(2019-01-20, 02:06 PM)tim Wrote: [ -> ]No worries, Will, thank you for that well written reply. Perfectly fine to be agnostic about the cause of near death experiences.
I'm very familiar with Keith's arguments, focussing on minor inconsistencies in the main and tending to ignore the much more important uncomfortable data (for neuroscience) such as conscious mental activity occurring without brain function.
I'll just give you a little snippet of Keith's behaviour. I've posted this before but you may not have seen it. In the book "The Self does not die", (Rivas and Smit) the facts about the Pam Reynolds case, direct from the surgeons who conducted the operation, are presented. I assisted with sorting through that case and Pam was under burst suppression (consciousness not possible) when she heard the conversation about her arteries being too small for cannulation etc etc. Fact.
I emailed Keith and told him. His reply was that he doesn't just accept what doctors say (Spetzler and Greene who conducted the operation) and that was it. He does however accept what militant atheist debunker Gerry Woerlee says about the case, that she had anaesthesia awareness. How's that for sound scepticism ? 
Gerry Woerlee (it must be said) is a very accomplished physician, but his materialist dogma is so important to him that he refuses to accept facts about various cases (he simply denies them) and that is not being a good sceptic as is the case with Augustine.
Furthermore, it doesn't matter about the few anomalies that occur, such as somebody seeing Elvis in the light or meeting a living relative etc...they are diversions from the main event. The important question is... can consciousness be separate from the brain ? That question will be answered once and for all.
I did see that exchange. And I remember that Augustine and Woerlee have speculated on all the things Reynolds might have been told about her operation prior to it. I find it frustrating that they, and other skeptics - and Sabom and other NDE researchers - have not, to my knowledge, just asked the surgery team some simple questions: "was Pam told prior to surgery how her head would be shaved? Was she shown or described anything about the saw used? When she first regained consciousness, were the hair shaving pattern and/or saw immediately present and observable? Did you and/or her attending nurses believe that Pam had experienced anesthesia awareness, and did you act accordingly under that assumption?"
If these questions are addressed in that book, that would be good to know. And it would be good if future NDE researchers - and skeptics - actively sought answers to such points as soon as possible, instead of not "accepting what doctors say."
But I'm afraid it does matter that anomalies are present, if only as a problem for a given model of NDEs that must be resolved. A survivalist and a physicalist could both explain the presence of Elvis through similar logic: because meeting Elvis was presumably important to that woman's life, it makes sense that he was present in her NDE, either because the encounter was significant enough that he was an appropriate person to lead her to the afterlife, or because he was a figure she would expect to see in that situation and imagined him being present. (A third option is that, under any interpretation of NDEs, if you or I could see what she saw, we would conclude that the figure wasn't Elvis at all, but was taken as such by the woman. But I'm taking these reports at face value here.)
Off the top of my head, most encounters with living persons in NDEs come either from observations of the surroundings, visions of living persons at a distance, or as incentives to "return." Again, survivalists and physicalists could both explain this one; either the NDEr is observing these living people in an incorporeal state and/or recalls them vividly as reasons not to pass on, or the NDEr generates images of living persons because they are familiar, and provide incentive to fight back death. Either way, there's some logic that can be discerned. (One of Augustine's more annoying mis-readings was of an NDE where a dead person waited at the end of the tunnel, and a living person waited at the other end - that is to say, where the NDEr was coming
from - but Augustine objected to a living person being the one beckoning someone toward the light.)
The encounter with Einstein is more of a problem for me. Again, taking it at face value, that account reads as a rather cilched, even cartoony depiction of scientists in the afterlife, not unlike what you'd see on
The Simpsons. There isn't any obvious reason why that man should have seen Einstein or any famous person in a glimpse of the afterlife, but there is reason to think a person with only a passing knowledge of science in operation would imagine such a scene when picturing smart people in the afterlife continuing to work. Similar concerns remain for those few NDEs with fictional characters and false prophecies.
But, as you say, the real question is whether consciousness can be independent of the brain, and on that score, I remain an agnostic, by turns swayed and baffled by various arguments on both sides.