I've told only a few people about my near death experience, and most of them were polite, but obviously didn't believe a word I was saying. To be honest, I wouldn't believe it either if I had not experienced it myself.
I did not "see" anything other than a bright light, but I was overcome with an incredible feeling that I was in the presence of, and communicating with somebody who was conveying a message of absolute love for, and total understanding of everything that I was. The feeling of euphoria is impossible to fully describe, because of the absoluteness of it.
I wanted to stay where I was. It was the best feeling I'd ever experienced, and I was content. Somehow, I was "shown" some bits of what I had to live for -- people I had not yet met, and amazing places and things that I had not yet seen or done. I don't really remember making a choice to return, but I woke up in a hospital with a broken back and other injuries. I later learned that I had been hit by a car while riding my bicycle, and was given CPR by a passing stranger.
It makes me uncomfortable to talk about this because it's all just so unbelievable, but there it is.
As the years have gone by, I've met the friends and family that I had in my visions, and I've also been to the places and done the things that I saw myself doing in the vision.
My whole perspective on life was changed by this event, and I have no fear of death whatsoever.
My memory is a bit hazy, but I thought what you are describing is very common with people who flatline and come back? I have vague memories that a new anesthetic drug was developed and used on soldiers undergoing surgery in the Vietnam war, and there was something about it that caused the same kind of reaction in those who were put under. Again, my memory is very hazy on the subject. I should go do some research and update this comment (and I just might).
EDIT
I did a little searching. I think it might have been an old report about Ketamine before it became more wide known. Apparently it was used during the Vietnam War.
Amazing recommendation! I was hooked by that most powerful New York Times Bestseller endorsement but in 1600s. "Many say: I wanted to learn, but only found madness. But those who seek wisdom will not find it elsewhere."
I was going to mention ketamine. Famous for this type of effect. I don't want to belittle the meaningful experience, but the mind is a really powerful organ and it's a safer bet to treat these experiences as arising from mind rather than beyond it. Shrug.
>>it's a safer bet to treat these experiences as arising from mind rather than beyond it
Your brain has to be alive and exist normally for it to have these experiences. So its quite obvious, nothing is coming from outside of it.
I do feel like its some kind of brain rebooting itself or something like that.
Its sad babies can't tell us if they experience the same during childbirth, but I have a guess that they experience something similar as well.
Its just that the brain is starting up and checking if there is a OxDEADBEEF or a fresh boot. And giving you the primal, brain not initialising any other interface(like eyes, ears, limbs etc). You experience what life would be if only brain existed on its own without everything else apart from it.
Lots to say there. The last few centuries have shown that many things which previously seemed inexplicable have been convincingly explained without resort to the supernatural. So a material basis of conscious experience seems a good bet.
Related, and hinted at by my original comment: the brain is capable of generating truly profound experiences. There is a tendency to ascribe them to something 'beyond ourselves' but again, advances in medicine and neuroscience have shown that these are explicable, subject to manipulation by chemical and electrical signals, which again suggests a material basis for conscious experience.
It's true that many things have yielded to science. And yet, what we discuss (the "hard problem of consciousness") hasn't. In my opinion, the burden is on you to prove that progress in other questions implies inevitable progress on an unrelated question that hasn't budged at all.
I said this in my other comment but, when you say the brain generates truly profound experiences, you beg the question (in the philosophical sense of the phrase). It's all in the word "experience." For in order for an experience to happen, some entity has to be experiencing. For there to be an illusion, there has to be an entity being deceived. And then how do you explain that entity? It can't be illusory experiences all the way down..
Any honest person has to see the connection between experience and the material brain. But I don't think it's honest to say it's obvious that experience is entirely material. The connection is deeply mysterious and may never be understood. I personally would rather accept that than claim that I don't really exist just so that everything can be explained.
The evidence is abundant and continues to chip away at the "hard problem". For example, we can through anesthesia turn on and off conscious experience. Through various drugs we can manipulate the character of conscious awareness, inducing ecstasy, visions, abiding serenity, terror, pain, grief... all states that were previously described as ineffable.
To say we haven't made progress on understanding consciousness is to move the post; we continue narrowing the 'hard problem' and eventually it seems like there will be nothing left other than a misunderstanding, something like the resolution of Xeno's paradox.
I don't mean to be insulting but, you don't seem to understand what the hard problem is. It is not "is the brain intimately linked with conscious experience?" I would agree we've made progress on that question. It is the harder question of "why is there conscious experience at all? Why does it feel the way it does?" I would argue no progress has been made on this whatsoever, and possibly can't be done.
You can try to claim that this question is meaningless, but that doesn't seem principled to me, not to mention that it completely ignores the fact that gestures broadly all this is happening.
In light of the fact that the entire universe is perceptible only through conscious awareness, the 'hard' question is equivalent to the question "why is there anything instead of nothing?" When asked this way, it's clearly not answerable. Everything short of that seems to have a material answer.
Edit: happy to chat more about this, as it's deeply interesting to me and I do want to understand your perspective. It may need a longer form than this thread allows. I've added a link to get in contact with me on my about page.
I'd be happy to talk more as I am passionate about this. I think the idea that there is no soul is actually extremely dehumanizing, and involves someone essentially saying "I don't really exist" (even if they redefine "I exist" to mean something more Materialist, it is, in my view, still saying that). I'll ping you on bluesky.
It matches what I briefly experienced when I felt ill staying alone in a hotel. (E. g. I understood that the events of the few recent days were sort of preparing me for that; I could ask questions.)
BTW there's a book "The night of fire" by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt that describes a similar experience he got staying alone in a desert. And, of course, countless other descriptions, e.g. "The varieties of religious experience" by W. James. You cannot convince anyone, of course; but there's also no way to fake it.
> To be honest, I wouldn't believe it either if I had not experienced it myself.
If you anticipated that others would find this hard to believe, why not write down those visions in detail at the time? That would have provided evidence others could have used to later evaluate whether your visions were accurate.
As a skeptic, and without knowing more details, I am leaning towards self-fulfilling prophecy (you did the things in the visions because you had the visions) or confirmation bias (similar to how horoscopes feel accurate because they're vague enough to map many situations).
I was 15 years old at the time, and not much of a writer.
Most of my visions did not stay in my consciousness. Over the years, when I would meet somebody new or be in a place that I had seen, it would trigger the memory of the vision. You can attribute this to Déjà vu if you like, but in this case I knew exactly where/when I had seen the vision beforehand, and it sometimes triggered more memories of not-yet-happened events.
