Peter Fenwick's Studies of End-of-Life-Phenomena

 or require that what people report is reinterpreted in some complex way - think of Bernardo discussing Idealism!

It sounds like you're trying to turn the forum into an echo chamber for those who already believe in a spiritual realm. The whole point for sceptics is that they don't believe that someone claiming to see a pink elephant while high on psilocybin actually means that the elephant exists.

It sounds like you're trying to turn the forum into an echo chamber for those who already believe in a spiritual realm. The whole point for sceptics is that they don't believe that someone claiming to see a pink elephant while high on psilocybin actually means that the elephant exists.

Well I explicitly said that we should use an Occam's Razor model consisting of one or two realms - you can choose one realm (materialism) if you like!

BTW, I am not telling anyone what to do - just describing the approach I think would be most constructive.

Academia is always keen to supply excessively complicated models of reality. Think of the old epicycles theory of planetary motion. Because mathematics hadn't evolved (I think) to the point where it was realised that a sum of functions of one kind could approximate a quite different function (think of square waves and their Fourier transform). The complicated answer simply had to be thrown away when the inverse square law was invented.

It is terribly easy to 'explain' things by inventing weird things. Think of GR, which doesn't seem to fit motion at the galactic scale without introducing 'dark matter'. Even Sabine Hossenfelder seems to be shifting towards what I think is the Occam's Razor explanation, blaming GR for the bad fit rather than coming up with an ad hoc idea. If GR is wrong, it will be cataclysmic for modern cosmology!

Returning to your 'pink elephants', it is a fact that people sometimes see things that others can't. They may have taken an hallucinogenic drug, or be ill in one way or another (if the illness disturbs their biochemistry that doesn't seem too different from using a drug). I would tend to say that all these visions should be explained together - there should be no distinction in principle between hallucinations and deathbed visions, visions induced by DMT, etc. It is unhelpful to try to explain these in different ways.

I think there are just too many instances in which people see visions that are informative - for example they may see a friend or relative and then discover later that that person died suddenly at the time of the vision. This is definitely better explained by dualistic reality.

Once you have a few such instances, Occam's Razor mandates that you explain all visions that way.

David

Returning to your 'pink elephants', it is a fact that people sometimes see things that others can't. They may have taken an hallucinogenic drug, or be ill in one way or another (if the illness disturbs their biochemistry that doesn't seem too different from using a drug). I would tend to say that all these visions should be explained together - there should be no distinction in principle between hallucinations and deathbed visions, visions induced by DMT

David

I also have a lot of visions as I tend to dream every night. Occasionally, I even see people who have passed away in these dreams. Are they real? No—it's all something my subconscious mind creates while I'm asleep. Overall, I don't believe visions hold any real evidence of anything except those documented by medical professionals with interviews conducted shortly after the medical event, being it a cardiac arrest or a paradoxical lucidity. I certainly don't think any commercialized account is worth considering (Eben Alexander and others comes to mind).

I also have a lot of visions as I tend to dream every night. Occasionally, I even see people who have passed away in these dreams. Are they real? No—it's all something my subconscious mind creates while I'm asleep. Overall, I don't believe visions hold any real evidence of anything except those documented by medical professionals with interviews conducted shortly after the medical event, being it a cardiac arrest or a paradoxical lucidity. I certainly don't think any commercialized account is worth considering (Eben Alexander and others comes to mind).

Visions are not about digital images, but about meanings.  I argue that your experience was real and related to personal meanings.  These are part of the informational processes structured at a subconscious level.  Your bio-information is real and there is connection to loved ones.  Whether ALL of the meanings in the dream were just you, I hope you keep an open mind to immaterial/informational structures and activity outside of your self-contained perception.

I do think that ancestors have communicated with their bio-sphere in all times and places in history.

I saw Eben Alexander speak in person.  I understand the concern for his commercial outlook.  However, he is a recorded data point in a vast set.  Confirmation is from numbers - not any one narrative.  Found his personal analysis was not for me. I think he has had experiences outside of normal, sincerely

It sounds like you're trying to turn the forum into an echo chamber for those who already believe in a spiritual realm. The whole point for sceptics is that they don't believe that someone claiming to see a pink elephant while high on psilocybin actually means that the elephant exists.

To be fair not many proponents here are going to tell the drug user there’s a pink elephant in actuality.

However, if multiple other people who were not high saw the same elephant from different angles then depending on the interviews and how trustworthy the reports seem I might accept it was likely an actual entity.

I also have a lot of visions as I tend to dream every night. Occasionally, I even see people who have passed away in these dreams. Are they real? No—it's all something my subconscious mind creates while I'm asleep. Overall, I don't believe visions hold any real evidence of anything except those documented by medical professionals with interviews conducted shortly after the medical event, being it a cardiac arrest or a paradoxical lucidity. I certainly don't think any commercialized account is worth considering (Eben Alexander and others comes to mind).

OK I think that all mental activity occurs in the alternate reality - which also neatly solves the Hard Problem.

By dismissing any 'commercialised' account, I presume you mean that anyone who writes a book on a subject is automatically assumed to have an ulterior motive! Presumably the same argument could be made against people writing papers, or making a YouTube video!

David

OK I think that all mental activity occurs in the alternate reality - which also neatly solves the Hard Problem.

Nice and simple, ehh not. So digesting psilocybin (which is just a mindless molecule) alternates the mental processing in the alternate reality, Does psilocybin teleport in there to do it’s work you think?

