So forgive me if this topic borders too much on religion, but this is something I've never understood.
For those who don't know what an NDE is, its a observed phenomenon where someone who is considered clinically or even full on brain dead. But then the person is revived and explains they had a sensation of floating out of their body and even observe the doctors working on them, some even claim to have heard conversations from far away, spoken with dead relatives, and some even claimed to have seen despite being blind.
Oh my god. Proof that souls exist, theologians rejoice, we have debunked materialism and proven life after death.
Only hold on not quite. No one buys it outside of a devoted few with various objections claiming it to be hallucination, the result of drugs, or even hoaxes perpetuated by the religious.
Except research conducted by men like Sam Parnia rules that out and shows that conciousness persists after death.
So.. afterlife confirmed right? No people just label Parnia crazy and continue to say this is nothing, even after the debunks fail to land. Even after this gets reported thousands of times in various regions and the only thing that changes is whether people see Jesus, Grandma, or Shiva.. aside from that little detail they remain uniform.
And well I never understood why.
I asked skeptics and they claim that the people are merely near death, not actually dead and thus it doesn't count.
Only problem is that even if the person is barely clinging onto life there's still the issue of conciousness being strong and present where none can exist.
If my computer's power supply was on the fritz and stopped working for a second yet my computer remained just as functional as ever during the few moments the PSU wasn't working. I'd consider that an oddity. I wouldn't say "Oh the PSU still kinda works, the fact that it completely tapped out for a solid three-minutes yet my PC stayed on is not weird at all."
So to say "Oh they're just NEAR death." Is simply moving the goal post and not a satisfactory answer.
I ask proponents and they tell me that NDEs are completely proven and that the afterlife is for realsies, but big bad Academia won't listen to anything that contradicts a physicalist view of the universe.
The problem with that is that's the excuse creationists give as to why no one believes the Earth is 6000 years old. Which is so blatantly falsified by even a cursory glance at science that its not even funny.
So that's not it. Unless I want to entertain conspiracy nonsense. Which I do not.
So I ask the scientifically trained what the real answer is, because obviously I missed something in all the data on NDEs that I'm simply too dense to figure out.
This is why. They don't remain uniform. You're, I think unintentionally, glossing over the details. People aren't just seeing the version of their familiar cultural deity but otherwise experiencing the same thing. They all have different experiences when it comes down to the details, and they conspicuously seem to match cultural norms.
So what is more likely happening is a thing that's unique to human biology, not an indicator of something "more."
Another thing is that personal testimony is not good enough to prove almost anything. I can tell you I have a red dragon in my garage. I can even believe it with all my being. But my earnest belief doesn't make it real for anyone else.
Lastly, it's particularly hard to study, even if we accept the premise that there's something there to study. "Here, dying person. Let me stick a bunch of electrodes on your brain as you kick the bucket. I'm sure your spouse and children wouldn't mind if we poke and prod a bit as you pass. Also, they can't be here. It might taint the data." I'm sure you can appreciate the ethical difficulty in studying the dying.
Personally, there's still plenty about this life we don't know about, and it's the one thing most of us can agree exists. I generally have no problem with people believing in an afterlife, but I have no reason or objective evidence to believe in an afterlife, either, and it's not my burden to prove.
Quantifying a subjective experience is... a challenge, to put it politely.
I'm sorry it's my understanding that everyone sees more or less the same thing, but they just call it something else.
Which would make sense considering if I died and there was some entity present looking at my corpse with me, I'd probably think it was God.
If NDEs are more varied than that, that's news to me, but from what I have seen it more or less boils down to...
"I saw someone, they comforted me, reviewed my life, and said it wasn't my time yet or they gave me a choice and I chose to go back."
And that's problematic for science. That's an experience nobody can verify. Even if we accept that for every NDE everyone sees the same core things, that is unjustly discounting the details. Certain religions are mutually exclusive, and the Native American seeing Grandfather is not the same as the Christian seeing Jesus. They are not the same figures or compatible religions.
And then what do you do with the myriad of people who experience nothing but nonetheless experience the "death" you pointed out? Does the afterlife not exist, since they didn't experience anything?
Does the afterlife only exist individually if you believe in one? If so, how do we determine that it's a universal experience and not a learned cultural expectation? How would science control for that?
Unless scientists can go to an afterlife, take measurements, and report back, we're just going off of people's incongruent stories. That's not a good way to build a rational epistemic foundation.