean cardiac arrest but strangely you don't specify this) is based on AWARE II. I don't see how you could say the study found this to be a "myth" when useable EEG data were only obtained for 53 of 567 patients, and of those 53, about half were found to have markedly depressed or absent EEG activity. More to the point, since the EEG readings were taken during resuscitation attempts, it isn't even clear if in the cases that EEG activity was found, it was due to brain activity or the attempts themselves.

In a 2025 paper in the journal International Review of Psychiatry, Angeli-Faez, Greyson, and van Lommel offer the following on AWARE-II:

"Several cortical patterns emerged on the frontal EEG in this study, ranging from the predominance of suppressed activity and seizures to slow-wave activity in the delta (1-4 Hz) and theta (4-8 Hz) bands (up to CPR 60 min) and alpha (8-13 Hz) (up to CPR 35 min) and beta (13-30 Hz) frequencies (Parnia et al., 2023). Researchers have interpreted these findings as ‘consistent with consciousness and a possible resumption of a network-level of cognitive and neuronal activity emerged up to 35–60 minutes into CPR’ (Parnia et al., 2023, p. 9; see also Parnia, 2024). However, their results are not consistent with neural signatures of consciousness during CPR; the EEG findings do not seem to represent consciousness, since none of these records were correlated with any recall of awareness in this study (Greyson & van Lommel, 2024). Despite the measures described to minimize CPR motion artifact on the EEG (Parnia, 2024; Parnia et al., 2023, p. 4), the data do not provide persuasive evidence that the EEG measures were separated from muscle contamination or CPR artifacts (Greyson & van Lommel, 2024). Further, in Figure 1a of this study, in the image referring to alpha activity (Parnia et al., 2023, p. 4), three (of a total of 4) electrodes show alpha rhythm, while one displays a flat trace, indicating suppressed activity. This association between suppressed activity and alpha waves reflects a malfunctioning of the cortex, associated with severe brain ischemia (mean rSO2 ~ 43%; baseline rSO2 ~ 70%), rather than a short EEG normalization arising during CPR. Given the long CPR duration (mean: 15.17 ± 12.55 min) in the absence of visible signs of consciousness (Parnia et al., 2023), and the vulnerability of alpha cortical power to impairments in oxygen delivery, it seems unlikely that this cortical activity indicated a restoration of waking consciousness."

It remains the case that the preponderance of evidence strongly favors the view that what mainstream neuroscientific theories hold to be the brain-level conditions for consciousness are rapidly lost in cardiac arrest.

2. "Compare this to the countless cardiac arrests that occur in hospitals worldwide where no veridical elements emerge, despite researchers actively looking for them." 

What are you talking about? How often do researchers have access to the details of patient case histories, which are generally locked away behind privacy law protections and so on? The overwhelming majority of cardiac arrest cases are dealt with as medical emergencies, not NDE research opportunities.

3. "The telling part is that NDE researchers have been promising controlled studies of veridical perception for decades, yet somehow these remarkable abilities never seem to manifest when proper experimental protocols are in place."

You repeatedly peddle this myth that no veridical NDE evidence has been obtained in prospective research. This is false. Penny Sartori, as I recall, got at least one case supplying such evidence in such a study. Moreover, you seem to forget (or not want to remember?) that AWARE-I did obtain evidence, even if not the evidence looked for (a target hit), of veridical OBE perception in an NDE. From a paper by philosopher Patrick Brissey, "Analysis of Recent Objections to the Traditional Near-Death Experience Argument for a Transphysical Self":

“one of Parnia et al.’s (2014) NDErs with accurate description of her resuscitation reported that she ‘blanked out’—that is, had a cardiac arrest—but claimed to have had continued consciousness while her brain was offline. She ‘remember[ed] vividly an automated voice saying, “Shock the patient,” “Shock the patient,”’ and then she observed a kind ‘woman’ beckoning her to travel to the corner of the hospital room (p. 5). The NDEr felt that she could not travel to the top of the room, but the woman’s warmth and persistence built confidence in the NDEr, and the next thing she knew she was observing the operation from the ceiling of the room along with the woman (p. 5). The NDEr testified, ‘I was up there, looking down at me, [1] the nurse, and [2] another man who had a bald head. . . I couldn’t see his face but I could see the back of his body. [3] He was quite a chunky fella. . . [4] He had blue scrubs on, and [5] he had a blue hat, but I could tell he didn’t have any hair, because of where the hat was.’ Then the NDEr woke up. Parnia et al. (2014) verified the NDEr’s claims as accurate. They wrote, ‘Post-script–Medical record review confirmed the use of the AED [automated external defibrillator], the medical team present during the cardiac arrest and the role the identified “man” played in responding to the cardiac arrest’ (p. 5). The authors of the study confirmed the NDEr’s observation of the defibrillation procedure and, essentially, the patient’s description of the ‘bald,’ ‘chunky fella’ wearing ‘blue scrubs’ and a ‘blue hat.’”

