I absolutely reject the idea that you should take something as true without true evidence just because it’s too difficult to get that evidence.

So do I.

This idea came from a couple case studies where a heart transplant recipient would seem to gain memories or personality traits from the donor. These cases sounded a lot like the typical “paranormal knowledge” story. Two particular cases were someone liking a food they didn’t like before but the donor did, and a child avoiding a toy that donor had with them when they died.

Being able to accurately describe the location of objects (in or outside the room) or describe specialized medical equipment, the appearance of the doctors in the room (even if the patient hadn’t met them before or after), and so on. This is all very strange stuff. To have hallucinated this stuff perfectly would be remarkable. Forget about being dead, some of these stories would be impressive even if the patient just had their eyes closed (or, in some cases, even if their eyes were wide open). In comparison, someone changing their toy or food preferences to more closely align with those of a particular stranger is, really, not that shocking. So I don’t think this is a fair comparison at all.

Again, we are running into the same issues we had before regarding your statistical noise hypothesis. We don’t know how many NDEs occur, or what percentage of them are reported to have components that require supernatural explanations. So to assert that it’s all just statistical noise is to assume, without any data, that these numbers are going to match what you’re looking for. Despite our data being constrained here, I actually think the absence of certain kinds of data counts strongly against the statistical noise hypothesis.

Because, if the statistical noise hypothesis were correct, it would be extremely common for patients to hallucinate what was going on in the hospital room inaccurately. But all the reports I get are of one of two categories:

• [1] reports of visiting another realm (these are the most common types of cases) or
• [2] reports of staying in the hospital and observing what is going on with surprising accuracy (these are the most interesting cases).

But I am not aware of even a single report of a third category of case,

• [3] reports of staying in the hospital and observing what is going wrong with total inaccuracy.

And I get that cases in the third category would be less likely to be reported on because those cases are less interesting. I see that concern. But we have to appreciate how, given your hypothesis, just how thoroughly these inaccurate accounts would dwarf all these seemingly supernatural ones. Cases in the third category would outnumber cases in the first category by the thousands at least (realistically, it would be more like the millions, due to the sheer level of detail in some cases in the first category, and just how unlikely it would be to hallucinate that detail accurately). If it really were the case that cases in the first category were so common then I would expect at minimum at least one or two of these inaccurate hallucinations to be reported in the medical literature. But I am not aware of a single case like this (is there really not one doctor that would write in their notes, “patient reported this and that occurred in the operating room, but he was wrong”?). So I have a challenge for you: can you identify even a single case that matches the description in (3)? After all, if you’re right, then these types of cases would be extremely plentiful so even if only 0.01% of these cases in the third category are reported on, it should still be fairly easy for you to identify at least one.

So, to sum it up, you’re making a number of assumptions here. The first assumption is that these NDE cases are banal enough that they could be ‘statistical noise’ (which, I think, is demonstrable false; these are not cases where someone changes their food preferences, they are cases where someone has detailed information that they should not have). Then you are assuming that there are an extraordinarily large number of NDE cases where people inaccurately report on what is going on in the hospital when they are going through an NDE (though this second assumption isn’t demonstrably false, it is at least extremely suspect since there doesn’t seem to be any cases like this reported in the medical literature, despite the extreme frequency of their occurrence). So your statistical noise hypothesis relies on these two assumptions, and both of them seem to collapse under scrutiny.

On top of that there are other things going on, too, such as preterminal lucidity, that also point to the possibility that we ‘survive’ our death. If you recall from my earlier comments, I was using NDE as an example from a particular book (Surviving Death by Leslie Kane). I chose NDEs because they are an example that is familiar to a lot of people. But it was only one chapter from the book, and it was one of the least interesting chapters. I’m not saying this because I think this book is the ultimate source of truth on this topic, I’m just saying that there is more than just NDEs to suggest that death is not the end. Unfortunately this stuff is so thoroughly stigmatized that people can’t even bring themselves to look at this data. But any honest person that did would realize, at the very least, that this stigma is unwarranted.