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In this essay I intend to argue that while Susan Blackmore (S.B.) does shed some light on the mind/body problem with her examination of ‘near death experiences’ (NDE), she doesn’t conclusively solve the monist/dualist dilemma and, in fact, perhaps just complicates the argument by raising more questions. For the purposes of this essay I will use the definition of NDEs, as given in our notes, as an experience people have while “they are technically dead for anything up to a couple of minutes.” Most often, people are classified as having been technically dead because they have died in an operating theatre with qualified medical staff around them, who can vouch for their state of having been dead. This, however, is not always foolproof, as a number of people have regained consciousness several hours or even days after having been pronounced dead by several doctors. Not all of these people have had NDE even though they have been technically dead. The problem seems to lie in how we define “life” and ”death”. How can we know when life ceases to exist in an organism, when we have trouble defining life itself? Physical processes continue in an organism many days after it is pronounced dead. In 1890 one concerned doctor, Dr. F. Gannal, even wrote a paper:” Mort Apparante et Mort Réele” and listed 418 references to help determining the real death from the apparent death. Lyall Watson refers to a case of a United States soldier, who was severely injured in South Vietnam. Doctors attempted to resuscitate him but gave up after 45 minutes when both electrocardiograph and electroencephalograph said he was dead. Yet, he recovered 4 hours later in the mortuary. Although these cases are not common, they happen frequently enough to require “dead” people to be laid out in a morgue or some other place, for some time before burial or cremation. Just in case! So, did the US soldier have a NDE? Unfortunately, there is no reference to his experience of the event, but he does fit our definition of being technically dead. The reason I point out the problem that we have in defining life and death, is that this aspect is not covered by S.B. For me the question arises as to whether people who have a NDE were really dead or just misdiagnosed. If it is a case of us needing to refine our diagnostic skills in relation to death, then we may have a scenario of no one actually having returned from the dead but rather people having had a specific out-of-the-body experience (OBE) in a barely functioning body. If this is the case, then we can argue about whether the mind can leave the body and experience the real world without using the physical body. However, there cannot be a persuasive argument about whether the mind can exist entirely independent from the body if no one has been really dead and experienced a total separation of the mind-body connection.
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