Consciousness: What is It and Where is it Found?
It is a common-place assumption that brains generate consciousness. The fact that brain damage, drug use, sleep deprivation, etc., impair thinking seems to confirm the brain’s generative capacity. However, how a physical mechanism could generate subjective experience is entirely unknown. In fact, the existence of top-down causation, where the mind affects the brain and body is inconsistent with the notion. Although normally correlated, there are reasons for thinking that consciousness can exist even when the brain is not functioning and also in the absence of brains all together. This may well be why brain science has done little to explain the mystery of consciousness and may never succeed in doing so. While willful obscurantism is not a good thing, appreciating mystery might just mean recognizing epistemological fact.
Consciousness is necessary for biological survival because it provides organisms with the ability to engage in the creativity necessary to improvise intelligent responses to novel situations, rather than simply following rules/algorithms in the manner of a machine. Both prey and predator, for instance, must outwit each other and eschew predictability just to survive or eat each day.
Are Brains Necessary? Part 1
Brains and a nervous system are not necessary for memory or evaluation. Stentor raesilii are a trumpet-shaped single-celled organism. If they are disturbed, they withdraw themselves out of harm’s way. If the stimulus appears to be harmless, the Stentor will quickly cease to react to the stimulus in a process called “habituation.” If the stimulus is a threat, when it appears the Stentor will increase the speed of retraction in a process called “sensitization.” If the negative stimulus continues, eventually the Stentor will swim away and attach itself elsewhere.[1]
figure 7.lA: The single-celled organism Stentor raesilii, showing the currents of water around it caused by the beating of its cilia.[2]
The slowing down of retraction and then its ignoring the stimulus is not due to chemicals being depleted or the like. This is proven with sensitization, where the reaction times actually increase.
Stentors exhibit memory and decision making. They evaluate the stimulus, change their reactions depending on the assessed risk, remember what happened last time and decide to try living somewhere else if the negative stimulus is too prolonged and threatening all without a brain or nervous system. This means that intelligence and consciousness seem to reach down into the fundamental units of life (cells).
Mimosa pudica also exhibit habituation and sensitization. In one experiment, an apparatus was rigged to drop the plants a few feet onto a soft and safe surface. Initially the plants closed up. Once they realized that it was safe, the plants stopped reacting.[3]
All organisms can be anesthetized – plants, animals, bacteria, chloroplasts, the mitochondria within cells.[4] This suggests that consciousness is more pervasively distributed than we normally imagine. Being “put to sleep” as the expression goes, implies having been awake.
Classical conditioning was made famous by Ivan Pavlov who got dogs to associate food with ringing a bell so the dogs would salivate just from hearing the bell. It turns out this can be applied to plants too. A scientist got plants to associate light with a fan blowing (normally the plants would just ignore the fan). The plants placed in darkness would turn towards a light source. The scientist turned on a fan every time the light was turned on. After three days when the scientist just turned on the fan with no light, the plants would turn towards the fan.[5] “Association” implies a mind of some sort.
Trees communicate with each other through mycorrhizal networks. These are fungi that live in symbiotic relationships with trees, attaching themselves to the roots and forming networks that resemble underground brains. Without the fungi, trees could not access certain minerals and could not grow taller than about three feet tall. In return, the trees supply sap to the fungi. Trees will also send sap to other trees that are in distress. In one instance, scientists found a tree stump that, having no leaves, could not photosynthesize to provide food for itself, being kept alive by the surrounding trees. Dying trees will send their sap to living trees. In another example of apparent mindfulness, plants being eaten by predators such as giraffes will warn the other trees by giving off gases and the other trees will pump toxins to their leaves to make them unpalatable.[6]
Are Brains Necessary? Part 2
In “Is Your Brain Really Necessary?”[7] John Lorber writes about several remarkable cases of hydrocephalus. This occurs when spinal fluid leaks into the skull in utero and prevents the brain from developing in the normal fashion. In some cases, this results in severe mental retardation, but in other instances the people suffering from hydrocephalus have 95% of their brain missing and are actually of above average mental functioning with no deficits whatsoever. The hope that brain science will identify which bit of the brain does what until a complete understanding of the brain is reached, is doomed. The brain seems to be largely redundant, at least in some cases, and as we will see later, the same parts of a brain can perform entirely different functions.
Scans of normal and hydrocephalic brains
A horizontal scan across the brain shows the ventricles as narrow slits in a normal individual and large cavities in a hydrocephalic patient.
In other instances, children who have had half their brains removed due to chronic epilepsy have gone on to make a full recovery and to have all or most of the normal mental functioning of anybody else.
Neuroplasticity and strokes
Neuroplasticity exhibited by stroke victims means that parts of the brain can be repurposed and lost mental functions can be performed by portions of the brain that once did something else.[8] This is achieved simply by a combination of merely wanting to regain an old ability and by trying to perform this ability repeatedly. But, if parts of the brain can be repurposed it means that there is not much point in trying to understand why one part of the brain does something different from another part of the brain. This is related to the fact that how one brain performs a particular task can be different from how another brain does it. Even the neurons that control the left and right ears of mice are in different parts of the brain and differ from mouse to mouse.[9] Since scientists strive to generate true generalizations, this lack of consistency between brains means that brain science has a big data problem. “Big data” is the term used to refer to masses of collected data that have no obvious meaning. No one has been able to come up with a theory that makes sense of it all. In such cases, no real knowledge is developed.
The notion of modularity; that the brain is divided into identifiable discreet functions is contradicted by neuroplasticity. For this reason, thinking of the brain as a kind of machine does not seem fruitful. A car is a machine. When an element fails, the function is lost. The brakes do not transform themselves into the transmission, or vice versa. The machine model of the brain would seem to imply that once a module was lost, the function would cease. Instead, the mind is sometimes the boss of the brain. The brain as servant changes to accommodate its master – at least with regard to neuroplasticity and strokes.
Placebos and Nocebos
Philosophers refer to top-down and bottom-up causation. Bottom-up causation occurs when physical factors affect the mind – such as sleep deprivation, or alcohol and caffeine consumption. Top-down causation is when the mind affects the brain and the rest of the body. This occurs, for instance, when people get emotionally upset by what someone has said, raising blood pressure and increasing respiration. Neuroplasticity is an example of top-down causation.
If mind were simply a product of brain function with the brain being a machine that produces consciousness, then it should not be possible for the mind’s wishes to turn around and affect what is producing it. Placebos and nocebos provide a striking example of this kind of top-down causation.
Henry K. Beecher accidentally discovered placebos in World War II. Having run out of morphine, he injected wounded soldiers with saline solution telling them it was morphine. This had exactly the same pain-killing affect that actual morphine does. It is now known that placebo painkillers work on precisely the same physical principles as “real” painkillers. Both function by releasing dopamine into the brain. This means that the recipients of placebo painkillers do not just falsely think that the pain has been reduced when it has not. The pain really is reduced.
Materialist scientists recognized the mind over matter implications of placebos and many of them steadfastly rejected their existence for many years. Unfortunately for them, the placebo effect is very real and stands up to experimental verification. It is repeatable and publicly observable. In fact, placebos are now a mandatory part of drug testing. Proposed new drugs must be proven to be more effective than placebos if they are to be approved by the FDA. For unknown reasons, placebos have been getting more and more effective, particularly in the USA, raising the bar for drug approval.
It is sometimes mistakenly thought that giving someone a placebo is giving them “nothing.” However, as has just been seen, placebos result in real physical effects. Thus, a controlled drug experiment would have to include three parts – the drug to be tested, a placebo, and literally nothing.
