#12 – Are Near-Death Experiences Evidence of an Afterlife? Fischer on the significance of near-death experience.

Would it be a letdown if you discovered that your near-death experience of an Afterlife turned out to just be a dream? That what you took to be an Afterlife isn't real and that the experience was something like a hallucination? You might be surprised to learn that Fischer argues that the unreality of the Afterlife in no way diminishes the significance of near-death experiences for those who are sincere about them. He argues that near-death experiences can provide us with emotional understanding (which is quite different from cognitive understanding) that is quite similar to how we understand narratives in fiction. Fictional narratives are no less meaningful in virtue of being fictional and so too with dreams, hallucinogenic drug trips, and near-death experiences. 

Fischer's argument here in chapter 9 is premised upon the success of his argument from chapter 8 (that near-death experience offer no evidence whatsoever of the existence of an Afterlife), but were that argument to fail, then so too would his argument struggle in chapter 9 as well. If the evidence near-death experiences give us of the existence of an Afterlife turns out to be misleading, because there would be no such place, then so too would one's experience of it be a letdown: it's significance and meaning would diminish for us. Do you remember what it was like to discover that the Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus wasn't real? It was a letdown and for some of us a big letdown. So too is this the case with near-death experiences and the Afterlife.

Transcript

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Welcome to Mortality Matters, a podcast about conceptual issues in the philosophy of death and the meaning of life. I am your host, Matthew Turnberg. Can near death experiences be meaningful if it turns out that none of their contents are real in any objective sense? In this episode, I'm covering chapter nine of John Martin Fisher's book, death Immortality and Meaning in Life. In this chapter, Fisher continues his discussion of near-death experiences. Having taken himself to dispatch the notion that they provide any evidence for the existence of an afterlife, he now considers the possible objection that the awe and wonder that near death experiences inspire and the profound transformations they induce in us are best explained by their ity. That is to say, That the beings that are so experienced are not only real but supernatural. Suppose you were on the fence about whether or not there's an afterlife and further suppose that you encounter someone who tells you not only do they believe that there is an afterlife, but they believe it because they've been there and come back. They had a near-death experience. Perhaps they had some sort of car accident or some other kind of physical trauma, which put them on death's door. Where upon they went through a dark tunnel towards a bright light. They had a review of their life as a whole and a sense of profoundness and oneness and love. Perhaps they may even have transcended to some other realm in which they had conversations with people who are long dead or some other kind of mystical or supernatural experience, and for some reason, they were unable to stay. They had to return. Back to ordinary life. So they've come back to tell the tale and inform you of what life after death is like. I think in that scenario, it's reasonable to believe them if there's no counter evidence or if there's no reason to doubt that they're untrustworthy or that these people might be lying or fraudulent. Now, of course, some people may be fraudulent. But if they're otherwise trustworthy, I think there's no reason to believe that they're not sincere. However, he doesn't dispute that such cases must be insincere. He thinks many such people can be sincere. There's no good reason to believe that what they claim to have experienced has any form of objective reality. His argument is somewhat pres oppositional. So the thought here is that to rehearse some of the arguments from chapter eight, in order for that to be true, what must be true of you such that what you describe as even possible, how is it even possible in the first instance for one to separate from one's body? Well, the presumption here is that one has a soul or as to say, one's mind is one's soul. And. It can exist without a body. And furthermore, it can exist in some immaterial way. It can transcend to some supernatural realm. So Fisher thinks that's a deeply mysterious notion, and in fact is false, that the mind doesn't work that way and the mind cannot exist without the body. And as such, there's no good reason to believe those experiences as reported are in fact true. Or as I might say, vertical. To say what they purport to experience are as exactly as they are represented by the experience itself, that it's not some sort of illusion or hallucination. So Fisher thinks that near death experiences are a bit like dreams, where in your dream life, all of the things you think are happening aren't really happening. So in chapter nine, you might find at this point of the argument, something incredibly deflating about Fisher's explanation, where you might find it overly reductionist. And so what he takes away at the left, he tries to give back with the right fisher attempts to explain how it is. That near death experiences can still be meaningful and significant for those who have them, even if they're not vertical as to say, even if there is no supernatural realm for one to go to in this way. Fisher's argument here in chapter nine is a little bit similar to certain atheists who can explain how life can still be meaningful or how morality can still have some form of objective basis absent a God, and the arguments proceed in a somewhat parallel fashion. So first Fisher reminds us of all sorts of other awesome things. Things that induce awe or wonder, which are not supernatural things like a beautiful sunset over in the ocean, or the Great Wall of China, or the Grand