[Meerenuch]

Hi Mike
You certainly are a hardened skeptic. I have to confess that my analytic mind goes a little soft in light of such compelling stories and the 'believer' in me kind of trumps my training in analytic philosophy.
The question of the "I" in this video is certainly very interesting and hits at the heart of the matter I think. Linguistic constructions of self awareness are extremely complex, especially in light of biological theories of consciouness based on brain science. For me there are two very interesting aspects of this: first our individual constructions of self concepts necessarily predate our knowledge of brain functions. In other words, our constructions of self begin with our births and continue throughout our lives. Many of the important ideas about who we are and how we relate to the world get formed in the first few years of life, before we are capable of rationally pondering the presence of that big mass of cells between our ears. Once we are old enough to start learning about brains and how they work (or how we think they work), we already have an "I" in place. Secondly, our language and intellectual culture has evolved mostly in the absence of real scientific knowledge about the brain. I think we don't really have very robust ways of speaking (either linguistically or culturally) about various aspects of human consciousness. Brain science is incredibly important to this process in our time, as philosophy was in the time of 'axial man' (this refers to the period in human history around 500BC or so when philosophy begins to emerge). As you mentioned, this gives philosophers of mind a lot to chew on. Bodies of philosophical discourse and a cultural context are just beginning to emerge in parallel with brain science. In terms of Western thought and culture, I think of brain science as the newest and coolest kid on the block. The problem is that he has only been on the block for about 5 minutes and, like a bunch of country bumpkins in awe of the suave city dweller, we look to him for all the answers. Skepticism about mystical experience is very much in vogue these days (especially in North America I think), whereas skepticism about science is frequently met with ridicule. I'm not blaming anyone in particular here, I just think it is a general condition of society.

My wife, who is an accomplished geoscientist, has often reminded me that as we approach the frontiers of the empirical (and the frontiers of our intellectual capabilities) in physics, biology and other sciences, we still tend to look for explanations that can seem irrational at first. From her point of view, some of the best science begins with essentially intuitive, non-rational processes. The empirical part comes later, not to prove the reality of a phenomenon or prove the reality of a theory, but rather to help us understand and explain it. In other words, science is another story in human history (probably one of the most interesting we have hit on for some time), but there could be other ways of understanding which will prove to be better. We look at mystic (or mythic) explanations as inferior, and in many ways they can be, but it maybe that out understanding of science and our reliance on the empirical may evolve into some hybridized way of thinking which is better able to cope with experiences that defy the rational.
Perhaps the video points us toward one way of establishing worthwhile connections between mystical and rational ways of thought in regard to current theories about who we are. To bring this back to music....I suppose I think of music as a valid and worthwhile mode of inquiry into human consciousness. Plus I don't have to pick up any brains!