Visualizing a Top-Down Theory of Mind and Cosmic Connectivity

Conventional thinking has been that the human mind is a bottom-up kind of thing. The idea is that your mind is produced solely by some combination of neurons in your brain. The thinking is kind of like this: your consciousness is like some juice, and your brain is the juice maker.

But there are some good reasons for thinking that this “bottom-up” assumption is quite false. For one thing, we have no understanding of how mere neurons (physical things) can produce the wonderful thing we call consciousness (a mental thing). Imagining that a mere grapefruit-sized blob like the brain can produce the human mind (a totally different type of thing) seems rather like imagining that a stone can be squeezed so that blood will drip out of it. We also have no understanding of how brains can store human memories that last for 50 years. As discussed here, rapid molecular and structural turnover in synapses should make it quite impossible for brains to be storing memories for longer than about a year. The speed with which we can recall memories seems inexplicable given any theory that memories are stored in brains, for reasons discussed here. Then there is the fact documented by the physician John Lorber that some humans can retain fairly normal minds and memory even though most of their brains have been destroyed by disease. Then there are near-death experiences, in which people undergoing cardiac arrest often report floating out of their bodies, sometimes reporting accurate details of the medical efforts going on while their heart was stopped. Such a thing should be impossible if the human mind is merely a bottom-up effect produced only by our brains.

But if the human mind is not a bottom-up kind of thing, maybe it is a top-down kind of thing. Maybe the human mind is an effect produced by some cause outside of the human body. Maybe instead of something coming from inside our bodies, the human mind is instead coming mainly from outside of our bodies. Such an idea seems very abstract and philosophical, but perhaps we can take a stab at trying to make it more understandable, by the use of some imagery. The images I will offer are quite schematic and speculative, but they may at least serve as a kind of crude device to help clarify a particular philosophical possibility. To be visually displayed adequately, a model like the one I will present would require a sophisticated animation; but not being an animator, I'll have to make do with some rather crude diagrams.

Let us start by imagining that there might be some cosmic source of minds, which may be the source of human minds and other types of minds (possibly also minds on other planets). We can visualize this mind source as being rather like a giant balloon filled with either hot gas or a warm fluid. 

Now let us imagine that your mind and the mind of each of us is like a little protrusion or bump on the surface of this giant balloon. We normally think of balloons as being spherical, but a balloon can have lots of little bumps and protrusions (for example, in one of the big balloons used in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, there may be little bumps corresponding to the nose or ears of some cartoon character). We can imagine that there might be billions or trillions of little bumps on the huge balloon of the cosmic mind source, and that each little bump might correspond to a particular person.

In the schematic diagram below, we see two little balloon bumps or protrusions corresponding to particular persons. They exist on the circumference of the great sphere of the cosmic mind source, and are some of billions of similar little bumps or protrusions on that sphere. 

I use red and blue in this diagram simply to illustrate different persons. But the idea is that the mind substance or consciousness fluid inside your little balloon bump is very much the same mind substance or fluid that is flowing around inside the huge balloon of the cosmic mind source. The same mind substance or fluid is flowing around inside your mind and all other minds that exist as little bumps on the circumference of the balloon. Under this model your mind does not arise from your brain, but from the cosmic mind source. So instead of there being a million different mind sources for a million different humans (each being a brain), there is instead a single mind source for these million human minds.

If you got your mind in such a way, by being a little protrusion off of the circumference of the huge balloon of the cosmic mind source, you might think of your mind as originating from inside your body. But in this model your mind does not at all originate from your body. It comes from the cosmic mind source. In fact, under this model the only way in which any mind can exist is by being inside the great balloon of the cosmic mind source, or as a kind of protrusion on the circumference of that balloon.

But notice that there is a little neck that connects your little bubble with the vastly greater bubble of the cosmic mind source. That little neck may be almost totally closed, or it may be more widely open. When that little neck is almost totally closed, you may feel no connection whatsoever with some great higher reality beyond yourself. But when that little neck is open wider, you may feel more of a sense of being in touch with some great reality beyond yourself. Perhaps mystical experiences or paranormal psychic experiences occur when this little neck opens much wider than normal. Under this model there is a direct line that can be traced between any one mind and any other mind, with no more than distance and bottlenecks inhibiting communication. So the potential for connectivity is almost limitless.

The diagram below illustrates this idea. The second person (shown in blue) is much more prone to spiritual or psychic or mystic experiences, because the neck-like opening at the base of his little bubble is much wider. In this model, all minds are inside the same vast balloon of mind-fluid. So when the neck like opening widens, a person may have greater connectivity with other minds, which may or may not correspond to minds inside bodies. In the visual below, I illustrate this idea, borrowing a line from one of the Star Wars movies.

In conventional bottom-up models of the mind, ESP is impossible. But in this model something like ESP is quite possible. Below is a diagram illustrating what happens. There is a path that can be traced from any given mind to another, since no mind exists outside of the huge bubble of the cosmic mind source. In the diagram below, we see ESP occurring between two minds.

