The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian) / quote 133 of 254
Neural correlates are not experiences
The second truth is that whatever thoughts and feelings are, they are not straightforwardly physical. You can’t see a memory under a microscope, and an emotion has no mass or velocity. It is true that with fMRI scanners you can see the brain activity associated with such experiences, and perhaps in the future we will be able to say exactly what the experience is purely on the basis of such observations. But no matter how good the technology gets, there is always a difference between observing a brain event and experiencing a mental event. To use the jargon, we can see the ‘neural correlates of consciousness’,…