LOL. I was actually *HOPING* you would quote Keith Augustine's article so I could knock it down with the research I've done on it before hand. It's always been the Skeptic's "Trump Card" so to speak, I've had many Close-Minded Skeptics pull it up in a debate, yet it disproves absolutely nothing.
Keith Augustine's arguments are nothing more than a bunch of largely unprovable "coulda, woulda, shouldas" towards veridical NDEs to try and explain how it "could" have happened naturally (yet he masquerades his opinions around as if they are undeniable fact) and goes with the assumption that the veridical experiencer is always lying and found out the information beforehand.
I find many of the "weird" NDEs he presents to be very spiritually & mystically profound, and find no real problem with them. One example is the description given by the little girl who said she saw "14 foot tall doctors with light bulbs in their chest". Augustine states this is a hallucination, however, Melvin Morse pointed out that a more religious child would have called them angels, and that adults in NDEs have reported seeing very tall figures with a light in their chest they described as angels. Augustine does interpret all of these as hallucinations however, and tries to flail his arms and cry hallucination at anything that doesn't fit his subjective mold of what is and is not an incoherent hallucination. "Coulda, woulda, shouldas" that he cannot objectively prove as "how it actually happened", is his cake argument, as well as crying hallucination at NDEs that most other people would not view as hallucinations at all.
Here is my personal examination of his article...
Here is a summery of the meat of what he argues:
1.) NDErs are always in a level of bodily consciousness during an NDE, as in their brains are still functioning though not picked up by equipment, they are subconsciously or unknowingly consciously picking up on conversations in the room and their mind is weaving the situation all together from preconceived ideas and remembered visuals about a hospital emergency room and how it should look like that turn out to be accurate.
2.) Pam Reynolds was conscious during Anesthesia, and heard things while under Anesthesia, and her mind put things together during Anesthesia. Her NDE portion took place before she was in the critical near-death state.
3.) Blind NDErs either remember the time when they were not blind, or if they never had sight, just picked up on clues, etc.
The problem with these arguments, is that it never deals with Numerous Veridical Perceptions where the people wander *outside* of the operating room and overhear conversations and see what people are doing outside of that room that turn out to be accurate! Some observe things happening miles away! Or even the DBV cases where NDErs appeared to loved ones far away at the time of clinical death.
Not to mention very accurate visual descriptions that take place in the operating room such as what the surgeons they have never met looked like, the unusual proceedors used, and like the NDE guy who saw the color tie someone was wearing, and how one NDEr had visually seen a surgeon flapping his arms in a weird manner that happened to be a personal habit of his, etc, etc, etc. He never deals with specific unexplainable stuff like that, and the few times he does, it's purely speculative "coulda, woulda, shouldas" masqueraded around as undeniable fact.
It also doesn't bother to explain how Pam Reynolds accurately described the instruments she had never seen before being used on her, nor about how she saw and met a dead relative that she didn't know at the time was dead! He never deals with stuff like that. Uses a lot of fancy talk, but ignores the death blow evidences like that.
There is also the study of the doctor who got numerous NDErs with no prior medical knowledge who had an NDE and had them describe their own resusitation while out of body, and numerous people who did not have an NDE with no prior medical knowledge and have them do the same, and the NDErs were all accurate and the non-NDErs were not!
I'd rate his arguments as something that needs to be answered indepth by someone bored, but aside from that, not much substance there.
And a good friend of mine, CDR stated the following regarding it...
"Augustine relies on using the weaknesses of particular NDEs to rebut all NDEs in much the same manner that creationists use the weakness of one line of evidence supporting evolution to attack the whole concept (ie. pepper moths in England).
This line of argument is reasonable if one assumes that transition between life and death states is orderly and precisely controlled. If there is a God and and afterlife, then everyone should experience the same thing and there should be no mistakes or inaccuracies in what is experienced.
Transition from fetus to living baby is not the same for everyone nor is it always orderly. Neither is tranistion form baby to toddler, toddler to pre-pubiscent, to adolescent or to adulthood or old age. The leap from life to death involves, perhaps, a complete change in consciousness, potentially far more complex than the steady but often uneven devlopment of the mid throughout physical life. Theredore the many discrepancies are not necessarily damning.
