[jmsmistral]

Interesting read - thanks for sharing. I have recently been reading-up on near-death experiences, shared-death experiences, and tangential subjects and highly recommend books like:

- Proof of Life After Life - https://tinyurl.com/proof-of-life-after-life-moody

- After - https://tinyurl.com/after-bruce-greyson

On the one side I am happy to see more scientifically-minded people attracted to these topics. At the same time, I am also dismayed at the block a lot of people have at any phenomena that doesn't seem to be physically-based.

[jemmyw]

> At the same time, I am also dismayed at the block a lot of people have at any phenomena that doesn't seem to be physically-based.

Because we've never found one that isn't physically based. And then you get into what does it even mean to be physical or meta-physical. We have models but they are incomplete and we do not know what makes up the universe anyway, at the most fundamental level. Or even if we have an eye on the most fundamental level. The moment you prove a meta-physical thing exists it loses the meta and becomes another part of physics.

Nobody has proof of life after death. If they had actual proof that stood up to scrutiny and was reproducible, that would be a big deal. It would open up so many avenues of research into the dynamics of how it works. Currently there is no proof. People saying they've experienced things after nearly dying isn't proof, otherwise so many crazy things would be true. I don't know what a proof would look like, but often the experiences involve being disembodied, so a reproduced and reproducible experiment where someone having a near death experience can accurately describe something they couldn't have had prior knowledge of, or guessed, or sensed (heard) in a coma, or found out after waking but before describing, that would be proof. Anecdote is not enough.

And none of this is to say there is no life after death. You can't prove against such a concept, although you can constrain the mechanism until it has to be something completely unknown to science to be true. Enough people do believe in it that they'll continue to investigate it. I don't personally believe there is any more to ourselves than the physics that happens in our brains and bodies, and I think that's amazing enough... maybe even more amazing than the idea there is something more. However, I don't think it a bad position to have a different belief, and to say that science has no answer here, and probably never will.

[jmsmistral]

I came across the Bigelow contest that had a sizeable prize for to people submit articles / essays arguing beyond a reasonable doubt that consciousness survives physical bodily death - here is a link to the top 3 winners: https://www.bigelowinstitute.org/index.php/bics-afterlife-pr...

There's some good material in there.

> I don't know what a proof would look like, but often the experiences involve being disembodied, so a reproduced and reproducible experiment where someone having a near death experience can accurately describe something they couldn't have had prior knowledge of, or guessed, or sensed (heard) in a coma, or found out after waking but before describing, that would be proof. Anecdote is not enough.

There are indeed multiple cases that follow that pattern that have been recorded and in papers (see an example below) - I think they're called "Peak in Darien" cases. The pattern is:

- Person has a near-death experience whilst unconscious - Something happens whilst they are unconscious that they would have no natural means of knowing - Same person comes back and has knowledge of what happened

Here's a paper from Bruce Greyson - https://med.virginia.edu/perceptual-studies/wp-content/uploa...

[RestartKernel]

> At the same time, I am also dismayed at the block a lot of people have at any phenomena that doesn't seem to be physically-based.

For me it's a matter of the scientific method — if it doesn't hold up to appropriate scrutiny, as the metaphysical never does, I can not consider it any more than a curious misunderstanding.

In the case of Marc's story, I'm skeptical about whether the events happened as described before I even take other explanations for his knowledge of the language into account.

[jmsmistral]

Agree about applying the scientific method. I do think it’s a range of phenomena that does not lend itself to the running of experiments.

That said - in the area of shared death experiences, you have multiple independent accounts of people experiencing the same phenomena, which is harder (or impossible) to brush off as “subjective” experience.