Patricia Churchland demeans Dualism and David Chalmers

I had a discussion with Aron Ra yesterday which I'll be putting on my channel at some point.
Made some points I generally agree with in terms of religion and atheism... then we got onto anomalous experience.
He generally just insisted that we KNOW the brain creates consciousness, and that we KNOW it's impossible for things such as veridical perception to take place.
When I asked how he would explain such cases with 3rd party verification, AND verification that the brain was not functioning at the time, his response was: Lucky guesses.
"Researchers have confirmation bias and only look at the hits, they always ignore the millions of misses between them".

Lucky guesses and confirmation bias. The problem with that is, it just doesn't wash anymore. There's far too many well researched and documented cases that contain no "misses" at all. Jan Holden demonstrated that. Smit and Rivas's book also. 

I'm glad he stated that (his case) because it shows he doesn't actually have one. Even Susan Blackmore doesn't use that objection anymore. She just says she doesn't want to discuss the cases and will wait to see what Parnia comes up with.

What it also reveals is that these vocal critics such as Ra (Nelson?) are not true sceptics at all. They just assume 'a priori' and make the assumption that it must be bullshit ! And that is what is so astonishing and intriguing about near death experiences. There really is something quite amazing going on and the Aaron Ra's of this world will never know. Shame really.

"Researchers have confirmation bias and only look at the hits, they always ignore the millions of misses between them".

The numbers just don't stand up to scrutiny. For example if we look at the AWARE study or the work of Penny Sartori, there simply aren't millions of cases. We're looking at a small sampling, a few cases. But there is no cherry-picking. All the data is included. The idea that Sam Parnia has secretly tested millions of patients and discarded the ones he didn't like is pure fantasy.

The numbers just don't stand up to scrutiny. For example if we look at the AWARE study or the work of Penny Sartori, there simply aren't millions of cases. We're looking at a small sampling, a few cases. But there is no cherry-picking. All the data is included. The idea that Sam Parnia has secretly tested millions of patients and discarded the ones he didn't like is pure fantasy.

And I always thought that once all the physiological/psychological potential explanations had been ruled out, then one is compelled to accept the only explanation that actually fits the data. 

I remember all the way back to the beginning. Researchers carefully and laboriously eliminating each proposal one by one, as they should of course. But the goal posts have just been moved back continually.