Agrees with skeptics that abstract mathematical objects like numbers don’t literally exist, but holds mathematics is still worth using — the way a novel’s characters don’t exist but the story is still worth telling — because it is a useful, convenient fiction rather than a body of literal truths.
A decades-long research program, based mainly at the University of Virginia, documenting young children who spontaneously report detailed memories of a specific deceased person’s life — in the strongest cases, memories investigators found to match a real, verifiable individual the child had no ordinary way of knowing about.
Proposes that our physical universe is not merely described by mathematics but literally is a mathematical structure — and, more radically, that every internally consistent mathematical structure exists physically as its own universe.
A body of clinical research studying vivid, structured experiences — a sense of leaving the body, moving through darkness toward light, profound peace, a life review — reported by a meaningful minority of people who survive cardiac arrest or come close to death.
A framing problem rather than a single theory: why abstract mathematics — often developed purely for its own internal elegance, with no application in mind — keeps turning out to describe physical reality with startling, almost eerie precision. Used as the stress-test underlying every other theory in this domain.
A well-tested psychological theory (not itself a claim about what actually happens after death) proposing that awareness of our own mortality is a uniquely human source of existential anxiety, and that cultural worldviews, religious beliefs, self-esteem, and a great deal of ordinary human behavior function partly to manage that anxiety.
Two rigorously proven results showing that any consistent formal system powerful enough to express basic arithmetic contains true statements it cannot prove, and cannot even prove its own consistency — with contested but far-reaching implications for whether mathematical truth can ever be fully captured by any fixed set of rules.
A speculative thought experiment built on the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, suggesting a conscious observer could never actually experience their own death — because in every random quantum branching event some branch always exists in which they continue, and an observer can only ever find themselves continuing to observe in a branch where they’re still alive to do so.
Holds that free will and determinism are not actually in conflict — that acting freely just means acting on one’s own reasons and desires without external coercion, regardless of whether those reasons were themselves ultimately caused by prior events.
Reframes the entire question of survival: Parfit argued there is no separately existing self or soul that must persist for “you” to continue — personal identity just consists of physical and psychological continuity, holding in different degrees, which means ordinary survival and even death may be less different, and less metaphysically dramatic, than they intuitively feel.