Afterlife: skeptical thought (Endings)

by David Turell , Saturday, November 19, 2016, 19:40 (2709 days ago) @ dhw

A review by a skeptic:

https://aeon.co/essays/my-paranormal-adventure-in-pursuit-of-life-after-death?utm_sourc...

"I should confess that, unlike Stevenson, who made no secret of his lifelong belief in the supernatural, I’m a sceptic. In fact that’s probably putting it too mildly. In my book The Belief Instinct (2011), I reviewed scientific findings from my own research as well as that of my colleagues in the new field of the ‘cognitive science of religion’. I laid out a case for how the human mind evolved to deceive us into believing in a ‘demon-haunted world’, as Carl Sagan put it, because such supernatural beliefs were biologically adaptive — at least they were adaptive tens of thousands of years ago, when our mental abilities were carved out by the godless forces of natural selection. That said, I’d be happy to be proven wrong about the afterlife. As Stevenson once wrote: ‘The wish not to believe can influence as strongly as the wish to believe.’ Sometimes we sceptics are really just cynics.

***

"Given all the effort Stevenson had put into what he called the ‘combination lock test for survival’, it would be a pity not to try to contact his spirit. He had come up with the idea for the test in the late 1960s after reading about a British widow whose husband died without telling her the combination to a lockbox that held important documents. After many frustrating attempts to open it, the despairing widow said she heard her husband’s voice giving her the code. When she tried that set of numbers — voila! — the lockbox sprung open. Not exactly a bulletproof case, but it got Stevenson thinking.

***

"Ten days after he died in hospital on 8 February 2007, The New York Times ran his obituary, mentioning the lock test. Soon, emails, letters and phone calls besieged the Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS) at the University of Virginia, the still-active parapsychology unit founded by Stevenson. People from all over the world claimed his spirit had given them the secret code to his personal lock.

"‘None of them worked,’ Bruce Greyson, Stevenson’s friend and successor at DOPS, told me. ‘We tried them all. Most of the codes sounded nothing at all like Ian, but we tried them anyway.’ Greyson, a psychiatrist himself and an expert on near-death experiences, is the keeper of the locks, which today mostly collect cobwebs at the bottom of a drawer in his office.

***

"only one of the 10 projects to be funded deals directly with the juicy question Stevenson was so keen to answer: ‘Do we, or do we not, survive death?’

"That prize went to Sam Parnia, director of resuscitation research at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, who plans to determine whether near-death experiences are real. We’ve all heard of ‘NDEs’, in which someone who was ‘clinically dead’ reports becoming detached from his body and hovering outside it or travelling to an alternate reality, thus proving that ‘Heaven is real.’ ....The common denominator in all such explanations is that NDEs are ‘no more than’ vivid hallucinations of death-rattled brains. (my comment: Never hallucinations. Too organized)

***

"telecommunicating with pretty angels — the main ingredients in Eben Alexander’s best-seller Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Near-Death Experience and Journey Into the Afterlife (2012) — simply can’t answer our big question. All such experiences simply boil down to: ‘If you say so.’

***

"Still, around 10 per cent of people who survive cardiac arrest report watching the chaotic scene from a floating, third-person perspective while medical personnel work to revive their lifeless bodies. That’s not an insubstantial figure, so it warrants further study. There are also stories in which patients accurately recount an idiosyncratic event that occurred while they were ‘clinically dead’. In a paper for the Journal of Scientific Exploration in 1998, Greyson quoted the case of Al Sullivan, an emergency quadruple bypass patient in Connecticut who described his surgeon’s habit of putting his thumbs in his armpits after scrubbing up and pointing to the necessary surgical instruments with his elbows or ‘flapping his arms as if trying to fly’.

***

"In the end, I’m left where I started on my little paranormal adventure. I did manage to pry open my mind for a while, but what blew in was only some good intentions and a bunch of hot air. My bet remains that immortal souls — yours, mine, and Ian Stevenson’s — are but the elusive shadows dancing on the walls of our physical brains. That doesn’t make them any less interesting or important. Such slippery spirits have plenty of codes of their own to be deciphered by scientists."

Comment: A skeptic just like Blackmore. Not hallucinations. Bruce Greyson is discussed in my book.