NDE's

Filmicaly, I still think that 'Flatliners' has a lot to commend it in terms of what it says about Near Death Experiences. Whatever we think about their cause we do have to reckon with the theological fact [and I do thinki it is theological apart from anything else] that the are 'near' death, not actual death, not final and therefore hard to assess in terms of just what they may be telling us about the final trip. At the end of the article referenced there is an intriguing suggestion which seems to echo Aquinas's potition [Aquinas, following Aristotle tended to see the body as the basis of personhood and the soul as emergent, if I can put it in those anachronistic terms without doing too much damage to Aquinas or Aristotle]:
"The suggestion made by van Lommel and other NDE researchers is that the mind may not entirely be the product of matter. And 'at the time of physical death, consciousness will continue to be experienced in another dimension.' Van Lommel said he likes to compare our brains with computers: 'The Internet is not produced by the computer, but received by it. And in the same way, our brain functions as a receiver, not as a producer, of consciousness.'"
I think that this is talking about top down causality and that far is useful. However the analogy is misleading; it seesm to say that if an individual brain dies there is still 'the net' beyond it, but the internet would blink out of existence if there was a power outage affecting all the main carriers and DNS computers and indeed all the PC's linked to the net _This is what the death of the brain would mean in the analogy. The human brain as internet? Yes indeed. But when the brain dies, what is left to carry the signals of individual consciousness? That indeed is still the question.
"Theological fact", I said earlier. So far the only prinicple of 'signal carrying', of continuity of identity that I can think of is God.

Dead reckoning | The San Diego Union-Tribune: