A major but biased new paper on consciousness

Durward 

I'm going to keep this relatively short. I personally find your posts difficult to parse because you fire off so many statements (whether factual or not) in each one, I wouldn't know where to start if I was going to respond to them (which I'm not, I simply don't have the time). This one is incorrect, for instance. 

So the problem is that we should have defined and outlined this as an altered state that appears when people are resuscitated, because we still don't know when it actually happensc.

We do know when it actuallys happens, though (the OBE during cardiac arrest) because we have enough reliable cases (from surgeons, doctors and medics etc) where patients have reported observing details of their operations that they could not possibly have seen or been aware of. Whilst it is true that these cases are technically anecdotes and therefore not empirically proven, that does not mean that they don't have great evidential value when considered as a whole.

Anecdotes are the bedrock of science and when you have enough of them from reliable sources, meticulously collected and studied, they do in fact amount to meeting a standard of evidence that takes them to a level regarded as beyond reasonable doubt. A level accepted as good enough in courtrooms, for instance, to sustain a conviction.

I don't know, but I'm assuming you require double blind "hits" in tightly controlled studies before you are willing to accept that these observations from the patient actually occured when they had no brain function. These experiments are ongoing and because of the extremely difficult nature of the experiment, we don't have one of those yet. Only one patient has ever been in a position (out of body) to actually have a chance of seeing the target (a target).  

We do have one (or two) very persuasive cases that were collected in the clinicial trials done so far that do in fact demonstrate that full consciousness was present without a functioning brain, but as in one case, the patient did not have his experience in a controlled area (a room with a target fitted) it could not be proven to the standard that hardline sceptics have demanded, even though it is patently obvious what occurred and when. 

As to your statement about 'heart failure' (do you mean heart stoppage?) and tunnels and the correlation thereof, I'm not aware that there is any. The tunnel experience occurs in NDE's no matter what the underlying crisis event and in many NDE's (particularly in the non western accounts) it doesn't of course.