Neuroscientists Keep Wrongly Assuming the Source of Something Must Be Near Its Observed Manifestations

A post of mine written back in 2014 shows a very strong consistency with my current beliefs after making a very thorough study of the brain. The post was entitled "The Receptacle Hypothesis: Could Your Mind Have Come From an External Source?" Back in 2014 I wrote this:

"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."

Below is the visual I gave in my 2014 post to illustrate the idea:

When I wrote these words back in 2014 1 had not yet made much of a study of the brain. Now, after having spent thousands of hours researching the brain, this idea I had suggested in 2014 seems like no mere possibility but more like a necessity. To explain why, I can return to the analogy of the little girl, the flowers and the bees. 

Suppose the little girl had studied flowers and their parts. It might have dawned on her that there is nothing in flowers capable of explaining the origin of bees. You can imagine some "bee construction" machinery, and flowers have none of the characteristics of such machinery. Upon considering how there is nothing in a flower that can explain the origin of a bee, the girl would have a good reason for rejecting the "flowers make bees" hypothesis. 

A similar state of affairs occurs with the brain and the mind. The brain lacks the features we might expect it to have if it were the source of our minds. We cannot identify any physical feature that would tend to produce a conscious being with a sense of self. The whole idea of mind arising from matter seems no more logical than blood dripping from a stone. But in the case of memory, we can identify a set of physical features that we would expect a brain to have if it were something that could explain our memory. From our work with computers, we know the type of features that enable the permanent storage and instant retrieval of information. They are features such as this:

• Something such as a read-write head allowing information to be written to some spot where it is permanently stored, and read from such a spot.
• Some stable physical substrate allowing information transmitted to the system to be permanently stored without the information quickly decaying.
• Features such as addressing and indexing allowing the instant retrieval of specific items of stored data.
• Some system allowing the instant storage of new information. 
• Some system for allowing information to be translated into symbolic tokens that are used for information storage (tokens such as letters or binary bits).
• Transmission paths allowing a very fast and error-free transmission of information between different parts of the system.  

No such things exist in the brain. Brains have no indexing and no addressing. Neurons don't come with neuron numbers or neuron addresses. There is no known physical substrate allowing sensory information to be permanently stored in the brain without the information quickly decaying. The synapses claimed to be the site of memory storage are "shifting sands" type of things, made of proteins with average lifetimes of less than two weeks; and such synapses are attached to dendritic spines with an average lifetime of a few months or less. 

DNA is a stable substrate for information storage, but there is zero evidence that things learned by the senses are stored in DNA. No one has ever found information learned in school stored in DNA, or in any other part of the brain. The synapses in the brain are almost all chemical synapses, which do not transmit information reliably (a signal will pass across a synapse with a reliability of less than 50%).  Neurons and synapses are extremely noisy structures, and chemical synapses have a very strong cumulative slowing effect on signal transmission.  The brain has no known mechanism for instantly storing memories, and the "synapse strengthening" claimed to be behind memory storage would require protein synthesis taking minutes or hours, being way to slow to account for new memories that humans can instantly acquire. Brains are too slow, too noisy and too unstable to be the source of human memory phenomena and human thinking, which is often blazing fast and 100% reliable (as when Hamlet actors recall more than a thousand lines of dialog with complete accuracy), and which routinely involves the preservation of memories for several decades. 

Besides the two examples in my 2014 post, I can think of two more examples that remind me of the fallacy of assuming that the source of something must be near its observed manifestations:

(1) If someone had no idea what caused TV shows to be displayed on a TV screen, he might assume that somehow the shows arise from the machine itself: that a TV is some kind of "TV show generator." This assumption would be very false. TV shows arise from complex causal affairs (called "TV show filming") that typically takes place many miles from the TV that displays the show.

(2) On a planet that was perpetually covered with clouds (which we may call planet Evercloudy), scientists who had never seen a sun might wonder how there arises the light that lights their planet and the heat that heats their planet. They might wrongly assume that such heat and light comes from the planet itself -- that maybe rocks or dirt emit heat and light. This answer would be dead wrong. The heat and light that blessed their planet would actually come from a very distant source that was unknown to them: the star which their planet revolved around. 

The hypothesis that minds must come from some source outside of a body can be supported not just by looking inward, asking ourselves whether brains have the characteristics that could explain minds. Such a hypothesis can also be supported by looking outward, and asking: do we have any reason to suspect there is some great mysterious causal reality outside of our bodies and our planet? Looking outward, we find ourselves in a universe that suddenly began in a fine-tuned manner, a universe that against the most gigantic odds has laws and fundamental constants allowing creatures such as ourselves to exist.  Nature had to hit many a distant bulls-eye to end up with a universe meeting the many requirements for organisms such as ourselves. Seeing such fine-tuning, and also what seems like the most enormous teleology in the origination of fantastically organized physical bodies such as the human body, and being unable to even explain the progression from a speck-sized zygote to a full human body without resorting to the lie that DNA is a body blueprint, we have every reason to suspect some unfathomably powerful mysterious causal reality beyond our understanding, which may (directly or indirectly) help explain how we got our minds that our brains cannot explain.

The little girl's hypothesis about flowers yielding bees would be hard to disprove. But you could discredit it by carefully filming hundreds of flowers, and observing that the bees always appeared from a point outside of the flower, rather than from within it. As for brains making minds, one way to discredit it is by very carefully studying what goes on in minds during near-death experiences in which the brain tends to shut down because of the heart stopping. At the link here we have a survey of survivors of the 1976 Tangshan earthquake which killed some 240,000 people.  81 survivors were interviewed, by talking to patients at a convalescent hospital, patients who had been admitted because of injuries suffered in the earthquake. 40 out of 81 reported "full blown" near-death experiences (7 or greater on the Greyson scale).  51% (41 out of 81) reported "thinking unusually fast," 28% (23 out of 81) reported "sudden understanding," 43% (35 out of 81) reported "an out-of-body experience," and 65% (53 out of 81) reported "unusually vivid thoughts."  The results are the opposite of what we would expect from the "brains make minds" idea.  If your brain makes your mind, you would never have an experience of floating out of your body, and you would never report your thoughts speeding up and your understanding increasing when your brain shut down.