I don’t think I like this overly biological explanation Ganesh. I am sceptical of explanations of events which seek to reduce them to functions of the brain or certain areas of the brain being stimulated. First, it seems to me that anything we experience in the {internal, external} world must necessarily have a corresponding biochemical event in the brain. Second, I do not think we can say which precedes the other: we do not know if events in the brain occur before the experiences that we have in the world or after. I tend to think that it is neither and that biochemical actions in the brain match up exactly with the experiences we have of the world. So, the temporal lobes may indeed be involved in the experience of déjà vu, but this doesn’t really tell us what déjà vu is. The stimulation of the temporal lobes which invoke a feeling of déjà vu in a laboratory might merely mean that it was predetermined that the person’s lobes were to be stimulated at such and such a time in order for this same person’s brain’s biochemistry to correspond to a déjà vu experience. The person still feels that they’ve experienced the moment before, it so happens that the stimulation is part of the experience. Does this make sense, any sense?
See, I think that déjà vu has to do more with a nonlinear experience of time, at least nonlinear in so far as we appear to experience time on a point by point basis. It is not so much information traveling backward in time, but more our awareness expanding to include a stretch of time. As we traverse spacetime we trace out paths that are known as “spacetime worms.” You can think of this as a tunnel of your body moving through space over time. For instance, as you get up out of your chair and walk out of the room that your are in, there is a spacetime worm that corresponds to that whole series of spacetime points. Now, what if déjà vu is such that our awareness expands beyond a linear sense of time and allows itself to experience a set of spacetime points all at once. This might give rise to the feeling of having “been there before” simply because the way that you would normally consciously track time has been distorted in such a way that you become aware of a section of a possible spacetime worm. Well, not really a possible worm, but the actual worm that will unfold for you over the next x seconds. So what if this is how it works, then information doesn’t have to travel back in time, but is more akin to the “determined system” that SMatthew puts forth. And this deterministic system also includes the events that occur within the frontal lobes of our brains. Does this make any sense, any sense at all?
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