CDR"
A friend of mine Darby had to the following to say regarding Keith Augustine's article...
"If I were to refute Augustine's argument, I would cite an excerpt from Charles Tart's article, "Who Might Survive Bodily Death?"
Out-of-Body Experiences
There are other phenomena that begin to bear more directly on the survival question, even if they have not been investigated nearly as well. For example, out-of-the-body experiences (OBEs). Years ago, I was very fortunate to meet a young woman who, since childhood, had OBE experiences routinely, many nights of the week. In fact as a child, she thought that it was normal that you go to bed, you fall asleep, you have a dream, you float up near the ceiling for a few seconds, you have another dream, and you wake up and go to school. Isn't that what sleep is about? I was able to have her spend four nights in my sleep laboratory. She had electrodes attached to her head to measure her brain waves. That meant that she could not get our of bed without making the recording machine in the next room spray ink all over the walls! After she was ready to go to sleep, I would go off to another room and randomly select a five-digit sequence, and write it on a piece of paper. Then I would go in and put it up on a shelf near the ceiling by a clock, so that even a person walking around in the room could not read it. I told her "If you get out of your body, not only do I want you to wake up afterwards and tell me about it, but try to read the number and take a look at the time, so we get the timing down right." Well, she had a total of seven or eight OBEs. During these she was in a brain wave state that I had never seen before. I have looked at a lot of records of people sleeping and dreaming, and this was like the dreaming state Stage One EEG, except there was a lot of slowed down alpha rhythm. I even showed it to the world's foremost EEG expert on sleep and we had 100 percent agreement. He said "It looks weird to me, too." I wish we had actually known what it meant. But she certainly was not near death.
On all nights but one, though, she said, "I'm sorry. I floated out of my body, but I was on the other side of the room, and I could not look at the number before I got back into my body." On the one occasion when she said she saw the number, she correctly reported that it was 25132. Now that is odds of a hundred thousand to one to guess that on a single try (Tart, 196 cool . I would have thought that, in a rational world, people all over the country would say, "Let's find the people who can do this, and let's study them extensively." But as you know, it did not happen.
Since the experiment occurs in a controlled environment, it is verifiable without suffering from the possible reductionist point of view that Pam Reynold and the shoe lady's accounts are subject to. The article also proves that, in this case, the event is both caused by the brain (or at the least correlates with a certain irregular pattern of brain activity if you believe consciousness to be independent of the brain) and a real, verifiable depiction of the world we live in.
There are legitimate accounts of OBEs. Maybe some times when people have an "OBE" it is just a hallucination and other times it is "real?" Maybe some OBEs result from a certain type of brain pattern while others from a different one? The fact that some people report having OBEs that don't fit reality does not refute the ones that do. The brain and consciousness as a whole are simply not known well enough to really say with authority what the 'cause' of varying OBEs are.
His argument against the book Mindsight and NDEs in the blind is just plain bad.
"That is, might a blind person have heard that people see certain things in a near-death encounter and unconsciously generated a fantasy that conformed to this belief?... [Blind NDErs might also] learn about what to expect in an afterlife from diverse sociocultural sources, and they may rely extensively on these expectations in generating a near-death fantasy...."
Obviously your culture plays some part in the NDE as some people report Jesus and others report different religious figures, but you are at least somewhat on a railroad track considering atheist and believers alike report similar experiences. Reducing the experience to a socially constructed unconscious desire is to ignore a very interesting and thought provoking branch of Neurobiology, Physics, Metaphysics, etc. It may be true, but there are many more dominant factors that shape the NDE.
In reference to a particular blind OBE case, he says,
"Although Ring and Cooper present this as a 'corroborative' case of sight during a blind respondent's out-of-body experience, it is clear that it is not."
Ring never claims it to be. He presents what he has and admits that the case cannot be confirmed. It's still noteworthy though.