“Nocebo” is the name given to a placebo that has negative effects. In a well-known experiment reported in the article Behaviorally Conditioned Immunosuppression by Robert Ader and Nicholas Cohen, rats were given sugar water with a drug that suppresses the immune system. All the rats were sickened and half died.[10] The remaining rats were then nursed back to health. They were then fed the sugar water with no added drug. Half of the recovered rats died as a result and all were sickened. This means that a mere belief or association can be enough to kill a creature. It is definitely mind over matter – a phrase that when repeated by one of my students in her psychology class reduced the professor to a fit of apoplexy.
It now appears that most of the efficacy of anti-depressants is the result of the placebo effect. Irving Kirsch in Antidepressants and the Placebo Effect[11] shows that if antidepressants outperform placebos at all, it is probably due to antidepressants having some rather horrible side effects, such as nausea. This means that patients and doctors are frequently able to tell whether patients are receiving the “real” drug or the placebo, effectively increasing the placebo effect for the “real” drug.
Hypnosis
Fergus Campbell, a physiology lecturer at Cambridge, regularly gives a demonstration to his classes of the mind over matter effects of hypnotism. He hypnotizes a student and tells him that he is being touched with a lighted cigarette. In fact, it is just a pencil. The skin reddens and a blister forms where the pencil touches.[12] Other hypnotists have done the same thing.[13]
In one experiment a soldier was told that a molten shell fragment had hit his hand. Within 20 minutes, a narrow red mark had developed. After an hour, a blister had formed, going on to become a second-degree burn. The soldier was under observation the entire time.[14]
In another case, for the purposes of relaxation, a patient was told to imagine lying on a beach on a sunny day. To the doctor’s surprise, her skin began to redden due to “sunburn” spreading across her shoulders and down one arm.[15] The sunburn conformed to the contours of her dress.
Warts are particularly amenable to cure via hypnosis. In one case, a German physician exposed patients’ to “x-rays” that were nothing more than an intimidating looking and sounding machine that did nothing. Their warts were then painted with a topical “medicine,” really a dye, and the patients were told not to touch the warts until the “medicine” had faded. 31% were cured after one treatment and 78.5% after more than one treatment. In some cases, the patients had had the warts for years and previous attempts at treatment had failed.[16]
To rule out the possibility of spontaneous remission, experimenters have been able to choose just one hand to be cured, and even select which warts on a hand will disappear and which remain.[17]
Fish skin disease is a painful congenital condition where there is a “thick, black, horny layer of skin, inelastic and subject to painful lesions.”[18] There is no known cure for this condition. However, hypnosis has resulted in some total recoveries.
In one experiment, women were hypnotized and asked to visualize the way they would wish to look while feeling tingling and a sensation of warmth. “Nearly all of the 70 women succeeded in increasing their breast size, with an average increase of 1½ to 2 inches.”[19]
Analgesics (painkilling) by hypnosis does not release dopamine in the manner of placebos, but can be equally effective. Naxolene, which blocks dopamine release, had no affect hypnotic analgesics when it was injected.[20] One woman had two impacted wisdom teeth extracted requiring removal of bone using chisels while hypnotized.[21]
Evidence that something profound is happening in hypnosis is that patients who are hypnotically regressed back to 5 or 6 months old babies have spontaneously developed the Babinski reflex which occurs when the sole of the foot is stroked in babies of that age. It was not suggested by the experimenters and the hypnotic subjects did not know the reflex existed.[22]
Near Death Experiences
Near Death Experiences (NDEs) are also not consistent with the notion that the brain produces consciousness rather than being merely the usual means that mind interfaces with physical reality. Pim van Lommel’s Consciousness Beyond Life is an excellent scientifically-minded book on the subject.[23] Van Lommel is a Dutch cardiologist and his work on NDEs has been published in The Lancet, the premiere British medical journal.
Van Lommel is at pains to show why many objections to the existence of NDEs are ill-informed and scientifically unsound. Oftentimes these “objections” are merely ad hoc musings with no evidential support and, in many cases, in contradiction with the known facts.
Some of the important features of NDEs include the fact that some people who were blind from birth experience perfect vision during an NDE.[24] This is particularly interesting because if sight is restored to someone blind from birth under normal conditions, their brains are unable to make sense of the unfamiliar sensory input.[25]
NDE experiences are typically hyper-lucid, faster, clearer, more real seeming, than everyday experience, with good memory formation.[26] None of these facts is consistent with the notion that NDEs are the result of oxygen deprivation which results in hazy experiences and interferes with memory formation.
Many NDEs contain verifiable perceptions, such as the story of a comatose patient who identified the man who had removed his false teeth while the patient was in a coma and asked him where he had put them.[27] Likewise, in the famous case of Pam Reynolds, she was able to identify the music playing in the operating theater, the tools used to open her cranium and the conversations had by the medical personnel during the operation. This, while her eyes were taped shut and “clickers” in her ears. Most importantly, her brain also had zero electrical activity at the time.[28]
NDEs are unlikely to be a human invention since there is large cross-cultural agreement about their features and their existence. Tibetan Buddhists, Plato’s story of Er, adherents of Judaism, Jainism, Islam, Hinduism and Christian mystics have reported similar phenomena to NDEs, including life review. Children who have not heard of NDEs have had them; sometimes meeting dead relatives or friends who they did not know were dead.[29]
Blind people seeing, verifiable perceptions, cross-cultural agreement and children’s NDEs mean that the notion that NDEs are hallucinations is not sustainable.
NDEs can include an out-of-body experience, an awareness of being dead, positive emotions, moving through a tunnel, the observation of colors, the observation of a celestial landscape, and the presence of a border with an awareness that if this border were crossed, it would not be possible to come back.[30]
Most importantly, NDEs cannot be the product of residual, undetectable brain function during cardiac arrest and therefore not detectable by an EEG. This is because of certain scientific facts concerning brain function. Muscles store glycogen, but the brain does not. The brain cannot operate without oxygen and blood flow. If the heartbeat is not immediately restored after cardiac arrest, there is a complete loss of all electrical activity in the cerebral cortex. This is always the result in between 10 and 20 seconds (15 sec. average).[31] The first result of the absence of blood flow is a neuron’s inability to maintain its membrane potential, resulting in a loss of neuronal function. The acute loss of electrical and synaptic activity in neurons can be seen as the cell’s inbuilt defense and energy-saving response. The remaining energy sources can be briefly deployed for the cell’s survival, for just a few minutes. The joint and simultaneous activity of the cerebral cortex and brain stem is a prerequisite for brain associated consciousness as shown by MRIs.[32] Blood flow to the brain during resuscitation is not enough to restore consciousness, for instance, during manual manipulation of the heart during CPR. That can be enough to keep you alive temporarily, but not to restore consciousness. Consciousness with no EEG reading should not be possible if consciousness were always dependent on brain activity. Upon resuscitation it takes between hours and several days for an EEG to return to normal. Recovery of consciousness takes from between 5 minutes, to 72 hours, with a mean time of 6 hours. Until this occurs, the brain mostly flatlines.[33] So NDEs are not the result of brain activity as one is being resuscitated.
NDEs are not related to medications, the duration of a cardiac arrest, the duration of unconsciousness, a fear of death, the standard of education, religious beliefs or religion, or familiarity with the notion of NDEs.[34]
Deathbed visitations are also common, where within a week or two of death a dying person experiences a visit from a loved one who has predeceased him. In many cases the visitor is invisible to others in the room and the dying person seems to be interacting with thin air.[35] In other cases, the visitors are visible to the attending doctors and nurses and have been picked out of photos that include large groups of people.[36] So, for instance, a nurse says “this is the person I saw” and points at what turns out to be the dead husband of the dying patient. The dying patient confirms that this is who visited her.
