Hmm …

… Can Mysticism Help Us Solve the Mind-Body Problem? - Scientific American Blog Network. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

I have had a few experiences that could be described as mystical. The most powerful one — when I was about 15 — has remained with me throughout my life and is with me more and more as my life draws to it close. My instinct regarding such experiences has always been that they were strictly personal and that one should not use them as the basis for a metaphysics. So I am with William James on that. But I am skeptical regarding Horgan’s suggestion that materialism is “a sensible default position.” One of the books I recommended for the Catholic World Report’s Best Books I Read in 2019, Mind, Perception and Science was written by a world-class neurologist, W. Russell Brain. The question it raises is this: “if the stuff of the universe that we know directly is mind, and matter is the same thing known only by means of conceptual symbols created by mind, it would seem as reasonable to call at least part of reality mind as to call it matter.” Keeping an open mind in these matters requires making our preferences and predilections don’t get in the way.