Mind Beyond Brain: The Brain as a Receiver of Consciousness

There is an ingrained belief in conventional science that consciousness is produced by the brain and is therefore confined to it. Yet many respected philosophers and scientists suggest we are in the dark about the origin of consciousness.  

“The brain does not generate thought … any more than the wire generates an electric current.”  —PAUL BRUNTON 

“The brain breathes mind like the lungs breathe air.” —HUSTON SMITH 

The main objection to the One Mind is the engrained belief that consciousness is somehow produced by the brain and is therefore confined to it. Brains stay put in the cranium and so, too, must minds. How much scientific support is there for this belief? (…) To even question the role of the brain is still blasphemy within conventional science. Consciousness is considered an emergent property of the brain, produced by its workings, pure and simple. But what do we know about the origins of consciousness? Many respected philosophers and scientists suggest we are in the dark about these questions. 

Nobel Prize–winning neurophysiologist Roger Sperry took a similar position, saying, “Those centermost processes of the brain with which consciousness is presumably associated are simply not understood. They are so far beyond our comprehension at present that no one I know of has been able even to imagine their nature.” Nobel Prize–winning physicist Eugene Wigner agreed, stating, “We have at present not even the vaguest idea how to connect the physicochemical processes with the state of mind.” And Sir John Maddox, former editor of the prestigious journal Nature, wrote “What consciousness consists of … is … a puzzle. Despite the marvelous successes of neuroscience in the past century … we seem as far from understanding the cognitive process as we were a century ago.” 

Given these great unknowns, the widespread assumption that the brain makes the mind and that the mind is confined to it is open to question, which opens the door to alternative scenarios. 

The Brain as a Receiver of Consciousness 

There are many reasons why scientists have assumed that the mind and brain are the same. When the brain is damaged through physical trauma or stroke, mental function can be deranged as a result. Vitamin deficiencies and malnutrition can cause impairment of thought processes, as can various environmental toxins. Brain tumors and infections can wreak havoc with mentation. Given these effects, it seems reasonable to assume that the mind and brain are essentially identical. 

However, none of these observations prove that the brain produces the mind or that the mind is confined to the brain. Consider your television set. Although you can damage it physically and destroy the picture on the screen, this does not prove that the TV set makes the picture. We know, rather, that the picture is due to electromagnetic signals originating outside the set itself and that the TV set receives, amplifies, and displays the signals; it does not produce them. 

The basic concept that the brain functions as an intermediary for the mind—but is not its cause—is ancient. Two millennia ago, Hippocrates, in his essay “On the Sacred Disease,” described the brain as “the messenger to consciousness” and as “the interpreter for consciousness.” 

Ferdinand C. S. Schiller, the Oxford philosopher, proposed in the 1890s that “matter is admirably calculated machinery for regulating, limiting and restraining the consciousness which it encases.” He argued further, “Matter is not what produces consciousness but what limits it and confines its intensity within certain limits …” In cases of brain trauma, Schiller suggested that the manifestation of consciousness has been affected, but consciousness itself has not been extinguished. He further proposed that it is forgetfulness, not memory, that is in greater need of an explanation. If it were not for the limitations of the brain, he believed, total recall would be possible. 

Henri-Louis Bergson, the French philosopher who won the 1927 Nobel Prize in Literature, believed the brain canalizes and limits the mind, excluding factors not required for survival and procreation. The brain, in his view, is both “the organ of attention to life” and an obstacle to wider awareness. Like Schiller, he suggested that memories lie outside the brain and are mostly screened out for practical purposes, as they are not crucial for the biological needs of the organism. He suggested that impairments of memory that result from diseases of the brain may indicate only that we need a healthy brain to locate and communicate memories, but the impairments are not evidence that memories exist only in the brain. 

Psychologist William James held views about consciousness similar to those of Schiller and Bergson. In his 1898 Ingersoll Lecture at Harvard University, he acknowledged that physical insults to the brain—trauma, stimulants, poisons, arrested development—can abolish memory or consciousness and scramble the quality of one’s ideas, but this is not necessarily evidence of a productive function of the brain. There are other possible functional relationships between the brain and the mind, he argued. There might be a permissive function, as found in the trigger of a crossbow, and a transmissive function, as with a lens, a prism, or the keys of a piano. “My thesis now is this,” James said, “that, when we think of the law that thought is a function of the brain, we are not required to think of productive function only; we are entitled also to consider permissive or transmissive function. And this, the ordinary psychophysiologist leaves out of his account.” 

Playing devil’s advocate, James objected: isn’t the production hypothesis simpler and more scientifically rigorous? From the standpoint of empirical science, James answered that this objection carries no weight whatsoever. All we ever observe is the concomitant variations or correlations between states of the brain and states of the mind. James is stating that venerable maxim of science that “correlation is not causation.” Night always follows day; the correlation is 100 percent; but that does not mean that day causes night. 

Many scientists boast of not believing in miracles. But, James said, if consciousness is indeed produced by the brain, this would count, “as far as our understanding goes, as great a miracle as if we said, thought is ‘spontaneously generated,’ or ‘created out of nothing.’” He continued: 

The theory of production is therefore not a jot more simple or credible in itself than any other conceivable theory. It is only a little more popular. All that one needs to do, therefore, if the ordinary materialist should challenge one to explain how the brain can be an organ for limiting and determining to a certain form a consciousness elsewhere produced, is to … [ask] him, in turn, to explain how it can be an organ for producing consciousness out of whole cloth. For polemic purposes, the two theories are thus exactly on a par. 

Aldous Huxley, who wrote about the nature of consciousness in 1954 in The Doors of Perception, affirmed the idea that the function of the nervous system is “eliminative” rather than productive, in that it protects us by eliminating the useless and irrelevant information we continually encounter in our daily existence. Otherwise, there is no reason in principle why each person is not capable of remembering everything in the universe. 

“Each one of us is potentially Mind at Large,” Huxley states. “But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, the Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us stay alive on the surface of this particular planet.” (…) 

If we are to have a ghost of a chance of understanding the One Mind and the relationship between mind and brain, we are going to have to learn to think nonlocally, not locally. Otherwise, we will be forever chasing problems that simply don’t apply in a nonlocal world. 

Source

~Excerpt from the book “One Mind: How Our Mind Is Part Of A Greater Consciousness And Why It Matters” by Larry Dossey, M.D. Hay House, Inc., 2013~