An article on near-death experiences

I read the following skeptical article on NDE's:

The Afterlife Is in Our Heads

These so-called scientific explanations of NDEs assume that it is entirely unproblematic that brains produce consciousness, and given this assumption, they advance speculative hypotheses about how the brain creates such experiences.



Incidentally, I wouldn't claim that NDEs give anything like proof of an afterlife. Clearly, one's mind and implicit expectations very much influences what one actually experiences. But this certainly doesn't mean that one isn't encountering some afterlife realm that one's implicit expectations and beliefs are moulding and shaping. Indeed, this to a certain extent even happens with our everyday embodied vision, as demonstrated by perceptual "illusions".

Just consider that dress.

Just a few comments on various quoted parts:

The idea that near-death experiences, also known as NDEs, offer proof of an afterlife for the soul has been remarkably persistent, despite an accumulation of scientific evidence to the contrary.

 …



NDEs are … explained by physiological processes, [neuroscientists] said, which have been pieced together over the past 50 years.

I’ve never come across any of this evidence. As I said above, at best, they are speculative hypotheses.

[A] wealth of neuroscience research describes how OBE-like experiences—a loss of the sense of self and disturbed body perception or ownership—can be triggered by brain damage, epilepsy, and migraine,7 as well as by stimulation of the part of the brain where the right temporal and parietal lobes meet.

Which, as I have continually explained on countless occasions e.g here, has no implications either way, since this would be precisely what we would expect regardless of whether NDEs are a glimpse of some external reality or not.

The “dissociative anesthetic ketamine can reproduce all aspects of the near-death experience,” Jansen wrote. That includes a sense of ineffability, timelessness, that what is experienced is “real,” that one is actually dead, a perception of separation from the body, vivid hallucination, rapid movement through a tunnel, and emerging “into the light.”

So this assumes that ketamine induced experiences are produced by the brain rather than modifying the brain to allow access to other realities. So this argument only works for those that draw a distinction between the ultimate origin of NDEs on the one hand, and psychedelic experiences on the other.

The article reports Anil Seth as saying:

“If somebody with no brain activity were able to experience something and remember it later, then pretty much everything we know about the brain, about science, about physics is wrong.”

This is just nonsense on stilts. Obviously, since the physical sciences wholly leave out consciousness in their description of reality, then necessarily they can have nothing to say about the abilities of consciousness.