#11 – Are Near-Death Experiences Evidence of an Afterlife? Fischer against near-death experiences.

Are near-death experiences evidence of an afterlife? What are we such that an afterlife could be possible for beings like us at all? In this episode, I discuss Fischer's criticisms of the evidentiary role near-death experiences have for belief in an afterlife. While he doesn't deny that they are experienced, Fischer likens near-death experiences to dreams and would only constitute evidence of an afterlife if there were something supernatural about the mind, namely, that the mind could exist without the body. Instead, he favors a naturalistic explanation of mental phenomena in which mentality is fully explicable in physical terms, and as such there is no reason to believe that any near-death experience is veridical.

However, Fischer sets an unfair explanatory burden upon the possibility of supernaturalist explanations, which entails less plausible conclusions about its inconceivability. Furthermore, the kind of naturalistic explanations he gives for near-death experiences merely provide neural correlates, which when we consider an analogy with color perception we see that this doesn't provide the kind of reduction that Fischer needs to dispatch supernaturalism about the afterlife. What we're left with is a dialectical impasse, in which near-death experiences do provide some evidence of an afterlife though perhaps misleading evidence if in actuality there is no such thing.  

Transcript

0:07

Welcome to Mortality Matters, a podcast about conceptual issues in the philosophy of death and the meaning of life. I am your host, Matthew Jernberg. What happens to us after we die? Is there an afterlife for us to go to? Or is death the end? Suppose you were on the fence about it. What kind of evidence would count so as to figure this out? The observations of others might be useful, and as it turns out, some claim to have gone to an afterlife of some sort or another, and return to tell the tale they have had. What can be described as a near death experience. But are near death experiences, really evidence of the afterlife. In this episode, I'm covering chapter eight of John Martin Fisher's book, death Immortality and Meaning In Life. Near Death Experiences Occur in Situations in which an individual's life is in jeopardy. And then only to a small percent of people they characteristically have some sort of out of body experience or some kind of life review, and many who have had near death experiences report traveling towards a light in a dark tunnel or some kind of voyage or sense of disembodied traversal. So in this chapter and the. John Martin Fisher gives a shorter version of his arguments that he spends a whole book on with his co-author, Benjamin Mitchell Yellen, in near death experiences, understanding visions of the afterlife. So in this chapter, Fisher reviews the near death experiences of a few different people such as, even Alexander Colton Burpo, Alex Malarkey, Pam Reynolds, and others. They all have very similar content, such as an out of body experience and traveling towards a light during a dark tunnel. So the details of any particular case is not super relevant for my purpose. What does matter is there seems to be a general claim that these occur in contexts in which the person is near death, typically in surgery or is in a coma or in some sort of condition where their brain is offline. Hence the thought is there's a disembodied detachment from one's body in which one has experiences independently of one's body or. In at least two of the cases, there appears to be independent corroboration of the stories. So in one such case, someone goes into cardiac arrest and is undergoing C P R, during which time the person claims to have had an out-of-body experience, and watching from above sees that his dentures were placed into a drawer. The next day he reminds the nurse of this, who was surprised because it only occurred when he was supposed to be unc. And in another case, when Pam Reynolds was undergoing surgery for a brain aneurysm, she was under anesthesia and so she couldn't have been conscious. And yet after the surgery, she reported specific conversations from the medical team about some of the details of her case that she couldn't have overheard while she was unconscious. So what both of these. Stories point to is insofar as there is independent corroboration for the veracity of one's claims while in a near death experience. This gives some evidence to believe that near death experiences are real in a objective sense. That one really does leave one's body and one can have this kind of out-of-body experience, which is not an illusion or hallucination, but is as real as it is represented. That has to say that one really is out of one's body. So Fischer tries to distinguish between two different senses of real that we use. One being subjective and the other being objective. Fischer doesn't deny that the people who underwent these near death experiences actually had those experiences. He doesn't deny the reality of their experience. Those who do, he would describe as a near death experience denier that even though a few of these people, such apparently as Alex Malarkey turned out to be fraudulent because he later claimed that he made it up and he didn't actually have the experiences that he claimed to. Not all such people are fraudulent, and some may actually have had those experiences. However, just because they had the experience