Alex Blasdel’s long read contains some fascinating facts and speculations (The new science of death: ‘There’s something happening in the brain that makes no sense, 2 April). However, it is odd to suggest that there are only three approaches to understanding so-called near-death experiences – physicalist, parapsychological and spiritualist.
While the field of near-death studies is indeed full of “kooks and grifters”, many serious scientists and rational thinkers in this and other fields, who are neither parapsychologists nor spiritualists, are now openly debating alternatives to physicalism. There are other, arguably better, metaphysical lenses through which to interpret the evidence, such as panpsychism and idealism (most notably, in my view, the rigorously rationalist “analytic idealism” put forward by the philosopher and computer engineer Bernardo Kastrup).
Alan Davies
Dale, Pembrokeshire
