Afterlife

[Angrboda]

There is no afterlife.  Consciousness is a manifestation of a physical system, the brain.  When we die, that system is irreparably disrupted and ceases to function.  Therefore our mind ends when the brain is disrupted at death.

There are many clinical reports of NDE consciousness after brain death.

http://www.near-death.com/science/eviden...-dead.html

If they occurred after brain death, then they would be death experiences. The truth is that some of them correlate with an apparent absence of brain function. I say apparent because it's not clear what brain function remains after loss of blood flow, which only occurs in a subset of NDEs. Experiments in rats show that there is a burst of activity immediately following disruption of blood flow. Could this be when the NDE is generated? You don't know because as has been pointed out, it's not clear when the NDE activity actually occurs.

Regardless, the handful of veridical NDEs do raise some interesting questions, but those questions aren't definitively answered by "consciousness after brain death." That's more interpretation than inference. I will also point out that 1/3 of all NDEs appear to occur in people not experiencing any life threatening situation. So what appears is a common experience that is in some way related to brain function or the lack of it. Science is in the business of taking unexplained order and discovering the underlying cause of that order. As of yet, NDEs are simply unexplained phenomena.