Here's an ingenious experiment - and a surprising one. By placing those pictures where only someone floating around near the ceiling could spot them, the boffins are entertaining the possibility that someone who is very obviously not floating around near the ceiling, but lying unconscious with eyes closed and brain non-functioning, might somehow be able to 'see' them. In other words, they are entertaining the possibility that the mind might not be local to the brain.
I'm relishing the possibility that they might get 'sightings' of those pictures. I believe it's possible, as there are records of 'hysterical' and hypnagogic conditions in which the sense of sight seems to come quite adrift from its optical location. It would be good, at least, to have a dent put in our idea of our selves as entities seated behind our eyes, looking out on the world - the equation, in other words, of mind with brain and brain with our whole selves.
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I've just added you to my list of people to kill.
ReplyDeleteThese pictures remind me of so many of my blog posts.It requires a bloody miracle before anybody bothers to look at them.
ReplyDeletePS. I don't like the look of this Dawkins character. If he gives you any trouble, Nige, give me a call. Judy can be around there in ten minutes, or five if the wind's behind her.
ReplyDeleteWhy would it be good to have a dent put in that idea? The brain is a perfectly agreeable, well-appointed location for the self, providing excellent views of external reality and well served by a host of local amenities, including other essential organs. To locate the self anywhere else would be madness, in my view, especially in the current economic climate.
ReplyDeleteIt's hard to see much coming from this. No matter what the experiment, you are looking for signs of a non-physical, intelligent and self-aware dimension that (if the experiment is to work) can be detected among our familiar physical dimensions. But almost by definition, if this new dimension exists, then it exists outside what we apprehend as the physical. No prizes for guessing that you won't find anything by poking around in our familiar three dimensions, even if you plaster the ceiling with Rembrandts!
ReplyDeleteThanks for the offer Dick/Judy. Who is this Dawkins fellow anyway? Name rings a bell. Not the one in the wheelchair with the funny voice is he? I could take him out on my own....
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