Ola blank and his colleagues electrically stimulated a veneral this neral madil, the right angular gyrus. The woman reported that she could see myself lying in bed from above, but i only see my legs and lower trunk. Stimulating an adjacent point in this area induce an ins anous feeling of lightness and floating about two meters above the bed close to the ceiling. But how do you think about those kinds of experiments thatyouot make it seem as if there's no mind or anything, floating off the brain? If you prick your arm with a needle, you will feel it. That's physical to mental causation right now. So you don't need the sophisticated stuff
In this expansive conversation, Michael Shermer speaks with Bernardo Kastrup, the executive director of Essentia Foundation. His work has been leading the modern renaissance of metaphysical idealism, the notion that reality is essentially mental. He has a Ph.D. in philosophy (ontology, philosophy of mind) and another Ph.D. in computer engineering (reconfigurable computing, artificial intelligence). Shermer and Kastrup discuss: materialism, idealism, dualism, monism, panpsychism, free will, determinism, consciousness, the problem of other minds, artificial intelligence, out of body and near-death experiences, model dependent realism, and the ultimate nature of reality.