doesn't mean what they were experiencing is as they thought it. As to say that the experience were vertical in this way. Fisher thinks of these near death experiences as a bit like dreams. People really dream. They really do have the experience in the dreams as they are depicted in the sense that if you have a dream of flying around or something, that really is an experience you have in the dream, but in reality, you never actually fly around, not in the way that you dream about it. Dreams are a kind of hallucination, and so to our near death experiences, according to. But there has to be some additional argument for this. It's merely denying that, like a dream, there is no such thing. Nobody actually goes outside of their bodies. That would be impossible. That is to give a conclusion without giving an argument. The sea Fischer's argument. You have to ask the question, what would have to be true of the mind? In order for a vertical out of body experience to be possible, what kind of thing is the mind such that it is so detachable from the body such that there could be a mind without a body and you would go where your mind goes? The most natural thought that would motivate this conclusion would be something called substance dualism. This is a view that the minds are souls. And that we don't have souls. We are souls, and what we have are bodies. We have a kind of accidental relationship between the mind and the. And it's detachable. So Decart famously had a view similar to this, although his view of the relationship between mind and body was a little bit more complicated insofar as he thought that we're not exactly like pilots of a ship. Or you could imagine a modern day equivalent to this analogy. Would be like a person driving a car. So you can think of your body as like a meat body, as like a vehicle, a meat vehicle. And what you are is the mind that pilots or drives around in the meat vehicle, which is accidentally related to the body that has to say it could be detached at any moment, and there's no necessity. That's linking the mind to the body. So Decart in some of the later passages of the meditations seems to suggest. That this is not his picture of what we are, and his conception of personal identity is a bit more robust than just being like a pilot of a vessel, a meat vessel. However, there's a view that's quite similar to day cards. You might think of it as just a more accidental view of the relationship between mind and body where we are just. Mines, and this is like, you might call it the pilot view. We're just driving around in our meat bodies, and when death occurs, it separates the mind from body and in certain contexts, certain near death contexts, there's a temporary separation where people move towards the light, so to speak, down the dark tunnel, but for some reason are called back, or either voluntarily or involuntarily return to their bodies to tell the tail and tell us all. What the afterlife is like during their journey in a near death experie. So Fisher describes this as a kind of supernaturalist view of the relationship between the mind and body, and he contrast this with what he calls physicalism, or he also uses the term naturalism interchangeably with his view, and he thinks that there's something magical about the mind. If it were a distinct substance from the body and were related in some kind of mysterious. What he's alluding to here is this famous problem of mind body interaction, sometimes called as the mind body problem. If the mind were a wholly distinct kind of thing that is independent of the body, such that it's possible for there to be a mind without a body. Then how is it possible for the mind to interact with the body, both in terms of what you might call upwards causation and downwards causation? So upwards causation is, think of perception or sensations. It's when some change. Is produced or brought about in the body, and that produces a change in the mind. So for instance, if you touch a hot stove, you feel pain. So there's the movement of the body which comes into contact with the hot stove, and then that produces a change in the mind, which is a sensation of pain as one's hand is burned. Likewise, there's downwards causation in which a change in the mind produces a. In the body. So for instance, that sensation of pain triggers something. Your mind may not consciously control the jerking of your hand away from the hot stove, and yet there is some kind of control that is being exerted, presumably by your mind, which produces a change in your body and retracts your hand from the hot. That would be an instance of what I'm calling downwards causation. So there's this kind of interaction which involves both upwards and downwards causation between the mind and the body. And that interaction would seem to be quite mysterious if the kind of thing that minds. R is an entirely different kind of thing than bodies and other physical interactions. So you might think, for instance, given the way causation works, that when one billiard ball hits another billiard ball, there's a kind of transmission of force. One material object hits another at a certain speed and momentum and some force is transferred to that other thing. And so there's some way of explaining it, perhaps using Newtonian mechanics. Can be explained how it is that the mechanism of causation operates in which one billiard ball, say the white ball hits the black ball, which then goes from a resting position to moving across the