Science & the Near-death Experience: How Consciousness Survives Death

by Chris Carter

The scientific evidence for life after death • Explains why near-death experiences (NDEs) offer evidence of an afterlife and discredits the psychological and physiological explanations for them • Challenges materialist arguments against consciousness surviving death • Examines ancient and modern accounts of NDEs from around the world, including China, India, and many from tribal societies such as the Native American and the Maori Predating all organized religion, the belief in an afterlife is fundamental to the human experience and dates back at least to the Neanderthals. By the mid-19th century, however, spurred by the progress of science, many people began to question the existence of an afterlife, and the doctrine of materialism--which believes that consciousness is a creation of the brain--began to spread. Now, using scientific evidence, Chris Carter challenges materialist arguments against consciousness surviving death and shows how near-death experiences (NDEs) may truly provide a glimpse of an awaiting afterlife. Using evidence from scientific studies, quantum mechanics, and consciousness research, Carter reveals how consciousness does not depend on the brain and may, in fact, survive the death of our bodies. Examining ancient and modern accounts of NDEs from around the world, including China, India, and tribal societies such as the Native American and the Maori, he explains how NDEs provide evidence of consciousness surviving the death of our bodies. He looks at the many psychological and physiological explanations for NDEs raised by skeptics--such as stress, birth memories, or oxygen starvation--and clearly shows why each of them fails to truly explain the NDE. Exploring the similarities between NDEs and visions experienced during actual death and the intersection of physics and consciousness, Carter uncovers the truth about mind, matter, and life after death.

Genres: Science, Nonfiction, Spirituality, Paranormal, Psychology, Religion, Philosophy

320 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 23, 2010

About the author

Chris Carter was educated at Oxford and is the author of three highly acclaimed books and several published articles dealing with controversial issues at the intersection of science and philosophy. His latest work is The Case for the Afterlife.

After working in the field of finance, Carter currently devotes his time to writing, playing racquet sports, and teaching physics.

Reviews

[Jessaka · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have been drawn to books o Quantum mechanics for years, that is, when they speak of God. Most physicists would debunk this book, and others like it, but the yogis have picked up on the new physics because it touches upon what they believe is the nature of reality. It is what they have been telling us for years, and that is this: “We are all One,” just as the Prominent quantum physicist Schoenrodinger has said. when he stated, “There is only One Consciousness.” These yogis also believe that this is what Christ meant when he said, “I am the Father are One.”

One other physicist had said that the universe was created though thought. I like how the aborigines of Australia believe that it was sung into existence. The Hindus believe also that that first there was Lord Brahma, and when Brahma stirred, the universe came into existence.
I used to attend the Vedanta Society, a Hindu group, and they once had a man come to give a lecture at our temple. I wrote about it in my review of “The Tao of Physics”, so, I will add this from that review:

“I listened again to DeLuca’s lecture to see what I remembered, and to write this in my review as it say, this is why I love quantum physics, even though I don’t understand it.

He began by stating that: ’“All things are temporary manifestations of God.’ Then he mentioned the great physicist, Schodinger and Deepak Chopra’s book, Quantum Healing. Chopra had said that that the molecules that are in us today can be in a tree or another person tomorrow, and the molecules that were in the moon a month ago could be in us today. He stated that this is not figuratively but literally. But much of this was lost on me, but the idea of our molecules flowing in and out of our body was fascinating.

DeLuca, like Capra, spent a some time on comparing quantum physicists with the Upanishads, but Capra also compared it to what Buddha had said about the nature of reality. While I could see what they both were talking about, I was not so sure that it could be applied in such a way because what the Buddha and the Upanishads had said were too vague to me.

Then DeLuca quoted from another quantum physicist, Max Planck:

“I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.’”
Since then, as I said, I have been trying to read books that connect quantum physicists to God. But because I never studied physics, much less quantum mechanics, I don’t know what I am reading, and so I pick out what I understand. I believe that this author, who is not a physicist, has done the same. He rather did the job for me, but I will still read then.

Then I read the Tao Te Ching, and the first verse says:

“The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The nameless is the beginning of heaven and eartn. The named is the mother of ten thousand things.”

