A recent scientific paper published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology is entitled "What if consciousness is not an emergent property of the brain? Observational and empirical challenges to materialistic models." The paper shows a view count of more than 30,000. The paper (by Helane Wahbeh, Dean Radin, Cedric Cannard and Arnaud Delorme) has some good aspects and some shortfalls.
The abstract states this:
"This review examines phenomena that apparently contradict the notion that consciousness is exclusively dependent on brain activity, including phenomena where consciousness appears to extend beyond the physical brain and body in both space and time. The mechanisms underlying these 'non-local' properties are vaguely suggestive of quantum entanglement in physics, but how such effects might manifest remains highly speculative."
It is very good to be paying attention to "phenomena where consciousness appears to extend beyond the physical brain and body in both space and time." But an immediate attempt to suggest such things are suggestive of quantum entanglement is probably misguided. Quantum entanglement seems to be a mysterious purely physical anomaly, having to do with very low-level microscopic things like particles, not very high-level non-physical things such as minds.
The paper then starts talking about "consciousness." It is always a mistake when pondering the human mind to be using language that keeps using this very reductive term "consciousness" over and over again. What we need to explain are minds, which involve a host of capabilities and very many diverse aspects, many very mysterious. The term "consciousness" is pretty much the weakest term you could use to describe human minds. Using the term "consciousness" for the human mind is like using the word "roundness" to describe planet Earth, a magnificent panoply of organisms.
I will pass over the paper's discussion of materialist theories of consciousness, some of which are discussed in other posts of this blog. In its middle the paper begins to discuss what it calls "non-local consciousness theories." Is that a good term to be using to describe alternatives to the dogma of "brains make minds"? No, that's not a very good term to be using. The first reason is that the shrink-speaking reductionist term "consciousness" is a very poor term to be using for the enormous wonder that is the human mind, something with so many different aspects and mysterious capabilities. The second reason why "non-local consciousness theories" is not a very good term to be using is that we should not box ourselves in to any assumption that the human mind is non-local.
The following two ideas are both reasonable possibilities:
(1) There is some cosmic mind storehouse or mind source, and each person's mind is like a little piece of that cosmic mind; so your mind isn't really local.
(2) Your mind very much is local, but not at all a product of your brain. At some point in your early history you were given a soul or spirit that is at this time locally confined to your body. Such a gift may have come from some divine reality of cosmic mind-providing facility. After your body dies, that soul or spirit will be released, and will continue to exist.
We cannot call scenario 2 a non-local theory of your mind, because it does postulate that your mind is currently quite a local reality. There is also quite a bit of parapsychology evidence suggesting that scenario 2 is more likely than scenario 1. For example, during near-death experiences people often report floating out of their bodies, just as if they had a soul or spirit locally confined to a body before that happened.
So the term "non-local theory of consciousness" is not a term that should be used for most viewpoints denying that your brain is the source of your mind. It is better to refer to such theories as "top-down theories of the mind," contrasting such theories with "bottom-up theories of the mind" in which it is assumed that the mind arises from low-level neural activity. Another good term that you might use is to call such theories "non-neural theories of the mind." It is a mistake to commit yourself unnecessarily to some idea that the mind is non-local, when there is so much to suggest that our minds are currently mostly local.
The paper attempts to introduce the idea of "non-local theories of consciousness," saying this:
"Traditional materialists envision a world in which mathematics is more fundamental than physics, which is more fundamental than chemistry, which is, in turn, more fundamental than biology. Thus, in this way, physical processes are foundational to the generation of our biology. However, suppose we envision that consciousness is actually more foundational than physics. In that case, we can imagine that these other physical disciplines can arise from consciousness. In other words, if biology emerges from chemistry, chemistry from physics, and physics emerges from consciousness, then from this perspective, non-local consciousness phenomena would no longer be regarded as anomalous because consciousness can transcend some physical laws. Theories proposing this idea have been offered by Federico Faggin, Donald Hoffman, Bernardo Kastrup, Vernon Neppe, and numerous others. Most of these theories are speculative, while others are supported through mathematical arguments or empirical data (Hoffman et al., 2015; Neppe and Close, 2020; Faggin, 2021b). We briefly review a sample of non-local consciousness theories."
