Philosopher A J Ayer's near death experience

[Magical Realist]

https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/blog...xperience/

"Most students of philosophy will recognize the name of A.J. Ayer, who died in 1989. An atheist, he was one of the best-known representatives of a school of thought known as “logical positivism,” which holds (among other things) that religious claims are meaningless because they are not empirically verifiable.

It’s therefore interesting to note that Ayer, a year before his own death, reported having a near-death experience. What’s fascinating about Ayer’s experience is less its content than his reactions during and after it:

“…he choked on a piece of salmon. ‘[It] was my own fault,’ he later wrote. ‘It went down the wrong way and almost immediately the graph recording my heartbeats plummeted.’

Hospital attendants immediately rushed in to save him, but they were too late: his heart completely stopped. They kept working, however, and, amazingly, his heart started beating again about four minutes later. Doctors thought he had [sic] must have suffered brain damage from the episode, so everyone was surprised when he eventually regained consciousness and was able to speak normally.

In the first conversation he could remember after waking up, he told a woman in his room, ‘Did you know that I was dead? The first time that I tried to cross the river I was frustrated, but my second attempt succeeded. It was most extraordinary.’

‘…I was confronted by a red light,’ he later wrote of his experience in an article titled ‘What I Saw When I Was Dead,’ ‘exceedingly bright, and also very painful even when I turned away from it.’

And what was this light? ‘I was aware that this light was responsible for the government of the universe.’

He describes meeting two creatures and trying to help them fix space-time, which was ‘slightly out of joint.’ After being ignored by the creatures, he writes, ‘I became more and more desperate, until the experience suddenly came to an end.’

That was the experience as Ayer himself described it. But even more interesting was his subsequent reaction.

“One of his doctors later claimed Ayer had confided to him, ‘I saw a Divine Being. I’m afraid I’m going to have to revise all my books and opinions.’"

Publicly, however, Ayer acknowledged his experience could have been a delusion. But it was also real enough for him to admit it made him reconsider some of his previous convictions: “My recent experiences have slightly weakened my conviction that my genuine death, which is due fairly soon, will be the end of me, though I continue to hope that it will be.”

He still wrote that “they have not weakened my conviction that there is no god.” Even so, his mere concession that his experience might point to the existence of an afterlife provoked such a reaction from his fellow atheist humanists that he was forced to write a follow-up article reaffirming his belief in materialism. He died… still publicly repudiating the existence of God.”

The article I’m quoting from, which was published on a Christian site, suggests that Ayer’s reaction was a huge mistake. But you don’t have to share the site’s religious orientation to ask whether, in light of such an experience, his reaction was an affirmation of a kind of faith. For he maintained his atheism and materialism in direct contradiction to what his near-death experience had initially led him to believe. Those who share his convictions and think that his reaction was appropriate accordingly share his faith and believe it to be reasonable. But how does that put atheism and materialism in a better position than any religion? Is atheism, too, a form of faith?"

--

[C C]

https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/blog...xperience/

[...] He still wrote that “they have not weakened my conviction that there is no god.” Even so, his mere concession that his experience might point to the existence of an afterlife provoked such a reaction from his fellow atheist humanists that he was forced to write a follow-up article reaffirming his belief in materialism. He died… still publicly repudiating the existence of God.”

When academicians like that get perturbed about a colleague's potential straying, they reveal it's not mere absence of belief, but being enmeshed in yet another dogmatic conviction or lifestyle. (And the conformity that comes with it.)

What's worse, is that like the occupational priest, career (and post-death legacy) is more important than that thought orientation supposedly held in one's head. Which is to say, the public appearance of staying consistent with one's previously announced identity is usually the actual driver when it comes to media repair jobs and setting things right with the "fellowship". (Again: still a member of some club and conforming to its rote and dogma.)

That's why I'm reluctant to classify myself as anything in certain territories, even an agnostic (which an averaging of the oscillations along a spectrum would likely place me). Because I'm not going to stay locked in to whatever _X_ I check on the information sheet for that month. The idea of growing roots in a particular soil like these guys (theist or atheist, materialist or immaterialist), and becoming a deeply immutable bot that can't even experimentally flex its way out of a slot and cognitive filter anymore, is still kind of repugnant.

From that link to Ayer's own written account:

What I saw when I was dead
http://www.philosopher.eu/others-writing...-was-dead/

excerpts: Let us grant, for the sake of argument, that we could have future lives. What form could they take? The easiest answer is that they would consist in the prolongation of our experiences, without any physical attachment. This is the theory that should appeal to radical empiricists. It is, indeed, consistent with the concept of personal identity which was adopted both by Hume and by William James, according to which one’s identity consists, not in the possession of an enduring soul, but in the sequence of one’s experiences, guaranteed by memory. They did not apply their theory to a future life, in which Hume at any rate disbelieved.

For those who are attracted by this theory, as I am, the main problem, which Hume admitted that he was unable to solve, is to discover the relation, or relations, which have to hold between experiences for them to belong to one and the same self. William James thought that he had found the answers with his relations of the felt togetherness and continuity of our thoughts and sensations, coupled with memory, in order to unite experiences that are separated in time. But while memory is undoubtedly necessary, it can be shown that it is not wholly sufficient.

I myself carried out a thorough examination and development of the theory in my book, The Origins of Pragmatism. I was reluctantly forced to conclude that I could not account for personal identity without falling back on the identity, through time, of one or more bodies that the person might successively occupy. Even then, I was unable to give a satisfactory account of the way in which a series of experiences is tied to a particular body at any given time.

