[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Originally Posted by David Bailey

I think it is important not to fall into the trap of expecting people groping for a new theory to have all the ends tied up.

I'm not asking about a mere end. I'm asking what it means for my experiences to be located in my body, which is a product of mindstuff, but not my mind, which is also a product of mindstuff. Seems like a fundamental question to me.

Conventional science has more or less run with a theory of consciousness that many people feel is fundamentally wrong - not least because of the paradoxes that you get when you transfer the action to a computer (at least in a gedanken experiment).

I'm still not sure what these paradoxes are. Maybe you could start a separate thread about them?

The mental part of our brains - if it is a distinct entity - is obviously almost totally unknown to science. Asking where we are located may not even make sense because our mental components might exist outside of space-time. Trying to make people commit to answers to questions like this can descend into a cheap way to devalue their arguments - analogous to someone in a bygone era asking, "But I still want to know which slit that particular electron went through!"

But the idealist doesn't argue that our minds are distinct; they argue that everything is mind. It's the dualists arguing that our minds are distinct. Are there any dualists left around these days?

Anyhoo, I agree that pestering someone for details of their new theory can be annoying. How about a whiff of a scent of an idea how the theory works? And how about the folks with the new ideas not ragging on scientists because they don't have all the details of consciousness yet? If lack of details is not a reason to discard, it should apply across the board.

~~ Paul