billiard table. And of course, Neurophysiologist produce very similar kinds of mechanistic explanations for how the nervous system works, both the central nervous system or the sympathetic nervous system in producing changes in the brain and how the brain seems to undergo different kinds of changes, so as to produce movement in the body. In the process of these explanations, there doesn't seem to be any kind of immaterial element, even if the neurophysiologist or neurologists have not fully explained how action works or how the mind works the thought is this is a. An incomplete picture from science that they're filling in the gaps. And so far there's been no good reason to think or suppose that we're going to introduce immaterial causes into the picture. And yet this is what the substance do list is committed to. There being some kind of immaterial cause It has to be immaterial because it's substance dualism as a view. The mind is a distinct kind of thing. It's not made out of matter. The way a billiard ball or any other material object is composed, it's made of different kind of stuff like soul stuff, which is a wholly different kind of substance. It's not made out of the elements of the periodic table, which would render it material. So that seems to be the view that's presupposed by many of these people reporting a near death experience, that at least there's some kind of independence of their mind from their bodies. Whether there would explicitly endorse something as robust as substance dualism is something of an open question, and I think it's a bit uncharitable to characterize a problematic view to any of these people. But at the same time, they seem to speak as if that's how they think of the relationship between the mind and the. They distinguish between they're, they're not the same according to these reporters of near death experiences, that what they are is are their minds or their souls, and that this is something severable and detachable from the bodies. And insofar as that's true, then there's a kind of independence that exists. It's not just merely possible that there could be a soul or a mind without a body, but that there is a mind without a body and out of body experiences. That's what makes it out of body. So Fisher thinks that substance dualism is false, and for this reason, the presupposition upon which many of these near-death experiences are premised is undermined. And hence, there's no good reason to believe that any of these near death experiences are vertical. They're like dreams or hallucination. And insofar as they are, dreams are hallucinations, they are not evidence of the afterlife. That's the rough outline of Fisher's argument. But of course, I think we should distinguish between evidence that's misleading versus something that's not even evidence at all. And I think in this regard, Fisher is a bit too uncharitable to these near death experiencers. And I think what they're reporting does constitute some sort of evidence, although that evidence may be misleading if it leads you to conclude that near death experiences are evidence of an afterlife, but something can be misleading evidence and still be evidence. Another problematic element of this chapter is Fisher seems to construct a false dichotomy between substance dualism. And what he describes as physicalism, which he calls the view that our minds and consciousness are entirely physical, our brains and processes in our brains. So I'm not exactly sure what that means for something to be physical, but typically it means it is fully described by the language of physics. Such that ideally, although he doesn't write about this, were there are some best system in which physics were to be finished and all discoveries of the discipline of physics would be discovered and codified into a system of natural laws that could be explicate in a whole detail without remainder. If that was possible, then consciousness would be fully explained under this. And of course I think we should distinguish between reductive and non reductive forms of physicalism. It very well may be the case that consciousness and the entirety of our mentality could be explained in purely the language of physics, but it need not. And if in fact, it turns out that the relationship between the various special sciences say between physics, chemistry, biology is not one of reduction, but there's a kind of non reductive, explanatory emergency you might call it, between the. Special sciences, then that would be a different way of characterizing the relationship between mind and body. So you wouldn't hold to this independence claim. If there is no body, there would be no mind. And yet a non reductive physicalist needn't be committed to the claim that causation only occurs the micro physical level. Or that a finished form of microphysics, so to speak, would explain everything in its own terms, that there's a kind of reductive element to a physical explanation that would only occur at the micro physical level that may in fact be impossible. So that there are non reductive and reductive forms of physicalism and the non reductive physicalist is not committed to the claim that there's anything supernatural going on. In fact, the non reductive physicalist is committed to denying that. However, as well as the independence thesis, that there could be a mind without a body that doesn't commit one into a kind of reductivist model of causation, where it only occurs at the micro physical level, or that minds