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Thank you so much for the heads up to your post!

js1138: Is this what you consider science?

unspun: I consider it valid research, including "forensics" and as much of the scientific process as possible (even if it's just a mite).

I am not familiar with his work and thus have no input to that particular subject. However, I want to mention that some things do not lend themselves to the kind of tests which feature falsifiablility (Popper) and thus a high degree of confidence.

Many statistical surveys are like this, e.g. rate of breast cancer in the abortion debate. Some surveys show trends which can be amplified though laboratory tests. For instance, the rate of lung cancer in the population shows an increased risk among smokers though some life-long smokers never succumb to it and non-smokers are known to die of it.

And in some cases, like the search for mass in the neutrino, vast numbers of neutrinos must pass through the medium before one throws an electron off thus proving mass.

In the search for near death experiences I found it particularly refreshing when a skeptic researcher was astonished at the result. Not everyone has the near death experience, but the nature of the experience itself - and that it is remarkably the same among those who experience it - are quite engaging results. The sameness of experience among children is even more astonishing.

In sum, the inability to test with falsification (Popper) and the inability to achieve a high percentage statistically, does not debunk the results although we may receive the information with less confidence.

In the search for near death experiences...

By my grandmother's report, she had a near death experience, but it was when her husband died and it was his death she was near. She was visited by an apparition of him upon his highway related death.

Thank you for summing that up! as I'd only alluded to it. And thank you Mr. Popper for rising up for science.

I have several problems with the kind of science that relies on the testimony about private events, particularly those implying esp or similar phenomena.

First, there is the widely observed phenomenon of brain disfunction, which can be either temporary or chronic. Known causes include drugs, fever, sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, epilepsy, tumors, infectious disease, trauma, and others. I have seen a family member in a delerium caused by an infection, experience hallucinations and delusions to the point that family peace was nearly destroyed (before we knew what was going on).

Second there is simple and complex witness error. It is quite easy to stage a surprise event, videotape it, and compare the tape to eyewitness accounts. The results of these kinds of experiments should be known to jurors at trials. They do not speak well for the veracity of witnesses. Several things happen, one of which is that people see what they want to see, confabulating events in a way that brings order and meaning to what they saw. I have personally experinced seeing something that wasn't there in a surprising situation.

Third there is fraud, which is characteristic of Uri Geller types. Many such charlatans have been exposed, and many others have been partially exposed. In my worldview, anyone who does not submit to a controlled experiment to demonstrate special powers should be assumed to be unreliable. Any such experiment should be supervised by competent stage magicians who are familiar with methods of trickery.

I have lived 57 years and never encountered anything or any testimony from friends, relatives or friends of friends that could not be accounted for by the first two of these explanations. I guess I have led a sheltered life, but I don't know anyone who has experienced anything that suggests a non-physical cause -- not just by my interpretation, but also by theirs. I simply haven't met anyone who believes in spooky stuff.

Most of the "symptoms" of near death experiences are generally considered to be relatively well-understood side-effects of our neurophysiology. Back when the military was doing "human limits" testing (i.e. finding out the range and nature of human physiological limits relating to temperature, pressure, acceleration, etc.) somewhere around the middle of the 20th century, they discovered that certain extreme activities (e.g. high-G compression) could reliably produce "near death experiences" in the test subjects. Further study of the phenomenon has basically shown that it has to do with the peculiar way the brain starts to shutdown when deprived of oxygen. The particular location of the visual cortex in the brain makes it particularly susceptible to generating artifacts under anomalous conditions.

This doesn't discount anyone's experience, just puts some perspective on it.