Hypothesizing an afterlife based on NDEs requires the idea that consciousness can exist separately from the brain. This doesn't seem warranted based on NDEs alone
This is exactly the argument I'm looking for. But I'm not sure if postulating other methods NDEs/ODEs could have happened is convincing that that's how they happened in all cases. So I'm not sure if the conversation has reached the point at which we can say "ergo, NDEs don't even suggest that consciousness can exist separately from the brain."
My hope is that research into the brain and AI will give sufficient evidence that we can come to this conclusion without this discussion. Perhaps it already has and I'm unaware of it, but the research I've seen takes this as an assumption, not a conclusion.
I think they suggest it, but very weakly. We've never seen consciousness existing without a brain, and we've studied how manipulating the brain affects consciousness (see, for example, Rebecca Saxe's TED talk which discusses using magnetic fields on the brain to alter moral judgments). All of the evidence we have points to a very high probability that consciousness is dependent on the brain.
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.