"As far as investigating the phenomena that constitute consciousness, that's what all the barrels-down-rivers experiments are looking at. The problem is that since consciousness covers so many areas, the only structured way to hit the problem is to deal with each area in turn. And from there, the only way to investigate each area is to find what it does under a load of different situations"

Ah, Science is very good at designing experiments that single out individual 'cause/effect' pairs: problem is that in Real Life, very few such individual pairings exist. When a multiplicity of 'causes' exist, they interact with each other (what happens when we ingest a given quantity of ONE drug is known, what happens when we ingest a soup of much smaller quantities of hundreds of drugs is really not very well known!) or even have powerful synergistic/catalytic effects.


"where do people reporting out-of-body experiences get the images they report seeing which couldn't have been seen through the eyes located in their body on the operating table or whatever. "

Having experienced a few such OOB images myself...

If you can't specify a 'Scientific Explanation' for the mechanism, then you end back up at the 'Faith based Religion' position.

I believe that 'Religion' was man's first groping attempts to discover 'Science' - it taking the very limited faith based path of 'knowing everything to start with' whereas Science takes the path of 'know nothing to begin with, just watch VERY closely'. The problem is that all 'Scientists' have inbuilt ASS-U-MEptions, as an "Act of Faith" anyway.... :-)