#11 – Are Near-Death Experiences Evidence of an Afterlife? Fischer against near-death experiences.

Mortality Matters: Meaning & Death

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Are near-death experiences evidence of an afterlife? What are we such that an afterlife could be possible for beings like us at all? In this episode, I discuss Fischer's criticisms of the evidentiary role near-death experiences have for belief in an afterlife. While he doesn't deny that they are experienced, Fischer likens near-death experiences to dreams and would only constitute evidence of an afterlife if there were something supernatural about the mind, namely, that the mind could exist without the body. Instead, he favors a naturalistic explanation of mental phenomena in which mentality is fully explicable in physical terms, and as such there is no reason to believe that any near-death experience is veridical.
However, Fischer sets an unfair explanatory burden upon the possibility of supernaturalist explanations, which entails less plausible conclusions about its inconceivability. Furthermore, the kind of naturalistic explanations he gives for near-death experiences merely provide neural correlates, which when we consider an analogy with color perception we see that this doesn't provide the kind of reduction that Fischer needs to dispatch supernaturalism about the afterlife. What we're left with is a dialectical impasse, in which near-death experiences do provide some evidence of an afterlife though perhaps misleading evidence if in actuality there is no such thing.