Canyon, or the pyramids of Egypt and so on. So the thought here is it's not necessary for something to be supernatural in order for it to be awesome or inspiring of wonder. So although Fisher doesn't explicitly state this, he's softening up the reader by describing purely natural phenomenon, which are nevertheless awesome. In order to illustrate how it is that Supernaturalism is not a necessary condition for anything to be worthy of awe, and while in the last chapter, Fisher drew a parallel between near death experiences and dreams. Here in chapter nine, he draws a similar parallel, but instead of with dreams, instead with hallucinogenic drugs like L s D. So he recounts personal experience with L S D that was reported by Oliver Sachs. And the details of the case are not super relevant. I'm not gonna recount them here, but they basically have exactly the same form of descriptions that a near death experience has. Namely, there's an out of body experience. You go down a dark tunnel with a light at the end of the tunnel, one has a life review. There's a kind of sense of transformation and a special connection to the simpler, mundane elements of everyday life. So there's the sense of the profound realization of the importance of the ordinary moments of life and the preciousness of life. And he cites multiple sources on this front. Not only Oliver Sachs, but also Michael Poland has a book How to Change Your Mind, which recounts the spirituality of hallucinogenic experiences with these types of drugs like L S D. And he also references Als Huxley, who says quite similar things. The reason Fisher is recounting these different experiences is to try to draw a certain parallelism between near-death experiences and hallucinogenic experiences on drugs. So the argument would be something like this. L S D trips or hallucinogenic drugs are similar to near death experiences. Trips on L S D are purely physically caused and therefore so too, we should think near death experiences are purely physically caused as well. That there is nothing supernatural about them, at least in terms of how they're produced. However, supernaturalists don't deny that near death experiences have a physical cause. Of course, when one is near death, whatever it is that nearly kills you is physically caused. And doulas and supernaturalists don't dispute that. In fact, they might find it entirely irrelevant and unsurprising. So the dispute is not whether some of the causes of a near-death experience are physical. But whether all of the causes of a near death experience are physical. So if the supernaturalists are right, then when one makes contact with a supernatural realm by going there during a near death experience, then part of what causes your experience is being an actual contact with the supernatural realm. And if that's the case, then part of the causes or some of the causes of your experience is something supernatural. And that is what Fisher would deny. Or at least Fisher would say that there's no good reason to believe that that's true. So various kinds of believers in the supernatural may make these kinds of parallelisms as well. The parallelism may actually go in the opposite direction. Perhaps someone like Duncan Trestle or he's a comedian who seems to believe in all sorts of spiritual and supernatural phenomenon, he may run the parallelism in the opposite direction by saying that. L S D trips or any kind of hallucinogenic substances are a pathway to contacting some kind of supernatural realm or supernatural entities. And of course, Trussel may be somewhat idiosyncratic, but he's not entirely alone in this thought. And so far as. There are classes of hallucinogens that are described as entheogenic. That is to say they put you in contact with something divine, and these substances are used quite commonly throughout many religions. Not only monotheistic faiths, but also at least in some versions, but in animistic tribes as well. Most famously in South America. So I think the naturalist response to that is to argue that it's not the content of experience, which has a kind of objective status. Rather, the hallucinogenic substances of this nature are similar to dreams, but their value or their significance derives from the effect they have on the experiencer. And this is pretty much what Fisher argues at the end of the last chapter. By saying things like near death experiences are not best understood in terms of the reality of their content, but in terms of how they affect the experiencer itself, so something like L S D or other kinds of hallucinogenic drugs. Don't put you in contact with something that's objectively real and supernatural. Rather, they affect the subjectivity of your own experience. You might think of it as a kind of distortion or glitching your perceptual states so that when it feels as if yourself dissolves and you become at one with the universe or that the barrier between what it is that you are and you're surrounding an environment dissolves and you have a sense of continuity with the universe such that it may not even be true that there's a you anymore. These are all effects of the subjectivity of your own experience. It doesn't literally become true. It's at best a metaphor. It feels as if the self dissolves when in fact the self does not dissolve. It's merely the feeling that it does, which is induced by the drug. So I think that is the kind of square style response that Fisher might be a little square in this regard, but I think this is the kind of response he would have to give, or any kind of naturalist would have to give for what is going on with the nature. Of experience and what it is like to undergo hallucinogenic experiences. And this is contrasted with self-described psycho knots such as Rom das, who think that hallucinogenic substances do put you in contact with something divine. It's not purely a matter of your subjectivity, but is an objective fact that when taking certain substances, you do come in contact. It's not merely that you feel as if you do, you actually do come in contact with the divine in one respect or another. Okay, so in order to