are identical. In type or token with brain states of some kind or another. Now there's a wealth of different positions in the philosophy of mind that are basically glossed over and not even considered, actually, they're not even glossed over, they're just not even considered in this. Chapter, but I'm pretty sure that John Martin Fisher is well aware of them and it would've been nice to maybe even have a footnote, if not a section devoted to trying to make sense of what near death experiences could be given different theories of the nature of the mind that Fisher is well aware of. So Dirk Para Boom, for instance, has a book defending a non reductive form of physicalism, which it would be kind of interesting. To see if there would be any difference in his take of the matter on near death experiences than, than say a more reductive form of physicalism as exemplified by figure like young Juan Kim. I'm not entirely sure. But perhaps nothing would turn on it because they may all agree with Fisher that insofar as the mind is wholly physical in some sense or another, which they may differ about, they would all agree that there's nothing about near death experiences, which would give evidence for a afterlife and for anything supernatural for that matter. So I think all of the physicalist, no matter what flavor of physicalist you may be, would agree to. However, there are philosophers who reject naturalism or physicalism, what have you about the mind, and yet also reject the Cartesian view that the mind is a distinct substance from the body, independent of it that nevertheless causally interacts. And produces changes in in the body. So for instance, there's a view of the mind called epiphenomenal, which typically is paired with what's called properties dualism. This is the view that the phenomenon of like consciousness and the characteristics of our experiences and what it is like to undergo and experience are properties of the, the activity of the matter of our brains. However, as a. It's distinct in kind and in fact they're from ordinary physical properties and that there's something special about consciousness and it's special in a way that does allow for some kind of independence such that there could be. Zombie creatures, which are physically identical to you, but lack consciousness and a zombie would be something similar. If it were even possible, it would be something similar to a body without a mind. Now, of course, zombies would still have certain mental phenomenon. Perhaps they would still have beliefs and desires. But they would not have a phenomenology. The lights would be dark on the zombies. There would be nothing going on there. If that view of the relationship between the mind and the body is epiphenomenal, that is to say there's upward causation, but no downward causation. And if consciousness were a property, Of certain kinds of material beings like humans or other animals, but not rocks or stones. Then it would be interesting to think, what implications does that have for near death experiences as evidence for the afterlife? Could near death experiences be evidence for an afterlife on a view of the mind as a kind of property's doist view? So here I think it really depends on how independent conscious properties are from matter on a property's do list view. It seems conceivable to me that there could be some kind of transferability of consciousness, and if what preserves our personal identity is our psychology of some sort or another, perhaps even phenomenal continuity, then it seems to me that on a property's do list view, It should be possible in principle for a mind to be transferable to like a machine or to download your consciousness onto a computer of some kind. Of course it wouldn't, insofar as downloadable content is concerned, one's mind would just come along for the ride with perhaps some sort of informational systems that are duplicated or transferred, but that's not the classical epiphenomenal view, which may hold that. There's something special about the wet matter of our brains. But if. Pair a property's dualist view with some kind of substrate independence view. Then it seems on the combination of those couple of views, which are intuitive, that the light of consciousness could be something that would be transferable in a way that would preserve our personal identities into a inhuman form, but it would still be a physical form. We would still need some kind of substrate, which would be material to preserve our consciousness in the. I'm not sure that would work though for an afterlife in which it's wholly immaterial. Typically, if it's something like heaven, the afterlife is a transcendental realm. It's not on the same plane of existence, so to speak. If that even makes sense to say that there are planes of existence as the ordinary material world. If that was the case, then I don't see how a property's do list could think that the afterlife were possible. And so, you know, if something was impossible. Some evidence for an impossibility would seem to be out of order. So I think that's also what's motivating fisher here. You think, well, something like the afterlife or a heaven is a transcendental realm. That's not even possible in the first instance. And so any kind of punitive experience that people have where they claim to go to an afterlife, they go towards the light through the dark tunnel and somehow come close to, if not arrive at heaven, and then they come back. That would require traversal