Michael Prescott's Blog

Drowning in a sea of thought

A new development in the study of schizophrenia could possibly be interpreted as providing support for the filter model of consciousness.

An NPR report tells us, 

People with schizophrenia — more than 21 million worldwide — tend to have less gray matter and fewer connections in their brain than healthy peers. But scientists aren't sure why. The research, for the first time, suggests that variations in a gene called complement component 4, or C4, for short, could be important. The gene had previously been known to help the immune system target infections.

A mutant form of the gene makes proteins that tag an excess number of brain synapses for destruction. This explanation meshes neatly with the tendency of schizophrenia to arise during adolescence, a period during which even healthy brains are busy pruning lots of connections.

What struck me about this story was the first sentence I quoted — that schizophrenics usually have "less gray matter and fewer connections in their brain" than other people. The new discovery suggests that a genetic malfunction causes the brain to clear away too many synaptic connections (a process called synaptic pruning). 

The filter theory, popularized by Aldous Huxley, sees the brain as a kind of reducing valve for consciousness. There is a vast ocean of higher consciousness, and then there is the far more limited consciousness ordinarily available to us during our physical, earthly existence. The brain's function, according to this view, is not to originate consciousness but to funnel it to us in small, manageable quantities. A corollary of this claim is that less brain function should, at least in some cases, lead to more consciousness — even too much of it. With the brain-filter mechanism impaired, an unmanageable flood of consciousness can get through, overwhelming us. 

Series of drawings by a schizophrenic illustrating how his perceptions changed as the episode became more severe. Image borrowed from this Viralnova page, which includes other examples of schizophrenic art. 

Schizophrenia seems to be characterized by just this sense of being overwhelmed by a floodtide of thoughts and hyper-awareness. A schizophrenic is not someone with a "split personality," as popularly imagined. Instead, schizophrenics find themselves overreacting to stimuli and weaving complex connections between unrelated events. They experience, one might say, an excess of consciousness, taking the form of elaborate theorizing, arcane symbolism, complex ritualistic behaviors, and one or more sub-personalities that communicate with them, usually in the form of voices that only they can hear. The cartoon image of a schizophrenic wearing a tinfoil hat has roots in reality: some schizophrenics feel as if thoughts are being beamed into their skulls from an outside source, and try to shut out these unwanted thoughts any way they can. 

Anyone who has read the writings of schizophrenics knows that such persons cannot focus on a single topic for very long. They start with one idea, but it quickly ramifies in a hundred different directions. I remember someone showing me a letter written by a schizophrenic which began, "In a nutshell ..." and then continued for more than twenty pages of minuscule handwriting without ever getting to the point. 

All of this is broadly consistent with the idea that an unfiltered (or at least radically less filtered) consciousness is being downloaded into their brains, leading to feelings of confusion, helplessness, hypervigilance, and overstimulation, an inability to control their own thinking, and a frightening sense of being out of control.

Another artwork by a schizophrenic, illustrating what it feels like to be in the grip of the disease. Source is the same Viralnova page linked above. 

Paranoia is often a feature of schizophrenia, precisely because schizophrenics feel that their thoughts originate outside of themselves, and because they perceive alarming patterns in innocuous details. Many schizophrenics assign religious meaning to the voices they hear and to the patterns they detect; they think they are in contact with gods or demons. A case can be made that, historically, the higher self has been interpreted as God (or gods) and demons by many mystics and religionists, and that this same misidentification occurs even in contemporary mystical experiences, such as NDEs. Julian Jaynes's book The Origin of Consciousness ... includes many interesting quotes from unmedicated 19th century schizophrenics who interpreted their voices in blatantly religious terms. (This is not to suggest that I agree with Jaynes's overall theory. I don't.) 

It's interesting to note that schizophrenia seems to involve fewer synaptic connections — yet, paradoxically, more mental connections. That is, the schizophrenic is constantly making spurious or fanciful mental connections between events. Why would this be, if synaptic connections are the necessary underpinning of mental connections? 

Similarly, schizophrenics are not characterized by less mental activity, but by more mental activity — in fact, by far too much of it. Yet they have less gray matter. Again, this seems paradoxical. Why should a reduction in gray matter correlate with an explosion of thoughts? 

On the basis of the filter model, these paradoxes disappear. The more synaptic connections there are, the tighter the sieve that filters consciousness down to manageable limits. The fewer synaptic connections, the looser the sieve and the less effective the filter — meaning that consciousness becomes unmanageable. The more gray matter there is, the better the filter that prevents thoughts from running amok. The less gray matter, the greater the likelihood that a surfeit of thoughts will spin out of control. 