When a person undergoes a near-death experience, it may be a little like depicted in the visual below. Such a person may undergo transcendent experiences, as he starts to move outside of the little bubble like protrusion that he has been previously confined to.

And what about when a person dies? It may be like the diagram below. Inside the great cosmic mind balloon may be trillions of minds, some corresponding to what we may call “the living,” and others corresponding to what we may call “the dead.” The main difference between the living and the dead is simply when you are living, you are isolated in a little protrusion on the circumference of the great cosmic mind balloon. When you exist in such an isolated little protrusion, you have little feeling of connectivity with other minds. But when your mortal life ends, you are no longer in that protrusion. Then you may have a great connectivity with a horde of other minds floating around inside the huge cosmic mind balloon.

Now you may ask: in this model, what is outside this vast balloon of cosmic mind fluid? The answer is: no mind at all. In this model, there are no little bubbles at all floating outside of the great cosmic balloon of mind fluid. Every single mind exists as a protrusion on the circumference of this balloon, as shown in the diagrams below, or in a more central position inside the balloon. The result is that all minds in the universe have a real degree of connectivity. For minds that exist within the main part of the balloon, and not its outer circumference, there may seem to be a tremendous degree of connectivity. If you are such a mind, you might easily or instantly be able to connect with many other minds, perhaps in something like mind-reading or thought-reading.

The images I have presented here are extremely crude. Do things work exactly as I have diagrammed here? Probably not. What I have discussed is a kind of crude schematic visualization designed to make you think about radically different ways in which reality could work, rather than an attempt to describe exactly and literally some alternate way in which reality works. The visualizations I have presented are kind of metaphorical, but there may be strong similarities between these metaphors and the way in which consciousness works.

But what is fascinating here is how easy it is to create a top-down idea of mind, under which various types of anomalous phenomena fit in naturally. Under a bottom-up theory of mind, things such as ESP, apparitions sightings, mystical experiences, and near-death experiences may seem like unthinkable abominations. But such things fit in easily and naturally once we move to a top-down theory of mind.

The biggest failure of all bottom-up theories of human mentality is not their failure to account for fairly rare paranormal phenomena but their failure to adequately account for the everyday reality of the human mind. We cannot account for our minds or our very long-term memories neurologically. Brains seem to have no functionality that can account for either the storage or the instant retrieval of very old memories, for reasons discussed here and here and here. The idea that there is some special combination of cell connections that can cause something like the lofty thoughts of philosophy to emerge from mere neurons does not seem credible, and seems hardly more credible than the idea that some combination of vines, roots, and trees in a dense Amazon jungle would cause that jungle to become conscious. Nor can we account for the origin of our minds using Darwinian ideas. As argued here, the human mind has many “luxury item” characteristics (such as math abilities, musical abilities, artistic creativity, abstract reasoning, and spirituality) that are not things that increase an organism's chance of surviving in the wild, and which therefore cannot be accounted for by using the explanation of natural selection (which is merely the threadbare, thimble-sized idea that fit stuff prospers, and unfit stuff doesn't).

But if we develop a top-down theory of the mind's origin, then all of the marvels of the human mind may become easily explicable. If human minds come top-down from some cosmic mind source, we would indeed expect that our minds should have every wondrous ability they have ever displayed.

Let us imagine an extraterrestrial planet on which the skies were always covered with thick clouds. Imagine that on such a planet the clouds are so thick that you can never see the sun in the sky. Intelligent beings on such a planet might wonder: how is it that their planet is lit up with light during the day? Unaware of the sun above them, such beings might come up with a bottom-up theory of illumination: that the dirt and rocks and the trees give off light during the day, which keeps the land illuminated. Such beings might think that such a theory was a certainty, and say to themselves, “Of course, it must be true; where else could light be coming from?” But they should instead be considering a top-down theory of illumination – that the illumination of daylight comes from a great unseen source above them.

Similarly, the average scientist holds to a bottom-up theory of consciousness, that our consciousness bubbles up from little neurons in our head. He says to himself, “Of course, this theory must be true; where else could our consciousness be coming from?” But such a person should be considering a top-down theory of consciousness, that our minds come mainly from some great unseen source. Just as it seems farfetched that rocks or dirt or trees could illuminate a planet, it seems farfetched that the great universe-pondering effect of human mentality could possibly arise from a little blob of protoplasm inside our skulls.

Postscript: Scientist Bernard Carr stated the following:

The existence of telepathy also suggests that our minds are part of a communal space rather than being wholly private. This "Universal Structure", as I term it, can be regarded as a higher dimensional information space which reconciles all our different experiences of the world. It necessarily incorporates physical space but it also includes non-physical realms which can only be accessed by mind.

The Big Hole in Lanza's Biocentrism

In his recent book Beyond Biocentrism, Robert Lanza MD and his co-author Bob Berman offer another case for the philosophy they advanced in their earlier work Biocentrism. Their philosophy of biocentrism is an example of what philosophers call idealism. Idealism is the philosophical position that matter has no independent existence outside of minds that perceive matter. An idealist is someone who believes that the universe is just a collection of minds. An idealist is someone who thinks that instead of our minds existing inside the solar system, it's the other way around: the solar system is merely something that exists as a perceptual regularity inside of minds such as ours.

