Thursday, September 18 2008: NDEs
I was watching backlogged recordings of that show House which TiVo lovingly stored away on its little hard drive for me. The show is significant (according to the criteria I just made up right now for this flogentry) because two of the main characters are "atheist*", which is envelope pushing for a network television show, but still unsurprising because the show goes out of its way to trivialize and neutralize their lack of belief in Santa. Most recently, there was a death junkie who, just as Dr House walks into the exam room, quite shockingly stands up, pulls out a knife and jams it into a wall outlet. As expected Dr House resuscitates him and we learn that last week the young man was in a car accident where he experienced cardiac arrest for 97 seconds - the best, most blissed out 97 seconds of his "life". For whatever reason this has an effect on Dr House who repeats the experiment himself later in the episode - apparently having an NDE himself to go along with his troubles.
This annoys me for three reasons.
1. Plenty of people have died and been resuscitated without ever having had an NDE.
2. When NDEs have a religious component, they conform to the person's preconceived notions of the afterlife (i.e., Hindus don't end up in heaven (or hell)).
3. NDEs are easily and completely explicable in terms of brain physiology - no gods necessary.
Interpreted in the best possible light, NDEs are inconclusive (assuming you force yourself to not only accept as reliable not only a person's report of a subjective experience they've had, but also accept as infallible their interpretation of what that experience means) and at worst another pointless distraction from the god crowd.
* Actually, one of the characters, Dr Cameron, says she believes in a guiding entity but doesn't think it is an anthropomorphic person. This sounds an awful lot like theism to me, meaning House is the only atheist on the show.
This annoys me for three reasons.
1. Plenty of people have died and been resuscitated without ever having had an NDE.
2. When NDEs have a religious component, they conform to the person's preconceived notions of the afterlife (i.e., Hindus don't end up in heaven (or hell)).
3. NDEs are easily and completely explicable in terms of brain physiology - no gods necessary.
Interpreted in the best possible light, NDEs are inconclusive (assuming you force yourself to not only accept as reliable not only a person's report of a subjective experience they've had, but also accept as infallible their interpretation of what that experience means) and at worst another pointless distraction from the god crowd.
* Actually, one of the characters, Dr Cameron, says she believes in a guiding entity but doesn't think it is an anthropomorphic person. This sounds an awful lot like theism to me, meaning House is the only atheist on the show.
