Hi Wanda,

I am short of time too so this will be short. I hope it reaches you before you leave.

"The knower is a detector in the metaphor. Moreover, it is a detector that can move about outside the body, if OBE is extant.

I cannot think of anything in the natural waorld that behaves like that. Perhaps you can."

You are right, I can't either. But that is why I think it would be so fruitful to use artificial metaphors in addition to natural ones. If there is something in the natural world that behaves like that it is the very mystery of conscious life that we are trying to explain in the first place.

So the artificial metaphor I like to use is a martian rover operated by a scientist at JPL. Here we have an apparently sentient, autonomous being (the martian rover) which, from the standpoint of Martians who don't know about earth scientists or their machines, act as if they were conscious.

In reality, the rover is not conscious but is connected to a sentient operator millions of miles away, who vicariously sees what the rover "sees", and who is able to control the rover's movements by exercising free will (resident in the JPL scientist). To the Martians observing the rover, the rover itself seems to be able to see, percieve, react to its environment, and exercise free will.

All of the mechanisms to allow this to happen are well known and I see no reason why similar mechanisms can't explain the behavior of living organisms with a single consciousness outside of 4D space-time operating them all. I think such a scenario explains an awful lot of mysterious questions.

Warm regards,

Paul

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