Aldous Huxley, after consuming mescaline and considering the nature of consciousness while under its effects, detailed in The Doors of Perception, that the brain basically acts as a filter, a "reducing valve", of a vaster mind, consciousness, "Mind at Large", as he termed it.

The heart also has neurons, so the heart, a brain of sorts, also plays the role in tandem with the brain confined in our skulls. Perhaps it could be said that the heart works moreso from an emotional, intuitive perspective than an intellectual, rational one.

There are many people, I have noticed, on the philosophy subreddit, that seem to hold the view that the brain is responsible for the emergence of mind due to sufficient complexity.

However, how can a sea of chemical neurotransmitters, and the electrical firings of, and interactions between, neuronal synapses, no matter how complex it all becomes, possibly create something so complex, and yet so simple, as mind or consciousness?

Yes, the introduction of chemical changes in the brain, or any form of brain damage, including diseases, can affect the physical expression of consciousness, however, this does not necessarily point to the brain being the source of consciousness, as many people seem to presume, or assume.

Alzheimer's patients given coconut oil over a number of months, according to a number of studies, showed improvements in their cognitive functioning and the return of memories. Basically, brain damage isn't necessarily permanent.

In epilepsy sufferers, their illness may be cured by removing the damaged part of the brain, and yet, they seem to show no signs of having lost a part of themselves, as consciousness or mind somehow routes around the problem. But, why doesn't mind route around the problem even with the damaged brain tissue intact?

Whether or not you believe they exist, innumerable people have claimed to have had out-of-body experiences and near-death experiences, where they say they were outside of their bodies, with full, lucid sensory awareness, and many have made claims of having experienced telepathy with other people or their pets that they cannot explain.

So... is mind or consciousness an emergent property of the brain, and perhaps heart, or could consciousness be the product of a non-physical "Mind at Large" that has been filtered through the physical, limited brain?

Of course, this raises many other questions, such as what it means for something to be "non-physical" or "immaterial", but try to keep the topic on the brain and how it produces consciousness. If you have ideas that fall outside of these two possibilities, fire away!

Discuss away!

Re: epilepsy sufferers -

There are cases of people who's occipital lobes have become so damaged that, not only do they loose vision and become blind, but they loose any concept of vision: they have no idea they lost anything, they cannot remember having vision or understand what it means. For them, there is no tragedy because they have lost even the ability to conceptualize what it is they lost.

So, in the case of those epilepsy sufferers who you claim don't loose any part of themselves in surgery: how do they know?

It's true that there are places where you can have brain damage without change to consciousness. Alteration to the cerebellum, for example can have gross motor effects but no substantive change to cognition or (self reported) consciousness. That is not true for other regions. As I already mentioned, damage to the sensory brain regions can have massive effects on consciousness.

Moving right along -

Please cite the source that stuff about coconut oil. I'm pretty sure if the results were robust, it would have been trumpeted from the rooftops of medical establishments all over the world.

Now, on the subject of OBE's, in his book 'Spiritual Doorways in the Brain' (which is an excellent book and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the neuroscience of mystical-type experience), Dr. Kevin Nelson cites a study in which surgeons placed random objects out-of-view in the operating theatre (such that they could not have been viewed by anyone on the floor), and, if the patient reported an OBE, they asked them to describe the scene they perceived. If I remember correctly, no one reported seeing any of the random objects, despite the fact that, based on their subjectively perceived location, they should have.

The author took this as evidence that the perceptions experienced in an OBE state are not actual percepts, but rather, manufactured by the brain based on prior experience, much like a dream, and I have to say, I agree with them.

Finally, there's the complexity question (and I think we've talked about this before):

If consciousness is an emergent property of the brain, you have to answer one question -

"How does consciousness emerge from the brain?"

If the 'filter' theory that you're suggesting is true, you suddenly have to answer to two questions:

"How does consciousness emerge from...wherever it emerges from?"
"How does it interact with the brain?" Which can be broken down into two sub-questions:

"How does the brain 'filter' consciousness," and "how do specific elements of consciousness come to be associated with specific brain regions?"

Now, none of this is evidence that your theory is wrong, per say, but it does suggest that your theory is more complicated: it requires making more assumptions. There's a question of 'elegance.'

