Is the Filter Theory committing the ad hoc fallacy and is it unfalsifiable?

Also looks like Sam Harris is agnostic about Survival? Or maybe he's against personal Survival but not an Idealist-esque "unified with the Ur-Mind" type Survival?

 -End of Faith

Yes it looks like from that one quote he is agnostic about survival but over the years I've heard him on many occaisions refer to belief in an afterlife as irrational and dangerous especially when it comes to religious beliefs. Back when Eben Alexander first appeared on the scene and Sam was questioning Ebens credentials as a scientist he suggested defering to James Randi's million dollar challenge as a way to resolve matters of the paranormal. I think Sam wants to have his cake and eat it too. He leave's just enough wiggle room to be able to maintain his status as a world class debunker of religion while retaining some openess to some of the more mystical aspects of Buddhism

Yes it looks like from that one quote he is agnostic about survival but over the years I've heard him on many occaisions refer to belief in an afterlife as irrational and dangerous especially when it comes to religious beliefs. Back when Eben Alexander first appeared on the scene and Sam was questioning Ebens credentials as a scientist he suggested defering to James Randi's million dollar challenge as a way to resolve matters of the paranormal. I think Sam wants to have his cake and eat it too. He leave's just enough wiggle room to be able to maintain his status as a world class debunker of religion while retaining some openess to some of the more mystical aspects of Buddhism

It's possible he is just trying to straddle the line to make a buck from people who want/need religion but also want to be atheists...

OTOH it seems he has genuinely come to see that the nature of consciousness, when properly reasoned about, does open the door to possibilities his old atheist Horseman persona thought to be verboten.

True, there are different types of dementia, some types are correlated with the presence of good days and bad days, and if a good day occurs at the end of a persons life, that 'might' define this temporal relationship to lucidity.

But good days, and bad days is not a satisfying explanation, neither is chance, and neither does the existence of this unexplained phenomenon demonstrate an afterlife.

I mean, you have to go and read the papers researching dementia type diseases, and incorporate the observations into some halfbaked theory, that might allow you to move forwards...

Certainly, but it much increases the probability of survival, since it demonstrates under very adverse circumstances a certain independence of the human mind from the physical brain.

Certainly, but it much increases the probability of survival, since it demonstrates under very adverse circumstances a certain independence of the human mind from the physical brain.

We should keep in [mind] that - AFAIK at least - we're debating whether souls need brains for cognitive function.

So under that topic of debate I'd say terminal lucidity gives us an indicator that souls don't need brains.

In a more general argument I would agree with @Max_B that Terminal Lucidity on its own is not proof of Survival though I suspect I think it's better evidence of Survival than he does.

The first paragraph does indeed state that controlled studies do consistently show veridical perception in NDEs to be a false claim. The second paragraph does nothing to refute that claim. So there's that.

Regarding the claim of a meta analysis of studies verifying mediums, I would need to look into that further. That paper appears not to have been published under normal journal review safeguards. If a paper passes legitimate peer review, non-experts can assume this paper has at least some validity in the field. I don't think we get that assurance in articles in Explore. There are many ways a meta analysis can go wrong.  That doesn't necessarily mean this study is wrong. I would want expert confirmation before trusting something there.

You can read what you want into it, but I think the statement is actually in error, because Parnia's AWARE studies have severe fundamental limitations - they are not viable true controlled research studies. This is because the adopted-out-of-necessity research protocol can't by its very nature be expected to reveal any significant effect. This is due to the basic nature of the NDE being very rare and uncontrollable and unpredictable as to when and where and to whom it occurs, and also because even if a subject really does separate from his body and brain he is under extremely adverse circumstances which will make it very unlikely for him to even notice the cues. If the subject does have an OBE, at that moment he has many other more important concerns, is distracted by and focused on seeing his body, and probably is quite upset by the radically different and bizarre environment, and by the condition of his body. 

The experimental option of artificially inducing NDEs would be exceedingly unethical. So Parnia's protocol is the best he can do with a very recalcitrant phenomenon that strongly resists being pinned down experimentally. It seems to me that the most probable result from the limited applications so far would be the nearly null results reported so far as to subjects noticing and remembering such cues at such a moment in such an overwhelmingly bizarre environment and situation. Because of all these adverse factors, a much larger experimental sample size would be needed to demonstrate the phenomenon, something that just isn't practically and financially possible.