to. Immaterial and transcendental realm as a different plane of existence, which which would be inaccessible to us unless substance dualism were true. Now, in the last episode, I wondered what would heaven have to be like if it were possible to go to, even if substance dualism were true? It seems as if there's. A kind of pairing problem in which we would become unpaired with our material bodies in this P plain of existence, and then somehow transcend to a higher or a different realm in which we would become, I guess, embodied or at least coupled with some other kind of thing in that other realm. Children will sometimes ask, well, if I were to die and go to heaven, would I just be a child forever? What would my body be like if I had a body? And if I don't have a body, what would that be like? Usually there's never any good answers to those kinds of questions. However, on a property's doist view of the nature of consciousness and the mind, even if it's paired with a robust kind of substrate independence, I don't see how you could have a transcendence in which the mind. Transcends to some other realm or other plaintiff of existence. So even if consciousness were special and independent of the body such that zombies were possible, I don't think on that view, near death experiences can be evidence of the afterlife. Nor do I think that the afterlife would be insofar it would be as it would be transcendental would even be possible under a property's do list view. Nevertheless, I think. This section could be radically expanded in a way that would be a lot more interesting. Fisher spends quite a lot of this chapter going into the details of various kinds of near death experiences that are all very similar, and it's not entirely relevant. So I think a lot of the words spent on that could have been spent on different conceptions of the mind and what implications they would have as to whether near death experiences or evidence of an after. However, there were the two cases of near death experiences with independent cooperation that you could see as a kind of argument in favor of substance dualism. So the thought here is that if the brain is offline during a near death experience and yet you have an experience, then there must be some sort of nonphysical mechanism that produces that experience, such as a. So those undergoing a near death experience, insofar as they're experiencing anything independently of the body, that means something else must be the vehicle by which those experiences are produced. So Fisher finds this argument unconvincing because he thinks that in order for there to be. Some sort of causation, like upwards or downwards causation. There must be some sort of mechanism. However, the mechanism that would interface the immaterial mind with the material brain is deeply mysterious in a way that suggests that there is no such thing and there could be no such causal interaction between an immaterial mental substance and a material body, uh, such as a brain or the body as. So here Fisher is relying on the interaction to do the work here. He doesn't mention this, but Decart famously, Anne mistakenly identified the penile gland as the locust in which the causal transmissions between the mind and the brain would occur. As it turns out, that's not what the penile gland does, but it was a good guess. So what Fishers thinks about. The so-called cases of independent corroboration is he thinks that they're so-called because it's not, he thinks that person with the dentures probably made a lucky guess and he likely just misremembered it and Pam Reynolds may have registered the relevant information of the conversation. She didn't actually overhear it. She didn't have a conscious experience cuz she was unconscious at the time under anesthesia. But the information may have registered in her brain and then later. Recollected. When she was awake. And so what the common element of this is? It, it's just much, it's very similar to dreams. So during a dream it feels as if one may live a long time or, or like some of the experiences, at least in my dreams, feel as if they have a duration much longer than the eight hours I had for them. But my time perception is kind of messed up with dreams, and this is true for everyone. And in fact, many of the dreams we recollect were only occurred to us in the last few minutes right before we woke up. And so there's a difference between the time in which the dream depicts and you know, the time. It seems like from the internal perspective of the dream, and in reality might call it the external time, the time at which the dream actually occurs. Object. And since there's a difference between those things that can distort one's perception of time as one's dreaming so too, is that also the case with near-death experiences where one retrospectively thinks that the near-death experience occurred during the surgery when in fact it may have been like a dream that only occurred in the last few minutes right before waking? So in order for the supernaturalist with as to say the substance do list to make the case that near death experiences are evidence for the afterlife fisher places. What I regard is an unfair and, strong explanatory burden upon their view. Namely, they need cases in which individuals report something that's verifiably true, but couldn't have possibly been acquired by physical mechanisms. And so one way to do that perhaps is to set up computer monitors in rooms that are not visible to patients while they're