Wow, lot's of interest here! And cool research publications coming up! Awesome.
Ni Nurta, my interest in this I don't really know how to describe. I think one part of it, is that the more we describe things in a peer-reviewable manner, the more straight forward it will be to transmit the dhamma in the future. And who knows, maybe one day we can just engineer enlightenment by pressing the right buttons in the brain.
Also, it's just really stimulating to explore.
That leads me to your question, Chris Marti: "So we're assuming that everything that we experience has a physical correlate that can be measured?"
- YES! I'm absolutely sure that's the case. No brain: No consciousness, no colors, no taste, no feelings, no any experience. Period.
And brainscience has mapped even individual senses to be correlated directly with quite accurate areas of the brain. For instance, one area in the occipital lobe corresponds to experiencing red, while another area corresponds to experiencing blue. Same goes for hearing, smelling, feeling, etc. And it does get quite complicated when we get to stuff like opinions, standpoints and complicated stuff like that... Oh, and consciousness! Some scientists believe that we can find the area in the brain responsible for that. I'm personally tempted to believe that consciousness is more inherrent in each part, and the brain does a good job sort of linking it together, so that consciousness can interact with consciousness. And hence we are becoming self-reflective, and a rock isn't even if consciousness is an inherrent part of its parts.
I look at it this way: Existence is multi- (perhaps infinite-) dimensioned.
Some of these dimensions are compantible within quantifiable space (or mathematical space) and that would be exactly the seven fundamental units of time, length, weight, current, temperature, candela, amount of substance. Because these are quantifiable, they can be objective and peer-reviewable. That makes them practical in the use of building bridges, electron microscopes and everything in between.
That is also the units we use in brain scans, and makes for practical descriptions of what goes on in the brain because it is so square, mathematical, exact, objectifiable.
But some dimensions are not quantifiable and 5 examples of such dimensions are our senses.
We can't say "how blue" or "how tired". Haha.. well, we can, but no mathematical description would make total sense.
Electrons buzzing around in a brain are commonly said to "produce" our experience, or be a part of it. And that's what some scientists want to prove. I guess one could also speculate that we are simply conscious of the brain and it's electrons too and therefore it's the other way around: Consciousness giving rise to its contents.
Which one it is, I suppose is like asking the famous chicken and egg question. I won't bother and actually got into a funnily dramatic episode with a brain researcher at a university I studied at once. Hah, what a thing to argue about!
But instead of looking at it, trying to map out causality (which quantifiable science (e.g. physics) always does), I look at it as exactly the same, but something which can be looked at from all these different dimensions of existence at once.
All in all, I believe a buzzing electron in your occipital lobe is not just an electron giving rise to "seeing". I believe the electron itself (in that specific environment) IS seeing. (as well as being an electron, and being the corresponding electric and electromagnetic fields, and being it's weight).
So, as you may infer, I guess this is all just a big mental jerk off for me. I have no clue about anything, but I sure to like to be stimulated.
