Reasons not to scoff at ghosts, visions and near-death experiences

The following article is not my own. The author is Andreas Sommer who is a German-born historian of science and magic who runs the Forbidden Histories website. The original article can be found here.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

‘If the fruits for life of the state of conversion are good, we ought to idealise and venerate it, even though it be a piece of natural psychology; if not, we ought to make short work with it, no matter what supernatural being may have infused it.’

From The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) by William James

There is a long tradition of scientists and other intellectuals in the West being casually dismissive of people’s spiritual experiences. In 1766, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant declared that people who claim to see spirits, such as his contemporary, the Swedish scientist Emanuel Swedenborg, are mad. Kant, a believer in the immortality of the soul, did not draw on empirical or medical knowledge to make his case, and was not beyond employing a fart joke to get his derision across: ‘If a hypochondriac wind romps in the intestines it depends on the direction it takes; if it descends it becomes a f–––, if it ascends it becomes an apparition or sacred inspiration.’ Another ‘enlightened’ enemy of other-worldly visions was the chemist and devout Christian, Joseph Priestley. His own critique of spirit seership in 1791 did not advance scientific arguments either, but presented biblical ‘proof’ that the only legitimate afterlife was the bodily resurrection of the dead on Judgment Day.

However, there is good cause to question the overzealous pathologisation of spiritual sightings and ghostly visions. About a century after Kant and Priestley scoffed at such experiences, William James, the ‘father’ of American scientific psychology, participated in research on the first international census of hallucinations in ‘healthy’ people. The census was carried out in 1889-97 on behalf of the International Congress of Experimental Psychology, and drew on a sample of 17,000 men and women. This survey showed that hallucinations – including ghostly visions – were remarkably widespread, thus severely undermining contemporary medical views of their inherent pathology. But the project was unorthodox in yet another respect because it scrutinised claims of ‘veridical’ impressions – that is, cases where people reported seeing an apparition of a loved one suffering an accident or other crisis, which they had in fact undergone, but which the hallucinator couldn’t have known about through ‘normal’ means. The vicinity of such positive findings with ‘ghost stories’ was reason enough for most intellectuals not to touch the census report with a bargepole, and the pathological interpretation of hallucinations and visions continued to prevail until the late-20th century.

Things slowly began to change in about 1971, when the British Medical Journal published a study on ‘the hallucinations of widowhood’ by the Welsh physician W Dewi Rees. Of the 293 bereaved women and men in Rees’s sample, 46.7 per cent reported encounters with their deceased spouses. Most important, 69 per cent perceived these encounters as helpful, whereas only 6 per cent found them unsettling. Many of these experiences, which ranged from a sense of presence, to tactile, auditory and visual impressions indistinguishable from interactions with living persons, continued over years. Rees’s paper inspired a trickle of fresh studies that confirmed his initial findings – these ‘hallucinations’ don’t seem inherently pathological nor therapeutically undesirable. On the contrary, whatever their ultimate causes, they often appear to provide the bereaved with much-needed strength to carry on.

Rees’s study coincided with writings by a pioneer of the modern hospice movement, the Swiss-American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, in which she emphasised the prevalence of comforting other-worldly visions reported by dying patients – an observation supported by later researchers. Indeed, a 2010 study in the Archives of Gerontology and Geriatrics addressed the need for special training for medical personnel regarding these experiences, and in recent years the academic literature on end-of-life care has recurrently examined the constructive functions of death-bed visions in helping the dying come to terms with impending death.

Kübler-Ross was also among the first psychiatrists to write about ‘near-death experiences’ (NDEs) reported by survivors of cardiac arrests and other close brushes with death. Certain elements have pervaded popular culture – impressions of leaving one’s body, passing through a tunnel or barrier, encounters with deceased loved ones, a light representing unconditional acceptance, insights of the interconnectedness of all living beings, and so on. Once you ignore the latest clickbait claiming that scientists studying NDEs have either ‘proven’ life after death or debunked the afterlife by reducing them to brain chemistry, you start to realise that there’s a considerable amount of rigorous research published in mainstream medical journals, whose consensus is in line with neither of these popular polarisations, but which shows the psychological import of the experiences.