Drug Use and Mystical Experiences
People who have taken psychedelics like LSD have reported some of the features of NDEs. Experiencing unearthly colors is a common event.
On an episode (#766) of the podcast WTF with Marc Maran, Shane Mauss described taking DMT, a chemical found in plants ingested by shamans. After many experiences he came to a carnival-like place where a blue woman was dancing. Mauss felt like he had known her for millions of life times. She said that they had been waiting for him. Her body was covered in serpentine figures with some kind of code written between the lines.
He later gave the drug to someone who had never taken it before and he was careful not to mention anything about his own experiences. While high, the newby said:
“Oh man, they love you in here.
There’s a feeling of love?
No, they love you. There is a carnival and there is a purple woman who says she knows you really well and you come in here all the time and she just needs you to know that she loves you.
I said “What did she look like?”
The strangest thing was that she had this serpentine pattern…”
Since Mauss is an avowed atheist, he found this rather unnerving. This seems similar to the veridical experiences of NDE’rs.
The evidence that psychedelics are unrelated to psychosis or madness is that they have been given to schizophrenics and others suffering from severer mental illnesses who have reported that the experiences are nothing like their pathological experiences.
Another consideration is that those who take psychedelics commonly rate their experience as the most important in their lives. This is similar to NDErs and mystics. And in addition, there seem to be many long-term positive benefits such as a reduced fear of death, more openness to experience, a reduced chance of suicide,[37] a better sense of life as meaningful and worthwhile, more positive feelings towards others, etc., and that fact is inconsistent with the experiences being pathological.
Dostoevsky had epilepsy. Ten seconds before having a seizure he would experience a profound mystical state filled with meaning. He commented that he would give his whole life for one such experience but also that the experience was so powerful he felt that he could not have stood it if it lasted longer. Dostoevsky is regarded as one of the greatest novelists of all time with a penetrating insight into the human condition. This suggests that though epilepsy can be life-threatening, the experiences it can induce can be legitimate and nonpathological.
Plato, in The Republic, with the character of Socrates, at one point seems to be trying to describe his own experiences of The Form of the Good. As the father of Western philosophy, Plato too seems to be endowed with extraordinary insight and wisdom. Jesus also claimed to be the beneficiary of religious experiences which seem related to the way in which he advanced the understanding of moral duties – love your enemy. Plotinus too claimed to have had four peak experiences in his lifetime and was so famed for his unbiased perspective that he was commonly asked to arbitrate disputes and parents who were about to die would leave their children for Plotinus to raise. None of these instances seem consistent with a notion of mystical experiences as pathological.
Plato, Nondual Consciousness, and Scientism
Plato’s dialogue, The Republic, is often incorrectly thought to be about an imaginary polis (city/state); a perfectly just utopia. Plato then gets mistakenly criticized for its rather horrible features. For instance, romantic love is banned and children are raised in anonymous nurseries so parents cannot be biased in favor of their often mediocre children.
However, Plato explicitly writes that he is only discussing the polis as a metaphor for the soul; using something large, exterior and visible to examine something with no size, invisible and interior. His paeans to love in the Symposium and the Phaedrus demonstrate that his imagined city is a dystopian nightmare that results when a single virtue like justice is pursued at the expense of all other virtues. Were all other virtues to be ignored, justice would require putting children in daycare centers so that no parent would know which child was his or hers and exhibit the usual parental favoritism. Each child would be objectively observed and the more brilliant and moral will be specially set aside to become future Guardians, so-called Philosopher Kings – rule by the wise and the good. Courageous champions would, upon returning from war, get to choose as their reward for heroic service beautiful, strong, smart, women in a kind of organized breeding program. Poetry (epic poems describing the behavior of heroes, anti-heroes, and the often unseemly behavior of the gods) will be either banished or very tightly censored. As such, The Republic, the dialog in which Plato’s Cave appears, is also a criticism of all ideologies that engage in precisely the distortion of taking a single good thing, like “order” (tyranny) or “compassion” (communism, the welfare state) and turning it into something intolerable by excluding other important things, like freedom.
Plato’s Cave is about the structure of reality which he conceives of as primarily involving consciousness and the spiritual. The philosopher is someone who takes the interior journey towards the sun – Plato’s symbol of the divine foundation of reality. Nikolai Berdyaev describes Plato as the discoverer of the noumenal – the spiritual reality that transcends space and time. It can be associated with all interior experience and subjectivity (subjective awareness).
In Plato’s metaphysics, there are four levels of reality; the physical, represented by the shadows on the back wall of the cave; mind (psyche), associated with the wall and the objects being paraded up and down behind it being lit by a fire – the combination producing the shadows on the back wall of the cave; the soul (nous), represented by real objects like a tree outside the cave, and The Form of the Good represented by the sun, which Plato sees as generating all the lower levels. Two downsides of Plato’s philosophy are that “freedom” is not featured prominently, and the more abstract and general seems to be regarded as more fundamental than the particular and personal. Berdyaev remedies these defects by denoting the Person, the individual, as having the highest moral worth, and by emphasizing freedom and providing a metaphysical ground for its existence. In Berdyaev’s view, before God the Father comes Mystery, the Ungrund – a spiritual infinity to which human consciousness also has a connection. Being acausal, and inexplicable, even in principle, this Freedom is partly why both your own consciousness and others’ subjectivity remain partly mysterious, inexplicable, and unpredictable. Creativity involves taking something nonexistent and bringing it into existence. If this process could be fully explained and reproduced on demand by following an algorithm – a step-by-step process of answering well-defined questions – then creativity would not exist. That is why creativity has to, if it is to exist at all, be inexplicable and unanalyzable.
Ivan Karamazov, a character in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, quotes the line “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.” Similarly, if consciousness did not exist, nature would need to invent it too since it is consciousness that allows creative, non-rule-following, intelligent, improvisatory responses to unexpected and unpredictable circumstances. No creature is omniscient, and some phenomena are unpredictable even in principle, such as the weather, and so programmed behavior cannot possibly be sufficient to permit the survival of the organism. The line from Ivan Karamazov is particularly pertinent because consciousness seems to have a divine, transcendent aspect and thus to be related to God and the Ungrund. God as Spirit and consciousness as a fundamentally spiritual phenomenon might be why the word “consciousness” was banished from much academic writing and regarded with such skepticism.
The allegory of the Cave posits depths to the human soul of which we can potentially be conscious. It suggests that physical reality; objects, have an inferior reality that is dependent on the spiritual. We can see something like this when we converse with another person with whom we are sympathetic. It is not one body talking to another; but my interior communing with your interior. The expression “the eyes are the gateway of the soul” captures this idea to an extent. The important stuff is on the inside, not on the surface.
Plato’s Cave helps explain the idea that the human being is a microcosm of the macrocosm. That to understand reality, we need to understand ourselves. We embody all levels of reality within us. This connection with infinite Freedom is what makes us partly divine – there is God in us, just as God has man in Him. In Christianity, God becomes man. Not as an all-conquering master, but as a servant of low social position who permits himself to be crucified, taking on the full extent of the tragedy and suffering of human existence.
Each person, each microcosm, is unique, and unrepeatable: this Person with his own consciousness and his own connection to meonic Freedom. Plato, on the other hand, mostly posited true existence in universals; abstractions and concepts: the Form of Beauty, of Justice, of Truth. In the Symposium, the novice loves the body, then realizes he loves the beauty of all bodies, and then all minds, and then Beauty itself, aside from all concrete instantiations. The spiritual and real is identified with the universal by Plato. However, it is the concrete and particular that is most real. There might be an idea of man in the mind of God, but this universal is only discovered in the particular man. It is the individual Person who has ultimate value, not the idea of the Person. The concrete Person is eternal and can no more cease to exist than God could.