Blessings
~ND

I'll just leave this here..

https://www.psychologyto...mind/201211/split-brains

So, looking at this, my first thought is that it's kind of a blow to the idea that your 'soul' (or self, or whatever) is somehow external and that the brain merely modulates it, since you can, by effecting the brain, split the soul in two.

Good stuff.

Blessings
~ND

I wouldnt necessarily come to that conclusion.
If we for example apply the concept from Vedantic Philosophy of the true self, or pure awareness, which is basically pure consciousness without inherent personality, the theory of the brain as a filter still works.
If we are talking about the soul as a more "personally tainted thing", then the interaction between soul and body could still be seen like the mixing of two elements, emerging as an original conscious experience.

That being said, I dont doubt that alot of more hard to explain psychich phenomena, can be ultimately explained by physiological properties.
If we look at nature, and the way in which animals have adapted to their environment, with sometimes incredibly sensitive but specific strategies, and how broad the skill set of humans is, I think theres alot of untouched potential, depending on how your brain is trained
Like mirror neurons, one who doesnt know about them could say that we are picking up the frequencies of other people to tune into their emotions, but as we know its just a system of cells, that fire as a mirror image of the signal that is triggering them. So the more similar our system is to the one whos sending it, and also very important the more we are aware of the subtle sensations of our body, the more well be able to feel what the other system feels. This is something that can be trained.

If I am allowed to lean a bit on a limb here, I could imagine, that what we are able to perceive inside our bodies, goes beyond the average persons wildest imagination, and to the precarious end of this limb, do we really know that theres not a vast amount of information stored in our DNA, and we are somehow able to transmit this Data into conscious experience?

Imo it has to be either something like that, or there really is a non-local field of information that can somehow be accessed. Theres just too much complex and meaningful snychronicities and phenomena in all kinds of consciousnes exploration.
So If we want to come back to the demand of a theory to be simple and elegant, I guess it really depends on what questions were asking.

Interesting! I was looking at this video, and it brought up the subject of split brains.

https://youtu.be/GB5TNrt...pM9JFC7TxcmN9R&t=724

What do you think?

I guess we all have our confirmation biases.

Or, we are ascribing meaning to patterns that don't exist because our internal 'pattern recognition' hardware is altered. I've had plenty of 'synchronicity' experiences that, in the moment, felt very profound. Rarely has that feeling held up to robust critical thinking.

Valmar: You haven't actually responded to any point that I've made yet. Maybe it is confirmation bias, but I certainly don't see how the Split Brain phenomena could possibly be evidence FOR the theory you presented here.

Blessings
~ND

No more than advanced Alzheimer's patients, I suspect, who've lost access to their memories.

The scientific instituations still know so very little about the brain's relations to consciousness in all of its manifestations. Still a hard question. For everyone on both sides of the fence.


But why? I can see why the materialist perspective would conclude that the brain produces mind, but from my perspective, I feel no closer to an answer. The "brain is mind" answer doesn't feel satisfactory.


Not if the pharmacuetical company-beholden medical establishment have millions to make off of patented drugs.

There is a correlation between coconut oil use and improvements in the conditions of Alzheimer's patients, at least. You might find these two links interesting:
https://coconutoil.com/c...oil-research-alzheimers/
http://articles.mercola....lzheimers-detection.aspx


In Robert Peterson's book, Out of Body Experiences, he noted that in his OBE forays, what he saw in the astral didn't necessarily correlate with what he knew in the physical, weirdly.

Excerpt:
"Astral travelers have always reported differences between the physical world and the OBE world. For
instance, a door that is closed physically might appear open while out of the body. Why are there
differences? The most common explanation is that we aren't really seeing the physical world: We are
seeing the astral counterpart of the physical world. It is said that the astral world is very plastic and when
left alone, it molds itself to the shape of physical objects."

Weird, to say the least. That could explain why that study failed... hard to experiment with, scientifically, in that way. But, OBEs still happen.


Well... I've been puzzling over that, and I started to hypothesize that, if "Mind at Large" incarnates, locks onto, into, whatever, a body, it's not the whole, but a "blank" aspect of, "Mind of Large" that is imprinted onto from birth.

