some great anecdotal evidence from hospitals involving patients who are "awake" during surgeries that it should be impossible to be conscious during. The patients seem to describe a similar experience of drifting above their bodies, entering the next room, and describing exactly what surgeons or employees were doing while it should've been impossible to ascertain that information
The problem is that there is no scientific evidence. It's one thing, e.g., to claim that your dog can speak a human language. It's another one to prove it. I can claim that there is an alien under my bed that abducts me every night and I can find anecdotal evidence that other people also seen aliens. I can also write and sell a book about it. Would you believe me? No. At least aliens are not against the basic laws of physics. Dualism requires even more mental acrobatics than alien abductions. But for some reason people more inclined to believe in dualism than in alien abductions. The most likely explanation is that it's wishful thinking, that your brain tries to trick yourself to believe in something without adequate evidence. The thought that one has soul or consciousness that does not die with their body is very comforting.
I think our consciousness is more than just electrical impulses in the brain.
If so, then why failures of the physical machinery directly reflected on it. E.g., you can stop being able to recognize faces, you can think that you're arm does not belong to you. Any aspect of your cognition is effected by changes in the brain. Your perception of the world is completely dependent on the brain. Why waking up somebody from an OBE results in them waking up in their physical body and not being able to stay in that reality? Is the more likely explanation that they return to their body from some other astral plan (which have never been measured by anybody on a physical level) or that they just wake up from dreaming?
Using the dualism logic, if we take any hallucinogens like acid, why should we believe that it just effects our perception and not causes us to see artifacts from some alternative universe?
they could never be proven by physical science. Quantum science maybe one day, but I think "proof" of life after death would negate the purpose of life in general, and that of free will.
Which means that the phenomena does not exists. If something exists it has effects on this universe or it can be effected. Light exists because photons "interact" with other particles. Imagine photons which would have no effect on anything (and anything that has any effect, by definition, can be measured or in/directly observed). We would not be able to observe it, but it would also have zero effects on this universe, i.e., it would not exist. Everything that can be observed is in the domain of science. Saying that something is not in the domain of science is synonymous to saying that it does not exists.
You mentioned quantum physics and free will. But there is no room for free will in quantum physics. That is a misrepresentation of the field. Quantum physics only introduces stochastic systems. There is no free will in quantum physics (as most people think of free will). There is only randomness. In quantum physics, or in any stochastic system, a human has as much free will as a coin has free will. When I spin a coin, it will randomly "decide" to show heads or tails.
Free will is a denial of causality. In order for something to exist in this universe, it has to be effected by this universe. Imagine a particle that would not be effected by anything, by definition, it would not exist.
Free will is just an illusion that some actions or decisions are immune to causality. Even if you introduce a soul to the system, free will is still not imaginable (the followings speaks about psychopaths):
“Whatever their conscious motives, these men cannot know why they are as they are. As sickening as I find their behavior, I have to admit that if I were to trade places with one of these men, atom for atom, I would be him: There is no extra part of me that could decide to see the world differently or to resist the impulse to victimize other people. Even if you believe that every human being harbors an immortal soul, the problem of responsibility remains: I cannot take credit for the fact that I do not have the soul of psychopath. If I had truly been in Komisarjevsky's shoes on July 23,2007 - that is, if I had his genes and life experience and identical brain (or soul) in an identical state - I would have acted exactly as he did. There is simply no intellectually respectable position from which to deny this.”
So even existence of a soul is not compatible with free will.
But let's go back to the soul.
Consciousness as being completely independent of the brain is also incompatible with current neuroscience.
“Given the right experimental manipulations, people can be led to believe that they consciously intended an action when they neither chose it nor had control over their movements.”
One consciousness per human is also not exactly compatible with neuroscience. Take for example split brain patients. Their left hemisphere can answer that they want to become an astronomer, but their right hemisphere can give a totally different answer. Also their left hemisphere will act as if it knows why right hemisphere does certain actions, but it will give wrong answers. Does each hemisphere has its own soul?
If dolphins sleep with one hemisphere at one time, does one hemisphere travel the astral plane, while another hemisphere observes this world?