Jeffrey Long, M. D. on Near-Death Experiences (NDEs)

Here (under 5 minutes).

'Coded' as used by Dr. Long in this video clip is medical jargon. For a patient to 'code' is for the patient to suffer cardiac arrest. 

It is a mistake to think that if an episode of experiencing is real, then  the intentional object of that episode of experiencing is also real. The question I want to pose is whether Dr. Long is making that mistake. But first I must explain the mistake and why it really is a mistake.

Consider a perceptual illusion.  I am returning from a long hike at twilight. I am tired and the light is bad. Suddenly I 'see' a rattlesnake.  I shout out to my partner and I stop marching forward. But it turns out that what I saw was a twisted tree root. This is a typical case of a visual perceptual illusion.  (There are also auditory, olfactory, tactile, and gustatory illusions.)

What I initially 'saw' is what I am calling the intentional object. The intentional object, the object intended, is distinct from the act  (occurrent episode) of consciousness directed upon the intentional object. Act and intentional object are obviously distinct; but that is not to say that the one can exist without the other: they are, necessarily, correlates of one another.  No act without an intentional object, no intentional object without an act. 

Now not all episodes of consciousness are object-directed, or consciousnesses of something (the 'of' to be read as an objective genitive). But some conscious states of a person are object-directed. These mental states exhibit what philosophers call 'intentionality.'  (Bear in mind that 'intentionality' as here used  is a term of art, a terminus technicus, not to be confused with more specific ordinary-language uses of 'intend' and 'intentionality.') Intentionality, then,  is object-directedness.  One must not assume, however, that every object of an intentional mental state  exists. Some intentional objects exist and some do not. 

Philosophers before and after Franz Brentano have repeatedly pointed out that the intentional object of  (subjective genitive) an object-directed state of consciousness  may or may not exist.  Intentionality, we may say, has the 'non-inference property.'  From 'S is conscious of  an F,' one cannot validly infer, 'there exists an x such that x is an F.' For example, if I am imagining, or hallucinating, or dreaming, or simply thinking about a centaur, it does not follow that there exists a centaur that I am imagining, or hallucinating, or dreaming, or simply thinking about.

In my hiking example, the snake I 'saw' did not exist. But there is no denying that (i) something  appeared to me, something that caused me to shout out and stop hiking, and that (ii) what  appeared to me did not have the properties of a tree root -- else I would not have shouted out and stopped moving.  I have no fear of tree roots. The intentional object had, or rather appeared to have, the properties of a rattlesnake. So in this case, the correlate of the act, the intentional object, did not exist. And this without prejudice to the reality of the act. 

If we agree that to be real = to exist extra-mentally ('outside' the mind), then in my example, the visual experience was real but its intentional object was not.

Suppose now that a person 'codes.' He suffers cardiac arrest. Oxygenated blood does not reach his brain,  and in consequence his EEG flatlines, which indicates that brain activity has ceased  and that the patient is 'brain dead.'  Suppose that at that very moment he has an NDE. An NDE is an occurrent episode of experiencing which is, moreover, intentional or object-directed.  The typical intentional object or objects of NDEs include such items as a tunnel, lights, angels, dead ancestors, and the the heavenly realm as described in Long's video, and as described in innumerable similar accounts of NDEs.  But from the occurrence and thus the reality of the near-death experiencing it does not follow that the heavenly realm and its contents are also real.  Their status might be merely intentional, and thus not real,  and this despite their being extremely vivid. 

Yes or no? This is the question I am raising.

Is it logically consistent with the patient's having of that near-death experience that he not survive his bodily death as an individual person who 'goes to heaven'?  Yes it is.   That he had a real experience is not in question. The patient was near death, but he was alive when he had the experience.  He is here to answer our questions. The patient is honest, and if anyone knows  whether he had an NDE, he does. He is the authority; he enjoys 'privileged access' to his mental states. 

But unless one confuses intentio and intentum, act and object, experiencing and the experienced-qua-experienced, one has to admit that the reality of the experiencing does not guarantee the reality of heaven or of angels or of dead/disembodied souls or one's  survival of  one's bodily death.

For it could be -- it is epistemically possible that -- it is like this. When a patient's EEG flatlines, and he does not recover, but actually dies, then his NDE, if he had one, is his last  experience, even if  it turns out to be an experience as of  heaven. Perhaps at the moment of dying, but while still alive, he 'sees' his beloved dead wife approach him, and he 'sees' her reach out to him, and he 'sees' himself reach out to her, but he does not see her or himself, where 'see' is being used as a 'verb of success.'  ('See' is being used as a verb of success if and only if 'S sees x' is so used as to entail 'X exists.' When 'S sees x' is used without this entailment, what we have is a phenomenological use of 'see.'  Note that both uses are literal. The phenomenological use is not figurative. Admittedly, the point being made in this parenthesis needs defense in  a separate post.)

