Michael Prescott's Blog

Splitting the difference

Matt Rouge recently reminded me of a study that came out in 2017, purporting to show that split-brain patients retain a single locus of consciousness. Although I put up a brief post about it at the time, I don't think I fully appreciated the implications.

In a corpus callosotomy, the sheaf of neural fibers connecting the left and right cerebral hemispheres is surgically severed. A connection between the< hemispheres remains intact, but is considered too weak to provide more than minimal communication. Decades ago, split-brain patients were tested in a famous series of experiments, as Science Daily explains:

In their canonical work, [Roger] Sperry and [Michael] Gazzaniga discovered that split-brain patients can only respond to stimuli in the right visual field with their right hand and vice versa. This was taken as evidence that severing the corpus callosum causes each hemisphere to gain its own consciousness.

This conclusion, in turn, has been used by skeptics to argue that consciousness is generated by the brain and therefore cannot survive death. I don't necessarily think this argument has the force it's supposed to have. One could argue that if the brain serves as a filter for extracerebral consciousness, then if it is cut in half, it simply functions as two filters. By way of analogy, a funnel that produces a sound by channeling a wind current would produce two sounds if it were somehow made into two funnels. There would still be only one current of wind.

In any case, a more recent study casts doubt on Sperry and Gazzaniga's conclusions:

[Yair] Pinto and his fellow researchers conducted a series of tests on two patients who had undergone a full callosotomy....  To the researchers’ surprise, the patients were able to respond to stimuli throughout the entire visual field with all the response types: left hand, right hand and verbally. Pinto: ‘The patients could accurately indicate whether an object was present in the left visual field and pinpoint its location, even when they responded with the right hand or verbally. This despite the fact that their cerebral hemispheres can hardly communicate with each other and do so at perhaps 1 bit per second, which is less than a normal conversation. I was so surprised that I decide repeat the experiments several more times with all types of control.’

According to Pinto, the results present clear evidence for unity of consciousness in split-brain patients. ‘The established view of split-brain patients implies that physical connections transmitting massive amounts of information are indispensable for unified consciousness, i.e. one conscious agent in one brain. Our findings, however, reveal that although the two hemispheres are completely insulated from each other, the brain as a whole is still able to produce only one conscious agent. This directly contradicts current orthodoxy and highlights the complexity of unified consciousness.’

It would appear that at least one set of researchers has made a mistake somewhere, since their results directly contradict each other. If the more recent experiments hold up to scrutiny, the implications are pretty serious.

In my post from 2017, I focused on the possibility that a common argument against survival had been undermined. But when I look at it now, it occurs to me that Pinto's study amounts to something close to positive evidence for survival. After all, if the two hemispheres of the brain still have a single locus of consciousness despite minimal connectivity, it would strongly suggest that consciousness originates outside the brain and simply uses the brain as an instrument — or at the very least, that consciousness, having originated in the brain, assumes some kind of extracerebral status that can persist even when the brain has been seriously impaired.

In other words, either consciousness originates in "the cloud" and is downloaded to the brain as needed, or consciousness originates in the brain and is periodically uploaded to "the cloud" for safekeeping. Either way, the destruction of the brain at death should not necessarily affect the content stored in the cloud.

For what it's worth, my personal view is that both of these options are correct: there is a give-and-take relationship between the brain and consciousness, similar to the back-and-forth communications between a Mars Rover and Mission Control, with data from the Rover transmitted to Mission Control, and Mission Control analyzing those data and sending back instructions. Note that the Rover has a degree of autonomy, analogous to reflex, instinct, or any learned behavior that has become automatic; it can respond immediately to certain problems without waiting for advice from Mission Control. I believe I first came across the Rover analogy in The Biology of Belief by Bruce Lipton.

Additional evidence for the contention that consciousness can be extracerebral may perhaps be found in the work of John Lorber, who discovered that some people with very limited gray matter can nevertheless function normally, and Karl Lashley, who found that no matter what part of a rat's brain he excised, or how much of it, the rat could still remember how to navigate a maze. 