You can read what you want into it, but I think the statement is actually in error, because Parnia's AWARE studies have severe fundamental limitations - they are not viable true controlled research studies. This is because the adopted-out-of-necessity research protocol can't by its very nature be expected to reveal any significant effect. This is due to the basic nature of the NDE being very rare and uncontrollable and unpredictable as to when and where and to whom it occurs, and also because even if a subject really does separate from his body and brain he is under extremely adverse circumstances which will make it very unlikely for him to even notice the cues. If the subject does have an OBE, at that moment he has many other more important concerns, is distracted by and focused on seeing his body, and probably is quite upset by the radically different and bizarre environment, and by the condition of his body. 

The experimental option of artificially inducing NDEs would be exceedingly unethical. So Parnia's protocol is the best he can do with a very recalcitrant phenomenon that strongly resists being pinned down experimentally. It seems to me that the most probable result from the limited applications so far would be the nearly null results reported so far as to subjects noticing and remembering such cues at such a moment in such an overwhelmingly bizarre environment and situation. Because of all these adverse factors, a much larger experimental sample size would be needed to demonstrate the phenomenon, something that just isn't practically and financially possible.

I'm not the first person to say this but if anyone wants to get hits for seeing those stickers you probably need to first look for people who have some skill in remote viewing or were trained as part of their culture to induce OOBEs (shamans).

At the very least one would ideally try to get lucid dreamers.

It's like the combination lock test - you need an incredibly large number of people to beat the odds of getting no communications. Then there are the communications that don't give the lock combination...

Bigelow is offering $1M in grants and I fear this will all be wasted on studies like AWARE that are near destined to fail.

I'm not the first person to say this but if anyone wants to get hits for seeing those stickers you probably need to first look for people who have some skill in remote viewing or were trained as part of their culture to induce OOBEs (shamans).

At the very least one would ideally try to get lucid dreamers.

It's like the combination lock test - you need an incredibly large number of people to beat the odds of getting no communications. Then there are the communications that don't give the lock combination...

Bigelow is offering $1M in grants and I fear this will all be wasted on studies like AWARE that are near destined to fail.

You are not going to get real-time hits on secret, hidden visual targets. The visual target information has to be a fact for you to have any chance of accessing it. It has to be measured. If you remove the real-time constraint, you can get access to something you will see in the future, but it requires the information to have feelings/emotions attached to it. Feelings/emotions seem to be a result of adding up information over what we understand as time. But in addition you've also got to be motivated, as motivation seems to be a result of adding up what we understand as the future. (Bem's best tests seem to confirm this). You can't use repeating patterns in the information, as they get smeared out due to interference. You can't trick it either, you've really got to believe it.

Also looks like Sam Harris is agnostic about Survival? Or maybe he's against personal Survival but not an Idealist-esque "unified with the Ur-Mind" type Survival?

 -End of Faith

Harris definitely does not believe in soul survival. He is the guy talking at this point is this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjKJ92b9Y04&t=4250s .

You're just reading what you want into it.  Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

I disagree. If you test your hypothesis many times, and your hypothesis yields results no better than chance guessing, why is that not evidence against your hypothesis?

What would you need as evidence against your hypothesis? Would we need to show that those with claimed NDEs do worse than what would be expected by chance guessing?

Harris definitely does not believe in soul survival. He is the guy talking at this point is this video:

I've seen that, why I am curious about that passage from End of Faith.

In Response to Controversy - a long essay largely about politics - he did say:

My position on the paranormal is this: Although many frauds have been perpetrated in the history of parapsychology, I believe that this field of study has been unfairly stigmatized. If some experimental psychologists want to spend their days studying telepathy, or the effects of prayer, I will be interested to know what they find out. And if it is true that toddlers occasionally start speaking in ancient languages (as Ian Stevenson alleged), I would like to know about it. However, I have not attempted to authenticate the data put forward in books such as Dean Radin’s The Conscious Universe and Ian Stevenson’s 20 Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation. The fact that I have not spent any time on this should suggest how worthy of my time I think such a project would be. Still, I found these books interesting, and I cannot categorically dismiss their contents in the way that I can dismiss the claims of religious dogmatists.

So he seems open to reincarnation as a possibility at the very least.

Though I do agree a lot of what he says seems to point more toward some kind of uniting with underlying Awareness than any kind of Personal Survival.