There can be mystical experiences that seem to suggest a dissolution of individual consciousness and a merger with something that might be called Pure Awareness, but this should not be posited as an ultimate metaphysical reality. Mystical experiences cannot always be used to produce good philosophy. For love to exist, for instance, there must be two. The lover and the beloved. If nondual consciousness is posited as descriptive of the way things really are then, then love has been eliminated from the picture. God cannot be Love, without human beings – people to love. God cannot be the Creator, if creation has no real existence. Prayer and meditation might be the route to communing with God, where the mind is silenced and we “listen” by paying attention to all interior experience. But, this is similar to how we communicate or commune with anyone else. It is necessary to shut up to hear what the other Person is saying. If our minds follow their usual modus operandi of free association, one thought leading to another with no real direction, then how are we to hear God, if God is trying to communicate? Were we to hear the voice of God, to feel the presence of the living God, while meditating or praying, does not mean “nondual” consciousness is more fundamental and real than the Person.
It might seem nice to figure out exactly how the individual consciousness is related to God and ultimate reality. Is there some spiritual stuff underlying everything and connecting everything? Is everything ultimately a giant Mind? These questions are an example of rationalistic empirical metaphysics, that apes the methods of science – a science of the spirit that more or less exactly parallels the approach of science to the physical realm. It takes Spirit as a substance; as an object. It treats the Freedom and interiority of Spirit as just another thing to be analyzed. It inappropriately imports the techniques of science developed to examine physical reality – the world of objects – into subjectivity. Spirit is found in subjective experience, not in objects. To label and catalog the Kingdom of God using concepts that apply to the Kingdom of Earth is to extend scientism into the realm of spirit. Scientism is the notion that only the techniques of science are truth-revealing; and nothing else is. But really, truth and knowledge are created by the human subject. They exist in the Person, whether a particular man’s or God’s. Knowledge, if it is to exist at all, exists in the Person. Were someone to see someone else’s soul body – their eternal heavenly form – and stare at the very (spiritual) matter out of which they are formed, they are not seeing the real person or communing with ultimate reality. Ultimate reality is the I/Thou relation; not the I/It. To commune with another Person, whether it be the Person of God, or a man, is an I/Thou relationship – my subject communicating and empathizing with another subject. The I/It relationship is subject meets object. Simply replacing spiritual objects with physical objects does not fundamentally change the I/It relationship. In I/Thou, my interior communes with your interior.
Mind at Large
The Cambridge philosopher C. D. Broad argued that the brain, nervous system and sense organs are eliminative rather than productive. In The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley comments that mind at large is “funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented … languages.”[38] Otherwise people would be overwhelmed by useless and irrelevant knowledge.
This is consistent with Frederick Myer’s earlier assertion that human consciousness evolves and adapts according to environmental and social pressures.[39] Abilities are developed and others are allowed to wither according to the demands of living in a particular context. Hunter gatherers will have a much more alert and intense interaction with their natural environment than someone living in a contemporary developed country, but their ability to think abstractly will probably be minimal. It is just not relevant or necessary for their existence.
The eliminative function of the brain seems to be supported by neurophysiology. The brains of babies are a mass of interconnections. Those interconnections that are not used are pruned away and those that are used are thereby reinforced and strengthened. Like muscles, use and activity affect the very structure of the brain. Abilities that are practiced improve and those that are irrelevant or ignored remain merely potential or disappear. Windows of development open and then close if the relevant activities fail to materialize.[40] For instance, the ability to hear and emulate the four tones of Mandarin Chinese. If not heard before a certain period in childhood, they will be hard to master.
Idiot Savants
Idiot savants are people who have unusual seemingly superhuman abilities but with corresponding deficits. In The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks describes twins with IQs of 60 who had a mysterious ability to identify prime numbers up to 20 digits long. They were variously diagnosed as autistic, psychotic and severely mentally retarded.
The movie Rain Man is loosely based on Kim Peek. He too was diagnosed as mentally retarded. However, he could read two pages of a book simultaneously, using one eye to read one page and the other eye to read the second page. He also had over 90% recall of everything he read. He had read over 10,000 books by the time he died. On the other hand, he was unable to look after himself at all. His father accompanied him everywhere and fed, bathed and dressed him every day.
Daniel Tammet is both a math prodigy and can learn a new language to fluency in a week. He was challenged to prove his ability by learning Icelandic in one week and then to be interviewed on TV by native speakers. He succeeded. He can recite pi from memory to 22,514 digits which he did in five hours and nine minutes in 2004. He is also autistic and suffered from epileptic seizures as a child.
Reducing consciousness to a trickle allows people to focus on the task at hand. Too narrowly focused, however, and consciousness can produce unusual but pointless abilities at the price of mental retardation and the loss of the capacity for independent living. The result is a kind of hyper-specialization. The twins cannot actually do anything productive with numbers. Reciting pi is pointless. Reading thousands of books and recalling them is not the same as acquiring wisdom and understanding. At best, Peek could serve as a kind of library of memory for intelligent people to access in the manner described by Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451 when books are burned.
The Goldilocks point is to be generally capable of many things: an all-rounder; a dilettante. Mircea Eliade once commented that he was grateful for the mind-numbing interest in minutiae demonstrated by specialists, such as the world’s leading expert on the left rear knees of the Alaskan semi-aquatic grasshopper. He could read all their work and try to make a useful synthesis, i.e., something interesting, out of it.
Expanding consciousness by taking LSD might open the valve to give someone access to broader, more expansive levels of consciousness, but being high on LSD renders the consumer not fit for anything productive and possibly a danger to himself and to others. To get anything productive done and take care of quotidian matters, normal consciousness is required.
Those who are regarded as enlightened tend to have had just a few peak experiences in their lifetimes. They do not walk about in a state of bliss and unity with all that is. Being one with the bus in mystical unity might turn into being one with the bus in another sense, or rather a smudge on the road. And the experience of “nonduality” does not mean that “oneness,” what philosophers call “Monism” defines reality. It is just an experience. Love is a real experience too – and love cannot exist were Monism to be true.
Mind and Epistemology
Sam Harris, one of the New Atheists, taking a leaf out of Descartes’ book, comments that consciousness is the one thing that cannot be doubted. Even if humans turn out to be brains in vats and the external world an illusion, the fact that people seem to be experiencing the world cannot be questioned.
Consciousness is experienced directly only from a first-person perspective and so is not amenable to scientific analysis grounded in third-person techniques. Therefore, any defects in a person’s brain function can potentially harm his ability to assess the plausibility of different ideas concerning the mind. People with low emotional intelligence, such as those suffering from autism or Asperger’s syndrome, are unable to identify or describe their own emotional states or those of others at all well. They are also likely, depending on severity, to lack a “theory of mind.” A theory of mind in this context means attributing mental states to other people in order to explain their behavior.
Such people are often attracted to science because science is restricted to the third person and no insight into a person’s own mental states or others is required. They are also more likely to be attracted to the notion that people resemble robots because of their own lack of insight into their inner workings. One individual encountered said that up until two years prior to my meeting him, he had doubted that emotions even existed. That gives an indication of just how profoundly lacking and strange his phenomenology must be. To a certain extent, he looked within and found nothing there. Another person stated that up until recently he had regarded interacting with other people as a waste of time. Unsurprisingly, he turned out to be a computer science major.
Since science focuses on what can be physically verified, its truths are in principle accessible to all. Science is a lowest common denominator phenomenon – mind using what can be very sophisticated techniques to study matter. By restricting themselves to studying the tactile and physical, scientists examine the world like very intelligent babies. Becoming habituated to this mode of thinking déformation professionnelle leads many of them to nihilism since meaning and purpose, being invisible, are excluded from their purview.