Information, please

Recently there’s been some hype in the media about how the idea of the universe as a computer simulation has been disproved. I was skeptical that such a sweeping hypothesis could be definitively falsified, and according to the good folks at Popular Mechanics, I was right. The researchers cited by news articles were not actually looking into the cosmic simulation question but into the issue of using classical computers to simulate quantum computers; and the results they got, while interesting, are irrelevant to the "information matrix" debate. 

In any event, the notion that the universe is simulated by some sort of physical supercomputer created by an extraterrestrial species is, in my opinion, rather childish — a result of limiting speculation to a crudely materialistic paradigm. What I see as a more sophisticated version of this idea is that the universe consists essentially of information and information processing, not because the cosmos is generated inside a MacBook operated by an extradimensional nerd with too much time on his hands, but because information as such underlies all physical entities and phenomena.

In other words, we’re not talking about a supercomputer designed by ET, but about a matrix of pure information that is the ground of being. The limitations of physical computational devices, whether using classical or quantum physics, are irrelevant to this idea, since no physical information processing is taking place. By definition, all physical things emerge from the information processing matrix. 

For a discussion of some possible advantages to this way of looking at things, please see Matt Rouge's guest post and one of my own posts from a few years ago. 

I’m hardly certain of this highly speculative notion, but I do find many of the arguments used to knock it down to be extremely weak. Let’s take a look at some of the more common objections. 

Objection 1: Information can exist only in the context of a mind that perceives it. An information field cannot be the ground of being, because it must be grounded in consciousness.

It’s true that the term information, as used colloquially, implies knowledge held by a mind. But that’s not how information theorists use the term. They speak, for instance, of information encoded in DNA. That information was present long before there were any human minds capable of knowing about it.

According to an online dictionary, information theory defines information as "a mathematical quantity expressing the probability of occurrence of a particular sequence of symbols, impulses, etc., as contrasted with that of alternative sequences." Mathematical quantities exist whether or not a mind conceives them. A hydrogen atom has one electron and it has always had one electron, long before anyone was around to notice it.

One could reply that God is the observer, the Mind that knows. But this merely begs the question by assuming there must be an observer in the first place.

A good discussion of the term "information" as used by theorists is found here. (The page is from an Intelligent Design site, but I’m not linking to it for that reason. I just think it’s a good essay.) I also discussed the issue at some length in this post.

Another thing that trips people up is that information theory is often concerned with the transmission and reception of messages. This naturally leads to the assumption that consciousness must be involved in formulating the message or at least in apprehending it.

But while intelligible messages aimed at consciousness can be studied this way (and in fact, the field got its start studying ways to improve the clarity of radio messages), the message in question does not need to be sent or received  by a mind. Messenger RNA, as its name implies, delivers messages, but that doesn’t mean the ribosomes that receive the information have minds or understand what they’re doing. Such messages can be compared to a key that fits a particular lock; the key does not know which lock it fits; the lock does not know that the key will open it; but when the right key finds the right lock, the "message" has been received.

In short, consciousness is not necessary for information to exist, when the term information is used in its technical sense.

Objection 2: Information can’t exist on its own; it must be encoded in some physical substrate, whether it’s the double helix of DNA, the pages of a book, the microcircuitry of a computer chip, or the neuronal pathways of the brain. Therefore a field or matrix of pure information is impossible and inconceivable.

I agree with part of this. An information matrix with no physical reality is inconceivable, in the sense that the human mind cannot visualize it or make it real. However, I don’t see this as a problem. Why would we think that the ultimate nature of reality would be directly graspable by our minds?

We live in a 4D space-time universe. We are fully immersed in it. It is pretty much all we know, with the occasional exception of profound mystical experiences that transcend space and time. But our hypothesis is that this 4D universe is not the ultimate reality — that there is a deeper level, below both physicality and consciousness, a level that is outside of space and time and is not definable in 4D terms.