respond adequately to this objection that a naturalistic explanation is reductive and fails to capture what makes a near death experience profound or meaningful, Fisher has to do a bit of work in order to set up what the meaning of an experience like a near death experience would consistent. And to do this, he makes this distinction between, well, you might think of his ordinary explanations and storytelling. So the thought is when engaging in storytelling, this helps us come to sort our experiences by constructing a narrative in which events are sequenced in emotionally recognizable patterns. And if stories are told, well, they make sense to us. They give us a kind of emotional understanding. And this emotional understanding is to be contrasted with what? Distinguished as a kind of cognitive understanding in which we just come to understand new information. So when we give explanations such as in science, or perhaps in mathematics or in other kinds of scientific realms or disciplines, what the scientist does is gives us an explanation that yields a kind of cognitive understanding. That presents a model of how the world works in some part or another. How psychologist gives a model as to how the mind works, or a geologist gives us a model about how plate tectonics works and so on. However, a storyteller is doing something else. According to Fisher, a storyteller is crafting a narrative by recounting certain events in certain characters in a certain setting, which has a certain emotional impact upon us by which we can relate to that scenario, or to those characters and to the events that they undergo. So the important difference between ordinary explanations, Which produce a kind of cognitive understanding and stories, which give us a kind of emotional understanding, is that we don't have to require that the stories are based on real events. We can understand that the stories are fictional when they are fictional, and yet they can have a certain meaning for us, which we can understand emotionally. Without being real, without there being those characters who actually really exist. So for instance, when I watch the Lord of the Rings movies, I can suspend my disbelief that Frodo's not a real person or that the one ring wouldn't really have magic of that nature wouldn't really be possible in real life. I can suspend my disbelief in. The magic of the one ring and appreciate the story in a way that can allow me to experience a certain range of emotions to go on the journey of that story, go through the emotional rollercoaster, so to speak, and have a certain kind of satisfaction in that. However, I think Fisher in this regard, underestimates stories. So stories are not just happy pills. That's a very reductionist way of thinking about stories, right? Sometimes we watch movies or we read books in order to make ourselves feel better or even to make ourselves feel worse. We might watch a scary movie to frighten us, right? To have the kind of emotional impact. But there, I think there's a kind of truth in storytelling, which is cognitive. To be fair to Fisher, he doesn't say that this distinction between cognitive and emotional understanding. Is mutually exclusive, right? He just distinguishes them. He doesn't say that they don't overlap. Perhaps you can emotionally and cognitively understand one and the same thing and you can have overlapping kinds of understanding. I would take it that that's what he thinks, cuz I think he's getting this from Valent's notion of a narrative explanation. Nevertheless, I think it's important to at least emphasize that the appreciation of literature and great art should have a certain cognitive element to it. And if we're only analyzing the meaning of a story or its value in terms of the kind of emotional outputs that we could derive from our experiences of literature or fiction, that's a quite impoverished way of appreciating great works of art and in fact, the greatest works of art. Tell us something profound, I think, about the human condition. And they do. So not just emotionally, but cognitively. We can read Russian literature and come to have a cognitive understanding of our affinity as mortal beings, or what the meaning of life consists in, or other kinds of philosophical questions, which we can understand at a cognitive level. Or we can watch a Woody Allen movie and have a deeper understanding of gender relationships, the relationships between men and women. Or I referenced Lord of the Rings earlier. So I think that can give us not just an emotional understanding, perhaps also a cognitive understanding about the nature of corruption and temptation and desire and the value of friendship. I'm also not entirely sure if emotional understanding is really a form of understanding at all and not just emotional relatability. I think if we were to call emotional understanding as a form of understanding, we need to be able to articulate what it is that one understands. So when it comes to education, when students take my classes and I give them a test, What I'm not trying to do is to set up incentives for the test so that students will just memorize and regurgitate whatever it is that they memorized. Because if I were to do so, I would be merely testing knowledge and it would be testing knowledge in a very ephemeral and temporary fashion. The hope is to do something more than that, that there's a kind of epistemic goal to teaching. Which goes beyond the mere acquisition of knowledge, but attains a certain level of understanding where to achieve understanding one must a, know what it is that one understands, but furthermore be able to have a certain explanatory connections between what the knowledge is based upon and the knowledge itself. So my point is that when somebody fully understands something, they should have some kind of self-awareness about what it is that they understand sufficiently for them to be able to articulate it. And in that way, I think it goes quite further beyond mere knowledge where one can know something without being in a position to be able to articulate what it is that one knows. In this way, I think