4. "The latter being a great example of empirical evidence sought under logical positivisme"

Not to offend, but this is a truly absurd statement. You're basically implying that all scientific inquiry is under the umbrella of logical positivism, when logical positivism has been understood to present a completely untenable account of the nature of science for many decades now, in the wake of the work of W.V.O. Quine and Pierre Duhem.

5. *critical remarks about the Gospels from Laird and sbu*

I recommend that both of you consider reading the following book, which is open access and so downloadable for free at the link, and which rather demolishes this notion of the Gospels as uncorroborated works lacking historicity: https://academic.oup.com/book/60034

6. "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"

I'm not favorably inclined to UFO crash stories, which seem in virtually all cases to originate in government disinformation ops. But it's incorrect to claim that EVERY piece of alleged UFO debris has been satisfactorily explained away: https://journalofscientificexploration.o.../view/2415

7. "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."

Setting aside crashed saucer tales, there are well-documented UFO cases from many different parts of the world. Cases such as this, which the massively skeptically biased Condon Committee judged "Unidentified" after thorough investigation, involving the observations of a Ph.D nuclear physicist, aren't being debunked by casually invoking proximity to military sites: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/ar...2125000247

Back to NDEs; I have to say it seems to me that the post from which the following points come was written by AI:

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

They don't, you (or the AI?) just omit(s) the cases that don't fit your (its) favored perspective on this, as I observed above. It should be noted that the famous "dentures man" case fell into the pilot phase of a prospective NDE study.

9. "With today's ubiquitous surveillance systems, advanced medical monitoring, and meticulous documentation practices, we should be swimming in fresh, well-documented cases"

Again, where are all the studies being conducted on veridical NDEs and failing to get any evidence for them? Research on this matter has been very limited. The above is frankly one of the worst arguments you've brought out yet. "The world has become so science-y and technological! Science is in the air! The techno-science molecules should be collecting science-y evidence of veridical NDEs by themselves, but they aren't."

10. "Consciousness can persist during various phases of cardiac events."

I went over the problems implicit in this above.

11. "most self-reported NDEs occur in non-cardiac arrest settings entirely."

You don't provide any data to support this claim. The occurrence of NDE-like states in persons not near death doesn't have any bearing on whether accurate perceptions in genuine near-death conditions that should be, on the naturalist view, impossible really happen. You might as well say that because people can have perceptual experiences while not objectively near death, the prospective fact that they can have perceptual experiences while objectively near death would tell us nothing interesting if true. This looks like you're throwing every point vaguely related to the topic under discussion that comes into your mind at the wall, hoping something sticks.

12. "As an extra curiosity that should give any serious researcher pause: there are no known documented veridical NDE cases in Danish medical literature - ever."

I seriously doubt if you or anyone else has done the research necessary to be highly confident that this is really the case. Even if it were true, so what? Multiple possible explanations for such an anomaly come to mind. Think this through carefully: what exactly would that entail that would be genuinely problematic for the veridical NDE hypothesis? This reflects a style of paralogistic debunker argument that I've frequently encountered: unable to deal with the evidence we in fact have, the debunker insists on how strange it is we don't have the evidence he believes we should have, thinking (most irrationally) that this somehow nullifies the actually extant evidence.

Prof. Janice Miner Holden has reviewed the evidence for veridical perception during NDEs. Her chapter about this is in The handbook of near-death experiences: Thirty years of investigation. Her review does not seem to be freely available, but it is possible to read some of it through GoogleBooks.

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."

….completely different topic….

It amuses me how you seemingly already admit defeat (by anticipating a negative result) on behalf of this new NDE study in your first 6 words ever on this forum.

I will also very much characterize your opening salute as what is usually called argument flooding. However, making multiple bad arguments does not accumulate into a single good one. I will, however, prefer to debate a single argument at a time. If you think it is appropriate to mix the debate about the lack of extraordinary evidence for veridical near-death experiences with the ridiculously low effect sizes from parapsychology in this thread, that is fine with me, even though I don’t ger your point in the NDE context? 

