Is there anything after death?

afterdeath

I was on Reddit today, and I came across (this link)[http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/eyiat/for_those_of_you_who_have_died_and_been/]. One of the things I've seen on this site that's bothered me is the exclusion of personal experiences in deciding what a person should or should not believe. I know that less wrong is mostly atheist, and I wanted to hear less wrong's reaction to descriptions of experiences like these.

For example, my dad was in the hospital 5 or 6 years ago when a truck came across an icy road and hit him head-on. His most vivid memory from this is a dream he had when he was in the hospital. He was in a pool of water with my mom, and they were both naked (they were underwater, but didn't need to breathe). He remembers that at the end of this pool, there was a bright light that he wanted to head towards. He began to swim that way...and here, I don't remember what happened, but he was unable to reach the light for some reason.

Such stories seem to be common for people who come close to death, and for a community based around rationality which seems to consider the likelihood of life after death as slim, I just wondered what your reactions are. My reaction is that such experiences are explainable in terms of neural activity, but that doesn't necessarily exclude the possibility that these are descriptions of experiences of an afterlife. I'm not convinced by them, but I do consider it to be possible.

In general, personal observation by humans is not strong evidence.

I agree. I also appreciate that you did not exclude it as evidence entirely.
I do not expect my personal experiences to be very convincing to anyone other than myself (Daniel Dennett wrote a very eloquent description of why this is true, it's in my room, I may post it here later). However, I am very convinced by my own experiences. I understand that my personal experiences with what I believe to have been God could be explained by neural anomalies, but until I have convincing reasons to believe that, or convincing reasons to believe there isn't a God outside my personal experiences, or convincing reasons to believe that my experiences are evidence of something else entirely, my personal experiences are sufficient to convince me that there is probably a God. [edited for clarification; I previously concluded that I would assume that there is a God, which was wrong]

Additionally, while one personal experience is not very convincing, many similar personal experiences can be. You can say that it is possibly group hallucination or something of that sort (a large prank, confused people, etc.), but until I have extra reason to believe that these people are wrong, I won't assume that.

Furthermore, even if you do accept that the stereotypical bright light and tunnel is evidence of an afterlife, why assume there's anything beyond that? Maybe the entire afterlife consists of a few seconds of bright light. And when you reach the light, the result is oblivion. There's nothing in the evidence that rules that out.

An interesting point. Not sure what my response to that is.

It would be really nice if there were an afterlife, but the vast majority of evidence is against it.

What evidence against the afterlife is there?

Indeed, given human desire for an afterlife, the fact that the best evidence is weak claims like NDEs,

Weak evidence like NDEs still requires an explanation. The obvious recourses are hallucination, neural anomalies, etc., but until I have extra evidence to support them, I won't believe them. If studies have been done to show that they are hallucinations, etc., then that would be sufficient. I don't know of any.

that itself becomes evidence against an afterlife, because with that much motivated cognition if there was strong evidence for an afterlife, it seems unlikely someone would not have hit on it by now.

What evidence might convince you? Simply curious, I can't think of any. Similarly, life could come from invisible unicorns prancing around our galaxy, but I can't think of any evidence for that. My reaction is different, though: I simply say "if it is, I can't know" not "there can't be, because we haven't seen evidence for it." I really don't like saying that God can't exist, there can't be an afterlife, etc., because we don't have evidence for which isn't the same thing as evidence against. My reaction is make no beliefs, not update my beliefs against.

What evidence might convince you? Simply curious, I can't think of any.

Well, the most obvious one is dying and finding myself in an apparent afterlife. But that's a bit flippant. Any of the following would make assign the idea of an afterlife a high probability:

1) A collection of mediums who are able to talk to the dead and can demonstrate that they are actually talking to the dead. Evidence that they can actually do so would a) correctly passing on pass-phrases to living people that were agreed upon before people died b) access to large amounts of i... (read more)

5jwhendy16y

It would be interesting for you to consider why you give the afterlife weight in light of "absence of evidence." By that, I mean that it might be helpful to consider where the "seed" got planted in the first place. Do things like NDEs and OBEs alone lead you to think that there is a possible afterlife, or was the idea/half-belief already present and NDEs/OBEs only make it slightly more likely or difficult to rule out entirely? I only ask because I would presume that in many, many cases (Xenu, thetans, fairies, the Loch Ness monster, aliens, and many conspiracy theories) you absolutely do treat absence of evidence as evidence of absence. Without a significant difference in the quantity or quality of evidence between these various cases, and without a reason to think that an NDE/OBE implies an immaterial self rather than simply an unexplained phenomenon... I suspect that the belief or concept of the afterlife hypothesis originated somewhere else and your current grounds for clinging to it (OBEs/NDEs needing to be explained and absence of evidence isn't...) aren't really real. To say it one more way: you might be discussing this topic as if a certain set of evidence matters, when it really has nothing to do with why you deal delicately with the afterlife idea while harshly with the other unsupported hypotheses I listed above.

2Dreaded_Anomaly16y

Personally, I find Occam's Razor convincing. Doesn't it strike you as unlikely that there would be a God, but the only evidence for God would be subjective experiences? [...] It seems like many similar experiences only indicate that many humans have similar brains. [...] There have been some studies about inducing NDEs with ketamine, as mentioned earlier. See this page for a few descriptions of various studies. There are also many studies about the brain's reaction to sensory deprivation, such as this recent one which demonstrated hallucinations after only 15 minutes. I wouldn't say any of this constitutes overwhelming evidence, but it's far from worthless. [...] I don't think anyone here would say that. Absence of evidence isn't necessarily evidence of absence, but without evidence, the probability of God, the afterlife, etc. is going to come up very low from a Bayesian evaluation.

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