Problems for Near Death Experiences as Evidence for Disembodied Consciousness

Ambiguities of Temporality and Memory

¹

I’m going to share a couple serious misgivings I have regarding near death experiences (NDEs) as evidence for disembodied consciousness. I have not done my scholarly due diligence and dug into the literature about NDEs to see whether these concerns have been redressed by those who take NDEs as strong evidence supporting the conclusion that the mind or soul (understood as the seat of consciousness) can exist independently of a functioning brain.² If anyone reading this essay is aware of replies to these objections, please share the references in the comments and I’ll revise accordingly. Otherwise, I’m going on hunches about issues I’ve not seen addressed. Moreover, the only literature I’m going to cite is, to say the least, dated, i.e., a few considerations Freud and Jung raise about the timing of dreams and the sources of dream content. I have no doubt that in the century that has passed since Freud last revised the Interpretation of Dreams a great deal of scientific work has shed more empirical light on these topics. I am not then saying “We know, based on these considerations, how dreams work, and this once and for all undermines NDE’s as evidence of disembodied consciousness,” but instead my claim is more like “Based on these considerations, it is possible or plausible that dreams work this way, and this greatly weakens the evidence NDEs provide for disembodied consciousness.” The proponent of NDEs as strong evidence for disembodiment would, if I am correct, need to give us good reason to rule out these possibilities. I’m only trying to shift the burden of proof. Certainly, if empirical discoveries have shown that dreams don’t work the way I’m supposing (with Freud and Jung) that they might, then my case poses no threat to the argument from NDEs to disembodied consciousness. What follows is just me thinking aloud about some philosophical considerations, and I am (as always) open to correction. At some point I might build these musings into a piece of respectable academic writing, but for now I’m only putting a few ideas into play.

Enough cautious hedging, here’s what I have in mind!

1. Preliminaries

Obviously NDEs are experiences someone has when she is closely approaching her demise. These experiences sometimes occur when their subjects are literally, even if reversibly, “dead,” in the sense that their hearts have stopped beating for relatively long periods of time and/or their brains have ceased to undergo detectable activity. In the most interesting cases, the experience the subject has during her “death” is starkly vivid and even conveys information that she seems unable to have accessed through normal bodily means. I will then characterize NDEs in terms of the these three attributes:

1. Extraordinary Phenomenological Richness. Subjects of NDE’s often report experiences that are “more real than real.” These experiences are vivid in their qualitative aspects, highly structured, and involve very complex emotional, moral, or spiritual contents that can be articulated coherently after the fact. This robust phenomenology is supposed to have a depth exceeding experiences associated with psychedelic substances and vivid dreams and even ordinary waking consciousness in terms of perceptual vivacity and cognitive coherence and significance.

2. Temporal Coincidence with Cessation of Brain Function. In some of the most interesting cases, phenomenologically rich NDEs occur while their subjects’ brains have ceased to function in any detectable manner that we would expect to be able to support such high-level consciousness. In the typical case of this sort, the subject returns from temporary “brain death” to report qualitatively and informationally rich experiences that presuppose sophisticated operations of perception and cognition while the physical means for such activities were, as far as we can tell, “off-line.”³

3. Anomalous Information Access. There are cases of subjects returning from NDEs and reporting information they had no plausible physical access to during that period. For example, there is a famous case of a child who returned from a NDE and gave a very detailed description of a tennis shoe on the roof ledge of the hospital in which she was treated. Her report was subsequently confirmed, and there is no plausible explanation in terms of her having ordinary perceptual access to the shoe or the ledge prior to her NDE.⁴ In such cases, even if there is no evidence that the subject’s brain has completely ceased functioning, it seems rather unlikely that the subject accessed the information through anything like ordinary physiological function.

I am not going to stake a claim as to whether these attributes are necessary or sufficient conditions (both or neither) for an NDE. Suffice it to say, they are frequent occurrences among the most significant cases, and I wager something like these phenomena are what gets people’s attention turned toward the issue. Moreover, extraordinary phenomenological richness, temporal coincidence with the cessation of brain function, and anomalous information access are, especially as conjunction, very strong evidence for the claim that consciousness can be disembodied, or at least that our standard understanding of the bodily conditions necessary for consciousness (neurophysiological function) is gravely flawed. If indeed NDEs do involve these three attributes, then it is reasonable to believe in disembodied consciousness, or to say we don’t really have any sense what role brain function plays in the embodiment of consciousness. The latter, however, would open the field for vast metaphysical speculation.

