Question: In TGD you state that physical processes in the brain have never been demonstrated to give rise to subjective experience (Appendix B). What do you make of experiences occurring in neurosurgery, in which physical stimulation of parts of the brain do cause conscious patients to experience mental phenomena? Or, for that matter, transcranial magnetic stimulation inducing subjective phenomena to occur? Both of these seem to undermine your assertion that these are merely correlated but not causative.
Response: You present yet another example of the “hard problem” that David Chalmers identified, and which I quote immediately above the passage you refer to in my book: “How do physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experience?” Your examples don’t answer this question. Though you refer to “cause,” if you look carefully, your examples don’t actually show cause. They show that physical stimulations of the brain accompany mental phenomena. But cause? How? What? Where? Why? Nor will any other such examples ever show cause. All such demonstrations only continue to beg the question of the hard problem without ever making even the slightest bit of headway in answering it. I suggest that you read TGD again but this time give more attention to the disintegration of substance—physicality and subjectivity—as it’s being pointed out. Note that these impressions always appear, not with, but as consciousness and never otherwise. Thus, as I point out repeatedly in the book, physicality reduces to Mind. There simply are no cases showing the reverse. Nor could there be. Comments are closed.
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