"Sure. And actually you don't need to leave clinical neuroscience to make that
observation. Um, one of the reasons being things like near-death experiences
that have arisen um, with the arrival of resuscitation
capabilities.
So, people who have had gone into cardiac arrest have
been able to be resuscitated from a a state of essentially being dead. you know, their heart has stopped and once
your heart has stopped for more than about 3, four, five minutes, you know,
your brain stops functioning as well.
And and people um have been resuscitated
and said that actually when they were clinically dead, they were in fact vividly conscious.
Um so that that would
be an interesting data set that that is an interesting data set to look at that we now have sort of 50 to 60 years of
data that perhaps in its early stages you could take to be a bit more anecdotal
but we have actually several decades of of um publications in things like the
Journal of Near-Death Studies and the Handbook of Near-Death Experiences.
And they're taken seriously now in a way that they weren't perhaps a couple of
decades ago. Yes. and you have um academic papers being written on them and you also have
um people who have changed their views on the mind body relationship based on
their own near-death experience.
So we could take someone like Eban Alexander who was a former Harvard neurosurgeon and used to be a strict physicist that um you know if you don't have a functioning neoortex you can't be
conscious
until um and in fact his patients after
he'd operated on them would come and tell him they'd had NDEs and he would kind of dismiss it until he himself
developed a severe bacterial menitis at the age of 54 went into a coma His family were told to put their affairs in order. He was not expected to survive and yet extraordinarily he did and he
made a full recovery and recounts an extremely vivid conscious experience.
Um that is so vivid that it's very hard to explain. Yeah. And the one of the
go-tos often is that it's residual brain activity. And of course we can't rule
that out. I mean all we can say is there's no detectable activity in the brain using the current technologies
that we have but but at the same time the kinds of experience that people report
don't seem to be consistent with a brain in its last seconds of life you know
just kind of petering out these are there's a disproportionality
to the kinds of things people are reporting and what's happening in the brain.
Um and of course the fact that
someone would change their mind, change their viewpoint to a view arguably that
is considered much less popular amongst Harvard neurosurgeons
um than the predominant physicalist view that you are your brain.
Um prompts you
to ask well why would you do that unless you actually believed what happened to you was very genuine. It's amazing it happened
to him right after spending so many years working on it. Exactly. So I think it's fascinating.
I don't see it as a proof that we have a soul. I don't see it as a proof that there's a heaven or even that God
exists. But if we are just our brains, data like this makes no sense.
And all you need is one genuine instance of someone having an out-of body authentic near-death experience to really bring strong challenge to the view that you are just your brain.
from the above link, starting about 18 mins in
