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Comment by hyggetrold | Hacker News Reader

I had an English teacher in high school who had a near death experience during a surgery. His description of the experience tracks with what's in the article - floating above the body, a tremendous feeling of peace and acceptance, and the feeling of being drawn towards a bright light.

I can't say I'm not afraid of death but it's nice to hear stories like these from folks that help lessen that fear. :)

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Obviously, I can't say what your teacher experienced. But think about this. His brain was going through a traumatic experience of some kind, presumably at least low oxygen and a accumulation of cellular waste products, such as CO2, due to lack of blood flow. After he was resuscitated, his now functioning brain was left to make narrative sense out of what it had experienced.

How much of that was was after the fact reconstruction and how much was actual experience? In the same way, our brain doesn't notice the visual blind spot and just assumes that whatever is there is consistent with its context, even though there is nothing it can experience there.

The fact that we can induce out of body experiences with drugs that appear to exactly match lends credence to this idea.

I suspect that people are somehow predisposed to interpreting the result of failed memory formation by a brain-in-dire-straights as having looked upon themselves. It could be a quirk of how memory/congition works, or it could be cultural, even.

How could this possibly be measured empirically? I’m not suggesting you’re wrong, necessarily (I don’t know one way or another) but it stretches credulity to position such subjective experiences that lie well outside of experimental ethics a “fact”. Do you have any links to research that could push back on that intuition?

I'd like to see a study such as that described but not limited to Americans. See what people experience when you cut across cultures and whatever expectations of what death is supposed to be like are less similar.

My wife had a near-death experience about seven years back and she described it to me later, saying there was indeed a tunnel, but it was filled with cartoon Satans holding dildos and our cat was there beckoning her to come. It seems like this is almost a kind of Rorschach test of whether you're a Christian, a foxhole atheist who deep down wants there to be a Christian-like afterlife, or an honest-to-god true nonbeliever.

It also recalls to me the first time I had a true night error experience. I'd been tremendously into UFO lore and alien abduction scenarios as a teenager thanks to the X-Files, so had read up so much on some of the possible explanations that I'd had it drilled into me by then that night terrors were one possible explanation, and probably similarly for experiences people had of things like succubi in centuries past. Then when it happened to me, I did indeed wake up totally paralyzed and my bed was surrounded by ghostly alien-looking figures. But I'd read so much about it at that point that I knew exactly what was happening, knew it wasn't really aliens, and didn't even really find it scary so much as frustrating because I could neither move nor fully wake up.

Your experience is called sleep paralysis. I get it every now and then, often with my face down in the pillow. Not dead yet.

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

Personal experience corroborates. The last embers of self fade away in a place far too narrow to fit anything but that overwhelming peace.

It's a difficult subject though, the fear of death underpins a significant portion of life (see terror management theory for that idea taken to the extreme). I don't know the value of trying to undermine it at scale.

Well - not to increase your fear of death - but, presumably your English teacher is still alive, so his experience is wholly distinct from actual death.

I try to imagine life before I was born, and that doesn't seem so bad, so i assume worst case that's what death will be like.

The moments before, yeah who knows...

I find little comfort in this myself because it’s not the fear of being dead - I almost certainly won’t have a self to experience anything but it is the time leading up to this point when one has to contemplate finite existence that I find terror in the loss of everything and everyone I cherish.

As I recently lost someone close and spent a lot of time by their side, including taking them to appointments and such, the loss of ability and agency associated with various cancers and diseases is also quite scary.

Many times I’ve heard Sam Harris discuss the topic and the topic of meditation and one thing he mentions is taking joy in that the current experience, whether that is dinner with friends or doing a push-up may be the last time you ever have that experience. While I appreciate that one should focus on the moment, I’ve unfortunately found myself doing my best not to “take time to reflect” because the reflection is a reminder of loss and not an inspiration to enjoy the moment.

Aleister Crowley offered a technique for remembering past lives.

When you find yourself half asleep, and that dreamy fuzzy place, try to remember back as far as you can.

With practice you'll remember further and further back. And eventually you'll remember before the time of your birth.

Past lives and such

This feels almost analogous to asking an LLM to name the 55th president of the united states.

there is a book, dead men can't complain, by Peter Clines.

In it there is a story about someone meeting a creature through near death experiences... It does not go well. The moments before death are the most terrifying.

I've had a couple of near death experiences and I can say yes to everything turning bright and white but not "being drawn towards" it.

It's a logical fallacy to say that a common experience is the only experience, and that fear therefore should be lessened. Perhaps the fear is there for good reason, and perhaps there is a soul and there is moral judgment at death and perhaps our moral character is sealed in stone at death, whether good or bad. Can't rule these out because lots of NDEs say it's a peaceful experience.

Well the fear is evolved. Outside of action hero movies things that don't adequately fear dying probably reproduce less. Except the honey badger.

Are you familiar with Russell’s teapot?

I question why such horrors were claimed in the first place

The burden of proof has already been sufficiently provided by Christianity. Just because many people don't accept it doesn't mean it's not acceptable.

I’m curious what you count as “proof”

I would posit this is likely where we diverge

Absolutely this is where we diverge. The nature of logical fallacies is that you generally can't recognize when you're committing one. In this case one of us is, and by definition neither can know which. To resolve that, I don't rely entirely on myself, but examine the logic of many others, which I'm sure you also do. But again where we differ is that I only trust the logic of those who have proven to have very good moral character as well as high intelligence and much knowledge, such as John Henry Newman.

> examine the logic of many others

>I only trust the logic of those who have proven to have very good moral character as well as high intelligence and much knowledge

Can you explain your epistemological system in more detail?

How do you evaluate claims of fact? Through what process would you demonstrate that a claim is true or false?

For example, would you claim that the process of logic that Franz Haber used on matters about Chemistry to create fertilizer, is incorrect because he used the same methods (in conflict with the proscription of their use by the Hague) to invent chemical warfare gasses that killed thousands in WWI?

What about Bill Shockley? He was an ardent white supremacist yet we live on top of his research in semiconductors

Yeah see there's the logical fallacy. Thanks for confirming.

Please point out the specific fallacy

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