Real babies, however, only exist because of love – one of the invisibles. Without love and affection most babies give up the will to live. Understaffed orphanages can have astronomical mortality rates for this reason. Those babies who survive are likely to suffer from attachment disorder and remain unassimilable to normal human society, having no interest in their fellow humans.[41]
Whatever the popularity and prestige of science, in real life mind cannot be ignored. Social existence means paying careful attention to the varying emotions and thoughts conveyed by faces, tones of voice and gesture. Far from being skeptical as to other people’s consciousness, close attention is paid to every nuance of an interlocutor. This ability to recognize human emotional states is highly developed by dogs in particular with whom humans have coevolved. Dogs, cats and humans relate to each other as conscious beings.
Consciousness and machines
One definition of a machine is that it is a rule-following device. A rule can only be instituted for something that is predictable. For unforeseen circumstances, no rule can be formulated.
Consciousness provides creatures with the ability to improvise; to respond flexibly to the uncertainties of their environments. In many activities, music, martial arts, writing, etc., someone begins as a novice with no skills. He then learns the rules. Mastery is attained when the rules have been become second nature and then transcended as required. There are literally no rules for a street fight. Anything can happen. Victory will depend on responding organically to the circumstances rather than behaving in a rule-driven machine-like manner.
Sheldrake writes: “Ethologists, scientists who study animal behavior, have observed that many fixed-action patterns show a “fixed” component and an “orienting” component that is relatively flexible.”[42] A fixed component, which might be regarded as rule-like, can include things like the quest for food. A hungry fox has no real choice about whether it feels hungry or not and the consequences of not eating are non-negotiable. However, in order to catch its prey, the fox must match the relatively random and unpredictable actions of the animal. Evolution and the survival of the fittest will select for hard to catch prey and smart, flexible predators.
A greylag goose is “programmed” to retrieve eggs that roll off its nest. That is a fixed component. The eggs are not round and so the motions of the goose’s bill in retrieving the egg and rolling it up a hill are the orienting aspect.
Similarly, female mud wasps of a Paralastor species in Australia build underground nests covered by a funnel that the wasp constructs. When scientists made holes in the funnel, or removed it, or altered it in other ways that would never occur naturally, the wasps would inspect the damage and respond intelligently and appropriately. Their response cannot be innate and instinctual because such events had never happened before. Their goal is to have a functioning well-protected nest. How this goal is achieved can include flexible behaviors and smart problem-solving.[43] The goal is fixed. How the goal is achieved is not. Even if the universe were rule-driven in some deep sense, the actual behaviors that creatures encounter are not in fact predictable or known in advance. Thus, if consciousness did not exist, it might have to have been invented by evolution.
Left Hemisphere, Right Hemisphere
In The Master and His Emissary, Iain McGilchrist writes that all creatures, like a little bird, need two types of consciousness simultaneously. They need to be able to focus on something specific, such as pecking at food, while it also needs to keep an eye out for predators which requires a more general awareness of environment. These are quite different activities. The Left Hemisphere (LH) is adapted for a narrow focus. The Right Hemisphere (RH) for the broad. The brains of human beings have the same division of function.
In most people, the LH governs the right side of the body, the RH, the left side. With birds, the left eye (RH) looks for predators, the right eye (LH) focuses on food and specifics. Since danger can take many forms and is unpredictable, the RH has to be very open-minded. The LH is for narrow focus, the explicit, the familiar, the literal, tools, mechanism/machines and the man-made. The broad focus of the RH is necessarily more vague and intuitive and handles the anomalous, novel, metaphorical, the living and organic. The LH is high resolution but narrow, the RH low resolution but broad.
The LH exhibits unrealistic optimism and self-belief. The RH has a tendency towards depression and is much more realistic about a person’s own abilities. LH has trouble following narratives because it has a poor sense of “wholes.” In art it favors flatness, abstract and conceptual art, black and white rather than color, simple geometric shapes and multiple perspectives all shoved together, e.g., cubism. Particularly RH paintings emphasize vistas with great depth of field and thus space and time,[44] emotion, figurative painting[45] and scenes related to the life world. In music, LH likes simple, repetitive rhythms. The RH favors melody, harmony and complex rhythms.
One reason children’s art is typically so bad is that children and many adult non-artists tend to draw what they “know” (LH) rather than what they perceive (RH). The following picture of two tables illustrates the difference:
The non-artist knows the table is rectangular and so a rectangle is drawn with a couple of legs sticking out. The picture on the right is closer to what is actually seen.
It usually takes a lot of training and practice to draw or paint something resembling what is really experienced. The default is LH ugliness and two-dimensional flatness. Good figurative painting requires a sense of space and depth. Concerning colors, the LH tendency when attempting to paint a black velvet dress, for instance, would be to grab a tube of paint black paint and to apply it. The LH “knows” the dress is black. In reality, even black velvet dresses are made up of multiple shades of color. They are not black holes after all.
The LH picture of a table and the RH table make an excellent visual metaphor for the frequent crudity of LH theory and unreal abstract concept-driven thinking. Homo economicus, the perfectly rational and egoistic consumer invented by bad economists, or the notion that all human psychology is hedonistic and driven only by pleasure, or brains are information processing devices, are examples of the gross LH simplifications and distortions that actually make human behavior harder to understand and predict, and more, not less, inexplicable.
Schizophrenia is a disease of extreme LH emphasis. Since empathy is RH and the ability to notice emotional nuance facially, vocally and bodily expressed, schizophrenics tend to be paranoid and are often convinced that the real people they know have been replaced by robotic imposters. This is at least partly because they lose the ability to intuit what other people are thinking and feeling – hence they seem robotic and suspicious. This notion that people are robots/machines is quite common among scientists who study “light of day” phenomena, rather than the mysterious, intuitive, metaphorical, emotional, humorous world of the RH.
Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West as well as McGilchrist characterize the West as awash in phenomena associated with an extreme LH emphasis. Spengler argues that Western civilization was originally much more RH (to use McGilchrist’s categories) and that all its most significant artistic (in the broadest sense) achievements were triumphs of RH accentuation.
The RH is where novel experiences and the anomalous are processed and where mathematical, and other, problems are solved. The RH is involved with the natural, the unfamiliar, the unique, emotions, the embodied, music, humor, understanding intonation and emotional nuance of speech, the metaphorical, nuance, and social relations. It has very little speech, but the RH is necessary for processing all the nonlinguistic aspects of speaking, including body language. Understanding what someone means by vocal inflection and facial expressions is an intuitive RH process rather than explicit.
Though communication exists between the two hemispheres, there is a fairly high degree of independence and needs to be. Awareness of context or extraneous background sounds can interfere with focus. Getting lost in specifics can harm a sense of the big picture. Making RH intuitive processes explicit can actually harm, slow them down or even destroy them. A joke explained is no longer funny. A metaphor spelled out can no longer function. The gestural aspect of speech (RH) if made conscious is merely distracting. Self-consciousness (LH) interferes with “flow” and public speaking. Processes like going to sleep involve letting go. We fall asleep, but wake up, having control over, rising above your feelings. Having a name on the tip of your tongue is more likely to be recalled if you stop focusing on it. Shortly before executing a jump in figure skating, breaking a board in karate, shooting at a target, thinking must cease. Happiness is best achieved indirectly not explicitly.
