how many atheists don't think humans are just robots?

Oh, you're talking about like an actual "Rosy The Robot" type. It's difficult, I grant, but it's not impossible. We have machines that can make determinations like that already. For example, google has technology today that you can use on your smart phone, pointing the camera at something, it makes a determination of what that something is likely to be, and then shops for it. Or, you could theoretically 'tag' an item as a kettle, a faucet as a faucet, if yo're programming a fresh robot for a specific user environment. Again, all in theory. Speaking of, let's say all this happened, right? YOu get yourself a tea making assistant. What would draw the line on this robot between intelligent in the computers vernacular and sentient?

i also highly doubt robots will have have emotions. they might show outward signs of it, but they won't experience saddness or anger or happiness etc

So emotions = sentience?

And how would you know if the robot is displaying the outward signs of emotions, that they don't have emotions? How do you judge if the humans in your life have genuine emotions if it's not by their outward displays of same?

i assume you're just being dense, but maybe you don't know. no one who experiences an NDE thinks it's like a dream. when people wake up from a dream, you know you had a dream and are awake. when people have NDEs, they know they have experienced the afterlife, something more real than this life. 

we know humans have emotions because we experience them ourselves and it is a good assumption that others do as well, especially if they display the outward signs of it. robots are not programmed to experience emotion, only to show outward signs of emotion. that's a fact. this is just another example of atheists being dense instead of acknowleding that emotion cannot, at least as of yet, be programmed. 

robots also dont going looking to have recreation, have fun, which i guess is related to emotion. they don't decide to go fishing just for leisure, for instance. 

This is exactly the point of my question: we can't say they will never have emotions. We can only say that they do not have them YET. It also doesn't answer if you think emotions equals sentience. 

No. What I ask, is why you dismiss the possibility that human brains being very similar process the information that goes through them when near to death and extremely active in similar ways? Note there's not a single NDE experience, there are similar traits, but these seem dependent on belief, culture and age. Studies suggest children see loved ones more than most, Indians often report seeing Hindu gods and Americans Jesus. Some people have out of body experiences others don't. Some experiences are positive, some negative some experience what they perceive as oblivion. With all this variation, why rule out the possibility that it's not simply the brain drawing on cultural data (it's usually stored a lot of that by the time of an NDE) to interpret the massive activity taking place.

As for why it seems real, why wouldn't it? If the brain is processing the same activity as it would when it sees a picture, hears music or smells flowers why would it matter if the senses caused that activity or not? Why would it change how real it appears?

I notice you haven't actually addressed why any of these positions aren't valid. You may ask 'how can you know they're correct' without addressing how you know they're invalid, to which I will answer honestly. I don't, my position, however, is that NDE's can't be shown as evidence for a soul as long as there are explanations that are valid that are explanations for NDE's.

you think there's elaborate stories embedded in our brain when we're dying. that, on it's face, is far fetched. why not just take it for what it looks like? people die and experience something that looks like the after life. it's plain evidence but atheists are too dense to acknowledge it. 

people also never see living relatives when they die. they are always dead relatives. if it was just a hallucination, you would expect flukes, but there are none. 

for more examples of little evidences such as that, check out doctor long's book, "evidence of the afterlife" 

The explanation that seems most likely to be correct to me, which would incorporate the cultural aspect without leaning on the supernatural, is that as death seems imminent, the brain responds with an excessive survival instinct. It would sort of explain the very common trope that you see your loved ones, particularly your children if you have any, before you die (and again it's worth noting we can't tell how 'near death' we're talking here, because there's no scientific distance between near death and death to compare...you pass the threshold of death and theres no way to study your experience). Your brain looks for the things it responded most strongly to: your offspring, making sure your genetic material is passed on, the shared pack or community experiences you had, etc. and tries to use those to sort of act as a neural "defibrulator" shock device. For some, it's Jesus, for others it's Hindu gods, yes, but the brain isn't trying to say those images are real, or even welcoming. It's playing on the fear of that experience to throw cold water on your face, to wake you up, if it can. Otherwise, you'd see Jesus, be like "YES! On my way to good old Jesus!" and oyu wouldn't survive, you'd give up too easily. No one wants to come back and report that in their NDE account, though, that they turned away from Jesus because they were afraid.

