A few questions

[bennyboy]

Absolutely, if you can demonstrate that this is the case.

You got me, because I can't even demonstrate the world outside my mind exists.

But when I make a couple assumptions, I observe (assume I observe?) that 100% of thought is found in a brain. We can even tease a brain into changing the thought it produces with drugs, disease, and injury. Using sensors we can map areas of the brain associated with different types of thought. 100% brain is all we get.

Does that mean there is no way there is a ghost in the machine? I suppose not. But as you say, 100% is compelling. At least some of the time anyway?

I think given drugs and selective brain damage experiments, etc., denying a strong link between mind and brain would involve some kind of denialist stance-- i.e. a refusal to assume there's an objective physical world at all, and that instead we're in the Matrix or the Mind of God. I'm not willing to discount those positions philosophically, but I think almost all of us implicitly reject them on a pragmatic level.

However, I think we actually understand less about both the brain and the mind than we have convinced ourselves we do. For example, we've never mapped all the neural activity associated with even a single idea-- and yet we confidently assert that an idea must necessarily be completely and exclusively, mapped in either brain structure, brain chemistry, or an interaction between them. Nor do we have even the beginnings of a plausible mechanical theory of consiousness, or even a comprehensive definition of what it is-- instead, we kind of wave toward the brain and say, "It's for sure in there somewhere." So when you talk about 100% correlation, it must be considered a very course kind of correlation. It's like saying that the Earth is conscious, because all consciousness we know about is somewhere on the Earth, or that the Universe is conscious, because all thought must necessarily be happening within it.

I want a microscopic level of detail. I want to point to a specific type of neuron, firing under a specific condition, and say, "THAT, right there. . . that is the most fundamental element of consciousness." But right now, the state of neurology makes this seem unlikely (i.e. probably false).