RH is very much the center of lived experience; of the life world with all its depth and richness. The RH is “the master” from the title of McGilchrist’s book. The LH ought to be no more than the emissary; the valued servant of the RH. However, in the last few centuries, the LH, which has tyrannical tendencies, has tried to become the master. The LH is where the ego is predominantly located. In split brain patients where the LH and the RH are surgically divided (this is done sometimes in the case of epileptic patients) one hand will sometimes fight with the other. In one man’s case, one hand would reach out to hug his wife while the other pushed her away. One hand reached for one shirt, the other another shirt. Or a patient will be driving a car and one hand will try to turn the steering wheel in the opposite direction. In these cases, the “naughty” hand is usually the left hand (RH), while the patient tends to identify herself with the right hand governed by the LH. The two hemispheres have quite different personalities.
The connection between LH and ego can also be seen in the fact that the LH is competitive, contentious, and agonistic. It wants to win. It is the part of you that hates to lose arguments.
Using the metaphor of Mystery and Order, the RH deals with Mystery – the unknown, the unfamiliar, the implicit, the emotional, the dark, danger, the chaotic. The LH is connected with Order – the known, the familiar, the rule-driven, the explicit, and light of day. Learning something means to take something unfamiliar and making it familiar. Since the RH deals with the novel, it is the problem-solving part. Once understood, the results are dealt with by the LH. When learning a new piece on the piano, the RH is involved. Once mastered, the result becomes a LH affair. The muscle memory developed by repetition is processed by the LH. If errors are made, the activity returns to the RH to figure out what went wrong; the activity is repeated until the correct muscle memory is developed in which case it becomes part of the familiar LH.
Science is an attempt to find Order. It would not be necessary if people lived in an entirely orderly, explicit, known world. The lived context of science implies Mystery. Theories are reductive and simplifying and help to pick out salient features of a phenomenon. They are always partial truths, though some are more partial than others. The alternative to a certain level of reductionism or partialness would be to simply reproduce the world which of course would be both impossible and unproductive. The test for whether a theory is sufficiently non-partial is whether it is fit for purpose and whether it contributes to human flourishing.
The LH looks for and finds order in the flux of experience. In reality, every person is slightly different and every experience is unique. The 100th time something is done is different from the 99th. In order not to just get lost in Mystery, the LH uses categories and applies them across experience. While focusing on the repetitive aspects of experience can be useful, too much LH and Order is boring – resulting in the feeling “been there, done that.”
Analytic philosophers pride themselves on trying to do away with vagueness. To do so, they tend to jettison context which cannot be brought into fine focus. However, in order to understand things and discern their meaning, it is necessary to have the big picture, the overview, as well as the details. There is no point in having details if the subject does not know what they are details of. Such philosophers also tend to leave themselves out of the picture even when what they are thinking about has reflexive implications. John Locke, for instance, tried to banish the RH from reality. All phenomena having to do with subjective experience he deemed unreal and once remarked about metaphors, a RH phenomenon, that they are “perfect cheats.” Analytic philosophers tend to check the logic of the words on the page and not to think about what those words might say about them. The trick is for them to recognize that they and their theories, which exist in minds, are part of reality too.
Attempting to understand consciousness by focusing only on the LH will omit everything connected to the RH. All such accounts tend to say nothing about music, humor, intuition, context, the metaphorical, emotion, emotional nuance of language, the unique and individual, social connection, and meaning.
Having a stroke in the RH means having to make do with the LH. Without the ability to deal with gestalts, the LH is forced to identify a person by single attributes, like a nose, or mouth, or haircut. Normal people recognize someone using the RH which has a broader focus and can see wholes. RH also deals with the unique – which is necessary to tell one person from another. RH perception takes multiple factors into account, including how a person moves. It provides fewer details, but it can see the forest for the trees.
A lot of moving through the world is non-linguistic. Animals reason and problem-solve non-linguistically and we do too, much of the time.
It is possible in experiments to cause each hemisphere in turn to cease to function using magnetism – brains are electro-magnetic at some level and this can be manipulated. In one experiment, subjects were given the following syllogism:
All monkeys climb trees.
Porcupines are monkeys.
Therefore, porcupines climb trees.[46]
When the RH is functioning subjects reject the argument as unsound since the second premise is false. The argument is recognized as technically valid – the premises if true would guarantee the truth of the conclusion – but that is all.
When only the LH was working, subjects accepted the argument as legitimate. When asked – but what about the second premise?, subjects acknowledged that it was false, but accepted it anyway saying “but it says here…”
The RH is more based in concrete reality; actual data. The LH has a tendency to get lost in abstractions that do not reflect the way things really are.
The trouble with system-creation is that intellectual systems try to provide an answer for everything. This is a power-grab by the LH – making theory primary and comprehensive. It effectively claims omniscience via self-referential abstractions.
A LH mode of thought concerning free will or the existence of telepathy might be to reject them both on the grounds that – “I don’t see how that is possible,” i.e., they might seem to contradict the thinker’s materialistic metaphysics. The RH response is to focus on the actual evidence and let the data determine the theory. The appropriate method of operation is to start with RH perception, perhaps modify those perceptions after pondering them (LH), and then return to RH experience. For instance, someone is looking into the distance. Another person comments that the lights are beautiful. The first person alters his attention and focus slightly and he notices the beauty of the lights. Beauty is perceived but perception can be modified by thought. Likewise, little children and even some animals perceive injustice (RH) at least when it concerns themselves. This perception can be modified by thought and theory (LH) – not always for the better. The result can be a permanent alteration in perception. However, attempts to generate morality through moral theories like utilitarianism do not work. The LH is analytic, not generative.
If thought begins and ends with the LH, then thinking has no content – content being provided by experience (RH), and skepticism and nihilism ensue. The LH spins its wheels self-referentially, never referring back to experience. Theory assumes such primacy that it will simply outlaw experiences and data inconsistent with it; a profoundly wrong-headed approach.
The Four Quadrants
Ken Wilber locates interior subjectivity and individual consciousness in the top left-hand quadrant.[47] But, human consciousness is also partly a communal phenomenon. Without culture (bottom left-hand quadrant) and the economic system that sustains it (bottom right-hand quadrant) humans cannot exist. So, to understand oneself, it is necessary to pay attention to one’s cultural heritage. Thoughts are influenced by the thoughts of others. Linguistic thoughts require a communal language that exists independently from any one mind. Likewise, normally, the brain and mind are intricately related (top-right quadrant).
The idea of the four quadrants is to encourage a thinker to focus on multiple aspects of an item. To answer a question like “Why do you like blue jeans?,” the four quadrants can be used to provide a more complete, less reductive answer. (IT) Jeans are practical. They are moderately warm and very durable. (ITS) Thanks to mass production and factories, they are readily available and reasonably cheap. There is no point liking jeans if it is not possible to buy them. (WE) The culture we live in considers them moderately fashionable, normal and acceptable. This will contribute to an individual’s view of jeans. (I) A person’s idiosyncratic taste happens to favor them. But this taste takes place in the context of biology, the social (economics), the cultural (interior, shared ideas and meanings) and the individual.
Similarly, “What does it mean to be a woman?” has a biological component (IT) contributing to cross-cultural constants concerning motherhood, e.g., the fact of pregnancy, the hormonal, and the feminine. What jobs are available to women in a particular society will influence the answer (ITS). There are general cultural conceptions of womanliness that tend to provide the choices available to an individual (WE). And finally, there is the conception that an individual man or woman has (I). Each quadrant influences all the others. If a woman thinks women are rough and tough, she might work out more, altering her biology. In turn, the hormones and brain organization of a woman will affect her mind and her thoughts on the subject. Which jobs a woman does will affect her body. Her body will in turn determine which jobs she is suitable for.
This means sex is biologically, socially, culturally, and individually constructed.
