Mind/Matter dualism

[Koko Ricky]

The argument that they're the same thing gets muddy because the higher the dimension you're embedded in, the more everything gets lumped together. You add another dimension or two beyond the three we know of (plus time) and suddenly huge aspects of reality are reduced to a single point. Plus, all matter was fused together (supposedly) right before the universe initiated its inflationary expanse, so everything literally is the same thing in that regard. But what you're talking about is probably closer to my water analogy; the water is already there, but enough has to be present so it can be observed. The problem with thought is the inability to produce an observable effect, unless you're the the one having the the thought. So if they are the same thing, then one half is oddly invisible to all but one person in the universe, and the other half can be observed through brain scans. Why is this, I wonder.

[fraggle]

The recent advances in deep neural networks (example) are pretty much the death knell of the idea that the brain relies on any kind of quantum effects, IMO. Sure we don't have anything close to an actual brain yet, but there have been so many successes attained with neural networks emulated through simple software (computer vision, etc.) that it basically shows quantum effects are completely unnecessary. Honestly it was a cute idea when Penrose proposed it back in the '90s but it's pretty clear now that it's not the case.

[Fonze]

GoatLord said:

The argument that they're the same thing gets muddy because the higher the dimension you're embedded in, the more everything gets lumped together. You add another dimension or two beyond the three we know of (plus time) and suddenly huge aspects of reality are reduced to a single point. Plus, all matter was fused together (supposedly) right before the universe initiated its inflationary expanse, so everything literally is the same thing in that regard. But what you're talking about is probably closer to my water analogy; the water is already there, but enough has to be present so it can be observed. The problem with thought is the inability to produce an observable effect, unless you're the the one having the the thought. So if they are the same thing, then one half is oddly invisible to all but one person in the universe, and the other half can be observed through brain scans. Why is this, I wonder.

How is your own thought observable to you? It's something that happens in your own head; there is nothing to observe. Experience, perhaps, but not to observe (you can't sense thoughts). The problem, though, with experiencing thoughts is that they are not embedded in the real world and are therefore not real. The same can be said for dreams, of which I can have nightmares of, say, My Little Brony that scar me for life, yet it wasn't real so I would be a fool to be scarred by (or take seriously) such a thing. Dreams, thoughts; they are nothing and we shouldn't view our own as important. I think part of the problem is that your looking for something more when the answer has been in front of you.

Now, do I believe in the soul? Yes. Could it be what really makes our thoughts feel so real and important to us? I suppose. But we are truly not much different from animals, so they must have a soul too, or none of us do. And our thoughts are about as much of nothing, if not far more-so, than we are in the grand scheme of things. I think that that is where your over-all point is leading, to the question of if we have souls because that's the only illogical reason as to why it can't just be biology and physics. We're getting into the realm of unanswerable questions and much as Socrates experienced, nobody has the answer. Unlike Socrates you haven't been sentenced to death or shameful exile by an angry mob, but I suppose this gets into not looking for answers, but asking the right questions.

If we are to look to religion; maybe God made our thoughts unobservable to others because by themselves they are totally worthless and only serve to feed complacency by saying, "well, at least I thought about it/you." heh

[Koko Ricky]

Fonze said:

How is your own thought observable to you? It's something that happens in your own head; there is nothing to observe. Experience, perhaps, but not to observe (you can't sense thoughts).

We might be getting into semantics here, but is there really a difference between experience and observed phenomenon? Are they not both essentially the same thing? Right now I'm typing this message; that is both an experience (the awareness I have of the action) and and observed phenomenon (the awareness I have of the action). It seems to me like they're basically the same thing. If I have a thought, I am experiencing the sensation of thinking, and I'm also observing the thought, which may be a sound or an image. I am observing it because, with a bit of patience, I can recreate the thought by illustrating it or by recording a specific sound.

Fonze said:

The problem, though, with experiencing thoughts is that they are not embedded in the real world and are therefore not real.

On what basis do you assume this? What is the criteria for "real"? If I produce a thought and see or hear it, how is that anything other than real? Isn't anything that's imagined literally real since I can then tell you what I was thinking about? Even fictional things like unicorns are real in the sense that humans imagine them (and we can see in brain scans that it's happening even if we don't see the image of the animal), and then use mouth noises (which are definitely physically real) to convey what they imagined.

Fonze said:

Dreams, thoughts; they are nothing...