If this epistemic possibility cannot  be ruled out, then there is no proof of an afterlife from NDEs. In that case we cannot be objectively certain that our man 'went to heaven'; we must countenance the possibility that he simply ceased to exist as an individual person.

Finally, can Dr. Long be taxed with having committed the mistake of confusing the reality of the experiencing with the reality of the experienced-qua-experienced? I think he can. The video shows that he is  certain that there is a heaven to which we go after death, and that the existence of this heaven  is proven by the very large number of NDEs that have been reported by honest people. But he is not entitled to this certainty, and he hasn't proven anything.

Am I denying that we survive our bodily deaths as individual persons? No! My point is merely that we cannot prove that we do on the basis of NDEs.  There is no rationally coercive argument from the reality of NDEs to the reality of an afterlife in which we continue to exist as individual persons.  

Comments

[Jordan Ballor]

Great post!

What about instances where people seem to come back from their NDEs with true knowledge about something that they would have had no other way of knowing?

[Vito B. Caiati]

Bill,

Although I lack the sophisticated tools of philosophic analysis that you employ in this excellent post, I share your rejection of the claim “that the existence of this heaven is proven by the very large number of NDEs that have been reported by honest people.” I have read a number of books, written by physicians or reputable researchers, that seek to justify this claim, and have found all of them unconvincing, no matter how replete with testimonial evidence, either that of those who underwent NDEs or that of physicians, such as Dr. Long, who confirm that such persons were in fact “dead.” As you observe, “But unless one confuses intentio and intentum, act and object, experiencing and the experienced-qua-experienced, one has to admit that the reality of the experiencing does not guarantee the reality of heaven or of angels or of dead/disembodied souls or one’s survival of one’s bodily death.” I would add to this the challenge presented by new scientific studies to the notion that consciousness ceases with brain death, which means that the flatlining of brain activity, should not be taken as evidence that death has occurred. In fact, recent research suggests that consciousness persists for some time after the brain has shut down. If this is the case, NDEs may be, in fact, not simply the last experiences of brains “at the moment of dying,” as you suggest, but rather those the cells of flatlined (“dead”) brains that are not yet been destroyed. If this is the case, then the evidence for your possible explanation of NDEs is strengthened, since the equation brain flatlining=death no longer holds, rendering all the reported experiences those of still living cells. The mystery of what constitutes death is thus deepened, but in a way that makes it possible to regard NDEs as evidence for continued life in some form, rather than as openings onto the world beyond. Here are a few reports of recent research on this matter: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/apr/02/new-science-of-death-brain-activity-consciousness-near-death-experience and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnoIf2NwaRY

Vito

[EG]

Hi Bill,

Thanks for sharing. This is rich content for the mental mill.

Perhaps in the spirit of this post, what I keep coming back to is the way in which logical reasoning at a certain level fails to capture the right substance of what is in (subjective) conscious experiences, and if it does, then it distorts them by placing formal constraints that simply don't exist intra-mentally. And perhaps, there is no particular fact of the matter that is logically decidable extra-mentally.

(Collaterally, I have in mind when talking about logical limitations, the theories of Godel for incompleteness, and Turing with the Halting problem. And, yes, these are talking about formal systems, but probably still useful in trying to pick up how logical reasoning about say, consciousness might necessary be "incomplete" or "undecidable".)

[BV]

Thanks, Jordan.

To answer your question I will first distinguish between NDEs and OBEs. A person could have one without the other. Suppose a healthy person lying on a couch comes to see himself from the POV of the ceiling. That would be an out-of-body experience. It would be a case of autoscopy. On the other hand, one might have an NDE without at the same time having an OBE. A third case would be a person near death who has an NDE that purports to reveal heavenly entities, but also sees his earthly body lying on the operating table. That would be a mixed case.

What you are taking about does not fit the pure NDE case, but it does fit the OBE and the mixed cases. Suppose I am near death on the operating table. I come to see my body and other things from the POV of the ceiling. I note that a nurse has a birette in her hair in a position where I could not have seen it from the POV of the operating table. That would seem to show that I was having a veridical visual experience that was not routed through my eyes, and would seem to support the view that I am a pure spirit that can literally see physical things even when I become disembodied.

To further complicate the discussion, there is the problem of demonic possession. There is a lot of evidence that demons, who are purely immaterial spirits, can hijack or come to control a human body and use that body to do things in the physical world such as speak foreign languages unknown to the person whose body was 'hijacked.'

