The locus of sensory perception is not in the brain, out-of-body experiences indicate that.
Thoughts are a kind of stuff different from the stuff that bodies are made of. They kind of hover around your head, and with practice, you can learn to see the thoughts around the heads of other people.
Emotion is again a third kind of stuff. Gurdjieff identified emotion with the "blood" of a kind of emotional "body" that was co-extensive with but not the same as the physical body.
This is basic, run=of-the-mill, kiddie-level metaphysics. The so-called "hard problem" of consciousness begins with the exclusion of all the relevant information.
Out-of-body experiences have failed to provide the person experiencing them with information that they couldn't have obtained while being in their body. That indicates that they're not in fact extrasensory experiences, but something that happens inside the brain.
It really depends on who you ask. There are people who routinely leave their bodies and go about and "obtain information", as you put it. Heck, there were Learning Annex classes on it. YMMV.
I'm pretty sure that proof of extrasensory experience would yield you a nobel prize, but so far all studies of the subject that I'm aware of were either negative or had their methods heavily critized.
It's a cultural "blockage": overcome the cultural conditioning against it and suddenly "woo-woo" is easy, even trivial. Conversely, you can float like a cloud over the Nobel Prize committee and they won't look up.
If I needed a million dollars I would ESP some lottery numbers.
It's Randi, not Randy. And he's retired now and the "paranormal challenge was officially terminated by the JREF in 2015."
Anyway, I have a lot of respect for him, he does (well, did) good and important work.
But the inability of a guy to encounter "genuine psi" who has made it his life's-work to show "it" to be non-existent does not contradict what I've said in this thread.
> you can learn to see the thoughts around the heads of other people
How do you learn that? If I'm being honest this sounds a bit too far fetched even for someone like myself who's experienced a fair share of strange phenomena that don't fit in the usual narratives.
The Wikipedia link you posted sounds a lot like Raja Yoga. Are they related in any way?
I learned how from a pamphlet I ordered out of the back of a comic book. I'm not kidding, this is true. (O_o) What a world!
There are techniques, but really the essences of it is that we're already doing it but culturally conditioned to pretend we're not. If you overcome the cultural conditioning (in whatever way) "presto" you can perceive thought-forms "of others" (in quotes because thoughts are not ours, they're independent(-ish).) Have you ever noticed how some homeless crazy people mutter stuff that seems like it was related to what you're thinking, like they can see your thoughts? Yeah, that's because they can, poor bastards.
FWIW, I consider thought-reading to be voyeuristic and an invasion of privacy, as well as useless. Not recommended. (Besides, everybody is just thinking about sex anyway (or videogames these days.))
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In re: Raja Yoga the goal is the same but the method of Self-Inquiry is superior.
Thoughts are a kind of stuff different from the stuff that bodies are made of. They kind of hover around your head, and with practice, you can learn to see the thoughts around the heads of other people.
Emotion is again a third kind of stuff. Gurdjieff identified emotion with the "blood" of a kind of emotional "body" that was co-extensive with but not the same as the physical body.
This is basic, run=of-the-mill, kiddie-level metaphysics. The so-called "hard problem" of consciousness begins with the exclusion of all the relevant information.
( If you really want to know what consciousness is, there is a wide, short road: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramana_Maharshi#Self-enquiry )