PeterJ said:
As to NDE's, it seems to me that if NDEs are regularly reported this is a scientific fact and it needs a scientific explanation, regardless of the content of those reports. If lots of people report that they feel sick after taking some medicine or other then we do not dismiss these reports on the grounds that the sciences deal only with intra-subjective data. A stack of reports can be measured with a ruler.
This analogy does not work. People getting sick produce a
physiological effect that can be measured! It is no longer
just in people's head. What physical evidence is there for NDE that allows for it to be objectively measured independent of "lost of people" reporting it?
The status of the contents of such reports is a different matter, obviously, but if we say that the contents of reports of NDEs are inadmissable in science this would put an end to any idea of 'scientific consciousness studies', and we might also start wondering if our written records of our meter readings are not also first-person reports.
By one way of looking at it nobody has ever observed anything other than a first-person report, which is why solipsism is unfalsifiable. It would therefore be impossible to defend the idea that first-person reports are not scientific data.
If you are saying that I cannot falsify a first person's report, then this is false. I can indeed QUESTION the validity of a first person report simply based on what he/she claims to have perceived. Why? Because I can show you examples on where the mind and what people "believe" they saw can be highly unreliable.
1. One often cited NDE is the so-called out-of-body experience. However, it has been shown, in not one, but at least TWO papers published in Science[1,2], on how the brain can be tricked into producing such out-of-body experience. In other words, there's no evidence of any such phenomenon, but yet, the participants still claim on having such an experience.
2. The mind can play quite a trick on us and can be highly unreliable. This has already been shown in many cases where participants claim something had happened, when it hasn't! See, for example, Ref. [3].
3. So if the mind can be be tricked, and also unreliable under the BEST of conditions, consider how even less reliable it is when it is under physical duress, such as when the body is near death!
And yet, even after all this, we still accept such anecdotal description as evidence, and a reliable one at that? How low of a standard do we need to set here?
Zz.
[1] H. Henrik Ehrsson Science v.317, p.104824 (2007).
[2] Bigna Lenggenhager et al. Science v.317, p. 1096 (2007).
[3] Dario L. M. Sacchi et al., Applied Cognitive Psychology v.21, p.1005 (2007).