I feel that the Tao that cannot be told means that you cannot know the mind of God, so when religions claim that God is thi or that, they are actually projecting their own personality onto this God. his. And that is their downfall, the beginning of the suffering that they can cause to mankind. I do believe that the mystics were correct when they experience God as Love, but that, too, is the Tao that cannot be told, or at least I think it is. And that opens up a new can of worms, such as, “If God is Love then why does he permit suffering? I have no answer for that and neither does any religions. I am just not satisfied with any of their answers. We just can’t really know, and so I just came to the conclusion that I had to let it go.

The author of this book also went into describing NDE. I used to love reading them, but I have lost a lot of interest in reding them. While he is busy refuting the scientists, he makes the mistake, as I see it, of talking about NDE of hell and not rejecting them. There is no such thing as a hell. The belief was created by man. And if you are to believe the bible, most people are going there because it states that the gate is narrow for those who believe, and wide is the gate that leads to destruction”. (My paraphrase.) Yet, those who record NDE say that very few go to hell.

While I believe in life after death, I believe that the NDE evolve. First, you experience death as you expect it to be for you. But I have no proof of this. And while “The Tibetan Book of the Dead” says this much, I don’t believe its conclusions either. I don’t believe in anything coming from Tibetan teachings, even though this one comes from the Bon religion. I just think that hell and karma were creations of man and came into being in later years. I recall reading in Strong Exhaustive Bible Concordance which is based on the King James version of the bible, that hell which is the translation of sheol and hades, means, “The common grave of mankind.”
Even the teaching of karma came into the Upanishads at at a later date. You won’t find it in the early teachings. And over time its meaning evolved, and when it was westernized, well, it evolved even more.

Basically, I just wish that the author had left out NDE. As they are contaminated by man’s belief systems. Even mystics add to their experiences as according to their faith. For I believe that you cannot experience God as Love and continue to believe in a religion that also teaches that God is a God of judgment. If God’s love is unconditional, as the bible says,, then how can the bible then put conditions on it? At least many mystics say that we are all saved, and yet, I would say, “There is no such thing.as having to be saved.”

I wukk end my review here because I realize that I could go on and on, because my experience with religions has caused me to rant and rave. But wait, maybe God has a split personality, after all, we live in duality, so maybe God is both love and hate. See, I can’t help myself, so in ending I will shout, “Get out, get out, you demons of confusion and rants.”

[Bookpuppy]

This book does a good job of summing up the primary objections to the strict materialist assumption of mind=brain. The book starts with consciousness and neuroscience, then moves from there into the near death experience while addressing all of the materialist arguments.

It's interesting to note that as a last ditch attempt to get away from an afterlife scenario, many materialists will claim telepathy or clairvoyance might be involved... two phenomena they deny as "pseudoscience" under any other context. It's amusing to watch as the goalposts are moved. One wonders why such people are so dedicated to believing there is no afterlife. What, other than religious abuse and crazy hell doctrines, could motivate someone to such a fatalistic viewpoint even in light of evidence to the contrary?

It's one thing to keep an open mind either way, it's quite another to dogmatically conclude that mind MUST equal brain just because someone with an ideological ax to grind wants it to.

[Erik Graff · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a cut above most of its fellows in the "New Age" or "Spirituality" shelves in the bookstore. It raises many issues, confronting normative science with anomalous data, but draws few convincing conclusions.

A strength of the book is its attack on certain kinds of monistic materialisms, particularly those which see mind as entirely dependent upon and derived from brain. Here the evidences leading to contemporary quantam physics and of placebo effects, ESP, cognitive-emotive therapies and especially some near-death experiences are effectively adduced to seriously bring this kind of materialism into question. Clearly, the model is insufficient to account for the data. However, Carter's own preference for a vague Mind/Body dualism which he apparently thinks allows for his pet belief in some sort of individual survival of personality after bodily death is not very convincingly supported and some important, ancillary issues are lost in his chase towards his goal.