He entirely and completely ignores the most impressive case in the book where a woman goes blind and then reports seeing her husband and ex-husband standing at the end of a corridor in the emergency room. It as well is anecdotal, but it is certainly stronger than the 'corroborative case' that he attacks.
I think there is a lot to learn about consciousness and the brain from the study of NDEs and OBEs, but dismissing them outright as hallucinations is not the way to do so. I think most skeptics read too far into these experiences and take them to be an argument for Intelligent Design or one particular religion or conception of God that they have already dismissed when that's not what these experiences really are. As far as skeptics go, Jansen is really the only one who I respect that doesn't present his premises while already starting with a conclusion.
Darby"
Here, however, is my "Trump Card." Michael Prescott wrote in his blog regarding Keith Augustine's article...
http://michaelprescott.typepad.com/michael_prescotts_blog/2006/08/ndes_and_their_.html - NDEs and their enemies
NDEs and their enemies
Reader TB directed me to a critique of near-death experiences by Keith Augustine, who believes that NDEs are hallucinations. His article is very long, and I haven't read all of it, but I thought I would respond to the part I have read.
Although more detailed than the average skeptical argument, Augustine's paper is in many respects quite typical. It makes some valid points, but is also weakened by silly nitpicking and unsupported assumptions. As an example of the former, Augustine "debunks" a case of a blind person who experienced vision in an NDE by complaining that her vision was colorblind! This is a little like the old joke about a talking horse, which ends with someone saying, "Don't pay any attention to that horse - he's a damn liar." Of course, the joke is that a talking horse is pretty remarkable, even if what he says is a lie. And vision in a blind person is also pretty remarkable, even if it's not in Technicolor.
Augustine also complains that NDErs may not undergo major transformative effects from their experience until some time afterward - perhaps even years. No doubt, but so what? It takes time to process any new experience. This doesn't make the experience unreal.
There are also assumptions about what an NDE "should" be, and then complaints that it doesn't always live up to these assumptions. For instance, Augustine protests that people can have NDEs even when they're not about to die. This is more an issue of terminology than anything else. Technically it's not an NDE if the person is not "near death." So what is it? An OBE (out-of-body experience). Can OBEs be induced by fear? Absolutely. This has been known since the late 19th century, when the Swiss Alpine Club recorded 30 cases of out-of-body experiences in mountain climbers who, when falling, thought they were going to die - even though the falls turned out not to be dangerous.
OBEs can also be triggered by anoxia, electrical stimulation of the brain, certain drugs, traumatic shock, or even deep meditative practices. Reductionists can say this "proves" the experience is rooted in neurology; dualists will say it shows that the spirit is only loosely entrained with the body, and can be fairly easily induced to separate. The latter belief has been part of mystical traditions for centuries.
Later, Augustine observes that NDErs sometimes encounter mythical beings or living people in their experience. Does this mean the experience must be a hallucination? He thinks so - but spiritualistic traditions going back at least as far as the Tibetan Book of the Dead frankly acknowledge that a person, while "crossing over," may encounter figments of his imagination. The explanation offered is that consciousness creates (or co-creates) the environment in which the newly deceased person finds himself. This same position is taken in mediumistic communications going back to the late 19th century - or actually the 18th century if we count the writings of Swedenborg.
In other words, the "theory" behind NDEs is considerably more sophisticated than most skeptics realize. And there are, of course, thousands upon thousands of cases. Augustine finds it doubtful that Kenneth Ring could find 21 cases of blind people having NDEs. His doubt merely shows that he doesn't know the extent of this phenomenon, which has been amply documented around the world. Health care workers - especially nurses in hospices - have seen it over and over. In a study of 344 patients who survived cardiac arrest, Dutch researcher Pim van Lommel found that 18% reported an NDE. Think of how many millions of people have heart attacks every year. And cardiac arrest is not the only way a person can be "near death," of course.