To someone who is not used to thinking as an idealist, idealism may initially seem absurd. But the case for idealism was advanced in a surprisingly forceful way in the eighteenth century, by British philosopher George Berkeley. In his classic philosophical work The Principles of Human Knowledge (which can be read here), Berkeley argued for immaterialism, the idea that matter has no existence outside of minds that perceive matter. His classic slogan was: to be is to be perceived.

In order to get a handle on this concept, let's try a thought experiment. Imagine that there exists no Earth at all, and no matter at all. But let's imagine that there exists a particular number of immaterial minds that have a spiritual existence. Suppose that some unknown thing causes these immaterial minds to have a series of thoughts and perceptions and sensations. Suppose also that instead of each of these minds having its own random set of thoughts and perceptions and sensations (like 30 different people having 30 different dreams, all totally different), there is instead a certain degree of similarity, a set of recurring patterns, so that there are various similarities in what goes on inside these immaterial minds. Imagine that all of these minds have somewhat similar thoughts, perceptions and sensations, with these corresponding to earthly experience (such as the experience of seeing it get dark every night, and the experience of seeing a blue sky).

The question then arises: how can you tell that you are not such an immaterial mind living in a universe without matter, in which your sensations of matter are coming from some unknown external source? The answer is: you really can't. There is really no way for you to figure out whether you are a matter person living in a mainly matter world or whether you are a mind person living in a totally mind world. From this standpoint, idealism seems like a rather plausible option, or at least something that is perhaps as likely to be true as not, a kind of 50-50 bet.

But if you are going to be an idealist and not willing to dismiss your fellow human beings as just perceptions in your mind (which would lead you to the morally disastrous position called solipsism), you would need to believe that there is something that causes multiple human beings to have the perceptual regularities and similarities that they have (such as a daily experience of the sky getting dark). Being a theist, George Berkeley simply argued that God was the source of perceptual regularities. If you had asked Berkeley whether the moon will disappear if humans become extinct, Berkeley probably would have said: no, because the moon will continue to persist as an idea in the mind of God. Someone taking a similar approach might argue that we experience sensations of gravitational attraction not because there is really matter undergoing self-attraction but because a divine agent has set up a kind of perceptual rule that all minds will experience perceptions of gravitational attraction.

But what is the philosophy of biocentrism that Lanza has recently been arguing for? It seems like Berkeley-style idealism, but one that is without any core explanation to explain the regularities of human perceptions. It seems like a kind of minimalist, stripped-down, bare-bones form of idealism.

On page 125, the authors say, “The world we see is the visual perception located in our head.” On page 137 the authors say, “There is nothing 'out there' beyond the reality constructed in our minds.” On page 186 the authors say, “We start by seeing that there is no real world 'out there' beyond us.”

This at first may sound like Berkeley-style idealism. But it seems there is a big difference. The biocentrism of Lanza and Berman apparently wishes to reduce the world to what goes on in the human mind, but their philosophy makes no attempt to describe anything that may be the source of human minds or the regularity of human experiences.

This has a certain advantage from the standpoint of simplicity. A typical scientist may want to think the universe is basically matter plus human minds. A Berkeley-style idealist might argue that the correct description of the universe is: human minds plus a divine mind. But biocentrism seems to speak as if the universe is simply: human minds (without any matter). That's simpler than either of the previous two options. But it's not very plausible. Without anything other than human minds, why would there exist human minds that happen to share so many perceptual regularities (such as the experience of seeing the moon in the sky and seeing a blue sky)? If there were just human minds, we would not expect such regularities.

We can imagine how things might be if there was an immaterial universe consisting of only random human minds with random experiences, without some type of cosmic cause of perceptual regularities. Such minds might have conversations like this:

Human #1: Why I had a lovely day today. It was fun watching all those elephants flying about in the green sky above me, and the five moons in the sky made it look even lovelier.

Human #2: My day wasn't so good. There were too many purple fireballs falling from the yellow sky. I much preferred yesterday's chocolate sky, which gave such a tasty rain.

Our experience has hundreds of perceptual regularities, which a non-idealist can account for by assuming matter and natural laws. A theistic idealist can also explain such perceptual regularities by assuming a perception-ordering agent that sets up certain “rules of the game.” But how do we explain the regularities of experience using the “only human minds” kind of thinking of biocentrism? It would seem that this is a big hole in their “bare bones” theory. Lanza and Berman have done nothing to explain the regularities of human perceptions. If we imagine only human minds, and that matter does not exist, we have no explanation of why human experiences are so similar, and why they share so many perceptual regularities. There might be some way for an idealist to explain such a thing in a non-theistic way, but Lanza and Berman have not attempted to do so. By making statements such as “There is nothing 'out there' beyond the reality constructed in our minds, “ Lanza and Berman seem to be advancing a “just human minds” description of the universe, one that is not very plausible because it lacks an explanation for the similarities and regularities of our experiences and perceptions.