Mystics like Plato and Plotinus focus on interior subjectivity. Neuroscientists study the singular and objective – the IT. Each person tends to have his favorite quadrant, but each quadrant influences the other. Brain and body influence mind – bottom-up causation – and mind influences brain and body – top-down causation. Individual minds exist within a cultural heritage that provides concepts, traditions, points of view, literature, poetry, music, art and philosophy. And those in turn are influenced by social institutions like the Church and economic practices.
So, consciousness at the level of mind exists in a social and cultural context which changes. Just as the experience of beauty depends on a creative effort on the part of the observer, so does spiritual truth. Although individual, people partly make use of the concepts and points of view they have garnered from others.
One thing missing from Wilber’s picture is a quadrant of “You.” It is important that a distinction is recognized between the You who is not I. “We” is merely the plural of “I.” This provides a link to the Absolute, but “You” recognizes that you may have different desires and ambitions from me. Christianity emphasizes the I/Thou of the Relative, while Buddhism tends to focus on the We – all is one.
Mimesis
The Person is unique, irreplaceable, and eternal. The Person and his consciousness have a link with the Kingdom of God. But, during life, we partake of the Kingdom of Earth. All sorts of necessities force themselves on the Person as part of social factors. Despite the absolute value of the individual, concrete, Person, hierarchies are necessary for social life. Also, we learn through imitation. This is extremely useful in developing our unique talents and capacities. But it also points us in the direction of social conformism and coercion; to think, believe, and feel what others think, believe, and feel. Things get particularly fraught in the case of desires, which are also imitated, because imitating desires puts us in competition with other people for the same things. This was pointed out by René Girard in books like The Scapegoat.
Without copying the speech and behaviors of others; someone is not really human at all – just a grunting animal who would possibly never discover the ability to walk on two legs.
To become a Person, we must realize our potential and other people are vital to achieve this. While we learn how to think by reading other people, we are not passive, mindless sheep either. We can choose our mimetic models and decide what to believe for ourselves. It will be necessary to read widely in order to have a good array of possibilities, thoughts, and concepts, to draw from in creating ourselves. If possible, living, breathing mentors can be invaluable. The primary benefit of a mentor is the faith in ourselves they can bolster. The mentor does not say “You are wonderful.” He says, “I see great potential in you. I have faith that you could really achieve something terrific if you put your mind to it.” Part of our self-conception comes from how other people respond to us. The mentor reinforces the idea that “you can do it.”
Human consciousness cannot exist in a vacuum. And the goal of the Person should be to live in loving communion with others. An alienated, loveless, consciousness is not a good one.
The trouble with conceptions of consciousness that regard consciousness as fundamentally indivisible is that it suggests that the individual Person is really an illusion and we are metaphysically connected. However, if love is only a recognition of an underlying connection, then it is not truly free. Being superglued to another person would not make you love them. And a metaphysical superglue is no better. If love exists, then the unique, irreplaceable nature of the Person, and his consciousness, must be real.
A True Myth
At times, Plato used the concept of myth or story. He would write “this may not be exactly true, but something like this might be the case.” The movie Surrogates could possibly fall within this category. In the movie, humans send robot surrogates to interact with the world for them, while the operator stays safe at home.[48] If a robot is harmed, no harm can come to its operator. However, someone figures out how to kill the operator when he destroys the robot, causing a crisis in the social setup.
Likewise, it is the view of most religions that humans are spiritual beings having a temporary sojourn on Earth. This means that bodies and brains are an interface with the physical world. Like the human operator in Surrogates, the spiritual self cannot be harmed or killed. It is immortal.
This transmission theory of mind suggests that consciousness exists in another non-physical atemporal dimension. A brain and body are necessary for us to interact and operate in the realm of the physical. The brain is thus like a radio receiver. It does not generate thoughts, and trying to find the source of consciousness in the brain is no more realistic than attempting to find the source of music and speech in a radio. If the brain is damaged, then transmission is impaired, and thinking and acting are affected; not because the brain can no longer produce consciousness properly.
The neuroscientist Benjamin Libet got experimental subjects to decide on their own when to press a button while hooked up to an electroencephalograph (EEG). He found that the conscious decision to press the button occurred 200 milliseconds before the finger moved. However, Libet also found brain activity 300 milliseconds before the conscious decision.[49] Brain activity, conscious decision, finger movement. Proponents of the idea that brains generate minds point to this and claim that this shows that brain activity predates conscious decision-making, demonstrating that physical events determine conscious awareness. This is then taken as evidence in support of determinism and against free will. However, this would also be consistent with the transmission theory of mind. On this interpretation, the conscious decision of the soul is communicated to the physical realm via the brain – soul, brain, mind, finger – with the brain being the interface between soul and conscious awareness on the physical plane. Libet himself regarded his experiment as supporting free will, suggesting that there was time in those 200 milliseconds for the mind to veto the decision coming from what could be called the soul mind. In a play on words he called this the “free won’t.” This is interestingly similar to Socrates’ claim that he had a kind of guardian angel, what the Greeks called a “daimon,” who never told him what to do, but only what not to do.
Is the Transmission Theory of Mind Plausible?
Is the transmission theory of mind plausible? Not to a materialist. But a materialist is also committed philosophically, whether he knows it or not, to determinism and the notion that morality, love, and friendship is an illusion. None of those things can exist without freedom and freedom is a decidedly unscientific concept. A death that was final and irrevocable would also seem to be nihilistic. The tragedy that everyone and every creature you have ever loved will die never to return is unacceptable. It would be an excellent reason for saying a giant “no” to life. We cannot prove that life is eternal, but we certainly can hope that it is. NDEs offer some evidence that consciousness can survive the cessation of all brain activity, and thus death. Drug and mystical experiences point to spiritual realities, and the great physicists were either theists like Isaac Newton who wrote more on religion than on physics, or they at least wrote books pointing out how much more to life and reality there is than physics.
Philosophers like John Locke tried to create a philosophy that took science as it existed at the time as its starting point, based as it is on a third-person perspective. In the process, Locke relegated all mind-dependent phenomena to nonexistence, and with it, consciousness. He did it without argument – meaning, he provided no reasons of any kind for his dismissal of consciousness as unreal. We still see this attitude in the modern association between something “objective” as being real, and something “subjective” as illusory. However, scientific and philosophical theories exist only in minds. If mind is not real, then neither are those theories. We use subjective awareness to determine objective truth, so subjectivity is the precondition of discovering what is objective. If the subjective is banished as invalid, the products of subjectivity, objective scientific knowledge, must also be rejected stemming as it does from an illusion.
What counts as “plausible” is very much the result of cultural context and a person’s starting assumptions about reality. Galileo and Locke’s way of thinking influenced Western culture, and thus the communal aspects of our own mind. It is important to remember that since this point of view was invented by a person, it can be uninvented. Another point of view can be adopted that takes subjectivity seriously. It is important to remember that it is impossible to prove that everything that truly exists is material; that only atoms and molecules are real. That is an unprovable metaphysical assumption. The primacy and reality of consciousness is equally plausible. And lots of evidence has been presented that consciousness is causally efficacious. The view known as panpsychism, that consciousness is a fundamental aspect of the universe and that even atoms have a tiny degree of consciousness, and that as organisms get more complex, so does their depth of consciousness; this view has gained a surprising degree of popularity among scientists, although Sam Harris told his wife not to mention her attraction to this idea in case it harmed her intellectual credibility. When she decided to broach the subject with her scientist friends, she found that many of them secretly agreed with her.