That is, a fragment of "Mind at Large" becomes blind to the greater whole. This fragment accounts for the unconscious, subconscious and conscious aspects of mind, the ego. The unconscious is majority, the subconscious less, and our conscious awareness most miniscule.

Only had this flash of insight yesterday.


I'm not sure... but, I'll have a stab:

The physical form, being very limited as it is, in turn restricts the totality of consciousness. As I said above, a blank fragment of "Mind at Large" acts as the basis for our ego. But as to what role the brain actually plays in limiting... we become essentially blind to anything but the five physical sense, which act as blinkers to anything else. Which is why we also cannot sense outside the vibrational / frequency limits of our senses.


Now this is something that has been constantly bugging me. Something to do with the way the physical form is organized and operates... almost like a switchboard, to use that analogy again. How those elements map to affecting different aspects of body, is even more mysterious.

I don't pretend to understand how non-physical mind and physical brain truly interplay, just that I personally believe I know that they do. I don't have enough life experience to really know where to begin.


Hmmm... the "brain is mind" camp also make huge assumptions that they base their research and experiments off of. They haven't yet answered the question they keep saying they'll answer. They haven't solved the hard question of consciousness.

The OBE, telepathy and NDE crowd don't have any assumptions to make ~ they've had direct experience that mind is more than merely the brain. The shaman has direct experience that there are metaphysical, disembodied, conscious intelligences not bound by the physical.

If this physical plane is a "simulation" of sorts, then the physical brain could just be a "software" representation of the "hardware". That is, what happens in the brain is merely the physical representation of what is occurring in the non-physical mind. The two are so tightly linked when non-physical mind is bound to the physical brain that affecting one affects the other. Could account for the "mind over matter" effect in all of its curious forms.

Thoughts?

Thanks for your detailed reply -


So there's not direct evidence that the brain produces consciousness - it's just that this is a simpler answer, and as a scientist, my instinct is to avoid unnecessary hypotheses. If you're positing something, you generally need evidence to back it up. Right now, we know that the mind and brain are connected. We have very strong evidence of that. We don't have evidence of anything, so I don't consider it to be worth thinking about (at least not 'officially'.

Being satisfactory is not a prerequisite for being an accurate theory. Plenty of people have seen theories very near and dear to their hearts crumble in the face of evidence (see: the Catholic church and geocentrism). There's no law that says the universe has to be nice or pretty (I happen to think it's beautiful, but don't take beauty as evidence).



How?



Now *that* is a very interesting hypothesis, one that had never occurred to me. I should meditate on that. My instinctive question would be that of brain damage: if I damage my occipital lobe, my sight goes away. You'd think if nonmaterialism held, then I would still have some sense of sight, even if it wasn't associated with the rest of reality the brain was embedded in. Where does that part of my consciousness 'go?' Why can't I access it?

If the brain makes the mind, the answer to the question is much simpler. The sight doesn't go anywhere, it ceases to exist when the brain area that processes it does.

As for the coconut oil, I'm reserving judgement. I have a bias towards peer-reviewed journals.

Blessings
~ND

I tend to be critical of a lot of popular new-age ideas put out by psychedelic enthusiasts, but I don't quite grasp the leap in logic here.

With a TV or radio, what you see or hear (in other words, the signal) can be affected by messing with the hardware. If one piece is no longer functional, you don't get an image or a sound. We don't have evidence that consciousness is external, but we don't have any more evidence to suggest that it's produced by the brain either -- so why is the fact that consciousness can be modulated (or terminated) by messing w/ the brain so often cited as reason to believe that consciousness is generated? It might be simpler to understand, but in the case of the TV/radio analogy, we know that what we perceive via the instrument isn't actually generated by the hardware. From what I can tell, that's a point for the non-materialist camp.

The hypothesis “consciousness is produced by brain activity” is not falsifiable and is therefore unscientific.

It might be possible to measure the absence of consciousness (although I doubt it), but it’s impossible to measure the presence of consciousness. For all you know, every other seemingly conscious being is a “philosophical zombie” – a being who claims to be conscious yet in fact is not. How would you differentiate the truly conscious from the zombies?

I see. Well, yes, we call *all* agree that mind and brain, whatever mind may be, are certainly connected in strong ways.