of knowledge more. Informationally. And although it's somewhat controversial, I don't think knowledge requires the kind of inferential connections that one may draw upon in one's web of belief, so to speak. However, all of this is merely to describe what Fisher calls cognitive understanding, but what he says about emotional understanding sounds more similar to me as what I would describe as relatability. If one seems to emotionally understand a story, I think what that means is that that person can relate to the characters, they can relate to the storytelling beats, even if it's radically different than anything they themselves experienced. They can relate to certain elements of it. So for instance, in Lord of the Rings, I myself am not very similar to a Hobbit. I wear shoes, I'm five 10, whereas hobbits are much shorter. I don't live in any condition that's similar to that, and yet I can relate to the kinds of friendships they have or their overall worldviews, or some of their values, which are skeptical of technology. Perhaps I don't emotionally understand it as well as I might think because I'm not so skeptical of technology. So the point of this digression into what level of emotional understanding we can have regarding storytelling is to bring it back to near death experiences. So Fisher, Talks about this because he thinks that near death experiences are fictional. They have a certain narrative structure. They have a kind of journey, like a voyage to some unknown destination, and typically they are accompanied by some sort of guide who is a benevolent. Authority figure, or even a parental figure of some kind, and that figure may be Jesus or God, or it might be your parents who have long since passed and now have come to speak to you from the other side of what Heaven is like. So Fisher's point here is that, Many of the experiences as recounted by those who claim to have near death experiences are things that play into certain storytelling tropes, and I think Fisher is using this as evidence, a further reason to believe that. They're fictional, although Fisher himself is not explicit on this point. However, insofar as near death experiences exhibit a familiar kind of narrative and a familiar kind of storytelling tropes, they can be meaningful without being supernatural. Fisher does not think that near death experiences must be supernatural in order to be meaningful at all. In fact, there are other kinds of stories with similar kinds of tropes and a similar narrative structure, which are quite meaningful, but don't involve the same kinds of supernaturalism. Now, I think De of Gilgamesh and Homer's, I and OSUs are not really great examples in the sofar, as they do involve supernatural elements. In all three of those stories, however, what I have in mind about them, there's no transcendence to some kind of immaterial, supernatural heaven. Although there are Greek myths in which characters do go to the underworld, but Fisher's point in recognizing the similarities in storytelling tropes was to indicate that, well, we have no good reason to believe that there really is a cyclops in some island as recounted in Homer's Odyssey. And so we also have no good reason to believe that there's an afterlife. Which is an immaterial, transcendent, supernatural realm. And furthermore, there doesn't have to be in order for it to be a good story. So just as we can have a certain kind of emotional understanding, despite the fact that the story is fictitious in partial recognition of the fictional aspect of a story, we can nevertheless have a significant experience. It doesn't take away from that experience to recognize that the story is fictional. However, despite the similarity in storytelling tropes, I do think there's a big difference here between dreams, L S D trips and traditional stories of voyages into the unknown and the kinds of testimonies that we receive from people claiming to have gone to an afterlife and returned. And the difference is this. Suppose that you are a skeptic and suppose that you think there is no afterlife and then you have an experience, you come close to death. You have an accident of some kind and you have a near death experience with all the same tropes. You go out of your body, you have an out of body experience. You then go down a dark tunnel. Your life flashes before your eyes. You recount everything in your life, and then you go towards the light and you enter into some sort of transcendent realm of love and happiness, and then you are uphold back in return. Suppose you found out somehow that guess what everything you experienced is real. And that it really is as you thought it is, as you experienced it. That's a real place. It's waiting for you after you die. I think that would give you good reason to believe that death isn't so scary and it would have an impact upon your life. It should change your life in certain kinds of ways if you were in doubt about it before. But now suppose, guess what? That's all a dream. None of that's real. There is no heaven. I think that has a different kind of practical import. Namely, you should fear death more than you would've otherwise. Cuz you know that's the end. And I think your experience would be a lot less meaningful if you, for independent reasons, discovered that the experience you had turned out to just be like a dream and that none of that is real. That there is no supernatural realm. There is no afterlife and none of that really exists. I think that'd be a huge letdown and it'd be a huge letdown and be significantly less meaningful than learning that Harry Potter isn't real or that Frodo isn't real. Or that there really was no cyclops nor an Aus to encounter Cyclops. So the difference is that when it comes to near death experiences, there's an implication for what will happen to you after you die. Whereas if Frodo is or isn't real or any of these other fictional stories, there's no implication whatsoever as to what will happen to you when you die. And that's the difference. And similarly, when it comes to. Stories. If it turns out that the stories of the Bible are actually true