Reviews of John Martin Fischers Near Death Experiences
Who wants to live forever? John Martin Fischer wouldn't be opposed to it — as long as he'd have an easy exit if he changed his mind a million years downwards the line.
It's a question that Fischer, a distinguished professor of philosophy at the University of California, Riverside, has spent a long time pondering.
A leading philosopher of costless will and moral responsibleness, Fischer also studies problems related to expiry and immortality. He believes wondering about death is an essential aspect of existence a "meaning-seeking being," and that how we view death has pregnant implications for how we live our lives.
In 2012, Fischer received the largest grant always awarded to a humanities professor at UC Riverside: $5.2 million from the John Templeton Foundation to report immortality.
The significant of near-death experiences
The funding supported the establishment of the iii-year Immortality Projection, an initiative directed and administered by Fischer, who used it to award subgrants to 34 teams of researchers around the world. So far, the Immortality Projection has produced more than 100 published books and periodical articles, and much of the research it funded is ongoing.
Fischer's book "Expiry, Immortality, and Pregnant in Life" (Oxford University Press) is the latest work to bring together that selection. Published this calendar week, the volume introduces readers to a broad range of ideas about what makes a life meaningful and how our attitudes toward expiry influence our approaches to life.
It as well includes Fischer's musings on a topic on which he's become something of an good in recent years: near-death experiences.
Twoscore years agone, while teaching philosophy at Yale University, Fischer created a course chosen "Mortal Questions" that got him hooked on classic literature near death and immortality. He brought an undergraduate, intermediate-level variation of the form, which he however teaches, to UC Riverside when he arrived 31 years ago.
But it wasn't until he established the Immortality Projection that he became acquainted with the small but growing customs of researchers who take begun to approach virtually-death experiences from an academic standpoint, he said.
The experiences were a recurring theme in many of the enquiry proposals Fischer evaluated when deciding which subgrants to award through the Immortality Project. Accordingly, a sizable chunk of the funded research has sought to reply questions most these phenomena.
The goal isn't to convince skeptics that about-death experiences are "real" or that people who report having them are telling the truth, Fischer said. It's more nearly interpreting the ways having these experiences can bear on how people live their lives.
All told, virtually v pct to 10 pct of people who find themselves in near-death contexts report having a near-death experience. Nigh ninety percent of those say their experiences were positive, like a adept dream.
"Some people written report to their families, 'I wish I could've stayed,'" Fischer said.
A common experience, across cultures
Descriptions of nigh-death experiences tend to share similarities. People often report out-of-body experiences where they feel themselves rising above their own bodies. They describe seeing a "life review" — a reel of highlights, or lowlights in the example of the unlucky ten per centum who study having a negative most-death experience, presented like a motion-picture show. And, perhaps virtually famously, they written report traveling down a dark tunnel toward light, or toward a destination that's guarded — by a river or gate, for case.
Frequently guiding this "trip of an after-lifetime," as Fischer likes to phone call information technology, are mentors: parents or relatives, religious leaders, or other trusted dominance figures.
"One affair that'due south totally indisputable is that the reports come from across different cultures and beyond fourth dimension — they get dorsum to ancient Greece — and they have certain patterns," Fischer said. "It's pretty hard to say that all of these people are lying or exaggerating or insincere."
Only questions about their meaning remain: Practice they show the existence of an afterlife? And what lessons can nosotros draw from them?
In Fischer'due south view, the effects a most-expiry feel can have on a person illuminate some of those answers.
He noted that in every culture his Immortality Projection team members have researched, one characteristic of human nature that shows upwardly time and again is a concern for expiry.
"A question most what happens to us afterward we dice, and quite often a fear of death," he explained.
People who report having near-death experiences, still, typically have much less "death anxiety" in the aftermath of their experiences. They likewise get more prosocial, more concerned near morality and justice, and more optimistic about life in general.
In one of the projects funded past the Immortality Project, researchers found that people who underwent simulated well-nigh-death experiences using virtual reality reaped many of the aforementioned positive benefits equally those who accept reported having "real" near-death experiences.
Even negative well-nigh-death experiences can yield positive results, Fischer said, by inspiring those who accept them to re-orient themselves to the good.
He noted that near-decease experiences are significant and attractive to many people because they seem to indicate "the possibility of an afterlife and, thus, a kind of immortality."
Humans have always longed for ways to overcome death, merely never has secular immortality — living forever — seemed like such a real possibility, Fischer said, with medical advances enabling life expectancies in adult countries to nigh double over the past century.
Would you really want to live forever?
The Immortality Project has also funded research into enhancing human longevity. In one such study, researchers found that across cultures, men tend to exist much more than positive most the possibility of "indefinite life extension," Fischer said.
There are "immortality optimists" and "immortality curmudgeons," he added. The optimists believe we will vanquish death, while the curmudgeons call back human being beings simply could not exist immortal, given basic facts about human nature.
Personally, Fischer is more of an "immortality realist." Given the opportunity, he'd choose to extend his ain life, only he doubts whether science has or will progress enough to really brand immortality an pick.
"I also worry about whether the human species will exist able to solve the problems of climatic change so that our environment will sustain immortal life," he said.
Fischer remains uncertain of what happens later we die. But, for now, he takes solace in the lessons he'south gleaned from studying near-death experiences.
"Most-death experiences don't tell the states where we are going, but they offer comfort on the journey: Information technology is guided by a chivalrous parental figure. We are not traveling alone," he wrote. "Companionship, solidarity in the face of the unknown, and dearest should surround u.s.a. in the concluding affiliate. Reflecting on near-death experiences provides insights into how we should live, and points to a less sterile, more humane kind of dying."
Fischer joined UC Riverside'due south faculty in 1988. He is the just philosopher to be named a University Professor by the University of California Board of Regents, an honor he received in 2017, and has authored and co-authored eight books and more than than 150 essays.
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Source: https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/trip-after-lifetime
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