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Why Consciousness is Not the Brain

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Thanks for the link, excellent!

Thanks to a few DMT experiences I now just know that consciousness is indeed not the brain! My tiny, primitive brain could never conjure up those unimaginable worlds.
 
The title of this thread is misleading, as I assumed it would explain "why", rather that make biased statements like "In spite of the complete absence of evidence.."

Most people believe subjectively that consciousness is in our mind, and that mind is in the brain.

Objectively, subjects' brains can be analyzed thru different stages of induced consciousness. The more active the brain, the more "aware" the subject is.

These changes are being measured in the brain, not in the toes, not in the heart, not in the "ether".

When your consciousness is altered from DMT, this happens because DMT is like a neurotransmitter and occurs when it crosses the blood-brain barrier, not when it's just simply in the bloodstream
 
--Shadow said:
Objectively, subjects' brains can be analyzed thru different stages of induced consciousness. The more active the brain, the more "aware" the subject is.
Click to expand...

In a study with psilocybin, the opposite was found to be true. It should be expected to see changes in brain activity under the influence of DMT anyway, despite ontology, as if I were to display to your visual senses a painting or a video in consensual reality, we would expect to see a change in neural activity by the very virtue of your perceiving it. Therefore in the case of DMT, changes in neural activity seem to be neither an argument for or against hyperspace being inside the brain or outside the brain as consciousness is being bombarded by a slew of stimuli. Observing brain activity could indicate the activity that the brain is using in order to conjure hallucinations or it could indicate the perception of external stimuli, or some ambiguously murky combination thereof which I find to be the most likely IMO.
 
Let’s not forget about near-death experiences:

Some experiencers of NDEs report very vivid experiences, including awareness of their immediate surroundings (reading nametags of nurses entering their room, hearing conversations which are later corroborated, etc) and a very heightened sensory awareness – all during a period when medical instruments are indicating no measurable brain activity.

The reality we experience is perfectly consistent with the hypothesis positing the primacy of consciousness – consciousness gives rise to what appears to be an independent physical reality.

And regarding the correlation between brain states and levels of consciousness – I can adjust the volume on my radio from loud to off, yet the adjustments I make to the volume have no effect at all on the radio signal.
 
I think it's funny when people state "consciousness is inside our head". Lol, I never quite understood why people throw that sentence/phrase out?

Everything we experience in our day to day life is, quote on quote, 'inside our head'. :lol:

We don't experience the physical world 'outside' of our 5 senses.

"DMT acts on specific receptor sites" Well no kidding :lol: But that doesn't explain the actual experience of DMT. Your pinpointing one aspect, that while it shows what the DMT molecules are doing on a neurotransmitter/brain level, there's still a massive gap when it comes to the actual subjectivity of the "I" being expanded and transcending the phenomenal world.
 
Consciousness truly is a fundamental mystery to our existence. We know this already but have yet to fully realize this due to our conditioning of the mind and heart. In other words, in-balance. Our brains are receivers of conscious energy while our hearts are the generators. We pulsate! We put so much emphasis on the brain being related to external sciences, figures, diagrams etc, we tend to forget the heart as the true generator and as the first organ to develop within the us. We feed our brains and hearts through the means of the body such as the sun, food, water, sleep, movement and so on so forth, which pumps it all around the body for full nourishment. What does this mean? It means our hearts developed and grew what we all are today. Literally, our hearts are the true generators of our existence and consciousness. This may sound all gushy mushy, but that in itself is a false condition of the hearts true potential.

How is it explained? How does the heart communicate? To the brain as an intelligent vehicle of discovery to our inner self and being. We live in a world where our brains and minds are receiving all the attention, while our hearts beat.. allowing us to experience the opportunity of life itself. The brain has evolved to the ability to communicate back to the heart to modulate its perception and pace such as flight or fight. We live within our minds and not in balance with our hearts.

We've layered over our hearts with question, after question, after question, after multi-layered sensory experience, after condition, after condition, without being with the heart itself. The heart knows aliveness. And when the brain knows aliveness, that's when our minds truly clarify, see, feel and listen. Because if there are 3 senses that have been abolished over the countless years, its those 3 in connection with our hearts subtle perception.
 
