You cannot separate brain and mind. Look at e.g. how sensory perception works and it is obvious (see here, here, or here). Mind and awareness, however, are not the same as consciousness.

As for (some) of your arguments … ahem, well, where to start …

Hallucinogens & meditation

There’s only one set of data, and it is consistent across all studies — cerebral blood flow and brain activity go down, and (IIRC) alpha and beta waves are suppressed, and delta waves are slightly amplified. That’s it. Always. You can read more e.g. here, here, or here.

Martha Weiss and retention of memory

This research is remarkable not because of what you claim, but because the results “challenge a broadly-held popular view of lepidopteran metamorphosis: that the caterpillar is essentially broken down entirely, and its components reorganized into a butterfly or moth.” Seriously, read the whole paper yourself.

John Lorber and “no need for brain”

Setting aside that there was no control group in his study due to the very nature of the research itself, here you can read an exhaustive explanation why Lorber’s conclusions are ripe for skepticism — in short: brain plasticity and old CT technology (40 years ago).

I will conclude with the same questions I addressed to peter dohan (which he ignored to this day), and which, even if I take the hope of “promissory materialism” at face value (I have high hopes for science too), I still deem relevant (but never heard asked):

• Considering that research during the last few decades provided sufficient amount of evidence for morphological and physiological similarities between mind-brains of mammals, what is the minimal necessary neural complexity to generate consciousness?
• Considering the above and that consciousness is observably (or better said, existentially) without attributes, how can billions of unique mind-brains of various species produce something which is (quite obviously) identical to a T?

Then again, no one knows where consciousness comes from, but everyone can clearly know what it is and what it’s not. It’s enough to know the answer to that proverbial question, “Who am I?”

Thus both, the materialist as well as the spiritualist, cannot talk meaningfully about consciousness before they realized it, and it’s no surprise that they are bound to conflate consciousness with a function of mind-brain (which, on the other hand, could prove to be correct, but see the questions above). And when it comes to mechanics of the mind-brain, the materialist has the “upper hand”. Whether one likes it or not.

CC: peter dohan