What if a person claiming to get messages from God was examined and found to have brain activity quite like that of persons who are diagnosed as mentally ill... what if all of this is true, yet it is also the case that the purportedly prophetic messages repeatedly proved true?
This is a nice way to try to avoid being cornered re the irreality of the self if you're a reductionist, for you can assert that a pattern obtains at the microscopic level that is not all that unlike the pattern found at the societal level. No need for the one self that does it all: instead, you have many sub-selfs that compete for dominance or take turns guiding the whole. The problem with this is, however, that the voters/officials are all zombies. None of them thinks about the whole as such. And perhaps none of them thinks even about themselves (unless one is a panzoist). None of them makes a comparison of alternatives. The more this proposed democracy seems like a zombocracy, the more consciousness will be seem to be epiphenomenal. Furthermore, if the oneness of the self is less real than the multiplicity of explanatory neural parts, then why can't each of these neural parts be conceived of as democracy as well? And why not parts of these parts, et...
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I guess my point in posting that is that being able to measure correlations between what people say and their brain activity is not necessarily the same as knowing the cause of what people say. A scientist who observed what I described would be left scratching his or her head and might eventually acknowledge that something more is going on than can be measured with tools made by human hands.