I'm old now, and I haven't had any experiences related to my visions for over a decade. I'm pretty sure that all of my visions have now been lived.
I don't know, this sounds like your subjective experience, I have no reason to disbelieve it. If you had said that your experience showed you the future, and X Y and Z were going to happen, then I might not believe that, but why wouldn't I believe you experienced what you say you did? Why would you lie?
This is HN so I'm not trying to evangelize you or anyone here, but what you described is 100% in line with Spiritism [1], a French-founded doctrine that's very popular both in France and Brazil [2]. I'm a believer.
Probably the contrarian take, but an informed one.
Near death experiences are probably the best way we have to assess the nature of reality.
Now, it's almost impossible to reach people who aren't ready with any arguments, but I'll outline some possible steps for anyone who's on the verge.
- Go to youtube, type in NDE and listen to a few
- Try to come up with a "rational" explanation (hallucinations, the brain dumping DMT, preconceived notions from Hollywood, the general culture and so on)
- Assess whether these make any sense under the conditions that NDEs occur, and scratch the ones that don't. Then watch a few more and you'll have to reject more still.
In particular, what was convincing to me, is how very very similar the cases are and that they happen to tribes living at a stone age technological level with no contact to Hollywood, and that there is a described case from Plato from over 2000 years ago that is identical to modern cases.
In the end, my conclusion is that objective reality has to be partially rejected, and all experience is the combination of some "nature of reality" as interpreted by each individual. This leads to clear contradictions if one assumes that there is one objective reality. Case in point, in NDEs there are a couple of common stages, and experiencers go through some or all of these, most often only some. One is traveling from the location of death to a heavenly realm. For westerners this often is flying through a star trek like hyperspace tunnel, while for stone age people they might be in a canoe that travels by itself to a distant island. So the nature of it is something like being pulled silently without effort towards a point in a manner that isn't part of the experiencer's notion of what's possible, and it is then realized and interpreted by each individual in the closest way that they can relate to.
If multiple people independently report the same experience (across time and space), isn't this actually evidence of objective reality rather than a refutation of it? It points to some underlying universal structure of our experience as constructed by our brains, which suggests that our brains are part of a mechanistic, external, and therefore objective reality instead of a subjective one (where our own ideas constitute reality).
I never remotely believed this because I don't even believe in a "me" really.
One hard hit in the head can literally change your personality entirely, then you have alzheimers and all the other degenerative brain diseases that will erase "you". Even if you avoid all that "you" will be wildly different every 15-20 years.
Christianity gets through this by saying you will return to your prime. That just seems kind of childish to me though, like "yeah when you die you and all your friends and family are gonna be 25 and you live in paradise together forever".
How do you resolve the idea of an eternal consciousness with the very real and common occurence of people losing their consciousness while they are still alive?
I have a fondness for the idea that the brain is like a radio reciever for a greater flow of the universe. Thus brain damage is like a broken antenna. The radio can die but the signal continues.
That said, we do then to attribute a lot of thinking to the technology of the time. Buddhists had their wheel of time, folks today think we live in a computer simulation. Things like that, so best not to take the idea too seriously.
Remember, life is too important to take seriously.
The brain is like a sail thats catching the wind of the soul. The wind pushes and shapes the sail, and the sail limits the shape of the wind inside it. If the sail is in bad condition, it changes how the wind catches it, or prevents it from catching altogether.
So the brain is animated by the soul, and also limits and shapes its experience. When we're affected by anesthetic, or we're badly injured, or have a stroke, our conscious experience is impacted, while we're here on this plane. Eventually we leave this form and experience reality more truly. This could be one reason why NDEs happen - the brain is so badly damaged that it fails to even contain the soul and we approach a more death-like state.
It is a nice thought, but still has a pre-requisite that there are "souls" floating around that get ensnared by human bodies. If that is true then life is a kind of prison we endure before being liberated by death.
Even if we assume those giant leaps of faith are true, it still means "I" go away when I die. My soul will only remember "me" as a brief torture where I was forced into a human shell and had to endure being "me" before being released once more to be a higher being. All my struggles, battles, self-improvement, etc. will be meaningless and my kids will be a cruel trick I played that imprisoned other souls.
I won't deny it takes giant leaps of faith. I think the questions are inherently unanswerable so any theory that's not in conflict with things we can know scientifically, and which doesn't lead to harming others, is as good as it can get. We can't really do better than thoughtful faith in this domain (and indeed I would (controversially) argue that the notion of inevitable scientific progress in this area is also a sort of faith, since there hasn't been any progress on the "hard problem" of consciousness..).
To your points, I would say that
> life is a kind of prison we endure before being liberated by death
Not exactly. More like a journey that we go through for mysterious reasons. Maybe so our soul can grow by learning lessons and having challenges that can only be when the stakes are real.
> "I" go away when I die
Not necessarily. Certain aspects of you, which are more contingent on brain traits, e.g. intelligence, some temperament. But the deepest self wouldn't disappear.
> All my struggles, battles, self-improvement, etc. will be meaningless
I see what you mean, but I wouldn't call it meaningless just because it wasn't "completely real." Also, I do believe that lessons learned here are learned for good. The soul is here to grow.
> my kids will be a cruel trick I played that imprisoned other souls.
I don't really see how you got here. In this theory, your kids are also here for their own purpose. Relationships and love are still meaningful and real. Life is cruel and involves a great deal of suffering, but that doesn't mean that existence is inherently bad.
I think Christian resurrection at prime usually means having the body of a 25-year old, not the mind. Maybe they'd say the physical brain can corrupt the eternal consciousness's expression while in this life, but it does still raise questions like how will you even recognize the eternal "you" when you've been trapped in a corruptible brain for all that you can remember, and what is the eternal part's worth if it can be corrupted by the brain. (Perhaps Mormonism addresses some of this, saying you lived as "you" unembodied before birth, but are not able to remember for now.)
The traditional concept of an 'embodied' resurrection (as opposed to ghosts playing harps) makes me lean towards: yes (eg the gut is part of the body). Who knows though, it's a fun question!
yeah it is :) Like, do we eat in heaven? If not, then all our little passengers must also be immortal in their resurrected form. But part of the biome is the dead bodies of those critters, and those dead bodies also affect our mood (chemistry doing its thing). So how does this work? Does heaven automatically maintain the correct chemistry in our guts to maintain our emotional and hormonal stability with needing the actual biome? Or does it maintain the biome at the correct chemistry without needing the actual ecosystem?
And other parts - do the bugs that live on our hair follicles come with us? Does hair even grow in heaven?
