Many of you will have, as of late, noticed, my many preoccupations with the burgeoning field of brain studies. See, i.e. here, and i.e. here.
There is a brilliant man named John Loftus who has a blog, called Debunking Christianity. But really I see Loftus as being primarily a kind of scientist. Not one in the academy per se (to his penultimate credit) but as an independent scientist and intellectual, in the tradition of Aristotle, Descartes, and Buckminster Fuller. For example, Loftus’ scholarly refutation of so-called Intelligent Design is almost as good as mine, which is a high compliment to him coming from me. For good measure, I’ll also add my two take-downs of seventh day adventist theologian William Dembski.
To get back to brain studies, Loftus has recently investigated the mind/body problem.
Unless you can solve [the mind/body] problem for me I cannot take seriously any beliefs in gods, spirits, poltergeists, out of body experiences, or miracles performed in the physical world by a spiritual God.
As I have shown, in an important sense the brain is the body, as demonstrated by especially pain studies, and even further especially the amygdala. And insofar as the brain is not the body, it is part of and through the body.
Like Loftus, I think the current attempts to solve this “problem” are way off base. Scientists are too quick to just assume an occult phenomenon like pain-at-a-distance (called “projection”), akin to gravity, in order to localize the human brain in the skull. This is patently absurd, as daily human experience demonstrates.
This John Loftus fellow is also similar to me in that he gets frustrated when people hear a “noise in the night” and invoke something mystical to solve it, ’cause they’re scared. Is this not my exact point in refuting Brian Greene on dark matter? Twice?
Science and Math Defeated 