One is, of course, the philosophical issue of reconciling the sciences, all of them, under one understanding. This was accomplished adequately for the Newtonian world-picture by Kant in the 18th century and probably could be adapted and maintained even in the face of Einstein's unwanted child, quantam physics. It is certainly not accomplished by Carter who fudges on many of the important issues such as the relation of determinism in the physical sciences and freedom in the moral ones as well as the relation between personal subjective and the suprapersonal objective "mind". Much of what his evidence requires can be answered, at least tentatively, without recourse to notions of individual survival.

In the sense in which he refers to it "materialism" serves as a straw man in Carter's arguments. There are such beliefs, yes, and they have more the character of metaphysics than of science, but afterlife hypotheses are not only objectionable from such perspectives. Everything he counts as evidence for personal perdurance could just as well be accounted for by some combination of psi-factors such as clairvoyance, telepathy, telekinesis, precognition etc. Further, all evidences he adduces are untestable and after the fact, just like reports of dream states are. There may, as Jung would have it, be a god-concept which is archetypally univeral, but that is not to say that there is a god in anything like the same sense that we say there is a sun or a moon or, to use Carter's example, France.

Still, this book is a cut above others I've seen. The tales told are interesting and challenging, the documentation, much of it, solid.

[Paul Dubuc · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book makes fascinating reading. I hadn't been much interested in NDEs and their validity didn't much matter to me one way or the other as evidence for life after death. I had been vaguely aware of the "scientific" explanations for them which which would dismiss their validity. But this book changed my opinion. The reality and validity of such experience seems very plausible. Carter deals very well with the usual materialist explanations for NDEs and finds them wanting. I would normally expect a lot of hype and exaggeration from a book like this, but Carter gives the evidence and the counter arguments a very even handed treatment. Science is not the loser here, only the materialistic assumptions that are often mistaken for good science.

Whatever your inclinations, if you're at all curious about the possibilities surrounding these experiences, this one good book to read.

[The Overflowing Inkwell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent. This and the final book of this series, Science and the Afterlife Experience: Evidence for the Immortality of Consciousness, are absolutely must-reads if you are interested in this topic. Very, very thorough and very clear. I was already aware of certain things, such as memories not being physically stored in the brain, so it was good to read further on the topic of how the mind is separate from the brain. I particularly love the comparisons made throughout the book: no one would disassemble a TV expecting to find where shows are made (like our brain does not manufacture consciousness but is rather a receiver of it, pg 93-94), just as no one would listen to the radio, smash the receiver, and conclude that, since the music has now stopped, the radio must have been producing the music (pg 13). Some of what Hancock referenced in Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind is also mentioned here, namely the theory that the brain is a limiter on consciousness rather than the generator of consciousness, as evidenced by what happens when the brain is offline in NDEs, clinical death, and so on that either bypass or 'open the valve' of the brain's built-in restrictions to allow the consciousness/mind do more of what it is naturally capable of doing.

As I thought with the Afterlife Experience, the book feels even-handed, grounded, and very well researched. The vast majority of the book is spent going through all arguments against the premise of the mind being separate from brain/body and that the experiences described are genuine realities rather than hallucination or fantasy; I thought the representation of the opposing arguments fair, allowing them to speak for themselves before being refuted.

At no point does the book tend toward the fantastical; it is always reminding the reader to be responsible in our research on this topic, to never take things at face value, and never encourages blind belief. It is also very honest that the facts we have of NDEs, deathbed experiences, and the like do not verify any known religion. There are numerous reports and examples given (I could likely read thousands of them before getting bored of them!) that let you see this for yourself and where they (rarely) differ and (nearly completely) concur across cultures and continents.

Very highly recommended.

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good book that references a lot of studies and scientific facts to convincingly make the argument that the mind is separate from the brain and that our consciousness survives death. First part of the book was really technical and discussed a lot of scientific and biological facts and studies, but it was still interesting to read about. The rest of the book contained a lot of verifiable case studies and examples of near death experiences. I don't see how someone could read all of the facts and arguments in this book and still think the mind is simply part of the brain.

[Anthony O'Connor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting.

