The Best Basis for Believing in an Afterlife?

While we are on the subject, here's a Guardian article I It is a long article and generally critical of the brain is a computer analogy. However, it is nevertheless an unwaveringly materialist account, completely ignoring the possibility that consciousness might not be a product of brain activity. From reading this - if it is a representation of where neuroscience and consciousness research stands - then there's not much hope for the views expressed on this forum. Those views are, apparently, not even part of the conversation.

The closest the article comes to acknowledging even a dualist approach is contained in the snippet:

from the Guardian article:

 Brette’s fundamental criticism was that, in thinking about “code”, researchers inadvertently drift from a technical sense, in which there is a link between a stimulus and the activity of the neuron, to a representational sense, according to which neuronal codes represent that stimulus.   The unstated implication in most descriptions of neural coding is that the activity of neural networks is presented to an ideal observer or reader within the brain, often described as “downstream structures” that have access to the optimal way to decode the signals. But the ways in which such structures actually process those signals is unknown, and is rarely explicitly hypothesised, even in simple models of neural network function.  

My rants are all about these "downstream structures" that have access to decoding (and encoding) signals.