We then are given little summaries of eight different theories called "non-local consciousness theories." Are all speculative, and the paper fails to give any compelling rationale discussed for any of these theories. The discussion of these sounds like strange metaphysics. Some excerpts:
"Operational probabilistic theory": "Faggin views the physical world as a virtual reality metaphor, in which sophisticated avatars controlled by conscious beings interact with each other, where the body that controls the avatar exists outside the computer and is not part of the program."
"Interface theory of perception": "Space and time emerge from conscious agents’ exchanges (Hoffman, 2014). Hoffman proposes that our perceptions (i.e., the conscious agents) are not views of a grounded truth but are more like a personal computer’s operating system and interface."
"Analytic idealism":"Analytic idealism is a metaphysics that postulates consciousness as Nature’s sole fundamental ground and that all natural phenomena are ultimately reducible to universal consciousness....Because there is only one universal consciousness, individuated living beings are described as dissociated mental complexes of the 'fundamentally unitary universal mind' (Kastrup, 2021, p. 267)." The description sounds intriguing, but the link is merely to a paper that is behind a paywall. Searching for "Bernardo Kastrup" on Google Scholar will, however, give you some interesting papers he wrote, such as the one here. It is possible to advance a credible form of idealism (the idea that everything is mental), but it requires elements far beyond what Kastrup postulates, which seems to lack any idea that we are here on purpose. What we need to explain are human minds and human mental phenomena in all their diversity, things vastly more than mere consciousness. So postulating a "universal consciousness" that we are fragments of does not seem adequate.
"Triadic dimensional vortical paradigm": "To address these discrepancies, Neppe and Close describe a mathematical model in which we exist in a 9-dimensional finite, quantized, volumetric, spinning reality embedded in an infinite continuity (9D+)...The model proposes that the 4D world we ordinarily experience is the physical component of this 9D+ existence."
"Zero-point field": "Joachim Keppler (2018) proposes a theory where the energy of the vacuum is the basis for consciousness, the so-called “zero-point field” (Keppler, 2018). This is a theory of panpsychism where consciousness permeates the universe yet is only concentrated and apparent in certain circumstances. Unlike other panpsychism theories, it is not the 'matter' that is conscious but empty space."
"Orchestrated objective reduction theory": This seems to actually be a version of "brains make minds" claims, and does not seem to belong in a list of "non-local theories of consciousness."
"Theory of double causality": The speculation described does not actually sound like a non-local theory of consciousness.
None of the discussion of these theories seems to provide much of a reason for thinking that your mind does not come from your brain. In addition to the many shortfalls of the brain which indicate that it is not a credible source for our brain (which our paper authors have failed to mention), and in addition to the evidence from psychical research, which frequently involves evidence of capabilities and experiences that cannot be explained by assuming that your mind merely comes from your brain, there is a very large additional rationale for thinking your mind does not come from your brain. But the "What If Consciousness Is Not an Emergent Property of the Brain?" fails completely to mention any part of that rationale. A quick sketch of that rationale is below:
(1) Filled with a host of engineering effects and thousands of impressive extremely complex protein inventions, and a host of fine-tuned cellular complexities, a human body is an enormously organized dynamic structure that is not credibly explained by any theories of material science, which utterly fail to credibly explain the progression from a speck-sized zygote to a full adult human body (a structure of enormous hierarchical organization not specified by DNA or its genes, which merely specify low-level chemical information).
(2) Hitting many a "distant bullseye," the physical universe is an extremely fine-tuned reality with many laws and just-right fundamental constants that would be incredibly unlikely to ever exist in any random universe.
(3) There is therefore an extremely large basis for assuming that our physical reality must be the result of some unfathomable purposeful agency acting to produce accidentally unachievable physical states. Purposeful agency is evident throughout biology, and the person denying such teleology is like a person on a rowboat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean who denies the existence of water.
(4) Given such a large basis for assuming that our physical bodies arise from some unfathomable purposeful superhuman agency, it is plausible to assume that such a purposeful causal agency is also the ultimate source of our minds.