Even in the supposed vacuum of space, quantum foam ensures that virtual particles constantly pop in and out of existence. It is literally impossible for nothingness to exist except as an abstract concept, such as, I had three apples in a bowl and removed them, now there are zero. But there's always stuff, material, atoms, quanta. Your logic seems to be that, because you cannot hold a thought in your hands or examine it under a microscope, it is "nothing." If something is nothing, then it shouldn't have any perceivable qualities at all and yet we have thoughts and dreams all the time!

Fonze said:

I think that that is where your over-all point is leading, to the question of if we have souls because that's the only illogical reason as to why it can't just be biology and physics. We're getting into the realm of unanswerable questions and much as Socrates experienced, nobody has the answer.

To me, words like "soul," "life force," "life essence," "spirit," "consciousness," "being," etc., are all mouth noises designed to compartmentalize the unspeakable, which is that innate sense that we're inside of ourselves, that there's a "little man"--what in the past has been called a homunculus--inside of each of us. There absolutely is some sort of strange phenomenon happening, which is very real, otherwise we would not have thoughts and we would not articulate those thoughts. You seem to believe this is real, so why not extend that and say that the thoughts and dreams this "little man" produces are also real?

Fonze said:

If we are to look to religion; maybe God made our thoughts unobservable to others because by themselves they are totally worthles...

That invalidates pretty much the entire course of humanity. It is because of thoughts--and only thoughts--that we went from hurling spears and grunting at one another to electrifying the entire world. Tesla himself came up with alternating current because of a vivid hallucination. He claimed to have seen all the moving parts. Now, whether or not he was a lunatic (probably a bit) is irrelevant, because his thoughts led him to basically create the modern world. That is not real, you say? That is nothing, you say? He literally manifested his thought as a physical object.

fraggle said:

The recent advances in deep neural networks (example) are pretty much the death knell of the idea that the brain relies on any kind of quantum effects, IMO. Sure we don't have anything close to an actual brain yet, but there have been so many successes attained with neural networks emulated through simple software (computer vision, etc.) that it basically shows quantum effects are completely unnecessary. Honestly it was a cute idea when Penrose proposed it back in the '90s but it's pretty clear now that it's not the case.

It just seems weird to me that quantum processes only govern some aspects of reality but not others. I think maybe quantum theory is incomplete and only seems like it works at specific scales. But I totally see what you mean.

[Tosi]

GoatLord said:

It just seems weird to me that quantum processes only govern some aspects of reality but not others. I think maybe quantum theory is incomplete and only seems like it works at specific scales. But I totally see what you mean.

Actually quantum mechanics governs all aspects of reality. It's just that at certain scales Newtonian physics (or special relativity) is a good enough approximation that there's no point in computing with a much more complicated theory.

There's a result presented in most QM textbooks that explains how to obtain Newtonian physics (or special relativity if you're using RQM) from QM. The result states that the expectation values for quantum mechanical observables follow Newton's equations of motion.

You can also go the other way; starting with the Poisson brackets of a classical theory, you can replace them by commutators and replace the classical variables with quantum operators to obtain a quantum (bosonic) theory. If you use anti-commutators then you get a fermionic theory.

I do agree that quantum theory is incomplete, but so is any theory that humans could come up with. However, theories such as quantum electrodynamics have been tested to such a scale of accuracy that they will suffice for any technology we need in the near future. The only reason to go deeper is out of a curiosity to learn more.

[NoXion]

GoatLord said:

First off here's a few links about macroscopic quantum behavior. There's shitloads of Google results.

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2010/mar/18/quantum-effect-spotted-in-a-visible-object
https://www.ted.com/talks/aaron_o_connell_making_sense_of_a_visible_quantum_object?language=en
http://phys.org/news/2015-07-macroscopic-quantum-phenomena-ice.html

And the relativistic argument doesn't really work out. It's well known that gravity and quantum mechanics don't get along due to gravity implying that electrons should crash into the nucleus, which of course they do not. String theory is seen as a way of allowing the two to co-exist. I think it's really silly to believe that you can draw some line in the sand where quantum phenomena stops being relevant. That's not reality so much as an extreme limitation of our understanding of physics, which is wholly incomplete.

Your first example is problematic because in order to observe the quantum effect macroscopically, they had to cool an object down to near absolute zero. So that would not be applicable to any Earthly organism. The second one is the same, except that it also introduces a vacuum. Again, not applicable to organisms on Earth. Your third example also involves temperatures that don't naturally exist on Earth; 20 Kelvin.

