Science knows surprisingly little about mind and consciousness. Current orthodoxy holds that consciousness is created by electrochemical reactions in the brain, and that mental experiences fulfill some essential data-processing function. However, nobody has any idea how a congeries of biochemical reactions and electrical currents in the brain creates the subjective experience of pain, anger, or love. . . . We have no explanation and we had better be clear about that.1
—Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens and Homo Deus
There is nothing about a brain, studied at any scale, that even suggests that it might harbor consciousness2 [emphasis in original].
—Sam Harris, neuroscientist
We can’t even begin to explain how consciousness, how sensation, arises out of electric chemistry.3—Henry Marsh, neurosurgeon
It’s absurd! Scientists have yet to explain the nature of consciousness. They have no means of objectively detecting it. They have not identified its necessary and sufficient causes. And yet, they ask us to wager everything on their belief that consciousness is solely a product of the brain.4
—B. Allan Wallace, Buddhist philosopher
Nothing in modern physics explains how a group of molecules in your brain create consciousness. The beauty of a sunset, the miracle of falling in love, the taste of a delicious meal—these are all mysteries to modern science. Nothing in science can explain how consciousness arose from matter. Our current model simply does not allow for consciousness, and our understanding of this most basic phenomenon of our existence is virtually nil. Interestingly, our present model of physics does not even recognize this as a problem.5—Stem-cell biologist Robert Lanza, MD; and physicist Bob Berman, in their book, Biocentrism
As discussed in the preface, we don’t know where consciousness comes from. That fact alone might blow your mind. It certainly did for me when I first learned of this notion. I had always been taught to assume that the brain is responsible for producing my conscious experience. But the fact is: We don’t know how physical, seemingly unconscious matter creates a nonphysical consciousness.
In general, science has made immense strides throughout history. It has enabled us to travel to the moon, to build smartphones, to genetically modify biological organisms, and much more. Yet, in spite of our progress, we still don’t know where our mind comes from! The most undeniable and obvious part of our existence is that we have the subjective, inner experience of feeling alive, and we still can’t explain it.
In this section we will elaborate on this critical topic and further explore the question that materialism can’t seem to answer: “Does the brain produce consciousness?”
Defining consciousness
In the preface and introduction, I loosely defined consciousness as the mind, an inner experience and awareness. One could use the following example as a guide: Your consciousness is experiencing the reading of these words right now. Consciousness is your sense of being you, and it is your sense of experiencing life. When you say, “I am reading this book,” you could regard “I” as consciousness.
While I will use the above definition for the purposes of this book, it is important to note that different people have different definitions of consciousness. For instance, as summarized in her 2012 book, Consciousness: Bridging the Gap Between Conventional Science and the New Super Science of Quantum Mechanics, Eva Herr interviewed ten prominent scientists and philosophers and found that they each had different definitions of consciousness.
That shouldn’t stop us from using the above definition, but we should simply acknowledge the definitional question that remains.6
The hard problem of consciousness
Now that we have settled on a general definition, let’s further explore the controversy. We were taught (perhaps implicitly) in biology class that the brain is what is responsible for our consciousness. That idea is so ingrained in our culture that we might not even realize that we make an assumption.
Why do we assume that the brain produces consciousness? Physicist Peter Russell provides one theory:
Our primary senses, our eyes and ears, happen to be situated on the head. Thus the central point of our perception, the point from which we seem to be experiencing the world, is somewhere behind the eyes and between the ears—somewhere, that is, in the middle of the head. The fact that our brains are also in our heads is just a coincidence, as the following thought experiment bears out. Imagine that your eyes and ears were transplanted to your knees, so that you now observe the world from this new vantage point. Where would you now experience your self to be—in your head or down by your knees? Your brain may still be in your head, but your head is no longer the central point of your perception. You would now be looking out onto the world from a different point, and you might well imagine your consciousness to be in your knees.7Another reason why we might assume that the brain produces consciousness is that there is a strong correlation between brain activity and conscious experience. But that still doesn’t explain how the brain produces consciousness. As stated by biochemist Dr. Rupert Sheldrake: “Even if we understand how eyes and brains respond to red light, the experience of redness is not accounted for”8 by our current understanding of the brain [emphasis in original].
Let’s assume for a moment that materialism is correct and that the brain produces conscious experience. Let’s explore the miracle that this would imply. Think about your thoughts and feelings. You know you are experiencing them, but you can’t touch them. They are nonphysical. How is it that these nonphysical thoughts and feelings of the mind magically arise from the physical matter of the brain? How is it that trillions of cells in the human body come together in a way that allows nonphysical conscious experience to emerge? This is precisely what makes the “hard problem” of consciousness so difficult to solve.
We don’t have an answer. As stated by philosopher Alva Noë: “After decades of concerted effort on the part of neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers, only one proposition about how the brain makes us conscious—how it gives rise to sensation, feeling, subjectivity—has emerged unchallenged: we don’t have a clue.”9
We can’t rely on an assumption that neuroscience will someday provide the answer. Should we simply wait for an answer that may never come?
Even Nobel laureate Francis Crick looked at this issue. Many know of Crick as the brilliant scientist who changed the world by codiscovering the double helix structure of DNA with James Watson. Few know that he then devoted the rest of his life to trying to prove that the brain produces consciousness. You don’t hear as much about that because he failed.10 But so has every other scientist who has tried.
