I have delivered conference talks on the methodological errors of this area -- I also never made the claim of Person-1; nor are Person-1 and Person-2 engaged in the same dialectic.

It is not a "conspiracy", as you'd know, if you had any familiarity with the methodological literature on these areas. The consensus view of methodological critics of these areas is (1) fMRI analysis is profoundly unreliable as a guide to relevant features of the brain; and (2) a significant majority of research in this area is unreproducible. Both of these have been demonstrated multiple times.

Psychologists are extremely poorly trained in statistics and how to apply statistics to scientific enquiries; let alone on the mathematical modelling which goes into phrasing and building neural networks. That someone has written a paper correlating coefficients of a model they've no training to understand against fMRI results -- is par for the course in this papermill.

The level of absurdity here is off the charts; but the epistemic culture around these areas of speculative science is obscene --- this is why a vast majority of their papers are unreporducibel.