Question

Do you think that Lund's analysis of OBEs and death bed experiences provide evidence for the survival hypothesis?

Answer 1

In his book, ‘Persons, Souls and Death: A Philosophical Inquiry into an Afterlife’ (Lund 2009), philosopher David Lund presents an argument for postmortem survival through extraordinary or psychical experiences such as Out of Body Experiences(OBE) Near Death Experiences (NDE)in the living. He builds a probabilistic argument that some people survive biological death of their consciousness from the disjunct but ‘empirical proof’ of animalistic experiences like NDE and OBE.

However, it should be noted that a good hypothesis is the one that leads us to expect our observational data; it does not lead to expectations about anything which may be contradictory to our observational data.Thus, the survival hypothesis that is suggested by Lund does not flow from the actual data and it therefore shows low predictive validity. Since for any explanation of psychical experiences would have to be one that leads us to expect what is otherwise improbable, the OBE and NDE do not cumulate into sufficient evidence of the survival hypothesis.