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Near Death Experiences and State-Space Consistency
Tyler (and Ryan) ask, Should near death experiences change your life? The answer is no. The reason, however, may surprise you. It's not because NDEs are unimportant it's because they are very important.
Recall that a rational choice-plan is time-consistent, you should not plan today to make choices for tomorrow when you know today that you will renege upon those choices tomorrow. Eating cake today because you will diet tomorrow is not a rational choice if you will not in fact diet tomorrow. Time-consistency does not require that you always follow through on today's plans - new information arrives which may cause you to rationally change your plans - but it does require that you expect to follow through on today's plans which means that if no new information arrives then you should follow through.
The same idea explains why if you are rational you should not change your life if you experience an NDE. NDEs are not new information. You know that you are mortal, right? You know that you could die today. You know that experiences like Ryan's are not uncommon. Thus, if you are rational you should not change your life if you experience an NDE.
Do I advise, therefore, that Ryan get on with his life as before? No, not at all. My advice is not for Ryan, it's for everyone else; Choosing rationally requires that you choose today so that if you have an NDE you will not change your life.
The fact that many people who have an NDE do change their lives is evidence that most people do not choose rationally. Thus the ways in which people who have had NDEs change their lives is important information for the rest of us who want to choose rationally.
Do you recall the secret to happiness offered by Gilbert, the one you almost certainly will not accept? It is to accept that your own anticipations of what you will do and feel if certain things occur is not as good a guide to what you will actually do and feel as are the actions and feelings of other people who actually have experienced those events. Thus, if near death experiences tend to make people more giving, caring and less fearful of change then this is how you should act today.
Long-time readers will know that I take the idea of reflective equilibrium quite seriously.
Posted by Alex Tabarrok on June 4, 2007 at 07:22 AM in Economics, Education, Philosophy, Religion, Travels | Permalink
Comments
How certain are you of your assumption that NDEs offer "no new information?"
Posted by: John Goes at Jun 4, 2007 7:32:06 AM
How certain are you of your assumption that NDEs offer "no new information?"
Right, because often NDEs are early signs of what actually may kill you (and sooner than you'd otherwise been expecting). Car crashes aren't in that category, but many medical scares are.
Posted by: Slocum at Jun 4, 2007 7:49:15 AM
I agree with the medical emergency near death experience (having had one at 33 years of age). In your 30's you see death as somehting likely to happen in a long time. I, at least, did not factor in the chance of it happening soon.
The result was a realignment of priorities. Not necessarily in the greatest of ways -- I became a bit of a workaholic which is the opposite of what is supposed to happen. :-)
Posted by: Joseph Delaney at Jun 4, 2007 8:00:15 AM
I dunno.
Let's say I don know I could die tomorrow, that people who have NDEs become more giving (or whatever) and that a rational choice-plan is time consistent.
It doesn't follow that a rational person behaves as they should given the existence of NDEs. That's a further conclusion and rationality doesn't define which conclusions a person has drawn but what conclusions they must draw, should they draw any at all. NDEs might not represent new information, but they may the impetus for conclusion drawing.
In such a case, people who have an NDE may rationally change their behavior; they might not have considered the topic before.
Of course, no one reading the post has much of an excuse.
Posted by: Steven Schreiber at Jun 4, 2007 8:51:37 AM
Bah. Should pay better attention.
"Let's say I do know I...."
Posted by: Steven Schreiber at Jun 4, 2007 8:52:30 AM
There is much to like in this post, but I'm tripping over its financial implications. Do insurance companies change their behavior towards you over near death experiences? Yes, auto, health, and life insurance companies definitely do. This suggests strongly that they do contain new information. In some cases the insurance company is only finding out what you already knew, but in others you may not have been aware of your risk level.
Posted by: DK at Jun 4, 2007 8:59:33 AM
NDEs come in a variety of forms, but they tend to connotate not only a situation in which one may die, but a sort of bodily death, in which white light is usually attendent. The reader didn't have that experience, but one shouldn't exclude these sorts of experiences from a general analysis. Is there any information in these experiences?
Posted by: John Goes at Jun 4, 2007 9:01:18 AM
I remember some book of questions that had, "If you were to die tomorrow, what would you regret not doing?
Why haven't you done it?"
I think that nicely summarizes Alex_Tabarrok's advise.