[BV]

More on this topic at Substack: https://williamfvallicella.substack.com/p/near-death-experiences?utm_source=publication-search

I comment on an NDE report by Richard John Neuhaus.

[EG]

Hi Bill,

Read the substack, it struck me, aren’t some myths just the encoded forms of knowledge, experience transfer that we are asking about with things like Death and where we go after? That there is no other real explanation, it is a domain of reality perception foreclosed to us as mortal creatures, and perhaps it may because what our experience of consciousness requires is gone, so its like a sound wave that stops because there is no more “matter” to “oscillate”. So, we have to tell a story that offers a plausible explanation, and then one which serves our nature, guiding or directing as each culture/age “knew best.”

[Tom T.]

Good analysis, and I agree with the conclusion. Put another way, I think the fact that NDE's do not conclusively prove that there is life after death is because they are sub-specie eyewitness accounts. Due, I think, to your act-object distinction, eyewitness accounts per se never conclusively prove the truth of what is reported. The truth-quotient they contain is always dependent upon external factors to the experience reported by the eyewitness. Is he a man of good character who is not given to lying or wild fabrications? Was the light good? Was he in a good position to see the event in question? Do others corroborate his report? Does what he reports make sense?

An NDE is a special sort of eyewitness account in which no external evidence is even possible. The truth value completely depends on the person's character and whether what is reported makes sense given the world as we know it. And it is the latter that most heavily influences the debate. If you are a child of modernity then you are inclined to reject any report of life outside of and transcendent to the physical world. If you are a Christian, however, you are supposed to already believe in the possibility of survival after death. Such reports, then, are more believable. And yet, even so, due to the inherent limitations of eyewitness accounts and your own personal take on what life after death entails, you might still hold (like me) that NDE's themselves are more than likely a mere psychological trick of consciousness (a trick, though, that might implicate a "continued life in some form," as Vito suggested above).

It's the commitments you hold about reality that make such reports more or less believable. Dr. Long thinks that NDE's conclusively prove life after death, but that is only because he is willing to believe that reality is larger than just the physical material. But even granting such a larger reality, Dr. Long fails to recognize that NDE's, like all eyewitness accounts, are never in themselves conclusively probative of the events they report on.

[BV]

I don't know what you are saying, Tom. First of all, an NDE is an experience. not an account. Second, what do you mean by "no external evidence is possible"?

Suppose the NDE is an OBE. The patient flatlines and sees his body on the operating table from the POV of the ceiling. He notes a birette in the hair of a nurse, and reports on this when he is resuscitated. Is that not external evidence?

Thirdly, your truth value remark makes no sense to me.

[Tom T.]

An NDE is an experience for the person who has it, but for others, it is a report or account of an experience. For example, Dr. Long's accounts of NDE's are of reports he has received, and not anything he has personally experienced. Also, your post regarding Richard John Neuhaus's experience is a report or account of his NDE, not your own experience.

I have never had a near-death experience, and neither has anyone else I know (with the exception of Eben Alexander and his family, posted in your substack article, 11/16/24, who I have known for some number of years). So whenever the issue of the probative value of NDE's come up, I take them as reports or accounts, just like any other eyewitness account.

I did not take your various posts on the subject as the narrow question about whether or not the experience is probative for the person who has it, nor do I now think that was your point. But I am not sure the analysis differs that much. If I had such an experience, I would have the same questions about it. Minus, of course, the issue of whether or not I am lying, I would still question the experience in light of my sense of the world as I know it. If I were prone to secular materialism, I would undoubtedly consider it a mere strange psychological quirk, like any dream or illusion I have experienced, with no lasting significance about an afterlife.

You distinguished between an NDE and an OBE in the comments above. As you point out, OBE's present different considerations and so I restricted my comment to NDE's in the context of whether they are proof of an afterlife in some extra-physical space, which is the issue I took to be under consideration. And in this context, "no external evidence is possible" was meant in the same sense as you recount that a person with an NDE "is the authority; he enjoys 'privileged access' to his mental states … " External evidence (or corroboration, if you will) is in theory available for eyewitness accounts in general; if someone tells me they saw a spectacular arch in St. Louis, I can go there and verify it. But there is no way to verify the claim of an afterlife in a heaven or some other alternate space-time continuum experienced in the near-death events under consideration.

The truth value in an NDE is the sliding scale from credible to incredible which is implied by your conclusion that there "is no rationally coercive argument from the reality of NDEs to the reality of an afterlife." If not rationally coercive or conclusive, any such argument might still present a more or less probability of being true.