This is an interesting exchange between Jeff and marduk. I have a few potential data points to add.
I think there's still an argument for near-death psi, these events always seem to take place right around the time the brain shuts down.
This applies not only to the consciousness experiencing an NDE but also to other individuals deeply entangled emotionally (consciously and subconsciously) with that individual. The SPR published two extensive collections of 'crisis apparitions' experienced by such individuals at the time of another individual's death. Precognition concerning another's death is another category of psi reported in SPR investigations, and precognition is also reported by some individual consciousnesses experiencing NDEs (cases in which the individual sees detailed images of his or her future life-to-be if he or she decides to return to the body -- i.e., his or her family, children yet unborn, and physical home -- that later turn out to have been veridical predictions). The latter is not reported often (to my knowledge), but often enough to have been noticed by NDE researchers.
I have little problem per se with non local consciousness, by which I mean emergent self conscious intelligence embedded in the structure of the universe.
One question being considered again today in the 'Consciousness and the Paranormal' thread is whether consciousness
emerges -- in the early evolution and inflation of the physical universe or with the appearance of life -- from
protoconsciousness {intrinsic interactive processes of information exchange in the quantum substrate} or whether consciousness is present in the first atom (Jeff's theory). In either case, the spectrum of protoconsciousness and consciousness can be understood as primordially rooted in being and as proliferating in complexity through the entanglement of information and minds.
What I do have a problem with is the idea that our brains tune into consciousness - there's simply no need or evidence for it, plus no causal mechanism, plus we are very different from person to person.
Newborn human babies are conscious (and some research suggests that they have been conscious at some level at some point in their development in the womb), so there may be no specific point at which "our brains tune into consciousness." In other species, the newborn are still more advanced in their development and emerge from the womb or the egg able and ready to cope with their new environment. The reincarnation research done by Ian Stephenson and others indicates that young children (~3 to 5 years old) maintain recollections of previous embodied lifetimes which, upon investigation, turn out to be veridical memories. This suggests that each individual embodied consciousness 'emerges' from a matrix of entangled consciousness that is 'nonlocal', the only question being "at what point?".
I have no problem with the idea of God, but I have problems with theories that require his existence.
It's too easy to become self-referential.
And herein lies my problem.
We can complete isolate a body from the electromagnetic spectrum of the universe.
Except maybe neutrinos and gravity waves.
People don't stop being conscious in those states.
Indeed they don't, as demonstrated in numerous telepathy experiments conducted by parapsychologists and psychical researchers. But what does that mean? Jeff does not seem to be arguing that individual consciousness is only operational when in contact with a universal plenum of consciousness carried by physical processes we currently understand.