Notice that extraordinary phenomenological richness would not provide much in the way of evidence for disembodied consciousness if it were not coincident with either temporal cessation of brain function or anomalous information access. That is, someone’s having a profound experience would not suggest that her consciousness were disembodied (or demand that we radically revise what we mean by “embodied”), unless this experience occurred while the ordinary physical conditions for consciousness (brain function) were off-line or the experience contained novel information it is highly unlikely that she obtained through the normal operation of the physiological means of perception and cognition. Thus, our question is then whether NDEs really do involve extraordinarily phenomenologically rich experiences coincident with the cessation of brain function and/or contain anomalous access to information. In what follows, I will argue that we have some good reasons to doubt that NDEs, including the most striking cases, actually do involved these grounds for concluding that consciousness can exist as disembodied.⁵

2. Coincidence with the Cessation of Brain Activity

One scenario for a NDE that supposedly supports the disembodiment of consciousness is the coincidence of a phenomenologically rich experience and the cessation of brain activity. Thus, we have in mind something fitting the following schema:

• S had E at T, where “S” is a subject of experience, “E” is a phenomenologically rich experience, and “T” is a time at which S’s nervous system was not displaying any detectable activity sufficient to sustain a phenomenologically rich experience.

S had E at T, almost trivially supports or even entails the disembodiment of consciousness, i.e., if the subject has a phenomenologically rich experience at precisely the time at which her neurophysiology is unable to support such activity, it follows that it is at least highly likely that neurophysiological activity is not a necessary condition for phenomenologically rich experience in all cases. That would seem to be all someone needs to make a reasonable case for disembodied consciousness. In fact, a NDE of this sort could be taken simply as a concrete example of such disembodiment.

A fairly obvious objection looms in this vicinity. I defined “T” as a time at which S’s nervous system was not displaying any detectable activity sufficient to sustain a phenomenologically rich experience. One could grant this in the case of the S’s having E and yet that does not necessarily entail that T was a time at which S’s nervous system was not having any activity sufficient to sustain a phenomenologically rich experience. That is, a skeptic regarding the evidential weight of NDEs for disembodied consciousness (hereafter “the NDE skeptic”) could suppose that E was sustained by neurophysiological activities that are undetectable by our current instrumentation.

This point is well-taken, but I don’t find the objection decisive. Certainly, it is possible that we are missing something at a fundamental level about the activities of the brain due to the limitations of our current technological prowess, but that possibility alone does not demand a strong probability. Unless the NDE skeptic can give us some positive reason as to why we should doubt our current instrumentation’s reliability for tracking the physical conditions associated with phenomenologically rich consciousness, she is asking the NDE proponent (someone who believes NDEs strongly support the disembodiment of consciousness) to prove a negative, i.e., that there is nothing significant our instruments are missing. I cannot prove that there is not an empirically undetectable serial killer currently in the room with me, but this causes me no worry.

Maybe, however, the NDE skeptic has something like this in mind: “Sure, it’s not at all likely that there is some as of now undetectable neurophysiological activity going on at T. Nevertheless, given what we already know about the relationship between high-level consciousness and its neurophysiological correlates, it is still more likely that there is some undetected neurophysiological activity occurring at T than that E occurred without any physical support at all.” Sometimes we have to go for an intrinsically low probability explanation when the only competitor is even more improbable. Thus, so the NDE skeptic may argue, we have to go with the otherwise unlikely hypothesis that there is something fundamental about the brain-consciousness connection that our current instrumentation misses.

There is no strict logical flaw in this reply by the NDE skeptic, but there is a very big problem that will arise when we push her to justify these probability assessments. Exactly how improbable is disembodied consciousness given our background knowledge? There are independent arguments in favor of disembodiment. How bad are they? It would be very difficult actually to assign a number to this assessment. Likewise, how likely (or unlikely) is it that our instrumentation is missing something important? Here too, I believe it would be very difficult to come to a principled assessment of this probability. Thus, the comparison between the prima facie probability of disembodied consciousness and the prima facie probability of as yet undetectable neurophysiological activities is inscrutable. I doubt there is any principled, non-question-begging way to sort out this issue. Thus, the objection from the possibility of currently non-detectable neurophysiological activities is insufficient to overcome the apparently strong prima facie likelihood that if S had E at T, then S’s consciousness was disembodied at T.

