If you've been following this thread for a while then you've probably noticed that when it comes to NDE's I have a high degree of skepticism for anecdotal accounts. Give me one verified account and I'll be tickled pink, but so far nobody has been able to do that.
The examples I gave are verified examples and not just anecdotal accounts. But what the verified accounts do is that they lend support for the many anecdotal accounts that are 'exactly the same' as also possibly having some substance.
The problem I see is that even with verified support that the NDE'ers account matches with witness accounts skeptics will still dismiss things. They can still say that everyone just imagined it was real, or exaggerated what actually happened or just not believe people. Thats because we cannot see for ourselves if this happened and there will never be a way of doing that.
But this is part of the problem with the different paradigm positions each side takes. If a persons belief is that there is nothing transcedent of the material world then nothing is going to convince them. They will always see these type of things a woo.
And I'm sorry, but here's where I'm going to say something that you're absolutely not going to like. I don't consider veridical NDE's to be verified accounts. In fact, I consider the testimony of the doctors and nurses to be just as much anecdotal as the patient's account is.
Now this may seem extremely biased and presumptive of me,
Yes it is extremely biased and presumptive no buts about it.
but it's based upon years of experience with normal human memory and behavior. We rarely remember things in the same way that they actually happened, and retelling them to others with whom we shared the experience often only serves to make the problem worse. We inadvertently incorporate their memories into ours, to the point that we can no longer distinguish between them. Instead the two accounts, which may have started out dissimilar eventually grow to be quite complementary.
Yeah there is some of that which happens. But we also accept an aweful lot of the retelling of stories which actually happened. But the fact that humans may sometimes if not often get the story wrong is not an arguement against the possibility that the events are exactly how they happened.
I mean some of these cases are pretty straight forward and theres not that much to get wrong. A patient who has been verified as dead, unreponsive describes what the doctors and nurses were doing at that time and the doctors and nurses acknowledging that is exactly what we were doing is not too much to remember. Besides its start to cast a wide net of undermining everyone involved like they all got it wrong. I think you will find we often accept first hand experiences as tru in everyday life.
I can understand if you discount this argument, but let me give you an analogy. Let's say that someone goes to see a clairvoyant who claims to be able to talk to the dead. The clairvoyant may begin with something very innocuous, like I'm seeing a man, his first name begins with an 'M' or an 'N'. It's either Mike, or Mark, or Nick... to which someone in the crowd will hold up their hand and say yes...Mike. To which the clairvoyant will say... he's an uncle, or a grandfather? And the audience member will reply grandfather. Now the exchange can go on like this for quite some time with the clairvoyant judiciously drawing out more and more information about the audience member's dearly departed, until at the end of the evening the audience member will be amazed at how much the clairvoyant knew about their poor deceased grandfather. Now you and I both know that this is a trick. The clairvoyant is simply following the lines of questioning that elicit a positive response, and disregarding those that don't. It looks totally inexplicable to the receptive person, but absolutely ridiculous to the skeptic.
But some NDE are not anything like this and perhaps that reveals something of the skeptic mind in that they seem to stereotype these things in simplistic terms. They have a preset framework that is totally unreal as to what actually happens.
Some NDE would be like the clairvoyant not guessing but actually being specific. Like naming the deceased, who they are and some specific message or event associated. If a clairvoyant was able to be that specific I think it would shock the audience. Of course skeptics will still say theres some trickery involved because thats their default position.
This isn't to say that in the case of NDE's either the doctor or the patient is deliberately trying to fabricate a more spectacular story, it's just that in the normal process of sharing their own perspectives the two stories meld into one, and the result seems absolutely irrefutable. Until someone makes a claim about a red shoe that isn't correct, to which the believer will simply disregard it and continue to focus on the things that haven't been refuted.
Sure people can exaggerate and even make stuff up. But what about the straight forward cases just based on the facts. Patient X was clinically dead or unconscious at the time they described events they could not have known. What people forgeet is that we can seperate NDE into two categories if you like.
One is the events happened factually. The other is what those events represent which is something harder to verify. But admitting the events factually happened is not acknowledging that NDE is real. It allows scientists to them deal with what happened by admitting they happened. If they can't do that then we don't get past finding out what is going on. If these events are denied to have even happened then all arguement stops.
It's a form of argument that's almost impossible to defeat because the true believer will simply move on to the next example, and the next one, and the next one... It's like trying to defend against a terrorist attack, the skeptic has to defeat every single version, while the believer only has to come up with a single inexplicable example in order to consider themselves to be vindicated.
The skeptic has to at least investigate a number of NDE to come to any conclusion. They have to get past their personal biases first before they can look at the evdience fairly.
But I think the real issue is that most skeptics will also be atheists and many materialists by the fact that they require physical evdience. They only believe in that which they can see themselves and want a rational explanation. So its a fundemental ontological and metaphysical issue about how the world and nature of reality is.
So a skeptic will dismiss other types of evdience like subjective conscious experience and the more transcental aspects of reality. But we know from even science that this materialist view of reality has been undermined and that there is more to reality than what we can scientifically verify. So if we are fair we have to first acknowledge that the evdience can be determined by a number of ways and not just empirically.
Anecdotal stories simply aren't trustworthy. Even well intentioned people can be vulnerable to misremembering and embellishing what was in the end just a perfectly natural and totally explicable event.
Yet our justice system relies of personal testimony. It has its place as long as there is other corroberating evdience. My support for NDE and consciousness beyond the physical brain doesn't just rely on NDE. That is just an expected symptom of a more fundemnetal idea of reality. That we as observers, conscious beings can know a reality beyond the physical world which actually influences the physical world. That the material world is just a reflection of something more fundemental like MInd. Even many pioneering quantum physicists believed this.
So the arguement for NDE is really part of a much bigger and stronger arguement for consciousness beyond the physical brain and in that sense it lends support for taking seriously NDE as perhaps revealing something about the nature or reality.
I mean take the current UFO congress hearings. Some are giving personal testimony under oath. They have said some pretty crazy things. Are we to just dismiss it all as lies. Or is there something going on. NOt necessarily aliens but somethng strange beyond current human knowledge.
So does this mean that I won't accept any evidence at all? No. Combined, AWARE and AWARE II placed thousands of visual markers on hospital shelves around the U.K, U.S. and Austria. So far nobody has reported seeing any of them. If someday, someone does, then you can call it a veridical NDE, but until then it's all just anecdotal.
I am not sure about that. I think even if someone does see the markers sskeptics will still say there was some trickery involved. Thats because we already have cases that prove someone can describe objects, events and conversations which clinically dead or unconscious. I suggest you read the examples I have given.
The events were followed up immediatly and verified so there was no time gap to forget or reimagine. The doctors just stated the facts and there was consensus. They describe these are unexplained but that doesn't mean they are true.
We have to get past this idea that acknowledging that something actually happened as it was claimed doesn't mean that something supernatural is going on. Thats another arguement to have as these examples like any examples in any field are not actually explaining what is happening. But we need to acknowledge they happen so that we can move to the next stage of determining what is going on. It may be a natural explanation.
Unless you've got one that you find particularly convincing, in which case bring it on. But don't expect me to pick one, because then you'd just go find another. You get one chance... make it a good one.
Well I investigate them all and could not find anything skeptical said about them like some other examples. Nor did I find any evdience to the contrary. The first example seems like a good one as its probably got more said about it than the others.