For instance, although no two NDEs are identical, they usually have in common that they cause lasting and often dramatic personality changes. Regardless of the survivors’ pre-existing spiritual inclinations, they usually form the conviction that death is not the end. Understandably, this finding alone makes a lot of people rather nervous, as one might fear threats to the secular character of science, or even an abuse of NDE research in the service of fire-and-brimstone evangelism. But the specialist literature provides little justification for such worries. Other attested after-effects of NDEs include dramatic increases in empathy, altruism and environmental responsibility, as well as strongly reduced competitiveness and consumerism.

Virtually all elements of NDEs can also occur in psychedelic ‘mystical’ experiences induced by substances such as psilocybin and DMT. Trials at institutions such as Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and Imperial College London have revealed that these experiences can occasion similar personality changes as NDEs, most notably a loss of fear of death and a newfound purpose in life. Psychedelic therapies are now becoming a serious contender in the treatment of severe conditions including addictions, post-traumatic stress disorder and treatment-resistant depressions.

This brings us back to James, whose arguments in The Varieties of Religious Experience for the pragmatic clinical and social value of such transformative episodes have been mostly ignored by the scientific and medical mainstream. If there really are concrete benefits of personality changes following ‘mystical’ experiences, this might justify a question that’s not usually raised: could it be harmful to follow blindly the standard narrative of Western modernity, according to which ‘materialism’ is not only the default metaphysics of science, but an obligatory philosophy of life demanded by centuries of supposedly linear progress based on allegedly impartial research?

Sure, the dangers of gullibility are evident enough in the tragedies caused by religious fanatics, medical quacks and ruthless politicians. And, granted, spiritual worldviews are not good for everybody. Faith in the ultimate benevolence of the cosmos will strike many as hopelessly irrational. Yet, a century on from James’s pragmatic philosophy and psychology of transformative experiences, it might be time to restore a balanced perspective, to acknowledge the damage that has been caused by stigma, misdiagnoses and mis- or overmedication of individuals reporting ‘weird’ experiences. One can be personally skeptical of the ultimate validity of mystical beliefs and leave properly theological questions strictly aside, yet still investigate the salutary and prophylactic potential of these phenomena.

By making this quasi-clinical proposal, I’m aware that I could be overstepping my boundaries as a historian of Western science studying the means by which transcendental positions have been rendered inherently ‘unscientific’ over time. However, questions of belief versus evidence are not the exclusive domain of scientific and historical research. In fact, orthodoxy is often crystallised collective bias starting on a subjective level, which, as James himself urged, is ‘a weakness of our nature from which we must free ourselves, if we can’. No matter if we are committed to scientific orthodoxy or to an open-minded perspective on ghostly visions and other unusual subjective experiences, both will require cultivating a relentless scrutiny of the concrete sources that nourish our most fundamental convictions – including the religious and scientific authorities on which they rest perhaps a little too willingly.

Andreas Sommer

This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons.

Perceptual illusions show our minds construct reality

via GIPHY


This is Richard Wiseman. He's a skeptic of the paranormal. I think he's especially fond of perceptual illusions as they show how easily people are fooled. The message he's essentially trying to convey is: 'you think you've seen something weird? Look at how easily we're fooled!'

Perhaps so.  But I think it also shows that we might sometimes be unable to see the unusual and anomalous in our visual fields.  Allow me to explain.

We don't just passively see what's out there. All the light that enters our eyes simply gives us a flat 2 dimensional plane of various shades of colour. However, we seem to immediately see a 3D world with objects at various distances. How so?

The answer is that it's derived from our familiarity with the world. In our experience of reality, familiar objects have certain sizes and a certain appearance. The mind uses this background experience to quite literally construct what we see out there. So, even though only a 2 dimensional plane of colour is actually immediately given, we seem to see directly a world in 3D -- a world populated with familiar objects at various distances.

