Is it hard to walk the line between being a scientist seeking physical, naturalistic explanations while not dismissing the supernatural or debunking people of faith, who see a lot of meaning in these experiences? But we know from the science that it didn’t really last that long. You might wake up and think, Man, I had the craziest dream and it lasted so long. The third part of the blueprint is the timing: When did they have the experience? Our understanding of when we think we had an experience doesn’t always match when we actually had it. The second step is to explain why these particular details would be included in an NDE-is it some sort of coping function, or something that we associate with death in the afterlife? For example, if somebody reports they were floating above their body and seeing themselves receiving CPR, you want to explain how they acquired the information about those details. The first is to provide an explanation for how the person reporting this experience acquired the information. The details might need to be filled in differently for different experiences, but it’s basically a blueprint. Even if there isn’t a specific physical explanation for every NDE, we argue that given the progress of science and the complexity of the human brain and of consciousness, we can still give you a blueprint for providing physical explanations. Many people claim that NDEs either prove that supernaturalism is true, or give us good reason to abandon physicalism and adopt supernaturalism. Explanations fall into two broad camps-in the book, we label them supernaturalism and physicalism. When we hear about these experiences, we wonder what’s going on. They are special states of consciousness experienced when the person is either clinically dead, or their brain isn’t functioning. A near-death experience is when they have some characteristic features like pleasant feelings, floating outside their bodies, traveling to other realms, seeing their life flash before their eyes or a light at the end of a tunnel, things like that. The description of your book about NDEs says “the authors provide a blueprint for a science-based explanation.”įirst of all, near-death experiences are not simply “brushes with death,” where someone is pronounced clinically dead due to a heart attack or something, or they had an experience where they thought they were going to die. There were about 34 projects, there were conferences, a younger scholars workshop, and a website describing it all. The basic idea was to fund research on two fronts-on empirical topics related to immortality, and on philosophical and theological research on immortality. ORBITER: What was The Immortality Project?īenjamin Mitchell-Yellin: It was based on a $5 million grant, from 2012 to 2015, from the Templeton Foundation. ORBITER was anxious to hear more-we were going to say we were dying to talk to him, but resisted-so we called Mitchell-Yellin for a conversation. Mitchell-Yellin received his PhD at Cal-Riverside, where he did his post-doc work with renowned philosopher John Martin Fischer on The Immortality Project, funded by the John Templeton Foundationįischer and Mitchell-Yellin co-authored the book Near-Death Experiences: Understanding Visions of the Afterlife (Oxford University Press, 2016).
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