near to death episodes (Endings)

by whitecraw, Tuesday, March 04, 2008, 23:47 (5887 days ago) @ John Clinch

But it would be impossible - certainly unethical - to attempt "test" near-death experiences (NDEs) so we are left only with personal accounts of those who have nearly died. These seem to chime with what happens when neuro-scientists stimulate the "God-spot" or similar areas of the brain of given subjects. Even if we could test NDEs, all we would be left with is subjective experience rather like those who experience life-changing sensations when their God-spots are stimulated. It would demonstrate little except that people have mystical experiences. We know that already.
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> There is no evidence - and I'm not saying that you personally subscribe to the notion - that NDEs point to the possibility of a life after death, however comforting the notion. So let us restrict ourselves to that which we CAN know about - i.e. to test theories about living brains - and leave everything else to the wannabe true believers (whoops, sorry, "agnostics"). - You put your finger on a very interesting point about the limits of scientific enquiry: that it cannot access the subjective or 'lived' aspect of experience, but is restricted to its objective or observable aspect; science can describe and explain the neurology of grief, for example, but it can give no insight into what it is to grieve, into what grief feels like. This latter ... the inner, 'felt' aspect of experience; its subjectivity ... science has to consign to the unknowable, whereas it is precisely this aspect of experience that we know most intimately and immediately because it is the aspect we live. - But the irreducibility of the human reality of things like grief and death to standard scientific explanation need not be a cause for despair. While these things are scientifically unknowable, they can be clarified through phenomenological reduction. The problem with things like grief and death is that our subjective experience of them is filtered by interpretation and our interpretations are informed by conceptual structures (theories, stories ... narratives). Hence, people who have been pulled back from death will represent their experience of death ... even to themselves ... in terms of some cultural motif, thereby making it publicly and privately comprehensible. The idea of passing on to some afterlife is in many cultures a powerful interpretative device in relation to death as a lived experience. - We can, however, get closer to an unmediated (authentic or 'true') experience of things like grief and death through phenomenological reduction. Phenomenological reduction is a kind of philosophical discipline in which one first becomes conscious of the cultural constructs through which our experience is filtered and then brackets them off. The idea is that, through successive deconstructions, more and more of the cultural accretions are stripped away to leave or reveal the thing itself in its primordial ownness; an experience of the thing itself, unmediated by the historical conceptualisations through which it is normally experienced. - Whether such a pristine experience is attainable in practice, or whether there will always remain some residue of interpretation, is a matter of debate among phenomenologists. Some argue that there is no such 'primordial ownness' to things, and liken the process of phenomenological reduction to that of peeling away the successive layers of an onion, at the heart of which nothing remains. - But whatever the outcomes of that particular debate, the point is that, just because scientific knowledge cannot extend to the subjectivity of experience ... i.e. cannot give us the sort of knowledge of grief that a bereaved parent has ... it does not follow that enquiry ought to be restricted to what can be known scientifically (namely, the neurological events that are the objective aspect of things like grief). There are non-scientific forms of enquiry that can go into aspects of reality from which science precludes itself.