How doctors choose to die (2012)

It seems like the go-to drug for terminally ill patients is often hoarded morphine or morphine derivatives, but death is slow and drawn-out, and someone might get the brilliant idea to resuscitate you, leaving you brain damaged and worse off than the situation you tried to escape from.

The typical responses of educated religious folks to this (as opposed to many religious folks who are still fundamentally mind-body dualists) is to posit some 'deeper' sense in which the mind 'can be thought of' as surviving death. Some religious folks simply defy any logical or evidential concerns and assert it based on it being a revealed fact, or a miracle, or a mystery.

There are a handful of philosophers gamely trying to keep mind-body dualism going as a philosophical idea, but they're a small minority, with no neurobiological expertise, and the arguments are entirely unfalsifiable and easily refuted (in both my opinion, and that of most philosophers, as far as I can gather).

I think people are entitled to believe what they want, and rationalise their beliefs however they choose, I am only responding to your claim of needing more evidence.

So yes, I think we can be as sure as we need to be that NDEs are functions of brain activity, not of our consciousness somehow being liberated from the confines of the neurones that run it and journeying to the afterlife, only to be returned to its neuronal matrix again. I can't imagine what more evidence we could need, unless you're suggesting that, until we understand everything about mental processes, we should act as if we understand nothing about them.

Presuming that I came from nothing, that means that "nothing" can produce qualia, which means that if I become "nothing" after death...

Apple trees come from nothing (at least to the same extent that human beings come from nothing), so nothing can produce apples, which means if the apple tree dies, perhaps the apple-producing essence of the tree can survive and still produce apples, even though the physical tree is long gone.

Qualia aren't 'things' that they can be produced.

I don't agree, if by "minds" we mean qualia itself. Of course, personality and memories and much of our experience lives in our brain. Most of what we call "mind" lives in the brain, and no one disputes this.

The question, to this point unanswered, surrounds whether anything's left over when the brain is gone. I tend to doubt that a brain-less qualia would carry much in the way of memory; it might be completely memory-less, acted upon by karma but unaware of any prior lives. A minute after I die, I don't expect to remember who "Michael O. Church" was, just as I don't remember previous lives in this one, although the karma accrued in this life will affect me.

Qualia is also impossible to measure except subjectively (and, of course, once the brain is gone, that person is not coming back to report). We can measure brain activity which is, under normal circumstances, highly correlated to subjective experience; we can't measure experience itself.

Fifty years ago, people thought that a person's thinking would cease under sensory deprivation. However, we find that people in floatation tanks actually have more cognitive activity. It seems that the increased freedom allows for a more intense and powerful experience. As for the NDE, this is likewise a time when we'd expect the person's consciousness to be dimming, but it seems to do the opposite. Of course, that doesn't prove anything about what happens when a person is actually dead, because... well, you can't interview them. Maybe the heightening of subjective experience continues after the brain shuts down, maybe subjective experience just ends. We can't ask them.

So yes, I think we can be as sure as we need to be that NDEs are functions of brain activity, not of our consciousness somehow being liberated from the confines of the neurones that run it and journeying to the afterlife, only to be returned to its neuronal matrix again.

To make it clear, I don't necessarily think that NDEs are a pure, reliable afterlife experience. There's something we'd have to confront if they were: reports contradict. People've come back from NDEs with predictions like that Japan would fall into the ocean in 1997; that clearly didn't happen. If we took every report of subjective spiritual experience literally, we'd be in a lot of trouble, because people come back from such experiences with some weird ideas.

I tend to think that there's something in the NDE, but a reliable afterlife experience that can be taken at face-value seems unlikely. I tend toward the Tibetan Buddhist interpretation, which is that it's still a subjective experience as the mind enters another bardo.

Of course, it will never constitute a case for "life after death" because the people having such experiences never died. Even many people who believe in an afterlife don't believe in NDEs as reliably true afterlife experiences for numerous reasons.

I can't imagine what more evidence we could need, unless you're suggesting that, until we understand everything about mental processes, we should act as if we understand nothing about them.

That's not what I'm suggesting at all. We should learn as much about the brain and the mind and the connection between the two as we can.

So I repeat, to the extent it is possible to answer the question, within the bounds of reasonable skepticism, we can conclude the mind is entirely embodied and therefore that an afterlife of mental experience is impossible.

You've not on what grounds we could conclude otherwise, you've just said you can imagine it to be, and you 'tend towards' thinking this or that, and you're willing to venture some mechanics for it. What could falsify your opinions?

I don't think you've really thought about it. Outside trying to match it with your Buddhist predilections. Why would memory be a qualia that is brain based, but others would not? Isn't the experience of remembering a qualia? Can you give an example of a qualia that wouldn't use any memories or associations what so ever? Do you think some memories are encoded outside the brain, whereas personal memories are brain based? Do you think hormones are involved in qualia? Would there be virtual hormones for disembodied qualia? Qualia isn't 'magic'.

I simply can't fathom how you conclude that some more understanding is needed to figure out if parts of the mind is disembodied.