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Would it be a letdown if you discovered that your near-death experience of an Afterlife turned out to just be a dream? That what you took to be an Afterlife isn't real and that the experience was something like a hallucination? You might be surprised to learn that Fischer argues that the unreality of the Afterlife in no way diminishes the significance of near-death experiences for those who are sincere about them. He argues that near-death experiences can provide us with emotional understanding (which is quite different from cognitive understanding) that is quite similar to how we understand narratives in fiction. Fictional narratives are no less meaningful in virtue of being fictional and so too with dreams, hallucinogenic drug trips, and near-death experiences.

Fischer's argument here in chapter 9 is premised upon the success of his argument from chapter 8 (that near-death experience offer no evidence whatsoever of the existence of an Afterlife), but were that argument to fail, then so too would his argument struggle in chapter 9 as well. If the evidence near-death experiences give us of the existence of an Afterlife turns out to be misleading, because there would be no such place, then so too would one's experience of it be a letdown: it's significance and meaning would diminish for us. Do you remember what it was like to discover that the Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus wasn't real? It was a letdown and for some of us a big letdown. So too is this the case with near-death experiences and the Afterlife.

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Are near-death experiences evidence of an afterlife? What are we such that an afterlife could be possible for beings like us at all? In this episode, I discuss Fischer's criticisms of the evidentiary role near-death experiences have for belief in an afterlife. While he doesn't deny that they are experienced, Fischer likens near-death experiences to dreams and would only constitute evidence of an afterlife if there were something supernatural about the mind, namely, that the mind could exist without the body. Instead, he favors a naturalistic explanation of mental phenomena in which mentality is fully explicable in physical terms, and as such there is no reason to believe that any near-death experience is veridical.

However, Fischer sets an unfair explanatory burden upon the possibility of supernaturalist explanations, which entails less plausible conclusions about its inconceivability. Furthermore, the kind of naturalistic explanations he gives for near-death experiences merely provide neural correlates, which when we consider an analogy with color perception we see that this doesn't provide the kind of reduction that Fischer needs to dispatch supernaturalism about the afterlife. What we're left with is a dialectical impasse, in which near-death experiences do provide some evidence of an afterlife though perhaps misleading evidence if in actuality there is no such thing.

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In this episode, I focus on the second half of Fischer's response to Williams' pessimistic criticisms of immortality in which he concentrates on supernatural conceptions of the afterlife. I first consider whether the afterlife is even possible for beings like us. Notably, any who believe that there is an afterlife (whether that be good or bad) must also think that death is a transition of some sort, typically a separation of soul from body, and that the transmigration into heaven or hell preserves the personal identity of the one who dies. Neither assumption is obvious and both are subject to challenge.

Next, I consider various conceptions of the afterlife in which there may be certain goods that would be otherwise unavailable, such as conversing with God or with good people from the past. Fischer underestimates how good heaven could be by focusing too much on a traditionally Christian conception of it. There is no good exclusive to mortal existence for which there could be no coherent conception of an afterlife that would include it, so however good eternal existence in heaven would be, it would be no worse than an immortal continuation of our lives in our material plane. For this reason, all of the arguments Fischer gives as to why immortality wouldn't be so bad would likewise apply to the afterlife, and then some.

Lastly, I discuss the desirability of various immortality scenarios depending upon who gets to be immortal, disagreeing with Fischer about the socioeconomic inequalities an indefinite life extension therapy would create as well as the prospects of overpopulation. Despite painting himself as a moderate between immortality pessimists and optimists, Fischer's definitions requires these to be not only mutually exclusive but exhaustive characterizations of our attitudes about the subject, so there is no conceptual room for what he takes to be his middle-ground position. Fischer may regard himself a realist about the desirability of immortality, but he is far too pessimistic about the desirability of human life continuing through future climate change.