Why Corroborated NDEs Can’t Just Be Explained Away

Why Corroborated NDEs Can’t Just Be Explained Away

In some cases, Gary Habermas recounts, patients who had NDEs while in a state of clinical death report dates and numbers that are later found to be accurate

 

Here are the first two excerpts: Here’s the first excerpt: Prof: There’s a growing number of verified near-death experiences. Gary Habermas notes more than 110 NDEs where experiencers’ detailed reports of what they saw when they were flatlined have been corroborated later. It’s exceedingly unlikely, Prof. Habermas argues, that all these cases result from misperception, deception, coincidences, or mistakes.

and

Near-death: What people learn when they are (briefly) dead. In this excerpt, Prof Gary Habermas reports that sometimes the returned experiencer says that someone else has died — but the official news only comes later. For reasons that are not yet clear, blind people can see during a near-death experience and details have been confirmed. Habermas relates some cases.

I'm not particularly impressed with Gary Habermas. It appears he relies exclusively on secondary sources for his conclusions. Anyone can purchase the same book by Bruce Greyson and form their own opinions. However, I recognize that his specific conclusions likely resonate well with his audience.

I'm not particularly impressed with Gary Habermas. It appears he relies exclusively on secondary sources for his conclusions. Anyone can purchase the same book by Bruce Greyson and form their own opinions. However, I recognize that his specific conclusions likely resonate well with his audience.

Curious what you mean by this as the article itself is presenting a summary of a chapter Habermas wrote on NDEs in a book - Minding the Brain - that focuses on a variety of subjects.

I do agree that anyone who bought the book solely hoping for something new regarding the scientific investigation of NDEs will be disappointed but the placement of the chapter in the book as a whole I think is good. For me it isn't *just* that there are NDEs, it's that Survival evidence fits into a picture of looking at reality and consciousness' place in it.

I'm not particularly impressed with Gary Habermas. It appears he relies exclusively on secondary sources for his conclusions. Anyone can purchase the same book by Bruce Greyson and form their own opinions. However, I recognize that his specific conclusions likely resonate well with his audience.

Exclusively from secondary sources? Consider the seminal research effort and compilation The Self Does Not Die, by Rivas, Dirven and Smit. From the Amazon summary:

"This book contains over 125 reliable, often firsthand accounts of perceptions during NDEs that were later verified as accurate by independent sources. These near-death experiencers were everyday people from all over the world—many of whom were clinically dead, unable to see or hear, and yet able to perceive new vistas of a world beyond the senses and even beyond death.
The Self Does Not Die is a trailblazing effort to present the most confirmed cases of consciousness beyond death ever compiled. In these cases, the authors have gone back to the original sources, the people involved in each case, whenever possible, rather than relying on secondhand sources. In so doing, they have assembled a unique collection of empirical data that any scholar worthy of the name must take into account.
By carefully studying and describing many convincing and corroborated cases, during cardiac arrest and other cases, the authors conclude that there are good reasons to assume that our consciousness does not always coincide with the functioning of our brain: Enhanced consciousness can sometimes be experienced separately from the body."

And consider the "white crow" principle so aptly named by William James. All it takes is discovering one white crow to prove the claim that there are no white crows is false. What is the likelihood that every single one of the more than 125 convincing and corroborated NDE cases in the book is false due to misperception, memory distortions, hallucination, fraud, etc.? The likelihood of that skeptic claim is negligible; it is not credible at all. 

@nbtruthman quoting Amazon

"This book contains over 125 reliable, often firsthand accounts of perceptions during NDEs that were later verified as accurate by independent sources. These near-death experiencers were everyday people from all over the world—many of whom were clinically dead, unable to see or hear, and yet able to perceive new vistas of a world beyond the senses and even beyond death.
The Self Does Not Die is a trailblazing effort to present the most confirmed cases of consciousness beyond death ever compiled. In these cases, the authors have gone back to the original sources, the people involved in each case, whenever possible, rather than relying on secondhand sources. In so doing, they have assembled a unique collection of empirical data that any scholar worthy of the name must take into account.
By carefully studying and describing many convincing and corroborated cases, during cardiac arrest and other cases, the authors conclude that there are good reasons to assume that our consciousness does not always coincide with the functioning of our brain: Enhanced consciousness can sometimes be experienced separately from the body."

Never trust a sales pitch!

@nbtruthman quoting Amazon


Never trust a sales pitch!

Cheap shot. Having actually read the book I can testify that this description is accurate. That's why I used it. And I notice that you avoided responding to the one white crow example.

Cheap shot. Having actually read the book I can testify that this description is accurate. That's why I used it. And I notice that you avoided responding to the one white crow example.

Yeah the book is, at worst, a follow up with people who thought something that happened to them but did not.

Yet it does seem to me if Survival evidence is subjective/anecdotal then even a good deal of consciousness research is as well. We know the personality of Phineas Gage was not such an extreme change, that Split Brain patients are likely not really two minds in one body, and that Blind Sight is not really conscious-less information processing.

Additionally most events in history are reports gathered in antiquity, with even modern work based on reports. The difference with Survival seems to be whether such a thing is metaphysically possible, and if it is than hard to see what makes Survival evidence of noticeably lower quality?

To go back to the example of CORTS, when even Neuroscience PhD and New Atheist Horseman Sam Harris is willing to say Stevenson's work is good enough to merit further investigation the claims of bias must also be put against the varied opposing beliefs in play...

To go back to the example of CORTS, when even Neuroscience PhD and New Atheist Horseman Sam Harris is willing to say Stevenson's work is good enough to merit further investigation the claims of bias must also be put against the varied opposing beliefs in play...

Do you have any references to back that up? I would like to know in what context he expressed this. Famously Carl Sagan said something similar but that quote was  cherry picked from a greater context and is often abused in the new age community.

Do you have any references to back that up? I would like to know in what context he expressed this. Famously Carl Sagan said something similar but that quote was  cherry picked from a greater context and is often abused in the new age community.

"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. (Here, I am making a point about gradations of certainty: Can I say for certain that a century of experimentation proves that telepathy doesn’t exist? No. It seems to me that reasonable people can disagree about the statistical data. Can I say for certain that the Bible and the Koran show every sign of having been written by ignorant mortals? Yes. And this is the only certainty one needs to dismiss the God of Abraham as a creature of fiction.)" 
 - from an old blog post

There's also some stuff from End of Faith that I'll post later...

There's also some stuff from End of Faith that I'll post later...

Oh, footnote 18 in End of Faith (page 242 in my copy): 

There may even be some credible evidence for reincarnation. See I. Stevenson, Twenty Cases Suggestive of
Reincarnation (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1974), Unlearned Language: New Studies in Xenoglossy (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1984), and Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect (West-
port, Conn.: Praeger, 1997).

Really we're at the point where Survival evidence, if not the larger spectrum of evidence from Deep Weird to Mysticism, should be taken seriously.

This is different than claiming Survival is at the level of scientific confidence that the seemingly bizarre QM level of reality enjoys as arguably the most battle tested set of replicated claims in history.