Here's
an interesting puzzle. A man has a ball which he throws very hard,
and the ball comes back to him. When he does this, the ball never
bounces off of anything, and never touches anything. There is nothing
special attached to the ball, nothing like strings or elastic bands.
The ball has no kind of special flying ability. How does the ball
keep coming back to the man? Think about this for a few seconds
before reading further.
The
answer is really quite simple. The man throws the ball straight up
into the air, and gravity returns the ball to him. This is a classic
example involving lateral thinking, also known as “outside the box”
thinking. Many people are puzzled by this problem, because they
confine their thoughts to a little “box” that limits their
thinking. In this case the “box” is the assumption that the man
must be throwing the ball in a roughly horizontal fashion, like some
baseball pitcher.
Like
people stumped by this “return of the ball” problem, the typical
neuroscientist of today seems to be the prisoner of unwarranted
assumptions. Faced with the problem of consciousness, and the problem
of how our memories our stored, a typical neurologist confines
himself to the “inside the box” assumption that the mind must
somehow be generated by the brain. So he keeps thinking about some
way that chemicals or neuron patterns or electricity might generate
consciousness or store memories. This approach has been futile.
After decades of knocking their head against this wall, scientists
still have no evidence of physical memory traces inside the brain,
nor do they have any real understanding of how things such as
concepts can arise from the brain. As Rupert Sheldrake says on page
194 of his excellent book Science Set Free, “More than a
century of intensive, well-funded research has failed to pin down
memory traces in brains.”
The
actual answer to the riddle of consciousness may lie in a non-local
solution. Our consciousness might arise not from our brains, from
some non-local source.
The
idea of a non-local source of consciousness may be entirely baffling
at first, but there is an analogy that may clarify the idea. The
analogy involves cloud computing. Let's compare how computers worked
during the 1980's and today. About 1985 if you had a computer, all of
your computing and memory storage was done locally. If you did some
computer work on some problem, the only thing working on it would be
the CPU stored on your desktop computer. If you stored some photos on
your computer, they would be stored on the hard drive of your
computer.
But
nowadays we have a very different situation. You may have some tiny
hand-held device that does not even have a hard drive. The device may
have little or no local memory. But you can still upload your photos
and videos in a way that results in them being permanently stored.
You also can do all kinds of computing, with the results permanently
stored far away. How can this happen? You are interacting with what
is nowadays called the Cloud.
Cloud computing
I
could start telling you the details of how the Cloud works,
discussing external web sites and their sever farms, and so forth.
But for the purposes of this discussion, it is much better if I don't
get into such details. It is better to think of the Cloud abstractly,
as a kind of ethereal amorphous mega-resource that enables non-local
computing and non-local storage of information. After we conceive of
the Cloud in such a way, a question arises. Could it be that our own
memories are not locally stored, but somehow stored in some cosmic
consciousness-generating reality, something a little comparable to
the Cloud we are now using for our computing?
Rather
than being stored inside our brains, our memories could be stored in
a kind of consciousness infrastructure somewhat resembling the Cloud
of the internet. Our personalities could also be stored in this
nonlocal consciousness infrastructure. Under this model, the main
purpose of the brain would be functions such as control of autonomic
functions, control of muscles, and the processing of visual stimuli.
The real core of our consciousness would be stored “in the cloud.”
Just as your photo collection may not exist on your handheld device,
but “in the cloud,” your memories may not exist in your brain but
“in the cloud,” with the latter cloud being a mysterious
consciousness infrastructure servicing multiple bodies.
The
concept discussed here is a kind of “client/server” concept. In
abstract terms, Facebook.com can be thought of a server providing
services to a vast horde of different clients, each a user who has a
Facebook account. Similarly, it might be that human individuals are
like clients who receive their consciousness from a mysterious
consciousness infrastructure that acts as a kind of non-local
“consciousness server” providing consciousness to many local
clients.