Basically what you are doing is pointing to edge cases (and close to absolute zero temperature is as edgy as it gets!) and claiming that they can apply in general, without further explanation. You need to show a generalisable application of the principle in order to make your case.

Edge cases are only to be expected in the complex universe in which we live; there isn't a "line in the sand" above which quantum effects suddenly no longer apply. Instead what happens is that quantum mechanics increasingly fades into the background, getting "lost in the noise", the further up the physical scales one goes. Lower temperatures can increase the scale at which quantum mechanical effects manifest, but you need to get pretty damn close to absolute zero for that to start happening at the kind of size scales that are directly relevant to the lived experience of human beings. But in so doing you end up moving out of the temperature scales in which human beings and similar organisms can even survive, let alone live comfortably.

...

As for the notion that brains are somehow the receivers rather than the generators of consciousness, I have seen other people elsewhere propose this. But I make no apologies for having a scientific/rationalist bias, and therefore I ask: how could such a hypothesis be proven false? It is all too possible for the proponents of such a hypothesis to continously move the goalposts when evidence contradicting their most recent iteration of their hypothesis turns up. Not only that, it introduces unnecessary terms and is inadequate to explain the functioning of the human brain as we currently understand it. That the mind is something which the brain does is too successful an explanation for the receiver hypothesis to be viable. If there was anything to it, then the materialist framework now used by neuroscientists would be continuously running into serious problems, but it isn't.

[dew]

GoatLord said:

Some people believe the brain receives rather than transmits consciousness, in which case, consciousness is some fundamental aspect of the universe and each organism experiences one (but not all) of its frequencies. One very strange side effect of say, smoking or vaporizing DMT (which your brain produces and which, for psychedelic purposes, is extracted from plants which for some bizarre reason contain neurotransmitters), is the feeling of overwhelming consciousness being present literally everywhere. I remember administering a tiny, tiny little bit to a friend as an experiment, and he reported an instant, unbelievable sense of consciousness emanating from everywhere, and within a few seconds he was astral projecting (I've experienced the same). Now, is this just a chemical reaction in the brain? Or is it possible to experience additional frequencies of awareness? Who knows. It could all be tricks of the mind. It could be something more.

WHY WON'T YOU STOP WITH THE JUNKIE PROPAGANDA? JUST FUCK OFF WITH THIS NEW-AGE BULLSHIT, PLEASE!

[Koko Ricky]

What are you so angry about, dew? You're the one who posted the "new age bullshit," taken from the generator. I was very suspicious that was the case when I read it, but I decided to humor you and see if there was anything I could work with. And I don't know if you're aware, but junkie or junky is a term for heroin addicts. Also, NoXion, thanks for the heads up, that was very insightful. I don't intend to provide evidence for the "brain as a receiver rather than transmitter" argument, because it's a philosophical pondering, rather than an attempt to prove anything concretely.

[Clonehunter]

dew has yet to be enlightened. He will continue to act out with his penis envy. But, he will soon be awakened by a power deep within himself — a power that is pranic, sublime.

[j4rio]

Now, is this just a chemical reaction in the brain? Or is it possible to experience additional frequencies of awareness? Who knows. It could all be tricks of the mind. It could be something more.

Experiences like that achieved with a xenobiotic are purely tricks of the mind. These chemicals disrupt the physiological state of body and the effect is basically the manifestation of it. If a chemical disrupts your gut, you'll get shits, if it disrupts your center of consciousness, you get, well, you get something. That something however ends once the disrupting chemical gets removed by your body and then attempts to repair whatever disruption this chemical caused.

Also, DMT is not a physiological neurotransmitter and is not present in the body at a concentration absolutely anywhere near as high as what you need to smoke to trip balls. You are nonetheless distorting your basic brain functions with it, because normally you are never under effect of that much DMT whatsoever.

[BaronOfStuff]

Oh, another one of these topics.

[NoXion]

dew said:

WHY WON'T YOU STOP WITH THE JUNKIE PROPAGANDA? JUST FUCK OFF WITH THIS NEW-AGE BULLSHIT, PLEASE!

If GoatLord is indeed promoting "junkie propaganda" then judging by the reactions he's getting, nobody's falling for it.

