They aren't outside of their bodies in the literal sense. Just as how some people may experience out-of-body moments when high on certain drugs or when going through severe dissociation but you would treat it as though they are actually outside of their bodies, the same applies to NDEs. This isn't evidence of our bodies not being real or the "ultimate form". You are taking a bunch of subjective accounts at face value.
Meditation practitioners also aren't qualified to say anything about this. They aren't researchers. Them maintaining awareness at the beginning of sleep stages doesn't really prove anything. You could argue that their results are due to changes in brain activity rather than it being due to some sort of spiritual nonsense. Just as how we are able to change our brain activity in such a way in order to accomplish certain tasks, such as the Stroop task (which involves your brain needing to exert control in order to keep you from automatically responding in the most routine way (reading the word) by having the prefrontal cortex exert control to favour colour representations and make them more salient in order to win out the disagreement between whether you should read the word or name the colour), you could argue that the effects of mediation likely stem from its impact on brain activity. An aspect of an executive region (the prefrontal cortex) is its ability to control other brain areas physiologically. Meditation, I'm assuming, likely affects cognitive control (also known as executive function), leading to the whole sleep thing that you are talking about.
So again, no it isn't "impossible to believe that the gelatinous blob could give rise to consciousness".
A.I. isn't a fucking brain. The two things are completely different from one another. Us taking inspiration from certain aspects of the brain when creating it doesn't mean that it functions in the exact same ways that a brain does. Just as how solar panels don't work in the exact same way that photosynthesis does despite us taking inspiration from it.
Answer sincerely.
Do you really believe you are: nails, skin, veins, bones, pus, feces, urine, liver, kidneys, lungs, brain, nervous system, hairs, eyes, teeth... And so on?
I guess if we wanted to say, poetically speaking, I guess you could say you are these things (a very macabre poetry, but...).
These things are in your body, but you are not your body.
You could say, if you were to lose an arm or a leg, we tend to say "I lost a part of me/of myself", but it is a matter of speech. And yet, your mind remains completely unaffected! (Outside of depression which could set in if you were to lose a limb)
We are the perceiver of all this, the witness, the conscious being.
Remember that science is what we know, as human beings, and there is a lot that was don't know, and we don't know what we don't know!!!
Even recently source just discovered a new type of microorganism living in our body which was not known until recently!
Also sciences is nit always 100% correct. Sometimes theories are wrong and they are later disproven.
I'm not coming from a religious point of view, but from what is factually real.
While we can say we are out bodies, ultimately this is not really true. The body is the hardware (the brain is part of the body too, not separate), the soul/mind/consciousness is the software.