The close relationship between mysticism and madness (and between madness and artistic or scientific genius) has often been commented on.* Perhaps the same loosening of the brain-filter that can afford access to mystical insights, artistic inspiration, and scientific innovation can also, in less happy cases, let in such a tidal wave of consciousness that the victim is left drowning in it. 

One more example of schizophrenic art. Source is the Viralnova page linked above. 

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*For a famous instance of the tendency to link insanity with artistic inspiration (and romantic love), see A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act V, Sc. 1: 

“Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.”

Famous last words

I scoured the Internet (and my memory) for some well-known last words of famous people. Not all of these are literally the last words the person ever spoke, but they are alleged to be among the person's final communications. A lot of urban legends have sprung up about deathbed quotations, and it's possible that some of these quotes are made up or embellished. Where I'm aware of a discrepancy, I've noted it.

"Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius; will you remember to pay the debt?" – Socrates just before drinking hemlock. This quote is often misunderstood as an example of Socrates making a trivial, homely allusion immediately prior to his death. Actually, he was making a reference to the practice of donating a cock (= rooster) to the god of healing, Asclepius, after one had been cured of an illness. The implication is that life is the illness which death will cure. The quotation appears in Plato's work Phaedo, and may or may not be historically accurate.

"Thomas Jefferson ..." - John Adams.  This quote is often rendered as "Thomas Jefferson survives," or in similar words. But it seems that only the name Thomas Jefferson was distinctly heard by the people at Adams's bedside. Adams and Jefferson had become friends in their old age, though they had been rivals earlier. It is usually assumed that Adams meant to say that Jefferson was still alive even as he lay dying (though in fact Jefferson had died a few hours earlier). An alternative explanation is that Adams had a deathbed vision of the newly deceased Jefferson waiting for him on the "other side."

"Beautiful." – Elizabeth Barrett Browning, after her husband asked her how she felt. In an alternative version, her dying words were: “It is beautiful!”

"It is very beautiful over there." – Thomas Edison. According to Wikiquote, "These have sometimes been reported as his last words, but were actually spoken several days before his death, as he awoke from a nap, gazing upwards, as reported by his physician Dr. Hubert S. Howe, in Thomas A. Edison, Benefactor of Mankind : The Romantic Life Story of the World's Greatest Inventor (1931) by Francis Trevelyan Miller, Ch. 25 : Edison's Views on Life — His Philosophy and Religion, p. 295."

"Turn up the lights, I don't want to go home in the dark." – O. Henry, quoting a popular song of his day.

"I see black light" – Victor Hugo.

"Curtain! Fast music! Light! Ready for the last finale! Great! The show looks good, the show looks good!" – Florenz Ziegfeld, the legendary showman and creator of the Ziegfeld Follies. This quote is often given, but seems to be considerably embellished. However, it does appear to be true that Ziegfeld died giving stage directions and that his last words were something like, "Looks good! Looks good!" 

"You're right. It's time. I love you all." – Michael Landon, the American TV star, after his family had gathered around him and his son had told him it was time to move on.  These do not seem to have been literally his last words, but he spoke them only a few hours before he died. He is said to have been alone with his wife Cindy at the moment of passing, and his actual last words were "I love you."

"A certain butterfly is already on the wing." – Vladimir Nabokov, author of Lolita. Nabokov was a great butterfly enthusiast. Although this could certainly be a reference to the liberation of the soul from the body, it could also refer to an actual butterfly that Nabokov had been chasing and which had eluded him. Possibly it means both things. 

"This is all an elaborate hoax." – Roger Ebert, in a note to his wife on the day before his death.

"Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow." – Steve Jobs' last words, according to his sister Mona Simpson. There is also an Internet story that has gone viral on social media claiming that Jobs' last words were an elaborate rejection of materialism and worldly success, but this claim has been thoroughly debunked.

 "Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees." – Gen. "Stonewall" Jackson, after being shot by one of his own men.

"I've got to get to the top of the hill." – Financier J.P. Morgan.

"I can't see a damned thing." – lawman Morgan Earp to his brother, Wyatt Earp. They had promised each other to report any vision of the next life if they had the chance. 

And finally this example of understated heroism from the explorer Robert Scott, whose Antarctic expedition ended  in tragedy when the entire team froze to death. These words were found in Scott's diary, though they were not the very last entry:

"We are weak, writing is difficult, but for my own sake I do not regret this journey, which has shown that Englishmen can endure hardships, help one another, and meet death with as great a fortitude as ever in the past. We took risks, we knew we took them; things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint, but bow to the will of Providence, determined still to do our best to the last."

