Does Consciousness Exist Outside of the Brain?

Does Consciousness Exist Outside of the Brain?

Clifford N. Lazarus Ph.D.

What’s more, according to Fenwick, our consciousness tricks us into perceiving a false duality of self and other when in fact there is only unity. We are not separate from other aspects of the universe but an integral and inextricable part of them. And when we die, we transcend the human experience of consciousness, and its illusion of duality, and merge with the universe's entire and unified property of consciousness. So, ironically, only in death can we be fully conscious.

This is not to be taken as joining God or a creator because the cosmic consciousness that Fenwick describes did not create the universe but is simply a property of it. Obviously, despite his impressive body of research into this subject, there is no current way to empirically establish the validity of Fenwick’s cosmic consciousness hypothesis. Ultimately, it aligns more with faith than science. Thus it seems the answer to the question in this post’s title is “No.” There is no empirically established explanatory framework for understanding how consciousness can exist independently and outside of the brain.

An amusing article, given it seems to spend a lot of time on Fenwick's work and ideas only to make a quick break back to the status quo. But then we've seen this sort of thing in the past, that the only way to get past the censors is to shift back to at least a veneer of support for brain=mind.

When it comes to "aligns more with faith than science", there is an irony in that subsequent statements such as "all of the energies and biophysical phenomena that the brain experiences as consciousness" contain inbuilt faith-based ideas or assumptions. Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, is it not?

When it comes to "aligns more with faith than science", there is an irony in that subsequent statements such as "all of the energies and biophysical phenomena that the brain experiences as consciousness" contain inbuilt faith-based ideas or assumptions. Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, is it not?

Yeah I found that amusing, though Fenwick's own conclusions about NDEs and dissolution into cosmic consciousness seem at odds with what NDErs have often said?

Also there's a reality that to try and push for proponent ideas one has to sometimes end with some language that supports the status quo. The whole article reminded me of Phillip Ball's piece on Occult Chemistry:

Occult Chemistry

Most of Occult Chemistry is taken up with descriptions and diagrams of these elemental substructures. The images are mesmerizing, elaborated in meticulous and often beautiful detail. With their ‘sciencey’ appearance, set amidst numerical calculations, it’s easy to see how contemporary readers might have found this stuff impossible to distinguish from real science – especially at a time when the discoveries of x-rays, electrons, radioactivity and atomic structure were making atomic physics a veritable phantasmagoria where anything seemed possible. But the allure goes deeper, for you can’t look at these images today without experiencing some frisson. The triplets of fundamental particles at the atom’s core evoke the quark structure of nucleons – and indeed it’s been argued that the revelations of Occult chemistry bear uncanny resonances with the discoveries of particle physics.2 What’s more, the lobes and dumbbells speak immediately to the chemist of the electron orbitals shortly to emerge from quantum chemistry – sheer coincidence, but eerie all the same. 

What Crookes’ contemporaries made of all this is not known, but I bet they were intrigued. Joseph John Thomson, the discoverer of the electron, went to séances, as did Pierre Curie. George Johnstone Stoney, who named the electron, was convinced that the universe was an infinite series of worlds within worlds. Francis Aston, the discoverer of isotopes, read the book and borrowed from it the term ‘meta-neon’ to refer to his newly discovered neon-22.

Yes, I like Fenwick, but I don't think I could agree with everything he says. He goes from observations we can all agree on (or most of us) to conclusions which are something of his own, not necessarily something that is an inevitable outcome.