The consistency of NDE are easy to explain: the brain being starved of oxygen and dying tends to shut down a particular way in all people. Loss of blood oxygen levels leads to narrowing of vision, as we know from astronaut training centrifuges. Keep this process up and it becomes a “tunnel of light.” The brain starts spasming towards the end, with everything being fired off faster than the conscious part can handle, which ends up being interpreted as your whole life flashing before your eyes.
You should read something other than Sue Blackmore on NDEs.
There are weirdly consistent reports of a whole lot more phenomena beyond what she outlined in _Dying To Live_ thirty years ago, which is more or less what you've summarized here.
They may just be a coincidental agglutination of evolution and human brain malfunctions, stacked up with a whole lot of coincidence / selection bias to account for the anecdotes of people gaining correct knowledge about physical reality while "dead".
If that's all they are (which I do find plausible if not persuasive), what you've written here leaves out a lot of steps needed to justify that position.
Thank you, I appreciate the time you took to write this to me, but I really don't have any interest in the phenomena. I didn't even know who Sue Blackmore was tbh.
In my worldview burden of justification falls on those who would posit non-materialistic, supernatural explanations.
FWIW, I wasn't trying to say that the position should be "supernatural by default" - just that there's a lot more to account for in NDEs than what you've described, and that I don't know of anyone who's looked into them seriously who holds to Blackmore's attempt at a purely materialist explanation (another way it falls down - if oxygen starvation accounts for NDEs, they shouldn't happen for people who aren't oxygen-starved, but they do).
As an agnostic who really wants to believe in the supernatural but has the same gut instinct that there needs to be evidence for it, I have a plausible materialist explanation for NDEs, but it's rather more involved and isn't especially rigorous.
