Dead for 45 minutes; an interesting near-death experience

[Angrboda]

The human body has all sorts of unexpected tricks to keep it alive. You can't always draw a straight line between "doesn't appear to be breathing" and "brain cells dying." The body's reaction to life threatening trauma is too complex to make such simplistic assumptions.

Moreover, it's worth noting that she was undergoing anaphylactic shock, presumably from ingestion of food. That doesn't necessarily imply that she was receiving no air to her lungs, her lungs were likely still functioning during this time, and there was no stoppage of blood flow to the brain. I don't know much about anaphylactic shock in general, but Wikipedia states that typical onset for ingestion of food is 2 hours, which makes the dramatic retelling of this story as "dead for 45 minutes" sound more like religious propaganda than an honest account of a true event.

Anyway, for my money, all this rests on an ontological mistake. I don't know for certain, but my hunch is that consciousness is not "a thing" and thus it can't leave your body and go places. Consciousness is data. Nothing more. Normally that data is maintained with appropriate values like, "I'm inside my body right now"; however, since it's data, it can take on any value it wants without the slightest violation of the laws of physics; values such as "I'm floating six feet above my body," or even, "I'm a six foot penis named Bob." Data can be anything it wants to be. It normally isn't, because the brain uses the data that is consciousness to organize behaviors and so it's meant to track and mirror real world events, but if the brain isn't functioning normally, that data can take on values that aren't normal.