| Afterlife & Souls | |
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Susan Blackmore should serve as picture-perfect example of what it means to be skeptical of supernatural and paranormal claims. As a student, she started out believing in the validity of all sorts of paranormal concepts - ESP, telepathy, astral planes, life after death... the works. But once she started to seriously investigate them, she found that the evidence wasn't what she assumed.
She devised her own experiments, and failed to find anything. She studied other groups, and failed to find anything. She visited haunted houses and even had herself "regressed" to search for past lives. She failed to find anything. She visited other experimenters, and only found experimental errors. In the end, she was accused of being a "psi-inhibitory experimenter," which means having the power of abolishing paranormal effects.
All of this was documented in her book In Search of the Light: Science & The Paranormal, which covers a large amount of ground dealing with paranormal claims and what she discovered in her journey from believer to skeptic. According to her, "True skepticism has nothing to do with disbelief. It is about taking people's claims seriously and trying to understand them."
In her book Dying to Live, this is exactly what she does, focusing specifically on the claims that there exist experiences of an afterlife. Blackmore argues that Near Death Experiences (NDEs) cannot be explained in terms of either a real afterlife or through hallucinations. What this means is that in her exploration, she avoids being dismissive of either approach. Instead, she compares their predictions to NDE reports and experimental evidence.
Blackmore does, however, have her own preferred description of what is going on and she shares it over the course of her book. She believes that the experiences can be explained in terms of unusual brain activity and (mis)interpretation of experiences.
Explaining
NDEs
Despite what some NDE supporters will claim, we must keep in mind that these experiences vary with the individual, the culture, and even the specific circumstances that the person was in. Another important fact to keep in mind is that experiences like those reported can be set off in a number of ways - a person doesn't even need to be near death to have them.
With these facts firmly in mind, Blackmore investigates the reports of NDEs and examines whether or not both those and similar experiences in other situations are better explained by the common supernaturalistic claims or by more prosaic, naturalistic events.
There are four main arguments used to justify the hypothesis that NDEs are the result of an experience of an afterlife. They are:
- Consistency
- Reality
- Paranormal
- Transformation
The "consistency argument" is that the reported experiences are consistent around the world and through time. Although there are similarities in experiences reported in other cultures and in the past, we do not find invariance. Instead, we do find real differences in other cultures and in varying people.
The "reality argument" is that the experiences feel so real that they must be real. Unfortunately, this attempts to argue that feelings are the same as evidence, which is not true. We can accept that the experiences are "real" in the sense that people do indeed have experiences. We can accept that the experiences are "real" in the sense that they feel very real. However, none of this means that they are "real" in the sense that they are products of our shared world rather than the mind itself.
The "paranormal argument" is that these experiences involve strange paranormal events which cannot be explained by any materialistic method. Thus, NDEs must involve some other dimension. Unfortunately, it is difficult to find independent corroboration for such claims.
The "transformation argument" is that people's lives have been transformed in significant ways. This is presumed not to be possible if the experiences were not real - therefore, the experiences must be of a genuine afterlife. This, too, is fallacious - all that is required is for the individual to sincerely believe in what happened to them in order for them to change.
There are many alternatives to the supernatural/afterlife hypothesis offered by NDE advocates. On the point of consistency, we must remember that all of the people in question are humans with human brains - and so it is not unreasonable to realize that similar brains will produce similar experiences.
Blackmore describes a variety of events which can produce the experiences reported: lack of oxygen to the brain, the release of endorphins, seizures in the limbic system and temporal lobe, the breakdown in the model of the "self" giving a "timeless" quality to the experiences, etc. With each claim about what a person experiences, there are simpler biological explanations which are superior to claims of an afterlife.
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