Reminds me of a great Zen teaching I heard once:

A master and his student are sitting in silence, meditating on the nature of reality. Beside them is a large boulder. All of a sudden, the student perks up and exclaims "I got it! I finally get it now." Pointing at the boulder he says, "That rock... is in my HEAD!"

The master sits in silence for a few moments, and eventually responds,

"Wow, you must have a pretty big head to fit that rock inside of it."
 
I think people are being misleading when they talk about consciousness being 'in our heads,' as though if we had precise enough microscopes we could find some little bubbles of consciousness floating around. Consciousness appears to be an emergent phenomena that comes out of the self-referential information processing in our brains.

Douglas Hofstadter explored this idea very thoroughly in 'Godel Escher Bach' and somewhat more concretely in 'I Am A Strange Loop.'
A lot of this stuff about consciousness being 'infinite' on 'non-local' just doesn't sit with the evidence I have seen. If I hit you on the head with a hammer, I can damage parts of your brain and fundamentally change your consciousness. If I add the right molecules to your brain, I can change how it processes information and subsequently, your subjective experience of consciousness.
 
I respect this line of thinking, Nathanial. Thinking about it this way is a very complex way of looking at it, which one would expect when unraveling such a thing as the brain and consciousness. I like how it doesn't simply ignore evidence as opposed to dogmatic "science" enthusiasts and looks at the brain as the information processing machine that it actually is. Having said that, I wanted to suggest ego-death as a possible outcome from consciousness disconnecting from the brain. Because it changes consciousness so dramatically and allows for a non ego-centric existence. And ofcourse, non-earthly experiences.
 
gibran2 said:
Let’s not forget about near-death experiences:

Some experiencers of NDEs report very vivid experiences, including awareness of their immediate surroundings (reading nametags of nurses entering their room, hearing conversations which are later corroborated, etc) and a very heightened sensory awareness – all during a period when medical instruments are indicating no measurable brain activity.
Click to expand...

That's not strictly speaking accurate. I've done a lot of research into this, and I have yet to see anyone provide evidence that NDEs happen when there is no brain activity. We don't know when NDEs happen: it may be that they occur in the last moments before brain activity ceases or in the few seconds after it starts up again. Anyone who has smoked DMT knows that time can get really weird when you're in an exotic state of consciousness, so it may be that seemingly long NDEs take very little time.

The fact of the matter is, we have no idea what an NDE looks like neurologically, so even if we were looking for it (and most of them occur during acute trauma when exploratory neuroscience isn't what on anyone's mind), we wouldn't really be able to recognize what we're seeing. Someone may come into a hospital going into cardiac arrest, be clinically dead for ten minutes and come out saying "hey, I just got burgers with Jesus and He likes curly fries," but we don't know when exactly our hypothetical man's existential burger jaunt happened. We certainly can't say with any certainty that it happened while there was zero brain activity.

Also, most of our measures for what constitute 'brain activity' aren't all that precise. EEGs and ERPs only get a small fraction of overall electrical energy and MRIs and fMRIs only track bloodflow, which we don't actually know for certain is a useful measure of brain activity. It could be that while you're 'brain' dead, there is low level limbic or subcortical activity that's just getting missed.
 
The idea of brain damage being strong evidence refuting consciousness being non local in nature is maybe not as water tight at it first appears, as is discussed in the article. The crude example of a television/radio set is used, it is clear that both televisions do not produce the images they display with the same applying to the radio producing sound. Damage either one and it is going to compromise the quality of the images or sounds coming through. I'm not saying I subscribe to this view, but it's food for thought at least.