and they're suppose Jesus is the son of God and the trinity is real. That should have a significant impact on what your worldview is and your thoughts about what will happen to you when you die. But if it turns out the Bible's just another work of fiction, much like Harry Potter, that too should have a significant impact on your worldview and what you think should happen or will happen to you when you die. So the stakes are as big as stakes can possibly be. The stakes could not be larger. We're talking about eternity. So I don't think that fishers argument here succeeds. I don't think that near death experiences can be just as. Significant or just as meaningful if it turns out it's all a dream, or at least similar to a dream in the sense that nothing you experienced is objectively real. Now, that isn't to say that a naturalistic explanation has no sense of meaning or significance whatsoever. I just think it's a huge letdown, and insofar as Fisher argues that it isn't Fisher's mistaken. So lastly, Fisher tries to argue that near death experiences are kind of like meaningful fiction. They should be understood metaphorically. Not literally, and insofar as they can be, that we can achieve a certain kind of emotional understanding from them. One can have this level of understanding, even in the acknowledgement that none of it is real and there's only one realm, the physical realm. So he is a materialist, and yet we can still have a certain kind of awe or inspiration from the fictional story that is the near death experience. It's not re reductionist or deflating to think of it that way. We just need to re-situate our sense of awe from a supernatural orientation to a natural orientation. However, I don't think that's accurate. If anything, if it really is true that there's a supernatural realm, then that fact should lessen our anxiety about death. But if it turns out that there isn't, that materialism is the case, then it should not assuage our death anxiety to have a near death experience, no more than just having an ordinary dream. And in this last section of the chapter, Fisher Waxes poetic a little bit about how near death experiences assuage death anxiety with a profound sense of love and this profound sense of love, specifically from one's parental guide or companion into this dreamlike state of an afterlife should induce in us a sense of awe and a sense of a reduced sense of death, anxiety, and a sense of loving guidance. But again, All of that is an illusion. If none of it is real, it really shouldn't make a difference. So why should a loving companion that accompanies want into this dream-like existence of an afterlife, assuage our death anxiety if it turns out that none of it is real? It's just a dream. In fact, if it's just a dream, it should make no difference to oblivion, which is what awaits us on a materialistic worldview. We're just gonna be food for worms. So if we have some dream which makes us more comfortable with our own death, then we're just in error. We're more or less delusional. Now, if it turns out that the near death experience was real, that these people really did go to an afterlife and came back. Then it makes perfect sense why that should relieve our death anxiety. Because previously we were anxious about being food for worms, and then when we hear about these people who go to the afterlife and come back, we realize, hey, they make it, maybe I can make it too. Maybe there's something real to go to. And if it turns out that's not true, then it's just delusional and there's no good reason to think it should calm our anxiety about death. We should still be anxious about death. If anything, it has no more rationality to it than when it comes to death anxiety than a pill which would alleviate it like an anti-anxiety medicine just has a causal effect on calming our anxiety, but in virtue of no reason whatsoever that would make it appropriate. It more or less just induces calmness in us regardless. So in this regard, I do think that Fisher is quite wrong. It is a huge letdown to realize that there is no supernatural world, that there is no afterlife to go to upon death. Perhaps that's the right left down to have, because if it turns out that it would be impossible for there to be an afterlife, that's part of the tragedy of our existence as finite beings and being diluted about that is not gonna help us. Alright, so in this episode, we considered how near death experiences could be meaningful within a materialistic and naturalistic worldview, which is what Fisher endorses. So Fisher argues that near death experiences can be just as meaningful for a naturalist as they could be for a supernaturalist, arguing that they should be best interpreted metaphorically as a kind of last voyage in one's life. And in that sense have similar storytelling tropes and a similar narrative structure as to other kinds of works of fiction in which people travel from familiar to unfamiliar realms. Fisher lichens, near death experiences to hallucinogenic drug experiences, such as taking a trip on L S D, however, The parallel can be run backwards in the other direction in which a supernaturalist can see things like hallucinogenic drugs as pathways by which one would contact the supernatural, either for good or ill. I challenge fisher's distinction between cognitive and emotional understanding, insofar as I think that emotional understanding may just be a kind of relatability. There is no proposition by which the person would be said to understand in this way. It's something of a mode of speaking that we would call emotional relatability as a form of understanding at all. And lastly, I think Fisher underestimates just how much of a letdown it is to realize that there's nothing supernatural and we're one to have a near death experience and then further discover that there is nothing supernatural that too. Would have a profound sapping effect on how meaningful or significant that near death experiences is for one's life, not least of which, because it has profound implications per what happens to us after we die, whereas other works of fiction do not.