A reply from Michael Sudduth

In my last post I discussed a couple of issues raised by Michael Sudduth and Bernardo Kastrup in regard to Proof of Heaven, Eben Alexander's bestselling book about his NDE. Dr. Sudduth was good enough to respond via email, and to give me permission to post his response, which follows. 

~~~~

Michael:

Thanks for commenting on my blog "In Defense of Sam Harris on Near-Death Experiences," as well as the responses to it. Let me say, at the outset, that I appreciate your less tilted and more sober analysis of the discussion. Nonetheless, I wanted to offer a rejoinder to your commentary, mostly in the spirit of clarification. Reality may be an irredeemable mess, but there's no good reason for supposing that arguments must be. So permit a few more flaps of the butterfly's wings, come what may.

As I made clear in my response to Kastrup, I didn't say (or imply) that on Harris' view Alexander's NDE could not be explained by postulating some purely natural mechanism, such as one invoking biologically active DMT compounds. Moreover, I didn't say, contrary to what you've suggested, that Harris wasn't trying to discredit Alexander's particular interpretation of his NDE by introducing such a possibility or by arguing for that Alexander's NDE resembles DMT experiences. The issue here is how the appeal is supposed to discredit Alexander's NDE.

To repeat what I stated in my original blog, and also in my response to Kastrup, I've objected to Kastrup's contention that Harris was trying to argue that a DMT explanation (or similar reductively naturalistic explanation) of Alexander's NDE is the likely explanation of the experience. There's no textual basis for attributing this strong claim to Harris, which as I illustrated actually contradicts what Harris said. Much less is there any textual support for attributing this claim to Harris for the reasons Kastrup invokes in the form of an argument Harris intact never presented.

The claims you and Kastrup have subsequently extracted from Harris are logically weaker claims than the claims Kastrup made in his original blog and book discussions of Harris. I'm assuming that we don't need a course in confirmation theory to understand the conceptual distinction between the following claims:

(i) Hypothesis h is a likely or probable explanation of an experience
(ii) Hypothesis h might explain the experience
(iii) Hypothesis h is a "far more credible" explanation of some experience than some other hypothesis h*.

Since these weaker claims ((ii) and (iii)) are logically compatible with everything I've said in my critique, adducing them does nothing to undermine what I originally argued concerning (i). It actually distracts from my original argument. It's an illustration of a red herring.

Moreover, to repeat the point central to Harris's actual discussion, Harris is not (by his own explicit admission) arguing that we have compelling reasons to suppose that Alexander's NDE was not a transcendent experience. He's arguing, as he says repeatedly (though systematically ignored by Kastrup) that Alexander has not provided good enough reason to accept that his NDE was a transcendent experience. Kastrup fails to grasp this, despite Harris' explicitly stating it at the beginning and end of his discussion. Kastrup's misrepresentation of Harris's larger argument, as well as my own, is an unfortunate and inexcusable amalgamation of poor critical thinking and poor textual exegesis. And his flagrant and flamboyant disregard for the need for conceptual clarity is an illustration of why the vast majority of professional philosophers, including those who believe in survival, don't take any of this stuff seriously.

As for your critical comments about Alexander's experience, I largely agree. But here I think we should return to the broader structure of Alexander's own argument. As Harris correctly points out, the transcendent interpretation of Alexander's experience depends on two crucial premises: (a) Alexander's cerebral cortex was completely inactive during his coma and (b) Alexander had his NDE when his cortex was completely inactive. Harris is correct that neither Alexander nor anyone else is justified claiming at least one of these premises. Consequently, Alexander's argument lacks cogency.

I'll have more to say about the factual and conceptual aspects to Alexander's NDE-argument in a subsequent blog, once I've completed my discussions with various neuroscientists and medical doctors, but sufficient for the day are the criticisms thereof.

As for my own views on survival, you wrote: "Michael Sudduth, a philosopher who is open to postmortem survival but thinks the current evidence and arguments for it are inadequate ..." Well, thanks for at least acknowledging my openness to postmortem survival. As you're probably aware, but it's worth reiterating, my agnosticism with respect to personal survival represents the further side of my earlier firm conviction on the matter. Nonetheless, as I've explained in several blogs, my views on survival are more nuanced than is usually recognized. For example, see my Personal Reflections on Life after Death. That being said, I don't say that the current evidence is inadequate. What I've consistently argued over the past few years is that the arguments purporting to show that the evidence is good are unsuccessful at showing this. I argue this in considerable detail in my recently published book, A Philosophical Critique of Empirical Arguments for Postmortem Survival (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