Posted by: Person at Jun 4, 2007 9:05:47 AM
Being in an incident that, had it gone differently, could have killed one, does not provide new information about one's ontological mortality, but it may provide new information about the likelihood of one experiencing sudden and arbitrary death. If I have never experienced some seemingly random phenomenon, I can, to a degree of statistical confidence, put an upper bound on the likelihood that I will experience it tomorrow, but if I have experienced it, even once, I can also put lower bound on that likelihood.
Doing so may move a possibility from the category of possibilities so unlikely as to not be worth responding to, and possibilities that are unlikely, but worth making some response to.
Posted by: Cyrus at Jun 4, 2007 10:40:53 AM
The idea that people might not make rational decisions never loses its power to surprise, does it? I would have thought that economists would have gotten over it by now.
Snarkiness aside, this does remind me one of my personal mottoes: "Live like you might not die tomorrow."
Posted by: Tony at Jun 4, 2007 10:59:56 AM
My philosophical question: can lack of vividness provide a rational reason for doing (not doing) something?
Posted by: Tyler Cowen at Jun 4, 2007 11:22:31 AM
Lack of vividness is an explanation for doing or not doing something but I don't think a rational reason for doing or not doing somethinig. Imagine you are designing an android, putting aside second-best considerations you wouldn't design vividness as a decision criteria would you? Similarly, people differ from animals precisely in the ability to overcome the pull of what is immediate and vivid to not ignore the longer-term and opaque.
Posted by: Alex Tabarrok at Jun 4, 2007 11:33:26 AM
Given that much of what traps us into current behaviors and habits is the expectations of others in our lives, couldn't an NDE give us a bit of an excuse for changing that persona?
Think of it as moving to a new city where nobody knows you.
Posted by: lex gibson at Jun 4, 2007 11:45:57 AM
lex_gibson: I think that was exactly the point that Tyler_Cowen made in his post about NDEs.
Posted by: Person at Jun 4, 2007 11:51:34 AM
I think there's also something to be said here for the slow-motion NDE of getting older. Martin Amis once said that in life you're always either saying hi or saying by, and that the switchover comes in one's mid thirties. I am wondering whether those of you over 40 aren't conscious of death nearly all the time. I also wonder whether the chronic NDE of middle age has some kind of inoculating or sedative effect which is the opposite of the effect resulting from an acute NDE. Orwell's Coming Up for Air (1938) is an excellent text on all this; the hero is middle-aged, knows war is coming, had an NDE in the last war, and has another in the course of the narrative. None of it has as big an effect as 17 quid.
Posted by: Dan at Jun 4, 2007 12:23:05 PM
Alex, I like your general thoughts here and agree with them -- we should not need to come close to death to realize that we could die tomorrow (or even this afternoon) and live our lives accordingly. However I have a few quibbles with your post.
First of all, NDE and "near-death experience" refer to a specific constellation of subjective experiences that some people undergo when they are near death due to illness or injury, or sometimes when threatened with death (such as a severe car accident that does not actually cause injury). An unfortunate term to be sure, but it is probably better to distinguish between people who come close to death, and those who come close to death and have a "NDE". Particularly since there are some very relevant differences in the response between NDE experiencers and non-NDE experiencers, which this prospective study of all cardiac arrest patients in several hospitals over several years shows clearly. For example, NDE experiencers are much more likely to believe in life after death than non-experiencers, show a greatly reduced fear of death, and are more interested in spirituality than non-experiencers.
Secondly, like John Goes, I also must question your statement that "NDEs are not new information." Candace who commented on Tyler's post on this topic wrote about her NDE at the age of 12. She most certainly had some new information -- that she was able to exist outside of her body and perceive events, later on corroborated by independent witnesses. Certainly if that happened to you it would increase your confidence that your consciousness will survive the death of your body, which would likely influence you in many ways.
Posted by: Matthew at Jun 4, 2007 12:43:43 PM
I will reiterate that Gilbert's secret of happiness may be sufficiently unlikely to be accepted that the fact that a person is willing to accept it suggests that they are abnormal enough that we have little basis for expecting the secret to work for them.
I think Cyrus is correct in his analysis.
Posted by: michael vassar at Jun 4, 2007 12:47:46 PM
To make what others have said above concrete: I work atop skyscrapers because my excellent sense of balance means that I can pocket the compensating wage differential for hazardous work. One day, I almost faint and fall off the building. Thus, I have overestimated my falling potential. I re-evaluate and change professions. Nothing irrational there... just an updating of subjective probabilities.
