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I see the open door called mysteries and people standing outside saying, you can't go in there. The mysteries I refer to are the unsolved mysteries of the material world.

As VR has pointed out, nearly all of the progress in understanding the mind has come from the study of the material processes of the brain. It is quite obvious from observing people with brain injuries, that bits of the mind can be eliminated by damage to the brain.

I had an uncle who lived 25 years with the kind of amnesia featured in the movie "Memento". Every day he woke up was, to him, the day after his injury. He did learn new habits that made him managable, but he never formed a new permanant conscious memory of anything that happened after his injury.

When someone asserts that materialism can't explain something, my response is our understanding is deficient, not material. I will retract this belief just as soon as the study of the material world ceases to be fruitful. Asserting that materialism can't enter the room of mysteries simply shuts down the most productive form of inquiry ever invented.

Thank you so much for your post!

what is the evidence that studies of brain function are headed for a brick wall?

On the materialist end we have Francis Crick (The Astonishing Hypothesis : The Scientific Search for the Soul) and on the physicalist end we have Roger Penrose (Emporer’s New Mind and Shadows of the Mind).

Critics find both hypotheses lacking for different reasons. To thoroughly explore the subject and stay up-to-date, I strongly recommend PSYCHE: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Consciousness.

From that site, Webster’s review of Crick’s book:

Richard Gregory, a leading visual psychologist, has argued that Crick is outside of his own field here and could be regarded as a "loose cannon" in the field of visual consciousness, and yet Crick's book is both informative and well written. Crick's main goal is to find a neural mechanism that will explain consciousness, particularly in the context of visual awareness...

Crick cheerfully admits that the evidence is not strong for his proposal, but claims that it might provide new guidelines for future research.

From the same site, Penrose’s response to critics

Questions to do with "the overlap of states" referred to by Klein do not really resolve the measurement issue, and von Neumann's point about the difficulty of locating exactly where (or when) R takes place just emphasizes the subtlety of the R phenomenon. However Klein is completely right in pointing to the biological difficulties involved in maintaining quantum coherence within microtubules and, more seriously, in allowing this coherence to "leap the synaptic barrier". To see how this might be achieved is a fundamental problem for the type of scheme that I (in conjunction with Stuart Hameroff) have been proposing. Clearly more understanding is needed. (See Section 14 below, for a tentative suggestion in relation to this.) On one of the reviews of Crick’s work which I read but can't seem to find again, it was noted that to truly explore brain functions - researchers would need to remove or nullify specific areas of the brain and see what happens, kind of like the work being done with knock-out genes and mice. Nobody really expects society to going along with that kind of research on human subjects.

Ok, back to your post 344 here… Jeepers!

I see the open door called mysteries and people standing outside saying, you can't go in there.

Truth is not threatened by inquiry; therefore resistance to inquiry is prima facie cause for such inquiry. Stonewalling only increases my sense of urgency.

As VR has pointed out, nearly all of the progress in understanding the mind has come from the study of the material processes of the brain.

I disagree and again point to PSYCHE: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Consciousness. IMHO, some of the best ideas are coming from the physics corner – especially Roger Penrose. And that website covers the whole field!

My two cents...

I strongly suspect the brain acts like a transceiver for our non-temporal being, what we normally call consciousness. If the transceiver is damaged, it will not process signals correctly. IOW, it would act the same way as if the entire process were temporal, i.e. the physical brain. I suggest it would be misleading to ignore the transceiver possibility.

We may be able to detect whether our brain is a transceiver. Some researchers already hypothesize this is what underlies NDEs. Also, unrelated work on higher dimensional dynamics or quantum mechanics may open new leads, possibly a means to detect non-spacial or non-temporal messaging.