How about, it keeps the discussion moving:
”To see if they could show that the brain treats those two concepts differently too, Tallon-Baudryʼs team asked people who were having their brain scanned to fixate on a point and then let their mind wander. Every now and then, they were interrupted and asked whether – at that precise moment – they were thinking about “me” or “I”, which they had been trained to recognise. Depending on which they reported, the HEP occurred in different parts of the brain: a region near the front for “me” thoughts and one further back for “I” thoughts. This showed for the first time that the brain does indeed discern between the two concepts.” – Laura Spinney, “Consciousness Isn’t Just the Brain: the Body Shapes Your Sense of Self” at New Scientist
It shouldn’t be a big surprise if the brain distinguishes between the two concepts because subject (I, the person who makes things happen) and object (me, the person who experiences something) are more or less fundamental ideas.
News, “The grammar of consciousness: I vs. me” at Mind Matters News
The mystery of consciousness includes our constant awareness of both of these statuses, I and me.
as to:
Talk about missing the forest for the trees. The question that is screaming to be answered is not whether or not the body can influence our thoughts (of course it does), or whether or not consciousness is associated with the brain (of course it is). Rather the question screaming to be answered is whether or not the material brain, all by its lonesome, can even generate consciousness in the first place, and whether or not consciousness and/or the immaterial mind can cause changes in the material brain and the material body.
As to the first question, we simply have no evidence whatsoever that the material brain, all by its lonesome, has the capacity within itself to generate consciousness.
As Rutgers University philosopher Jerry Fodor stated,
And as Sebastian Seung of MIT stated,
Here are a few more quotes along the same line.
This utter failure on the part of neuroscientists to give us the first clue as to how the material brain may possibly generate consciousness is simply stunning, As Michael Egnor recently noted, “”It’s sobering to note that neuroscience has utterly failed to explain how the brain and mind relate. It is as if cosmology had failed to tell us anything meaningful about the universe; or medical science failed to tell us anything about health and disease; or geology failed to tell us anything about rocks. Neuroscience has told us nothing— nothing—about how the brain gives rise to the mind. ”
The reason why material processes can never explain consciousness, particularly never explain qualia, is fairly simple to understand.
As Frank Jackson made clear in his philosophical argument ‘Mary’s Room’, no amount of scientific and physical examination on Mary’s part will ever reveal to Mary exactly what the inner subjective conscious experience, i.e. qualia, of the color blue actually is until Mary actually experiences what the color blue is for herself.
As David Chalmers has pointed out with the philosophical zombie argument, for all we know, the person we are talking to, or even the person that we are examining with all our scientific instruments, could hypothetically be a philosophical zombie who has no inner subjective conscious experience whatsoever and that the philosophical zombie we are examining may just robotically be giving us correct answers that seem appropriate to any situation that we may be asking the philosophical zombie about.
Materialists simply do not have any realistic clue how anything material could ever generate the inner subjective consciousness experience of qualia.
As Professor of Psychology David Barash states in the following article, an article which happens to be entitled “the hardest problem in science?”, “But the hard problem of consciousness is so hard that I can’t even imagine what kind of empirical findings would satisfactorily solve it. In fact, I don’t even know what kind of discovery would get us to first base, not to mention a home run.”
Like qualia, the mental attribute of ‘Persistence of Self-Identity through time’ (which may also be termed ‘the experience of ‘the Now”), also refuses to be reduced to material explanation.
As to defining ‘the experience of the now’, we each have a unique perspective of being outside of time. In fact we each seemingly watch from some mysterious outside perspective of time as time seemingly passes us by. Simply put, we seem to be standing on an island of ‘now’ as the river of time continually flows past us.
In the following video, Dr. Suarez states that the irresolvable dilemma for reductive materialists in them trying to explain ‘the experience of the now’,,, “it is impossible for us to be ‘persons’ experiencing ‘now’ if we are nothing but particles flowing in space time. Moreover, for us to refer to ourselves as ‘persons’, we cannot refer to space-time as the ultimate substratum upon which everything exists, but must refer to a Person who is not bound by space time. (In other words) We must refer to God!”