Posted by: Jonathan at Jun 4, 2007 3:40:02 PM
Alex,
Your comments point up the problem with economists. They seem to have only a limited understanding of the human experience.
Most of us non economists understand that most humans are not particularly rational (as defined by an economist). Most of us get some enjoyment from buying a lottery ticket. Most of us grow and or change after a NDA.
All incomprehensible in the economist model. But that is reality. Economists need to re-examine their models.
In my personal experience. I had a near death by drowning. I had what seemed like a long time fighting to escape before I started trying to breathing water. I had no spiritual experience. Most of the time I was under water I was struggling physically while mentally I was berating myself for getting into the situation.
What I learned was that the situation was not that scary. I know that drowning is something not so terrible to go through. Thinking about it is scary. When it is actually happening, you have other things to worry about.
I think that this was something valuable to learn
Posted by: Robb Lutton at Jun 4, 2007 10:23:13 PM
I had an NDE after a suicide attempt. I had a new experience during it, and I would certainly call it new information. My new information was that I felt no fear, and I felt no anxiety, even though I'd felt overwhelming anxiety for the prior 6 years as a daily experience. For me, this was life altering in that moment. Instead of feeling a fear of death, I found no fear in that moment, and decided that that was enough to stop feeling afraid while living. (you may call that irrational or nonrational, but for me, the existence of a moment with no fear was a kind of existence proof that life could be okay. ) I believe that I chose not to die after that, and that's why I'm here today. Now, that last part could be wrong, but even if so, the experience was life altering because I was able to remember not being afraid after the NDE, and that memory was a kind of "not feeling afraid" in its own right, and that meant I didn't feel afraid the same way as I had before. For many years after that event, I was able to hold on to that lack of fear. Eventually, it faded, and I felt that gripping anxiety and fear again, but that was long enough to change other elements of my behavior, internally and externally, so that my happiness is unqualifiedly higher now than before.
I guess Tyler would claim I wasn't rational in the first place. He would say that my suicide attempt was irrational because "choosing today as if I had an NDE wouldn't change my life" would have meant not trying to commit suicide in the first place. And others would say that ending my life wasn't rational a priori, I imagine. But I disagree. I couldn't have known that an NDE would make me feel unafraid; I couldn't have known that I would ever stop feeling that fear until I stopped feeling it.
Posted by: anonymous at Jun 4, 2007 11:43:04 PM
There is much confusion here between someone who has had a close brush with death, perhaps lost consciousness, and survived (an accident, major surgery, heart attack, etc.) and someone who has had a particular phenomenon called the "near-death experience" or NDE. The two are totally different. In the NDE, one typically experiences an ineffable world which, in most cases, dramatically alters the world view of the experiencer. For more information about NDEs and their aftereffects, I suggest you go to the website of the International Association for Near-Death Studies (www.iands.org), click on the "About NDEs" tab and then click on "Common Aftereffects" from the dror down menu. An even better explanation of NDE aftereffects is offered in an audio file of a presentation by Dr. Bruce Greyson of the University of Virginia Medical School at http://www.iands.org/conferences/2005_conference_presentations
(scroll down to the 2nd presentation.).
As someone who has had a typical close brush with death I think it is possible to rationally structure one's life to anticipate that. An NDE, which I have not had, is a very different animal, far more profound and life altering. We can all attempt to learn about NDEs and try to learn from those who have had this experience - what they fairly consistently report is the purpose of life, what happens to us when we die, etc. - which is the reason so many people are interested in this phenomenon.
Allen
Posted by: Allen at Jun 5, 2007 6:54:35 AM
Life-changing NDEs fall into the general category of conversion experiences. Surely one would expect conversion experiences to change one's notions of rational behaviour, although that's not generally the way people express it.
Posted by: intellectual pariah at Jun 5, 2007 8:43:59 AM
I see NDE's the same light as MLC's (midlife crises). Sometimes it takes a crises to overcome the inertia of our lives (whether internal or external). Much good can come from both though you probably wouldn't ever intentionally have either. Interesting. (Well interesting enough for me to write a blog post about it.)
I was also amazed at the statistics found at one of the links (the U of V link I believe) where 1 in 20 people reports having an NDE.
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