You provide an impressive list of references to past psi controversy but what is easily overlooked when building an argument based on Z-score alone is that it does not measure the magnitude of an effect, only how unlikely the data are under the null hypothesis, given the number of trials. With enough repetitions, even a trivially small deviation from chance will look “highly significant.” That is exactly what we see in Schmidt’s case: statistically impressive z-values driven by microscopically small effect sizes (d ≈ 0.02–0.04). In medicine or psychology, such an effect would be considered not just “weak” but practically meaningless, and probably attributable to noise, bias, or unnoticed artifacts. So equating that kind of vanishingly small signal with extraordinary evidence in the NDE debate, is just another way of admitting that the evidence for veridical NDEs is hanging by a thread.

Daryl Bem’s “feeling the future” results recently again failed to replicate by a new and better designed experiment  https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/f...sos.191375 - the secret sauce? “. In the study we applied direct data deposition in combination with born-open data and real-time research reports to extend transparency to protocol delivery and data collection. We also used piloting, checklists, laboratory logs and video-documented trial sessions to ascertain as-intended protocol delivery, and external research auditors to monitor research integrity. We found 49.89% successful guesses, while Bem reported 53.07% success rate”

The point is that tiny effect sizes tend to disappear when the level of scrutiny is raised, and I sincerely doubt that any of the classical psi studies claiming an effect would be reproducible under modern standards - so no, Z-scores alone doesn’t impress me. There’s obviously good reason why these results haven’t captured the attention of the mainstream academia.

It amuses me how you seemingly already admit defeat (by anticipating a negative result) on behalf of this new NDE study in your first 6 words ever on this forum.

I will also very much characterize your opening salute as what is usually called argument flooding. However, making multiple bad arguments does not accumulate into a single good one. I will, however, prefer to debate a single argument at a time. If you think it is appropriate to mix the debate about the lack of extraordinary evidence for veridical near-death experiences with the ridiculously low effect sizes from parapsychology in this thread, that is fine with me, even though I don’t ger your point in the NDE context? 

You provide an impressive list of references to past psi controversy but what is easily overlooked when building an argument based on Z-score alone is that it does not measure the magnitude of an effect, only how unlikely the data are under the null hypothesis, given the number of trials. With enough repetitions, even a trivially small deviation from chance will look “highly significant.” That is exactly what we see in Schmidt’s case: statistically impressive z-values driven by microscopically small effect sizes (d ≈ 0.02–0.04). In medicine or psychology, such an effect would be considered not just “weak” but practically meaningless, and probably attributable to noise, bias, or unnoticed artifacts. So equating that kind of vanishingly small signal with extraordinary evidence in the NDE debate, is just another way of admitting that the evidence for veridical NDEs is hanging by a thread.

Daryl Bem’s “feeling the future” results recently again failed to replicate by a new and better designed experiment  https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/f...sos.191375 - the secret sauce? “. In the study we applied direct data deposition in combination with born-open data and real-time research reports to extend transparency to protocol delivery and data collection. We also used piloting, checklists, laboratory logs and video-documented trial sessions to ascertain as-intended protocol delivery, and external research auditors to monitor research integrity. We found 49.89% successful guesses, while Bem reported 53.07% success rate”

The point is that tiny effect sizes tend to disappear when the level of scrutiny is raised, and I sincerely doubt that any of the classical psi studies claiming an effect would be reproducible under modern standards - so no, Z-scores alone doesn’t impress me. There’s obviously good reason why these results haven’t captured the attention of the mainstream academia.

1. "anticipating a negative result"
Please re-read what I wrote, i.e., what's actually in my post, not what you're interpretively layering on it so you can have something to knock down and a pretended point to score. There's no anticipation of a negative result. Rather, there's a highlighting of the fact that it would be irrelevant if proponents of veridical NDEs tried to rationalize inconvenient findings away. Reality being, this kind of rationalization to deal with information unfavorable to a view to which one is committed is a ubiquitous human phenomenon, and is clearly evident among debunkers and proponents of paranormal claims.

2. "making multiple bad arguments"
I really wouldn't talk if I were you. I'm yet to see you make anything even in the vicinity of a good argument, and mostly your reasoning is completely and embarrassingly broken.

3. "I will also very much characterize your opening salute as what is usually called argument flooding"
This is really ironic considering it was because of your own deluge of stale, sometimes barely relevant, debunker talking points, clearly thrown out with almost no thought, that I had to write such long posts carefully unpicking them.