The "hard" problem of consciousness still remains. Some (philosophical?) scientists have found the question difficult enough to fall back to claiming that consciousness doesn't exist, and that we're all just akin to philosophical zombies, biological robots without conscious awareness. That seems rather nihilistic, but some of them seem to revel in it... :/

However, while the brain, and its activity, is measurable and can be correlated with certain mental activity... the scientific institutions still don't understand how raw conscious experience translates to changes in brain activity. Psychedelics change brain activity, but how does that account for the sometimes mindblowing experiences that cannot be articulated in words? How could a neurologist who hasn't taken psychedelics really understand?

There is nothing about brain activity that translates into a raw experience full of, say, ecstatic emotions that might include being at a park with beautiful scenery and wondrous choruses of happy birds. How can that be truly understood through mere brain activity measurements? I seriously doubt the brain is the whole story.

Consciousness is still hard to understand. The brain is still essentially a mystery, despite all we know about it. The heart has neurons, fascinatingly.


Indeed!

The universe is beautiful as it is...

As for accuracy... the science just isn't there yet. Given my personal experiences, physicalism just doesn't seem to produce an answer to explain the full picture of what reality is, nevermind consciousness, including quantum mechanics' weird world.


It's a hypothesis I developed when wondering how past life memories work. This seemed to be something of an explanation.


If the non-physical and physical are tightly bound together, then damaging the physical affects the non-physical expression through the physical. Without the physical brain being alive, the non-physical mind isn't restricted or bound by those negative effects anymore.


This theory isn't necessarily simpler. It is a perspective that is just as valid as the one I postulated, depending on your perspective.

Hmmm... what if one considers consciousness to be the "hardware", and the body, the "software"? A weird way to put it, but consider this hypothesis:

The physical body is structured, maintained, and directed, by an energy field, which some spiritualists call the "aura". The "aura" is, in turn, structured, maintained, and directed, by the unconscious mind, which contains the human archetype, which is why embryos form and grow into humans from conception, and which is why we have all of our human instincts. The "aura" could be considered the electricity in the circuits, and as I said above, the body the "software", and conscious, mind, the "hardware". And the "Soul" is the external power source.

Now I could start talking about a human groupsoul that the unconscious mind links into, but the very crude analogy above is enough, even if it doesn't make much sense.

And yet... each of us humans can infer that other humans are conscious, by mere observation. It seems plain as day that the other humans I interact with are fully conscious.

I know that I am conscious, intuitively, and I see that mirrored in others. The "philosophical zombie" seems more than a bit ridiculous of an idea, to be honest.

I can also infer that non-human animals are conscious, because they interact with the world in certain similar ways as humans do. They perceive through their senses, they feel emotions. They seem to experience happiness, sadness, frustration, excitedness. It can be inferred that they are indeed conscious of their actions, but just that they perceive and think about the world differently to us humans.

As for plants... ah, hmmm. They don't have an animal brain... yet they seem to respond to their environments as though they were alive. Plant intelligence has been recognised as a concept: they respond to pain, they recognise family and neighbours, they recognise the humans who care for them, and who have hurt them or their friends, they recognise when rain is coming, and so, prepare their bodies accordingly. Their root systems are a kind of "brain". Maybe the whole plant can be the "brain"?

One could say they blindly interact with their environments as a machine might to inputs, but it can be inferred from research into plants that they are every bit as conscious as we animals are.

Bacteria? Can we infer that they are conscious from the way they act, seemingly vastly alien to both plant and animal they may be?

I believe other human beings are conscious, but there is no scientific experiment I can devise to prove they are. The scientific problem with consciousness is that it can’t be measured, not even indirectly.

We can measure behavior, we can measure biochemical concentrations, neurological change, etc., but behavior does not equal consciousness. In science, you can’t test or experiment with that which you can’t measure.

So how is it possible to scientifically make the claim that consciousness is produced by the brain?

It's not, directly, and at no point did I claim it was. The point I was making that it's inappropriate to hypothesize a more complex explanation for consciousness when there's no evidence for it. Right now, we have two competing claims, neither of which is provable:

1) Consciousness comes from the integration of information in the brain.
2) Consciousness comes from 'outside' and is somehow modulated by the integration of information in the brain.

