Near-death experiences fascinate me. Maybe a bit less now than they used to, as the older I get, the more accepting I am of the undeniable reality that I'm not going to live forever.
But I used to devour books about near-death experiences with relish back when I really didn't like the thought of dying.
Recently I read a review in the Washington Post of a book that I would have loved to read in the days I was more afraid of death than I am now, "Sebastian Junger was a skeptic of the afterlife. Then he nearly died."
That's a gift link from my digital subscription. Hopefully it will work for you. If not, this PDF file of the review is another way to read it.
Download Sebastian Junger’s ‘In My Time of Dying’ reviewed - The Washington Post
Here's some excerpts to whet your appetite for reading the entire review of In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife.
The eventual diagnosis: a ruptured aneurysm in a pancreatic artery that had caused a massive abdominal hemorrhage, with enough blood loss to bring Junger perilously close to death. As surgeons worked to save him, Junger experienced the presence of his late father, who invited his son to join him. “There’s nothing to be scared of,” he seemed to say. “Don’t fight it.”
Junger, a confirmed atheist and an adherent of the scientific method, had been raised by a physicist (his father) and a painter (his mother). His upbringing had left little room for a spiritual experience like this one, which turns out to be the central conundrum of this book and, I’d venture, his life. The meeting with his father was understandably unnerving. “He was dead, I was alive, and I wanted nothing to do with him.” But it’s hard to unsee what you’ve seen: His father had not only visited him but opened the door to the idea that an afterlife might actually exist.
Really? Show me the proof. Oh, you can’t. Well, how can something be true if you can’t prove it? Ted Kaptchuk, a well-regarded Harvard physician, once told a New Yorker writer that he’d always “believed there is an important component of medicine that involves suggestion, ritual and belief,” adding: “All ideas that make scientists scream.”
...Can we prove an afterlife exists? No. Might one exist? Junger gives us reason to believe in that possibility. In any case, how lucky we are that Junger survived and that we’re able to join him on another mind-blowing adventure — this time to a place all of us will one day visit.
I have no doubt that Junger truly did have the experiences he describes that followed a harrowing medical emergency.
The big question, of course, is what to make of his visions. That's an unsettled question, though there's reason to believe that near-death experiences are a product of a brain on the edge of dying. Who knows for sure, though?
No one, including Sebastian Junger.
NDE’s are regularly aired by those who have experienced them and, as often reported can have a profound, life changing effect on people. But that said, as a naturalist and one who regards all the so-called mysteries of life, mind, self, consciousness as being biological, I can see no sense in postulating a ‘life’ after death. Also, no independent, non-biological entity that may survive death has ever been found – only assumed and believed in.
Nature – which includes inorganic as well as organic material – works perfectly well and has existence and non-existence as a basic part of its functioning – or perhaps, its total function. As an integral part of this scheme, birth and death are inevitable and necessary and wired into all of natural evolution. Even planets, suns and galaxies come to an end; creation and destruction being natural principles – and the universe rolls merrily along.
The discussions and assumptions will always go on, it belongs to our human nature – particularly the mental aspects where thinking overlays the actualities and realities of birth and death with mind created hopes, fantasies, desires and generally concepts that merely serve to console and placate our fears of total annihilation.
As the old saying goes: “Hope springs eternal from the human breast.”
Posted by: Ron E. | July 18, 2024 at 02:13 AM
"The big question, of course, is what to make of his visions. That's an unsettled question, though there's reason to believe that near-death experiences are a product of a brain on the edge of dying. Who knows for sure, though?"
Umpteen umpteen times you've written here that you're adamantly sure that consciousness is nothing more than a neural illusion.
The consensus among neuroscientists is that NDEs are rooted in neurobiological processes rather than evidence of an afterlife. Not "no one knows for sure."
Posted by: sant64 | July 18, 2024 at 09:45 AM
I haven't yet read the full thing, that you've linked to, but basis a quick read of this post: To conclude from NDEs that afterlife's a thing, or even that it's "not settled", is the same category of error as imagining that dreams are proof of reincarnation, or that psychedelics-induced hallucinations are proof that there's guardians that gatekeep otherworldly realms, or that hallucinations encountered when meditating means that there are stars and constellations within us --- or if not quite proof, that these things are not settled.
Sorry to disagree, Brian, but these things are completely settled. (That is, nothing is 100℅ settled, and all knowledge is provisional and subject to updation; but leaving that blanket qualification aside, there are no grounds to imagine this is not settled.)
We do know what NDEs are about. Oxygen deprivation of the brain, for one thing. And if our understanding isn't 100℅ crystallized on this, then that's still no reason to go looking for extravagant explanations like an afterlife. Extraordinary claims call for extraordinary evidence; and no evidence had so far been presented.
NDEs are no more than hallucinations triggered by the brain being deprived of oxygen, and other similar causes. I think we can take that as entirely settled.
