There is not much chance you will win the lottery, but it is certain someone or other will win. When we find a connection between two things or events, we judge the probability the two are regularly related only after we have looked around for other causes and excluded other possibilities. Having a ticket is connected to winning. If we are the only ticket holder we will be the winner. But to be sure we have to make sure we really are the only ticket holder. Obvious?
Not to neural scientists, one of whom is accused of mass murder at a movie theater imitating a scene and character from the movie. We don't know much yet. A video made of him at age 18 records his belief the mind has the ability to alter the past*. He was enrolled at the University of California.
I've had many talks with this University's neuro scientists. (See here.) The University's neuro scientists think the brain is the only ticket in the lottery. All our experiences and thoughts are caused by the brain. We are machines.
It is possible we are more, and that the other larger part of us makes use of the smaller physical part the brain as its tool. But there can be no mechanical connection between the mechanical and not mechanical, so this possibility is dismissed by neuro scientists.
If we are all just brains, and the same brain state is created by a movie as by what the movie enacts, and the brain can more easily get itself into the movie theater, then all other things being equal it should do it. But if the brain is also a neuro scientist it knows that the brain really is only partially recreating the experience while sitting passively in the movie theater. A much more complete recreation requires actually reenacting the movie, reinacting what the movie is doing to the brains in the audience.
The movie is a representation, and the neural scientist brain wants to represent the representation. If the movie is about a killer in a movie theater, the neuro scientist brain doesn't just want to kill, it wants to kill at the movie theater showing the movie.
The brain wants to be the representation. Not just of a killer, but a killer in a movie about a killer. Imitation of imitation of a killer. Why?
Reality to a brain is indistinguishable from its representation. A killed brain doesn't communicate alternative representations. The neuro scientist brain is attracted both by representing representation, and destroying other machines for representation. It wants to push into the background the possibility there is actually something being represented, that a human being is more than representation.
A neuro scientist brain fears there may be other lottery tickets around and wants to tear them up.
The neuro scientist brain is something like today's unregulated corporation. A corporation is required to seek profit and disregard all other motivations. Like a neuro scientist claims love, sympathy, friendship, kindness are just brain states serving the general functioning of the brain, corporations, while financing politicians or selling products, use talk about these "feelings" only as tools for production of profit, in other words to get your money. They want your last dollar. They want you so broke you can't buy a ticket to the lottery.
* "Over the course of the summer I've been working with a temporal illusion. It's an illusion that allows you to change the past."
* "Over the course of the summer I've been working with a temporal illusion. It's an illusion that allows you to change the past."
