Sharon Hewitt Rawlette on NDEs

Courtesy of the SPR Facebook page - Sharon Hewitt Rawlette has a new blog post at Psychology Today entitled "Are Near-Death Experiences Just Comforting Illusions?" which draws on examples from "The Self Does Not Die":
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/...-illusions

[Laird]

Sharon's writing is wonderfully lucid. She thoroughly deserves her blog on Psychology Today. Thanks for sharing this, Chris.

I'm late to adding this but instead of making a new thread I thought I may as well add to this one...

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette has her own blog on WordPress that I highly recommend, where you can find the rest of her articles and thoughts on NDEs as well as other phenomena, including coincidences and synchronicities: 

https://sharonrawlette.wordpress.com/blog

So in regards to this article, I found a very strange and cynical criticism made of the case where the physician verified the quarter on the roof. Joe I assume is meant to be the physician in this little comparison:

Imagine the scene: Joe, the hospital maintenance person, is asked by one of the medical staff to go get a ladder and check the top of the equipment for a quarter.


Joe: A quarter what?
Staff: A quarter, the coin, two bits, ...
Joe: Oh.

Joe gets the ladder and ascends, thinking what of this request? And now, there he is atop the ladder, and he has a command decision to make: does he humor the staffer who's sent him on this quest, or does he disappoint him or her? Joe's a mensch.

Joe: Oh, look, somebody did leave a quarter up here.

But no good deed goes unpunished.

Staff: Great! This means we survive bodily death! Bring me that quarter which is a witness to our eternal life!

Joe mimes picking up a quarter, and places his hand in his pocket, where a benevolent God has placed several coins, including some quarters. Joe descends the ladder, hands the quarter to the staffer.

Staff: We're going to be viral on the internet, Joe!
Joe smiles and saunters off, 25 cents poorer, but assured of internet fame.

Ditto for the shoe on the roof.

I have no idea what this was meant to imply. The case didn't exactly go 'viral' because most people probably haven't read this PsychologyToday post or The Self Does Not Die sadly. I can't imagine it would be common for one to find specifically a quarter on a hospital roof, so...is this trying to say it was a combination of fraud and coincidence for the cases? How on earth does confirmation bias come into play?

The guy who posted this apparently studies dreams and is unconvinced of claims of precognitive dreams. He adds that: 

First, the stories are anecdotes, and second, they are identical to stories offered in support of other alleged phenomena which [b]if those other things actually ever happened,[/b] then they would fully explain the claimed feats [b]whether or not[/b] people don't really die.

He uses these precognitive dreams as an example of just coincidences. 

I understand Sharon did not go into depth with each case but seriously? Is this how all veridical NDEs are gonna get addressed now?

Someone else in the thread pointed out how it was a direct observation, not some guess. And what was the response? "Wow aren't you gullible for believing in just some story". He then says this:

Well, those objects being in those places is unusual, and that is why we bother to discuss the report.


[b]However[/b] it is not prohibitively unusual for somebody to report the location of something accurately without ever having seen the target personally. As I pointed out in one of the earlier posts, for some unknown somebody somewhere, these out-of-place objects are less remarkable than they are for the average person in this discussion. Some tech lost some change (you're in tech, you know techies sometimes drop stuff),  somebody returned from the roof less well shod than when they ascended.

Anecdotes just aren't going to cut it. If you haven't eliminated a candidate explanation by careful experimental design, then it's a candidate. [b]Example:[/b] The patient is the person who lost the quarter (the brother, father, best friend, occasional drinking buddy, ... of the person who lost the quarter). The patient's favorite nurse is <any of the above relationships>  of the person who lost the quarter... Information leaks.

Is this guy seriously trying to argue that finding quarters and red shoes on a hospital roof is a more common than we think. And no, there were no relations between those involved so no information was leaked. 

What is this trying to say???

It seems the same explanation as usually proffered - error, coincidence or fraud. It’s just dressed up to sound less like it. 

As an aside, I don’t see that these sort of observations whether from an OBE type of experience or some form of clairvoyance, necessarily  prove survival. They can certainly indicate it’s likely in some situations. They do suggest the likelihood of the ability of consciousness to extend beyond the body in some way though as far as I can see. 

Where I agree with the writer is that a single anecdote on its own probably isn’t going to convince a sceptical person, or even an open-minded individual, they do need to be viewed in the context of the body of evidence and other reported experiences.

There’s an old saying something along the lines of “the plural of anecdote isn’t evidence”, however if we replace “anecdote” with “first hand report of a personal experience” it seems to be evidence of something.

It seems the same explanation as usually proffered - error, coincidence or fraud. It’s just dressed up to sound less like it. 

As an aside, I don’t see that these sort of observations whether from an OBE type of experience or some form of clairvoyance, necessarily  prove survival. They can certainly indicate it’s likely in some situations. They do suggest the likelihood of the ability of consciousness to extend beyond the body in some way though as far as I can see. 

Where I agree with the writer is that a single anecdote on its own probably isn’t going to convince a sceptical person, or even an open-minded individual, they do need to be viewed in the context of the body of evidence and other reported experiences.

There’s an old saying something along the lines of “the plural of anecdote isn’t evidence”, however if we replace “anecdote” with “first hand report of a personal experience” it seems to be evidence of something.

It should be pointed out that this response didn't address the content of The Self Does Not Die which has many more veridical cases, or that of Al Sullivan. The guy just insists that "there's nothing extraordinary" about somone randomly "knowing" the location of something they should not have known about. To me this seems like moving the goal post for what standards of evidence they would accept and is a slanderous accusation without evidence. This logic certainly doesn't apply to the shoe case. But he argued that 'being very ill' shouldn't make a difference. 

He didn't address this point though: 

In other cases, it has been verified that an NDEr accurately perceived an event that occurred precisely during the period when the NDEr’s heart was stopped and normal brain function had ceased.

This was on a thread that can be found here. But yeah, I noticed the response was cherry-picking the post. They do not seem to understand that this isn't just "some story" easily embellished or mis-remembered. They did not bother looking any further into the actual case and the state of the mind at the time, leading to the skeptic then saying this:

There is nothing in the reports that logically connects finding an everyday object in an unusual place, looking there because somebody told you to, with anybody's personality surviving death. Nobody died in these stories. That the predicting person was very sick at about the time they think they found out about the unusual location of the object...it's a matter of conscious selection.

To me this demonstrates how none of them read the full article, and how they do not understand the states these people were in that should not have permitted this. In both cases, these people were not in fit conditions before or after to make lucky guesses with direct observations. 

I have never understood why (pseudo)skeptics claim to be champions of evidence and yet will resort to even slanderous accusations of these experiences and those verifying them based on little to no evidence. To me, just saying that it 'makes more sense' isn't good enough. That's not justifiable if you're tarnishing someone's reputation.