The Brain as Filter: On Removing the Stuffing from the Keyhole

The Brain as Filter: On Removing the Stuffing from the Keyhole

Larry Dosey, MD

The fallback position in modern neuroscience is that filter theories sell the brain short. The brain makes consciousness, most scientists believe, rather like the liver produces bile or the pancreas secrete insulin. There is no Source, no higher intelligence. All intelligence, all consciousness, originates in (and dies with) the physical brain. But an increasing number of science insiders and philosophers consider this view to be neuromythology—, a faith-based ideology with no empirical foundation. As professor of philosophy Robert Almeder, of Georgia State University, says,

"Where in the scientific literature, biological, neurobiological, or otherwise, is it established either by observation or by the methods of testing and experiment, that consciousness is a biological property secreted by the brain in the same way a gland secretes a hormone. There is no scientifically well-confirmed belief within science that consciousness is a biological product of the brain. We do not see the brain secrete consciousness in the same way we see a gland secrete a hormone. Consciousness is nothing like a hormone.29"

Almeder's comment exposes the poverty of our current understanding of the origins of consciousness. As such, we are in no position to dismiss concepts of a Source, higher intelligence, or brain filters. Our ignorance is sometimes admitted. In considering how consciousness might arise from some physical organ such as the brain, Harvard experimental psychologist Steven Pinker acknowledges, “"Beats the heck out of me. I have some prejudices, but no idea of how to begin to look for a defensible answer. And neither does anyone else.”30"

Does Consciousness Depend on the Brain?

Chris Carter

The Issues at Stake

There are really two separate issues here: one is the logical possibility of survival, and the other is the empirical possibility.  The arguments of the epiphenomenalists, the identity theorists, and the behaviorists are logically inconsistent with the idea of survival: if consciousness is merely a useless by-product of brain activity, or is identical with brain activity, or does not really exist except as observed behavior, then
obviously what we call consciousness cannot survive the destruction of the brain.  However, as we have seen earlier, there seems to be compelling reasons for rejecting the first of these theories, and it is questionable if the latter two theories are at all consistent with observation and introspection — or for that matter, are anything more than just silly.

If however, we are willing to admit the existence of consciousness and not only as a useless by-product, then the post-mortem
existence of consciousness is at least a logical possibility — that is, there is no self-contradiction in the assertion that consciousness may exist in the absence of a brain.  Then the question becomes whether or not survival is an empirical possibility – that is, whether or not the idea of survival is compatible with the facts and laws of nature as currently understood.

In his book Schiller proposes that "matter is admirably calculated machinery for regulating, limiting and restraining the consciousness
which it encases."  He argues that the simpler physical structure of "lower beings" depresses their consciousness to a lower point, and that the higher organizational complexity of man allows a higher level of consciousness.  Inother words, Matter is not what produces consciousness but what limits it and confines its intensity within certain limits … This explanation admits the connection of Matter and Consciousness, but contends that the course of interpretation must proceed in the contrary direction.  Thus it will fit the facts which Materialism rejected as 'supernatural' and thereby attains to an explanation which is ultimately tenable instead of one which is ultimately absurd.  And it is an explanation the possibility of which no evidence in favour of Materialism can possibly affect.

The principal reasons why material processes can never explain consciousness, in particular never explain qualia, are fairly simple to understand. There is one main physical argument, and a number of philosophical ones.

First principal reason: any and all physicalist explanations for consciousness are directly contradicted by the existence of a huge body of actual empirical evidence of the ultimate independence of mind from the physical brain, from various paranormal phenomena especially veridical NDEs and past life memories. Denying the validity of this requires plausibly explaining as fraud or misperception or whatever each and every one of a multitude of investigated occurrences having veridical features, something that simply can't be done.

Second principal reason: the Hard Problem in philosophy of mind. 

The Hard Problem can be interpreted in a number of different ways. One was expressed by Frank Jackson in his philosophical argument ‘Mary’s Room’. No amount of scientific and physical examination on Mary’s part can ever reveal to Mary exactly what the inner subjective conscious experience, i.e. qualia, of the color blue actually is until Mary actually experiences what the color blue is for herself. Conclusion: subjective experience and perception in consciousness is absolutely of a fundamentally different and higher existential order than the physical world.

From https://www.urantia.org/study/seminar-pr...#Emergence:

11.2.1 Qualia – Perception (“The Hard Problem” )
Philosopher of the mind Frank Jackson imagined a thought experiment —Mary’s Room— to explain qualia and why it is such an intractable problem for science. The problem identified is referred to as the knowledge argument. Here is the description of the thought experiment:
“Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like ‘red’, ‘blue’, and so on. She discovers, for example, just which wavelength combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal cords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence ‘The sky is blue’. (…) What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a color television monitor? Will she learn anything or not?”
Jackson believed that Mary did learn something new: she learned what it was like to experience color.
“It seems just obvious that she will learn something about the world and our visual experience of it. But then is it inescapable that her previous knowledge was incomplete. But she had all the physical information. Ergo there is more to have than that, and Physicalism [materialism] is false.”