Part One:
Paschendale said:
I've had an NDE as well. I nearly drowned as a child. But despite being confused at what I was experiencing, learning later on that it was simply my brain malfunctioning from lack of oxygen doesn't make every other thing I experience suddenly false.
If anoxia explained NDE's, I'd be inclined to believe so. But I don't think anoxia does explain them. My experiences have been unusual, for a couple of reasons. First, because I had an NDE. But second, because I was able to replicate the experience through the application of mystical exercises. I was clearly not in a state of anoxia during those experiences.
As best I can determine, the theories about anoxia are based on there being similar language used to describe NDEs and the phenomena that occur during anoxia. But they're only similar at a sufficient level of generality. For example, people who have the classic NDE describe seeing a light, and people who suffer anoxia describe seeing a light or lights. But when you read the more detailed descriptions of many cases of each, the comparison doesn't hold up.
Paschendale said:
I don't understand all of my dreams, either. To know how and why we experience what do allows us to interpret them and find out what's really going on. Sometimes we are deceived. Sometimes we simply don't understand. Keep in mind that likely the only reason you think that what you experienced during an NDE was an afterlife is because you were told to expect that from your religious ideas.
I have to make an aside here and point out that the issues you're bringing up have had whole books written about them, as well as countless journal articles, especially if you include the literature on the epistemology of mystical experiences, which I think bears on the topic. So there's no way to respond adequately in this kind of medium. To remedy this, I recommend reading an essay by Steven Katz, which supports your position, called "Language, Epistemology, and Mysticism." But then also read Kabbalah: New Perspectives by Moshe Idel.
What I got out of this (and other similar reading) was this: There has been an ongoing discussion about the notion that religious experience is constructed from dogma--that is, that what mystics experience is entirely shaped by their religious milieu. Katz makes what I think is probably the best case for this idea, at least that I've ever read. To give him his due, I think he does a good job. The essay is very clear and well organized. However, unfortunately, his data is wrong. One of the centerpiece examples of the essay is to show that the kabbalists have no equivalent concept to the buddhist notion of nirvana, the complete absorbtion of the five skandas into emptiness. Moshe Idel does a good job showing that this is false, and that Katz was simply ignoring a great deal of kabbalistic literature to reach his desired conclusion.
My NDE happened when I was very young, and I hadn't been exposed to any religious ideas by that time. I think I had probably heard the name "Jesus," but hadn't ever been to church or anything. My parents became religious when I was older, but weren't at the time. So there doesn't seem to be warrant for the claim that my NDE was constructed out of my expectations. There is a whole sub-literature on the NDEs of young children, and the experiences exhibit surprising uniformity, even among children young enough not to have absorbed religious ideology.
By the time I began to practice mystical techniques, I had been exposed to a wide array of religious ideas. However, my experiences didn't resemble anything like I had been taught. I was expecting all kinds of things, but what I got was very different. And these, in turn, are the real reasons I tend to reject this line of argument.
But there are independent reasons also, most of which should emerge below.
Paschendale said:
That was certainly what I thought at the time, as well. But now I know more, and so I can apply my reason and logic to the situation, and understand what was really going on. I think you're being entirely hyperbolic here.
One thing that isn't explained well by the "dying brain" hypothesis is the change in personality that people who have NDEs undergo. And one point that has been lamentably understudied in academic literature on mystical experiences is the power that they import. Mystics are utterly changed by their experiences. In my case, the very first time I experienced the first real result of meditation, I was...well, I'm not even sure I know what to say about it. There is the time before, and the time after. It's the single biggest dividing point in my life. It was both supremely beautiful, but also terrible and destructive. Imagine finding out that every single thing you ever believed, including very basic beliefs about your self, other people, and the universe, were false. It was as if everything I knew had been ground down into dust.
None of this is hyperbole.
Paschendale said:
Consciousness isn't unexplainable at all. We may not be able to completely explain it at the moment, but there is no reason to think that these details will elude us forever. This is a bit of the "god of the gaps" argument. But either way, consciousness isn't mysterious. It's just how brains work. Non-human species certainly have some consciousness, and have thoughts, but their brains don't do as much as ours do. There is absolutely nothing to suggest some kind of non-physical component.
I lay before you the same challenge I've laid before others: just give me some barest hint of an actual explanation that doesn't suffer some obvious flaw. The problem is that mental properties and physical properties are completely unlike. How we could get the former from the latter isn't clear. At the very basic level, this is the reason to think a physicalist explanation of consciousness will elude us.
The more elaborate reason is what I already posted: calculationist accounts of consciousness all suffer fatal flaws (I'm prepared to discuss this in more detail at your pleasure). But so do non-calculationist models, all of which fall to Jaegwon Kim's supervenience argument, which seems to be decisive against them. And these seems to exhaust the physicalist possibilities. I take it as pretty decisive against a position that all its possible versions must be false.
This is another reason to reject the notion that a dying brain somehow explains NDEs--precisely because there is no explanation of experience from the brain in general, and so no particular case has an explanation either.
As a final point: people on your side of the divide have done a great deal of looking into how religious ideas have evolved. I agree with at least some of the points you make. I would challenge you to apply the same skeptical eye to the development of the ideas you seem to have embraced.
Paschendale said:
This doesn't speak to the validity of any wrong ideas, only that human beings, regardless of culture, still have the same kinds of minds. Every culture anthropomorphized the forces of nature in order to attempt to understand them. We understand human existence. In the absence of any other kind of understanding, we apply what we do understand. This was true for every budding human culture. This includes applying human existence to human non-existence, creating an afterlife.
I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to get at here. Specifically, I don't follow from the point about anthropomorphization to the next sentence about understanding human existence.
Paschendale said:
That sounds like you don't understand the arguments against you very well, and fail to understand the obvious problems with your own.
This is, of course, possible. I will only say that I don't think it's the case.