Do rats need a brain?

John Lorber’s classic findings that some people, with no obvious disability, have a severely different brain geometry due to severe hydropcephalus apparently also translate to other primals. The results from the article linked to below has also been published in Nature.

https://news.northeastern.edu/2020/01/22...rmal-life/

I have a hard time seeing how the implications of this discovery really supports the dualist narrative. John Lorber’s findings have sometimes been used to support the notion of consciousness being located outside the brain. But if this is true, should we then also believe rats are consciousness? How do their external consciousness differ from our external consciousness? Do they have NDEs? I believe this further underpins physicalism even though neuroplasticity is a grand mystery. Which ‘agent’ orchestrates that functions can relocate to other areas of the brain?

Lorber's story was a party piece, it was never written up and published, it was meant to be provocative. Yes a rat apparently needs what we label a nervous system, otherwise they wouldn't see, smell or move their legs.

Paramecium swim around, have sex, eat, and they don't have such a nervous system, but they have plenty of cilia and as a eukaryote, they have a centriole. But they are small, with a low volume to surface area.

Do rats have NDE's, I don't think we have any answer to this, but surely the answer is likely to be yes, they are a complex, clever, social mammal with a brain.

John Lorber’s classic findings that some people, with no obvious disability, have a severely different brain geometry due to severe hydropcephalus apparently also translate to other primals. The results from the article linked to below has also been published in Nature.

https://news.northeastern.edu/2020/01/22...rmal-life/

I have a hard time seeing how the implications of this discovery really supports the dualist narrative. John Lorber’s findings have sometimes been used to support the notion of consciousness being located outside the brain. But if this is true, should we then also believe rats are consciousness? How do their external consciousness differ from our external consciousness? Do they have NDEs? I believe this further underpins physicalism even though neuroplasticity is a grand mystery. Which ‘agent’ orchestrates that functions can relocate to other areas of the brain?

The "Other systems argument"
Personally I'm open to the idea of animals consciousness, in spite of the ephiphenomenalist basis for it.

John Lorber’s classic findings that some people, with no obvious disability, have a severely different brain geometry due to severe hydropcephalus apparently also translate to other primals. The results from the article linked to below has also been published in Nature.

https://news.northeastern.edu/2020/01/22...rmal-life/

I have a hard time seeing how the implications of this discovery really supports the dualist narrative. John Lorber’s findings have sometimes been used to support the notion of consciousness being located outside the brain. But if this is true, should we then also believe rats are consciousness? How do their external consciousness differ from our external consciousness? Do they have NDEs? I believe this further underpins physicalism even though neuroplasticity is a grand mystery. Which ‘agent’ orchestrates that functions can relocate to other areas of the brain?

I always figured rats have consciousness? I think it would be difficult for us to determine if they have NDEs since we cannot communicate with them.

It's a bit odd to say this underpins physicalism while noting a "grand mystery". As per Sam Harris, Physicalism is nonsensical because it proposes Something (consciousness) comes from Nothing (the non-conscious physical). We can also look to the writings of another atheist, author of Why I am Not a Christian Bertrand Russell:

• 'Historically, we may regard materialism as a system of dogma set up to combat orthodox dogma...Accordingly we find that, as ancient orthodoxies disintegrate, materialism more and more gives way to scepticism.'
  
  
• All that physics gives us is certain equations giving abstract properties of their changes. But as to what it is that changes, and what it changes from and to—as to this, physics is silent.
  
  
• It is obvious that a man who can see, knows things that a blind man cannot know; but a blind man can know the whole of physics.
  

I don't even consider Physicalism a serious option, in fact I think it's only academia's atheist-materialist fundamentalism that keeps this non-starter alive.

The major question instead, IMO, is whether consciousness dies when the brain dies?

So whether hydrocephalus points to a soul (non-local/external consciousness)...I would agree this isn't hard proof but it is one data point of interest.

John Lorber’s classic findings that some people, with no obvious disability, have a severely different brain geometry due to severe hydropcephalus apparently also translate to other primals. The results from the article linked to below has also been published in Nature.

https://news.northeastern.edu/2020/01/22...rmal-life/

I have a hard time seeing how the implications of this discovery really supports the dualist narrative. John Lorber’s findings have sometimes been used to support the notion of consciousness being located outside the brain. But if this is true, should we then also believe rats are consciousness? How do their external consciousness differ from our external consciousness? Do they have NDEs? I believe this further underpins physicalism even though neuroplasticity is a grand mystery. Which ‘agent’ orchestrates that functions can relocate to other areas of the brain?

First, I think talking about "severely different brain geometry" is a bit disingenuous. By analogy, suppose we found someone who was perfectly normal except that their heart was 90% smaller, or they had two kidneys but they were 90% smaller than normal. This would probably create a much greater shock in medical science because science has a better grip on what these organs do, and the details of how they do it.

The fact that people turn up from time to time who are perfectly normal except that they have 90% less brain tissue creates less angst simply because the understanding of the brain and consciousness is quite vague.

I don't believe we are fundamentally distinct from other animals (and maybe plants), so I suspect rats do have NDE's - but like everything else to do with the brain, it is devilishly hard to test!

I guess it helps that I'm not religious in the conventional sense, so I don't get told what to believe. That does not make me into a materialist, although I used to be until I saw just how much materialism fails to explain, or explains in a sloppy way that relies far too heavily on the idea that certain experiments are done badly, the file drawer effect, etc.

As it happens, I seem to remember that there were some experiments done in which rats' brain waves were monitored while they were decapitated. There was a burst of neuronal activity after about 1 minute. This was interpreted as a change caused by the build-up of glutamate in the brain.

That is a classic materialist experiment - if no burst of activity had been reported, that would have been interpreted to mean that NDE's were in some way not real. Alternatively, since there was a burst of activity, this was explained prosaically.

Likewise, if everyone with severe hydrocephalus was severely impaired, materialists would point to this as a confirmation of materialism, and since there are such people who are normal - a notable example was a man with a maths degree - you at least want to use this strange fact to support materialism (rather unconvincingly, I'd say).

David