“This is not the digestive function of some lower life form we’re talking about here. These are implications that reach all of humanity,” said Jeffrey Long, a radiation oncologist and co-author of the 2011 book “Evidence of the Afterlife: The Science of Near-Death Experiences.”

“Do we have some evidence?” he asked. “And how strong is that evidence that we have life after death, that our consciousness survives bodily death?” Long — who was not involved in either the NEPTUNE paper or the critique — said he has studied more than 4,000 near-death experiences.

🙄

the “sweeping critique” was:

Of note, they did not discuss major NDE features that seem incompatible with their physicalist theory, such as veridical out-of-body perceptions during NDEs (Holden, 2009). Furthermore, some NDEs include encounters with deceased persons of whose death the experiencer had no knowledge, or whom the experiencer had never met; accurate information acquired about the deaths of these deceased persons challenges the interpretation of these visions as hallucinations (Greyson, 2010c; Khanna et al., 2018).

Martial et al. (2025) acknowledged that, in developing their coherent overarching model, “We have excluded dualistic theories from our discussion owing to the lack of empirical neuroscientific evidence and the fact that a fundamental tenet of neuroscience asserts that human experience arises from the brain”

psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2026-82154-001.html

ruling out supernatural explanations and approaching science with an empirical and physicalist approach shouldn’t be that controversial, and the fact that some oncologist is willing to believe in a supernatural after-life doesn’t exactly change anything :-/

Out of body perceptions are common aspects of altered states and dissociative episodes (and dissociation is a frequent change in mental state that happens during trauma such as a near-death-experience, I’ve had this happen to myself during acute physical trauma). Out of body experiences don’t really prove anything supernatural.

And I’m highly skeptical that during NDEs that accurate information was acquired about deceased persons that they did not know before - that is the kind of claim that if found to be true would be all over the news.