alt Hacker NewsA materialist would argue that nothing you describe rules out malfunction in a brain failing rapidly due to oxygen starvation, and that the commonality of experiences is explicable in terms of common failure modes in effectively identical brain architecture. (Just about everyone's visual cortex works about the same, etc.)
I think it's cute how hardcore materialists believe it is even in theory possible to distinguish their position from ideological simulationism. Maybe in a thousand years. Not now. But phenomenology is the name of the philosophical discipline that you are now struggling to recapitulate.
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You think it's cute, do you? But there are endless unfalsifiable and silly alternative explanations for everything. They're distinguished only by being silly. The observation that everything could be a simulation deserves a "so what". Maybe you're the cutie pie.
So we agree but one point: There are tens of thousands of NDEs happening under monitored conditions (operating tables) when we know for a fact that the brain is out of oxygen and energy according to any know physical (not to mention evolutionary) mechanism, and that has to be explained.