[...] A prevalent fallacy is the assumption that a proof of an afterlife would also be a proof of the existence of a deity. This is far from being the case. If, as I hold, there is no good reason to believe that a god either created or presides over this world, there is equally no good reason to believe that a god created or presides over the next world, on the unlikely supposition that such a thing exists. It is conceivable that one’s experiences in the next world, if there are any, will supply evidence of a god’s existence, but we have no right to presume on such evidence, when we have not had the relevant experiences.

[...] The only philosophical problem that our finding ourselves landed on a future life might clarify would be that of the relation between mind and body, if our future lives consisted, not in the resurrection of our bodies, but in the prolongation of the series of our present experiences. We should then be witnessing the triumph of dualism, though not the dualism which Descartes thought that he had established. If our lives consisted in an extended series of experiences, we should still have no good reason to regard ourselves as spiritual substances.

So there it is. My recent experiences have slightly weakened my conviction that my genuine death, which is due fairly soon, will be the end of me, though I continue to hope that it will be. They have not weakened my conviction that there is no god. I trust that my remaining an atheist will allay the anxieties of my fellow supporters of the British Humanist Association, the Rationalist Press Association and the South Place Ethical Society.

[Secular Sanity]

"MY purpose in writing a postscript to the article about my 'death', which I contributed to the 28 August issue of the Sunday Telegraph, is not primarily to retract anything that I wrote or to express my regret that my Shakespearian title for the article, 'That undiscovered country', was not retained, but to correct a misunderstanding to which the article appears to have given rise.

I say 'not primarily to retract' because one of my sentences was written so carelessly that it is literally, false as it stands. In the final paragraph, I wrote, 'My recent experiences have slightly weakened my conviction that my genuine death . . . will be the end of me.' They have not and never did weaken that conviction. What I should have said and would have said, had I not been anxious to appear undogmatic, is that my experiences have weakened, not my belief that there is no life after death, but my inflexible attitude towards that belief."

Postscript to a postmortem

[Magical Realist]

That's why I'm reluctant to classify myself as anything in certain territories, even an agnostic (which an averaging of the oscillations along a spectrum would likely place me). Because I'm not going to stay locked in to whatever _X_ I check on the information sheet for that month. The idea of growing roots in a particular soil like these guys (theist or atheist, materialist or immaterialist), and becoming a deeply immutable bot that can't even experimentally flex its way out of a slot and cognitive filter anymore, is still kind of repugnant.

My need to identify myself with some philosophical position is less than my desire to experience every thought and idea as it occurs, whether I agree with it or not. It may be a materialist thought, or a Buddhist thought, or a Kantian thought, or a pantheistic thought. But like you I'm not so interested in wearing a label and then forcing mysef to think that way for the rest of my life. Believing, iow, is secondary to thinking. I provisionally believe in order to understand, and then go on to some other belief to understand some other thought.

[C C]

Going back to that again, snipping yet more items out...

What I saw when I was dead
http://www.philosopher.eu/others-writing...-was-dead/

excerpts: . . .  the concept of personal identity which was adopted both by Hume and by William James, according to which one’s identity consists, not in the possession of an enduring soul, but in the sequence of one’s experiences, guaranteed by memory.  [...] William James thought that he had found the answers with his relations of the felt togetherness and continuity of our thoughts and sensations, coupled with memory, in order to unite experiences that are separated in time. But while memory is undoubtedly necessary, it can be shown that it is not wholly sufficient.

[...] I was reluctantly forced to conclude that I could not account for personal identity without falling back on the identity, through time, of one or more bodies that the person might successively occupy. Even then, I was unable to give a satisfactory account of the way in which a series of experiences is tied to a particular body at any given time.

[...] The only philosophical problem that our finding ourselves landed on a future life might clarify would be that of the relation between mind and body, if our future lives consisted, not in the resurrection of our bodies, but in the prolongation of the series of our present experiences...

There's the quantum immortality possibility, which not only guarantees a body corresponding to such continued experiences, but also detouring from the the body states that would have held any memory of dying in an alternate universe.

Which might explain why Hugh Everett was so reckless with his health that he died at age 51: obesity, frequent chain-smoking and alcohol drinking. Though he knew that he would objectively die in various worlds of the future, subjectively he believed that he would always find himself in a body that survived in another universe.

In their own way, both the past moment and the future moment adjacent to this "now" are akin to parallel worlds -- they each have a slightly different configuration from this one. Since there's already the illusion of our consciousness hopping from one chunk-sequence of brain states to the next (i.e., the so-called flow of time), and memory is the actual factor that provides the sense of shared identity connecting past and future body states...

Then I don't see how that illusion of "something" transiting from one body-state to another would really run into a problem with regard to Everett's "many worlds". As long as a distinct, surviving duplicate holds approximately the same past memories, or the stored information of the surviving brain is consistent with the extinct one.

Again, there's no "spiritual substance" literally moving one different body state to the next in even an ordinary block-universe, uncomplicated by the complexity of a multiverse version. Yet one is still hard-pressed to deny the body states of past memories as not sharing or belonging to the identity of the current state. The continuance of identity over the chain of experiences is hung together by memory.

However, it's mad to believe that one could perpetually survive in variations of this world. The experiences would have to incrementally evolve toward different temporal eras where one was a cyborg and ultimately where one did reside in a crazy world with different rules. In course of that, one's identity and memories would probably gradually change toward being someone radically different, as well. The original identity would slowly be lost via a figurative trillion cuts of the knife.