Thread: can the mind exist independent from the brain?

I'm a little late to the party, but I figure it's better to reply to an existing thread than to make a new one and I'd like to chime in on this debate.

Originally Posted by Thegnome54

Is it possible that the brain is not in charge of thought, and some non-physical entity is? Of course. But that is completely unnecessary. By Occam's razor, we already have a simple explanation which seems to work. Why invent something non-physical?

I don't think that our current explanation 'works' at all. It does adequately address some of the correlations between mind and brain, but it also dismisses a great deal of inconvenient observable evidence that throws the whole model into question.

For example, in the case of dying people who have developed severe brain damage. Often, in the later stages of disease, these people can't even remember the names and faces of family members. In the hours approaching their death, sometimes these people will spontaneously become lucid and clear of thought. They will remember faces, names, and be able to speak clearly despite the fact that the brain damage supposedly responsible for their cognitive affliction is still very much there. This phenomenon is well known as "Terminal Lucidity".

Similarly there is a brain affliction known as hydrocephalus. In the most severe cases of hydrocephalus, a patient can be left with less than 5% of the brain mass of a normal person - and yet, even in these most severe cases there are patients who have above average IQs and seemingly no mental deficits.

The last one I'll bring up here is acquired savant syndrome - where brain damage actually results in radically increased mental abilities.

Those who believe consciousness to be a creation of the brain are left in an uncomfortable position by these kinds of mysteries. After all, if the brain produces consciousness why would brain damage result in radically increased mental abilities? Why are some people with severe brain tumors suddenly able to transcend their brain damage and remember people, faces, and hold a normal conversation as their death nears? How would people be able to live a normal life with a miniscule fraction of a normal brain?

Originally Posted by Roller

If the mind is not physical, how does it seemingly have a causal effect upon the physical?

My own view is that consciousness is an intrinsic irreducible part of the universe and that the brain behaves as a kind of filter for consciousness. Cyril Burt sums this up well:

“The brain is not an organ that generates consciousness, but rather an instrument evolved to transmit and limit the processes of consciousness and of conscious attention so as to restrict them to those aspects of the material environment which at any moment are crucial for the terrestrial success of the individual”

Not only does this view instantly solve all of these neurological mysteries, but it also does not conflict with neuroscience, because it does not deny the correlations observed surrounding the brain – it simply interprets them differently than materialists do.

For example, is the brain activity correlated with certain states of consciousness the measure of consciousness, or the measure of the brain responding to consciousness?

When you take a drug, is the effect on consciousness caused by the brain altering the way it produces consciousness or does the drug merely alter the brain's ability to regulate consciousness which consequently produces the change?

When you hit your head, does it cause a mechanical change in the brain which translates to consciousness, or does it cause a mechanical change in the brain which alters the way the brain regulates consciousness?

Without wanting to get off-subject here, there have been no scientifically proven OBE's - at least, not in the dualist form.

What would you consider scientifically proven? There are scientists who have done extensive work around the out of body experience who do claim dualist results - notably, Robert Monroe’s team as well as the Societies for Psychical Research.

But I’m going to go off on a limb here and assume what you mean is large, peer reviewed studies? If that is the case, then I would say the reason that OBEs have not been proven is because to my knowledge there have been no large peer reviewed teams studying the phenomenon with a goal of testing the validity of dualism.

Recently, scientists have been able to induce OBE's by things such as electrodes, and even simple camera-delay setups.

While these may technically be OBEs by definition, they have little in common with a true OBE. Giving somebody a sense of being somewhere else is not the same thing as feeling yourself lift off your body, floating around, touching objects and feeling them, as well as feeling bizarre ‘new’ sensations.

If the mind is not physical, what is it made of?

Why does it have to be ‘made’ of anything at all?

If the mind is not physical, why do we end with our death?

We don’t end with our death.

Why are we 'anchored' to our bodies? Could we not be capable of swapping minds with another's body?

I don’t know why we are anchored here. From a philosophical standpoint this question could be viewed almost as saying, what is the purpose of life? Perhaps, we are not in this situation voluntarily. Perhaps we are here for a unique physical experience.

I doubt people are capable of swapping bodies. If it is possible, few people know how to do it, and they’re not talking. Look at the OBE, or the NDE, there are seemingly endless stories you can read from people who claim to have experienced these things and virtually none that claim that body swapping is possible.

Originally Posted by RideTheWalrus

Why does it have to be ‘made’ of anything at all?

If it isn't made of anything, it contains nothing, it is nothing, it doesn't exist.

Originally Posted by StonedApe

If it isn't made of anything, it contains nothing, it is nothing, it doesn't exist.

Originally Posted by StonedApe

If it isn't made of anything, it contains nothing, it is nothing, it doesn't exist.

This whole thread is about that very question. Is the mind purely physical, or is it not limited to the body?

When you state that if consciousness exists, it must be made of matter you're essentially starting with your conclusion. It's not logically proving a case, it's just stating your belief system.

