The presence of consciousness is the difference between a living human body and a corpse. The body's only foundational difference in death is that it is not animated by a mind, and it is thus inactive and lifeless. This conceptual distinction and the logical fact that to perceive requires only an immaterial mind and not a body (even if no human minds actually exist apart from bodies, there is nothing logically impossible about an unembodied consciousness). It does not follow that the mind does or does not depart from the body directly or at some later point after death, free of its corporeal confinement, though there would be no outward evidence for this as far as ordinary sensory experiences suggest. Still, when someone dies, all mere evidence for their independent consciousness as a separate mind vanishes. One can no longer see their expressions or movements.
If soul oblivion/sleep until the resurrection (Daniel 12:2) is true as the Bible plainly puts forth (Ecclesiastes 9:5-10, Job 3:11-19, Psalm 88:10-12, and more), then when it seems like the consciousness fades from the bodies of people into nonexistence or metaphysical inactivity--immaterial whether it separately exists from the body or not, as a mind and its perceptions can only be nonphysical even if they reside in a material form--this really is what is happening. The soul is not leaving the body to go to a purely spiritual realm or inhabiting a placeholder or new body away from the dimension of our earthly lives according to the Bible. It is impossible to know from sensory observation if other minds do or ever have existed, if the sensory perceptions as a collective correspond to the external world at all, or if other minds have gone to an immediate afterlife, but if the Biblical doctrine of soul sleep really is true, then what appears to be the case on a terrestrial, sensory level matches with what is the case on a grander metaphysical level: the consciousness of the dead has ceased to exist or is locked within an unperceiving state.
Scientific epistemology is indeed utterly secondary and therefore inferior to logic. Reason provides absolute certainty because of its necessary truths, while sensory perceptions are involuntary experiences that, except in the very precise case of there simply being a physical body that my consciousness currently dwells in [1], are not knowable except on the level of mental experiences that might not correspond to an outside world of matter, for it does not logically follow from seeing or hearing something that it really exists as more than an immaterial hallucination. One knows from reason that reason exists; one knows from reason that one's consciousness exists, with direct introspective experience also being accessible; one knows from reason that science is epistemologically useless except for discovering correlations and practicalities on the level of mere perception.
All the same, what would seem to be the case on the level of observing human corpses is really the case according to the Bible. Though an immediate afterlife is logically possible, it would only be possible for there to be an afterlife of torment (as evangelicals often conceive of Sheol) that some or all of the dead instantly go to if it was an amoral afterlife, for otherwise people are tormented for longer or shorter periods based only upon the happenstance timing of the birth and death in human history, and it could not be an everlasting torment and still be proportionate to finite sins. As irrelevant as it is to knowing logical possibilities or necessities that do not depend on matter or perception of matter, as well as to knowing the teachings of the Bible, the seeming lifelessness of a corpse would left to itself provide no evidence for or against an immediate afterlife and makes the dead truly seem dead.
The seeming causal springing of the mind from the human body--it could be the other way around, though the divine mind would sustain all matter and all minds besides its own either way--simply parallels the Biblical teaching that the soul is not conscious between death and the resurrection unless it is briefly, prematurely revived by supernatural powers, such as with the witch of Endor summoning Samuel (1 Samuel 28) or Jesus conversing with Moses and Elijah during his transfiguration (Matthew 17). The Biblical Sheol is and was not a place of torment or paradise for anyone as creation waits for the apocalyptic return of Christ and the events that follow. It is the grave, the physical ground or tomb that holds the body and it is also the corresponding mental nonexistence or existence in a dreamless, unthinking sleep of death. According to this, what would seem to be the case more strictly from observing a corpse would actually be true, and death is a foreshadowing of the total nonexistence of the soul in the second death (Ezekiel 18:4, 2 Peter 2:6, Revelation 20:15).
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