David Bailey
Member
Yes, we've already established the fact that most philosophers are ignorant about NDE research, but that's got nothing to do with the point I'm making here about the importance of clarity and precision in the terms we use.
We don't get these philosophers on Skeptiko so they can tell us about psi and NDE research. That would be a waste of time since they don't know anything about these things. We get them on to talk about metaphysics. A great place to start would be the concept of 'freedom' or 'free will'.
The problem is that these definitions - e.g. libertarian free will - arose out of a struggle to relate free will and consciousness to a supposedly deterministic universe - a universe that was closed, so that nothing outside the universe could be acting upon it. Suppose there was a philosophy of N-rays - it would become irrelevant once it was realised that N-rays didn't exist!
Analogously, all the philosophical finessing of the concept of free will - designed to fit it into a deterministic universe (augmented by pure chance) stands to fall as we explore evidence - such as NDE's - that there is a non-material world. When science and philosophy build on foundations that turn out to be false, whole chunks or erudition simply become irrelevant.
To be clear, I am not asserting that NDE's prove that free will exists independently of the physical universe, but I am saying that if that is what we are discussing, then we should use the concept of free will in its traditional form.
David