Consciousness and the Brain
The problem of explaining consciousness has exercised the minds of many writers on Medium over recent months, and of course neuroscientists and philosophers for much longer. I’m planning to start a series of articles on that theme soon. Recently, however, I’ve become engaged in a conversation with Peter Dohan, which has encouraged me to make a preliminary foray. Here is the relevant background to what follows.
I’m sure most readers will be familiar with the term the Hard Problem, coined by Australian philosopher David Chalmers, to describe the difficulties encountered when one tries to explain how the brain produces consciousness, subjective experiences. I referred to this in an earlier article, and Mr. Dohan responded: “The Hard Problem you describe to me is similar to Medieval Scholastics wondering how many angels can dance on a pin. It is not a problem — it is a neurophysiologic process whose mechanisms are not completely understood. There is too much evidence from Penfield to functional MRIs of subjects thinking to deny the brain is the source of the mind. Descartes had it backwards: it is sum, ergo cogito, not cogito, ergo sum. This brain-mind split is an ignis fatuus”.
My response included: “Don’t agree with you on your first point. How many angels dancing on a pin is a silly exercise where the answer not only cannot be known, but it is essentially meaningless, and the question is just a silly mind game in the first place. The Hard Problem is a legitimate scientific/ philosophical question, the answer to which we should be able to figure out… Regarding Penfield and MRIs, it depends how you interpret their results and conclusions. There is still plenty of reason to deny the brain is the source of the mind”.
Mr Dohan’s next response then included the statement that neuroscience “is now THE cutting edge biologic science… The most important characteristic of science, as Popper noted, is that it is falsifiable. I suggest there is no ‘falsifiabilty’ in philosophy; it is one idea countering another, often with h’faluting terms that are rather meaningless. Much of the philosophy I read has a ‘masturbatory’ tautologic quality to it. To me, the true purpose of philosophy has nothing to do with ultimate origins (that is called ‘theology’ or ‘cosmology’ depending on one’s orientation.). The true purpose of philosophy is defining the proper and moral (in the best sense of the word) way to lead a meaningful life. There is only one way, IMO, to interpret the Penfield, et al data — the brain is the source of consciousness. Why do we get altered states of consciousness with LSD, alcohol, THC, etc? Why does the Dali Lama experience a burst of EEG gamma waves when he meditates? All this, and many more examples, gives rise to a simple answer — the brain is the source of mind”. He finished with: “Personally, I was brought up a Quaker, aligned it with Buddhism, and lead a life directed by the inner voice within”.
===================================
This second response of his is my starting point here, in that I want to challenge the idea that the brain is the source of consciousness. Before I get onto that, however, I’ll respond briefly to his other points.
His understanding of the true purpose of philosophy is personal to him and not one, I imagine, shared by many philosophers. What he is here calling philosophy might be more appropriately called ethics, which is one branch of philosophy. The question of ultimate origins (theology, cosmology etc.) is another branch of philosophy usually called metaphysics, and is also valid, not something to be dismissed. (I think we also need metabiology and metaneuroscience.) Some scientists have a low opinion of philosophy. It is unfortunate that Mr. Dohan is not impressed by the philosophy he has read — I would agree that some of it can get masturbatory. I would argue, however, that it is important to have people from outside disciplines looking at one’s work; they might be better able to spot any flaws.
Is there falsifiability in philosophy? There certainly should be, because much of modern science is driven by the philosophy of materialism, often without any acknowledgement that this is the case, and without having demonstrated the truth of that philosophical position — it is merely assumed.
It is interesting that Mr. Dohan has some involvement with Buddhism. I don’t think that Buddhists believe that the brain is the source of consciousness. Is not the whole point of Buddhism to free consciousness from the need to reincarnate into a body and its brain? I also find it strange that someone whose life is directed by an inner voice, can ascribe that to the physical brain; how does the brain come up with this wise guidance? I would be grateful for some further clarification.
While on that subject, let’s consider meditation, which I assume Mr. Dohan practises if he is influenced by Buddhism. The goal of meditation is for the conscious self to control and silence all thought, in order to reach a higher state of consciousness. Many, but perhaps not all, neuroscientists say that our sense of personal identity, our conscious self, is an illusion created by the brain. Yet this possibly illusory conscious self has the desire, and the ability, to silence thoughts, the contents of the mind, which are presumably created by the brain. So the brain has created an illusory entity which wants to stop one of the main activities of the brain, the production of thoughts. Therefore one aspect of the brain is in conflict with another, even though the first one may not really exist. How can neuroscience explain this? I humbly submit that this whole argument is nonsensical — merely going round in circles — yet it is the logical deduction from the belief that the brain produces consciousness. Is it not a simpler explanation that this consciousness that wants to silence thought, and achieve a higher level, is independent of the brain? (Simpler explanations are what scientists and philosophers say they prefer.)