unconscious in their beds. But if they have an out of body experience, they could read presumably from the, the monitor and report later what those are. But so far, apparently no one has successfully done that. In a reliable fashion. Another thing perhaps is you might put messages on the top of bookcases that are not visible to people when they're undergoing the surgery or bookcases or shelves or something like this. So if you were looking down upon your body, you would see the message or the number and you'd be able to say what it is. And apparently that's never happened. So providing some reason to believe, or at least no reason to believe the people claim to have near death experiences actually do go out of their. Even if they have the sensation that it is. So Fisher doesn't think that any of these near death experiences are vertical, cuz if he were to admit even one that would, I think provide some reason to believe in the afterlife. So for Fisher, the mere possibility of a naturalistic explanation is superior. To the Supernaturalist explanation every time, because even if physical science is yet to be completed, that's much better than the deep mystery posited by view of the mind as a distinct substance in a supernaturalist worldview. So I actually think this is kind of unfair, explanatory burden that Fisher seems to be setting up for his opponents here. Part of the reason is think about a different, What if we lived in the Harry Potter world, or in the Lord of the Rings world, or some kind of, you know, it's not the real world. It's not the actual world, but a possible world in which magic were real. Could the mind be a distinct substance from the body in that world? I don't see why not. If physicalism were true, it may be necessarily true. And if that's the case, then in no possible world could the mind be distinct from the body. And yet I don't see a strong argument for that, or at least for me, I've always been somewhat sympathetic that zombies or other kinds of beings with minds without bodies were possible in perhaps a remote possible world. And yet that's not how it works In. The actual world. However, there's something called the conceivable argument in favor of substance dualism. If it's even conceivable for there to be a mind without a body, then it's possible for there to be a mind without a body, which means that the mind and the body are not identical, or at least the mind is not identical to any part of the body like the brain. I'm running rough shot over that argument. I mean, there's many variants of the conceivable argument. There's many variants of the modal argument for substance dualism, which are quite powerful. However, I think the debate is, Logically naive. That is to say, I think what matters is how counterfactually robust, the bridge principles between the mind and the body are in the real world, in the actual world, in the here and now, and not modally distant. Possible worlds which could be radically unlike our own. So even if mind brain identity fails even at the level of tokens, if not types, any plausibly similar possible world to our own with similar laws of nature would have a coincidence between the mind and the body. There's a so robust that something like zombies would not be possible in those kinds of world. The laws of nature would have to be radically different in order for magic to be possible and in order for zombies to be possible. But insofar as its coherent description, describing zombies and insofar as it's conceivable, I think that's some good reason to believe that it's possible. Though the laws of nature would have to be radically different, and the contrary view that would stipulate that such even moly, remote possible worlds were impossible, seems quite. Ignore your intuitions. Such so-called possibilities are. In fact, I impossibilities because presumably your principle is true. There's something question begging about that. There has to be some independent reason to believe that zombies or magic would be impossible and that there could be no possible world at which laws of nature were so radically different that such things would then be. However, when writing about near death experiences and what evidence they have for the afterlife, going into the details of the conceivably and modal arguments for substance dualism, I think would be too much of a distraction for this chapter. So I don't fault Fisher for ignoring those. Nevertheless, I think it's instructive to ask yourself how different could the world possibly be and if the world were radically different than it actually is. Could substance dualism be a more plausible explanation for near death experiences than the ones that Fisher seems to make up on the fly about some of these case studies? And some of these self reports. Sometimes this comes up in the philosophy of religion, about naturalistic evidence for the existence of God. So what kind of evidence should one need in order to believe that there's a God? If an old man in the sky spontaneously appeared and said, I am God, would that be as sufficient evidence to believe that there's a God? Or perhaps would that be reason to believe that you went? Or you had some other kind of hallucination, or you might pinch yourself to wonder if you're dreaming. And it seems as if no matter how detailed the experience would be, it would only afford a naturalistic kind of explanation, right? So if a head appeared in the sky, that would be a reason to believe that there's some sort