John's vision of heaven in the book of Revelation includes both the wedding feast of the Lamb and the trees of life that will bear 12 different fruits in season. Jesus also ate fish a few times after his resurrection to demonstrate the physicality of his resurrected body. So there is the concept of eating in the resurrected paradise of the new heavens and the new earth.
Hrm. I've thought about this a lot and came to the conclusion that we, or rather our brains are just an antenna, 'receiving stuff' from another plane of existence.
If you change/destroy parts of the antenna or the 'bioelectronic circuits' the channel fades out, and you get more and more noise, until there is no signal anymore.
No more resonance with the frequency of your station.
That equals death on this plane.
What lead me to this apart from NDE/OOBE are the cases of so called Terminal Lucidity, when old or very sick people die, but regain conciousness in their last moments. In a timeframe from sometimes two to three days before exitus, but mostly just a few dozen seconds to minutes before exitus.
The thing is that some of these brains are so rotten and degenerated, that it is impossible according to our current understanding, that these people are even able to do anything coordinated, not to mention speak, and recognizing their loved ones/family, telling them things.
And yet this happens again and again, not that often, but it does. While their brains are absolute mush.
In a similar vein, there are stories of lost animals like cats and dogs finding their way back to the humans they once lived with. Over long distances like several hundred miles, often after years.
That can't happen by random chance. So either they can read signs, and understand our words better than we think, or there are other mechanisms at play.
What that is telling about this otherplaneness is uncertain, just that it exists.
Probably impossible to gain any certain insights about that, because of wrong cabling, interface, modulation, format, whatever.
At best we can just hope to skim the interface, membrane and get a few hazy views from the other side near that membrane, but not that far through it.
Maybe there are even other interfaces, membranes, from up there, going on and on, and/or recursing into others.
Basically if the base reality that we experience through a holographic world/emergent reality has no concept of time, consequence, etc, you have to create a simulation/game with rules that can allow free will to happen, that has a timeline, has consequences. Once setup, those rules apply even if they ruin the simulation experience for some, they are a necessary part of the holographic world/emergent reality serving it's purpose. Sadly, to create an emergent reality that allows free will you have to create a reality that allows suffering and children dying of cancer and Alzheimer's and consequences if you hit someone in the head. But the blow to the head/Alzheimers is nothing different than an alcohol haze one night that goes away in the morning. The you in the underlying lower (higher?) real dimensions doesn't change just because you got drunk/alzheimers/hit on the head in the emergent dimensions/reality/holographic world.
Read CS Lewis 'The Problem of Pain' then think about emergent dimensions/holographic worlds being the only way to have our kind of consciousness/self determination/free will/experiential identity if one exists in a underlying dimensional state with no linear time, no physical limitations, etc, and so forth. The emergent reality/holographic world is the 'chess board with clear rules' needed for us to have/experience/pretend to free will from the underlying reality without time or rules. In CS Lewis 'The Problem of Pain', pain sucks, but is needed for this world to do whatever it is supposed to do. Alzheimers, consequences of blows to the head, etc aren't themselves needed but they themselves are emergent from the rules that are needed for 'here' to exist and serve it's purpose. But they are also just part of (or structure for) the holographic/emergent reality, not the true base lower (higher?) reality.
Not manic. Just not great at communicating these thoughts. Don't lock me up please.
Nope. It would be very convenient for the modern American/Western nihilistic religion called atheism, but nope. Science doesn't support it.
In our limited experiential world things appear to decay. If our spacetime experience is emergent from something else (in which time doesn't exist), or is holographic, we have no idea what's really going on at the fundamental (lower/higher?) level. How can you have decay in the base reality that doesn't have time? Is decay not an artifact of time? If time is emergent not fundamental, so is decay.
Check out some Susskind and CS Lewis The Problem of Pain. It makes for a fun thought game.
Start with 'what reality/rules would we need in order to exercise truly free will' (the concepts from The Problem of Pain). We need time (action/consequence). We need to be able to impact ourselves/others. I need to be able to hurt you/myself. Kill you/myself. Need the mechanisms that are then used/abused by things like Alzheimer's. But if we bring in Susskind, that is all just happening in the emergent space/time (my emergent free will reality) not in the base reality (my lower/higher? reality that doesn't have things like time). There is no reason that what impacts us in the 'free will reality' that enables us to have free will/experience time also impacts whatever we might be in the base reality (my lower/higher? reality). In that reality without time we are the child just born and the body turned to dust. We are forever in the moments when our loved ones held us. That is heaven. Not some new experiential timeline to reflect. We ARE ALL THE MOMENTS, not a reflection on the moments after the fact.
Hell IS repeating every bad thing, forever. Heaven is experiencing love from your loved ones, forever. But not in some cloud world we exist in after death thinking back. But in the same one that everything happened, only at the non-emergent level not the emergent spacetime level. Me in the non-emergent reality is already in heaven/hell, is already experiencing it all, because it exists in a space without emergent linear time. I will be in heaven, because I will have hugs from my mom and hugs for my children, forever. That is where lower (higher?) level me will dwell.
To be fair, this is the point I worked back from after my mom died. How do I deal with loosing her (as an ex-Catholic). In what reality are her hugs for me forever? This is what I gamed out. We are all the moments, forever, in the non-emergent reality without linear time.
How else can the non-emergent true reality contain our emergent linear space time reality?
As for myself, I try to do a thought experiment. Imagine that I could travel back in time and meet myself at 18-20 years old. I could most likely convince myself that I was me from the future. But I don't think I could convince myself of the thing I've learned that are outside of what is imaginable for my younger self. So we could never be angry with other people for not understanding. Even so, with everything that you get right compared to the people downvoting you, I think you have a too simplistic view of reality, and frankly, not optimistic enough.
There's this mushroom Lanmaoa asiatica that causes people to hallucinate hundreds of tiny people running around interacting with the environment. Consistently, across cultures and regions. You eat this mushroom and you're pretty likely to have a very similar hallucination to everybody else who eats this mushroom. Now is there some objective reality of hidden little elves everywhere that only this mushroom unlocks? Or is it a specific physical trigger that when people go through it they have the same sort of experience.
You can have the same question about the near death experiences. Are they experiences of an objective reality somewhere or is it a common physical situation triggering similar experiences across people and cultures.
> In particular, what was convincing to me, is how very very similar the cases are and that they happen to tribes living at a stone age technological level with no contact to Hollywood, and that there is a described case from Plato from over 2000 years ago that is identical to modern cases.
This sounds intriguing.