Doesn’t start well. Strident almost petulant ‘arguments’. You’re the dogmatist. No you’re the dogmatist. Quibbling over definitions. Light weight Attempts at theories/explanations. The inevitable invocation of quantum mechanics. ( consciousness and quantum mechanics have nothing to do with each other. This is just an old silly attempt at an interpretation from ancient times - pre 1980s ) If the phenomena are real any theory/model/explanation will be far stranger than anything currently imagined - classical or quantum. Theories given herein are hopelessly inadequate.
Subsequent Parts are much better. A survey of cases. A careful study of and refutation of the standard explanations. A look at the experience in different cultures. All quite fascinating and suggestive. Where do we go from here?
Do NDEs provide evidence that consciousness can survive death, that there is more to it than its current physical implementation?
This is something we all want to be true. The book in no way establishes any conclusions. Anecdotes are not evidence. If wishes were horses we’d all be kings.

[Marije · Rating 3 out of 5]

This year I wanted to read some books outside my comfort zone. So here I am.

The first part, about quantum mechanics, was a bit of a mess. A lot of the scholars quoted died long before the turn of the century, and their opinions (if they were ever taken seriously) have now been debunked, often without difficulty. Also, check whether the quoted scholars have any authority on the topic at all: if I win a prize for drawing a really cool snail, no one should take my advice on winning a marathon seriously because of it.

I almost stopped reading because of all this, but I’m glad I didn’t. When about one-third into the book the actual topic of Near-Death Experiences began, it became interesting again. I still skimmed over the big claims of “this has been proven to undoubtedly be true!!” parts, but I enjoyed the stories and the philosophical explorations.

All in all, this was a fun read but don’t take it too seriously when it comes to the science side of it all.

[Dan Zarfati · Rating 5 out of 5]

Chris Carter is very methodic researcher on the claims of the paranormal, these book has theories and cases of NDE, it is of clear writting and it is very easy to understand the points of the writer.

[Justin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was too academic for me. I probably could've understood it but I've already read other things that offered some proof/skepticism. The amount of work I'd have needed to expend to get additional proof/skepticism didn't seem worth it.

The author is fond of directly quoting brilliant people. This is all good, but I like my books to be succinct distillations of wisdom that are as easy to understand as possible. I think the author could've done this as other authors have. For example, even though I didn't like Supernormal: Science, Yoga and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities it was much more readable. It is possible that this book could have better science than the books I've read (which were pretty unscientific and at best were mostly objective experiences) the author just ruined it for me with their writing level.

[Joel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Carter produces a thorough scientific investigation accreting the case for the separation of consciousness from matter and the inadequacy of materialism to account for NDEs. He provides incontrivertable proof within the parameters of, and buttressed by, quantum mechanic theory.

The question of whether consciousness can permanently survive after death (rather than simply while 'near-death') is evidenced (but not proven beyond reasonable doubt) by studies of deathbed visions, the content of which are consonent with near-death experiences.

Overall, I found it well-written, well-corroborated and convincing.

[Willa]

Review, and rating, pending.

But, meanwhile, most importantly: if you accept the author's line of reasoning-- and I'm not saying you should-- as providing evidence of an afterlife, then you may as well note that his evidence says that prior beliefs play no role in determining anything about near death experiences. Everyone gets the same peace and joy and reunion with loved ones et cetera. So ultimately there's little point in worrying about whether it's true or not or altering your behavior-- you're going to get what you're going to get. Hence, practically, you can skip the book entirely.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an excellent introduction to the subject of NDEs. If you've been reading into the area for any amount of time you may be frustrated by the seeming repetition of the essential ideas, but, then, this book was not written for you. Rather, this book was written to introduce the topic to neophytes.

Where this book misses a step, though, is that it involves itself in demeaning attacks on the materialists in the same way that they have attacked non-materialists. This is not helpful. Good news the attacks are minimal and not vicious.

A good introduction to the subject matter.

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars.

[Gabriel · Rating 2 out of 5]

I did not think this book was written very well. He stopped short of "proving" that near death experiences are real.

[Jeanine · Rating 3 out of 5]

An overview of what Scientist thinks about near death experiences. Then the facts , the stories, the circumstances. Very in depth and interesting.