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Short answer: there isn’t a defensible, evidence-based number. With what we know today, science has no reliable evidence that consciousness survives bodily (brain) death, so any numerical “probability” would be guesswork rather than a result of research.

Here’s the state of play, briefly:

• Neuroscience ties consciousness to brain activity. Contemporary reviews and reference works (updated in 2024) treat conscious experience as dependent on functioning neural circuits; when the brain is destroyed or irreversibly inactive, consciousness—as we can measure or infer it—ceases. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, PMC, ScienceDirect)

• Near-death experiences (NDEs) don’t show survival after death. Large reviews describe powerful, often life-changing experiences reported around cardiac arrest or critical illness, but they remain experiences during a dying or recovering brain, not after irreversible death. Physiological explanations (e.g., altered oxygen/glucose, neurotransmitters, REM-like intrusions) are consistent with the data. (PMC)

• What the best clinical studies show:
  • The AWARE II multicentre study recorded organized EEG activity and some reports of conscious awareness during CPR in a subset of resuscitated patients. This suggests residual or briefly resurgent brain activity can occur during cardiac arrest—but it does not imply awareness after brain death or long after circulation stops. (PubMed, ScienceDirect, NYU Langone Health, Resuscitation Journal)
  • Several case reports and small series show brief surges in high-frequency (gamma) activity in the dying human brain. These spikes may correlate with conscious-like processing, but they happen before death becomes irreversible, and they don’t demonstrate persistence of consciousness after the brain has shut down. (PNAS, Scientific American)

• Key distinction: “Clinical death” (no heartbeat/no breathing) can be reversible for minutes; “brain death” and post-mortem cellular death are not. Existing observations come from the reversible window, so they can’t establish survival beyond death. (PMC)

Bottom line

From current research, the empirically supported probability that consciousness persists after irreversible biological (brain) death is indistinguishable from zero. Claims of a nonzero probability are philosophical or theological positions, not outcomes of controlled studies. Future evidence could change this, but that’s where the data are today. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, PMC, PubMed, PNAS)

If you’d like, I can unpack any of these studies or walk through what a rigorous test would have to look like.