js: Nonsense. The brain changes in response to consequences. Behavior is governed by consequenses.
Two questions there, right off of the bat.
In the first place, it seems to me that "personal revelation" doesn't "trump" anything. Oddly enough, it only seems to make the "anything" explicable in human terms according to reason, direct experience, culture, and plain common sense -- which are common to everybody (or at least human everybodies).
On the second question, Whether or not behavior is governed by "consequences." Fine. But consequences of what?
This the very "fuzzy zone" that scientific atheists and metaphysical naturalists (though not necessarily the methodological naturalists -- e.g., adherents of the scientific method in its proper "epistemologial starkness") seemingly refuse to define. Maybe according to their own method they know they legitimately can't do that. (But that doesn't prevent them from "philosophizing" all the same....)
Dear jw, you keep looking for evidence of minds not associated with bodies.
I'd suggest you might want to reverse that problem, and then maybe you could get better answers: Imagine a body not associated with a mind -- i.e., Try to imagine a natural body totally disconnected from intelligence.
In the second place, if we're going to speak of epiphenomena of the human brain, then it seems to me we first need to lay down the evidences put forth regarding the nature of the brain.
It seems clear at the outset that the brain is a chemical/physical system that somehow supports extraordinarily high rates of distributed information processing that appears to be indispensable to biological organization and the preservation in a living state of the biological organism.
Yet at that juncture, one easily gets the feeling that this is a problem that methodological naturalism must avoid -- in order to be consistent with itself -- which would be the problem of WHO or WHAT is (a) initiating the process?; and (b) to what purpose?
Dawkins assures us that both questions are illegitimate....
But then, he's an atheist; so what does he know?
Moreover, such intelligence could never possibly be the "epiphenomenon" of what the human mind, in its freedom from physical determinism, has freely chosen to observe.
Those are the HUMAN questions; and so I pay them great heed. Pshaw! is the answer I remit to the folks who say there is no such thing as human free will....
Anyhoot, think about it my friend. And give me a yell back if ever you feel like it.
Disconnected from what?
Give me an example of an intelligence that does not require a body.