W:

I think that as a postulate for testing, the notion of a non-material element could in fact lead to predictable results, with one caveat. The test structure must be written in terms germane to the subject. Just as you would not look for color-changes in a material to indicate the effect of mass in in its vicinity, because it is not a relevant variable, so too you would have to be sure to make a test of non-material awareness, or life force, or whatever you call it, not rely on material variables which aren't germane. That's the problem with our testing history, largely -- for example, Rhine's statistical analyses using guesses about card symbols. The framework is wrong for the kind of subject you are trying to test.

It is just self-fulfilling prediction to require a postulate of non-material awareness to act enough like material objects to satisfy the test, and then fail it becaus eit doesn't act that way. You're dealing with the very center of subjectivity and the source of opinion and the fountain head of all wishful thinking, here. You're not going to easily get it to perform in rectilinear fashion like the flipping of a coin. But that does not mean that "it" doesn't exist, unless you define existence as only consisting of energy/matter phenomena in space and time. If you do that, of course, you have left all imagination out of the picture, or so it would seem. Unless you presuppose that imagination (and all its dimensions) are just material projections, which leads you directly back top the Hard Problem that Dr Blackmore discusses.

Here's a related question: does talk-based therapy ever change a person? If so, how does that happen? There's some kind of reviewing going on, looking at old information and past decisions and perhaps changing those past decisions when one finds the data was flawed or some such. Even if we posit the old stories are stored in wet-ware, wjo's doing the reviewing? Are we positing a system of mirrors in which wet-warelooks at wet-ware and becomes wet-ware aware? How can that even seem possible? The leap in qualitas which Dr Blackmore refers to is glaringly apparent; why should it be ignored for the sake of a comfortable frame of mind? At least, I don't see how such a system could stand up to scrutiny (and scrutiny by who or what?).

I cannot buy Francis Crick's unthinkable speculation that we just haven't uncovered enough complexity to see how it really is all electrons. All of it. Even our knowing that this is so. That strikes me as almost a blasphemy against thought itself, oddly enough, but putting that aside it strikes me as illogical in the extreme, because it insists on an identity-in-kind between particles (at some scale) and awareness.

But the honesty answer is that "science" (whoever that is) doesn't yet know. My opinion, and that is all that it is, is that as long as science locks itself in to the effort to prove the material nature of thought they will run around in circles, because they are trying to make elctrons do something they cannot, no matter how cleverly arranged.

Perhaps, since this is opinion, we just need to agree that we look at these things differently.

I always appreciate your thoughts on the matter.

A