However, I don't think that's what he's doing. I think he's just a somewhat philosophical individual whose existential curiosity outpaces his intellectual discipline.

To be perfectly honest, I kind of wish more people were like him in some ways, rather than wrapped up absolute nonsense like reality TV.

GoatLord said:

Also, NoXion, thanks for the heads up, that was very insightful. I don't intend to provide evidence for the "brain as a receiver rather than transmitter" argument, because it's a philosophical pondering, rather than an attempt to prove anything concretely.

Actually, I didn't ask you for evidence. My question regarding falsifiability was rational rather than empirical. When you ponder a philosophical concept, it's just as useful - if not more so! - to think of ways it could be proven wrong as it is to think of ways it could be proven right. You don't need access to a laboratory or the know-how to properly read a scientific paper - it's the sort of thing the ancient Greek philosophers could have done. Yes, they often got things wrong, but they also entertained some surprisingly prescient concepts, like Democritus' atomism, Anaximander's proto-evolutionary ideas about Earthly life, and Epicurus' plurality of worlds (a precursor to modern notions of exoplanets inhabited by extraterrestrial life).

[durian]

GoatLord said:

I don't intend to provide evidence for the "brain as a receiver rather than transmitter" argument, because it's a philosophical pondering, rather than an attempt to prove anything concretely.

Not to admonish you for the clearly rather loose way in which you're using terms like "philosophy" and "philosophical", but you do the discipline a disservice by invoking it in this way. It's true that claims advanced within philosophy, and in particular the metaphysics of mind, tend not to be the kinds of claims that can be tested empirically, but this doesn't mean that they're not subject to any constraints. In this area (as I think I've mentioned before) the chief constraints (aside from coherence) are explanatory - that is, any position you advance must earn its keep through its capacity to account for something - some range of generally accepted facts. Further, since there will always be competing positions on offer, you should also be able to give good reasons/arguments for finding your favoured explanation preferable to others. This kind of work is the main business of philosophy; it isn't proof-free zone where we don't have to worry about justifying the claims that we make.

[Koko Ricky]

A few things worth mentioning:

1) A common definition of philosophy is "the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence, especially when considered as an academic discipline." I listen to lectures and interviews with philophers, scientists and spiritual leaders, as well as occasionally read books regarding different scientific disciplines, then engage in conversation about related topics. This may not be strict academic philosophy, but I believe it in some way falls under the definition, so I don't see how my use of the term is "loose." Maybe it's just armchair philosophy and therefore is invalid? I can accept that.

2) I don't tend to make claims about reality. I think about aspects of reality and compare it with how other people view it. I don't cling to these thought experiments as being true. I have very few concrete beliefs about the nature of reality because I do not have confidence that I can understand it properly.

3) There is a tendency by most people to reject what I feel is the best evidence that the contents of the mind is far more encompassing than the "it's all in your head" paradigm that is currently so popular. When I recommend someone ingest psilocybin or vaporize DMT as a means of directly observing a state in which the duality of mind/matter completely dissolves, I'm typically met with dismissal by people who not only refuse to try the experiment but also reduce the experience to cognitive dissonance, as though the experience is utterly meaningless and arbitrary.

4) Due to the laughably poor understanding we have of consciousness, there's no way I can offer a way to prove or disprove my ideas (they are not theories or hypotheses). I can only offer what I stated above, and if you're a scientific rationalist or a denominational theist, then you will likely not take my word seriously, which I understand. I think there are a lot misconceptions surrounding such experiments which attempt to explore the nature of consciousness, due to post-hippy "drug culture" memes and new-age pseudoscience.

[Guest DILDOMASTER666]

I think my thoughts are entirely determined by my unique chemical composition at this very moment. I think it's also incorrect to elevate the worth of our experiences to "beyond our bodies"; this suggests some unknowable, unseeable "truth" about ourselves, which I think is a stupid and poisonous line of thinking in lieu of actual knowledge on the subject.

[durian]

Heh, all philosophy is armchair philosophy :)
I said that you're using the term loosely because, though you describe your inquiries as philosophical, you don't seem to be attempting to comport yourself especially closely with the norms of philosophy as an academic discipline, and as the definition you supply acknowledges, this is one of the term's principal connotations. Anyway, there's no harm in that; I just wanted to note the slight awkwardness in disavowing the obligation to offer any reasons for supposing that the things you've said might be true, on the basis that they're "philosophical" ponderings, since philosophy has always been very explicitly focused on reasons.

