Raymond Moody — American Philosopher born on June 30, 1944,

Raymond A. Moody, Jr. is a philosopher, psychologist, physician and author, most famous for his books about life after death and the near-death experiences, a term that he coined in 1975 in his best-selling book Life After Life. Raymond Moody's research explores what happens when a person dies. He is now recognized as the father of near death experience psychology... (wikipedia)

No doubt many people have the feeling that to talk about death at all is, in effect, to conjure it up mentally, to bring it closer in such a way that one has to face up to the inevitability of one's own eventual demise. So, to spare ourselves this psychological trauma, we decide just to try to avoid the topic as much as possible.
If you present your dog to a veterinarian with the instruction to put him to sleep, you would normally mean something very different than you would upon taking your wife or husband to an anesthesiologist with the same words.
The subject of death is taboo. We feel, perhaps only subconsciously, that to be in contact with death in any way, even indirectly, somehow confronts us with the prospect of our own deaths, draws our own deaths closer and makes them more real and thinkable.
I was reading Plato's 'The Republic' at age 18, and I can't account fully the electricity that had for me.
People into hard sciences, neurophysiology, often ignore a core philosophical question: 'What is the relationship between our unique, inner experience of conscious awareness and material substance?' The answer is: We don't know, and some people are so terrified to say, 'I don't know.'