Again, speaking as a scientist, I am inclined to go with the one that requires making the fewest assumptions, so that leads me to prefer Option (1) to Option (2). Why hypothesize some kind of 'outside' element when there's no evidence for it?

Now, simplicity is not EVIDENCE for Option (1), both options lack any evidence, and imagine always will. But we know that the brain and consciousness interact, so that's where I stop. I don't see the point in hypothesizing other things since it lacks even a shred of evidence backing it up.

As for the plants, animals, and bacteria, I imagine they have some kind of consciousness, after all, they are integrating information. It is probably very different from what we have but there's still some measurable Phi value.

Here's an example:

I show you a box with a marble in it. If I tell you that this marble isn't actually in the box, but rather, is the result of an incredibly advanced hologram and is only an illusion, how likely are you to think that I'm lying? The marble behaves like a marble in every respect (it rolls, it makes noise when it hits the side of the box, it refracts light, etc). Furthermore, I won't tell you anything about this magic projector, and no matter how hard you look, you cannot find it, or even a sign of it.

Do you believe in the projector, or do you decide that I'm full of it and the marble is just a marble?



Good question. My instinctive response is that, in the receiver model, consciousness is not tied to the brain, at least not intrinsically, and so should continue to exist in some way even if the brain is damaged. But when my visual cortex is damaged, the loss of visual perception is total - it's not like there's some 'visionness' that was one tied to my occiptal lobe that has now been released, it's just gone.

The brain could still be a receiver of consciousness in this model, but then what are you left with:

"The brain is a receiver of consciousness but modulates it in such a way that it creates all of our phenomonological qualia and without the brain, consciousness looses every single sensory or perceptive hallmark we associate with being being conscious."

If that's the case, than what's the point? If the brain is responsible for turning the 'received' signal in what we experience as consciousness and that consciousness cannot persist in a way that we recognize without the brain then we might as well say the brain generates consciousness by the creation of qualia and we're back where we started.

In this model, just call the 'signal' information and that's basically the point I've been arguing the whole time.

Maybe information is a the quantum of consciousness, I don't know.

Blessings
~ND

There is actually a third option, and I think it’s the simplest of them all: Consciousness is all there is. This is the claim of proponents of the “primacy of consciousness” paradigm.

The complications created by trying to reconcile a physical world and a separate world of consciousness are eliminated – there is only consciousness. There is no physical world.

Maybe the interaction between consciousness and brain(physical existence) happens at the quantum level, where everything seems to happen randomly but with probabilites, maybe what is shaping these probabilities is the counsciousness and that's why there is meaning in what arises and not chaos... it's apparent at the quantum level and some classical levels how our observations/awareness/counsciousness directly affects things.

I'm not sure I see much of a distinction in the two views you mentioned. The problem lies in the ambiguity of the phrase "consciousness comes from". This raises the same problems associated with the terms "emergence" or "arises from". Option (1): What is the exact relationship between integrated information and consciousness? Clearly the sentence implies that consciousness supervenes on integrated information - but how? Is it metaphysical supervenience: that is, a reduction of consciousness to integrated information in neural networks? If so then the further question is whether we are proposing an epistemological reduction (as in analytic functionalism, a la Daniel Dennett) or a reduction by brute-metaphysical necessity (as in identity theory, ala J.J. Smart)? If however consciousness supervenes on integrated info only by nomological necessity (natural laws of some kind, correlational), then it is possible that integrated information is compatible with filter theory (it would depend on the exact character of the psychophysical laws linking consciousness and the brain, as determined by empirical investigation).

That is to say, filter theory can indeed be rendered compatible with integrated information theory, or more broadly with the certain facts of neuroscience. (I will attach two papers which discuss considerations about a plausible "filter theory" of consciousness, and its relation of neuroscience, in detail.) Additionally, recent research into the neurobiological effects of psychedelic substances gives credence to some kind of filter theory - I discussed this research here https://www.dmt-nexus.me...aspx?g=posts&t=71180 .