We can compare the biocentrism of Lanza and Berman to the idea that our experience is produced by some computer simulation created by an extraterrestrial civilization (an idea that also involves a claim that matter isn't really out there). Such an idea has its own difficulties, but at least it is able to explain the regularities of human perceptions. Just as all players of a video game have certain common perceptual experiences, because the game was programmed with a certain set of rules, under the simulated universe idea we can account for similarities of human perceptions by imagining that it is “part of the programming.” But if we just imagine that the universe consists of nothing but human minds, without attempting to account for why such minds exist, there is no obvious way to account for the similarities of human perceptions. 

 

Cloud Computing and the Concept of Non-local Consciousness

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.' "

It's Hard to Explain “Radical Brain Plasticity” Under Our Current Paradigm

Neurologists think they have it figured out pretty well: your mind is purely a by-product of your brain; consciousness is like light produced by a light bulb, and the light bulb is the brain itself; particular parts of the brain are like particular parts of a computer; if one of those parts fails or is missing, your mind is crippled just as if someone yanked out some of the chips inside a computer. 

The problem is that there a good deal of evidence against such thinking. I've discussed some of these items before, but let's look at some new items that have been discussed in the news.

One interesting case recently reported was that of a woman who has no cerebellum. The cerebellum is known as the “little brain,” and is located near the middle of the brain. But in terms of the percentage of brain cells found in the cerebellum, it is misleading to say the cerebellum is the “little brain.” According to this scientific paper, the most recent estimates are that there are about 22 billion neurons in the cerebrum (the outer part of the brain), and 101 billion neurons in the cerebellum. So as the cerebellum has most of the brain's neurons, we might expect that this woman with no cerebellum was completely dysfunctional.

But actually, it turns out that the woman without a cerebellum merely suffered from mild mental retardation. She was able to walk and talk, and had even got married and had a daughter. How could that be: losing 80% of your brain neurons produces only mild mental retardation?

Another interesting case recently reported is that of an 88-year old man (identified as H.W.) who tested very well on a test of mental functioning, getting the maximum possible score of 30. But it was found that the man had no corpus callosum. The corpus callosum is the main part of the brain that links the two brain hemispheres. As an article reports:

Given the importance of the callosum for connecting the bicameral brain, you’d think this would have had profound neuropsychological consequences for H.W. In fact, a detailed clinical interview revealed that he’d led a normal, independent life – first in the military and later as a flower delivery man. Until recently, if H.W.’s testimony is to be believed, he appeared to have suffered no significant psychological or neurological effects of his unusual brain...Brescian and her colleagues conducted comprehensive neuropsych tests on H.W. and on most he excelled or performed normally. This included IQ tests, abstract reasoning, naming tests, visual scanning, motor planning, visual attention and auditory perception.

The same article refers us to another case of a boy named E.B. who had surgery to remove almost the entire left half of his brain. But he underwent rehabilitation, and “EB's language fluency improved remarkably over the ensuing two to three years until no language problems at all were reported at school or in the family home.” Now how is that possible? If the light (consciousness and intelligence) is all coming from the 100-watt light bulb (the brain), how do you get almost 100 watts of light when you slice the light bulb in half?

Scientists have a kind of lame phrase to try to describe such things. They call it brain plasticity. Brain plasticity is supposed to kind of mean: if one part of the brain goes down, some other part will take over its work. It's basically a kind of non-explanation rather like saying: the brain can keep working pretty good even if you yank out most of its neurons. I guess now we're forced to accept a doctrine of “radical brain plasticity.”

But how can we explain such a thing? Through Darwinian natural selection, perhaps? I can imagine the explanation:

Through the blind process of natural selection, humans slowly developed radical brain plasticity, to help them survive and flourish during all those times about 30,000 years ago when many people were losing half of their brains because of brain surgery.

Oops, that doesn't quite work, does it? That's because about 30,000 years ago, when humans were shuffling around in caves, there was no brain surgery. It seems hard to explain the origin of “radical brain plasticity” giving any reasons relating to natural selection. From the standpoint of survival of the fittest, nature shouldn't care about about helping out the occasional person with a brain defect such as being born without a cerebellum. If Darwinian evolution has 100 healthy brains and 1 defective brain, in theory its attitude should just be: I don't care about the deficient brain – let the fittest survive and reproduce. That's the gist of natural selection – let the weak be damned, and let the strong flourish. So how exactly can we account for the origin of this “radical brain plasticity”?

It's very hard to explain such a thing under conventional ideas that the brain is the light bulb and consciousness is the light. Drastically different ideas may be needed, including some new brain/consciousness model that may be compatible with phenomena such as near-death experiences, a phenomenon quite incompatible with the brain/light-bulb model of consciousness. 

 

"Plant Intelligence" Studies May Hint at a New Theory of Mind

Last year Michael Pollan created something of a sensation with his New Yorker article entitled “The Intelligent Plant.” Pollan discussed a variety of findings and experiments which suggest that plants may have capabilities that somewhat resemble or mimic aspects of the human mind.