> Case in point, in NDEs there are a couple of common stages, and experiencers go through some or all of these, most often only some. One is traveling from the location of death to a heavenly realm. For westerners this often is flying through a star trek like hyperspace tunnel, while for stone age people they might be in a canoe that travels by itself to a distant island.
Ah, so the similarity is all enitrely in your interpretation of these clearly dissimilar visions.
If I listen to 100 NDEs and in 50 they travel through a tunnel like this or somehow go through space, and in 2 from stone age cultures they travel in a manner apt to their everyday experience and it has those things in common I think it's a fine hypothesis that what they have in common is the nature of what's happening. And in 48 they didn't experience this stage.
Have you read any pop neuroscience book? There are common experiences that can be generated by one or another kind of brain-wrong. You sort of acknowledged this already when you mentioned DMT. If you poke somebody in specific parts of the brain you can get illusions of changing size, shadowy figures, mirth, and other delightful errors. We also interpret things very eagerly, like the "night hag" phenomenon where being unable to sense one's own breathing turns into an illusion of something sitting on your chest. That's another worldwide cross-cultural concept, by the way, but there is no night hag, there's just human physiology.
So, bright lights and tunnels. Shared human visual neurological glitches. Heard of "tunnel vision"? That's a real medical condition, which can be caused by blood loss, adrenaline, or low oxygen.
I would be seriously uncomfortable to discover myself making authoritative reference to anything out of a "pop neuroscience" book, unless I had myself validated the claim - at least as far as making sure there is a paper that says what is claimed of it, by whatever failed academic turned mountebank I am reading. (If those guys were comfortable being held to what they say, why did they stop writing for peer reviewers? I'm hardly an academic chauvinist, God knows, but if you want to be safe here in the 2030s, you really need to learn to spot a grifter...)
The tunnel vision you experience during hypovolemia is nothing like the "tunnel of light" reported in NDEs. It's just that you lose your visual field gradually, from periphery to fovea, as your visual cortex loses perfusion. In theory, a well-perfused brain dying for some other reason, such as a sudden complete loss of oxygen supply secondary to circulatory collapse secondary to fine VF or asystole, would retain the ability to "fill in" with something, the way our brains in normal operation cover the many gaps and lacks in our visual perception. (This is part of why I asked the other fellow not to bother me again about this at least until he knows what "ATP" means and why that is relevant here.)
It is strikingly absurd to imagine any of this does or can support a radically materialist conception of the universe. As I said before, materialism is exactly as religious as simulationism - exactly so, inasmuch as I expect to see a "solution" for the "mind-body problem" [1] around the same time as we solve the halting problem or constructively prove P=NP.
OK, you could also read a serious neuroscience textbook, but that seemed a less reasonable thing to expect of anyone. The basic point remains true though.
Tunnel vision is a tunnel, in your vision, associated with death. Since I'm talking to people who will latch on to anything at all similar to a tunnel in reports of experiences, and say "See! Commonalities!", this is sufficient to explain why a lot of the nearly-dead throughout world history have involved something tunnel-like somewhere in their reports.
I don't know who is reporting a "tunnel of light" specifically. I would expect that belongs to a post-1970s culture of near death experiences that's part of the rest of the culture of Forteana and the Mysteries of the Unexplained.
When talking about what evidence supports, really we're talking about the opposite: which theories evidence falsifies, and which surviving, falsifiable theory is the most parsimonious. Falsifiability matters, and parsimony matters. Otherwise, you can imagine what you like, but it carries no weight as an explanation.
Why is that unreasonable to expect? How can someone participate in a discussion of neuroscience without the requisite knowledge?
But, luckily for me, I'm not among those here who have arrogated unto themselves the requirement, with its implicit assumption of the necessary capacity, to explain all or indeed any of this. I'm just here to counsel those who do persist in such insistence, much in the manner of that fellow whose job it used to be to murmur memento mori.
A materialist would argue that nothing you describe rules out malfunction in a brain failing rapidly due to oxygen starvation, and that the commonality of experiences is explicable in terms of common failure modes in effectively identical brain architecture. (Just about everyone's visual cortex works about the same, etc.)
I think it's cute how hardcore materialists believe it is even in theory possible to distinguish their position from ideological simulationism. Maybe in a thousand years. Not now. But phenomenology is the name of the philosophical discipline that you are now struggling to recapitulate.
What are the unaccountably unlikely commonalities that I should be noticing? Between this and the article, I see only: some kind of colored light, some kind of officiating beings, and a river (A.J.Ayer says he presumably had the Styx in mind, though amusingly in the actual ancient Greek account it's a different river and there's no need to cross it).
> And I look down at my arm and I realize that I can no longer define the boundaries of my body. I can't define where I begin and where I end, because the atoms and the molecules of my arm blended with the atoms and molecules of the wall.
Why do those experiences indicate the presence or non-presence of an afterlife?
This claim from Ayer -- how do we make the leap from these experiences existing to being evidence of a life after consciousness?
> On the face of it, these experiences, on the assumption that the last one was veridical, are rather strong evidence that death does not put an end to consciousness
Why do you exclude this hypothesis? It's well known that some drugs such as DMT do cause very similar hallucinations among people, even across cultures (as is the case with NDE).
I have two data points thet I ponder occasionally:
1. I have met three identical twins so far. Each of them has reported having some kind of communication with the other twin that could not be explained by conventional means. I have no reason to think any of them lied.
2. My sister used to be very into astrology. She could predict someone's star sign within a few minutes of meeting them to much better than 1 in 12 accuracy.
I do not present these as proof of anything. I do not expect anyone else to believe them or give them any credence. This is just anecdata. I haven't worked out any rational explanation for them.
But I'm inclined to believe two things from them:
1. Brains are weird. Human psychology is complex and fascinating and does things that we do not understand.
2. That there are well-conceived, well-constructed scientific experiments that show there is no scientific basis for telekinesis or astrology, that these are not "real" things, does not necessarily contradict the human experience of them as "real" things. We do not inhabit a well-constructed scientific experiment so our lived experience of life may be different from the actual truth.
Incredibly easy to explain this without trying hard. The subject has some sense of movement forwards, and the brain rationalises it, like we do in dreams, imagining a tunnel or a canoe or whatever familiar thing is associated with that feeling of drifting or flying. So we can conclude that maybe near death experiences cause a feeling of falling or drifting, and is a bit like dreaming - not that objective reality should be rejected.
