The life after death conversations are interesting, aren't they? I think that we might be able to save some time if we simply consider whether or not there is a creator God. If there is, which science has come onboard with more in the last few years, then in turn it just makes sense that God did not create us to whiff out when we die. So it may be that some of the NDE's are real and some of them are the result of brain activity before clinical death. In a way, it might not matter which is which if one simply considers the possibility of God. And if God, then afterlife rather than getting snuffed out.Physics Guy wrote: ↑Sat Nov 29, 2025 10:00 amThere can be different definitions of death for medical purposes, mostly for triage. At what point is it best to give up trying to save someone and work on patients with better chances? For the question of whether there can be life beyond bodily death, though, the decisive issue is brain activity. As long as some neurons are still firing, a person's experience is still that of a living brain. It doesn't matter whether the heart is still pumping or not, or whether the brain activity is unhealthy. Calling NDE's evidence for life after death because "death" has occurred by some medical definition that is irrelevant to the crucial issue of remembered experience is a fallacy of equivocation, a play on words like saying that diamonds are worthless because diamonds are ice, baby, and ice can just melt.
Somebody who really wants all those NDE accounts to be worth something might object that defining death as total loss of brain function unfairly rigs the game by making death something from which no-one can come back by definition. First of all that wouldn't be a valid objection. There is no rule that says that every question has to offer equal chances to both sides. If you say that jumping to the moon means actually touching the actual moon using only my own leg power, I don't get to say that you have cheated by defining "jumping to the moon" in a way that makes it inherently impossible. On the contrary, the only way to leave any chance for jumping to the moon to be possible is to use a trick definition. Really jumping to the moon is impossible.
Secondly, defining death in this case as brain shut-down does not actually imply that returning from death is impossible—at least, not necessarily. It could hypothetically occur, as far as I can tell, that somebody's brain stops doing anything, and cools to room temperature, but then after some time they are somehow revived. If there were enough cases like that, and the revived people in those cases all tended to report experiences that were significantly different from the reports from people who only came near death, then that might count as evidence that there was some kind of consciousness that persisted through bodily death. We'd have a control group (the people whose brains never shut down completely) plus the test group (the people whose brains did shut down), and there'd be a significant difference in reported effects, so it would be reasonable—though not certain—to suppose that the difference in effects was due to the difference in conditions, namely actual death.
If the memories of those revived brain-dead people were only similar to those of people whose brains hadn't completely shut down before they were revived, however, this would rather suggest that the remembered experiences in all cases occurred while the brain was still working, and that all that had persisted through total brain shut-down had been memory of what had happened before. So if evidence for life after death ever does appear from medical revivals, it will have to be through people reporting things other than lights, life reviews, feelings of love, or the like. The currently accumulated data about NDE experiences are the background to which actual post-death experiences would have to be compared: they are what is not evidence for life after death.
Yes, that sounds harsh, if you want NDEs to mean something. It's the truth, though. That's how medical evidence works: you contrast with the control group that only received the placebo. If the people who didn't get your new drug recover just as well as the people who did get it, then your drug didn't do anything. If the people whose brains did shut down say things just like the ones whose brains didn't, then those experiences were not ones of death, but just the sputtering of a brain close to death, remembered after revival.
It seems as though a loving God that placed us here to gain experience would not do so for naught. Doesn't it?
When Raymond Moody's book came out decades ago, I picked it up and read it. Fascinating stuff. Was then, is now.
Regards,
MG
