(May 18, 2025 at 12:16 am)John 6IX Breezy Wrote:(May 17, 2025 at 7:46 pm)emjay Wrote: And the amount of correlational evidence is overwhelming, and anyone arguing the counter case that consciousness is independent of the brain... and I don't know if you are arguing that, but if you believe in an afterlife, I assume you must be to some extent... has to answer why they even have a brain and why physical interactions with it, such as brain damage and drugs, have reliable and predictable effects on consciousness.
As a Christian I'm a monist in terms of the mind-body problem, consciousness emerges out of complex processes and is inseparable from the brain.
But as a psychologist, I'm part of a newer school of thought that has begun to view consciousness as fundamental in the structure of reality, and that treats cognition not as locked inside a brain in a vat, but as embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended (what's called 4E cognition).
You'd probably enjoy David Bentley Hart's book All Things are Full of Gods, if you haven't read it already.
It's an extended argument about all the current mind/body theories, and comes to a conclusion something like the one you describe.
He wrote it all as a dialogue among Greek gods, with Hephaestus of course representing the materialists, and Psyche and Hermes on the other side. It sounds cringe, but it does work, and makes extended description of theory more readable. You'd no doubt get more out of it than I did.
https://www.amazon.com/All-Things-Are-Fu...315&sr=8-6