There’s no problem then for a NDE proponent along those lines, but there is a much thornier difficulty around the corner. We do not have any direct evidence for S had E at T. Rather, we infer this claim from a report by S regarding her recollection. That is, we infer S had E at T from S recollects that S had E at T. Notice, obviously, that the latter does not entail the former. For example, Smitty could recollect that he saw Jones in the library suspiciously wielding a candlestick at 8:00 last evening, while it is false that Jones was indeed in the library so armed at that time. There are two broad ways Smitty’s recollection could go awry:

• Material Error: Jones wasn’t in the library or Jones wasn’t wielding a candlestick (or neither).

• Temporal Error: Smitty’s recollection is materially correct (he did have an experience of Jones in the library wielding a candlestick), but the experience didn’t occur at 8:00 last evening.

In short, one could be confused about what she experienced (material error) or when she had that experience (temporal error). The question of material error regarding NDE recollections is not our concern here; we aren’t worried about whether a subject who comes back from the “dead” to report having a life-review with an angelic being is telling us something that really happened, as opposed to something they merely experienced as happening. Our question is whether such an experience, veridical or otherwise occurred without the operation of the subject’s brain, and that is an issue of when the experience occurred in relation to the cessation of brain function. In other words, our concern is over whether these experiences happen while the brain is (as far as we tell) inactive, and therefore they are likely cases of disembodied consciousness. Thus, we need to consider the possibility of NDE recollections falling into temporal error. It is obvious that such temporal errors are possible. Smitty’s recollection that he experienced being queried by angelic beings while his brain was not functioning does not entail that he actually experienced being queried by angelic beings while his brain was not functioning. Again, S recollects that S had E at T does not imply that S had E at T. It is then perfectly possible that one has a vivid recollection of a phenomenologically rich experience as having occurred while she was suffering a complete cessation of the relevant neurophysiological activities, and yet that is not when the experience actually occurred. Maybe the experience occurred in between the time the relevant neurophysiological activities were completely suppressed and when the subject returned to waking consciousness.

It is hard to deny that the temporal error in NDE recollections is possible, but is it likely? It seems that it is not altogether unlikely. For example, if Smitty dreams that he was chased by a bear last night at 2:34 AM, it doesn’t mean that his dream really occurred at 2:34 AM. It might have occurred at the very last moments before he woke up at 6:00 AM. Whatever temporally indicators our dreams may carry, they don’t give us good reasons to believe that they really occurred at a time they depict or over the duration they seem to take, but only that we dreamed that they happened at that time or with that duration. If Smitty insisted that the dream occurred at 2:34 AM because that is how he recollects the dream, he would clearly be overstepping what he can concluded. Even if Smitty claims that it seems like the dream had been going on for several hours, that it does not entail that it actually did go on for so long. One would likely tell Smitty that “It was part of your dream that it happened at 2:34 AM or that the ordeal lasted for several hours, but that is not to say that the dream happened at 2:34 AM or for such a stretch of time.” Indeed, Freud points out how long temporal sequences that occur in the content of dreams can be condensed into short the instances between a certain stimulus and our waking:

… it was possible for a dreamer to compress such an apparently superabundant quantity of material into the short period elapsing his perceiving the rousing stimulus and his waking.⁶

… a dream is able to compress into a very short space of time an amount of perceptual matter far greater than the amount of ideational matter that can be dealt with by our waking mind.⁷

In other words, what we recollect as a dream with a certain duration or an earlier moment of occurrence might be something our psyche concocted at the very last second, as it were. For example, I once had a vivid dream with an elaborate plot culminating in a stranger putting his had on my shoulder, though at that moment I woke to my wife tapping my shoulder to remind me that I had to be up early that morning. Very likely my psyche concocted the dream retroactively in reaction to the stimulation by my wife’s tapping. The dream probably played out over just a few seconds, though I recollected it as though it had taken place over the course of a day. I woke with a memory of a certain duration, but that’s not the actual duration of the dream. Moreover, suppose that part of the dream was that the tapping on my shoulder occurred at 11:00 PM the evening before (and not at 4:30 AM when my long-suffering wife helped me wake up in time to get to the airport). That’s perfectly plausible, but this only shows that our recollection of when a dream occurred based on our experience of the dream is quite unreliable.