I think this leads naturally to the long held by me anyway observation that the deepest mystery is not whether or not there is survival, but rather what is it that survives. We humans typically identify ourselves in large part by our memories of our unique life going back to childhood and our current personalities derived from these countless experiences. While whatever it is that survives, presumably the soul, may at first in the process be mostly our ordinary self with some small degree of expansion, as in NDEs. But ultimately in the process this resultant "being" is more an "it" than a personal self in our sense at all, it is so expanded in consciousness and with the large number of other unique and different past lives now shared simultaneously in its memory, surely vastly changing its "personality". This "self" is now it seems to me something alien to our human consciousness. I don't see how at least from the human persective we can really identify ourselves with this "being".
 
If this analysis and point of view is the case, then by ordinary human definitions, there isn't really anything like long term "true survival" of our unique personal self, and we might as well get used to it and console ourselves that apparently the transformation process after death does not involve fear, but is gentle and loving, an involuntary indefinite expansion, opening up, of consciousness in a partially humanly consoling way analogous in small part to the long-term changes in personality and consciousness that take place automatically as a human matures from a baby consciousness to that of an old adult. Despite these vast changes in personal perspective, knowledge and some aspects of personality that took place over their prior life, most adults would still consider these former versions of themselves to each still be their unique personal self. 

This analogy fails, unfortunately, when considering that in the expansion process the soul supposedly consciously incorporates in its composite personality a vast array of different separate unique former Earth lives, a vast increase in differentness over the natural progression of growth from baby to old adult happening in Earth life.

As you say, there is, apparently, the survival of the unique human personal self for a limited period of time following physical death or near death conditions outside the body, before this transformation has taken place. This is evidenced by such paranormal phenomena as mediumistic communications, NDEs, and reincarnation memories of somehow what is remembered as the self choosing the next life. There are mediumistic communications with longer dead humans and they would along the lines of this model have to be explained as the greatly expanded soul being deciding (out of compassion and desire to console) to communicate by taking taking on the guise of a small part of its now hugely expanded self - the sitter's deceased loved one. This seems plausible to me.

Excellent post, so much so I needed to take some time to collect my thoughts.

As you say for me the question is no longer Survival but what aspect of the person survives. When one considers the possibility of being flooded with past-life memories upon death it is indeed difficult to see how such an entity would be the person we are in this life.

However, there is some comfort in knowing children have claimed contact with dead loved ones and that loved ones have reincarnated back into this world to be close to family. 

Another thing to consider is that we can look back on memories of youth and see them from a new perspective, giving hope that each life is not just a drop in an endlessly growing bucket of experiences but a growth of the whole that takes in the perspective of our current life.

Beyond that we may not maintain all our memories of childhood but we still do carry those formative years inside of us. And so while this life may only be a piece of our immortal existence, it still matters and still carries meaningful weight in what Eric Weiss calls the "Long Trajectory" of existence.

I also have a lot of visions as I tend to dream every night. Occasionally, I even see people who have passed away in these dreams. Are they real? No—it's all something my subconscious mind creates while I'm asleep. Overall, I don't believe visions hold any real evidence of anything except those documented by medical professionals with interviews conducted shortly after the medical event, being it a cardiac arrest or a paradoxical lucidity. I certainly don't think any commercialized account is worth considering (Eben Alexander and others comes to mind).

It's not clear to me exactly what you are throwing out from consideration here as evidence for paranormal phenomena, in your assessment of "visions" and their validity.

My overall impression is that out of a large amount of scientistic materialist skepticism of all things claimed to be paranormal, you used "visions" as an example of your overall viewpoint.

Certainly, as opposed to your opinion, not all NDErs who wrote books about their experiences were liars trying to get rich; anyway most NDErs just don't publish books about their experiences. And most of the 125 or so verified veridical accounts in the latest edition of The Self Does Not Die were not such published cases, and in any case some of the best cases were indeed verified and documented by medical personnel present at the time - Pam Reynolds comes to mind. 

My impression is that you are using this true observation that some or most "visions" as you call them are generated by the subconscious mind, for the purpose of attempting to blanket apply that observation to all of the paranormal, whether or not that makes any sense.

Many paranormal phenomena don't involve "visions". What about reincarnation, evidenced mostly by memories coming out in early childhood of an apparent past life, where the information is investigated and confirmed as a solved case? Here, the past person the child talked about as his previous identity is located in the past and found to have really existed at a certain date and place. Ian Stevenson famously investigated and studied many cases that he and his colleagues "solved" successfully, where the overwhelmingly most likely explanation was that somehow reincarnation had ocurred. These included many birthmark and birth defect cases which were especially evidential.

This is such an old and tired debate. What about veridical mediumistic communications, psi phenomena like telepathy, precognition, psychokinesis - the list goes on.

There is a very large body of evidence accumulated on the reality of these phenomena. In order to debunk the entire field of paranormal phenomena you would need to plausibly debunk every single one of these evidences many of which are well established.

When one considers the possibility of being flooded with past-life memories upon death it is indeed difficult to see how such an entity would be the person we are in this life.

Why do you think that anyone would be flooded with past-life memories upon death? To me it seems clear that this kind of development is gradual.

Furthermore, as Jenny Cockell wrote in Journeys Through Time (page 257):

Above all, I am very aware of having been the same person throughout these lives...

In Adventures Beyond the Body William Buhlman describes the experience of being flooded with past-life memories and it doesn't support your theory.

Jurgen Ziewe describes the existence as pure self in his videos as follows:" it doesn't mean you stop being a person. Your individuality is still intact. We don't lose our individuality. We don't lose our persona. We still recognize other people as who they are." [All quotes transcribed by me after watching his videos.]

Another quote from Jenny Cockell from that same book and same page:

We also have a core personality that is carried from life to life, that evolves with us.