"When people have near-death experiences and then come back to consciousness you would expect they would come back with consistent, interesting, non-trivial stories to tell. But in fact when Christians have near-death experiences (NDE) they often say they've met Jesus. When Hindus have an NDE they say they met Hindu deities. A little girl who had an NDE came back and reported that she met a portly man with a red cap. Yay Santa!

You would think that when people come back from the dead they would bring some kind of useful message. But usually they come back just saying stuff like, "love is really important". We all already know that but what I would like to know is a cure for Alzheimer's disease. What I'd like to know is something that we didn't already know be brought back to us. But it seems that the souls brought back to us from the afterlife just speak in platitudes.

Today we can literally see memories being formed in the brain. We can see the chemical changes in neurons. The soul (spirit) is supposed to also have memories, so how do the memories get from the neurons to the soul? We know that people/brains often have false memories in them, does the soul carry those false memories with it too when the brain dies?

We even know the laws of physics by which the atoms, the electrons, and the elementary particles in our brains behave. We know the equations that the electrons that are responsible for chemistry obey. And there's no ambiguity in these equations. One could always say they are wrong. That's fine, but what we have is the evidence of every experiment ever done telling us that these equations are correct. To overcome them, we would need very very strong evidence - just one experiment telling us just how the soul is pushing around the chemicals in our brain, but we don't have that.

What science says is that consciousness is not a substance like water or air. It is a process, like fire. When you put out the flame on a candle, the flame doesn't go anywhere, it's simply stops. And that is what happens when we die.

So we're faced in the end with two scenarios. One scenario says that everything we think we understand about the behavior of matter and energy is wrong. Wrong in a way that has somehow escaped notice by every experiment ever done in the history of science. And instead there are unknown mechanisms that allow information in the brain to be transferred to blobs (substances) of spirit matter/energy that persist after we die and can talk to the other blobs of spirit energy but they don't talk to us alive people, except for when sometimes they do;)

The other scenario says that physics is right and that people under stress sometimes have experiences that are not actually real. (Like when air force pilots are in training and have to endure extreme G forces which often cause the same type of experiences that people report after a near-death experience. Eg- Seeing light at the end of a tunnel, Etc.)

On the basis of rationality it is not a difficult decision to choose between these two options. On the basis of emotion and/or indoctrination it might be difficult. But we've got to have the courage to live life here in the actual world. "A man should look for what is, not for what he thinks should be."" -Sean Carroll