On the NDE front, there are pretty large number of reports of people outside their body when they have flat lined on the EEG, showing no detectable brain activity (not saying there isn't any...I think it is very likely there is below current detection levels), being able to perceive events around them, such as being in an accident or being operated on in seemingly real time. So I do get the point about time distortion and it can most certainly be a factor but I don't think this neatly explains away all cases of this nature. Based on what we think we know though, with the brain being essentially a biological computer, people should simply not be able to able to experience heightened states of perception, as well as advanced powers of reasoning, thought and logic when there is no measurable brain activity, and cases such as these are pretty numerous, with up to 10% of cardiac arrest patients reporting such experiences. Based on what we think we know about the brain, such experiences should not be possible.

A potential non local nature of consciousness could also explain OBE's to some extent, as I personally don't believe that science yet has a complete or valid explanation for these. Past studies (and most are quite old) have shown inconsistencies in the type of OBE's studied, as well as areas brain activation and brain waves. I would definitely consider it logical to assume that brain parts are activated or deactivated during OBE's, but this doesn't mean it's all happening in our heads (remembering that all of reality is effectively happening on our heads and we are limited to a brain edited version of reality). I'm not knocking brains I think they are really awesome. My DMT breakthrough experience makes me wonder though, the places I experienced and what I saw felt so beyond what I could imagine. Damn straight my brain was heavily involved with what I experiences but could it explain everything. Maybe, I'm not certain though personally.
 
Nathanial.Dread said:
A lot of this stuff about consciousness being 'infinite' on 'non-local' just doesn't sit with the evidence I have seen. If I hit you on the head with a hammer, I can damage parts of your brain and fundamentally change your consciousness. If I add the right molecules to your brain, I can change how it processes information and subsequently, your subjective experience of consciousness.
Click to expand...

This makes no sense, for reasons Bancopuma has pointed out. The simple radio/TV example shows this clearly.

You've also made related remarks regarding there being no evidence for 'psychic' phenomena (or whatever we chose to call it) in a recent thread (which obviously relates to this whole non-local topic), to which I replied here, indicating that there actually is some very intriguing studies that have been done.

It seems like the differing opinions on this sort of thing sometimes just depend more on ones own experiences and reality-tunnel that they come at the topic with, more than what the overall evidence actually seems to indicate. It's tricky business this stuff, consciousness studying consciousness 😉
 
universecannon said:
Nathanial.Dread said:
A lot of this stuff about consciousness being 'infinite' on 'non-local' just doesn't sit with the evidence I have seen. If I hit you on the head with a hammer, I can damage parts of your brain and fundamentally change your consciousness. If I add the right molecules to your brain, I can change how it processes information and subsequently, your subjective experience of consciousness.
Click to expand...

This makes no sense, for reasons Bancopuma has pointed out. The simple radio/TV example shows this clearly.

You've also made related remarks regarding there being no evidence for 'psychic' phenomena (or whatever we chose to call it) in a recent thread (which obviously relates to this whole non-local topic), to which I replied here, indicating that there actually is some very intriguing studies that have been done.

It seems like the differing opinions on this sort of thing sometimes just depend more on ones own experiences and reality-tunnel that they come at the topic with, more than what the overall evidence actually seems to indicate. It's tricky business this stuff, consciousness studying consciousness 😉
Click to expand...
Apply Occam's Razor: if you believe the 'TV antenna' hypothesis, you are necessarily calling into existence a whole host of phenomena related to consciousness that, to my mind, have no solid evidence backing up their existence. Where is consciousness coming from? In what medium is it transmitted? Where is the 'receiving organ' in the brain? How does the brain transmit one kind of information into another? It is a much simpler proposition to say that consciousness is an emergent property of local information processing: that requires no transmission from some other place, you have to posit the existence of far fewer novel phenomena, and so far, the evidence seems to be coming out in favor of it.

I certainly haven't seen any convincing evidence for the TV Antenna theory, beyond first hand accounts and experiences.

You could say "well, there's my experience to back it up," but experiential, unverifiable, unquantified evidence is a very risky thing to base science off of. People believe all kinds of things that we know are untrue based on evidence. If I have a delusion that I am the King Of England, my first hand experience doesn't outweigh the evidence to the contrary. The same is true of psychedelic experiences.

In fact, my personal DMT and psilocybin experiences have made me *more* convinced that consciousness is an emergent, local phenomena.

