I wrote a diary back in October of 2014 that generated some very interesting comments and discussion. It was about the scientific quest for a quantified description of consciousness - a long-time 'scholarly' interest of mine - and the phenomenon of Near-Death Experience [NDE]:
Waking Up Dead - The Quest for Consciousness
This diary is a bit of an extension on the theme, as I awakened on the first day of a new year to an article on CNN entitled Beyond Goodbye about a related but different-in-kind phenomenon being called Shared-Death Experience [SDE]. It caught my eye because though I haven't spoken or written about it in public, the primary impetus of my joining the scientific quest way back in the late 1990s was just this experience that at the time was essentially unknown or unspoken of, at least not in any of the scientific, medical, philosophical or psychological sources that were required or suggested reading for the courses and seminars I participated in per the subject of consciousness.
I'm glad this phenomenon is now being recognized and investigated, as I'd felt pretty lonely all those years when dealing with proponents of both NDEs as actual descriptions of life-after-death, and scientific skeptics who wrote all the 'classic' experiences off to anoxia and other physiological symptoms of dying brains. My experience didn't involve me being close to my own death, or dying and then being revived. It didn't involve any tunnels or lights at the end of them, shining angelic beings, dead relatives, peaceful feelings, OOB overhead views, or any other of the standards of NDE. So obviously my experiences could not be waived away by any of 'the usual' skeptical diagnoses crafted to dismiss tales of NDE. For a quarter of a century since that strange journey, I had no idea other people had ever had experiences such as mine.
When I went looking further, a website came up at the top of my search - Shared Death Experience Study that looked interesting. Only to find that it too had managed to reduce the phenomenon to a list of "typical experiences" that don't match mine. The first of the bulleted items applies, but only vaguely. These are:
• Room shape changes
• Bystander(s) views mist rising from dying person's body
• Dying person telepathically communicates with bystander(s)
• Bystander(s) leaves their body
• Bystander(s) engulfed by intensely bright light that feels like absolute love
• Life review about dying person, the bystander(s) or both
• Bystander(s) accompanies the dying person through a tunnel to 'heaven'
• Bystander(s) view or are otherwise aware of deceased relatives and friends in the room of dying person
These descriptions, like all descriptions of direct subjective experiences, must of course come to us after being filtered through the 'normal' waking consciousness of the person doing the telling, thus of course are colored by that person's beliefs, worldview, descriptive talents/abilities and such, having by the time the tale is told made sense within those parameters of the experience for themselves. So they won't be exact, and cannot be expected to be exact. And perhaps this is why my own experience doesn't match the criteria well enough to make the list. Given that those which do make the list must be those which share the same type of cultural and personal belief rationalizations.
Similarly, I found the description by Kevin Williams on his site - People Who Are Not Near-Death Can Experience Someone Else's NDE to be as non-sensical as the title itself. If the person the experience is shared with went ahead and died, then his/her experience wasn't "near-death" in the first place - it was all the way to and beyond. They didn't come back to corroborate the other's story, so it's darned silly to consider the dead person as some kind of reliable witness for that purpose, isn't it? I can certainly say with conviction that my own experience wasn't a 'sharing' of what the dead person experienced or how he might have described his own perceptions if he wasn't dead. Hell, I have no clue if he experienced anything at all. It was my OWN experience of his death. I went into his eyes looking for him, and I found him in St. Elsewhere, so to speak. He cannot corroborate my tale because he's dead and you won't get an answer if you ask.
Still, the shortcomings of our descriptive abilities don't negate the most interesting aspects of all such stories and experiences. Rather, they tend to lend some credence to the perfectly respectable scientific position that consciousness is not just an epiphenomenon of complex wiring - an illusion we pridefully claim is real - but an actual feature (physical parameter) of space-time itself. Perhaps something akin to the Hameroff-Penrose Orchestrated Objective Reduction model of consciousness, which has been gaining support over the past couple of decades and is scheduled to be tested with at least two new experiments this year.
If indeed there is merit in the Orch-OR model, then phenomena like NDEs and SDEs can be rationally accounted for. As I am wont to opine about things scientific (on the physics end, in which I do have some background and lots of independent study), any wannabe "Theory of Everything" that can't account for the anomalies cannot consider itself sufficiently explanatory of reality.
At any rate, because my previous diary generated such an interesting discussion, I thought I'd throw this out today - when we're all recovering from late-night revelry and not too plugged into political intrigues - to see what more of interest can be generated. Please, have at it in the comments, and Happy 2015 to all!
Useful Links:
Waking Up Dead - The Quest for Consciousness
Beyond Goodbye
Shared Death Experience Study
Shared Death Experience
Orchestrated OR Theory