Stephen King and the Afterlife

In 2015 Stephen King came out with an anthology of short stories, The Bazaar of Bad Dreams. It's a good collection – uneven, as most anthologies are, but with more than its share of memorable tales. The one I want to comment on is called "Afterlife."

The story itself is not meant to be taken too seriously. It’s a tongue-in-cheek episode in which the newly deceased Bill encounters an irascible office clerk who’s serving time in purgatory for having run the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, site of a horrendous industrial accident in 1911. But while the story is something of a lark, its ideas on evidence for life after death seem to be intended seriously.

In the story Bill experiences the moment of dying and sees a brilliant white light. We learn his thoughts:

During the last year, Bill has read a great deal about the passage from life to death … , and while most of it struck him as bullshit, the so-called white light phenomenon seemed quite plausible. For one thing, it has been reported in all cultures. For another, it has a smidgen of scientific credibility. One theory he's read suggests the white light comes as a result of the sudden sensation of blood flow to the brain. Another, more elegant, posits that the brain is performing a final global scan in an effort to find an experience comparable to dying.

Or it may just be a final firework.

“Ascent of the Blessed,”Hieronymus Bosch, c. 1500-04

Now, Bill’s analysis here seems less than acute, though no doubt he can be forgiven inasmuch as he has just undergone a painful death by prostate cancer.

He says that most of the evidence for life after death is “bullshit,” but the white light phenomenon seems real to him, because it’s been reported across many cultures. The problem with this is that every major aspect of the near death experience has been reported across many cultures. Leaving the body, observing what’s going on around it, traveling through a tunnel, communion with a greater intelligence sometimes characterized as a deity, reunion with loved ones, a glimpse of an afterlife environment – all of this has been reported the world over, with no less frequency than the white light. Any number of books can provide countless examples, but I’ll recommend my own Life & Afterlife for a pretty comprehensive overview.

Then we get to the “scientific” side of the white light. Two explanations are offered. The first is the shutdown of blood to the brain. But the white light is reported only in a minority of cases, while the brain’s blood flow presumably shuts down in any patient approaching death.

A more sophisticated version of this theory entails the rapid decay of the optic nerves brought on by blood loss. But the white light has been experienced by people who had no functioning optic nerves to begin with. Take Vicki Umipeg, a premature baby whose optic nerves were destroyed by excess oxygen in the incubator. During her NDE, she found herself “moving toward light” and emerged into “a place of tremendous light, [which] was something you could feel as well as see.” Another patient who was blind from birth, Brad Barrow, reported that his NDE included an “all-encompassing” light that “could penetrate everything that was there.” (Quotes are from “Near-Death and Out-of-Body Experiences in the Blind: A Study of Apparent Eyeless Vision,” by Kenneth Ring, Ph.D. and Sharon Cooper, M.A.; Journal of Near-Death Studies, 16(2) Winter 1997.)

Bill’s other explanation is that the brain generates an image of white light because it is scanning for an experience similar to dying and can’t find one. I don’t think this is actually a scientific explanation at all, but more of an ad hoc conjecture. There’s no reason why the brain would produce a field of white light in the absence of any way of interpreting the experience. More likely, if the brain were looking for an experience similar to dying, it would home in on memories of falling asleep or passing out, which are superficially similar to losing consciousness as the body dies.

Of course, characters in fiction do not necessarily represent the views of their author. Does Bill represent Stephen King’s view? I think he probably does, and I base this opinion on King’s brief introduction to his story. In it, he says he’s at the point in life where he’s interested in the question of "what comes after," but he hasn’t reached a conclusion because

none of us can really draw one, can we? Nobody has sent back any cell phone video from the land of death. There's faith, of course (and a veritable deluge of “heaven is real” books), but faith is, by its very definition, belief without proof …

Maybe the brain is equipped with a deeply embedded exit program that starts running just as everything else is running down, and we're getting ready to catch that final train. To me, the reports of near-death experiences tend to support this idea.

There doesn’t seem to be much daylight between Steve and Bill. In each case, we see a high priority placed on being a no-nonsense realist who will not be taken in by any “heaven is real“ BS. No evidence other than near-death experiences seems worth considering. And even the NDE data can be explained as the glitching-up of a dying brain.

The core assumption is materialistic: the brain generates consciousness; therefore consciousness cannot persist after the brain is dead. This is supposed to be scientific, but materialism or physicalism is not scientific per se. Science can analyze data but cannot tell us the ultimate source of that data - the ground of being - which may be physical or nonphysical. Philosophical materialism, dualism, and idealism are all fully compatible with science. Indeed, one might ague that quantum mechanics makes physicalism the least plausible of the three options.

At the end of his introduction, King includes this remark:

The reason fantasy fiction remains such a vital and necessary genre is that it lets us talk about such things in a way realistic fiction cannot.

It’s an odd note to end on. In the introductions to the many other fantasy stories in his collection, he never feels the need to justify fantasy ficton in this way. It’s as if he is particularly eager to let the reader know he does not see the idea of life after death as a realistic option. Heaven forbid (so to speak) that anyone should take him as one of those gullible religious types.

The thing is, it’s entirely possible to reject conventional religion, while still accepting the evidence for personal survival of death. In fact, this is the position ultimately arrived at by many people who have studied the subject in depth.