Bancopuma: I think you're underestimating the power of your brain to come up with crazy things. The studies are slim to the ground, but fMRIs of people on psilocybin have shown that brain activity is changing in radical ways in pretty significant places. I imagine that DMT produces the same effects, but much, much more powerfully, which means your brain on DMT is processing information in a manner far more alien than anything you imagine in day-to-day life.

Dr. Kevin Nelson, a neurologist has done some considerable work in this field (mostly the neural process underlying NDEs). I would encourage you guys to seek his work out. I'll try to find some of his articles as soon as I'm back on my college campus.

Blessings
~ND
 
gibran2 said:
Let’s not forget about near-death experiences:
Click to expand...

Didn't they get debunked years ago..? (remember the operating room with the random number generator?)

It's a result of lack of oxygen to the brain. Pilot's would also experience NDE's when hitting G-forces that prevented enough blood (and therefore oxygen) reaching the brain.

Global said:
--Shadow said:
Objectively, subjects' brains can be analyzed thru different stages of induced consciousness. The more active the brain, the more "aware" the subject is.
Click to expand...

In a study with psilocybin, the opposite was found to be true. It should be expected to see changes in brain activity under the influence of DMT anyway, despite ontology, as if I were to display to your visual senses a painting or a video in consensual reality, we would expect to see a change in neural activity by the very virtue of your perceiving it.

Therefore in the case of DMT, changes in neural activity seem to be neither an argument for or against hyperspace being inside the brain or outside the brain as consciousness is being bombarded by a slew of stimuli. Observing brain activity could indicate the activity that the brain is using in order to conjure hallucinations or it could indicate the perception of external stimuli, or some ambiguously murky combination thereof which I find to be the most likely IMO.
Click to expand...


Thanks Global... interesting to hear that about psilocybin, I will have a read of that study


So the two possibilities you have mention are: (or mix of the two)
1) brain activity could indicate the activity that the brain is using in order to conjure hallucinations
OR
2) it could indicate the perception of external stimuli

I have a problem with the 2nd possibility...

We have 5 senses we use to intake and perceive external stimuli. Yet we have not detected these supposed external stimuli with any of the scientific tools we have that can currently measure these? In fact, we even have scientific tools to measure stimulus that humans cannot perceive (such as various ranges in the auditory and visual spectrum, such as infra-red)
 
Cognitive Heart said:
IMO, consciousness truly is a fundamental mystery to our existence. We know this already but have yet to fully realize this due to conditionings of the mind and heart connection. In other words, an in-balance. Our brains are receivers of conscious energy while our hearts are the real generators. We pulsate! We put so much emphasis on the brain being related to external sciences, figures, diagrams etc, we tend to forget the heart as the true generator, and as the first organ to develop within the organism. We feed our hearts survival through the means of the body such as the sun, food, water, sleep, movement and so on so forth, which pumps it all around the body for full utilization. What does this mean? It means our hearts developed and grew what we all are today. Literally, our hearts are the true generators of our existence and consciousness. Oh, well, this may sound all gushy mushy, but that in itself is a false condition of the hearts true potential.

How is it explained? How does the heart communicate? To the brain as an intelligent vehicle of discovery to our inner self and being. We live in a world where our brains and minds are receiving all the attention, while our hearts beat, allowing us to experience the opportunity of life itself. The heart knows no language, only our logical left hemispheres in connection with our right hemisphere. Yet the brain has evolved to the ability to communicate back to the heart to modulate its perception and pace and vice versa, such as flight or fight. We live within our minds and not in balance with our hearts.

Our hearts are the true generators of life, IMO. Isn't it obvious? We've layered over our hearts with question, after question, after question, after multi-layered sensory experiences, after condition, after condition etc, without being with the heart itself. The heart knows aliveness. And when the brain knows aliveness, that's when our minds truly clarify, see, feel and listen. Because if there are 3 senses that have been abolished over the countless years, its those 3, in connection with our hearts, subtle perception.

Does any1 see what I see?

