Where have I said you need to avoid selection?
Well let me quote what you wrote in the previous thread (emphasis added)
I'm not sure why you're talking to me about "explain them all" and "ad hoc". The claim is that these experiences mean something in terms of a consciousness separate from the brain. It makes sense to me to investigate what kinds of experiences are had under these circumstances and whether these are unique in some way - some way that informs us about the process of consciousness. Also, it should be noted that the appearance of "common elements" is an artifact of selecting out a small subset of all the auditory-visual experiences people report around the time of physical/medical crises on the basis of these "common elements" (I've said before that we should be interested in all the auditory-visual experiences which people report, not just this small subset). I have no interest in explaining them in terms of a materialist viewpoint - what a waste of time. I'm not interested in "ad hoc" explanations, either.
I am more than willing to countenance the idea that these strange phenomena happen when the brain has become disabled to a greater or lesser degree - due to cardiac arrest, anaesthesia, gee forces draining blood from the brain, etc. The point is that the recognised phenomena of NDE's aren't normal parts of everyday life - they only come to the fore in situations in which the brain can't do its job.
From a completely materialistic perspective, the brain and only the brain creates consciousness (though how it creates awareness is a total mystery) and that includes all these intense phenomena - that can often be remembered vividly for the rest of a person's life. That isn't bad for an organ that is close to expiring!
From a non-materialist perspective, the brain is an interface to actual consciousness - an interface that filters out a lot of 'irrelevant' information. Clearly, this perspective fits much better with the peculiar facts of some NDE's.
One of the strangest aspects of some NDE's is what you describe as autoscopic - observing yourself. Now I think anyone who claims that people can use information from their senses to assemble (not in a deliberate sense) one of these accounts, should try some experiments. Even being fully conscious in a dentist's chair, shows you how little visual information is available. You can't see the drill, or any of the other gadgets they use, nor can you see them mix the filling material, etc. Admittedly you can hear what is going on, but I doubt if one could give a really good account of the whole procedure after it is over -
one that would correspond with what could be seen from the ceiling. Seeing what is going on from the vantage point of the ceiling while lying on a bed is clearly physically impossible, so the only way to square these accounts with standard materialistic assumptions, is to bend them until they can just about be explained - but does that make sense?
Furthermore, as Billw pointed out above, brain damage (either before birth or later) often seems to unleash amazing special abilities. Once again, that makes more sense using a brain-as-interface model, than using a model where the brain simply creates consciousness.
In conclusion, this isn't about selection (or any other statistical issue) - and I am well aware of what can be 'achieved' using skewed samples - it is about the fact that some people whose brains are temporarily disabled, have experiences that really don't fit with materialistic assumptions. To the extent that you would really like to explore this, I think most readers of this forum would be right behind you, but it might help if you realised that you might end up having to agree with the 'other' side of this debate.
David