Pollan stated: “Plants are able to sense and optimally respond to so many environmental variables—light, water, gravity, temperature, soil structure, nutrients, toxins, microbes, herbivores, chemical signals from other plants—that there may exist some brainlike information-processing system to integrate the data and coördinate a plant’s behavioral response.” He pointed out that in 2006 six scientists had called for a new field of study to be called “plant neurobiology.”

I may note that intelligence is not necessarily the same as consciousness, so the idea that plants may have some degree of intelligence does not necessarily imply that plants have consciousness. Computer programs, for example, are not self-conscious, but do show some degree of intelligence.

Pollan claims that “plants have evolved between fifteen and twenty distinct senses, including analogues of our five,” such as sight, hearing, touch, and smell. Somehow plants seem to gather information and then “decide” where to move their roots or stems. A simple example is called phototropism: a plant will grow its stems toward a source of light. Plants also seem to grow away from competitors, notes plant ecologist Rick Karban. Botanists have studied phenomena that resemble communication or signaling between different plants. 

Is there a bit of Mind in our meadows?

Scientist Monica Gagliana has written a paper entitled “Animal-like Learning in Mimosa Pudica.” She claims to have detected that this plant species can “learn” to ignore a stimulus that it originally responded to.

Recently a scientific journal published a paper “Adaptive and selective seed abortion reveals complex conditional decision making in plants." The paper stated: “Ecological evidence for complex decision making in plants thus includes a structural memory (the second seed), simple reasoning (integration of inner and outer conditions), conditional behavior (abortion), and anticipation of future risks (seed predation)." The paper is summarized here, in an article entitled "Are Plants More Intelligent Than We Assume?"

Some materialists have dismissed and belittled such findings, claiming that they are all nonsense. Their reasoning goes like this:

1. Neurons are the sole source of intelligence.
   
2. Plants do not have neurons.
   
3. Therefore plants cannot have anything like intelligence.
   

This reasoning is similar to the reasoning used to reject evidence for a wide variety of paranormal phenomena suggesting human consciousness can exist outside of the brain (phenomena such as near-death experiences, medium phenomena, and apparition sightings). The strategy is all too familiar: when someone accumulates or produces evidence that contradicts your assumption, portray that person as a fraud, a fool, or a fanatic. One may ask why materialists cling so stubbornly to the premise that neurons are the sole source of intelligence, given that no one has any real understanding of how neurons actually produce thoughts.

But what if there is something more than just trickery, misinterpretations or errors behind the numerous indications that neurons may not be the sole source of intelligence? One can imagine an alternate theory of intelligence that may be consistent with these findings about plant intelligence and indications of paranormal phenomena.

The theory might be something along these lines. It could be that there is some unknown external source of what we might call Mind Stuff. A sufficient amount of this Mind Stuff might result in self-conscious beings like us. A much smaller amount of this Mind Stuff might result in some limited degree of information processing capability such as may exist in plants. It could be that our brains are just receptacles for this Mind Stuff, or some kind of receivers that tune in to this Mind Stuff (or organs that attract this Mind Stuff, like a magnet attracts metal, or like a capacitor attracts electric charge). It could be that plants are able to somehow attract or store a small amount of this Mind Stuff. Through such a theory we might be able to get around the difficulty that plants seem to have a limited degree of something like intelligence, even though they have no neurons. We might also be able to explain the anomalous observations discussed here and here (such as the fact that some human minds perform well even with only half as many neurons). 

Although it fits all observations (including reports of paranormal phenomena), such a theory will no doubt be spurned by conventional theorists, who will continue to cling to the dogma that thought can only be produced by neurons, clinging to it like a young child clinging to his favorite stuffed animal.

9 Strange Mental Phenomena That May Support an Alternate Theory of Consciousness

In a previous post I advanced what I called a receptacle hypothesis of consciousness, the idea that our minds may come from some unknown external source, rather than being purely the product of our brains. I did not claim that such a hypothesis is a likelihood, but I suggested it as an interesting alternate hypothesis. I suggested only one thing that might be evidence tending to support such a hypothesis: the phenomenon of near-death experiences. But there may be other mental phenomena that lend support to this hypothesis or similar alternate ideas about human consciousness. Let's take a look at such phenomena. 

 

I'll start by mentioning two or three phenomena that are only weakly supportive of the receptacle hypothesis of mind, and then move up to some phenomena that may support this hypothesis more strongly.

Savants

Savants (once called “idiot savants,” although that seems an inappropriate term) are individuals who have some mental disability but also have some extraordinary mental talents. Many people are familiar with savants from the film Rain Man starring Dustin Hoffman, based on an actual savant. An example of a savant is Daniel Tammet, who has been diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome. He holds the European record for reciting Pi from memory, to 22,514 digits. Supposedly he learned the Icelandic language in only ten days.

Another example of a savant is the late Kim Peek, who supposedly could accurately recall the details of 12,000 books he had read, despite having an IQ of only 87. Like several savants, he had the ability to instantly calculate the day of the week on which any person he met was born.

