I'm not saying that science is an alternative belief, I'm saying that physicalism and dualism are alternative beliefs. The same evidence can be interpreted in both ways and neither philosophy has been proven or disproven by science. In my opinion, there have been enough weird events to put the physicalism philosophy in doubt.
I actually have no earthly idea what you're even talking about at this point. I'm only interested in the science. Anything beyond that is just conjecture at best, superstition at worst.
While NDEs are not objective or repeatable, they sometimes do meet the scientific criteria of falsifiability. A prediction of the future will either come true or it won't.
Which is a woefully inadequate standard, because of course the occasional "prediction" will correlate with what actually happens by pure chance. As I said, the burden of proof is to demonstrate that it happens more frequently than chance alone could explain.
One thing that intrigues me about NDEs is the fact they are often not consistent with a person's pre-existing beliefs or with mainstream Christian doctrine, and yet they are internally consistent in a way that dreams rarely are, and the information people receive makes sense.
As the SciAm article noted, a lot of the consistency probably comes from the fact that the lore of "near-death experiences" is widespread in popular culture, so it's what people have consciously or subconsciously come to
expect such an experience to be like. We all osmose the assumptions of the culture we're immersed in every day, even if they disagree with our own nominal beliefs. And that can influence the form our dreams and hallucinations take. So the consistency is actually a point against their being real -- because they're consistent with cultural expectations and are thus what people would be expected to hallucinate.
You see this in UFO reports too. Historically, claims of close encounters with UFO aliens have always tended to correlate with the dominant mass-media images of aliens at the time. In the late '40s or so, they were little green men; in the B-movie '50s, they were big scary monsters; in the '60s and the early days of sci-fi TV before elaborate makeup effects, they came to be described as idealized humans. Then the "Gray" image was introduced in the mid-'60s as a conjecture of what humans might evolve into in a million years (based on the cultural biases of the era, which is why it's asexual and very pale-skinned), and it soon started showing up in UFO accounts. But then, works like
Close Encounters and the movie
Roswell (and later
The X-Files, Communion, Stargate SG-1, etc.) started feeding ideas from UFO lore back into pop culture, so it became a self-reinforcing feedback loop. The "Gray" image has persisted as a consistent part of UFO claims for decades, not because there are actual skinny bald alien nudists out there, but because it's become what people
expect UFO aliens to look like, so it's what they imagine if they hallucinate an abduction.
The consistency also makes sense given that there appear to be certain specific neurological effects creating these perceptions. Affecting the visual cortex can create the perception of tunnel vision or moving toward a light. Suppressing parietal activity can make one feel detached from one's body or at one with the universe. They're consistent because the structure of the human brain is consistent. They are a "real" phenomenon -- just not in the way people have traditionally interpreted them.
Also, I question your source for these claims you're making. Anecdotal accounts are unreliable, because we all try to organize our memories into a coherent narrative. If people describe their "experiences" in a way that seems coherent and sensible, that coherence may be the framework they built after the fact to organize a much more scattered and confusing set of perceptions. (Which, again, is why
Flatliners was such a terrible attempt to depict a "scientific" process. The "experimenters" just took the subjects' word that what they experienced had literally happened when and how they perceived it, during the time their brains were shut down, rather than being constructed by the brain after the fact in an attempt to fill the memory gap or make sense of the incoherent perceptions of a brain in a severely disrupted state.)
Many people who have had an NDE report that their lives have been changed for the better. If NDEs are based on a brain mechanism, then it's not clear how such a mechanism evolved, since a mechanism that only kicks in when someone's about to die would confer no survival advantage, especially in the age before CPR.
First off, "many"? That's too vague to be useful. How many? More than half? Or are you just cherrypicking the minority of reports that happen to reinforce your prejudice? Unless you can demonstrate it's a larger percentage than could result from random happenstance, you've got nothing.
And who says it's a survival mechanism just because people learn from it? Obviously people who have brushes with death are gonna reassess their lives, maybe make some changes for the better -- either to reduce their mortality risk in the future or to make the most of the finite time they have. That's only natural regardless of whether "NDEs" are involved or not.
One of the biggest myths of evolution is that traits that confer a given advantage are actually
meant to do so, as if in conscious response to a need. No. It's random. It's stochastic. New traits arise at random, and those that happen to convey some benefit are selected for in future generations. A trait that was selected for because it fulfilled one need will often accidentally turn out to have another benefit.
Some of the same altered mental states that are part of "NDEs" are involved in meditation and ecstatic rituals as well -- such as the parietal shutdown that divorces the observer from the perception of being separate from the universe or confined to one's body. Meditation and spiritual exercises can improve people's lives by giving them a new perspective on themselves or helping them enter more beneficial and constructive mental states. If the same neurological phenomenon is experienced in some people near the brink of death, then it follows logically that it could have similar benefits. Not because evolution deliberately shaped it to do so, but because that just happens to be one of the aftereffects of tweaking brain activity in a certain way.
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