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

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 …

Random points in no particular order...

Apparitions... i.e. Roman Ghosts Treasurers House York - Dress and weapons years later found to be accurate - (excavated Roman road, light tight environment, single source of 'fresh' photons).
Ouija board... i.e. University of British Columbia study on non conscious knowledge (tricked into the belief they were not moving the puck)
Out of Body Experiences... My own childhood experience of seeing my fathers other house broken into (spontaneous bursts of non-linear network creation in childhood - Jay Giedd)
Wormholes connect replicas... Sufficiently isolated replicas/copies can connect different spacetimes - via Euclidean wormholes. Penington 2019 revolution in theoretical physics.
End of Spacetime & extension of QM... QM & Spacetime 'likely' emerge together from some simpler structure Nima Arkani-Hamed, Maldacena
Quantum Biology... Do brain structures have sufficient isolation?, looking like it... Hydrated Microtubules (MTs) show metal-like conductivity Temperature/Length insensitive. Hydrated MT's show expulsion of magnetic field.

One has to let it all go. I don't think one can bring all these (and other) observations together without accepting the everyday world of ones Experience, is completely emergent from some shared process which creates a result. What lies behind that result seems unknowable... because Experience is a result of that process...

I think it's a really insurmountable challenge Sbu has put on himself to prove that veridical NDEs are a myth. 

I think it's always a valid position to remind ourselves of the evidence that we have any its reality, that these are not scientifcally recorded events and they are anectdotal reports. However, this does somewhat feel like the whole conversation that happened surrounding the existence of NDEs in the first place, where people debated whether or not they existed at all. We shouldn't forget that pressure that exists among people that have NDEs in general, the lack of reporting, the rarity of the experiences. There is a lot of accounts of verdical NDEs, some of them very very good, I feel like the question of whether or not they do happen shouldn't really be there, they very much seem to occur even if they're very rare. 

That of course leads into the question of whether or not these veridical NDEs are legitimate, whether the information they report is accurate, but I think that's separate to whether or not they do exist.

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?

No you are not right. I will address the following point:

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

The hallmark of genuine scientific phenomena is reproducible effects that maintain consistent direction across independent studies. Psi research fails this basic test spectacularly. Daryl Bem's original "Feeling the Future" experiments claimed evidence for precognition with hit rates of 53% - statistically significantly above the 50% expected by chance. In the paper you reference they find evidence for the opposite pattern: 49.65% success in 127,000 trials.
This isn't merely a failure to replicate - it's a reversal of the claimed effect. With 127,000 trials, this below-chance result is statistically significant in the opposite direction, suggesting "a not feeling the future" psychic ability, if we were to take it at face value.

You don’t find it a little odd that we suddenly have directional inconsistency in the otherwise nice idea of “peeking into the future”?

Outside the small circle of fanatic believers these wildly fluctation results are clearly the signature of spurious results generated by methodological artifacts rather than genuine phenomena.

According to the law of large numbers, if a real psi effect existed, larger sample sizes should converge toward the true effect size, not flip between above-chance and below-chance results across different studies. The fact that some studies find "psi" while others find "anti-psi" demonstrates that these deviations from chance are artifacts of flawed methodology rather than evidence for psychic abilities.

This pattern reveals why statistical significance alone, without reproducible direction and effect size are basically worthless. This insight is the true value of the paper you are referencing.

I think it's a really insurmountable challenge Sbu has put on himself to prove that veridical NDEs are a myth. 

I think it's always a valid position to remind ourselves of the evidence that we have any its reality, that these are not scientifcally recorded events and they are anectdotal reports. However, this does somewhat feel like the whole conversation that happened surrounding the existence of NDEs in the first place, where people debated whether or not they existed at all. We shouldn't forget that pressure that exists among people that have NDEs in general, the lack of reporting, the rarity of the experiences. There is a lot of accounts of verdical NDEs, some of them very very good, I feel like the question of whether or not they do happen shouldn't really be there, they very much seem to occur even if they're very rare. 

That of course leads into the question of whether or not these veridical NDEs are legitimate, whether the information they report is accurate, but I think that's separate to whether or not they do exist.

Yeah I think the "legal standard" of witness accounts has been met, or at least we might call it a "journalism standard" where the phenomenon is worth a deeper look.

On the other hand, I get the skeptical divide between Survival evidence and evidence for QM oddities, as the latter are far more replicable. I don't expect STEM academia to start adding lines to textbooks saying the afterlife is definitively real in the way quantum tunneling is real.

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 …

I'll make a separate thread for this, as I'd need to go back and look through the book. I do recall at least a few cases where it was very unlikely - it not impossible - for the information to come by normal means.

No you are not right. I will address the following point:


The hallmark of genuine scientific phenomena is reproducible effects that maintain consistent direction across independent studies. Psi research fails this basic test spectacularly. Daryl Bem's original "Feeling the Future" experiments claimed evidence for precognition with hit rates of 53% - statistically significantly above the 50% expected by chance. In the paper you reference they find evidence for the opposite pattern: 49.65% success in 127,000 trials.
This isn't merely a failure to replicate - it's a reversal of the claimed effect. With 127,000 trials, this below-chance result is statistically significant in the opposite direction, suggesting "a not feeling the future" psychic ability, if we were to take it at face value.

You don’t find it a little odd that we suddenly have directional inconsistency in the otherwise nice idea of “peeking into the future”?

