QUOTE: “Panpsychism offers no distinctive predictions or explanations. It finds a place for consciousness in the physical world, but that place is a sort of limbo. Consciousness is indeed a hard nut to crack, but I think we should exhaust the other options before we take a metaphysical sledgehammer to it.
"Rather than thinking that this is a fundamental property of all matter, I think that it is an illusion. As well as senses for representing the external world, we have a sort of inner sense, which represents aspects of our own brain activity. And this inner sense gives us a very special perspective on our brain states, creating the impression that they have intrinsic phenomenal qualities that are quite different from all physical properties. It is a powerful impression, but just an impression. Consciousness, in that sense, is not everywhere but nowhere. Perhaps this seems as strange a view as panpsychism. But thinking about consciousness can lead one to embrace strange views."

DAVID's comment: What I present is disjointed, therefore, read the whole essay, but I don't think consciousness is an illusion.

If he thinks consciousness is an illusion, then of course panpsychism is a non-starter. And I agree with him completely when he says his view is every bit as strange as panpsychism. Many panpsychists are theists, but there is no need for a God if one takes the view that all matter already contains some rudimentary form of consciousness. Then it would be a matter of that rudimentary consciousness evolving step by step as matter begins to organize itself into living forms, which themselves become increasingly conscious. Yes indeed, it is an idea that is every bit as strange as no consciousness at all, or as chance engendering consciousness, or as a conscious mind that never had a source at all and was capable of creating a universe. Once again, it’s enough to drive a person to agnosticism.

DAVID: […] the brains suddenly enlarged in each new stage and then the products of that new-sized brain appeared. That sequence tells us the new cortex could produce new thoughts and concepts, whereas the smaller brain could not.

dhw: But according to you, the cortex does NOT produce thoughts and concepts! You keep forgetting that you are a dualist!

I never forget I am a dualist as I sit in front of my computer, from which I am totally separate. I view ( and you refuse to do so) my brain as a wet biologic computer which I (s/s/c) use within my body, but the s/s/c is a separate software as shown by NDE's.

dhw: However, if the cortex is indeed the producer of thoughts – materialist view, which may well be correct – it is perfectly feasible that individual old cortexes produced new thoughts and concepts (you don’t seem to recognize that just like sapiens some individual hominids might have been cleverer than others), but these required additional abilities for their implementation, and so just as the illiterate women’s brains rewired themselves IN RESPONSE to new concepts, the pre-sapiens brain expanded IN RESPONSE to the need for new abilities, i.e. the implementation of the concept was the cause of the expansion.

Twisted thought, backwards. An existing large cortex shrinks with use! These is no evidence that new desired uses forces expansion, but it is a neat theory to avoid God.

DAVID: The mental processes are biochemical processes at the base of consciousness functioning. But they are the living wet hardware!

dhw: Once again, you the dualist are telling us that mental processes are biochemical!

Of course they are! Read above.

DAVID: You keep refusing to accept my analogy that the brain is used as a computer by the s/s/c and for the living person, the brain is the access to the s/s/c. After death that connection is not required.

dhw: The computer analogy leads to nothing but confusion. What is your dualistic self/soul/consciousness if it’s not the living person?

My s/s/c is immaterially existing within me and can separate from me. NDE's!

dhw: So apparently the brain is the living person’s means of access to the living person. What does that mean? If the s/s/c is NOT confined to biochemical processes (your dualism), then mental processes are NOT biochemical processes, and no amount of obfuscation with computer analogies can disguise this contradiction! (See “learning new tasks” for yet more computer obfuscations).

Just try to imagine what I clearly see. Our personalities cannot be seen or felt. I know your personality but I can't see it or touch it. But I can see your face in my memory and recognize it, all immaterial. All of us are wet biology with functional immaterial s/s/c's existing in us to run the brain.

DAVID: Not exactly, because in none of the subjects was new information received:

Thank you for making this crucial point. For me it is an essential factor that demands open-mindedness in one’s attitude not just towards NDEs but towards all psychic experiences that provide information which would not otherwise have been accessible.

QUOTE: “Near-death experiences are sometimes said to give people a different outlook on life, and may be helpful in reducing fear of death and increasing people’s concern for others. Similar effects have been reported for psychedelic experiences, and a number of studies have reported positive effects on wellbeing when patients with life-threatening cancer take the drug psilocybin."

DAVID’s comment: Not entirely a comparison, but a clear example of thought alteration.

dhw: Yes, it’s a clear example of how drugs/diseases change the brain and hence a person’s thoughts and behaviour. As I keep pointing out, it is evidence for materialism, whereas psychic experiences that provide new information – together with the known fact that thought also changes the brain (illiterate women, taxi drivers, musicians) – provide evidence for dualism. Hence the great dichotomy which you refuse to recognize, although we have spent so much time trying to resolve it.

All I have done is recognize the material side of the problem, not that I am a materialist, but your mind is tightly closed to the way I approach the problem. So be it.

He believes in a form of an intelligent information theory. The whole article is worth reading as it has excellent explanations of how the brain seems to work:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05097-x?utm_source=briefing-dy&utm_mediu...

".. we hope to get closer to solving the more fundamental problem.
We seek, in particular, the neuronal correlates of consciousness (NCC), defined as the minimal neuronal mechanisms jointly sufficient for any specific conscious experience.

***

"Or consider the cerebellum, the “little brain” underneath the back of the brain. One of the most ancient brain circuits in evolutionary terms, it is involved in motor control, posture and gait and in the fluid execution of complex sequences of motor movements. Playing the piano, typing, ice dancing or climbing a rock wall—all these activities involve the cerebellum. It has the brain’s most glorious neurons, called Purkinje cells, which possess tendrils that spread like a sea fan coral and harbor complex electrical dynamics. It also has by far the most neurons, about 69 billion (most of which are the star-shaped cerebellar granule cells), four times more than in the rest of the brain combined.