Augustine says that a famed NDE case, in which a patient saw a tennis shoe on the ledge of the hospital while out of the body (a shoe that was later confirmed to be there), has been debunked by skeptical investigators. According to the debunkers, a shoe placed on that ledge would be easily visible from the parking lot, and thus the NDEr could have overhead hospital staff commenting on it. Maybe. But I have learned to be skeptical of the skeptics. Their claims are not always to be trusted. Both James Randi and Michael Shermer, two leading skeptics, have been caught in gross misstatements of fact. (For an example involving Randi, see here; for Shermer, here.) In this case, we must take the skeptics' word that the shoe would have been easy to spot from down below. Would skeptics take a parapsychologist's word on such a matter? Why should there be a double standard, according to which every claim made by an investigator of the paranormal is open to doubt, but every claim made by a skeptic is assumed to be strictly factual?
Next, Augustine criticizes the celebrated "Pam Reynolds" case, in which a patient's bodily functions were brought to a complete standstill while she underwent surgery for an aneurysm at the base of her brain. "Reynolds" (a pseudonym) had a vivid NDE. Augustine points out that the veridical aspects of the NDE took place before the patient's body temperature had been lowered and before her heart and brain activity had been stopped. This is a good point, and I concede that many writers have been unclear about this. Still, the NDE appears to have continued throughout the entire procedure, ending only when the patient was revived.
Augustine argues that Reynolds, not fully sedated, overheard enough of the conversation around her to form a mental picture of the procedures that were being followed. But this hardly explains how she was able to describe the appearance of surgical instruments used on her, some of which were quite unusual. Augustine says that some NDErs may pick up this information from TV medical dramas - apparently unaware that "control groups" of TV watchers, when asked to imagine how an operation would look, never display the accuracy of NDErs.
His main source for the Reynolds critique is an article by G.M. Woerlee. Ian Lawton responds to Woerlee, observing,
However, most crucially of all - and maintaining their typical selectiveness - none of [the skeptics] has even tried to explain how [Pam Reynolds] was able to “see” the saw used to open up her skull. Remember that this had an unusual design that a non-expert could not be expected to guess at, and that Pam also described its accompanying “interchangeable blades” in a “socket-wrench case”. Remember too that her eyes were firmly closed, lubricated and taped shut throughout the operation, and that the saw was being used on the top of her head, which would in any case have been out of range of her normal eyesight.
Lawton also cites a psychiatrist, whose contribution is too lengthy to be quoted. Read it for yourself.*
In his article, Woerlee maintains that many patients in cardiac arrest may not, in fact, have flat EEGs. He says that in the confusion of the operating room, when desperate efforts at resuscitation are being made, there is often no time to hook up the EEG properly. The above-mentioned Dutch researcher Pim van Lommel deals with this issue at considerable length. Though his English is a bit shaky, he gets his points across. If Lommel is right, then cardiac arrest does invariably lead to a cessation of brain activity within seconds.
Could NDEs and OBEs have a purely physiological/psychological basis? If they do, then not just some but all of the veridical reports are wrong (and these include veridical perception of things happening well outside the operating room and out of the patient's earshot). The clinical testing of OBEs - in which strain gauges were triggered at a distance, apparently by the test subject's roving presence, and in which an animal reacted consistently as if the subject were in the room when he was reportedly having an OBE while asleep in the next room - would have to be debunked. Remote viewing, which yielded some spectacular hits (as well as major misses) in the Stargate program, would have to be debunked. The reports of anthropologists who have observed relevant psi phenomena among tribesmen would have to be debunked (see Sheldrake, The Sense of Being Stared At).
A determined debunker can cast doubt on anything, just as a determined lawyer can make a witness doubt his own memory (or convince a jury that DNA evidence was planted, or mis-analyzed, or both). At some point it becomes a mere debating game. I know how this game works, and there is some value in it - up to a point. But eventually the sheer weight of cases has to count for something.
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* I have linked to the Google-cached Web page because Lawton's Web site is down. The URL for the original page is
http://www.ianlawton.com/nde2.htm
Also concerning Augustine's Article: (Excertped)
"Those arguments and others have been countered in the critique of Susan Blackmore's Dying to Live at visitunderthetree.com;"
http://visitunderthetree.com/nde/blackmoreCrit.html 