The classic illustration of this idea is Edwin Abbott’s Flatland, a book that is part social commentary, part religious satire, and part mathematical treatise. In the book, Mr. A. Square, a two-dimensional resident of Flatland, is lifted up out of the sheet of paper that is his world and rudely introduced to the third physical dimension (height). From his new perspective he can look down on Flatland and see inside the buildings. When he returns, he tries to give voice to his revelation, but no one knows what he’s talking about. The other Flatlanders think Mr. A. Square is crazy.

When it comes to imagining a ground of being that is outside the parameters of our universe — outside space and time — we are in the same unfortunate position as the people of Flatland. We can’t really conceive of it, except in theoretical terms, and we can’t picture it except by metaphors and analogies. But this is true of any attempt to describe the fundamental nature of reality.

The issue of metaphors and analogies leads us to ...

Objection 3: Isn’t the information matrix merely the latest in a long line of metaphysical theories that use current technology as a metaphor for reality? When clockwork mechanisms were all the rage, the idea of a clockwork universe was fashionable. Centuries later, when holography was au courant, David Bohm compared the universe to a hologram. Now that we're in the Information Age, the universe is seen as a virtual-reality environment generated by information processing. When the next technological revolution comes along, the metaphor will change again.

There’s a good deal of truth in this observation, but I’m not sure it’s actually damaging to our hypothesis. As I said above, the only way to intellectually grasp (or at least grasp at) the foundational nature of reality is by metaphor and analogy. As our technology becomes more sophisticated, our metaphors may get closer to the truth.

The clockwork universe was not a completely accurate representation, but it was a major advance over the idea of a universe ruled by the whims of gods. This Newtonian paradigm is still perfectly valid when dealing with macroscopic phenomena. Using Newton's calculations exclusively, it is possible to chart the trajectory of a spacecraft from Earth to the moon.

As for Bohm's theory, a holographic universe is broadly compatible with the information processing idea. A holographic plate consists of wave interference patterns, which are simply encoded information, so the universe-as-hologram is essentially a 4D image projected out of a substrate of information. And since Bohm's holographic universe changes over time, the holographic plate presumably must be undergoing changes as well, which would correspond to the ongoing algorithms of  information processing.

Better technology in the future may well yield better metaphors, but for now we need to work with what we have. In general, using cutting-edge tech as a springboard  for ontological speculation has proven pretty successful.

Other objections are possible. Some people feel the whole idea of an information-based universe is depressingly cold and impersonal. Maybe so, but why does reality have to be warm and fuzzy? Others find the idea to be unscientific because it is unfalsifiable in principle. This is probably true, but how is that different from any other ontological proposition? Still others note that the all-important issue of the origin of consciousness is left ambiguous; is mind an emergent property of an informational system, or something else? Honestly, I don’t know.

Finally, there are those who complain that commonly reported transcendent experiences such as episodes of "cosmic consciousness" and NDEs say nothing about information as the ground of being. But this is debatable. Some NDEs do include decidedly "holographic" elements, as our longtime commenter Art has often mentioned, and most "cosmic consciousness" episodes involve the sense that a complex, well-orchestrated, logical system underlies the illusion of  physical reality. I think the information-matrix idea is also broadly consistent with the Seth material channeled by Jane Roberts. (See this book for a discussion of parallels between Seth's lectures and Bohm's holomovement.)

For additional discussions, see The Bottom Layer website, which does an unusually good job of laying out the reasons for thinking that quantum phenomena can best be understood as expressions of an information processing system; Brian Whitworth's highly technical but fascinating essays; and, what the hell, my own novella Chasing Omega, which includes this issue in a dramatized depiction of afterlife research and the possibilities it raises. 

All rats go to heaven

Back in 2014 I published three blog posts on a study that showed a surge of electrical activity in the brains of dying rats. (First post, second post, third post.)

The surge was suggested as a possible naturalistic explanation of the near-death experience. Some NDE researchers countered that the electrical surge was so extremely minute (too small to be detected by a standard EEG) that it could not account for the complexity of the subjective experience reported by patients.

