Which is more strange?

[KCfromNC]

Sounds intriguing! Can you elaborate a bit on that, please?

Lots of interesting reading here : Neuroscience of free will - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The idea behind most of these is that the brain is working to start action before the conscious mind is aware of it.

There's also lot of research showing that there's a specific part of the brain set up to recognize when "I" do something and it's a different part of the brain than when "they" do something. And experiments show that it is possible to trigger the false idea that "I" did something through various means - e.g. http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~wegner/pdfs/Wegner&Wheatley1999.pdf - which hints that the method the brain uses to figure out what it did isn't always related to the parts of the brain which do the work.

There's interesting overviews not included in the wiki page, too, like http://psych.dbourget.com/readings/Pockett.pdf.

 

[sandwiches]

Consiocusness or heat? Consciousness or atoms? Consciousness or stones?

I do not mean "strange" in the sense of numerically unusual in our universe.

I mean strange from an absolute perspective if you will pardon the term.

I say this because in philosophy it seems to me that sometimes matter and "normal" physical phenomena are taken for granted, as if they didn't really need an excuse for being there. Where as consciousness has to apologise for taking us by surprise!

I think it's only when we compartmentalize matter and consciousness discretely that we think of consciousness as being mysterious. Which makes as much sense as compartmentalizing "flowing" from "water" and then thinking that "flowing" is so mysterious.