You also wrote: "As I've explained on other occasions (once in direct response to Michael Sudduth), I'm very skeptical of the super-psi idea, which Sudduth seems to find somewhat persuasive, or at least well worth considering." As Stephen Braude and I have argued for several years now (arguments that have gone largely unanswered), survivalist rejoinders to the super-psi hypothesis have been wrong-headed and steeped in some profound conceptual confusions. But this is all dialectical foreplay. I'm not entirely sure what you've taken away from our earlier discussions, Michael, but as it turns out, the fundamental problem infecting classical empirical arguments for survival doesn't really depend on attributing any plausibility to the so-called super-psi hypothesis. It's for this reason that I've been saying for some time now that there needs to be a rather profound recalibration of the entire empirical survival debate. That's the challenge my recent book offers.

Proof of life

So here's the thing. Neurosurgeon Eben Alexander wrote a best-selling book called Proof of Heaven, which made the cover of Newsweek. In the book he said that he had a profound NDE while comatose, and that the NDE constitutes empirical evidence of life after death. Sam Harris, an atheist philosopher who is open-minded on issues of psi and postmortem survival, criticized Alexander's claims and followed up with further criticism. Bernardo Kastrup, a philosopher and author who embraces Idealism (the idea that consciousness is everything), took on Harris's arguments in a blog post and then a second post. Michael Sudduth, a philosopher who is open to postmortem survival but thinks the current evidence and arguments for it are inadequate, criticized Kastrup for his opinion piece and defended Harris. Kastrup replied to Sudduth. Sudduth replied to Kastrup.

Got it?

Yeah, it's a kerfuffle.

Though I'm a little reluctant to enter these roiled waters, I've decided to tug on my waders and give it a go. But since these arguments can persist  forever without accomplishing much, I'm going to limit my comments to just a couple of issues, and to focus only on Kastrup and Sudduth.

First, I have to say that I think both of them make some good points. And what I want to do is highlight the single strongest point (in my opinion) that each of them makes.

I'll start with Kastrup. In his reply to Sudduth's initial post, Kastrup writes:

I ... argued that a chemical or physical trigger [such as the chemical DMT] does not necessarily invalidate the transcendent nature of [Alexander's] experience, since all NDEs are, ultimately, triggered by some physical event. What does Sudduth have to say about this? He writes: "Kastrup is correct, of course, that in at least one sense the similarity between Alexander’s NDE and DMT experiences doesn’t defeat the authenticity of the former as a valid transcendent experience." But this was my point. So Sudduth actually agrees with my point. What's his problem then? Well, he asserts that "Harris nowhere claims [that] Alexander’s NDE was produced by brain chemistry," so my point is a straw-man. What? With a blush of embarrassment, I leave it to you to judge it after you consider the following passage by Harris:

"Does Alexander know that DMT already exists in the brain as a neurotransmitter? Did his brain experience a surge of DMT release during his coma? This is pure speculation, of course, but it is a far more credible hypothesis than that his cortex 'shut down,' freeing his soul to travel to another dimension."

Can someone explain to me how is it that Harris is not suggesting here that DMT could explain Alexander's NDE on a purely chemical basis? I mean, how much clearer could this possibly be? Sudduth's grievance is that Harris does not outright state that the NDE was caused by chemicals; that Harris merely mentions the possibility that it was. Duh. So what? It would obviously have been ridiculous if Harris had asserted that he knew what caused Alexander's NDE. Raising the possibility of a chemical cause was as far as Harris could have gone to try to debunk Alexander.

In his reply, Sudduth defends his position, but I have to side with Kastrup here. It is, in my opinion, mere pettifoggery to suggest that Harris was not trying to discredit Alexander's NDE by suggesting that it could have been caused by a surge of DMT in the brain. True, Harris did not say definitively and unequivocally that this was the explanation, but he presented this hypothesis as "far more credible" than the postmortem-survival hypothesis. 

Now, perhaps it is more credible in this case. It very well may be, as I'll discuss briefly below. But there is no point in pretending that Harris was doing something other than what he was very obviously doing.

That brings us to what I feel is Sudduth's strongest point, the issue of when exactly Alexander's NDE took place. In his initial post, he writes:

In Proof of Heaven, and in subsequent interviews and talks, Alexander ... argues, howbeit in a reserved manner, that his alleged veridical perceptions during his NDE provide evidence that his NDE occurred during his coma....

[H]e allegedly experienced communications from a person who tried, on particular occasions, psychically contacting him while he was in his coma, and he also saw faces that corresponded to actual people, five of whom were present at Alexander’s bedside shortly before he came out of his coma (Proof of Heaven, 108-10). If we regard these features of his experience as veridical perceptions, then, given the assumption of the time-anchor argument, it would seem that he had these perceptual experiences at specific points during his coma.

