Alex
Administrator
I guess you could take that position, but Schwartz's data crushes this idea... if I remember correctly the difference between the control group was pretty substantial.Taking the materialist's point of view, that consciousness is an illusion, then during meditation something is going on but not what you think. The brain is doing something to itself but it produces the illusion that you have intention and awareness. In that case (yes it is absurd and ignores tons of contradictory evidence from parapsychology etc) consciousness is not causing the changes in the brain it is only correlated with changes in the brain.
How do you prove the conscious experiences you have during meditation are causing changes in the brain and are not just an interesting correlation?
What Schwartz et al are trying to do is to show that during meditation there is necessarily a causal relationship between conscious experience and neural activity because quantum mechanics tells us that a conscious observer necessarily influences any quantum systems that it observes.
A meditator doesn't have to consciously know how to rewire neurons in the same way a double slit observer doesn't have to know the location on the detection screen he should put the wave he collapsed into a particle.
BTW you could say the same about Radin's experiment... correlation doesn't mean causation... but that's where statistics come into play.