Matt McCormick wrote this in his contribution to the collection titled Dead as a Doornail: “While most of us would acknowledge some connection between mental function and the brain, we may have failed to see just how deep the connection runs. Even the most abstract mental faculties—and the most specific features and contents of our private mental states—can be mapped directly onto brain functions. … People who suffer from Anton-Babinski syndrome are cortically blind, but they don’t believe they’re blind or consciously blind. They will adamantly insist they can see even in the face of clear evidence of their blindness, dismissing their inability to perform visual tasks by confabulating explanations for their poor performance. … The syndrome results from a specific sort of damage to the occipital lobe of the brain.” Is this wholly a result of brain damage, as the skeptics assert, or is this a clue about the underlying origins and actions of consciousness? What can Creator tell us?

This is a good example of the bias at work by the neuroscientists, who have a materialist perspective, and think of the brain as a kind of machine made up of component parts, having specific functions and fully understandable with enough probing of particular brain regions, all of which have specific duties and capabilities, so anything that happens with perturbation is assumed in advance to be a consequence of the abnormal state of the brain tissue itself. In this case, there is a kind of in-between state where the brain does not go dark with an ongoing abnormality, but something is going on within the thoughts that fully convinces the person afflicted that they are experiencing vision, even when this is impossible, and demonstrably so, in a physical sense. But rather than being a weird inexplicable consequence of loss of function, which is what is assumed, the fact the mind is attempting to plug in a semblance of prior vision is actually a clue that consciousness is using its resources to be creative and fill in the gap for the person, and the fact this is not perceived as such by the impaired person is simply a result of the damaged state where they are missing a true linkup between consciousness and the workings of the brain. So the intention is still present within consciousness to see, but the body is not working properly and the feedback that interacts with consciousness to close the loop is absent, and so conscious intention keeps trying to make visual observations and will not get a perception via thought that something has gone wrong and there is a function missing. This is because there are various ways consciousness impinges that differ in different parts of the brain, to handle various roles for interpreting what happens. This is documented, functionally speaking, by many such studies of what part of the brain is involved with various kinds of thought and various types of perception of the senses and actions, involving things like movement in the body and emotional states, that can be turned on or off via impinging on areas of the brain, and so on. Because the repertoire of the human being is so large, there are many intricate pathways that consciousness utilizes to put things together and orchestrate a complex series of events needed to have an intention acted upon, and then experienced by the mind and body, by the doing, during the operation itself. So what is happening here is some of the pathways are intact and others not, so there is an activity wanting to take place and a perception that is the case. "I am looking at this," is what is sensed by the person's mind, but the pathway that will feed back a visual stimulus, and the part of the brain responsible for displaying that stimulus, and making sense of it, and bringing that to conscious awareness has been disconnected. So this is sort of like a stew with some of the ingredients being absent, it has the semblance of a stew but, by strict definition, is faulty. So this is more a demonstration of an underlying and mysterious complexity for a conscious impulse coming from somewhere, and that somewhere is not being identified in studying people with this particular syndrome—only the clues that what is happening is more complicated than is being appreciated because the data are being very selectively interpreted and some observations ignored altogether.