Abstract: Keith Augustine claims that near-death experiences are actually hallucinations. However, this proposition has several serious problems that I explicate in this commentary.

Abstract: In this response to Keith Augustine's paper, I discuss the question of the nature and causation of near-death experiences (NDEs) with hallucinatory features. The attribution of hallucinations to either a brain mechanism or a peek into the afterworld raises fundamental questions about both the epistemology and ontology of our neuroscience, and of our scientific models of an afterlife. It also raises questions about the physiological state of the brain giving rise to NDEs that arise in very different situations and are clearly unlikely to have a unitary cause. These fundamental questions can be answered only in proper prospective trials when both the brain physiology and psychological variables of the experiencer are known.

Article offering alternative arguments and conclusions to those Keith Augustine offered regarding discrepancies between some near-death experiencers' (NDErs') reports of events they perceived during their NDEs and objective information available about those events.

Article surveying near-death experiences (NDEs) incorporating out-of-body discrepancies, bodily sensations, encounters with living persons and fictional characters, random or insignificant memories, returns from a point of no return, hallucinatory imagery, and unfulfilled predictions. Though attempts to accommodate hallucinatory NDEs within a survivalist framework are possible, they signal a failure to take the empirical evidence against a survivalist interpretation of NDEs seriously.

Article purporting that near-death experience (NDE) reports are sometimes open to multiple interpretations, that different kinds of NDEs should be distinguished according to their diverse physiological mechanisms, and that transformations following NDEs but not other hallucinatory experiences require special explanation if NDEs are hallucinations.