[Koko Ricky]

durian said:

Heh, all philosophy is armchair philosophy :)
I said that you're using the term loosely because, though you describe your inquiries as philosophical, you don't seem to be attempting to comport yourself especially closely with the norms of philosophy as an academic discipline, and as the definition you supply acknowledges, this is one of the term's principal connotations. Anyway, there's no harm in that; I just wanted to note the slight awkwardness in disavowing the obligation to offer any reasons for supposing that the things you've said might be true, on the basis that they're "philosophical" ponderings, since philosophy has always been very explicitly focused on reasons.

Well, as I said, the reason I ponder about reality in the manner that I do is scoff-worthy to most people. I tend to feel as though everything is literally real, that there's no cutoff between dreams, thoughts, hallucinations, subjective experience, the recognition of external/internal sensory stimuli, etc. Now, can I offer a specific reason I feel this way? Not really. But the idea that you can draw a line in the sand between the "real" world and the apparently not real world of things we conveniently don't understand (such as the goings on of the mind) makes utterly no sense to me. It's like saying a scientist is doing unnatural things in the lab, despite the fact that he could not do those things without manipulating the natural world. There is not really any basis for separating things into real/not real because all that can exist is reality. There is no "non reality" state that a person or object can exist in.

Fisk said:

I think my thoughts are entirely determined by my unique chemical composition at this very moment. I think it's also incorrect to elevate the worth of our experiences to "beyond our bodies"; this suggests some unknowable, unseeable "truth" about ourselves, which I think is a stupid and poisonous line of thinking in lieu of actual knowledge on the subject.

Why is that a stupid way to think? I'm not going to say it's correct or incorrect, because I can't prove it one way or the other, but if you're going to say it's a stupid and poisonous way to think, you should explain why you believe that to be. I personally think getting very specific the way Abrahamic religions do is poisonous, but to question whether or not the apparently internal theatrics of our minds is more than we assume it to be doesn't seem stupid so much as in opposition to scientific materialism. What do you believe thoughts are, anyway? We can say they're the manifestation of electrochemical exchanges between neurons, but that doesn't reveal why I can simultaneously experience both the world around me and images/sounds which only I can sense, simply by willing myself to do so.

[durian]

The thing is, there have been many thinkers over time who have held views that aren't at all far from what you've just said, but who also attempted to give good reasons and sound arguments for thinking the things that they did, so you might enjoy dipping your toes in:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/idealism/

[j4rio]

GoatLord said:

Why is that a stupid way to think? I'm not going to say it's correct or incorrect, because I can't prove it one way or the other, but if you're going to say it's a stupid and poisonous way to think, you should explain why you believe that to be.

Because philosophical answers to questions have no applicable substance to them? I highly doubt many very important inventions would be possible if we simply accepted truth behind untestable philosophical theories without delving further into matters.

[fraggle]

GoatLord said:

I tend to feel as though everything is literally real, that there's no cutoff between dreams, thoughts, hallucinations, subjective experience, the recognition of external/internal sensory stimuli, etc. Now, can I offer a specific reason I feel this way? Not really.

I can probably think of a few reasons.

[JXC]

If you want to stop arguing about this dualism stuff, then go watch Qualia Soup's excellent 2-part video refutation of dualism.

[Koko Ricky]

I'm not really arguing because I do not definitively believe my view is correct, and in fact it's not even a view so much as a "what if" scenario; an attempt to express this strange notion I have that trying to compartmentalize different experiences into "real" and "not real" is illusory. It seems VERY convenient that since we don't understand the intangibility of thought, we say it isn't real. That's like saying 2+2=4 isn't real because you won't find such a mathematical abstract literally floating in space; but it is clearly real as a concept, even though concepts are non-physical. If I see something in my head and illustrate it for you, does it only become real because of the physical action, or was it always real because I couldn't have illustrated it without first having the internal experience of the idea? I'm gong to watch that video.

EDIT: Just finished watching. Very heady stuff, I'll probably have to re-watch several times to fully absorb it, but it was fascinating nonetheless. One thing I immediately took away from it is that it's inadequate to describe a phenomenon as not being something else. The subjective experience of mind is not "real," because for something to be "real" it must be made of quanta and particles. That's a good start, but if you can't explain why phenomena that is not made of quanta and particles isn't real, then you've failed to provide a concrete definition for reality.