Sure, this is a great subject for further research. Sure, we'll update our worldview with whatever new thing science comes up with on this, including even an afterlife if that's actually what turns up. But as things stand: Sorry again to to disagree, but NDEs have nothing to do with afterlife. There's no afterlife, and that's as settled as anything can be.
Posted by: Appreciative Reader | July 18, 2024 at 11:05 AM
Read the full article just now. (Thanks for the link, Brian!)
First, I think I misread the angle of your post when I speed-read through it yesterday. I wasn’t so much disagreeing with you, I see now, as disagreeing with Junger on this. It’s not you who were claiming that “it isn’t settled” and that NDEs maybe are indication of an afterlife, it was Junger who was doing that; and you were only paraphrasing the content of his article, and presenting his conclusion not yours. My bad, I should have known better.
Two: this somewhat tangential observation: Let’s say, hypothetically, that the evidence does show us that there’s actually an afterlife. That doesn’t actually bring us any closer to a theistic worldview. That’s actually a non sequitur, if we really think this through, I mean the theism/atheism angle vis-a-vis the afterlife thing. In general terms, a theistic schema isn’t necessarily predicated on the existence of an afterlife for us humans; and nor does the existence of an afterlife for us humans say anything about whether there’s a God, or a whole gaggle of gods, who are the creators and/or the managers of all of this whole cosmos. It’s just that the actual evidence does not point to either an afterlife, or to a theistic schema; but the two are separate things really, generally speaking, even though specific woo-woo beliefs often happen to incorporate both those.
And three, the main substance of my comment yesterday, that I’d posted without having reading the actual article itself, does seem to apply fully to Juger’s piece. I mean, at a personal level I’m all sympathy for the man’s vulnerability at that point, that led him to those thoughts, absolutely; but I think it was the combination of the sheer poignancy of his vivid hallucinations, as well as the …well, the vulnerability at his having come so close to dying, that made him leap away from his earlier rationality and on to this elementary error in reasoning. Like I said, his conclusions about an afterlife --- either that there actually is an afterlife, or even the weaker version of that, which is that whether or not there is an afterlife isn’t quite settled --- are an elementary error in reasoning, and of exactly the same category of error as someone taking dreams to be a proof of reincarnation, or taking psychedelic-fueled visions as evidence for supernatural realms and entities, or taking visions seen during meditation as evidence for the existence of constellations within the human microcosm. All they are is hallucinations, every one of them, that’s what’s reasonable to believe in the absence of convincing objective evidence to the contrary.
Posted by: Appreciative Reader | July 19, 2024 at 11:32 AM
Read the full article just now. (Thanks for the link, Brian!)
First, I think I misread the angle of your post when I speed-read through it yesterday. I wasn’t so much disagreeing with you, I see now, as disagreeing with Junger on this. It’s not you who were claiming that “it isn’t settled” and that NDEs maybe are indication of an afterlife, it was Junger who was doing that; and you were only paraphrasing the content of his article, and presenting his conclusion not yours. My bad, I should have known better.
Two: this somewhat tangential observation: Let’s say, hypothetically, that the evidence does show us that there’s actually an afterlife. That doesn’t actually bring us any closer to a theistic worldview. That’s actually a non sequitur, if we really think this through, I mean the theism/atheism angle vis-a-vis the afterlife thing. In general terms, a theistic schema isn’t necessarily predicated on the existence of an afterlife for us humans; and nor does the existence of an afterlife for us humans say anything about whether there’s a God, or a whole gaggle of gods, who are the creators and/or the managers of all of this whole cosmos. It’s just that the actual evidence does not point to either an afterlife, or to a theistic schema; but the two are separate things really, generally speaking, even though specific woo-woo beliefs often happen to incorporate both those.
And three, the main substance of my comment yesterday, that I’d posted without having reading the actual article itself, does seem to apply fully to Juger’s piece. I mean, at a personal level I’m all sympathy for the man’s vulnerability at that point, that led him to those thoughts, absolutely; but I think it was the combination of the sheer poignancy of his vivid hallucinations, as well as the …well, the vulnerability at his having come so close to dying, that made him leap away from his earlier rationality and on to this elementary error in reasoning. Like I said, his conclusions about an afterlife --- either that there actually is an afterlife, or even the weaker version of that, which is that whether or not there is an afterlife isn’t quite settled --- are an elementary error in reasoning, and of exactly the same category of error as someone taking dreams to be a proof of reincarnation, or taking psychedelic-fueled visions as evidence for supernatural realms and entities, or taking visions seen during meditation as evidence for the existence of constellations within the human microcosm. All they are is hallucinations, every one of them, that’s what’s reasonable to believe in the absence of convincing objective evidence to the contrary.
Posted by: Appreciative Reader | July 19, 2024 at 11:32 AM
Ego death.
Posted by: deathcabforcutie | July 24, 2024 at 08:25 AM