One fairly obvious response to the time-anchor argument would be to concede that Alexander had the veridical perceptual experiences (in his NDE) during his coma. This wouldn’t be extraordinary, and it certainly wouldn’t support the extrasomatic interpretation of his experience, unless there was good evidence that his cortex was shutdown at the time of the perceptions. As Harris noted, a significant number of coma patients have awareness during coma. Perhaps more significantly, there’s data that shows that even coma patients in a vegetative state can gradually transition into a state of minimal awareness, and then lapse back into a vegetative state (see Schnakers, Giacino, and Laureys). In the absence of functional data tracking patterns of brain activity, it’s difficult to see how Alexander can properly rule this out.  Moreover, Alexander’s description of the human faces bubbling up out of a dark muck, and whose voices were unintelligible, wouldn’t be surprising as subjective features of a change in cortical activity shortly before regaining consciousness.  While this would not explain the alleged communications with Susan Reintjes who was not physically present, if there’s any evidence for telepathic interactions between people, it’s drawn from persons whose cerebral cortex is actually functional.

Now let’s be clear here. I’m not suggesting that residual and changing cortical activity, generating moments of minimal awareness, actually explains the apparently veridical features of Alexander’s experience. I’m rather pointing out a consequence of Alexander’s lack of functional data: if he doesn’t have adequate evidence that his cerebral cortex was shutdown for the entire duration of his coma, establishing on the basis of time-anchors that he must have had the experiences during his coma doesn’t do much for the conclusion he wishes to establish.

I think Sudduth is right about this, and it's the biggest problem I've had with Alexander's story from the start. The strongest NDEs involve a veridical component that can be verified after the fact and can anchor the experience to events in the known world. Alexander's experience lacks this element. His vague impression of a psychic communication is too ambiguous to count for much, and his impressions of visitors at his bedside are not inconsistent with the limited perceptual capabilities of comatose patients. Alexander would probably argue that, because he remembers experiencing most of his otherworldly journey before these time-anchors occurred, it proves that his NDE must have taken place while he was deeply comatose. But we're not really justified in making that inference. His memory might be inaccurate, or the entire NDE might have occurred within just a few minutes during the period when he was recovering from the worst of his illness. As Sudduth points out, people who take psychogenic drugs often report elaborate, lengthy experiences that seem to go on for many hours, but which take place within just a few minutes of (what we might call) "Earth time."

I said this was the biggest problem I've had with Alexander's account. There are two other problems. One is that the experience really does seem like a drug trip. I've read accounts of DMT testing under controlled conditions by psychiatrist Rick Strassman, and the bizarre, hallucinatory narrative recounted by Alexander matches them very well. Though I've never taken hallucinogenic drugs myself, when I think of Alexander's book, the images that come to my mind are from the Beatles movie Yellow Submarine – imagery that was obviously inspired by LSD trips.

My other problem with Alexander's book is related but slightly different. His NDE is simply different in almost all respects from the standard NDE's that have been reported, documented, and tabulated for decades. I don't know of any other NDE where somebody reports flying around on the back of a giant butterfly, for instance. To me, one of the convincing features of NDEs is their relative consistency (taking into account cultural and personal differences). Alexander's NDE breaks the mold in so many ways that it is, at best, an outlier, and perhaps more plausibly, not a true NDE at all.

The fact is that Alexander's NDE is by no means the most convincing such case. It has been widely discussed because it is the first NDE, as far as I know, to be reported by a brain surgeon. Alexander's professional training and status provide his story with a certain intrinsic interest and perhaps make it more credible, to some people, than the account of (say) a plumber. But there are many other NDEs that boast more striking veridical details and which fit much more comfortably into established narrative patterns. 

Many other issues have been raised in this discussion, but as I said, I'm not going to try to get into them all. As I've explained on other occasions (once in direct response to Michael Sudduth), I'm very skeptical of the super-psi idea, which Sudduth seems to find somewhat persuasive, or at least well worth considering. I'm also skeptical of Kastrup's philosophical idealism and the idea that reality can be explained in monistic terms – i.e., that everything can be reduced to a single thing. I suspect that reality, rather than being neat and simple and elegant, is actually something of a mess.

At the very least, this little dust-up has offered proof of a tenet of chaos theory: when a butterfly flaps its wings, it can indeed stir up a storm.