Hyperthymesia

Hyperthymesia is the rare ability of a person to remember almost everything that has ever happened to him.  25 cases have been documented in peer-reviewed journals. Hyperthymesia was the focus of a 60 Minutes segment that interviewed a group of people with this ability, including actress Marilu Henner. Henner says she can remember almost every day of her life since she was about 11 years old. In June 2012 a journal reported the case of a man identified merely as HK. The man could clearly recall every day of his life since he was about 11. The man underwent a brain scan, which showed that his brain was smaller than average.

Another person with hyperthymesia is Jill Price, who can recall details from every day in her life since she was 14. Her brain was scanned, and found to be normal. 

These cases of hyperthymesia and savants may be hard to fit in with the hypothesis that the human mind is entirely produced by the brain, as do other examples of extraordinary mental abilities.  

Brain Surgery Anomaly

Michael S. Gazzaniga is the director of the SAGE Center of the Study of Mind at the University of California. In his book Who's In Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain, he says this about a particular type of split-brain surgery:

In this procedure, the large tract of nerves that connects the two hemispheres, the corpus callosum, is severed to prevent the spread of electrical impulses. Their isolated left brain, however, which receives no input from the right hemisphere (in essence losing half its size) remains just as intelligent as a whole brain. If brain quantity is so important, you would think there would be an effect on problem solving and hypothesizing when half the brain is lost, but there is not.

This may be hard to explain under the idea that the mind is entirely the product of the brain, but it is no difficulty under the hypothesis that the brain is a mere receptacle for consciousness.

ESP
 
ESP or extrasensory perception is the alleged ability of some people to obtain Information in some paranormal way outside of the senses. Recently we saw headlines such as “ESP Debunked in New Psychology Study.” But the study in question did not at all do that – the study didn't even mention ESP, nor did it mention a sixth sense.

The most compelling evidence for ESP comes from what are called ganzfeld experiments. A ganzfeld experiment is one in which a test for extra-sensory perception is combined with sensory deprivation achieved through methods such as cutting a ping-pong ball in half and taping it over someone's eyes, and having someone wear an earphone transmitting white noise. In these ESP experiments, the expected chance hit rate (matching of a user's selection and a random target) is 25%. But as wikipedia reports here, “In 2010, Lance Storm, Patrizio Tressoldi, and Lorenzo Di Risio analyzed 29 ganzfeld studies from 1997 to 2008. Of the 1,498 trials, 483 produced hits, corresponding to a hit rate of 32.2%.” That success rate of 32.2% is hugely above the expected by-chance success rate of 25%. The review article can be found here. The probability of such a hit rate occurring by chance is incredibly low. The Law of Large Numbers dictates that whenever you do a huge number of trials, there is only a very low chance of exceeding the result expected by chance.

If ESP exists, it is very hard to fit in with the idea that our consciousness is entirely produced by our brains.

The Placebo Effect

A placebo is typically a sugar pill that a doctor gives to a patient, merely in the hopes that the patient's belief that he is getting an effective treatment will actually do some good. The placebo effect is the astonishing degree to which placebos are actually effective in reducing symptoms. This study indicates that half of a drug's effectiveness may be due to the placebo effect. This study indicates that when patients are given a placebo pill labeled as a drug, it does just as well in alleviating migraine headaches as when patients are given an actual drug labeled as a placebo. The placebo seems to work not just for problems involving the brain, but also other parts of the body. Wikipedia says, “A meta-study of 31 placebo-controlled trials of the gastric acid secretion inhibitor drug cimetidine in the treatment of gastric or duodenal ulcers found that placebo treatments, in many cases, were as effective as active drugs.” 

The placebo effect is very difficult to account for under the theory that your mind is entirely produced by your brain. But imagine if your whole body is a receptacle for your consciousness, which somehow arose from some unknown distant source. In that case something like the placebo effect would not be so surprising.

The Global Consciousness Project

The Global Consciousness Project is a long-running study to see whether random number generators behave differently during significant world events. The project uses random number generators scattered all over the world, and has operated for more than 15 years. The web site for the project indicates that overall the project has produced results with a probability of less than one in a million, indicating a significant deviation from the results expected by chance. It is as if somehow the human mind has an influence on computerized mechanical devices. Such an effect is hard to account for under the idea that your mind is entirely the product of your brain, but may be easier to explain under the hypothesis that your consciousness has some mysterious distant origin.

Near Death Experiences

The site here www.nderf.org gives over 1800 accounts of near death experiences, which have for several decades been the subject of serious investigation by researchers. But weren't near-death experiences debunked by some recent scientific study? No, the study involved rats, not humans, and merely showed that for 30 seconds at the time of death they had a particular type of brain wave. The conclusion that some people drew from this study (“Rats show signs of higher consciousness at death”) was quite strained, considering that we haven't the slightest idea how these rats thought or felt when they were dying, and even the very idea of talking about consciousness in rats may be rather laughable. In any case, I doubt anyone reading some of the long, involved accounts at the site above would think that most of the people were describing something that occurred in 30 seconds of time. 

In quite a few near death experiences, people report floating above their bodies, an observation which seems to be completely incompatible with the idea that the mind is produced solely by the brain.  

