Oxford University Press
has recently published a book entitled Near Death Experiences:
Understanding Visions of the Afterlife by
the philosophers John Martin Fischer and Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin.
University presses typically publish books by people who are experts
in what they are writing about. But being a philosopher is no
qualification at all for writing a book on near-death experiences.
Being a neurologist, a psychologist or a parapsychologist might be a
relevant credential, but we should not expect a philosopher would be
more qualified to write about near-death experiences than, say, a
plumber or a baseball pitcher.
Fischer
and Mitchell-Yellin certainly have not made up for their lack of
relevant credentials by being diligent in doing original research on
their topic. They seemed to have done no original research
whatsoever, and seem to show no evidence of having personally talked to
anyone who had a near-death experience. They also seem to show no evidence
of having personally interviewed any of the doctors or scientists who
are researching near-death experiences. Where's the legwork? Fischer
and Mitchell-Yellin have taken a lazy armchair approach which fails
to offer any substantive new contribution to this topic. They haven't
even done any numerical or classification work such as numerically
categorizing or classifying near-death experiences.
Armchair indolence
Their
discussion of near-death experiences has curious omissions. In recent
years probably the biggest event in the field of near-death
experiences was the 2014 AWARE study published in a scientific
journal, a paper authored by Sam Parnia and co-authored by many other
doctors and scientists. The study receives no mention in Fischer and
Mitchell-Yellin's book.
They
do discuss the well-known Pam Reynolds case of a woman who reported
verified details of her operation while she was unconscious and allegedly having an out-of-body experience. Reynolds
had both her eyes and her ears blocked (the latter being blocked by
an earphone emitting 100-decibel clicks). To try to explain this,
Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin offer an explanation (on page 23) that is not
credible: “Rather, we are raising the possibility that, even though
she was unconscious, auditory impressions may still have registered,
and they could have come to be conscious awareness later.” That's
absurd. A sound is not something that sits in your brain like an
unread e-mail message to be read at your leisure. If a sound isn't
part of your conscious experience, the sound will not be remembered
later. I may note that in this case Reynolds had earphones that were
blocking her hearing and sending in 100-decibel clicks, so in this
case a “delayed perception of received sounds” theory is
particularly lame.
We can
imagine someone suggesting something similar: “While I was out cold
from all those sleeping pills, and while I had my headphones on, that
were sending me loud white noise, I heard you insult me, and when I
woke up I remembered hearing that when I was in deep sleep.” That's hardly a
claim you'd believe.
To try
to support this untenable theory, Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin
imagine a case of someone who drives home passing by a traffic
accident, pays no attention to it, comes home, and then sees a report
of it on the TV, leading him to recall seeing the accident. But
that's a case of paying little attention to a perception you are
consciously experiencing, which does nothing to make credible Fischer
and Mitchell-Yellin's preposterous idea that your brain can store
memories of something you heard while you were unconscious.
Fischer
and Mitchell-Yellin do not champion any one natural explanation to
account for near-death experiences, relying on a pastiche of sketchy
ideas, suggestions and suspicions. One of the main things they rely
on is an utterly dubious appeal to an unbelievable psychological
theory called terror management theory. On page 68-69 of their book,
Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin suggest that “terror management theory
can explain why people who have near-death experiences would
experience reunions specifically with their loved ones.”
Fischer
and Mitchell-Yellin attempt to pass off this extremely dubious
“terror management theory” as some kind of established science,
claiming that it is “well-validated” and that “over the past
three decades, its predictions about human behavior have been
repeatedly verified.” They offer no evidence or reference to back
up this claim, which is off the mark. A 2009 paper entitled “Mortality
Salience: Testing the Predictions of Terror Management Theory”
discussed four studies that all failed to verify the predictions of
terror management theory. The paper here notes a case where terror
management theory (TMT) makes the wrong prediction:
TMT researchers assert
that disgust reactions to death are part of such defenses, generating
the prediction that death disgust should increase with age. Here,
using the measure of disgust sensitivity devised by the Rozin School,
we have shown that, contrary to this prediction, disgust sensitivity
in the death domain declines with age.
On
page 141 of their book, Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin are trying to
explain a near-death experience in which a child named Colton
reported floating out of his body, and then observing his father
praying in one room and his mother praying in another room (an
account confirmed by his father). Again Fischer and
Mitchell-Yellin appeal to terror management theory. They say:
For the second step, we
might appeal to terror management theory. It is plausible that a
visual representation of his parents praying would help to relieve
some of Colton Burpo's anxiety about his severe illness and surgery.
This
is weak logic, since it does nothing to explain the accuracy of the
reported observation or vision, nor is it clear why anyone would
hallucinate about their parents praying as an anxiety-reducing
mechanism (since your parents would be most likely to simultaneously pray
for you if you were on the brink of death). A sight of your parents
praying for your survival is no more anxiety-reducing than the sight
of a priest giving you last rites.
Like
Freud's simplistic theory which attempted to explain most human
psychological problems as being caused by a single cause (childhood traumas), terror management theory is a simplistic
psychological theory that claims that the fear of death is the
motivating cause behind very much or most human behavior. But the
idea that human behavior is mostly motivated by anxiety about death
is completely inconsistent with a large variety of observed human
behaviors that are very risky, such as suicides, unsafe sex, bungee
jumping, jaywalking, cliff-diving, cigarette smoking, eating
unhealthy foods, and people who drive fast and drive without seat
belts. So these types of human behaviors are strong evidence against
terror management theory, which is not something “well validated”
as Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin claim.
A
paper here rebuts terror management theory:
Although terror
management theory's proponents claim that it is an evolutionary theory of human
behavior, its major tenets are implausible when examined carefully
from a modern evolutionary
perspective. We explain why it is unlikely that natural selection
would have designed a
“survival instinct” or innate “fear of death,” nor an
anxiety-reduction system in general, or
worldview-defense system in particular, to ameliorate such fears.
The
point is a solid one. Natural selection is “interested” only in
your survival until you are finished reproducing, and has no interest
whatsoever in whether you might have pleasant hallucinations when you
die. I may note that terror management theory is an attempt to
explain common human behaviors and beliefs, and does not at all
predict that you will have pleasant visions when you die. Fischer
and Mitchell-Yellin have hijacked terror management theory, using it
for some purpose that it was not intended. It's rather like some
person claiming that Heisenberg's uncertainty principle (part of
quantum mechanics) helps explain why his girlfriend is uncertain
about spending the night with him.
There
is, in fact, no evidence that humans not close to dying have
anxiety-reducing hallucinations when they are faced with anxiety or
are in fear of death. No one who is approached by a threatening
gunman ever has a hallucination that the gunman is bearing a bouquet
of flowers, and no one who is on a sinking ship ever has a hallucination
that a ship has come to save him. Moreover, people have near-death
experiences when their heart has stopped or they are unconscious, so
any psychological theory to explain a near-death experience vision is
futile. Psychology is not going on when you are unconscious. Your
brain does not do “fear management” when you are unconscious,
because there is no fear at such a time.
I can
think of ways in which a philosopher could use his philosophical
training to add to the debate about near-death experiences –
perhaps by offering some insight from the branch of philosophy called
the philosophy of mind, or perhaps by speculating about some metaphysical
reality that might explain such experiences. But we don't seem to get
any such thing from Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin, who just lazily
give us garden-variety armchair skepticism without any original
research.
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