The thing I don't get about accounts of NDE and what people say about them afterwards is this: if they lived to tell the tale, their near death wasn't actual death. They didn't "peak over to the other side". So whatever they experienced was what the brain experienced well within the realm of the living. And we know it was within the living enough that the person recovered and was able to recount the experience! How can there be any argument about this? How anyone can draw any conclusions about an alleged afterlife from this is beyond me.
Isaac Asimov famously reflected upon this. When he had a close call with death, he didn't see anything. He didn't expect to, and he didn't. It's very likely that our expectations shape what we see, at least partly... that's the brain conjuring imagery and trying to make sense of what it can, I suppose.
Whenever I've been under anesthesia, it was like an on/off switch. I didn't even dream, even though I do remember some of my dreams.
The most striking thing to me is that Ayer hopes there isn't life after death.
> My recent experiences have slightly weakened my conviction that my genuine death, which is due fairly soon, will be the end of me, though I continue to hope that it will be. (italics mine)
I do get the sense that many atheists not only reject God & the afterlife but actually don't want there to be a God or an afterlife. (I think Thomas Nagel wrote something along those lines.) I sort of get it but regardless I think it's very interesting.
Being familiar with Ayer from his Epistemology works, this writeup was unexpected. How could an empiricist write "My recent experiences have slightly weakened my conviction that my genuine death, which is due fairly soon, will be the end of me". It also directly contradicted his stance about metaphycal claims.
Here's something I don't understand about the argument that all conscious experience is some kind of illusion.
An illusion necessarily implies an entity experiencing the illusion. So what's that entity? It can't be illusions all the way down.
I think some people would rather claim that they themselves don't exist rather than admit that there might be something spiritual or unexplainable about existence. And I find that very strange.
I don't remember anything like that, but I strongly doubt I was ever in asystole. (I went looking for occurrence rates of spontaneous recovery from that 'flatlined' state, and found only case reports - all nicknaming their subjects "Lazarus...") On the other hand, it sounds like he was a lot better perfused when he lost consciousness than I was by the time I did, so who knows, really?
> McTaggart derived his certainty from his metaphysics, which implied that what we confusedly perceive as material objects, in some cases housing minds, are really souls, eternally viewing one another with something of the order of love.
Maybe I am wrong but isn’t that how shinto perceives the world? That a tree you might chop down will kill a kami who lives there. So our acts of here and now have a much bigger implication on the musubi than on the actual after life.
I read a book about this called Life After Life, written in the 1970s. A doctor spoke with hundreds of people who experienced Near Death Experiences, and wrote commonalities / patterns that most experienced. Found this absolutely fascinating. Coming from a non-religious background, I found this book somewhat of a brain breaker.
As others mentioned (including @BoardsOfCanada) - search for "NDE" on a video platform, and watch a few. I make no claims to be a professional assessor of truth/lies, but when you watch many of those videos, ask yourself honestly, is this person lying (or rehearsing a staged story)? Additionally, some mention "impossible" information (like an out-of-body experience, where they are able see something outside of the room, which would be impossible for their body to do; or receive/hear information).
What I appreciate about that book is that the doctor (Raymond Moody) doesn't offer judgements or much of his own opinions, but he tries to faithfully retell what the patient experienced.
What's interesting is some of the discussions the patients have with the "luminous being(s)" and souls/spirits/entities on the other side...
They seem to frequently ask questions like, "What did you learn (while on Earth)?" - and there is the implication that our souls are sent to Earth with a specific mission.
The people who experience these NDEs also often say that this other world (spirit/soul world?) feels MORE REAL than the Earth world, and that they report feeling finally "at home".
Other interesting observations - (1) they rarely smell anything in the other world, (2) many report perfect sight / knowledge (for example, can clearly see infinite detail of a mountain range on the horizon), (3) Often hear musical "chimes", (4) the "luminous beings" have a sense of humor, and are not judgemental during the life-review, (5) During the life review, they often get to see the experience from another perspective - for example, during a fight with a sibling, you can see the fight/feelings from the other siblings' perspective, (6) the people often come back with some sort of "gift" / power - for example, the ability to sense other peoples' emotions at a distance (like extreme empathy), or to heal people with touch. (7) Apparently suicide is a big no-no - the people who attempted to kill themselves were essentially "scolded", told that it was a huge mistake - "We" are not supposed to decide who dies, including ourselves - and that we have a mission to carry out, even if the circumstances are difficult. That was a bit shocking to read...
Pretty fascinating stuff.
I personally have not experienced an NDE, but I have spoken to several trusted friends - including a man who drowned as a child, and was brought back to life. He experienced the common "symptoms" of the NDE described in those videos... just the level of detail he can recall from the conversation he had with the "luminous being", and the extreme feeling of "home" and intense love he experienced - he said that since that point, he's not afraid of death at all, and after that experience, he felt strongly driven to become a teacher and help others....
For Ayer similar near death experiences give more evidence for the afterlife. I admit that it seems better than different, but it's still incredibly weak and not unexpected. Dying brain having similar perceptions is not that unexpected. Just like machine elves are when taking DMT.
Ayer makes good points that evidence of dualism does not imply 'spirit' or soul dualism, or existence of a deity.
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I did not "see" anything other than a bright light, but I was overcome with an incredible feeling that I was in the presence of, and communicating with somebody who was conveying a message of absolute love for, and total understanding of everything that I was. The feeling of euphoria is impossible to fully describe, because of the absoluteness of it.
I wanted to stay where I was. It was the best feeling I'd ever experienced, and I was content. Somehow, I was "shown" some bits of what I had to live for -- people I had not yet met, and amazing places and things that I had not yet seen or done. I don't really remember making a choice to return, but I woke up in a hospital with a broken back and other injuries. I later learned that I had been hit by a car while riding my bicycle, and was given CPR by a passing stranger.
It makes me uncomfortable to talk about this because it's all just so unbelievable, but there it is.
As the years have gone by, I've met the friends and family that I had in my visions, and I've also been to the places and done the things that I saw myself doing in the vision.
My whole perspective on life was changed by this event, and I have no fear of death whatsoever.
https://www.nderf.org/Experiences/1kevin_p_nde.html
Which isn't my real name btw. They pseudonymized that.
EDIT I did a little searching. I think it might have been an old report about Ketamine before it became more wide known. Apparently it was used during the Vietnam War.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketamine#Near-death_experience
>>it's a safer bet to treat these experiences as arising from mind rather than beyond it
Your brain has to be alive and exist normally for it to have these experiences. So its quite obvious, nothing is coming from outside of it.
I do feel like its some kind of brain rebooting itself or something like that.
