In general, personal observation by humans is not strong evidence.
Personally speaking, I myself suffer from sleep paralysis with occasional accompanying hallucinations. I've seen ghosts, demons, aliens and sometime the Borg standing over me. And when it is happening it almost always feels very real and very scary (even when there's no hallucinatory aspect). Human observational data for anything other than possibly locating a hypothesis is not at all reliable.
Furthermore, even if you do accept that the stereotypical bright light and tunnel is evidence of an afterlife, why assume there's anything beyond that? Maybe the entire afterlife consists of a few seconds of bright light. And when you reach the light, the result is oblivion. There's nothing in the evidence that rules that out.
It would be really nice if there were an afterlife, but the vast majority of evidence is against it. Indeed, given human desire for an afterlife, the fact that the best evidence is weak claims like NDEs, that itself becomes evidence against an afterlife, because with that much motivated cognition if there was strong evidence for an afterlife, it seems unlikely someone would not have hit on it by now.
In general, personal observation by humans is not strong evidence.
I agree. I also appreciate that you did not exclude it as evidence entirely.
I do not expect my personal experiences to be very convincing to anyone other than myself (Daniel Dennett wrote a very eloquent description of why this is true, it's in my room, I may post it here later). However, I am very convinced by my own experiences. I understand that my personal experiences with what I believe to have been God could be explained by neural anomalies, but until I have convincing reasons ...
I was on Reddit today, and I came across (this link)[http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/eyiat/for_those_of_you_who_have_died_and_been/]. One of the things I've seen on this site that's bothered me is the exclusion of personal experiences in deciding what a person should or should not believe. I know that less wrong is mostly atheist, and I wanted to hear less wrong's reaction to descriptions of experiences like these.
For example, my dad was in the hospital 5 or 6 years ago when a truck came across an icy road and hit him head-on. His most vivid memory from this is a dream he had when he was in the hospital. He was in a pool of water with my mom, and they were both naked (they were underwater, but didn't need to breathe). He remembers that at the end of this pool, there was a bright light that he wanted to head towards. He began to swim that way...and here, I don't remember what happened, but he was unable to reach the light for some reason.
Such stories seem to be common for people who come close to death, and for a community based around rationality which seems to consider the likelihood of life after death as slim, I just wondered what your reactions are. My reaction is that such experiences are explainable in terms of neural activity, but that doesn't necessarily exclude the possibility that these are descriptions of experiences of an afterlife. I'm not convinced by them, but I do consider it to be possible.