"What happens to consciousness if parts of the cerebellum are lost to a stroke or to the surgeon’s knife? Very little!

"One important lesson from the spinal cord and the cerebellum is that the genie of consciousness does not just appear when any neural tissue is excited. More is needed. This additional factor is found in the gray matter making up the celebrated cerebral cortex, the outer surface of the brain. It is a laminated sheet of intricately interconnected nervous tissue, Two of these sheets, highly folded, along with their hundreds of millions of wires—the white matter—are crammed into the skull. All available evidence implicates neocortical tissue in generating feelings.

***

"Surgeons sometimes had to excise a large belt of prefrontal cortex to remove tumors or to ameliorate epileptic seizures. The loss of a portion of the frontal lobe did have certain deleterious effects: the patients developed a lack of inhibition of inappropriate emotions or actions, motor deficits, or uncontrollable repetition of specific action or words. Following the operation, however, their personality and IQ improved, and they went on to live for many more years, with no evidence that the drastic removal of frontal tissue significantly affected their conscious experience. Conversely, removal of even small regions of the posterior cortex, where the hot zone resides, can lead to a loss of entire classes of conscious content: patients are unable to recognize faces or to see motion, color or space.

"So it appears that the sights, sounds and other sensations of life as we experience it are generated by regions within the posterior cortex. As far as we can tell, almost all conscious experiences have their origin there.

***

"Fierce debates have arisen around the two most popular theories of consciousness. One is the global neuronal workspace (GNW) by psychologist Bernard J. Baars and neuroscientists Stanislas Dehaene and Jean-Pierre Changeux. The theory begins with the observation that when you are conscious of something, many different parts of your brain have access to that information. If, on the other hand, you act unconsciously, that information is localized to the specific sensory motor system involved.

***

"According to GNW, consciousness emerges when incoming sensory information, inscribed onto such a blackboard, is broadcast globally to multiple cognitive systems—which process these data to speak, store or call up a memory or execute an action.

"Because the blackboard has limited space, we can only be aware of a little information at any given instant. The network of neurons that broadcast these messages is hypothesized to be located in the frontal and parietal lobes. Once these sparse data are broadcast on this network and are globally available, the information becomes conscious.

"Integrated information theory (IIT), developed by Tononi and his collaborators, including me, has a very different starting point: experience itself. Each experience has certain essential properties. It is intrinsic, existing only for the subject as its “owner”; it is structured... and it is specific—distinct from any other conscious experience, such as a particular frame in a movie.

***

"IIT theory also derives, from the complexity of the underlying interconnected structure, a single nonnegative number Φ (pronounced “fy”) that quantifies this consciousness. If Φ is zero, the system does not feel like anything to be itself. Conversely, the bigger this number, the more intrinsic causal power the system possesses and the more conscious it is. The brain, which has enormous and highly specific connectivity, possesses very high Φ, which implies a high level of consciousness.

"IIT also predicts that a sophisticated simulation of a human brain running on a digital computer cannot be conscious.... Consciousness cannot be computed: it must be built into the structure of the system. "

Comment: All thinking is in the prefrontal region. Most implementation involves the cerebellum. Most human brain enlargement is prefrontal. No answers but lots of information.

A study of a boy who had his epilepsy causing area removed and still has full cognition:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2175549-boys-brain-works-just-fine-after-a-large-p...

"A boy who had a large portion of his brain removed to relieve his severe epilepsy is still able to function normally, showing how adaptable our brains can be.

"The boy started having seizures at the age of four. No treatments could stop his epilepsy, so as a last resort surgeons removed a third of his brain’s right hemisphere just before his seventh birthday. This “lobectomy” surgery removed his entire occipital lobe, which carries out visual processing, and most of his temporal lobe, which processes visual and auditory information.

"Researchers wanted to find out how the boy’s brain would recover after losing one of its visual centres – we usually have two, one in each of the brain’s hemispheres. A key question was what would happen to the boy’s “higher order” visual capabilities, such as being able to recognise faces and objects – mainly the job of the right hemisphere.

"By studying the boy’s brain and behaviour for three years following his surgery, the team could see which parts of his brain were able to recover. Remarkably, they found that his intellect, visual perception, and face and object recognition skills were all normal for his age.

"The only thing the boy can’t do is see the whole visual field. “He is essentially blind to information on the left side of the world. Anything to the left of his nose is not transmitted to his brain, because the occipital lobe in his right hemisphere is missing and cannot receive this information,” says Marlene Behrmann of Carnegie Mellon University, Pennsylvania. It seems that humans need two hemispheres to have full 180 degree vision, she says.

"While the boy’s ability to “see” with the right hand side of his brain never recovered, the team found that his left hemisphere reorganised itself to take over high-level tasks such as face and object recognition. This hemisphere is normally more involved in tasks like word recognition, such as knowing that a round green object you see is an apple.

“'We saw a kind of jostling in the left hemisphere between regions engaged in word and face recognition, which resolved and settled into a new organisation,” says Behrmann.

"These high-level abilities may have been able to recover because they were still developing when the boy had his lobectomy, says Behrmann. Other people who lose one of their visual systems may not fare as well, she warns.

"The boy says he wants to be a neurologist when he grows up."

Comment: Egnor is right. The mind is immaterial. When an adult has a stroke that destroys part of the visual cortex they do lose part of their field of vision, just as this child, which shows that the mind must depend on the brain circuits. But the boy maintained some higher-level functions It means the mind/soul must use the recovered and existing brain circuits to function.