Its sad babies can't tell us if they experience the same during childbirth, but I have a guess that they experience something similar as well.
Its just that the brain is starting up and checking if there is a OxDEADBEEF or a fresh boot. And giving you the primal, brain not initialising any other interface(like eyes, ears, limbs etc). You experience what life would be if only brain existed on its own without everything else apart from it.
Related, and hinted at by my original comment: the brain is capable of generating truly profound experiences. There is a tendency to ascribe them to something 'beyond ourselves' but again, advances in medicine and neuroscience have shown that these are explicable, subject to manipulation by chemical and electrical signals, which again suggests a material basis for conscious experience.
I said this in my other comment but, when you say the brain generates truly profound experiences, you beg the question (in the philosophical sense of the phrase). It's all in the word "experience." For in order for an experience to happen, some entity has to be experiencing. For there to be an illusion, there has to be an entity being deceived. And then how do you explain that entity? It can't be illusory experiences all the way down..
Any honest person has to see the connection between experience and the material brain. But I don't think it's honest to say it's obvious that experience is entirely material. The connection is deeply mysterious and may never be understood. I personally would rather accept that than claim that I don't really exist just so that everything can be explained.
To say we haven't made progress on understanding consciousness is to move the post; we continue narrowing the 'hard problem' and eventually it seems like there will be nothing left other than a misunderstanding, something like the resolution of Xeno's paradox.
You can try to claim that this question is meaningless, but that doesn't seem principled to me, not to mention that it completely ignores the fact that gestures broadly all this is happening.
Edit: happy to chat more about this, as it's deeply interesting to me and I do want to understand your perspective. It may need a longer form than this thread allows. I've added a link to get in contact with me on my about page.
I'd be happy to talk more as I am passionate about this. I think the idea that there is no soul is actually extremely dehumanizing, and involves someone essentially saying "I don't really exist" (even if they redefine "I exist" to mean something more Materialist, it is, in my view, still saying that). I'll ping you on bluesky.
BTW there's a book "The night of fire" by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt that describes a similar experience he got staying alone in a desert. And, of course, countless other descriptions, e.g. "The varieties of religious experience" by W. James. You cannot convince anyone, of course; but there's also no way to fake it.
> To be honest, I wouldn't believe it either if I had not experienced it myself.
If you anticipated that others would find this hard to believe, why not write down those visions in detail at the time? That would have provided evidence others could have used to later evaluate whether your visions were accurate.
As a skeptic, and without knowing more details, I am leaning towards self-fulfilling prophecy (you did the things in the visions because you had the visions) or confirmation bias (similar to how horoscopes feel accurate because they're vague enough to map many situations).
I hope you're right though.
I was 15 years old at the time, and not much of a writer.
Most of my visions did not stay in my consciousness. Over the years, when I would meet somebody new or be in a place that I had seen, it would trigger the memory of the vision. You can attribute this to Déjà vu if you like, but in this case I knew exactly where/when I had seen the vision beforehand, and it sometimes triggered more memories of not-yet-happened events.
I'm old now, and I haven't had any experiences related to my visions for over a decade. I'm pretty sure that all of my visions have now been lived.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardecist_spiritism
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardecist_spiritism#cite_note-...
Near death experiences are probably the best way we have to assess the nature of reality.
Now, it's almost impossible to reach people who aren't ready with any arguments, but I'll outline some possible steps for anyone who's on the verge.
- Go to youtube, type in NDE and listen to a few
- Try to come up with a "rational" explanation (hallucinations, the brain dumping DMT, preconceived notions from Hollywood, the general culture and so on)
- Assess whether these make any sense under the conditions that NDEs occur, and scratch the ones that don't. Then watch a few more and you'll have to reject more still.
In particular, what was convincing to me, is how very very similar the cases are and that they happen to tribes living at a stone age technological level with no contact to Hollywood, and that there is a described case from Plato from over 2000 years ago that is identical to modern cases.
In the end, my conclusion is that objective reality has to be partially rejected, and all experience is the combination of some "nature of reality" as interpreted by each individual. This leads to clear contradictions if one assumes that there is one objective reality. Case in point, in NDEs there are a couple of common stages, and experiencers go through some or all of these, most often only some. One is traveling from the location of death to a heavenly realm. For westerners this often is flying through a star trek like hyperspace tunnel, while for stone age people they might be in a canoe that travels by itself to a distant island. So the nature of it is something like being pulled silently without effort towards a point in a manner that isn't part of the experiencer's notion of what's possible, and it is then realized and interpreted by each individual in the closest way that they can relate to.
One hard hit in the head can literally change your personality entirely, then you have alzheimers and all the other degenerative brain diseases that will erase "you". Even if you avoid all that "you" will be wildly different every 15-20 years.
Christianity gets through this by saying you will return to your prime. That just seems kind of childish to me though, like "yeah when you die you and all your friends and family are gonna be 25 and you live in paradise together forever".
How do you resolve the idea of an eternal consciousness with the very real and common occurence of people losing their consciousness while they are still alive?
It’s rare for me to remember -aspects of my daily life in dreams.
I would think being dead would be a significant hinderance.
That said, we do then to attribute a lot of thinking to the technology of the time. Buddhists had their wheel of time, folks today think we live in a computer simulation. Things like that, so best not to take the idea too seriously.
Remember, life is too important to take seriously.
So the brain is animated by the soul, and also limits and shapes its experience. When we're affected by anesthetic, or we're badly injured, or have a stroke, our conscious experience is impacted, while we're here on this plane. Eventually we leave this form and experience reality more truly. This could be one reason why NDEs happen - the brain is so badly damaged that it fails to even contain the soul and we approach a more death-like state.
Even if we assume those giant leaps of faith are true, it still means "I" go away when I die. My soul will only remember "me" as a brief torture where I was forced into a human shell and had to endure being "me" before being released once more to be a higher being. All my struggles, battles, self-improvement, etc. will be meaningless and my kids will be a cruel trick I played that imprisoned other souls.
To your points, I would say that
> life is a kind of prison we endure before being liberated by death
Not exactly. More like a journey that we go through for mysterious reasons. Maybe so our soul can grow by learning lessons and having challenges that can only be when the stakes are real.
> "I" go away when I die
Not necessarily. Certain aspects of you, which are more contingent on brain traits, e.g. intelligence, some temperament. But the deepest self wouldn't disappear.
> All my struggles, battles, self-improvement, etc. will be meaningless
I see what you mean, but I wouldn't call it meaningless just because it wasn't "completely real." Also, I do believe that lessons learned here are learned for good. The soul is here to grow.
