“Brain” — you assume there is a purely, “stand-alone” “physical” brain. That is not direct evidence, that is an assumption.

If you visit the neuropsychology lab where I did part of my doctoral internship, you’ll see — in conventional language — a brain on the lab table, several interns standing around talking about it, a neuropsychologist giving information about it, walls, ceiling, floor, chairs, etc You have an implicit assumption that what you “see” is a stand-alone set of physical objects.

But that is an assumption. Assuming you are functioning in the average waking state that most humans in the modern age function in, all you know for certain — beyond a shadow of a doubt — is that there is an image in awareness (note I didn’t say “your” awareness) which is a unified image, not broken up into brains, tables, interns, walls, etc. One interconnected image in awareness.

now, if we accept (I don’t) the neuroscientists’ analysis of how this image comes to be, it is NOT “out there” but entirely constructed in our brain. This is not woo woo, not new age pabulum, not old mystical superstition, but one of the most universally agreed upon understandings of sensory perception over more than 150 years.

So right away, you have all kinds of assumptions (not just you but 99% of people) that are in conflict with science. We’re not touching philosophy here, just looking at the science, good old every day science that you may have learned in high school or junior high, nothing even about quantum physics.

Now, there’s 2 sets of words remaining to be looked at more closely.

Look carefully — can you tell the difference between these two sets:

SET #1: Moon, sun, retina

SET #2: photons, electrochemical signals, networks of neural connections

Think a little longer before I answer.

What is the difference bewteen the moon and photons, between the sun and electrochemical signals?

Let’s take the 2nd one:

The sun, you see. Of course, taking the neuroscientific analysis, the image “sun” that appears in awareness is NOT — according to science, realistic science (it’s officially known as “critical realism” which I’ve mentioned to you before but it’s been awhile) — something that exists objectively, out there.

I guess I have to repeat: I”m NOT saying “If you don’t look the sun is not there.” I’m saying, “if you don’t look at the sun image, the sun image is not out there.”

But you experience the sun image directly. you can’t doubt you experience it. A billion people could tell you you are not experiencing it, but you woudln’t doubt for a moment — because you KNOW — you experience the image. You may be in a dream or state of psychosis, but it is absolutely true that you are experiencing the sun image.

Now, electrochemical signals? Can you see, touch, taste, hear or smell them? Be very careful here it gets tricky — if you touch a live wire you’ll feel a shock, but are you DIRECTLY PERCEIVING ‘electricity?

Neuroscientists and psychologists, looking at the activity of the brain through some kind of imaging device, see something, but once again, that’s an image in awareness.

But does that mean I’m saying “electrochemical messages transmitted from the eye down the optic nerve to the occipital lobe and then on to other parts of the cortex and subcortical regions all of which is correlated somehow with the image in awareness” does NOT exist?

no.

Here, I’ll sum it up.

In fact, I’ll do it in historical context and it may make more sense.

Back at the beginning of the modern age, there were terrible religious wars, AND there was some (not as much as some historians claim) persecution of some of the scientists trying to create a new scientific method (some of the greatest members of the church were encouraging the new method, so we have to be careful not to make the history black and white).

whatever the specific facts were about the conflict between religion and science, a number of scientists, like Diderot, were concerned enough that they proposed — like Descartes and Galileo — a separation of spheres.

Religion got SET #1 — the mind, soul, experience, the qualities of color, sound, touch, etc.

Science was given SET #2 — purely abstract, numerical relationships.

Somewhere around the mid to late 19th century, a growing number of scientists forgot about this division, and came to believe, because their analysis of the abstract numerical relationships of measurable features of our conscious experience was so successful, THEIR abstract numbers represented Reality and our conscious experience merely an illusory set of images constructed in the brain.

now, if you take abstract numbers, and ask if they are alive, conscious, intelligent or sentient, well, AND you think these abstract numerical relationships represent Reality, then of course you will think the real world is dead, unconscious stupid and insentient.

And there were people — William Blake, among the most inspired, but many even at the time of Galileo and Bacon (some of them members of the church who advocated for the new scientific method BUT warned them not to take it as being reaity)— who way way back before agnosticism and atheism started to become popular predicted quite clearly that it might be possible that scientists would one day forget they’re only taking a tiny slice of conscious experience and confusing it with Reality.

So there’s really nothing else to say or prove. When people say, “Science has steadily replaced supernatural causes with physical ones” there is no meaning to that statement. “Supernatural” in this case is meaningless; “cause” as most people, including scientists and all too many philosophers, is meaningless, and “physical” in the abstract sense (SET #2) — as a philosophic description fo reality — is the most meaningless word in all of science, EXCEPT when you’re using it in a very narrow way as physicists properly do.

I suggest before asking me for any more help (though I enjoy this thoroughly) go to YouTube, look for Bernardo Kastrup’s Analytic Idealism course, and go through #1 and #2. ignore the first 15 minutes of #1, I think it’s badly explained. And don’t bother with the rest; I have studied Bernardo’s idealist alternative since 2013. I told him back then it was not clear, and I only think it’s gotten worse since then. But he is one of the best alive in his critique of naive realism (your columns are a mix of naive and — fortunately — critical realism), and his critique of materialism and physicalism.

Thanks for this conversation.