This is your brain on materialism
It's in your brain. But what does it explain?
Not as much as some people think, as Ambivablog vehemently points out:
It's almost ridiculous how bright and proud and brave they are at having explained away . . . absolutely nothing! So they've found the location in the brain associated with out-of-body experiences. If anything, that only makes it more mysterious that the electrical stimulation of that bit of tissue can trigger the experience of being up near the ceiling looking down at one's own body. Why? How? How can you see without your eyes? Are those experiences just hallucinations? Is the storied accuracy of things seen and heard during "near-death" OBEs strictly apocryphal? The purely material explanation is not the simplest one, the Occam's Razor close shave. You'd have to go through contortions to explain why the brain would accurately record precise details of a scene in the midst of a mortal crisis, then choose to hallucinate an accurate view of that scene from a physically impossible perspective.
Matter is interesting, but is it everything? I find it noteworthy how often studies like this use a naive soul/body dualism as a foil. "Look, this mental phenomenon has a corrolary in the brain. Bet you didn't see that one coming." Is the assumption that we're all Cartesian dualists in need of materialism? There are other anthropologies out there, including that of orthodox Christianity. The medieval philosopher Thomas Aquinas, for instance, described the soul as the form of the body. That's not exactly ghost-in-the-machine language, now is it?