4. "building an argument based on Z-score alone"
Again you completely fail to understand what I wrote. My point was to illustrate how debunkers repeatedly tried to rationalize away findings inconsistent with their own predictions of how improved methodology would eliminate putative psi effects, only to, in the end, drop the discussion when the evidence against them became too strong. I did this to show that, contrary to your suggestion, this sort of behavior isn't the preserve of one side of this debate. I see you've decided to pick up the slack of your debunker comrades, by further shifting the goalposts. If only Hyman, Akers, and Hansel had been bold enough to claim that the real problem all along was that parapsychologists used the same tests of significance that everyone else did ... what a brilliant maneuver.

5. "In medicine or psychology, such an effect would be considered not just ‘weak’ but practically meaningless, and probably attributable to noise, bias, or unnoticed artifacts."
Did ChatGPT also hallucinate these wonderful "insights" for you? Lacking any explanation for how these highly significant effects were achieved under such rigorous conditions, the complaint is now that the smallness of the effects somehow undoes their reality. Is there a rule somewhere that all real effects must be of a certain minimum magnitude? The size of the effect of aspirin on heart attack rates is less than 0.07. There are many small but real effects noted in the behavioral and clinical sciences. Moreover, every parapsychologist knows that effects in micro-PK research tend to be very small. In ESP research, however, this is not the case. Bryan Williams points out that ESP effect sizes are comparable to those found in mainstream psychology: https://journalofscientificexploration.o.../view/1667

6. "So equating that kind of vanishingly small signal with extraordinary evidence in the NDE debate, is just another way of admitting that the evidence for veridical NDEs is hanging by a thread"
Let's see you identify anywhere in anything I've written where such an "equating" occurred. You'll be looking for a while, since I never did that. Once more, you seem to have no understanding of why I brought up the Schmidt work.

7. “Daryl Bem’s ‘feeling the future’ results recently again failed to replicate by a new and better designed experiment”
Further research was recently done to check the robustness of this failed replication, involving a number of additional experiments with far larger numbers of trials: https://osf.io/53ckh/download. The researchers found an anomalous result consistent with psi, which they then replicated in an extremely rigorous, pre-registered experiment with 127,000 trials. A further experiment didn't replicate the effect, but the authors have no explanation for the effect they did achieve. Their own tests for bias in their methods revealed no evidence of such. They conclude that their results could reflect psi or some unknown methods artifact, rather conveniently for their own debunker tendencies, given their failure to find any evidence of such an artifact. Additionally, Caroline Watt has now replicated a psi effect in precognitive Ganzfeld experiments twice in a row, in meticulously done pre-registered studies: https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/Proce...Papers.pdf

8. "so no, Z-scores alone doesn’t impress me"
You've irrationally decided to fixate on the "Z-scores alone" when I never highlighted "Z-scores alone." Rather, it was the quality of Schmidt's methodology and debunkers' cognitively motivated ways of dealing with his research on which I focused.

7. “Daryl Bem’s ‘feeling the future’ results recently again failed to replicate by a new and better designed experiment”
Further research was recently done to check the robustness of this failed replication, involving a number of additional experiments with far larger numbers of trials: https://osf.io/53ckh/download. The researchers found an anomalous result consistent with psi, which they then replicated in an extremely rigorous, pre-registered experiment with 127,000 trials. A further experiment didn't replicate the effect, but the authors have no explanation for the effect they did achieve.

And as you “forgot” to mention, that final and failing-to-replicate study had a whopping 217000 trials (page 35) - and the sucessful replication study showed something like 49.65% hits vs 50% expected, a much smaller deviation than the one originally reported by Bem.
Now regarding the “aspirin effect” study you forget to mention which one? The effect of aspirin has been evaluated in many studies some of them “observational junk” studies where it’s impossible to correct for confounding factors. Other studies has similar to the psi research failed to show any effect and aspirin is now only recommended as a protective measure among those who already had a previous cardiovascular event:

“ The shift in advice stems from comprehensive research. For instance, a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that in healthy older adults, aspirin did not significantly reduce the incidence of heart attack or stroke. However, it did increase the risk of life-threatening haemorrhage. Another large study in The Lancet corroborated these findings, emphasising the delicate balance between benefits and harms.

However, the chance that someone who has already had a heart attack or stroke will have another one is generally high enough to justify the risks associated with aspirin. This is called “secondary prevention”, and Nice still recommends using aspirin in these cases. Yet, even here there is evidence for more caution, ”

https://research.reading.ac.uk/research-...ence-says/

The point still stands - one has to be extremely careful when dealing with micro-effect sizes.

