Comment by NateEag
3 years ago
You should read something other than Sue Blackmore on NDEs.
There are weirdly consistent reports of a whole lot more phenomena beyond what she outlined in _Dying To Live_ thirty years ago, which is more or less what you've summarized here.
They may just be a coincidental agglutination of evolution and human brain malfunctions, stacked up with a whole lot of coincidence / selection bias to account for the anecdotes of people gaining correct knowledge about physical reality while "dead".
If that's all they are (which I do find plausible if not persuasive), what you've written here leaves out a lot of steps needed to justify that position.
Thank you, I appreciate the time you took to write this to me, but I really don't have any interest in the phenomena. I didn't even know who Sue Blackmore was tbh.
In my worldview burden of justification falls on those who would posit non-materialistic, supernatural explanations.
You're welcome. That's perfectly fair.
FWIW, I wasn't trying to say that the position should be "supernatural by default" - just that there's a lot more to account for in NDEs than what you've described, and that I don't know of anyone who's looked into them seriously who holds to Blackmore's attempt at a purely materialist explanation (another way it falls down - if oxygen starvation accounts for NDEs, they shouldn't happen for people who aren't oxygen-starved, but they do).
As an agnostic who really wants to believe in the supernatural but has the same gut instinct that there needs to be evidence for it, I have a plausible materialist explanation for NDEs, but it's rather more involved and isn't especially rigorous.