April 9. Blisk McQueen comments on The Accidental Universe. He describes his background in reductionist hard science, and how he got in serious trouble for writing a paper pointing out the similarity between DNA and primitive programming languages, which would imply a programmer. Blocked from continuing to study genetics, he switched to neurochemistry, where he still believed "that human consciousness is merely an emergent phenomenon mediated by electrochemical signals" -- until he tried psilocybin mushrooms. Now he thinks science is in "a blind corner" by studying only measurable things and ignoring consciousness.
On the same subject, Embrace the Unexplained: how fantastic stories unlock the nature of consciousness. The author cites examples of unexplained visions related to people dying, but they're hard to study because they cannot be replicated or measured. He speculates that strong psychic phenomena are rare because they require intense emotion, that psychic visions are best viewed as hallucinations that somehow correspond to real events, and that the brain is like a radio tuner for some kind of collective consciousness.
Can you give me a non-circular definition of the difference between "hallucination" and "real"? I've done more thinking on this stuff than on any other subject, and when people say it's easy for science to put consciousness first, they have no idea how deep the rabbit hole goes. This is a book-length subject, and the best book so far, The Trickster and the Paranormal by George Hansen, merely hints at it.
Let me try a scientific metaphor: Newtonian physics is extremely powerful within a certain range, but it would be a mistake to think it can explain everything, because there is a wider range that we can only understand with quantum physics or relativity.
In the same way, science as we know it has given us amazing stuff like space probes and the internet. But it operates under deep philosophical assumptions that are not open for testing, and it is a mistake to think that we can explain everything while continuing to make those assumptions.
If we make a different set of deep assumptions, objective materialist science is not wrong. It remains a valuable shortcut, an intellectual tool that works perfectly well within a certain range. Meanwhile, we can begin to understand experiences that modern science must exclude. We might classify these these under "the paranormal" or "fringe science" or sometimes "conspiracy theory". But even people who explore this stuff with an open mind are rarely using the appropriate core philosophies, so they get frustrated and half-crazy looking for "proof" or "the truth". I think we can explore consciousness with science in the sense that we can make hypotheses and test them, but we won't get anywhere until we abandon the requirement that your perspective and my perspective must be consistent. Do I "believe in ghosts"? Where is the end of the rainbow?