And yes I understand you didn’t really want to discuss psi research and this all was a point you were making about sceptical behaviour - but it does not compare to any potential future sceptism from the NDE community. The problems with psi research is so many that sceptism is the reasonable stance. With NDEs we haven’t yet had a single ‘visual’ hit in a fully controlled study. Another failure to replicate shouldn’t warrant a reaction.


Getting back to the (lack of) NDE evidence I can only maintain that I remain totally unconvinced due to the reasons already mentioned in this thread. I agree that the brain wave theory I was suggesting still doesn’t have full empirical backing.

With NDEs we haven’t yet had a single ‘visual’ hit in a fully controlled study.

We haven't yet had a study which measures the visual accuracy of experients recall.

And as you “forgot” to mention, that final and failing-to-replicate study had a whopping 217000 trials (page 35) - and the sucessful replication study showed something like 49.65% hits vs 50% expected, a much smaller deviation than the one originally reported by Bem.
Now regarding the “aspirin effect” study you forget to mention which one? The effect of aspirin has been evaluated in many studies some of them “observational junk” studies where it’s impossible to correct for confounding factors. Other studies has similar to the psi research failed to show any effect and aspirin is now only recommended as a protective measure among those who already had a previous cardiovascular event:

“ The shift in advice stems from comprehensive research. For instance, a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that in healthy older adults, aspirin did not significantly reduce the incidence of heart attack or stroke. However, it did increase the risk of life-threatening haemorrhage. Another large study in The Lancet corroborated these findings, emphasising the delicate balance between benefits and harms.

However, the chance that someone who has already had a heart attack or stroke will have another one is generally high enough to justify the risks associated with aspirin. This is called “secondary prevention”, and Nice still recommends using aspirin in these cases. Yet, even here there is evidence for more caution, ”

https://research.reading.ac.uk/research-...ence-says/

The point still stands - one has to be extremely careful when dealing with micro-effect sizes.

And yes I understand you didn’t really want to discuss psi research and this all was a point you were making about sceptical behaviour - but it does not compare to any potential future sceptism from the NDE community. The problems with psi research is so many that sceptism is the reasonable stance. With NDEs we haven’t yet had a single ‘visual’ hit in a fully controlled study. Another failure to replicate shouldn’t warrant a reaction.


Getting back to the (lack of) NDE evidence I can only maintain that I remain totally unconvinced due to the reasons already mentioned in this thread. I agree that the brain wave theory I was suggesting still doesn’t have full empirical backing.

1.“And as you ‘forgot’ to mention, that final and failing-to-replicate study had a whopping 217000 trials (page 35) - and the sucessful replication study showed something like 49.65% hits vs 50% expected, a much smaller deviation than the one originally reported by Bem.”

I didn't forget anything. I noted clearly that the final study failed to replicate, and I linked to the full study PDF so anyone could consider the results. That's hardly the behavior of somebody trying to hide things. It's notable that the final study may well constitute a questionable research practice, since the skeptically inclined authors evidently chose to keep pre-registering and performing studies until they got a null result, which is the very kind of suspicious behavior that pre-registration is supposed to prevent. And, all that aside, the final null study cannot explain the highly significant result previously obtained, as even the biased authors apparently understand, since they make their inability to account for that result obvious and note the effect could be due to psi. They can invoke some unknown "artifact" as their only alternative scenario, but the simple reality is that they could find no evidence for such a thing despite a very thorough search for it. Are we supposed to be guided primarily by empirical evidence in these things, or by dogma? Empirical inquiry delivered no support for the "artifact" hypothesis.

Now what's genuinely interesting is that you "forgot" to address Watt's studies (or the fact that, on the whole, ESP effect sizes are comparable to those in mainstream psychology), the far more important ones since psi effects are known to be larger in altered states of consciousness and with selected participants than in normal waking consciousness with unselected participants (as per Tressoldi and Storm, 2021, "Anomalous Cognition: An Umbrella Review of the Meta-Analytic Evidence"). The Bem replication falls into the latter category, so the effect being small is hardly a surprise, the Ganzeld research by Watt into the former. This is a real tell that you're not exactly interested in the truth, but in pushing the debunker conclusion at any cost. You complain about studies with small effect sizes as your reason to dismiss psi research, and when I cite successful studies with larger effect sizes, you ignore them. Is that the behavior of someone who wants to assess these matters in light of the best evidence, or of someone who wants an excuse for his pre-determined conclusion and will turn a blind eye to anything that interferes with that?

