A. J. Ayer – ‘What I Saw When I Was Dead’ (1988)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardecist_spiritism

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardecist_spiritism#cite_note-...

EDIT I did a little searching. I think it might have been an old report about Ketamine before it became more wide known. Apparently it was used during the Vietnam War.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketamine#Near-death_experience

If you anticipated that others would find this hard to believe, why not write down those visions in detail at the time? That would have provided evidence others could have used to later evaluate whether your visions were accurate.

As a skeptic, and without knowing more details, I am leaning towards self-fulfilling prophecy (you did the things in the visions because you had the visions) or confirmation bias (similar to how horoscopes feel accurate because they're vague enough to map many situations).

I hope you're right though.

BTW there's a book "The night of fire" by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt that describes a similar experience he got staying alone in a desert. And, of course, countless other descriptions, e.g. "The varieties of religious experience" by W. James. You cannot convince anyone, of course; but there's also no way to fake it.

https://www.nderf.org/Experiences/1kevin_p_nde.html

Which isn't my real name btw. They pseudonymized that.

One hard hit in the head can literally change your personality entirely, then you have alzheimers and all the other degenerative brain diseases that will erase "you". Even if you avoid all that "you" will be wildly different every 15-20 years.

Christianity gets through this by saying you will return to your prime. That just seems kind of childish to me though, like "yeah when you die you and all your friends and family are gonna be 25 and you live in paradise together forever".

How do you resolve the idea of an eternal consciousness with the very real and common occurence of people losing their consciousness while they are still alive?

This sounds intriguing.

> Case in point, in NDEs there are a couple of common stages, and experiencers go through some or all of these, most often only some. One is traveling from the location of death to a heavenly realm. For westerners this often is flying through a star trek like hyperspace tunnel, while for stone age people they might be in a canoe that travels by itself to a distant island.

Ah, so the similarity is all enitrely in your interpretation of these clearly dissimilar visions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_Er

What are the unaccountably unlikely commonalities that I should be noticing? Between this and the article, I see only: some kind of colored light, some kind of officiating beings, and a river (A.J.Ayer says he presumably had the Styx in mind, though amusingly in the actual ancient Greek account it's a different river and there's no need to cross it).

https://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_my_stroke_of_ins...

> And I look down at my arm and I realize that I can no longer define the boundaries of my body. I can't define where I begin and where I end, because the atoms and the molecules of my arm blended with the atoms and molecules of the wall.

This claim from Ayer -- how do we make the leap from these experiences existing to being evidence of a life after consciousness?

> On the face of it, these experiences, on the assumption that the last one was veridical, are rather strong evidence that death does not put an end to consciousness

1. I have met three identical twins so far. Each of them has reported having some kind of communication with the other twin that could not be explained by conventional means. I have no reason to think any of them lied.

2. My sister used to be very into astrology. She could predict someone's star sign within a few minutes of meeting them to much better than 1 in 12 accuracy.

I do not present these as proof of anything. I do not expect anyone else to believe them or give them any credence. This is just anecdata. I haven't worked out any rational explanation for them.

But I'm inclined to believe two things from them:

1. Brains are weird. Human psychology is complex and fascinating and does things that we do not understand.

2. That there are well-conceived, well-constructed scientific experiments that show there is no scientific basis for telekinesis or astrology, that these are not "real" things, does not necessarily contradict the human experience of them as "real" things. We do not inhabit a well-constructed scientific experiment so our lived experience of life may be different from the actual truth.

Why do you exclude this hypothesis? It's well known that some drugs such as DMT do cause very similar hallucinations among people, even across cultures (as is the case with NDE).

You can have the same question about the near death experiences. Are they experiences of an objective reality somewhere or is it a common physical situation triggering similar experiences across people and cultures.

I think it's cute how hardcore materialists believe it is even in theory possible to distinguish their position from ideological simulationism. Maybe in a thousand years. Not now. But phenomenology is the name of the philosophical discipline that you are now struggling to recapitulate.

Note: Atheism, agnosticism are all religions ( or religious thinking disguised as reasoning ); no less fanatic than the ones their adherents so fervently ridicule.

I certainly don't wish for death, I still find so much beauty and joy in life, and I still find and experience love. But I don't wish for an afterlife, or prolonged life. If I'm fortunate to live until my natural death, I will welcome it.

Humanity will go on, there are billions of threads of consciousness right now, and I feel so much gratitude that I was and am one of those. I have a lot of comfort in being wrapped and surrounded by those threads, and that they will continue around me when mine frays and ends.

My cannon view is that we're just the universe experiencing itself, and that while my consciousness will end, that universe will go on, my atoms part of it.

So this makes me think that from moment to moment, as we pass through time at one second per second, it's as if we're being sent through a transporter. That is to say, if in the far future after my death I am reassembled, or even if just a close imitation of me is assembled from whatever data they can get hold of, then that would be no different from me, or Bernard, being brought back to life. "I am Bernard", he would say, and he'd still be right. Of course other Bernard wouldn't get to share his experiences, but so what. My former self can't share my present experiences.

So, why hope for this to happen at all? It has to be that what we're emotionally invested in is not really "continuity of experience", which is a myth, but continuity of ideas. It's nice if those ideas can sit together in the coherent context of a mind. The Woody Allen quote is "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying." But perhaps in fact through your work is good enough, really? Like a close second.

What I mean to say is, I don't so much hope for an afterlife, as to discover that it philosophically doesn't matter anyway. Though I prefer people not dead.

When there is an afterlife or perhaps even eternity, the problems begin.

I feel that eternity in Heaven would actually be Hell, because nothing would matter. No danger, no failure, no challenge, no goals, no purpose. What gives life meaning are mortality, limitations, beginnings and endings, progress.

I recently watched the film "Eternity" on Apple TV, starring Elizabeth Olsen, in which everyone after they die has to choose their own form of afterlife and then stick with it forever. All I could think about was how bored I would eventually get. (The film itself was pretty good, not boring. That's because it had an ending!)

Fiction is ideal for playing out these scenarios. Think also of the film "Highlander", in which the ultimate "prize" of the immortals turns out to be mortality. MacLeod's life had become repetitive, and he couldn't fully invest in it, because he kept losing everyone he loved. They grew old and died, while he lived on and had to keep changing identities. For a while it's a grand adventure... until it isn't anymore.

I can certainly understand wanting to live longer, but eternity is unimaginably long, way too long. I don't think that's something to be desired.

I think his conclusion is very reasonable. It's highly likely that NDEs are minds sputtering to a stop. But if you experience one (while your heart has stopped for 4 minutes no less), it seems rational to "slightly" update your priors towards the possibility of some kind of afterlife. At the very least, it may indicate some kind of conscious experience after you're "dead" but before your brain significantly degrades.

That aside, I will say that his experience sounds a lot like a DMT trip. Particularly the sense that "space, like a badly fitting jigsaw puzzle, was slightly out of joint" and the feeling of being in the presence of "the government of the universe".

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

1. Restaurants should carry an anti-choking device. Too many elderly risk a stroke without it.

2. People often do have a delusion or vision just before death, one that is a product of their own brain, fitting their understanding of the world. I had an incredible vision when I had taken half an oxycodone prescribed for pain.

3. There are more ways of expressing one's belief or disbelief in god besides atheism and agnosticm. Consider "agnostic theism" which means “I believe god exists, but I do not know that with certainty”, also "agnostic atheism" which means “I don't believe in a god but also say it can’t be known.”

As for any genuine otherworldly vision, no, I don't believe that happened here.