Could Our Brains Be An Interface Between Body and Mind?

It seem to me that it would be useful for some researchers to examine the possibility that the conventional assumptions are incorrect, and see what can be accomplished by postulating that the brain (a physical/material system operating in space and time) is an interface device connecting the physical/material body with a non-material, non-physical mind that is not located in space and is "outside of" time----"eternal" in the sense of beyond time rather than in the sense of infinite duration in time.

The left-brain, right-brain differences, seen from this point of view, might suggest that the left brain is the side of the interface device that connects to the time-bound body, and the right brain is the side of the device that connects to the "eternal" mind. I doubt if it is actually this simple, partly because the available evidence from imaging seems to show a lot more complexity in the distribution of functions, and partly because some functions such as vision and hearing draw on both hemispheres of the brain. But it might be possible to devise some experiments based on this general hypothesis that might not occur to scientists who take the current assumptions as proved facts.

A simple analogy that I have thought about that is suggestive of the problems of proving the correctness of current basic assumptions uses a "black box" model: Imagine a black box whose exterior we can see, with two push buttons on it. We push button one and speak to it, then push button two and hear the same words coming back out. Certainly one possibility is that there is some kind of tape recorder or memory chip inside which records sounds when button one is pressed, then plays them back when button two is pressed. But another possibility is that there is a transceiver in the black box, which transmits the sounds it picks up to a transceiver located somewhere else and which in turn is connected to a recorder. When you push button two on the known black box, it sends a signal to the second transceiver to play back the "tape" and send it back over to the black box which then duly emits it. (This is where the analogy, like all analogies, is inexact, since the second mechanism here, the transceiver-recorder, is itself a physical system, but it is being used to stand for the non-material mind in the hypothesis.)

Assume we are talking about memory, and are assuming that memories are stored in some fashion in the black box. Then assume that after speaking into the black box but before pushing button two we take a baseball bat and beat the heck out of the black box. Then we push button two, and nothing happens. Aha! we say. This proves that memories are stored in this box, and that we have damaged those memories.

Of course in the case of the black box it is obvious that we have proved no such thing.

Why should it prove anything in the case of a brain that has been damaged by disease or trauma?

It is well known that by poking an electrode into specific areas of someone's brain, certain memories can be evoked. According to my analogy, however, this is not proof that the evoked memory was "stored" in that area of the brain, or indeed stored in the brain at all. Given the unconventional hypothesis that the mind is "eternal" in the sense of not located in time or space, and that memory is the ability to recall some experience that happened at some other point in time, it would be quite possible that memory would a function of the mind and not of the brain. In this event, what would need explaining would not be why we remember things, but why we ever forget things, and also (wildly) why we don't remember what happened the day after tomorrow. ("It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards"-----Alice in Wonderland.)

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