Are thoughts transcendant?

I can't, frankly, and that's part of the problem. We don't even know what it is we're trying to explain. I think that's a characature of our position. I firmly believe that consciousness involves nothing but physical processes going on in the Brain - mostly, it seems, neurons firing - but although all these processes can be reduced to that level (or further, we can go down to cell chemistry or atomic physics) the necessary explanations don't exist at that level. This isn't special pleading, it's true of almost all interesting behaviours at the macro level - I defy anyone to provide a useful description of a car engine that operates entirely at the sub-atomic level, for example, but no-one is going around claiming special stuff is needed for a car engine. We don't know. No-one has yet provided a useful description of how the brain causes consciousness. Prove it under properly controlled lab conditions and we'll talk.

The trouble with this article is we have no references leading back to the actual data. What does "practically no brain at all" mean? How many neurons were there? What pathology of the ganglions was present?Animals spend an inorndinate amount of energy running their brains; especially so in Humans - if we don't need it why would we have evolved to do that. This "study" is taken from Nexus Magazine, are you familiar with it? I am. I have a copy in the other room, cover stories include "Hitler's Death Debunked" and "Crop Circles of 2007" - you'll excuse me if I don't consider it a reliable source. Even if true, what we have here is a collection of uncontrolled anecdotes. Any links to the actual experiments? Psychic research has had positive results before, but everytime those results have vanished when errors in the experimental methods have been corrected.

I did read it. I found nothing of interest in it. Given that it's from a known unreliable source I'm not inclined to look further. Of course not every anecdotal account is wrong. They are however completely meaningless as proof, for the very simple reason that you can prove anything with anecdotal evidence from the efficacy of antibiotics, through alien abduction to homeopathy. When you want to make extraordinary claims you need extraordinary evidence; a bunch of stories just won't cut it.