Alleged Ghost Sightings

People have reported seeing ghosts throughout human history. Many people would like to classify ghosts as a superstition of the past, like the belief in witches. The problem is that people keep reporting that they have seen ghosts. For example, for 5 years on the television show Celebrity Ghost Stories numerous celebrities  have gone on camera to report seeing ghosts (a list of these celebrities is found here).

Alleged Reincarnation Evidence

Reincarnation is the hypothesis that one person can be born with the soul or consciousness of another person who previously died. If all we had as evidence for reincarnation were uncorroborated stories of past-lives told during hypnotic regression, such evidence could easily be dismissed as mere fantasies produced during an abnormal mental condition. However, the evidence is a lot more substantial. After decades of research, Professor Ian Stevenson at the University of Virginia published a 2268-page two volume work Reincarnation and Biology, in which he described in meticulous detail thousands of cases of alleged reincarnation, involving small children who claimed to have had a previous life. According to this link in a Scientific American blog, “Reincarnation and Biology contained 225 case reports of children who remembered previous lives and who also had physical anomalies that matched those previous lives, details that could in some cases be confirmed by the dead person’s autopsy record and photos.” Stevenson's work has been carried on by Jim Tucker, a psychiatrist at the University of Virginia who has recently published a book Return to Life: Extraordinary Cases of Children who Remember Past Lives. See this link for an interview.

Again we have a case of an alleged phenomena that is quite inconsistent with the idea that our consciousness is solely produced by the brain, but which is quite compatible with the receptacle hypothesis of consciousness.

Conclusion

I have cited here quite a few type of phenomena that may tend to support the theory I previously discussed, that our brains or bodies may be a mere receptacle of our minds, and that our minds may have arisen elsewhere, from some unknown external source outside of our bodies. The various phenomena discussed here may all tend to lend credibility to such a hypothesis. All of these phenomena are hard to explain under the alternate hypothesis, that the mind is produced solely by the brain. I am not claiming that all of these phenomena are necessarily what they appear to be; I am merely pointing out that they may tend to conflict with the conventional theory that our minds are produced solely  by brain activity. 

None of this proves that this receptacle hypothesis of consciousness is true, but at least these items may indicate that such a theory should be given serious consideration.

No doubt some will denounce some of these items I have cited as things that are too “weird” or far-out. But I think it is remarkable that a scientist who might make such a dismissal might then later proceed to spend lots of time writing about multiverses, parallel universes, string theory, time travel, distant extraterrestrial civilizations, and space-time wormholes – all of which are things just as strange (or stranger) than any of the items I have mentioned here.

In fact, there seems to be a very strange double standard in the minds of many a modern scientist. You might describe this double standard like this:

It is acceptable and encouraged to discuss multiverses, parallel universes, distant extraterrestrial civilizations, time travel, string theory, and space-time wormholes, things for which there is no observational evidence. But it is forbidden to discuss things like ESP, ghosts, and near-death experiences, which seem to be supported by many observations.

Such an ass-backwards principle makes no sense at all.

Postscript: for a discussion of other strange phenomena that may support an alternate hypothesis of consciousness, see this post. Among the cases discussed are two astonishing cases of people who managed to function well despite having hardly any brain tissue.  

Post-postscript: For other fascinating cases of savants, see this link. 

The Receptacle Hypothesis: Could Your Mind Have Come From an External Source?

One of the biggest problems of philosophy is the problem of consciousness. How is it that our brains, made of matter, are able to produce human consciousness? Matter seems to be something completely different from consciousness. So for a brain to produce consciousness almost seems like blood dripping from a stone, a case of one thing producing a totally different type of thing.

There have been numerous attempts to explain the production of consciousness by the brain, but none have been very satisfactory. It may be time to consider a radically different hypothesis about consciousness. What if consciousness is not actually produced by the brain? What if consciousness arises from some external source, and the brain is merely a receptacle for consciousness? (A receptacle is an object or space used to store something.)

Such a theory may seem outrageous at first, because the average person always observes consciousness associated with brain activity. So does that not prove that the brain causes consciousness? Not necessarily. What we observe is consciousness correlated with brain activity. Whenever we observe consciousness, we also see brain activity. But correlation does not prove causation. The fact that x is always observed with y does not prove that x causes y or that y causes x.

Let me give a simple example that will illustrate this point, one that will actually help to suggest a theory of consciousness very different from conventional theories. Imagine a very young girl who lives in a house with a flower garden in its backyard. The small girl hasn't yet gone to school, and knows nothing about the details of flowers or bees. The only times she ever observes bees is when she sees them hovering near the flowers in her garden. For this young girl, there is a 100% correlation between the observation of bees and the observation of flowers.

The girl then comes up with what seems to her to be a perfectly reasonable explanation for where bees come from. She concludes that bees are produced by flowers-- that flowers make bees just like apple trees make apples. This theory fits with all of her observations and knowledge. The actual truth is quite different – the bees come from a distant source (a bee hive) and they are attracted to flowers. But since the girl knows nothing of bee hives, she doesn't think of this explanation. The girl misidentifies something local (the flower) as the cause of something (the bee) which actually comes from something distant (the bee hive).

