“Neuroscience is a large interdisciplinary field founded on the premise that all of behaviour and all of the cognitive processes that constitute the mind have their origin in the structure and function of the nervous system, especially in the brain. According to this view, the mind can be regarded as a set of operations carried out by the brain.

There are multiple lines of evidence that support this view. They are here briefly summarized along with some examples. Neuroscientists can:

• Measure an aspect of brain function that correlates with a particular mental state or process.
• Manipulate brain activity using drugs, electricity or magnetism.
• Study brain damage.
• Study neuro-developmental disorders.”¹

“The mind may be composed of particles that are immortal, but it is not immortal itself. Even if the particles of our mind came together in the same arrangement in future ages, our minds would have no memory of being us as we are now, just as our minds now have no memory of ever being together in the same combination and arrangement in past ages.” — Lucretius²

A near-death experience (NDE) is a personal experience associated with impending death, encompassing multiple possible sensations. Generally near-death experiences are considered to be “true” inasmuch as the experiencer believes that it happened in the way they recount it. There is no malice or intent to mislead.

Nevertheless, some explanations from neuroscience hypothesize the NDE to be a hallucinatory state caused by various neurological factors such as cerebral anoxia, hypercarbia, abnormal activity in the temporal lobes and brain damage, though the exact nature of such experiences is not universally agreed upon.³

Some modern neuroscientists believe that “The near-death experience is a complex set of phenomena and a single account will not capture all its components.” But “Taken together, the scientific evidence suggests that all aspects of the near-death experience have a neurophysiological or psychological basis.”⁴

But that is a good thing:

“You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed. You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world.” — Aaron Freeman⁵

Next in the outline: Life is the concentration of all value

1. ^α This quote is from Consciousness after death on Wikipedia.
2. ^α Lucretius, Book Three of De Rerum Natura
3. ^α More on Near-Death Experiences on Wikipedia
4. ^α Mobbs, D & Watt, C 2011, There is nothing paranormal about near-death experiences: how neuroscience can explain seeing bright lights, meeting the dead, or being convinced you are one of them, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, vol. 15, no. 10, pp. 447-449. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2011.07.010
5. ^α This lovely quotation is from The Science of Death: A Eulogy on futurism.com.