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.
Hard disagree with that analogy.
You are not "working" as a human just because you have supposed memories of the time when you were dead.
The idea of a soul is very spiritual and links only come up in fields that are not generally deemed well established, therefore the existence of a soul is a different discussion.
While I agree NDEs are interesting, they are really hard to research. As other comments are saying, there's no controlled environment. Also the only source of information are the people's memories, there's no other way to understand their experience, and memories can be very unreliable as every lawyer will be able to tell you. Also consider for a second the idea that every human who shares these experiences is talking about a time where their whole buddy was neither in a normal functioning state, nor even alive. They did come back to, but in that timeframe their brain might as well have produced absolute garbage to fill in gaps of their memory. I wonder how different short and long-term memories are of that same time frame.
If we consider your analogy why not change it. Imagine you run your PC and then your power goes out. Your PC is out for 3 minutes, afterwards it turns back on. It will boot fresh ("wake up"), tell you it knows something's wrong because it never properly shut down, and maybe some programs will greet you with error messages. I file you wrote at that exact moment not has gibberish in it because encoding errors destroyed the legible parts of it when your PC crashed from the blackout. But would you consider that document a normal representation of what the PC "saw" during the blackout? What it "experienced"?
Of course people with NDEs telling you what they remember can be valuable and interesting, but unless you can validate that from the outside, their memories are first party accounts of their experience at best and "encoding errors" at worst, so taking them at face value with no ability to cross-check is a no-go for scientists.
It's too much room for subjectivity and wrong inferences, and we already know that when we look of the people associated with the idea of NDEs.
You raise a fairly good point. My only objection is people claiming to be more lucid than normal during an NDE, but even that falls within subjective experience prone to error
By the way
I realize this has nothing to do with my original post, but I do wanna throw it out there...
What do you think of NDE's sister phenomena, Terminal Lucidity? People with severe mental problems suddenly gaining awareness of their surroundings and become "normal" again (in some cases, for the first time) just as they're dying?