It should also be noted that the founders of integrated information theory (IIT), Tononi and Koch, take consciousness as a fundamental property in its own right - as "different in kind" to physics. IIT is proposed as a bridging principle between mind and matter. Their theory is thus panpsychist, as information is ubiquitous in physics, down to the level of the quantum vacuum. Tononi and Koch did not formulate IIT in terms of filter theory, however the fact that they do regard consciousness as fundamental and situated w/in a panpsychist ontology opens the door for a compatibility b/w the two views, at least as a possibility.

You implicitly mention the principle of Occam's Razor which I am in agreement with - we don't multiply entities, not without necessity. The first part of this axiom is well known; it is the second part that often is neglected. As an analogy: in physics, entities are often found to be explicable in terms of simpler entities (Occam's razor applies) - however, sometimes an entity has to be taken as fundamental, and not explained in terms of anything simpler. In the nineteenth century, it was discovered that electromagnetism could not be explained entirely in terms of mechanical processes previous theories of physics described. Thus, Maxwell postulated electromagnetic charge as a fundamental force in its own right - the ontology of physics had to be expanded based on empirical facts, and novel fundamental laws had to be theorized/discovered to explain how electromagnetism related to mechanical processes.

Now, based on the empirical datum of consciousness, do we have reason to supplement our physical theories with consciousness as a fundamental property of the world, like Maxwell did with electromagnetism, following good principles of science and reason? I think we do, based on the considerations and lines of evidence I enumerated in a previous thread: https://www.dmt-nexus.me...m=767813&#post767813 . There is evidence that consciousness is tightly correlated with brain processes; yet there also exists evidence indicative of there being something more to consciousness than brain processes (perhaps, as you say, and "outside component" ), and this data cannot be readily accommodated if one holds a purely materialistic theory of consciousness. A filter theory happens to be one kind of theory that can accommodate both sets of facts. (As you've rightly noted, none of this is "proof" - I don't believe science is in the business of "proving" anything anyway: science rather concerns itself with evidence, the preponderance of which triangulates on a given theory.)


I think you make a couple of controversial assumptions about filter theory that ought not be made. For instance, the sort of considerations you mention above are compatible with filter theory - indeed, it is these kinds of considerations that filter theory, as an alternative to materialism, was proposed to account for (see attachments) . I'll assume a dualistic filter view in what follows for simplicity, but it's important to note that filter theories are compatible with a variety of ontologies, including some forms of monism. According to filter theorists, ordinary consciousness is tightly "coupled" to the brain and modulated by it's activity in specific ways that we do not yet understand well, and which vary based upon the details of the filter theory being proposed. While we are alive (i.e., while metabolic activity of a certain functional significance is occurring in the brain), the brain somehow "manifests" consciousness in the physical world, expressing itself through the brain. It is the brain, the integrator sensory information, that is responsible for the kind content that consciousness experiences (however, the fact that this content is phenomenally conscious, and exactly how - e.g., the qualitative "feel" of a pain sensation - is a property of consciousness itself). Therefore, you damage the visual cortex, one can no longer have ordinary visual perceptions - consciousness has lost a particular way to express itself through the brain.

Of course the foregoing discussion is general. The question you posed earlier, what might the consciousness experience if it were not so "tied" to the brain? also needs to be addressed. This question is intimately related to the question of what consciousness is, and whether or not consciousness has a component that could be said to be more than the functioning of the brain. What exactly is it that the brain is filtering out? How does consciousness get associated with brains in the first place (here, I believe monistic theories have the upper hand)? Under what conditions does the brain's filtering mechanisms inhibit conscious expression (that is, act as a "reducing valve" )? Conversely, under what conditions do said mechanisms act permissively (when/how does the reducing valve "open up" )? These are all very interesting, complex questions, and I cannot do it full justice here. However, some work has in fact been done toward closing these gaps in our knowledge. I can only again offer a few supportive references. There are a number of books which address these very questions in great detail, and offer several diverse, relevant lines of evidence. E.g.: "Irreducible Mind" and "Beyond Physicalism", by Edward F. Kelly and approx 15 or so contributing university psychologists, researchers, philosophers, etc; "Mystical Encounters With The Natural World: Experiences and Explanations," by Paul Marshall; "Unsnarling the World Knot," and "Parapsychology, Philosophy, Spirituality: A postmodern exploration" by David Ray Griffin. The info I posted in a separate thread - linked above - is also relevant.