Recently a reader sent me two more studies on same subject. The first article, "Asphyxia-activated corticocardiac signaling accelerates onset of cardiac arrest," was originally published in 2015. Its findings: 

Asphyxia stimulates a robust and sustained increase of functional and effective cortical connectivity, an immediate increase in cortical release of a large set of neurotransmitters, and a delayed activation of corticocardiac functional and effective connectivity that persists until the onset of ventricular fibrillation.... These results demonstrate that asphyxia activates a brainstorm, which accelerates premature death of the heart and the brain.

The second article, "Neural Correlates of Consciousness at Near-Electrocerebral Silence in an Asphyxial Cardiac Arrest Model," appeared in April of 2017. It concludes: 

In summary, we found asphyxial CA [= cardiac arrest] to induce a period of near-electrocerebral silence that was marked by hypersynchrony in the frontal lobes and increased power in the visual cortices, which suggests potential markers of consciousness.

The material in both cases gets very technical, as would be expected of articles written by and for neuroscientists.

My first reaction is that the electrical activity reported still seems to be extremely minimal and restricted to narrow bands of the electromagnetic spectrum. This would (I think) make it hard to account for the persistence of consciousness according to currently accepted models of brain functioning, which posit widespread "global" information processing. In addition, the surge is very brief, yet some NDEs take place considerably later and last longer (as estimated by patients' veridical observations).

These points were part of the rebuttal offered by Bruce Greyson, Edward F. Kelly, and W.J. Ross Dunseath after the earlier rat study was published: 

[T]he activity observed following cardiac arrest represents a tiny fraction of the total neuroelectric power present just before arrest ..., and thus it is misleading to describe these rat brains as being “hyperaroused.” All that can be concluded is that activity of unknown functional significance occurred at a few places in the EEG frequency spectrum in the context of near-total obliteration of activity accompanying the waking state. The pertinent question here is not whether there is any brain electrical activity at all after cardiac arrest, but whether there is activity of the type currently thought to be necessary for conscious experience....

[M]any reports of near-death experiences include verifiable perceptions by the experiencer that are anchored to specific time periods far longer than 30 s after cardiac arrest, the duration of the electrical surge in this study.

There was also a response by Robert Mays, who, like Greyson et al., argued that the electrical activity post-cardiac arrest was too small to account for consciousness.

The original researchers responded forcefully to Greyson et al. in this letter.

I think the NDE researchers' objections would apply to the new studies also. But I'm no expert, and perhaps there is something new in these papers, so I'm putting them out there to see if anyone more knowledgeable than I am in matters of neuroscience would like to comment.

Two halves, but still whole

NDE researcher Titus Rivas posted a link 0n Facebook to an interesting article called "Split Brain Does Not Lead to Split Consciousness."

One of the most popular arguments against the so-called transmission theory (the idea that the brain serves as a receiver, rather than an originator, of consciousness) involves studies of patients who've undergone a callosotomy — the severing of the corpus callosum, the bundle of nerve fiber joining the left and right hemispheres of the brain. This increasingly rare operation is used as a last resort in cases of severe epilepsy. It has the effect of almost entirely isolating the two halves of the brain, which remain joined only by a few thin threads of nerve tissue (primarily the fornix and the anterior and posterior commissures) which transmit very limited electrical signals.

Previously, scientists who studied the post-op patients concluded that these people now had two distinct centers of consciousness. In effect, where there had been one mind, there were now two. This was taken by many champions of materialism as strong evidence that the mind is generated by the brain, and that mind-body (or soul-body) dualism is untenable.

The new study, however, reaches a different conclusion. Here's a summary provided by the linked article:

A new research study contradicts the established view that so-called split-brain patients have a split consciousness. Instead, the researchers behind the study, led by UvA psychologist Yair Pinto, have found strong evidence showing that despite being characterised by little to no communication between the right and left brain hemispheres, split brain does not cause two independent conscious perceivers in one brain. Their results are published in the latest edition of the journal Brain.

