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Originally Posted by Radical  Supernatural phenomena are a product of the brain! |
Steve brought up video games and I think it's a good metaphor to use.
Imagine a person seated on a sofa playing Super Mario Brothers. Every move that Super Mario makes precisely correlates with a signal received on a Nintendo controller--that's the way it works. Yet if Luigi were studying Mario from inside-the-Nintendo, it might be very difficult to "see" the person sitting on the couch who is playing. Everything would appear to originate from "the controller"...so phenomena like the fingers pushing could be discovered only as tiny cul-de-sacs and footnotes of "gamepad science".
I am reminded of this poem about blind men and an elephant:
Blind Men and the Elephant (a.k.a., "Blindmen") (by John Godfrey Saxe).
There's no doubting it: the brain is clearly a bottleneck by which our presence in the physical world using the "5 senses" is accomplished. Just like you-as-Mario can't be animated without a controller, you-as-Radical can't be animated without a brain. But the broader question is about where the identity lies...and what do you want to study. Are you interested in Mario, or are you interested in the person playing the game seated on a couch?
Neither is an intrinsically invalid place to start. While you are playing the game you become Mario. So it might seem that a study fixated on the paradigm of the Nintendo controller as the "source" is sensible, all else is irrelevant because it is only techniques that affect the controller that further you in the game. Yet some people are interested in other questions...like are there other game cartridges, or is there beer in the fridge.