> my kids will be a cruel trick I played that imprisoned other souls.
I don't really see how you got here. In this theory, your kids are also here for their own purpose. Relationships and love are still meaningful and real. Life is cruel and involves a great deal of suffering, but that doesn't mean that existence is inherently bad.
I have questions...
If you change/destroy parts of the antenna or the 'bioelectronic circuits' the channel fades out, and you get more and more noise, until there is no signal anymore.
No more resonance with the frequency of your station.
That equals death on this plane.
What lead me to this apart from NDE/OOBE are the cases of so called Terminal Lucidity, when old or very sick people die, but regain conciousness in their last moments. In a timeframe from sometimes two to three days before exitus, but mostly just a few dozen seconds to minutes before exitus.
The thing is that some of these brains are so rotten and degenerated, that it is impossible according to our current understanding, that these people are even able to do anything coordinated, not to mention speak, and recognizing their loved ones/family, telling them things.
And yet this happens again and again, not that often, but it does. While their brains are absolute mush.
In a similar vein, there are stories of lost animals like cats and dogs finding their way back to the humans they once lived with. Over long distances like several hundred miles, often after years.
That can't happen by random chance. So either they can read signs, and understand our words better than we think, or there are other mechanisms at play.
What that is telling about this otherplaneness is uncertain, just that it exists.
Probably impossible to gain any certain insights about that, because of wrong cabling, interface, modulation, format, whatever.
At best we can just hope to skim the interface, membrane and get a few hazy views from the other side near that membrane, but not that far through it.
Maybe there are even other interfaces, membranes, from up there, going on and on, and/or recursing into others.
Read CS Lewis 'The Problem of Pain' then think about emergent dimensions/holographic worlds being the only way to have our kind of consciousness/self determination/free will/experiential identity if one exists in a underlying dimensional state with no linear time, no physical limitations, etc, and so forth. The emergent reality/holographic world is the 'chess board with clear rules' needed for us to have/experience/pretend to free will from the underlying reality without time or rules. In CS Lewis 'The Problem of Pain', pain sucks, but is needed for this world to do whatever it is supposed to do. Alzheimers, consequences of blows to the head, etc aren't themselves needed but they themselves are emergent from the rules that are needed for 'here' to exist and serve it's purpose. But they are also just part of (or structure for) the holographic/emergent reality, not the true base lower (higher?) reality.
Not manic. Just not great at communicating these thoughts. Don't lock me up please.
So there will be errors in the great plan of whichever nature. Some of them may get caught by error correction codes, some others not.
These uncaught exceptions are enabling deviations from the great plan :-)
In our limited experiential world things appear to decay. If our spacetime experience is emergent from something else (in which time doesn't exist), or is holographic, we have no idea what's really going on at the fundamental (lower/higher?) level. How can you have decay in the base reality that doesn't have time? Is decay not an artifact of time? If time is emergent not fundamental, so is decay.
Check out some Susskind and CS Lewis The Problem of Pain. It makes for a fun thought game.
Start with 'what reality/rules would we need in order to exercise truly free will' (the concepts from The Problem of Pain). We need time (action/consequence). We need to be able to impact ourselves/others. I need to be able to hurt you/myself. Kill you/myself. Need the mechanisms that are then used/abused by things like Alzheimer's. But if we bring in Susskind, that is all just happening in the emergent space/time (my emergent free will reality) not in the base reality (my lower/higher? reality that doesn't have things like time). There is no reason that what impacts us in the 'free will reality' that enables us to have free will/experience time also impacts whatever we might be in the base reality (my lower/higher? reality). In that reality without time we are the child just born and the body turned to dust. We are forever in the moments when our loved ones held us. That is heaven. Not some new experiential timeline to reflect. We ARE ALL THE MOMENTS, not a reflection on the moments after the fact.
Hell IS repeating every bad thing, forever. Heaven is experiencing love from your loved ones, forever. But not in some cloud world we exist in after death thinking back. But in the same one that everything happened, only at the non-emergent level not the emergent spacetime level. Me in the non-emergent reality is already in heaven/hell, is already experiencing it all, because it exists in a space without emergent linear time. I will be in heaven, because I will have hugs from my mom and hugs for my children, forever. That is where lower (higher?) level me will dwell.
To be fair, this is the point I worked back from after my mom died. How do I deal with loosing her (as an ex-Catholic). In what reality are her hugs for me forever? This is what I gamed out. We are all the moments, forever, in the non-emergent reality without linear time.
How else can the non-emergent true reality contain our emergent linear space time reality?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Susskind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Problem_of_Pain
You can have the same question about the near death experiences. Are they experiences of an objective reality somewhere or is it a common physical situation triggering similar experiences across people and cultures.
> In particular, what was convincing to me, is how very very similar the cases are and that they happen to tribes living at a stone age technological level with no contact to Hollywood, and that there is a described case from Plato from over 2000 years ago that is identical to modern cases.
This sounds intriguing.
> Case in point, in NDEs there are a couple of common stages, and experiencers go through some or all of these, most often only some. One is traveling from the location of death to a heavenly realm. For westerners this often is flying through a star trek like hyperspace tunnel, while for stone age people they might be in a canoe that travels by itself to a distant island.
Ah, so the similarity is all enitrely in your interpretation of these clearly dissimilar visions.
So, bright lights and tunnels. Shared human visual neurological glitches. Heard of "tunnel vision"? That's a real medical condition, which can be caused by blood loss, adrenaline, or low oxygen.
The tunnel vision you experience during hypovolemia is nothing like the "tunnel of light" reported in NDEs. It's just that you lose your visual field gradually, from periphery to fovea, as your visual cortex loses perfusion. In theory, a well-perfused brain dying for some other reason, such as a sudden complete loss of oxygen supply secondary to circulatory collapse secondary to fine VF or asystole, would retain the ability to "fill in" with something, the way our brains in normal operation cover the many gaps and lacks in our visual perception. (This is part of why I asked the other fellow not to bother me again about this at least until he knows what "ATP" means and why that is relevant here.)
It is strikingly absurd to imagine any of this does or can support a radically materialist conception of the universe. As I said before, materialism is exactly as religious as simulationism - exactly so, inasmuch as I expect to see a "solution" for the "mind-body problem" [1] around the same time as we solve the halting problem or constructively prove P=NP.
[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dualism/#DuaMinBodPro
Tunnel vision is a tunnel, in your vision, associated with death. Since I'm talking to people who will latch on to anything at all similar to a tunnel in reports of experiences, and say "See! Commonalities!", this is sufficient to explain why a lot of the nearly-dead throughout world history have involved something tunnel-like somewhere in their reports.