It's looking for anything that might give it an edge to continue functioning. This only requires the assumption that life wants to propagate and continue over any other drive, it relies only on the existence of survival instinct, which we know exists. It's just a hypothesis, but there's no way to prove it based on the shifty data set. I think it just fits best with what we know today. 

This is patently false. Many people report seeing their life flash before their eyes, this often includes living relatives. 

EXACTLY THE SAME TYPES OF "ELABORATE STORIES" YOUR BRAIN SHOWS YOU WHEN YOU ARE DREAMING.

"you think there's elaborate stories embedded in our brain when we're dying. that, on it's face, is far fetched. why not just take it for what it looks like? people die and experience something that looks like the after life. it's plain evidence but atheists are too dense to acknowledge it. "

The first sentence of this is a strawman. I haven't once said I think there're stories embedded in the brain at all. In fact, I've addressed why that isn't my position. My position is to question why NDE's couldn't just be the brain processing stimulus as always, only in this case the stimulus isn't caused by the senses as is standard. You haven't actually said why this is far fetched only that you think it is. Why is it far fetched to think NDE's are the brain processing activity within the brain? Why do you insist this must require an 'embedded story' When as I've stated, many different stories of NDE's exist? You simply swung at a strawman, one that had already been addressed. Have the common decency to address what I'm actually saying please. 

Possibly, though their consciousness during NDE's and the actual existence of what they see is far more in question than the in universe Vorlons.

Sounds pretty reasonable to me.

here is more on the science of near death experiences, how it's corroborated 

the only conclusion that can be drawn is that you think there are elaborate stories that look a lot a like in their content, are consistent... in the brain. you stating that you don't think this but rather that you think it's the brain hallucinating is just another way of stating what i said. maybe you should reckon with your beliefs, take them to their logical conclusion. 

in the link in the last post i show NDEs of non western and children and those before 1975 (the year they become public knowledge for the vast majority of people), all have similar outcomes and elements. they see a being of light, for example, at the same proportion in each group. the studies of this break the experiences down into components like that. 

the actual number of people seeing living relatives is less than five percent. it's in the book i mentioned earlier. many of them describe seeing relatives that have long passed and they dont think of much. there's a strong connection to your blood line, even though you might think it would include friends more often. also, there are many examples of people seeing relatives they didn't know they had, until they died. there's too many intricacies like these to just dismiss NDEs as hallucations. all i see from atheists who actually get informed of this stuff and then reject it.... is a deep seated need to not believe. 

i just showed you how dreams are different than NDEs. why are you going to just continue to pretend they're the same?

there are only about five percent of people who see deceased people who see non-relatives, like friends. including relatives you dont think of much and that are long deceased.  i conclude that there's a special link to our blood relatives, cause if it was just random hallucainating, youd expect that number to be a lot higher than just five percent. 

Your religion teaches that the vast majority of souls are bound for hell, it stands to reason then that the vast majority of NDE's would involve a trip to hell and not paradise. Explain how this is not the case with NDE's, in fact I have never read of an NDE experiencing the horror of hell.

Departure information also.

These are both from you. The number isn't zero, the instance isn't never. It doesn't matter anyway, I'm not sure what it proves. You say you CONCLUDE that it's related to your bloodline (let's call that DNA, it's less mystical sounding, this isn't a Castlevania game), but that's not exactly a fact on the matter. All of this, in fact, is pretty difficult to argue. The only way that these NDE commonalities, of which there are not that many, when you look at them honestly (and all of them can be explained by the brain alone, not the brain + another dimension), could actually prove an afterlife is if you could talk to someone who has ACTUALLY died. Not near death, not cessation of organ function only to be resuscitated, but someone who was actually dead and STILL WAS DEAD. It's the event horizon of a black hole, you cannot know what happens when someone is actually dead. These are experiences that occur during life, even though they're named near death. It's still life. 

You've basically said that the people who talk about their NDE believe their experience was "more real than a dream".

This is obviously an opinion.

Lots of people have similar dreams, does this mean that those dreams are "real"?

I found this remarkably compelling. [LINK]

But I heard that episode was based on a dream that felt super real, no, actually it was an NDE, I mean, that guy was falling and was about to die, and that allowed them to see into another dimension (beyond death) and then when they didn't die, they made a documentary about it and that's where the show comes from, but the writers didn't want people to think they were crazy so they never told anyone...