Outside the small circle of fanatic believers these wildly fluctation results are clearly the signature of spurious results generated by methodological artifacts rather than genuine phenomena.

According to the law of large numbers, if a real psi effect existed, larger sample sizes should converge toward the true effect size, not flip between above-chance and below-chance results across different studies. The fact that some studies find "psi" while others find "anti-psi" demonstrates that these deviations from chance are artifacts of flawed methodology rather than evidence for psychic abilities.

This pattern reveals why statistical significance alone, without reproducible direction and effect size are basically worthless. This insight is the true value of the paper you are referencing.

You continue to ignore the failure to find any evidence of an artifact to account for the results noted, following a thorough search for such evidence, and in one of the most rigorous and carefully conducted experiments perhaps in the history of psychology, making risk of a methods problem very low--and the large number of trials makes a random coincidence explanation very hard to credit. The effect simply shouldn't have been observed, if psi didn't exist. We just discussed a case showing that conventional very small effects can exhibit substantial lability (for an unconventional very small effect like that studied by Bem and which is poorly understood, the scope for unmeasured and unknown sources of lability is obviously much greater). Your own research into the aspirin--heart-attack-risk effect bore this out. I offered some information to make sense of this lability in the aspirin case, and observed potential factors underlying lability in the case of the Bem effect. But, because it doesn't fit your bigoted debunker worldview, you'll stubbornly ignore all of these considerations to keep pushing the same tired line on parapsychology.

And, again, you persistently ignore the psi research concerning larger-magnitude effects that is so far proving to be quite robust to highly rigorous pre-registered experimental tests. You're obviously an ideologue. Like every other debunker, you want all focus on the weaker evidence even when stronger evidence is available and repeatedly indicated to you.

I think it's always a valid position to remind ourselves of the evidence that we have any its reality, that these are not scientifcally recorded events and they are anectdotal reports.

They are individually anecdotal ~ but they are not collectively so. You cannot "scientifically" record them for obvious reasons nor would that mean anything, given their nature.

Besides, anecdotes can simply be true, irrespective of an amount of them. In good science, you need just one significant anecdote to overturn a whole theory.

Only for ideologues are anecdotes something to be dismissed and belittled, because they're not really being scientific.

Any actual, good scientist should be intrigued by a number of anecdotes, because that always signifies a pattern waiting to be understood.

In good science, you need just one significant anecdote to overturn a whole theory.

I agree with your post overall but unsure about this?

I'm trying to think of a historical example?

You continue to ignore the failure to find any evidence of an artifact to account for the results noted, following a thorough search for such evidence, and in one of the most rigorous and carefully conducted experiments perhaps in the history of psychology, making risk of a methods problem very low--and the large number of trials makes a random coincidence explanation very hard to credit. The effect simply shouldn't have been observed, if psi didn't exist. We just discussed a case showing that conventional very small effects can exhibit substantial lability (for an unconventional very small effect like that studied by Bem and which is poorly understood, the scope for unmeasured and unknown sources of lability is obviously much greater). Your own research into the aspirin--heart-attack-risk effect bore this out. I offered some information to make sense of this lability in the aspirin case, and observed potential factors underlying lability in the case of the Bem effect. But, because it doesn't fit your bigoted debunker worldview, you'll stubbornly ignore all of these considerations to keep pushing the same tired line on parapsychology.

And, again, you persistently ignore the psi research concerning larger-magnitude effects that is so far proving to be quite robust to highly rigorous pre-registered experimental tests. You're obviously an ideologue. Like every other debunker, you want all focus on the weaker evidence even when stronger evidence is available and repeatedly indicated to you.

The standards for proclaiming discovery should be no different for psi than for conventional sciences. Take the example of daily aspirin where older data suggested a clear survival benefit, but newer, larger studies have zero effect for primary prevention. That's how science works - or would you use the same flawed logic as with psi that the effect suddenly changed sign? That in the 80's and 90's people had a positive biological response to aspirin and suddenly in the last 10 years our biology changed and aspirin now doesn't work anymore? By any reasonable logic, the early positive effects were likely due to methodological limitations or selective reporting - equally, there never was any "feeling the future" psychic ability (ohh wait I forgot the metaanalysis of these studies now show evidence for the “NOT feeling the future effect” with more misses than expected).
And by the same logic - if new and better studies can't prove the existence of veridical NDEs where cardiac arrest patients observe the entire resuscitation theater from above (which should be almost common nowadays according to David), then the reasonable conclusion is that it simply doesn't happen.

And by the same logic - if new and better studies can't prove the existence of veridical NDEs where cardiac arrest patients observe the entire resuscitation theater from above (which should be almost common nowadays according to David), then the reasonable conclusion is that it simply doesn't happen.

I feel like something should be put into perspective with this. 

In AWARE 2, there were 567 participants. 53 survived, 28 were able to complete interviews and there were 6 NDEs, no veridical perceptions. 

In AWARE 1, there were 2060 participants. 140 survived, 101 were able to complete interviews, 10 people had NDEs and there were 2 accounts of veridical perception. One of those accounts was verified via timestamps, but the room it occured inside had no targets. 

The two BEST studies we have give us a total pool of 16 to work with, with two veridical NDEs, one of which was verified via timestamps. And using that miniscule dataset, you're saying that veridical NDEs are a myth?

Like I said in my other comment, there's always the question of whether or not these instances provide accurate information, but saying they're a myth based on the scientific evidence we DO have I feel is a very hard thing to argue.