Our memories and identities may be stored non-locally
Such
a theoretical model does not actually require us to buy into a
computational model of the mind, in which the mind is regarded as
something like a computer output. The essence of this model is not a
computational assumption, but a “client/server” concept. The
essence of this model is that local entities (or clients) all are
enabled by some external, non-local infrastructure which provides
them with something that they could not get by themselves. Just as
you cannot get Facebook functionality all by yourself (without
internet access), it may be that the little mass of flesh between
your ears is totally incapable of producing consciousness by itself,
and that your consciousness comes from an external consciousness
infrastructure that may be thought of as a kind of “consciousness
server” serving multiple clients (different people).
Empirical
support for such a model may come from a wide variety of paranormal
and psychic phenomena which are inexplicable using the hypothesis
that your mind is produced entirely by your brain, but which may be
explicable through an alternate model in which your memories are
stored non-locally, and your consciousness depends on interactions
with some great external reality. Empirical support for such a model
may also come from studies such as those done by John Lorber, which
found astonishing cases of people who had good memories and good
intellectual functioning, even though most of their brains were
destroyed by diseases such as hydrocephalus.
I may
note that some people talking about the idea of non-local
consciousness will talk in grandiose metaphysical terms, speculating
that consciousness may be in some sense “infinite” or “without
beginning and without end.” But the idea of non-local consciousness
does not require such lofty notions. It simply requires the idea of
an unknown external dependency upon which our consciousness depends.
The
history of science has partially been a story of the discovery of
previously unknown external dependencies upon which our existence
depends. In ancient times people may have thought that the only
external dependency that humans relied on was that of the sun. But
scientists have gradually discovered more and more other external
dependencies, some of them cosmic in scope. First they discovered
that our existence depends on a cosmic gravitational force, which
holds stars and planets together. Then scientists discovered how our
existence depends on a cosmic electromagnetic force or field, which
enables the chemistry on which life depend. Later scientists
discovered a mysterious cosmic field called the Higgs field, which
supposedly “gives mass to all particles.” In light of such
previous developments, would it be very surprising if we were to
discover one day some “consciousness field” or some external
consciousness-enabling infrastructure, acting on a cosmic level to
enable memory and consciousness? No, such a discovery would just be
another item in the same historical trend of humans discovering more
and more external dependencies on which their existence depends.
Postscript: After writing this post, I discovered a 2013 scientific paper, "Long-Term Memory: Scaling of Information to Brain Size" by Donald R. Forsdyke of the Department of Biomedical and Molecular Sciences of Queens University in Canada. He quotes the physician John Lorber on an honors student with an IQ of 126 and a severe case of hydrocephaly that left him with almost no brain:
Instead of the normal 4.5 centimetre thickness of brain tissue between the ventricles and the cortical surface, there was just a thin layer of mantle measuring a millimeter or so. The cranium is filled mainly with cerebrospinal fluid. … I can’t say whether the mathematics student has a brain weighing 50 grams or 150 grams, but it’s clear that it is nowhere near the normal 1.5 kilograms.
Forsdyke notes two similar cases in more recent years, one from France and another from Brazil. He then states the following, suggesting a "cloud computing" idea of the mind vastly different from the "brain makes your mind" idea, and rather similar to what I have mentioned here:
"For all these storage alternatives, the thinking is conventional in that long-term memory is
held to be within the brain, and the hydrocephalic cases remain hard to explain. Yet currently
most of us, including the present author, would prudently bet on one or more of the stand-alone
forms. The unconventional alternatives are that the repository is external to the nervous system,
either elsewhere within the body, or extra-corporeal. The former is unlikely since the functions
of other body organs are well understood. Remarkably, the latter has been on the table since at
least the time of Avicenna and hypothetical mechanisms have been advanced (Talbot 1991;
Berkovich 1993; Forsdyke 2009; Doerfler 2010). Its modern metaphor is 'cloud computing.' "
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