--

:thumb_up:
Click to expand...

Great poetry... not so great science
 
Hey Nathanial,

I do get what you're saying about the brain, and I don't believe I am underestimating the power of it, and of course psychedelics can exert a very powerful effect on that. But going on this logic, this doesn't neatly explain NDE's when there is no measurable brain activity at all. I'm not saying I subscribe to the non-local theory but I think it is good to treat this as an open book. Also I do agree that maybe this is better suited to the philosophy section.

There are a number of areas though that are intriguing regarding consciousness. There is pretty strong evidence to suggest consciousness can affect random number generators, and there are many reported cases of precognition, telepathy, OBE's, NDE's, some of them veridical beyond doubt, but because such experiences tend to be rare and sporadic, they simply cannot be effectively studied by the scientific method, are labelled as black swan phenomena, or worse as woo woo, and are neglected. The scientific method demands repeatability in order to test assumptions and move forward with methodologies, and many of these experiences fall out of this framework of study. So science may be missing a trick here.

You ask "Where is consciousness coming from?" but I could reflect this question back at you. "It is a much simpler proposition to say that consciousness is an emergent property of local information processing" may definitely be along the right lines for sure, but is still a pretty shallow description of how consciousness comes about.

Shadow:

"We have 5 senses we use to intake and perceive external stimuli. Yet we have not detected these supposed external stimuli with any of the scientific tools we have that can currently measure these? In fact, we even have scientific tools to measure stimulus that humans cannot perceive (such as various ranges in the auditory and visual spectrum, such as infra-red)"

I get what you're saying but important not to overhype the power of our current scientific spectrum. Yes it is indeed true we can detect over wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum even though our brains can only directly perceive something like 0.1% of it. Also dark matter compromises around 85% of the universe, and dark energy around 95%, and apart from their mass, they are totally and utterly shrouded from us and our current scientific tools. Science is ever a work in progress, and our measuring devices are being ever refined and fine-tuned and upgraded. Radio and other waves are pretty fitting analogy actually, as prior to the days of being able to detect them, one would have been considered completely mad to propose there were invisible waves permeating the Aether. transmitting information. But the point here is that the VAST majority of reality/the universe remains completely shrouded from our current scientific tools, and even with the stuff we CAN observe and measure, we still know very little about that! Consciousness being a prime example of this. Thus I don't think it is unreasonable to propose that in the future, we will develop measuring devices that will be able to detect phenomena or energies currently beyond detection levels. In fact I think that is a pretty reasonable line of thought.

NDE's have in no way been "debunked" as you put it. The AWARE study to which I believe you refer is still on going, and even if NDE's are real and non-illusionary in nature, the chances of a viable hit on an image or random number generator could still be *extremely* slim.

The hypoxia/NDE hypothesis is far from water tight. Lack of oxygen predominantly causes extreme confusion and feelings of panic, disorientation, fear, reduction in consciousness, with oxygen starved brain tending to produce psychotic and chaotic hallucinations. Hypoxic hallucinations also occur in a state of consciousness or partial consciousness, not unconsciousness as with NDE's. Also people going through NDE's may not even be subject to low oxygen levels. NDE'ers very commonly report feelings of extremely heightened perception, feels of serenity and peace, and abilities of complex though and reasoning which should be next ti impossible in an NDE state. Still other people have experienced both hypoxia and NDE's at different times in their life and state there is a very profound difference in the state induced by both. Pilots can and do experience strange OBE like feelings and black outs, not necessarily down to hypoxia but more the effects of gravity pushing blood to the brain with force, but this does not refute what is going on in NDE's, and should be considered as separate phenomenon I think.

There is some interesting research by Dr Kenneth Ring, detailing case studies of people born with congenital blindness who report visual phenomena during NDE's, which again, based on what we currently think we know about the brain, should simply not be possible, while also making the hypoxia theory highly questionable.
 
Sorry to be such a quoter....