Originally Posted by RideTheWalrus

I don't think that our current explanation 'works' at all. It does adequately address some of the correlations between mind and brain, but it also dismisses a great deal of inconvenient observable evidence that throws the whole model into question.

For example, in the case of dying people who have developed severe brain damage. Often, in the later stages of disease, these people can't even remember the names and faces of family members. In the hours approaching their death, sometimes these people will spontaneously become lucid and clear of thought. They will remember faces, names, and be able to speak clearly despite the fact that the brain damage supposedly responsible for their cognitive affliction is still very much there. This phenomenon is well known as "Terminal Lucidity".

Similarly there is a brain affliction known as hydrocephalus. In the most severe cases of hydrocephalus, a patient can be left with less than 5% of the brain mass of a normal person - and yet, even in these most severe cases there are patients who have above average IQs and seemingly no mental deficits.

The last one I'll bring up here is acquired savant syndrome - where brain damage actually results in radically increased mental abilities.

Those who believe consciousness to be a creation of the brain are left in an uncomfortable position by these kinds of mysteries. After all, if the brain produces consciousness why would brain damage result in radically increased mental abilities? Why are some people with severe brain tumors suddenly able to transcend their brain damage and remember people, faces, and hold a normal conversation as their death nears? How would people be able to live a normal life with a miniscule fraction of a normal brain?

You mentioned three possible challenges to our current explanation, and I will address them as best I can:

Terminal lucidity is indeed a mysterious thing. Little research has been done into the matter, most likely due to the obvious methodological difficulties involved. I did find one paper (Terminal lucidity in patients with chronic schizop... [J Nerv Ment Dis. 2009] - PubMed result) that attempted to glean some kind of quantifiable data from a survey of the literature. Considerable text from this paper can be found in a blog post here (Imminent Death and Spontaneous Return to Mental Awareness | Havealittletalk's Blog).

You're right that we can't explain it and that it seems very odd, given what we currently believe about diseases like Alzheimers. The truth is that we really don't know all that much about these diseases in the first place. It's entirely possible that they disable retrieval of memories rather than the memories themselves. In this case, like a deleted file, a trivial change in the brain might enable their return. Perhaps such a change occurs near death.We can both agree that it's a strange phenomenon, so the question boils down to this: does it make more sense to accept the leap of dualism (which is a massive assertion) in order to cling to our current understanding of Alzheimers, or to consider that we may misunderstand the disease? The former option is made even less attractive when you realize that dualism
does not explain terminal lucidity either - a mechanism for brain change near death is still needed to explain the change in 'filtering', as you would say. The nail in the coffin for me is that, as I mentioned, this phenomenon is by nature difficult to examine scientifically. We're left with a confusing phenomenon which we know little about that seems to challenge our notions of a disease we know little about. These are hardly the rock and hard place you would want to use to force us to accept a costly claim like dualism.

Hydrocephalus is also an interesting phenomenon, but I believe your facts are a bit off here. I believe you're referring to a specific case where a man was found to be leading a functional life with a severe case that left him with only a smallish portion of brain matter. You can see pictures of his brain in this article: Brain of a white-collar worker : The Lancet For fun and reference, here are some slices of my own brain: imgur: the simple image sharer

First I should point out that although the article does not specify what percent of his brain matter is left, it does look significantly more than 5%. Next, and most importantly, his IQ was 75. This is a barely functional level of intelligence, just above qualifying legally as mentally disabled. Thus this example in fact continues to support the correlation between 'mind' and brain. I don't believe any other cases of such severe Hydrocephalus have been found in adults.

As for acquired savantism, I found this article by Dr. Darold Treffert who appears to be an authority on the matter: Accidental Genius

He points out that most cases of this appear to follow damage to the left anterior temporal region. The prevailing theory is that this area is responsible for significant inhibition, and messing with it allows otherwise buried 'skills' to arise. Given how little we know about how the brain works, this seems a very reasonable hypothesis. Think about our attention system - we are able to recognize objects in busy settings because when we focus on them our brain inhibits processing of clutter and extraneous things around them in the visual field. Without this inhibition, we might be 'savants' of perception, percieving every single thing in the visual field all of the time. This ability would probably be accompanied by increased distractability and difficulty focusing. In many of these accidental savantism cases, the increase in artistic skill is accompanied by dementia or other important losses. It's difficult to say why the brain does what it does, but we can be fairly certain that it has evolved towards a local maximum of performance for human survival. If we posit that this local maximum includes having inhibited 'savant' functions, then the whole thing ceases to be an issue.

All of these phenomena may be cause for some relatively minor revisions of our current ideas about how the brain is probably related to consciousness, but none of them are anywhere near problematic enough to warrant discarding the notion of brain=mind. Even if they were, you would still need to come up with evidence that specifically supports your 'consciousness filtering' theory rather than simply providing problems with materialism.

My question is this: what would evidence for the existence of (anything) non-physical look like? What predictions does your consciousness-filtering theory make that clash with those of materialism?