“All the evidence we have shows an association between certain parts of the brain and certain mental processes. But it’s a chicken and egg question: Does cellular activity produce the mind, or does the mind produce cellular activity?”
Say you want to raise your arm. Your intent will initiate the mental processes required. We don’t know how the subjective thinking of ”Raise arm!” initiates cellular processes. Intent may be related to a function of the parietal cortex, but how thinking something initiates cellular process we are unsure of. To this they refer.
The brain produces an electromagnetic field. They were hypothesising that the field has a reciprocal effect on the cells that produce it, and this effect is ‘consciousness’ or whatever our subjective experience communicates to initiate an action. Maybe when we can clone a human brain with green fluorescent protein we’ll find out all neurones initiate other neurones, thus we function. We don’t know yet.
I’d beware of dismissing an expert of a field in which one has no domain expertise—check or ask first. This is the corollary to trusting experts too much.
Say you want to raise your arm. Your intent will initiate the mental processes required. We don’t know how the subjective thinking of ”Raise arm!” initiates cellular processes. Intent may be related to a function of the parietal cortex, but how thinking something initiates cellular process we are unsure of. To this they refer.
The brain produces an electromagnetic field. They were hypothesising that the field has a reciprocal effect on the cells that produce it, and this effect is ‘consciousness’ or whatever our subjective experience communicates to initiate an action. Maybe when we can clone a human brain with green fluorescent protein we’ll find out all neurones initiate other neurones, thus we function. We don’t know yet.
I’d beware of dismissing an expert of a field in which one has no domain expertise—check or ask first. This is the corollary to trusting experts too much.