I don't know who is reporting a "tunnel of light" specifically. I would expect that belongs to a post-1970s culture of near death experiences that's part of the rest of the culture of Forteana and the Mysteries of the Unexplained.
When talking about what evidence supports, really we're talking about the opposite: which theories evidence falsifies, and which surviving, falsifiable theory is the most parsimonious. Falsifiability matters, and parsimony matters. Otherwise, you can imagine what you like, but it carries no weight as an explanation.
But, luckily for me, I'm not among those here who have arrogated unto themselves the requirement, with its implicit assumption of the necessary capacity, to explain all or indeed any of this. I'm just here to counsel those who do persist in such insistence, much in the manner of that fellow whose job it used to be to murmur memento mori.
I think it's cute how hardcore materialists believe it is even in theory possible to distinguish their position from ideological simulationism. Maybe in a thousand years. Not now. But phenomenology is the name of the philosophical discipline that you are now struggling to recapitulate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_Er
What are the unaccountably unlikely commonalities that I should be noticing? Between this and the article, I see only: some kind of colored light, some kind of officiating beings, and a river (A.J.Ayer says he presumably had the Styx in mind, though amusingly in the actual ancient Greek account it's a different river and there's no need to cross it).
https://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_my_stroke_of_ins...
> And I look down at my arm and I realize that I can no longer define the boundaries of my body. I can't define where I begin and where I end, because the atoms and the molecules of my arm blended with the atoms and molecules of the wall.
This claim from Ayer -- how do we make the leap from these experiences existing to being evidence of a life after consciousness?
> On the face of it, these experiences, on the assumption that the last one was veridical, are rather strong evidence that death does not put an end to consciousness
> the brain dumping DMT
Why do you exclude this hypothesis? It's well known that some drugs such as DMT do cause very similar hallucinations among people, even across cultures (as is the case with NDE).
1. I have met three identical twins so far. Each of them has reported having some kind of communication with the other twin that could not be explained by conventional means. I have no reason to think any of them lied.
2. My sister used to be very into astrology. She could predict someone's star sign within a few minutes of meeting them to much better than 1 in 12 accuracy.
I do not present these as proof of anything. I do not expect anyone else to believe them or give them any credence. This is just anecdata. I haven't worked out any rational explanation for them.
But I'm inclined to believe two things from them:
1. Brains are weird. Human psychology is complex and fascinating and does things that we do not understand.
2. That there are well-conceived, well-constructed scientific experiments that show there is no scientific basis for telekinesis or astrology, that these are not "real" things, does not necessarily contradict the human experience of them as "real" things. We do not inhabit a well-constructed scientific experiment so our lived experience of life may be different from the actual truth.
Isaac Asimov famously reflected upon this. When he had a close call with death, he didn't see anything. He didn't expect to, and he didn't. It's very likely that our expectations shape what we see, at least partly... that's the brain conjuring imagery and trying to make sense of what it can, I suppose.
Whenever I've been under anesthesia, it was like an on/off switch. I didn't even dream, even though I do remember some of my dreams.
> My recent experiences have slightly weakened my conviction that my genuine death, which is due fairly soon, will be the end of me, though I continue to hope that it will be. (italics mine)
I do get the sense that many atheists not only reject God & the afterlife but actually don't want there to be a God or an afterlife. (I think Thomas Nagel wrote something along those lines.) I sort of get it but regardless I think it's very interesting.
An illusion necessarily implies an entity experiencing the illusion. So what's that entity? It can't be illusions all the way down.
I think some people would rather claim that they themselves don't exist rather than admit that there might be something spiritual or unexplainable about existence. And I find that very strange.
> McTaggart derived his certainty from his metaphysics, which implied that what we confusedly perceive as material objects, in some cases housing minds, are really souls, eternally viewing one another with something of the order of love.
Maybe I am wrong but isn’t that how shinto perceives the world? That a tree you might chop down will kill a kami who lives there. So our acts of here and now have a much bigger implication on the musubi than on the actual after life.
As others mentioned (including @BoardsOfCanada) - search for "NDE" on a video platform, and watch a few. I make no claims to be a professional assessor of truth/lies, but when you watch many of those videos, ask yourself honestly, is this person lying (or rehearsing a staged story)? Additionally, some mention "impossible" information (like an out-of-body experience, where they are able see something outside of the room, which would be impossible for their body to do; or receive/hear information).
What I appreciate about that book is that the doctor (Raymond Moody) doesn't offer judgements or much of his own opinions, but he tries to faithfully retell what the patient experienced.
What's interesting is some of the discussions the patients have with the "luminous being(s)" and souls/spirits/entities on the other side...
They seem to frequently ask questions like, "What did you learn (while on Earth)?" - and there is the implication that our souls are sent to Earth with a specific mission.
The people who experience these NDEs also often say that this other world (spirit/soul world?) feels MORE REAL than the Earth world, and that they report feeling finally "at home".
Other interesting observations - (1) they rarely smell anything in the other world, (2) many report perfect sight / knowledge (for example, can clearly see infinite detail of a mountain range on the horizon), (3) Often hear musical "chimes", (4) the "luminous beings" have a sense of humor, and are not judgemental during the life-review, (5) During the life review, they often get to see the experience from another perspective - for example, during a fight with a sibling, you can see the fight/feelings from the other siblings' perspective, (6) the people often come back with some sort of "gift" / power - for example, the ability to sense other peoples' emotions at a distance (like extreme empathy), or to heal people with touch. (7) Apparently suicide is a big no-no - the people who attempted to kill themselves were essentially "scolded", told that it was a huge mistake - "We" are not supposed to decide who dies, including ourselves - and that we have a mission to carry out, even if the circumstances are difficult. That was a bit shocking to read...
Pretty fascinating stuff.
I personally have not experienced an NDE, but I have spoken to several trusted friends - including a man who drowned as a child, and was brought back to life. He experienced the common "symptoms" of the NDE described in those videos... just the level of detail he can recall from the conversation he had with the "luminous being", and the extreme feeling of "home" and intense love he experienced - he said that since that point, he's not afraid of death at all, and after that experience, he felt strongly driven to become a teacher and help others....
https://www.amazon.com/Life-After-Bestselling-Investigation-...
Worth checking out, even if just for curiosity / open the mind's sake...
Ayer makes good points that evidence of dualism does not imply 'spirit' or soul dualism, or existence of a deity.