Consciousness: and brain damage (General)

by dhw, Wednesday, December 27, 2017, 16:00 (2521 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: This review article demonstrates how much consciousness function can survive a variety of brain injuries or abnormalities:
https://med.virginia.edu/perceptual-studies/wp-content/uploads/sites/360/2017/12/Discre...

Thank you for this extremely revealing article, which deals with many of the aspects of consciousness we have been discussing, but from an angle we have not considered before. I am going to cherrypick quotes that strike me as particularly relevant.

“Neuroscientists typically assume that human mental functions are generated by the brain…”

This of course is the materialist view.

“…findings that pertain to brain dysplasia and brain lesions indicate that in some individuals there is a considerable discrepancy between the cerebral structures and cognitive functioning.”

This makes it clear that the current attribution of certain cognitive functions to certain parts of the brain is unreliable.

"Assuming that a given brain structure dictates the mental capacities of the individual, it remains difficult to explain how the remaining brain structures and their neural activities can “know” that a “language center” is missing now, and how these neurons
induce and guide its duplication in their own hemisphere. Majorek(2012) argued that this activity requires the existence of a higher control center that would be able to detect this gap in function and to initiate steps that lead to its mending. He stressed that […] given the decentralized organization of the brain, it would be difficult to imagine where such a control center could be located.”

We are getting very close to the nub of the matter now. It is clear that something organizes the materials of the brain to enable them to provide the elements that have gone missing. The dualist would argue that this is the immaterial “soul”/self/conscious mind. However:

“Several studies suggest that the brain can indeed be altered by mental stimuli and processes on the molecular, cellular, and neural circuit levels.”

And this is the sentence that really made me prick up my ears. It lies at the very heart of the hypothesis which I suggest links the whole history of life, evolution and consciousness together: namely, the intelligent cell. Like every other cell community, the brain is an interlinking network in which individual cells and individual clusters communicate with one another. If one cluster is diseased or missing, the something that does the reorganizing may be the cells themselves, cooperating intelligently to fill the gap. An analogy would be ant communities, which never fail to fill any gaps in their social structure, although it is “difficult to imagine “ where a control centre could be located. Combined intelligences would explain at ALL levels of life and evolution precisely how each community works. David insists that cells only APPEAR to be intelligent, and it was all either preprogrammed 3.8 billion years ago by his God, or his God dabbled. My hypothesis is that cells ARE intelligent, but it allows for a God to be the creator of cellular intelligence.

“[Beauregard] concluded that these studies strongly support the view that thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and volition do exert a causal influence on brain plasticity, and he pointed to the obvious fact that mental causation is an essential ingredient for successful
therapies.”

Once again we have evidence that thought and the effort made by consciousness/the mind create changes in the brain, just like the Indian women learning to write. The brain does not change in anticipation of the thought/effort.

“According to Beauregard (2007), such findings call into question positions in which all mental processes are thought to be entirely reducible to biochemical processes.”

This clearly opens the way to the dualistic split between mind and body.

DAVID’s comment: Bruce Greyson has described and agrees with the way consciousness leaves the brain in NDE's. […]

This is the point at which we need a reconciliation between the two theories, and one of these days I shall return to that subject!