To reiterate, this construction crucially depends on what we're used to seeing. Hence, when we introduce an anomalous object such as an unusually large-sized drinking glass, our minds will be wanting to see it as a normal-sized glass. So, they will be a propensity to see the glass closer and smaller than it really is. However, other cues in the environment normally alert us that what we are seeing is an anomalously large version of a familiar object. But here, in this gif, those other cues are absent, so we naturally see it as a normal-sized glass that is closer than it actually is.

But, what's interesting is that if we were to see something unfamiliar to us, something we've never seen before, there will be a propensity to see it as something more familiar. The upshot of all this is that there might be more unusual and anomalous phenomena out there than we suppose, but we just can't see it.

I suspect it might also have implications for what we appear to see during something like a near-death experience. If our vision in an afterlife realm works anything like normal vision, then our minds with their implicit expectations will shape and mould what we actually perceive.

A similar post by me written a few years ago:  Are Perceptual illusions always necessarily illusions?

NDE’s, burden of proof, and Ockham’s razor

The other day I read the following Guardian article regarding peoples’ “spiritual experiences” near death.  I’m more interested though in the subsequent comments underneath the article.  A preponderance of the comments are dismissive with many of them claiming that those who are disposed to accept these experiences at face value -- that is those who regard these experiences as suggesting an encounter with an afterlife -- should bear the burden of proof.  Another common claim in the comments is that one should accept the simplest explanation, namely that it is the brain that is producing these experiences.

The Burden of Proof

 

The burden of proof is on those that are making a claim.  Immediately we encounter a problem here since although the author comes across as being sympathetic to the afterlife interpretation, he has not specifically claimed he accepts this interpretation.  Contrariwise, a preponderance of the commentators claim that the brain alone can explain these experiences.  So, it seems the skeptics ought to bear the burden of proof.

However, there is another strategy that skeptics tend to adopt, and that is to say the burden of proof rests upon those who are disposed to accept phenomena that contradict our scientific understanding of how the world works.  They further tend to say we know that science tells us that the brain produces consciousness justifying this knowledge claim by pointing out that the mind is profoundly affected and compromised by a dysfunctional brain e.g. as in dementia.  Hence, to suppose consciousness survives the permanent cessation of the functioning of the brain is an extraordinary claim, and those who make this claim bear the burden of proof.

In other words, those who are disposed to take these “spiritual experiences” at face value bear the burden of proof if, and only if, it is indeed the case that an afterlife contradicts what science has revealed about the world.  And what has science revealed about the world in this context?  According to skeptics it apparently has revealed that the brain produces consciousness!  But then to claim that those who are disposed to believe in an afterlife bear the burden of proof is to presuppose at the very outset that science has shown the brain produces consciousness.  It is therefore mere question begging.

But does science show, or at least strongly suggest, the brain produces consciousness?  I have written extensively about this in other blog posts, and the answer is emphatically no.  Indeed, on the contrary, not only has science not shown any such thing, it could not in principle do so.  See my Neither Modern Materialism nor Science as currently conceived can explain Consciousness.  Specifically, regarding a dysfunctional brain adversely affecting the mind read my Brains affecting Minds do not rule out an Afterlife.  So science doesn't say consciousness is a product of the brain, nor does it say it isn't.  Science, at least as currently conceived, can only be neutral on this issue.  It has nothing to say at all about how or why consciousness exists, least of all whether it can survive the deaths of our bodies.

Ockham’s Razor

 

So much for the burden of proof.  But in the comments there was also the claim that we ought to accept the simplest explanation.   This is to appeal to Ockham’s razor.  This can broadly be thought of as a rule of thumb that says that when you have two or more competing theories that make exactly the same predictions, in the absence of further evidence the simplest one is to be preferred.  Simpler in the sense it invokes the fewer number of assumptions than the competing theories. 

Now, the immediate problem here is that regardless of whether the brain produces consciousness or otherwise, we lack any theories either way.  Indeed, it is why we have had the mind-body problem for the past couple of thousand years.  But, the hypothesis that the brain produces consciousness has a special apparent problem in this regard since, as I explain in my Brains affecting Minds do not rule out an Afterlife, not only do we not currently have a mechanism whereby brain processes could produce conscious experiences, but there is no conceivable mechanism that could be revealed.  This is why many contemporary philosophers and scientists are reductive materialists since materialism circumvents this problem by identifying brain processes or their function with specific conscious experiences.  However, I have argued that reductive materialism is not tenable.  See my Why the existence of consciousness rules modern materialism out.