It could be that the average person who concludes that consciousness is created by brain activity is just like this little girl. It could be that each human consciousness arises from some distant external source, and then is somehow attracted to a newborn human. It could be that a human body acts as a kind of receptacle for human consciousness, but does not actually produce that consciousness. This external source of consciousness could be rather like the beehive, a person's consciousness could be rather like the bee, and a human brain could be rather like the flower – something to which consciousness that arose from elsewhere is attracted towards, and hovers around. Somewhat like the little girl mentioned above, we may be misidentifying something local (our brains) as the cause of something (our consciousness) which may actually have originated from something distant (some unknown external source of consciousness outside of our bodies).

Let us consider another case that will illustrate this point that correlation does not prove causation (and which will give another example where something local is misidentified as the source of something with a distant source). Imagine a scientist in the year 1700 trying to explain comets. The scientist would consider all the observations he knew about comets – that comets seem to appear rather suddenly out in space not far from  planets such as Mars and Jupiter. The scientist might then conclude: planets produce comets. He might guess that comets are occasionally burped out from planets rather like a man spits out food. Given his limited knowledge, he would have almost no other way of explaining comets.

Again, this would be a case where a local source is misidentified as the cause of something which comes from a distant source. Now we know that comets come from a ring-like cloud of comets called the Oort Cloud located far beyond the orbit of the most distant planet. The comets come from the distant source we cannot see because they are attracted (by gravity) to things we can see (the sun and the planets). Similarly, it may be that a human consciousness arises from some distant source we know nothing of, and that an individual consciousness is somehow attracted towards some local thing that we can see, a newborn human body.

It might be that the human brain is not what is producing our consciousness. It might be that the human body is just acting as a kind of receptacle for consciousness that originated from some distant source.

This receptacle theory of consciousness may appeal to anyone who thinks that human consciousness is something that is too wonderful and amazing to be produced by a few pounds of gelatinous mass like a brain. If you think that things such as the plays of Shakespeare or the theory of relativity or the symphonies of Beethoven or the dialogues of Plato are something too sublime to have been produced by a few pounds of flesh, you may be attracted to the idea that our consciousness comes from some higher external source – perhaps something (material or immaterial) that is a lot more lofty than a few pounds of flesh.

One advantage of such a theory is that it removes the difficulty of explaining how natural selection was able to create all the wonders of human consciousness. As explained in this post, it is hard to explain how Darwinian evolution was able to produce quite a few features of human consciousness (such as aesthetic appreciation, spirituality, and philosophical reasoning abilities) that do not seem to have any survival value, from a Darwinian standpoint of "surviving until reproduction." But if our consciousness comes from elsewhere, this difficulty goes away.

We know that brain states can have an effect on the current state of our consciousness – for example, someone with Alzheimer's disease can lose his memory, and someone with a stroke can lose some mental abilities. Does that prove that your brain produces your mind? Not necessarily. The state of your television set affects how good a picture you see, and if you smash your TV set with a hammer, you won't see your programs as well as before. But that does not show your television set produces the television programs. The television programs come from elsewhere. Similarly, your mind could have originated from an external source, and the current state of your brain could act as a kind of limit on the current state of that mind.

Now let's consider: what, if anything, might be evidence to support such a receptacle theory of consciousness? It seems that anything suggesting that human consciousness can exist outside of the body might be evidence against the assumption that consciousness is produced entirely by the human brain. We might say that any such evidence, if it exists, would tend to enhance the credibility of this receptacle theory, or at least “raise its stock” by quite a few points.

Evidence for near-death experiences (NDE) might therefore tend to lend credence to this receptacle theory. If your consciousness somehow originated from an external source, and then somehow came to dwell in your body, then we might expect that your consciousness might survive for at least a while after your brain function stopped.

Near death experiences seem to be quite incompatible with the idea that the brain is the sole producer of consciousness. If these experiences are not just hallucinations, then one almost needs some kind of miracle to account for some of these near death experiences, under the assumption that the brain is the sole producer of consciousness. But if we postulate that our minds came from some external source, then something like a near-death experience follows rather naturally from such an assumption. Returning to the analogy of the hive, the bee, and the flower, we should not be surprised if the bee leaves the flower if the flower is severed or dies.

Of course, the meaning of near-death experiences is certainly debatable. My purpose in this post is not to show the likelihood of this receptacle hypothesis of consciousness, but merely to present it as an interesting alternative to the conventional idea that consciousness is entirely produced by the human brain.

It may be argued that the theory I have suggested isn't really a theory, because it makes no predictions. To the contrary, there are some predictions that seem to follow from such a theory. These include the following: (1) all attempts to exactly explain the production of consciousness by analyzing neuron activity will be futile; (2) we will never be able to transfer or store minds by replicating brain states; (3) we will discover further evidence along the lines of near-death experiences and other phenomena suggesting consciousness can exist when the brain is not functioning. I don't know whether any of these things will come true, but at least they seem to be predictions that follow from a receptacle theory of consciousness.