Instead of assuming that “the brain creates consciousness; we just don’t understand yet how it happens, but one day we will,” we can consider an alternative. Perhaps the brain does not produce consciousness, and that is why we can’t answer the hard problem of consciousness. Perhaps consciousness exists independently of the brain (and the body) and the brain is merely a filtering mechanism—a localization process—for consciousness.
Larry Dossey, MD, summarizes this stance in the following quotation from his 2013 book, One Mind:
There are many reasons why scientists have assumed that the mind and brain are one and the same. When the brain is damaged through physical trauma or stroke, mental function can be deranged as a result. Vitamin deficiencies and malnutrition can cause impairment of thought processes, as can various environmental toxins. Brain tumors and infections can wreak havoc with mentation. In view of these effects, it has seemed reasonable to assume that mind and brain are essentially identical. But none of these observations prove that the brain produces the mind or that the mind is confined to the brain. Consider your television set. Although you can damage it physically and destroy the picture on the screen, this does not prove that the TV set actually makes the picture. We know, rather, that the picture is due to electromagnetic signals originating outside the set itself and that the TV set receives, amplifies, and displays the signals; it does not produce them. All we ever observe is the concomitant variations or correlations between states of the brain and states of the mind.… [Consider the] venerable maxim of science that “correlation is not causation.” Night always follows day; the correlation is 100 percent; but that does not mean that day causes night11 [emphasis in original].
Similarly, Gary Schwartz, who earned his PhD in psychology from Harvard, served as a professor at Yale and is currently a professor at the University of Arizona, agrees with Dr. Dossey’s stance. After spending most of his career holding the materialist view of “brain first, mind second,” Dr. Schwartz now concludes: “Mind is first. Consciousness exists independently of brain activity. It does not depend upon the brain for its survival. Mind is first, the brain is second. The brain is not the creator of the mind, it is a powerful tool of the mind. The brain is an antenna/ receiver for the mind, like a sophisticated television or cell phone.”12Diane Powell, a Johns Hopkins MD, former Harvard Medical School faculty member, and practicing neuropsychiatrist, has come to a similar conclusion. She thinks materialist neuroscience is on the wrong path by focusing on the brain when trying to understand consciousness: “Trying to understand consciousness by investigating the gray matter in our skulls is like trying to comprehend music by dismantling CD players and analyzing their parts.”13
Put another way, she compares materialist neuroscience’s efforts to “looking…at the hardware and thinking you’re going to understand the software.”14
Eben Alexander, who earned his MD from Duke University and served on the faculty at Harvard Medical School as an associate professor in brain surgery, holds the same view. He says, “As a neurosurgeon, I was taught that the brain creates consciousness.…The truth is that the more we come to understand the physical brain, the more we realize it does not create consciousness at all. We are conscious in spite of our brain! The brain serves more as a reducing valve or filter, limiting pre-existing consciousness down to the trickle of the illusory ‘here-now.’”15And British psychologist Sir Cyril Burt stated: “Why should we assume that consciousness needs a material brain to produce it? A closer scrutiny of the actual facts makes it far more probable that the brain is an organ for selecting and transmitting consciousness rather than for generating it.”16The list of similar quotations could go on and on. In fact, in 2014 a group of more than 200 scientists and philosophers published A Manifesto for a Post-Materialist Science,17 which takes a similar position.
The point is: There are many well-educated people who challenge the unproven materialist assumption that “the brain produces consciousness.” You might not have known that until now. If there is anything you should take away from this chapter (and perhaps even from this book), it should be that we do not know where our mind comes from!
Let’s now explore several examples that support the idea that materialism needs to be questioned—examples in which less brain activity translates into heightened or enriched conscious experience.18
1Harari, Homo Deus, 108-109.
2Harris, Waking Up, 60.
3Friedman, A neurosurgeon calls this basic fact about the brain ‘too strange to understand,’http://www.businessinsider.com/the-strangest-thing-about-the-brain-2016-6.
4Tsakiris, Why Science Is Wrong, 7-8.
5Lanza and Berman, Biocentrism, 4.
6If consciousness is indeed the fundamental medium of reality, as this book suggests, then we might be striving for the impossible by trying to define it using language. Language is inherently limiting. Consciousness might be limitless, even across space and time. And if that is the case, any word used to describe it will miss its unlimited essence.
7Russell, From Science to God, 83-84.
8Sheldrake, Science Set Free, 10.
9Noë, Out of Our Heads, xi.
10Sheldrake, Science Set Free, 9.
11Dossey, One Mind, 81-82.
12Schwartz, The Afterlife Experiments, 267.
13Powell, The ESP Enigma, 23.
14Suzannah Scully (Cosmos in You), interview with Dr. Diane Powell, May 9, 2017, https://www.suzannahscully.com/full-episodes.
15Alexander, ‘Near-Death Experiences: The Mind-Body Debate & the Nature of Reality’ in the Science of Near-Death Experiences, ed. John C. Hagan III, 108-109.
16Burt, ESP and Psychology.
17Manifesto for a Post-Materialist Science, http://opensciences.org/about/manifesto-for-a-post-materialist-science.
18For more on this general topic, see Bernardo Kastrup’s March 2017 article entitled Transcending the Brain available at https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/transcending-the-brain/.
From: An End to Upside Down Thinking
Dispelling the Myth That the Brain Produces Consciousness, and the Implications for Everyday Life
Mark Gober
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