In further defining the mental attribute of ‘the experience of the now’, in the following article Stanley Jaki states that “There can be no active mind without its sensing its existence in the moment called now.,,, ,,,There is no physical parallel to the mind’s ability to extend from its position in the momentary present to its past moments, or in its ability to imagine its future. The mind remains identical with itself while it lives through its momentary nows.”
And ‘the experience of ‘the now” also happens to be exactly where Albert Einstein got into trouble with leading philosophers of his day and also happens to be exactly where Einstein eventually got into trouble with quantum mechanics itself. Around 1935, Einstein was asked by Rudolf Carnap (who was a philosopher):
Einstein’s denied that it was possible, he said:
Prior to that encounter with Carnap, Einstein also had another disagreement with another famous philosopher, Henri Bergson, over what the proper definition of time should be (Bergson was also very well versed in the specific mental attribute of the ‘experience of the now’). In fact, that disagreement with Henri Bergson over what the proper definition of time should be was actually one of the primary reasons that Einstein failed to ever receive a Nobel prize for his work on relativity:
The specific statement that Einstein made to Carnap on the train, “The experience of ‘the now’ cannot be turned into an object of physical measurement, it can never be a part of physics.” was a very interesting statement for Einstein to make to the philosopher since “The experience of ‘the now’ has, from many recent experiments in quantum mechanics, established itself as very much being a defining part of our physical measurements in quantum mechanics.
For instance, the following delayed choice experiment with atoms demonstrated that, “It proves that measurement is everything. At the quantum level, reality does not exist if you are not looking at it,”
Likewise, the following violation of Leggett’s inequality stressed the quantum-mechanical assertion that reality does not exist when we’re not observing it.
The Mind First and/or Theistic implications of quantum experiments such as the preceding are fairly obvious. As Professor Scott Aaronson of MIT once quipped, “Look, we all have fun ridiculing the creationists,,, But if we accept the usual picture of quantum mechanics, then in a certain sense the situation is far worse: the world (as you experience it) might as well not have existed 10^-43 seconds ago!”
Thus, contrary to what Einstein himself thought was possible for experimental physics, physicists have now shown, in overwhelming fashion, that ‘the experience of the now’ is very much a part of experimental physics. In fact, due to advances in quantum mechanics, it would now be much more appropriate to rephrase Einstein’s answer to the philosopher Rudolph Carnap in this way:
Moreover, in regards to quantum mechanics and the brain itself, Stuart Hameroff’s and Roger Penrose’s contention that quantum mechanics must be at play in the brain has now been experimentally confirmed.
Of related interest: At about the 16:30 minute mark of the following video, an interesting experiment on the sleeping brain is highlighted in which it is demonstrated that there is a fairly profound difference in the way the brain ‘shares information’ between different parts of the brain in its sleeping state compared to how the brain ‘shares information’ in its waking state. i.e. In the sleeping state, the brain shares much less information with different parts of the brain than the brain does during our waking state.
The interesting thing about these long range correlations in the brain, long range correlations that differentiate a sleeping brain from a brain that is awake, is that the long range correlations are found to be, for all intents and purposes, ‘instantaneous’
In other words, ‘non-local’, beyond space and time, quantum entanglement must be invoked to explain how we are conscious.
I leave my comments on this subject here for now, but suffice it to say for now that consciousness is currently experimentally proven to forever be beyond any possible materialistic explanation. In other words, neuroscientists who may seek to explain how the brain might possibly generate consciousness, (as reasonable as that quest may seem to them), will forever be stymied in their search for that hypothetical materialistic explanation of consciousness.
i.e. To explain how consciousness is generated in the brain, as far as empirical science itself is concerned, we are now forced to appeal to a cause that is itself beyond all space-time, matter-energy.