[ExI] consciousness and perception

[Damien Broderick]

At 12:42 PM 1/22/2009 -0800, Ian G. wrote:

>When I wrote [*] for aught I knew
>it was a new idea. I was pondering the question, since my percept of a
>star in the heavens is actually just photos from a star that have struck
>my optic nerve and been processed in my brain, how is it that the percept
>appears 'out there'. Suddenly I concluded that what I see as being 'out
>there' must be a model in my brain
>[*] http://www.iangoddard.com/paranorm.htm

Mental modeling has been investigated for decades, of course (and 
seems to me self-evident); see, e.g. Philip Johnson-Laird's, um, 
MENTAL MODELS (1983) and lots of work by Stephen Kosslyn and his 
associates; from Wiki on Kosslyn: "Image and Mind (1980), Ghosts in 
the Mind's Machine (1983), Wet Mind (1992, with Olivier Koenig), 
...Image and Brain (1994), The Case for Mental Imagery (2006, with 
Thompson and Ganis)" etc.

Your 1999 explanation for out of body experiences is pretty much the 
same reached by psychologist/memeticist Susan Blackmore's (summarized 
in Beyond the Body: An Investigation of Out-Of-The-Body Experiences, 
Academy Chicago Publishers, 1983).

Damien Broderick