It would be helpful if the site wasn't down...

What is of discussion here?:

1. Restaurants should carry an anti-choking device. Too many elderly risk a stroke without it.

2. People often do have a delusion or vision just before death, one that is a product of their own brain, fitting their understanding of the world. I had an incredible vision when I had taken half an oxycodone prescribed for pain.

3. There are more ways of expressing one's belief or disbelief in god besides atheism and agnosticm. Consider "agnostic theism" which means “I believe god exists, but I do not know that with certainty”, also "agnostic atheism" which means “I don't believe in a god but also say it can’t be known.”

As for any genuine otherworldly vision, no, I don't believe that happened here.

Is it worthy of discussion because there is something actionable in it?

Thanks adzm ;).

Why do those experiences indicate the presence or non-presence of an afterlife?

This claim from Ayer -- how do we make the leap from these experiences existing to being evidence of a life after consciousness?

> On the face of it, these experiences, on the assumption that the last one was veridical, are rather strong evidence that death does not put an end to consciousness

Incredibly easy to explain this without trying hard. The subject has some sense of movement forwards, and the brain rationalises it, like we do in dreams, imagining a tunnel or a canoe or whatever familiar thing is associated with that feeling of drifting or flying. So we can conclude that maybe near death experiences cause a feeling of falling or drifting, and is a bit like dreaming - not that objective reality should be rejected.

A materialist would argue that nothing you describe rules out malfunction in a brain failing rapidly due to oxygen starvation, and that the commonality of experiences is explicable in terms of common failure modes in effectively identical brain architecture. (Just about everyone's visual cortex works about the same, etc.)

I think it's cute how hardcore materialists believe it is even in theory possible to distinguish their position from ideological simulationism. Maybe in a thousand years. Not now. But phenomenology is the name of the philosophical discipline that you are now struggling to recapitulate.

If multiple people independently report the same experience (across time and space), isn't this actually evidence of objective reality rather than a refutation of it? It points to some underlying universal structure of our experience as constructed by our brains, which suggests that our brains are part of a mechanistic, external, and therefore objective reality instead of a subjective one (where our own ideas constitute reality).

Reminded me of this TED talk of a woman who had a stroke and told about the experience:

https://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_my_stroke_of_ins...

> And I look down at my arm and I realize that I can no longer define the boundaries of my body. I can't define where I begin and where I end, because the atoms and the molecules of my arm blended with the atoms and molecules of the wall.

Here's Plato's thing, the "myth of Er":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_Er

What are the unaccountably unlikely commonalities that I should be noticing? Between this and the article, I see only: some kind of colored light, some kind of officiating beings, and a river (A.J.Ayer says he presumably had the Styx in mind, though amusingly in the actual ancient Greek account it's a different river and there's no need to cross it).

> In particular, what was convincing to me, is how very very similar the cases are and that they happen to tribes living at a stone age technological level with no contact to Hollywood, and that there is a described case from Plato from over 2000 years ago that is identical to modern cases.

This sounds intriguing.

> Case in point, in NDEs there are a couple of common stages, and experiencers go through some or all of these, most often only some. One is traveling from the location of death to a heavenly realm. For westerners this often is flying through a star trek like hyperspace tunnel, while for stone age people they might be in a canoe that travels by itself to a distant island.

Ah, so the similarity is all enitrely in your interpretation of these clearly dissimilar visions.

Objective reality exists, but nobody can ever perceive it, at least not while they're perceiving things through the filter of their body

Motivated reasoning masquerading as rationality

It is the safest and easiest solution. You die, nothing happens.

When there is an afterlife or perhaps even eternity, the problems begin.

I'm just 40, and while I won't go into it, I've lived a very long life so far. An incredible amount of joy, but also grief and pain. Memory for me, when I'm drinking my coffee in the morning, is warm and cozy in a numbing sort of way, but I have to be careful where I walk in it.

I certainly don't wish for death, I still find so much beauty and joy in life, and I still find and experience love. But I don't wish for an afterlife, or prolonged life. If I'm fortunate to live until my natural death, I will welcome it.

Humanity will go on, there are billions of threads of consciousness right now, and I feel so much gratitude that I was and am one of those. I have a lot of comfort in being wrapped and surrounded by those threads, and that they will continue around me when mine frays and ends.

My cannon view is that we're just the universe experiencing itself, and that while my consciousness will end, that universe will go on, my atoms part of it.