Sam Harris has published:
Science on the Brink of Death : Sam Harris
I guess it's a response to episode 192. If someone would like to pull together a response to this (I've started below) I'd be happy to help and publish.
Here are some initial thoughts:
1. Quote:
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Such accounts have led many people to believe that consciousness must be independent of the brain. Unfortunately, these experiences vary across cultures, and no single feature is common to them all.
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same ol' Sam... no references... no understanding of the NDE literature... more re-hashing of worn-out Skeptical arguements. I mean, he really needs to learn how to use Google:
from:
Phenomenology of Near-death Experiences: A Cross-cultural Perspective
Transcultural Psychiatry 2008 45: 121
John Belanti, Mahendra Perera and Karuppiah Jagadheesan
"The variability across cultures is most likely to be due to our interpretation and verbalizing of such esoteric events through the filters of language, cultural experiences, religion, education and their influence on our belief systems either shedding influence as an individual variable or more often perhaps by their rich interplay between these factors." The Handbook of Near-Death Expereinces summs it up nicely:
Census of non-western near-death experiences to 2005: observations and critical reflections "Visions of another world beyond death have a long history and appear most cultures. This census and earlier ones indicate that these visions seem to be a cross-cultural phenomena."
Reference:
Kellehear, A., 2009. Census of non-western near-death experiences to 2005: observations and critical reflections. In: Holden, J. M., Greyson, B. and James, D., eds. The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences: Thirty years of investigation. Santa Barbra, California: ABC-CLIO, pp. 135-158.
2. Quote:
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It should also trouble NDE enthusiasts that only 10−20 percent of people who approach clinical death recall having any experience at all.
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more silliness... this is an issue that cuts both ways.... and adds nothing to Sam's argument. NDE researchers don't know why the recall rate is around 10%, but there are some hints that it may have a lot to do with the way the accounts are collected.
but to really appreciate the Silliness of Sam's point one only has to turn it around:
"It should also trouble NDE Skeptics that 10−20 percent of people who approach clinical death (millions and million of people) recall having these transformative experiences." 3. Quote:
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However, the deepest problem with drawing sweeping conclusions from the NDE is that those who have had one and subsequently talked about it did not actually die. In fact, many appear to have been in no real danger of dying.
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More backward thinking. First off, many did die. Most cardiac arrest patients studied by van Lommel and others were DEAD by the standards that the medical community uses. The fact that they were resuscitated and brought back to life is a sperate issues (Dr. Sam Parnia makes this point well... can someone dig up a reference?).
What Sam Harris is really getting at is that some NDErs have no medical trauma (e.g. are in a plane they believe is about to crash). But despite Harris' wrongheaded claim this fact actually creates a greater burden for Skeptics. i.e. why would a healthy brain and a severely compromised brain (like one that has a flat EEG after cardiac arrest) have a similar hyper-lucid experience. If you're angling for a neurological explanation for NDEs this data is moving you in the wrong direction... again, this is rudimentary knowledge within NDE research cirles, and more evidence that Sam Harris is in way over his head.
4. Quote:
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Many students of the NDE claim that certain people have left their bodies and perceived the commotion surrounding their near death—the efforts of hospital staff to resuscitate them, details of surgery, the behavior of family members, etc. Certain subjects even say that they have learned facts while traveling beyond their bodies that would otherwise have been impossible to know—for instance, a secret told by a dead relative, the truth of which was later confirmed. Of course, reports of this kind seem especially vulnerable to self-deception, if not conscious fraud.
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Good. Now we're getting somewhere -- it's fraud/sloppy research. Dozens of qualified researchers, publishing in peer-reviewed journals, are being duped. Well, there are a lot of reasons to think otherwise, but a claim likes this really needs to be backed up by the claimant -- where's the fraud Sam? How much is there? How has it effected the conclusions of NDE researchers?
5. Quote:
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There is another problem, however: Even if true, such phenomena might suggest only that the human mind possesses powers of extrasensory perception (e.g. clairvoyance or telepathy). This would be a very important discovery, but it wouldn’t demonstrate the survival of death. Why? Because unless we could know that a subject’s brain was not functioning when these impressions were formed, the involvement of the brain must be presumed.
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ok, the super-Psi hypothesis... i.e. "if I'm wrong about everything else I've ever said about scientific materialism and reductionistic neuroscience, I want this to be my back-up position."
again, I've already addressed this with Sam, but here you go again:
NDE Researcher, Dr. Penny Sartori, examines memories of resuscitation by patients suffering cardiac arrest.
With near death experience cases making there way into the, New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of Psychiatry, and other major medical journals, NDE doubters have looked to the timing of patient memories as a way of explaining this unexplainable phenomena. If memories of out of body travel, and all embracing love occur after ones brush with death, NDEs may still fit within our medical science worldview.
The timing of NDE memories is the research question Dr. Penny Sartori sought to answer, “I worked in the intensive care unit and because of the nature of my job, of course, I’d come across a lot of death. And of course makes you wonder what happens when we die. For five years I gathered data, where I spoke to patients in the intensive care unit and particularly patients who’d had a cardiac arrest. When these patients revived, as soon as they were medically fit, I approached them and asked the simple question, ‘Did you have any memory of the time that you were unconscious?’”
“For the people who had a near-death experience and out of body experience [their recollection of resuscitation] was really quite accurate and I decided then to ask the control group, the people who’d had a cardiac arrest but had no recollection of anything at all. I asked them if they would reenact their resuscitation scenario and tell me what they thought that we had done to resuscitate them. And what I found is that many of the patients couldn’t even guess as to what we’d done. They had no idea at all. And then some of them did make guesses, but these were based on TV hospital dramas that they’d seen. I found that what they reported was widely inaccurate. So there was a stark contrast really in the very accurate out of body experiences reported and then the guesses that the control group had made.”, Dr. Sartori reported.
from:
90. EEG Expert Can?t Explain Near Death Experience Data... and, Dr. Penny Sartori Finds More Than Hallucinations in NDE Accounts | Skeptiko - Science at the Tipping Point
BTW Jan Holden pubished a simliar study... it can be found in the Handbook of Near-Death Experiences
6. Quote:
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There is also a rumor circulating online that, after attacking Alexander from the safety of my blog, I have refused to debate him in public. This is untrue. I merely declined the privilege of appearing with him on a parapsychology podcast, in the company of an irritating and unscrupulous host. I would be happy to have a public discussion with Alexander, should it ever seem worth doing.
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No one is buying this Sam. I'd be happy to help arrange a debate between you and Dr. Alexander or ANY leading NDE researcher... just let me know if it "ever seems worth doing"
I could go on, but maybe some of you can pick it up from here... PM me if you'd like to formalize your involvement.
Discuss: Sam Harris, Science on the Brink of Death 
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