John Martin Fischer NDE talk

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Can veridical near death experiences be explained ?

I'm posting this because for the first time (at least as far as I know) California University Philosophy professor, John Martin Fisher, admits here (@1.09.14)  that some of them don't have an explanation.  

Quote: "He (Parnia) doesn't see how they can be explained naturalistically. And what I would say is...it's not obvious how they can be explained...but...I'm kind of a default naturalist in the sense that I come to these (experiences) with the presupposition or the prejudice/antecedent view that there must be some way to explain how these people got this information. That's my starting assumption.

But, in intellectual honestly, I have to say that I don't know how to explain some of these."      

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgqAYtXfP9c  1.06.16

Some of the 'sceptical' members on this forum (not mentioning any names) might benefit from adopting such a position, IMHO.
(This post was last modified: 2018-05-15, 05:18 PM by tim.)
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The latest issue of the Journal of Near-Death Studies (Winter 2017, but just out now) has an article by Robert and Suzanne Mays critiquing the Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin physicalist interpretation of NDEs and a response by one of the authors.

(Here's at least one, older article by Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin presenting their views.)

Here's part of the abstract of the Mays' new article: 

Quote:In our critique, we identify two major weaknesses to their argument: heavy reliance on ad hoc hypotheses and frequent appeal to "promissory materialism". Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin applied the term "hallucination" to NDEs because, by definition, they "do not correspond to reality". We found use of this term problematic for several reasons: that NDE perceptions are phenomenollgically different from hallucinations, that NDE perceptions of the physical realm are nearly always veridical, and that labelling NDEs "hallucinations" pathologizes a normal, subjective experience, with potentially harmful psychological outcomes. Although Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin argued against a theory of NDEs that invokes only one explanatory factor, we argue for a likely common proximate cause for all NDEs and that the nonphysical "mind-identity theory", in which the non-material mind separates from the physical body in an NDE, is a likely candiate theory with good explanatory power. We believe that ultimately the theory explaining NDEs will be corrected through the normal process of scientific inquiry, resulting in an expansion of current physicalist theory to include what is now considered supernatural, thus becoming an extended, transmaterial naturalist theory.

Mitchell-Yellin responds, and then Mays and Mays offer a rejoinder.

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