[j4rio]

GoatLord said:

The subjective experience of mind is not "real," because for something to be "real" it must be made of quanta and particles. That's a good start, but if you can't explain why phenomena that is not made of quanta and particles isn't real, then you've failed to provide a concrete definition for reality.

A sufficiently big active neuronal network communicating through electrical synapses isn't real enough? And I'm not talking about mechanism of creation of thoughts as you keep putting it, I'm talking about thoughts themselves. A thought may simply be a composition of few thousands of neuronal synapses. As in, one day we may decode entirely the way they communicate and with usage of this knowledge even extract thoughts themselves. It may sound as science fiction at this point but you never know what may future bring.

[Koko Ricky]

I'm actually quite positive that technological progression will inevitably lead to decoding the electrochemical signals into proper images and even sounds. It'll be extremely fuzzy and noisy at first, but over time it'll become sharper and more detailed. However, that to me would not bridge the gap between subjective experience and objective observation.

That is because the act of producing a thought (which is "non-ordinary" reality) has this funny way of overlaying itself on top of "ordinary" reality. If for instance I imagine an apple, I am simultaneously witnessing both the ordinary reality around me and the non-ordinary reality of the imagined image. I could try to describe it as being like having a 50% transparent Photoshop layer placed above a layer which is the external world around me, but the effect is far more subtle than that.

So subtle, in fact, that if I get sufficiently lost in a thought, the external world seems to almost disappear, even though my awareness of it is always there. If you were to ask a special effects company to recreate such a scene in a movie, they would be unable to do so, because there is a sense that two realities are co-existing in a larger structure which we do not have a name for and which is unfortunately not open to investigation, since, at least for science, there is nothing to measure other than brain activity.

That inability to dissect one's capacity to think of an internal scenario and participate in the external world simultaneously will not be resolved by producing dream images, because it will not explain how it's possible for a location to be both embedded in our subjective experiences and yet only have a causal location and not a manifested location.

[Fonze]

If you imagine an apple, can you eat it? Can it sustain your life?

If I take bath salts and think that I'm a zombie, does that make it okay for me to eat somebody's face off?

If what you think is real then I might as well go around telling people I'm Rambo because I've seen, thought about, and therefore experienced his greatest struggles.

[Koko Ricky]

If a thought is not real, then what it is it? And I'm not talking about how having a thought must mean that it's physically real, I'm talking about the fact that the experience of having the thought is real, in that, you can recall having the thought later on.

[durian]

I don't really want to get sucked into this, but who ever said that thoughts, or mental events more generally, weren't real? Seems like a pretty extreme view to me.

[Koko Ricky]

We're told that growing up. "It's not real," "It's all in your head," etc. I have heard the "Thoughts aren't real" stance countless times. It makes no sense. All experience is real, but some experiences are physical and some are...something not quite physical, or if it is physical, we don't have the tools to understand it. People make those kinds of statements when they don't understand something. We don't understand the mind, so we say that its contents aren't real in the same way external reality is.

[Xerge]

I don't believe in this, but I think you might find it interesting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliminative_materialism

[Aliotroph?]

GoatLord said:

We're told that growing up. "It's not real," "It's all in your head," etc. I have heard the "Thoughts aren't real" stance countless times. It makes no sense. All experience is real, but some experiences are physical and some are...something not quite physical, or if it is physical, we don't have the tools to understand it. People make those kinds of statements when they don't understand something. We don't understand the mind, so we say that its contents aren't real in the same way external reality is.

They were saying the monster under your bed wasn't real, and they were correct. It was a thought, so it was in your head. Why is this so troubling to you?

People minimize each other's experiences all the time. It's similar to the reaction you probably got when you spent all day babbling about something you did with your friend that your family didn't get to do. They got tired of your focus on something they couldn't experience.

GoatLord said:

That inability to dissect one's capacity to think of an internal scenario and participate in the external world simultaneously will not be resolved by producing dream images, because it will not explain how it's possible for a location to be both embedded in our subjective experiences and yet only have a causal location and not a manifested location.

Why is this so mysterious? Brains generate inputs for their own sensory-processing circuitry and feed it in alongside real inputs. This appears to be almost entirely dependent on possession of a rich pool of memories to recall. Nobody imagines a space marine without either remembering a space marine or having something to base the idea on (space and marines?).