Of course we also lack a mechanism or scientific story of how a immaterial self or soul relates to the body, but unlike the brain producing consciousness thesis, this does not appear to be an intractable problem.  Even if it were, clearly the lack of explanations or theories for either possibility entails we can scarcely apply Ockham’s razor here.

If anything the onus should surely be on those who dispute that these experiences are indicative of an afterlife. After all, the most compelling argument for annihilation is that as we approach death our consciousness diminishes gradually until it reaches zero. But, for those who have NDE's, they often state they were more conscious than they have ever felt in their lives, and this at the threshold of death. Are we to imagine that at that moment their consciousness plunges to zero? This seems incongruous to me.  A similar point can be applied to terminal lucidity.  Such experiences have to be post-hoc rationalised away by the skeptic, often utilizing convoluted conventional explanations.  Then, of course, they have to face the apparent irreconcilable difficulty of explaining how the brain or the whole body could produce consciousness.

Conclusion

 

Whatever the specific issue that is being argued over I disapprove of either side declaring their position should be considered to be correct in the absence of their opponents proving their case.  One should not win by default. Moreover, often both sides will dispute who has the burden of proof, and who Ockham’s razor favours.  Since this is often not clear cut, and indeed, as I explain above, the appeal to such principles often presupposes one’s position, then the prospect of any fruitful exchange of views is a forlorn one.

My purpose in this post was not to argue that NDEs and deathbed visions are proof of an afterlife.  Although I do think that these phenomena strongly suggest an afterlife, there are problems with this evidence as I acknowledge in part 9 of my A Response to The Myth of an Afterlife. My task in this post was merely to dispute that those disposed to believe NDE’s suggest an afterlife bear the burden of proof, or that appealing to Ockham’s razor renders the afterlife hypothesis unlikely.  

How could we see, hear, taste, touch and smell during an "out of body experience" (OBE)?

Someone in a Facebook group who has had a near-death experience was stumped when a nurse asked him how he could see, hear, taste, touch and smell without their five sense organs during their OBE.

Clearly the nurse, and indeed many others, think that from the fact that damage to one's eyes or visual part of the brain leads to a reduction in vision or even blindness, that both one's eyes and one's brain are crucial to being able to see. The same argument applies to the other four senses.

It seems to me though that this argument is without merit. Here is an analogy. If one is in a house, the transparency of the glass within the windows is an essential condition for being able to see the sky. However, this only applies whilst we are in the house. If we were to venture outside, the windows are an irrelevance. We would have an unrestricted view of the sky.

I suggest exactly the same could be the case during an OBE. Let's suppose the ability to see and hear and smell are intrinsic aspects of a non-physical self or soul. In that case, during an OBE we should have unrestricted vision; maybe even vastly enhanced vision and the ability to see in all directions at once. But, whilst the non-physical self or soul is "housed" within one's body, we can only see, hear and smell by virtue of a functioning brain and unimpaired senses. Here, though, the brain and senses are only playing a similar role as the windows do within our house in the analogy outlined above.

For many of those who believe in an afterlife, the hypothesis is that the brain suppresses or filters conscious experiences rather than creates them. A properly functioning brain will allow us to see, hear, taste, touch and smell. And indeed, come to that, a properly functioning brain can allow us to be able to perceive, think, feel, and deliberate too. Contrariwise, a dysfunctional brain might reduce or completely suppress our senses and mental capacities just as dirty windows or drawing the curtains can impede or completely obscure our view of the sky.

None of this of course entails that the brain does play such a role. But the fact our five senses and mental capacities can be impaired, if not eliminated, due to a dysfunctional brain does not in itself entail that all these abilities could not be had by non-physical selves or souls. And indeed, should the above reasoning be correct, one might expect that a disembodied self or soul might well have enhanced senses and an enhanced mental capacity. This can be compared to having a greater view of the sky once we have exited from a house.