====================================
Turning now to the main point of discussion, let’s focus on this statement: “Why do we get altered states of consciousness with LSD, alcohol, THC, etc? Why does the Dali Lama experience a burst of EEG gamma waves when he meditates? All this, and many more examples, gives rise to a simple answer — the brain is the source of mind”. I agree 100% that these examples might lead to that conclusion (although I have the reservation that the Dali Lama’s meditating consciousness might be the cause of the burst of gamma waves). The problem is that other sets of data lead to a different conclusion, which suggests that the answer might not be quite so simple after all.
I won’t go into details about them here, but there are two brilliant books by a team of writers under the general editorship of Edward Kelly called Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century and Beyond Physicalism: Toward Reconciliation of Science and Spirituality, which contain a lot of science, as well as discussions of reincarnation, out-of-body experiences, parapsychology and similar topics, which materialists would consider unscientific. I would describe them as almost the Bible for arguing against the idea that the brain is the source of consciousness. There is also an excellent series on Medium called Top Down-Bottom Up by Gerald R. Baron which discusses these issues in some detail.
Let’s have a look at some of this alternative data, beginning with the question of memory — I believe this is probably the best argument against the brain being the source of consciousness. (My source for what follows are chapters 7 and 8 of The Science Delusion¹, a book by the highly qualified but non-materialist biologist Rupert Sheldrake.) For those who believe that the brain is the source of subjective experience, memories must be stored in the brain as material traces. Where else could they be? This might seem obvious to materialists, yet “it raises appalling logical problems. Attempts to locate memory traces have been unsuccessful despite more than a century of research, costing many billions of dollars. For promissory materialists, this failure does not imply that the trace theory of memory might be wrong; it merely means that we need to spend more time and money searching for the elusive memory traces”. (I count Mr Dohan as a promissory materialist, based upon his first response above.)
I won’t go into details about the logical problems outlined by Sheldrake, since they might be considered philosophical rather than scientific but, in a nutshell, an infinite regress would be required. Sticking instead to the science, the first problem is that the molecules within the nervous system are continually being replaced over a period of at most a few months, but in many cases much shorter times.“How then is memory stored in the brain so that its trace is relatively immune to molecular turnover?” (Sheldrake is quoting Francis Crick who, although a fanatical materialist, believing therefore that there must ultimately be some solution to this problem, at least here acknowledges the difficulty.) Materialist science, however, has still not found memory traces in the brain.
Here are some details from specific experiments. Karl Lashley, having trained various animals to perform a variety of tasks, “surgically cut nerve tracts or removed portions of the brain and measured the effects on the animals’ memory. To his astonishment, he found that the animals could still remember what they had learned even after large amounts of brain tissue had been removed”. “Lashley then showed that learned habits were retained after the associative areas of the brain were destroyed. Habits also survived a series of deep incisions into the cerebral cortex that destroyed cross-connections within it. Moreover, if the cerebral cortex was intact, removal of subcortical structures such as the cerebellum did not destroy the memory either”. “Even in invertebrates specific memory traces have proved elusive. In a series of experiments with trained octopuses, learned habits survived when various parts of the brain were removed”. In experiments by Steven Rose “the region of the brain (of young chicks) involved in the learning process was not necessary for the retention of memory”. There have been similar results with mice.
When a caterpillar is metamorphosed into a moth “in the pupa, almost all the caterpillar tissues are dissolved before the new structures of the adult develop. Most of the nervous system is dissolved as well”. Yet Martha Weiss and her colleagues “found that moths could remember what they had learned as caterpillars in spite of all the changes they went through during metamorphosis”.
Erik Kandel, Nobel Laureate in 2000, said in his acceptance speech that these problems of understanding how memory works “will require more than the bottom-up approach of molecular biology”. The obvious and significant question is, if memories are not stored in the brain, where can they be stored? Perhaps neuroscience, and materialism in general, will need a rethink.
Let’s turn next to the question of intelligence. Do you think humans need a brain to be intelligent? People who suffer from hydrocephalus have much of their skulls filled with cerebrospinal fluid. The neurologist John Lorber “found that some people with extreme hydrocephalus were surprisingly normal, which led him to ask the provocative question: ‘Is the brain really necessary?’ ”. Of sixty people who had more than 95% of the cranial cavity filled with cerebrospinal fluid “some were seriously retarded, but others were more or less normal, and some had IQs of well over 100. One young man who had an IQ of 126 and a first-class degree in mathematics… had ‘virtually no brain’… His mental activity and his memory were still able to function more or less normally even though he had a brain only five per cent of the normal size”.