of powerful being, which presumably under his. Power appears as a head in the sky. That in itself is no reason to believe that the head that appeared in the sky belongs to the same being that may have created the universe. In fact, you're given no reason to believe that anyone created the universe just by such experiences. Now, perhaps this is an inductive argument, so you might think that with a sufficient. Robust amount of different kinds of experiences. You could imagine that these would unify into a plausible story, especially if it conforms with one's favorite religious text. However, there is quite the gap I think, between the philosopher's conception of God and all of its perfections and pretty robust metaphysical properties and whatever kinds of experiences we could have no matter how exotic. And for similar reasons, you might think that any kind of inductive argument or at least an inductive argument based on what you classify as a religious experience, be insufficient to believe in the existence of a God. And likewise, no matter what kind of experience you might have of an afterlife, you might think that that's not really going to work as evidence for and afterlife. Alternatively, you might run that back the other direction, but if that's the case, then why shouldn't Fisher take. Reports of people with near-death experiences as evidence of her and afterlife, even if it's Dee or implausible. Seems like the two phenomenon are relatively parallel in my mind. So Fisher thinks that the near-death experience reports seem to have a kind of similarity. Not because they're perceiving anything real objectively speaking, but rather it's because the Experiencers have a kind of similarity with respect to themselves as to say there are certain cultural tropes or stories that they share about their following, the light down the dark tunnel, which is a metaphorical way of interpreting what they're experiencing, which is basically a halluc. And some evidence he gives for this is, well, apparently in Japan people don't interpret the flickering of light as light down a dark tunnel as like traversing to an afterlife. Instead, they think of it as like tending to a rock garden with friends and loved ones, which is similarly comforting and yet is interpreted differently. So the fact there are different cultural modes of interpreting these near death experiences is a reason to think. Those experiences are not vertical. And so in this way, Fisher seems to give a kind of naturalistic reduction of near death experiences, not in terms of the verticality of the experience of what's being perceived, but in terms of the characteristics of the experiences that people have. Similar hallucinations when undergoing certain kinds of trauma or near death experiences in near death contexts. And the variation between cultures is explained in terms of the kind of metaphors and. That exist in order to interpret those experiences in that society. So the reason to give these kinds of explanations to suggest that there's nothing there, there. That there is no dark tunnel with a light at the end of it. That's all just an hallucination. And in fact, he cites a neurologist, Kevin Nelson, who explains how the dark tunnels associated with the compromise of blood flow to the retina. And the bright light is a flow of neuronal excitement moving from a part of the brainstem to the subcortical visual relay and then to the occipital cortex. So different parts of the brain that is what is producing those sens. Here's the problem with these kinds of naturalistic, reductive explanations, because you can also give that for color perception. You can tell a true story about how it is that the brain processes or the eyes interpret light and that the brain processes the visual stimuli that is produced from the eyes, and yet that doesn't mean that what you see isn't real. That when you look at a red apple, That the apple isn't really red, or at least there's a bit of a debate about color perception in pH. And the metaphysics of perception and epistemology perception, but nevertheless, we don't say that ordinary color perception is hallucinogenic or a bit like a dream. And so giving a kind of mechanistic explanation as to what. Causes or gives rise to these experiences is insufficient to establish that the experiences are not by themselves vertical. The reason being is because it's very much in parallel and analogous with the kind of naturalistic reduction of explanations we can give about ordinary color perception. And yet ordinary color perception very much is vertical. So what is Fisher's explanation then as to why the near death experiences are not vertical and yet ordinary color? Perception is vertical. If he's merely appealing to naturalistic, reductive explanations, that's not gonna work. However, he does have a positive view of why it is that we have these near-death experiences. Cuz if you've bought into his argument so far and you think that, well, these aren't vertical, so then why do people have them? What, what advantage could there be, at least evolutionarily for having these near-death experiences if they're not objectively real? If there's. Afterlife and there's no traveling to the afterlife through a near-death experience, then why would we even have these kinds of things? What advantage could there be? And so this is where Fisher does concede that there doesn't appear to be any evolutionary advantage for a near-death experience on its own. However, it's a necessary