Near-death experiences, revisited

I'm afraid I was too easily impressed by Mario Beauregard's account of an odd, and seemingly compelling, story of an out-of-body experience of seeing a shoe on an inaccessible hospital ledge. PZ Myers, a biologist, has now responded to Beauregard's post, calling it "yet another piece of evidence ... that Beauregard is a crank." (PZ Myers, Near-death, distorted: Taking aim at a recent Salon story about the science of out-of-body experiences, Salon.com, Apr. 26, 2012. I haven't linked to the Salon posting because it seems to be broken now (April 27), but the original piece is available, under the title The NDE [Near-Death Experience] Illusion, at Myers' blog, Pharyngula.)

Myers is pretty convincing in arguing that Beauregard has assumed without proof that people's recollections of perceptions during periods when their brains were completely out of action really are recollections -- rather than after-the-fact mental constructs of the sort we create all the time and call "recollections." That wouldn't account for the shoe case I was impressed by, but Myers finds that unpersuasive as well. In fact, he writes, this story "has been totally demolished," and he links to a critique of it at a blog called "The Secular Web: a drop of reason in a pool of confusion."

I think the problems with this story, as delineated at The Secular Web, really are too big to get around -- assuming, of course, that the evidence in the debunking account is accurate. The social worker who reported it did not actually do so (at least in public) till seven years later. The patient who supposedly had the experience can't be found and may now be dead.

But the debunkers seem to accept that the original report of the story was honest, albeit "subconsciously embellished." Their main point is that the patient could have learned of the shoe's existence from conversations she overheard during her 3 days in the hospital before the heart attack that precipitated her out-of-body experience. That seems to be right. But it is not exactly "demolition"; there is, after all, no proof at all that she did hear about the shoe this way.

The debunkers' theory requires that the hypothetical conversation that the patient overheard include not only the existence of the shoe but also details about its appearance. To be sure, the debunkers imply (reasonably) that those details might have been later embellishments. If they weren't, they might indeed have been discernible and so perhaps spoken of -- but one might wonder how detailed this imagined conversation would have been likely to be.

The problems with this story are big enough that I can’t think of it as reliable. But has it been demolished? Only in the sense that it’s clear that it’s not clearly true. But it’s not been proven that it’s false. The reason that Myers sees it as having been demolished, it seems to me, is that he starts from the premise that all human perception is based on the physical brain and body, and therefore regards any assertion to the contrary as unlikely to be correct. That’s a reasonable approach. The problem is that if you start from the opposite premise, that the human mind or soul has an existence beyond the confines of the material body, then you might say that reports of out-of-body experiences are evidence to support your premise unless they’re proven to be false. Again, the shoe story hasn’t been proven to be false; it’s been proven not to be provably true, which isn’t the same thing.

Which premise should one start from? The trouble with asking that question is that the whole point of looking at the stories of out-of-body experiences is to try to figure out what the right premise is. You can’t pick the premise definitively until you’ve done the testing, and as of now, at least in this instance, it seems to me that the testing can’t produce a definitive result until you’ve picked a premise. And that means we are, in truth, in doubt.

Near-death experiences and rationalism

Could there possibly be life after the death? A good materialist might feel obliged to say no, since we know so clearly that those who have died are no longer in this world. In fact, materialists might say no with such emphasis that to write a blog post considering another answer is a rash act. Still, that absolute no may be too quick, even for someone without religious faith, since we also know pretty clearly that we don't understand huge aspects of the material world (e.g., dark matter, making up most of the universe, etc., etc.), and so it's not really possible to prove that physical laws mean for sure that life after death cannot exist.

But for anyone who would like to believe that life continues after death, but not to do so just as a leap of faith, it would be nice to have some positive evidence. For some time there's been some, in the form of "near-death experiences." There seems to be no doubt that people do have these experiences, and they have a notably heavenly flavor (e.g., being welcomed to the light) -- but perhaps these are just the illusory experiences of brains running out of oxygen.

Or, on the other hand, perhaps not. In a long article posted yesterday in Salon.com, a research psychologist named Mario Beauregard says not. (Near Death, explained: New science is shedding light on what really happens during out-of-body experiences -- with shocking results, Apr. 21, 2012) Here's one of the points Beauregard makes:

One of the best known of these corroborated veridical NDE [near-death experience] perceptions—perceptions that can be proven to coincide with reality—is the experience of a woman named Maria, whose case was first documented by her critical care social worker, Kimberly Clark.

Maria was a migrant worker who had a severe heart attack while visiting friends in Seattle. She was rushed to Harborview Hospital and placed in the coronary care unit. A few days later, she had a cardiac arrest but was rapidly resuscitated. The following day, Clark visited her. Maria told Clark that during her cardiac arrest she was able to look down from the ceiling and watch the medical team at work on her body. At one point in this experience, said Maria, she found herself outside the hospital and spotted a tennis shoe on the ledge of the north side of the third floor of the building. She was able to provide several details regarding its appearance, including the observations that one of its laces was stuck underneath the heel and that the little toe area was worn. Maria wanted to know for sure whether she had “really” seen that shoe, and she begged Clark to try to locate it.

Quite skeptical, Clark went to the location described by Maria—and found the tennis shoe. From the window of her hospital room, the details that Maria had recounted could not be discerned. But upon retrieval of the shoe, Clark confirmed Maria’s observations. “The only way she could have had such a perspective,” said Clark, “was if she had been floating right outside and at very close range to the tennis shoe. I retrieved the shoe and brought it back to Maria; it was very concrete evidence for me.”

Of course it is possible to be skeptical about this story. The version posted in Salon, and quoted here, is obviously incomplete -- we don't know when it was supposed to have happened, when it was reported, or much at all about the people involved. And we do know that lots of things that lots of people have reported have turned out to be not only false but absurd.

But this is an interesting story. If we merely assume that the participants were not lying, we at once face evidence that is much more difficult to dismiss than the coming-to-the-light category of reports. "Coming to the light" fits smoothly into religious imagery that is powerful in our culture, and so may be discounted as the product of brain distress channelled into familiar cultural channels. But the details of the appearance of a sneaker on a building ledge?

If the participants weren't lying, and if there wasn't some overlooked source for the cardiac patient's knowledge of this shoe, then it does seem that she saw something that she could not have seen with her eyes. That in turn opens up the possibility of existence outside our physical bodies, and the next step -- not the same step, but clearly a related one -- would be the possibility of existence after our physical bodies are gone.

Vast numbers of people believe in life after death -- offhand, I'd guess most people now alive hold this belief. But it is not easy to square this belief with rationalism, and the great appeal of rationalism is that it helps us not to believe in the various false claims that have so often plagued humanity and led to so much suffering. And yet, perhaps, it is important not to make rationalism too much an article of faith itself, and to consider with an open mind the possibility that, to paraphrase Hamlet, there are more things in heaven and on earth than are dreamt of in this philosophy.