Thus, it is perfectly plausible for a subject to awake with a recollection of a NDE that seems to have gone on for many minutes, hours, and even in some cases weeks, while the actual duration of the experience might be just a few seconds. I could easily awake from a night’s sleep recollecting a dream of watching the hands of a clock move from 12:00 PM to 8:00 AM, but that does not imply that the dream actually lasted for eight ours or even that it occurred at any point in that interval the night before. Rather, I would only know that I awoke with a recollection of having so dreamed, but that tells us nothing of the actual duration or moment of occurrence of the experience. I see no reason in principle to think a NDE would behave any differently. Thus, someone might come back from a period of the cessation of her brain functions and recollect that she had a phenomenologically rich experience during that cessation, even though she actually had the experience after her brain function was to some degree restored. Really, how could the subject detect the difference? It could be that she simply wakes up with the condensed memory of the experience as having occurred over a long period of time or during the cessation, even though that memory was formed after the cessation but before she achieved wakeful consciousness.

Something like this sort of temporal confusion, according to Freud anyway, seems to happen all the time in our ordinary dreams. Thus, the mere fact that a subject reports an extraordinarily phenomenologically rich experience as having occurred during a cessation of brain function is good reason to conclude such an experience occurred, i.e., there is no reason to doubt that that the subject indeed had an a profound experience, even an encounter that changes her now regained life. Be that at is it may, the apparent regular phenomena of dreaming gives us some good reason to doubt that the NDE actually occurred during the suppression of neurophysiological activity. At the very least we have a plausible, and I would say probable, account of the duration and moment of occurrence of the the NDE that does not put it as occurring during the cessation of brain activity.

There are cases, however, in which the subject of an NDE reports information that seems to have been obtained during the cessation of brain function, e.g., a verified recollection of the attending physician making a joke while the subject was “dead.’ In such a case, it seems we would have a good reason to conclude that the NDE did occur during the period the brain was inactive, and therefore she must have been disembodied in some sense. This consideration, since it seemingly involves obtaining perceptual/cognitive information while the normal physical mechanisms for such are inoperative moves us to a consideration of anomalous information access.

3. Anomalous Information Access

Indeed, many NDE reports do involve what seems like access to information that cannot be accounted for by our normal physiologically grounded mechanism for accessing our environment. As I just mentioned, some subjects of NDEs recollect conversations or events that third parties can verify as having occurred during the cessation of brain activity. Moreover, earlier we discussed the case of a child returning from a NDE to report a shoe on the ledge of a hospital roof which was later verified, even though there is no plausible account of how she could have seen the shoe by normal perceptual means. Are these cases then good evidence of disembodiment? I believe we should be very cautious about answering affirmatively.

It is the stuff of Psychology 101 to point out that we take in a lot more information than we consciously perceive or remember explicitly; remember the stock example of the fan running the background that you certainly can hear (the sound is reaching your ear drums and having upstream effects on your nervous system), but you don’t consciously perceive it until someone points it out to you or the fan shuts off. It has long been knowing that there is a lot of information on hand in our perceptual-cognitive systems that is never deployed consciously, or is in fact brought to awareness later, even under odd circumstances. Freud notes that often these forgotten perceptions are invoked in our dreams:

It is easy to see how the remarkable preference shown by the memory in dreams for indifferent, and consequently unnoticed, elements in waking experience is bound to lead people to overlook in general the dependency of dreams upon waking life…. [and understanding our dreams may require] … hunting out every kind of utterly worthless psychical event from the remotest corners of the chambers of one’s memory, and in dragging to light once again every kind of completely indifferent moment of the past from the oblivion in which it was buried the very hour, perhaps, after it occurred.⁸

That is, Freud agues throughout the Interpretation of Dreams that the material of dreams (though not their symbolic import!) is drawn from waking experience, even though those experiences may not remembered explicitly. For example, he relays accounts of people having dreams of places, events, and people that they thought were fictions, but later discovered were depictions based on memories they had not fully recalled, e.g., a subject having a dream about a certain man that he finds out later to have been a long-forgotten neighbor during his early childhood. The point here is that we can have ideational contents in our dreams that are actually memories from waking life that have never before been consciously explicit to us. Even Jung seems to think something like this might be going on in some “precognitive dreams”:

Thus, dreams may sometimes announce certain situations long before they actually happen. This is not necessarily a miracle or a form of precognition. Many crises in our lives have a long unconscious history. We move toward them step by step, unaware of the dangers that are accumulating. But what we consciously fail to see is frequently perceived by our unconscious, which can the information on through dreams.⁹

The unconscious carries all sorts of information that we do not readily access in our ego awareness; whether it is ordinary mundane events, e.g., I saw Smitty on Tuesday, or long held anxieties, e.g., I’m worried that I have failed my friends. This unconsciously held information apparently can come to the foreground in our dreams, or at least this is what Freud and Jung propose with some plausibility. Something might seem to a subject as though it is a novel content of her dream, even though it is actually a perception or thought that has been rattling around in her nervous system unconsciously.