After pretty much wasting the reader's time by talking about eight speculative theories claimed as "non-local theories of consciousness," the "What If Consciousness Is Not an Emergent Property of the Brain?" paper begins to discuss some reasons for believing that your mind does not come from your brain. These reasons include:
(1) "Perceiving information about distant locations": That's a timid term for what is discussed, which is remote viewing. The paper fails to mention specific compelling evidence for remote viewing, although such evidence exists. A much better way of establishing "perceiving information about distant locations" would be to discuss the evidence for clairvoyance, which is massive, and stretches over about two hundred years.
(2) "Perceiving information from another person" : again we have a timid term for what is discussed, which is ESP (extrasensory perception) or telepathy. Referring to the Ganzfeld protocol for ESP tests, we read this:
"The chance of the 'receiving' person correctly selecting the actual image is thus 25%. Over 120 published experiments have used this protocol, comprising about 4,000 individual trials, and the overall hit rate was just over 30%."
Results vastly better than this in large trials where the expected rate is 25% or less (with success rates as high as 73%) have been published, but our authors fail to mention them. This is another example of a senseless, timid tendency of people to ignore parapsychology results gathered before 1970.
(3) "Perceiving the future": we hear some details about the Bem precognition tests, with a claim that "There was a pre-stimulus effect demonstrating a physiological response prior to the unpredictable stimuli (fixed effect: overall effect size = 0.21, 95% CI = 0.15 – 0.27, z = 6.9, p < 2.71 × 10–12; Mossbridge et al., 2012)."
(4) "Apparent cognitive abilities beyond the experience/learning/skill of the person exhibiting them." We get this interesting paragraph:
"Another example is Indriði Indriðason (1883–1912), who apparently spoke multiple languages he did not know (Haraldsson, 2012). Similarly, Alec Harris spoke at length to witness Sir Alexander Cannon in Hindustani and Tibetan, two languages that Harris would have had no way of knowing, but Sir Alexander did know (Vandersande, 2008, p. 113). Other xenoglossy cases have also been documented by University of Virginia scientist Ian Stevenson (Stevenson and Pasricha, 1979, 1980). While anecdotal and subject to the known biases of experiential reports, these cases have been meticulously well-documented. Similar cases of 'acquired' and 'spontaneous savants' refer to individuals who, either through a traumatic event or with no apparent cause at all, suddenly gain exceptional musical or mathematical skills (Treffert, 2009)."
(5) "Non-local consciousness experiences are common." We are referred to some studies finding that psychical or paranormal experiences are very common. One of the studies has the interesting result below, in which 20% of a sample of "elite American scientists" report having had an out-of-body experience (OBE), and significant fractions of all groups reporting ESP experiences.
(6) "Cognitive abilities can be retained when the brain is seriously compromised." Very many types of cases of this type could have been reported, using items such as I discuss in my posts here and here. But the only phenomenon discussed is terminal lucidity. We get a citation of the paper here referring to this mysterious phenomenon.
The evidence discussion in the second half of the paper is not half as strong as it could have been. But at least we can be thankful that the authors have introduced some readers to important evidence they may not have known about. Overall, the authors of the paper have been pretty clumsy and ineffective in presenting the case that the cause of human minds is something other than brains. The case for such a thing is many times greater than you would think from merely reading their paper. The biggest shortcoming of the paper is that the authors have totally failed to pay attention to a line of evidence extremely relevant to their subject, the many physical shortfalls of the brain which suggest very strongly that it cannot be the source of human mental phenomena such as instant learning, instant recall, very fast thinking, and the preservation of memories for more than 50 years. Such physical shortfalls of the brain include things such as the very short lifetime of synaptic proteins, the very high level of multiple types of signal noise in the brain, the lack of any known information writing or information reading mechanism in the brain capable of explaining the preservation or recall of school-learned information ("synapse strengthening" being no such thing), the lack of any addressing or indexing in the brain that could help explain instant recall, and the unreliable transmission of signals in chemical sysnapses, which transmit a nerve impulse with a reliability of less than 50%. Such very relevant physical shortfalls of the brain are discussed in detail in other posts of this blog.
Wonder if animals have OBEs?
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