This doesn't neatly explain NDE's when there is no measurable brain activity at all
Click to expand...
There is no evidence to suggest that the NDE occurs when there is no brain activity. For all we know, these experiences and memories are built either as consciousness is shutting down (from brain lacking O2), or as consciousness is transitioning thru the intermediatary stages between unconscious (no brain activity) to 'fully conscious'

There is pretty strong evidence to suggest consciousness can affect random number generators... tend to be rare and sporadic...
Click to expand...
If you can't be consistent with doing something consciously, then it's more likely coincidence.
In fact, in many cases where certain "rare or sporadic" coincidences occur that are attributed to some higher force or miracle at work, you'll find mathematically it would be more of a miracle if these "rare and sporadic" things didn't occur..

but is still a pretty shallow description of how consciousness comes about
Click to expand...
The description can be shallow if you reduce it in such simple terms, but really when you look at the whole mechanics of the brain and each sensory input path to the cortex, it's obviously more in-depth.

Interesting hearing about those case studies with people born blind but see visual phenomena during NDE's... this could be attributed to "blind sight" phenomena. I don't know thou, i haven't read the article yet...

I don't think it is unreasonable to propose that in the future, we will develop measuring devices that will be able to detect phenomena or energies currently beyond detection levels. In fact I think that is a pretty reasonable line of thought.
Click to expand...
Definitely! There may very well still be another force in the universe besides dark matter and dark energy, that could be causing the expansion of the universe.. it's all exciting and very intriguing stuff. Thou even thou we cannot measure things such as black holes, we can measure effects these phenomena have to identify their presence


NDE's have in no way been "debunked" as you put it. The AWARE study to which I believe you refer is still on going, and even if NDE's are real and non-illusory in nature, the chances of a viable hit on an image or random number generator could still be *extremely* slim.

The scientific method demands repeatability in order to test assumptions and move forward with methodologies, and many of these experiences fall out of this framework of study. So science may be missing a trick here.
Click to expand...
Maybe not debunked directly, as it's also tru you cannot directly debunk that pigs can't fly. But until there is sufficient evidence or reason to confirm that they are true, we must assume they are not true. If NDE's are real, why would a viable hit on a number generator or other method produce an *extremely* slim result? If you really are dealing with the external world, there must be something that can be reliably measured I would think..


The hypoxia/NDE hypothesis is far from water tight. Lack of oxygen predominantly causes extreme confusion and feelings of panic, disorientation, fear, reduction in consciousness, with oxygen starved brain tending to produce psychotic and chaotic hallucinations. Hypoxic hallucinations also occur in a state of consciousness or partial consciousness, not unconsciousness as with NDE's. Also people going through NDE's may not even be subject to low oxygen levels. NDE'ers very commonly report feelings of extremely heightened perception, feels of serenity and peace, and abilities of complex though and reasoning which should be next ti impossible in an NDE state. Still other people have experienced both hypoxia and NDE's at different times in their life and state there is a very profound difference in the state induced by both. Pilots can and do experience strange OBE like feelings and black outs, not necessarily down to hypoxia but more the effects of gravity pushing blood to the brain with force, but this does not refute what is going on in NDE's, and should be considered as separate phenomenon I think.
Click to expand...
so..we are saying 'consciousness is reduced' and 'hallucinations (which also occur in a state of consciousness)' are produced when the BRAIN is affected.. right?
 
I have read numerous accounts of NDEs where the experiencer is aware of the goings-on in their hospital room. They are able to recall conversations, identify people who were in their room only during their period of unconsciousness, see and describe instruments that were used, and more.

The suggestion that NDE memories are formed either before or after the NDE is not supported by any evidence, and as stated above, anecdotal evidence to the contrary exists.

The details of NDEs, many psychedelic experiences, and numerous other phenomena are currently unexplainable by science. This doesn’t mean that they will never be explained, but it does mean that any “explanations” offered today are highly speculative and generally unsupported by evidence.

There is no evidence that a materialistic interpretation of our experiences accurately reflects what really is. There is no scientific test one can perform now – or ever – that can conclusively demonstrate the correctness of a materialistic model of reality. (Same can be said of any other model of reality one cares to dream up.)
 
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