byproduct or what he calls a spandrel of something that does have a survival advantage, namely having a certain calm alertness in the face of extreme. So when you're in a context which is extremely dangerous, like undergoing surgery or falling off a cliff, then the brain tends to go a bit crazy, so to speak. The brain pumps yourself through all these chemicals, which can help produce a kind of calm alertness in the face of extreme danger. But one in the side effects of this can be an out-of-body experience or other elements of the near-death experience story, which is partly why, for instance, fighter pilots would have an out-of-body experie. But also epilepsy patients or people with dementia. And so Fisher thinks that near death experiences are necessary byproducts or side effects of the brain's fight or flight impulse to stay calm and carry on. And this is true not only for the positive near death experiences, which are transformative and spiritual, or giving less anxiety, but also for the negative ones as well, which can be quite horrific. As long as they're coming along for the ride, so to speak, with the brain's ability to have an impulse for fight or flight, then so too must one, have the positive as well as the negative. The good comes with the bad, and Fisher ends this section with a bit of an appeal to ignorance. Unfortunately, by arguing that the alternative to his view, which is the substance dualism view, can't even explain ordinary perception without positing some sort of mysterious non. Mechanism by which the transmission of visual stimuli to the eyes is somehow brought to a non-physical and immaterial brain. Can't be the penal gland. It has to be something else, but it's mysterious what else it could be. And so in fact, it produces not a simpler explanation of near-death experiences or near perception. It produces a much more complex and much more mysterious explanation than ordinary physical. He doesn't specify which variety of physicalism he favors, just some kind of physicalism. And further, he thinks that appeals to the vivacity or the vividness of a near-death experience doesn't establish that it's not a dream or hallucination. Dreams can be vivid. In fact, they can be just as vivid if not more vivid than ordinary life. That by itself does not establish that there's an external reality answering to the experience one has in a near death experience. That there really is an afterlife that you really do go to and you talk to God or you know community angels and then come back to Earth. And likewise, he thinks that appealing to the similarity of the reports between the different near death experiencers does not help establish that there really is an afterlife. It just establishes, there's a certain kind of similar. Between the experiencers, between the people who are giving such reports. But again, I think that argument doesn't really work or is problematic because that's also true with ordinary color perception. And yet we don't believe that ordinary colors don't exist or that those experiences are not vertical and that there isn't an external reality that matches or corresponds with our ordinary color perceptions. Now, you may still think that perhaps, I mean, this is a view that the colors are subjective, that any kind of. What you might call is a secondary quality exists merely in the mind of the perceivers, and yet there are primary qualities that are what those secondary qualities are tracking, and perhaps like the shape of the object or its degree of reflectiveness for certain wavelengths of lights if it's associated with redness, for instance, like a red apple. And so that's how we can be confident of the reliability of our senses in our perceptual organs. And yet for some reason, we cannot be confident according to Fisher on the near death experiences. And yet we don't really have a good explanation for why that is. I think the strongest argument from this chapter is arguments against the reality of substance dualism, but those are, that argument only is strong and that argument only succeeds. And so far as near death experiences of presupposing a certain kind of substance dualism. Which he then refutes and undermines, which is the reason I think that this chapter, I think would be overall stronger if he were to consider. Models of the mind of how the mind relates to the body and argues on none of these plausible theories of the mind's relationship with the body. Does it make sense to infer that there really isn't an afterlife except for perhaps substance dualism? And on that view, that that view is clearly false about the nature of the mind? All right, so in this episode we looked at whether near death experiences really are evidence of an afterlife. And Fisher says, no. He thinks that would imply a view of the mind, which is clearly false and deeply mysterious, and in fact, there's nothing supernatural going on. Naturalism is true. The mind is physical. There is no afterlife and near-death experiences are spandrels of the flight or flight mechanism of the brain. That is to say there are necessary byproducts of something that is evolutionarily advantage. So even if near death experiences themselves are not advantageous, they are byproducts of something that is so in this way, near death experiences are no more evidence of an afterlife as a dream is evidence of whatever it is that you're dreaming about. And they have the same kind of status. They're both sorts of hallucinations according to Fisher.