2. "the chance that someone who has already had a heart attack or stroke will have another one is generally high enough to justify the risks associated with aspirin"
This would appear to be a concession of the truth of the only relevant point on this front that I made: that the aspirin effect on heart attack risk, while very small, is real or, if I was wrong, at least probably real. I said nothing whatsoever about the effect being so large as to justify any particular pattern of aspirin use. I simply observed that very small effects can be real, contra your argument that very small effects should be dismissed out of hand as spurious. Now you've retroactively modified your position, to make it out that you were merely advocating carefulness, rather than thoughtless dismissal, but anyone can see that you did the latter from your prior posts. Consider what you actually wrote: "In medicine or psychology, such an effect would be considered not just 'weak' but practically meaningless." Clearly this is false since your own research has demonstrated that much attention is still given to the very small aspirin--heart-attack-risk effect in medicine, and guidelines continue to recommend aspirin be used to lower heart attack risk for some people. The effect is apparently real enough to have the PRACTICAL CONSEQUENCE of leading doctors and medical groups to recommend its use to people in certain risk categories. So much for "practically meaningless." Moreover, the inconsistency of the effect likely has to do with genetic variation in the general population, which typically isn't accounted for in studies on aspirin's use for cardiac patients: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/ar...7725000881. Perhaps the very small and labile Bem effect is also difficult to consistently detect because of poor understanding of unmeasured but nevertheless causally involved variables? We already have good evidence that different people are better in psi tasks than others, and that this is partly due to personality variance. In other words, certain factors potentially bearing on effect lability are known, therefore this isn't just baseless speculation on my part.

3. "With NDEs we haven’t yet had a single ‘visual’ hit in a fully controlled study"
More goal-post shifting. Remember that you set out here to show that veridical NDEs are a "myth"? That they're only found in long-after-the-fact retrospective research? Well, I completely demolished that nonsense. So you grabbed on to my observation that there have been no pre-specified visual target hits in the (very limited number of) prospective NDE studies so far performed, and you pretend that that's what your case rested on all along.

4. "sceptical behaviour - but it does not compare to any potential future sceptism from the NDE community. The problems with psi research is so many that sceptism is the reasonable stance"
Hmm, let me try: Proponent behavior doesn't compare to any potential future ideological debunkery from the skeptic community. The problems with debunker "research" are so great that paranormal belief is the reasonable stance.

See? I can say self-serving things without any explicit support too. Am I now right?

3. "With NDEs we haven’t yet had a single ‘visual’ hit in a fully controlled study"
More goal-post shifting. Remember that you set out here to show that veridical NDEs are a "myth"? That they're only found in long-after-the-fact retrospective research? Well, I completely demolished that nonsense. So you grabbed on to my observation that there have been no pre-specified visual target hits in the (very limited number of) prospective NDE studies so far performed, and you pretend that that's what your case rested on all along.

Very well said!

Furthermore, it is extremely difficult to get a fully-controlled study of an NDE, because they're so unpredictable, and because you simply cannot test everyone, not in a medical setting where the goal is to keep people alive, not let them die and come back, because they might not...

The majority of NDErs have to be tracked down after the fact ~ or are self-reported years later, because many are afraid to talk about them for fear of stigma, religious, social or otherwise.

What makes NDEs noteworthy is when they can be corroborated by other parties ~ that is, the NDEr has specific, maybe explicit, knowledge of facts happening outside of their sensory range, which includes their eyes and ears being covered, as in Pam Reynolds' case. We know she had all her blood drained ~ so how could she have any consciousness?

What is never explained is how brains have some special capability in a highly specific circumstance when such a capability has never been demonstrated otherwise? Very ad hoc nonsense.

Does anyone recall , of the cases in “The Self does not Die,” how many of the veridical experiences happened outside of what someone could try to rationally claim … such as overhearing something while “dead” but in the same room . Examples of seeing or hearing things from other rooms or areas at the time . 

Also , what about cases of learning someone died in an NDE but not having known that prior ? How is that explained ?

One other consideration …

What if it’s true that NDE’s aren’t the cause or the only cause of such experiences , but many factors can contribute to it , can “loosen” our attachment to the physical world . I don’t know . What if in some weird way we can be in more than one place at once . Once my mom said , when meditating , she immediately “was above my body, looking down at myself.” … wtf does that mean . Yes maybe hallucination but could it be something else? 

Just putting questions out there …