In his next chapter, Sheldrake then gets down to the topic at the heart of this discussion; it is entitled ‘Are Minds Confined to Brains?’ (If they are not confined to brains, then one has to wonder whether the brain produces them.) The arguments here are perhaps a little less relevant than those in the previous chapter, especially regarding memory, but interesting nevertheless.
Having examined some bizarre statements by hardened materialists (B. F. Skinner, Paul Churchland, Francis Crick, Susan Greenfield), and noted that materialism is the apparently unchallengeable assumption by such influential figures, he then says that, if we treat materialism as a scientific hypothesis, rather than a philosophical dogma, it should be testable. Alluding to Carl Sagan’s well known statement, he asks “Where is the extraordinary evidence for the materialist claim that the mind is nothing but the activity of the brain?” His answer is that there is very little.
I suspect that his arguments might not convince ardent materialists, and perhaps do not directly address Mr. Dohan’s original point. They are nevertheless relevant, since they discuss the consequences of believing that the brain is responsible for consciousness. Here is a sample: “No one has ever seen a thought or an image inside someone else’s brain, or inside his or her own”. “Direct experience offers no support for the extraordinary claim that all experiences are inside brains. Direct experience is not irrelevant to the nature of consciousness: it is consciousness”.
He then goes into a discussion about the nature of vision, and the great difficulties in explaining scientifically how it is achieved, which is too lengthy to go into details here. My understanding of his conclusion is that, if the brain is responsible for consciousness, thus subjective experience, then vision cannot be scientifically explained. Exploring the history of the problem, one humorous comment is: “Ironically, the triumph of (Kepler’s) intromission theory (of vision) was achieved by leaving the experience of seeing unexplained. This problem has haunted science ever since”.
The logical deduction from the materialist premise is “that the brain constructs a picture or model of the world inside itself”, which is the orthodox assumption. This leads to strange conclusions, however; when we look at the sky, for example, the sky we actually see is supposedly inside our heads. Because this seems nonsensical to most people, they tend to reject the viewpoint of academic scientists and philosophers. Such public disdain is obviously very disappointing for them. Sheldrake mentions an investigation into peoples’ beliefs about the nature of vision, conducted in the 1990s by psychologist Gerald Winer and his colleagues. They were surprised that ‘wrong’ beliefs were common among children, and shocked “when they discovered that they were also widespread among college students, even among those studying psychology, who had been taught the ‘correct’ theory of vision… Education had failed to convert most of the students to the ‘correct’ belief”. Winer wonders “whether education can eradicate these odd, but seemingly powerful, intuitions about perceptions”. As Sheldrake says: “These ‘odd’ intuitions about perception persist because they are closer to experience than the official doctrine, which leaves so much unexplained — including consciousness itself”. One wonders whether the public know better than the scientists!
Sheldrake then explores those scientists and philosophers who have held opposing views: William James, Alfred North Whitehead, Max Velmans, Francisco Varela, Arva Noë, Henry Bergson. He then ends the chapter by noting that “most materialists are not true believers when it comes to themselves… In practice, they are dualists who believe they make free choices. Those who take their materialist faith seriously ought to believe that they are like robots with no free will… Materialism is unpersuasive if one takes one’s own experience into account. But because it is the creed of established science, its authority is enormous. That is why so many educated people try to resolve this dilemma by adopting a materialist persona in scientific discourse, while in private accepting the reality of conscious experience and choice”. Is that not a form of hypocrisy?
We therefore end up with one set of data which suggests that consciousness is produced by the brain — the fact that consciousness is altered by alcohol and psychedelic substances — and another set which suggests the opposite. How do we resolve the contradiction? I have no training in these matters or specialist knowledge, so can only make a tentative, and perhaps not especially convincing, suggestion. The argument about alcohol is not an empirical observation; no scientist, as far as I understand it, is able to watch consciousness being affected by the alcohol. It is rather an inference or logical deduction, which might therefore be an incorrect assumption. Is it just possible that consciousness and the brain are so closely integrated, the superimposition is so tight, that it is sometimes almost impossible to distinguish between them?
I hope you have enjoyed this article. I have written in the past about other topics, including spirituality, metaphysics, Christianity, psychology, science, politics, and astrology. All these articles are on Medium, but the simplest way to see a guide to them is to visit my website (click here and here).
=====================================
Footnote:
1. Coronet, 2012