Take then the example of the NDE subject who recollected seeing the sneaker on the roof edge, even though she had no direct perceptual access to that location. I see no reason to contest those facts, but I wonder how unlikely it is that she may have heard, without consciously recollecting it, a member of the custodial staff of the hospital complaining about having to fetch that shoe from the ledge, or a nurse recounting a tale of troublesome patient who put his show outside a window just to be a bother. Maybe the conversation was overheard while the patient was unconscious or barely conscious or too distressed to register the event consciously, even though her nervous system registered it. I don’t find it particularly unlikely that somebody passing through an ER might say something along these lines which is then subconsciously retained by a patient. In such a scenario, this information would be availed for the construction of the subject’s NDE, without her having any anomalous access to a remote state of affairs. Likewise, it does not seem terribly unlikely that that a nurse might say, as she pushes that patient’s gurney to the recovery room following a life saving procedure during which the subject’s brain had temporarily ceased functioning, “I can’t believe Dr. Bombay told that terrible joke about…,” which which was then incorporated unconsciously into the subject’s recollection of her NDE. The fact that we do not always remember how information gets into our perceptual/cognitive systems can give its recollection (say, in a dream or NDE) an anomalous appearance, even though there is a perfectly mundane explanation.

One may argue that the sorts of scenarios I have suggested for the occurrence of apparently anomalously accessed information in NDEs are themselves not terribly likely. I certainly disagree (janitors complaining about otiose tasks, and nurses recounting annoying behaviors by patients and physicians don’t seem at all unlikely to me), but let’s grant that point. Even so, we are left then to compare the prima facie probabilities of my proposed mundane explanations and the prima facie probability of disembodied consciousness. Once again, I believe it is difficult to make a definite probability assessment of disembodied consciousness without begging all sorts of thorny metaphysical questions. There is, however, certainly a greater than zero chance in favor of my proposed explanations of apparently anomalous access to information in NDEs. Thus, tangle of how likely disembodied consciousness is independently form the NDE question would have be unraveled and in a way that makes disembodiment more probable, before we could decide the case in favor of the NDE proponent. Thus, apparently anomalously accessed information during NDEs does not, as things stand now, provide strong evidence in favor of disembodied consciousness. In other words, on the one hand we have a plausible explanation (the subjects were exposed to and unconsciously retained the information in a rather common way), and on the other hand we have a highly controversial explanation that seems difficult to assess (the subject was disembodied) without begging the question in this debate.

I don’t propose any of these considerations as decisive, but only as indications of where I believe the burden of proof resides in this debate, and if a case could be made that disembodied consciousness is prima facie more likely than griping hospital staff in the vicinity of a critical patient, then NDEs may be a lot more interesting as arguments for the survival of bodily death than I can currently concede.

1. El Greco, The Entombment of Gonzalo Ruiz

2. Please note that I am not arguing that brains are sufficient for complex modes of conscious (like what we find in humans), but only that NDEs give us little reason to deny that brains are necessary for such conscious events.

3. Bernardo Kastrup makes the case that there is curious correlation between phenomenological richness and the decrease in neurophysiological activity following the ingestion of psychedelic substances. See Kastrup, Bernardo (2016). What Neuroimaging of the Psychedelic State Tells Us about the Mind-Body Problem. Journal of Cognition and Neuroethics 4 (2):1-9. There is some question as to whether overall activity goes down, i.e., whether the brain works differently (“desynchronized) as opposed of working less in psychedelic experiences. See Siegel JS, et al, “Silocybin Desynchronizes Brain Networks.” medRxiv [Preprint]. 2023 Aug.

4. Gary R. Habermas discusses this case in “Near-Death Experiences and the Evidence — A Review Essay,” LBTS Faculty Publications and Presentation (1996): https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1340&context=lts_fac_pubs (accessed 8/14/24).

5. A philosophical theist might point out that she already has good reasons to believe that disembodied consciousness exists inasmuch as she has good reasons to believe that God exists. Suffice it to say that in this essay I am implicitly qualifying “disembodied consciousness” as “disembodied human consciousness.”

6. Sigmund Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Stratchey (Basic Books, 2010), p. 59.

7. Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, p. 93. See also pp. 500ff.

8. Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, p., 52.

9. C. G. Jung, “Approaching the Unconscious,” in Man and His Symbols (Bantam, 2023), pp,. 34-35.