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adamzerner comments on What do rationalists think about the afterlife? - Less Wrong Discussion
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It causes damage to our ability to communicate our consciousness. For all we know, people with brain damage (and who are sleeping, unconscious, dead etc.) may be conscious, but just unable to communicate it with us (or remember it when they wake up
A concrete example might help. Consciousness could exist on some small quantum or string level, or other small level we haven't even discovered yet. It's possible that this level is undisturbed when we die, and that we continue to be conscious.
This isn't really the sort of thing that Shminux is probably talking about. People with many kinds of brain damage fully retain their ability to communicate, while various faculties for thought associated with those brain regions are affected. Or, on the other hand, regions associated with language can be damaged, leaving subjects impaired in their ability to communicate, while other faculties for thought appear to be largely intact. Brain damage does not simply amount to leaving our consciousness "on" or "off."
To follow up on my earlier comment, I strongly recommend checking out the book "The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons," by Sam Kean. It's unremittently interesting and engaging, and discusses cases which pretty thoroughly disabuse the notion of brain damaged individuals failing to communicate an intact consciousness in just about every chapter.
An extreme form of brain damage might be destruction of the entire brain. I don't think that someone with their entire brain removed has consciousness but lacks the ability to communicate it; suggesting that consciousness continues after death seems to me to be pushing well beyond what we understand "consciousness" to refer to.