It is possible to at least hope that life is meaningful. A life where consciousness continues after physical death would seem to be more meaningful than one where it does not. The prospect of having everything a person learned in life be annihilated upon death seems bleak. There are reasons to think this might not be the case. Reincarnation too would seem to make life more meaningful by providing multiple opportunities to get it right. There is some evidence that reincarnation exists involving children who claim to be the reincarnated relatives of those still living and proceed to prove it. The trouble with reincarnation is that it relegates the Person to the cosmos and a cosmocentric position, which is a typically Greek and Roman tendency. A vision of the Kingdom of God is more hopeful because it offers the possibility of overcoming all the frustrations and tragedies of earthly existence. To be reborn in a spiritual reality would seem better than to simply keep experiencing this finite, time-bound realm.
Human beings have a dream of paradise. For the Greeks it was the distant past. For Christians, the Kingdom of God will appear in the future. If, in fact, we are spiritual beings, then we come from paradise and we return to paradise, so the Greeks and the Christians are both right. Plato and Christians agree that “success” in this realm is irrelevant. Jesus was a miserable failure by those standards and yet a roaring success in heavenly terms, as was Plato’s beloved teacher Socrates.
Conclusion
Materialists posit consciousness as something emerging from brains or, if brazen enough, try to deny that consciousness exists at all. Some even deny the existence of life; claiming that it is a poorly defined concept and that all definitions of life are unsatisfactory because some computer programs share the characteristics of life so defined. In those two cases, materialists are willing to simply deny the two most important features of any human being. One, that the person is alive. Two, the person is conscious. Some materialists are willing to take these drastic steps because they intuit that consciousness and God are connected.
Top-down causation seen in placebos, nocebos, hypnosis, etc., suggests that mind is causally efficacious and not simply being generated by a brain in a bottom-up manner. Neuroplasticity seen in stroke victims suggests that the brain changes itself to accommodate the wishes of the Person, rather than brain structure being determinative of the Person. The fact that someone could be missing ninety five percent of his brain, or a little girl could have one entire half of her brain removed and still function perfectly normally raises serious questions about just how necessary brains are for consciousness; the fact that plants can communicate and be classically conditioned to associate light and fans, that single-cells can behave intelligently, all indicate a separation between brains and consciousness. And this is good news for the hope of eternal life.
Notes
[1] Rupert Sheldrake, Science Set Free (Penguin Random House, 2013) p. 200.
[2] Rupert Sheldrake, p. 201.
[3] http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2015/12/15/can-a-plant-remember-this-one-seems-to-heres-the-evidence/
[4] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/artful-amoeba/plants-like-people-succumb-to-anesthesia-video/
[5] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/artful-amoeba/smarty-plants-my-latest-guest-spot-for-radiolab/
[6] https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/from-tree-to-shining-tree
[7] See for background: Roger Lewin, “Is Your Brain Really Necessary?” Science No. 210 (12 December 1980). [SydneyTrads: consider also the 2007 case of a 44 year old French man, who, while having most of his brain consumed by ventricular enlargements, was still able to live with “normal social functioning”. See for further information: Lionel Feuillet, Henry Dufour and Jean Pelletier, “Brain of White-Collar Worker” The Lancet Vol. 370 No. 9583 (21 July 2007) [DOI:10/1016/S0140-6736(07)61127-1]]
[8] Moheb Constandi, Neuroplasticity (The MIT Press, 2016).
[9] Ju Lu, Juan Carlos Tapia, Olivia L. White and Jeff W. Lichtman, “The interscutularis muscle connectome” Public Library of Science Biology (10 February 2009) [DOI:10.1371/journal.pbio.1000032]
[10] Robert Ader and Nicholas Cohen, “Behaviorally Conditioned Immunosuppression” Psychosomatic Medicine Vol. 37 No. 4 (July-August 1975).
[11] Irving Kirsch, “Antidepressants and the Placebo Effect” Zeitschrift Fur Psychologie Vol. 222 No. 3 (2014) [DOI:10.1027/2151-2604/a000176].
[12] Sheldrake, Science Set Free, p. 275.
[13] E. G. Pattie (1941), “The production of blisters by hypnotic suggestion: a review,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 36, 62-72.
[14] Ullman, M. (1947). Herpes simplex and second degree burn induced under hypnosis, American Journal of Psychiatry, 103, 828-830, p. 829.
[15] Bellis, J. M., (1966) Hypnotic pseudo sun-burn, American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, 8, 310-312.
[16] Barber. T. X. (1984), in A. A. Sheikh (Ed) Imagination and Healing, pp 69-127, p 80.
[17] Dreaper, R. (1978) Recalcitrant warts on the hand cured by hypnosis, Practitioner, 220, 305-310.
[18] Barber, T.X, (1984) in A. A. Sheikh (Ed) Imagination and Healing, pp 69-127.
[19] Barber, T. X, (1978) Hypnosis, suggestions, and psychosomatic phenomena, A new look from the standpoint of recent experimental studies, American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, 21, 13-27, p. 20.
[20] Goldstein A. & Hildegard, E. R. (1975) Failure of the opiate antagonist naloxone to modify hypnotic analgesia, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, 72, 2041-2043..
[21] Mason A. A. (1955) Surgery under hypnosis, Anasthesia, 10. 295-299.
[22] Gidro-Frank, L. and Bowersbuch, M. K. (1948) A study of the plantar response in hypnotic age regression, Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 107, 443-458..
[23] Pim van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life – The Science of Near Death Experience (Harper Collins, 2010).
[24] Ibid. p. 23 ff.
[25] Oliver Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars (Vintage 1, 1996).
[26] Pim van Lommel, op. cit. p. 115.
[27] Ibid. p. 127 ff.
[28] Ibid. pp. 169-170.
[29] Ibid. p. 144.
[30] Ibid.
[31] Ibid. p. 162.
[32] Ibid. p. 165.
[33] Ibid. p. 163.
[34] Ibid. p. 145.
[35] Edward Kelly and Emily Kelly, Irreducible Mind (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2006) p. 110.
[36] Ibid.
[37] https://www.uab.edu/news/research/item/5650-classic-psychedelic-use-found-to-be-protective-with-regard-to-psychological-distress-and-suicidality-study-finds
[38] Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception (Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2009) p. 6.
[39] Edward Kelly and Emily Kelly, op. cit. p. 80.
[40] Patricia K. Kuhl, “Brain Mechanisms in Early Language Acquisition” Neuron Vol. 67 Issue 5 (9 September 2010); Gail Gross, “Your Baby’s Brain, Part 3: Windows of Opportunity” Huffington Post (blog) (12 September 2014 @ 11:21 ET; updated 12 November 2014) <huffingtonpost.com> (accessed 26 April 2017).
[41] Tara Bahrampour, “Romanian orphans subjected to deprivation must now deal with dysfunction” Washington Post (online) (30 January 2014) <washingtonpost.com> (accessed 26 April 2017).
[42] Sheldrake, p. 135.
[43] Sheldrake, p. 136.
[44] Oswald Spengler makes a connection between visual depth of field; space, and the spiritual and transcendent. Mystical experience is RH, as is experience in general. LH analysis can help make sense of the experience or parse its meaning, but there is a reason that excessive rationalism and the atheistic tend to go together.
[45] Examples of figurative painting include the human figure, animals, trees, etc. The contrast is with abstract art that does not depict concrete things in any way.
[46] The Russians who did this experiment did not know that some kinds of porcupines really do climb trees, so it is necessary to ignore this inconvenient fact!
[47] Mark Michael Lewis, “Ken Wilber and the Foundation for an Integral Science” Rational Spirituality (online) (undated) <rationalspirituality.com> (accessed 26 April 2017).
[48] “Surrogates” (Director: Jonathan Mostow; Writers: Michael Ferris, John Brancato and others; Released on 24 September 2009).
[49] Sheldrake, op. cit. p. 123.
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