Pinto, lead researcher on the University of Amsterdam team, writes, "The established view of split-brain patients implies that physical connections transmitting massive amounts of information are indispensable for unified consciousness, i.e. one conscious agent in one brain. Our findings, however, reveal that although the two hemispheres are completely insulated from each other, the brain as a whole is still able to produce only one conscious agent. This directly contradicts current orthodoxy and highlights the complexity of unified consciousness."

Though the article says nothing about the philosophical implications of the study, it appears to me that one of the most commonly employed arguments against the brain as a mediator, not producer, of consciousness may now be obsolete. In fact, we can go further and say that the new study's findings are more consistent with transmission than with production. If the mind remains unified even when the brain has been divided, it would suggest that the mind is primary, the brain secondary — that consciousness originates outside the brain and is merely processed by it or funneled through it.

At the very least, the new findings greatly complicate the case for materialism.

Lest we forget

A fair amount of parapsychological research involves fieldwork and case studies, in which people's personal memories become an issue. In some cases, a subject recounts an episode that he or she remembers vividly, though it may have happened weeks, months, or even years or decades earlier. Usually this testimony is taken as essentially accurate unless there is some reason to suspect fabrication. In other cases, the researchers themselves must rely on their memory when writing up phenomena that they have witnessed (in a séance room, for instance) at some earlier time.

It seems only natural to assume that eyewitness accounts, especially when provided by disinterested parties, are generally reliable. And yet this may not be the case – a point addressed in detail in New Testament scholar Bart D. Ehrman's intriguing book Jesus Before the Gospels.

As the title indicates, the focus of the book is the way in which Jesus was remembered by various Christian communities in the early years of the religion's development. In the course of exploring this issue, Ehrman discusses modern findings on the nature and limitations of memory. He explains that our memories are often less accurate and dependable than we believe.

Remember when Donald Trump got in hot water for saying he had seen news footage of thousands of Muslims celebrating in New York City on 9/11? Even though no video was found to support Trump's assertion, he insisted he remembered it clearly. He probably did. A false memory can be every bit as convincing as a real one. One study makes this point via precisely the same phenomenon: people's vivid memories of news footage that never existed.

The study involves a cargo plane that crashed into an Amsterdam apartment building in 1992, killing dozens of people. Ten months after the event, survey respondents were asked if they remembered seeing news footage of the moment when the plane struck the building. More than half of them – 55% – said yes. In a later study, 66% of respondents remembered watching the footage. But there never had been any footage. The crash had not been caught on video.

Ehrman writes:

These striking results obviously puzzled the researchers, in part because basic common sense should have told anyone that there could not have been a film. Remember, this is 1992, before cell phone cameras .… And yet, between half and two thirds of the people surveyed – most of them graduate students and professors – indicated they had seen the nonexistent film .…

Even more puzzling were the detailed answers that some of those interviewed [gave] about what they actually saw on the film – for example, whether the plane crashed into the building horizontally or vertically and whether the fire caused by the plane started at impact or only later .…

Obviously they were imagining [these details], based on logical inferences (the fire must have started right away) and on what they had been told by others (the plane crashed into the building as the plane was heading straight down). The psychologists argued that these people’s imaginations became so vivid, and were repeated so many times, that they eventually did not realize they were imagining something. They really thought they were remembering it. In fact they did remember it. But it was a false memory. Not just a false memory one of them had. A false memory most of them had.

Then there was a study done at Wesleyan University cheekily titled "Do You Remember Proposing Marriage to the Pepsi Machine?" In this study, forty students were escorted around campus and instructed to perform an action, or to imagine performing it, or to watch someone else perform it, or to imagine someone else performing it. Some of the actions were commonplace, while others were bizarre. In one case students were asked to propose marriage to a Pepsi machine.

Two weeks later the participants were interviewed and asked if the action had been imagined or performed. The conclusions were clear. Whether the action was normal or bizarre, participants who imagined it often remember doing it: “We found that imagining familiar or bizarre actions during a campus walk can lead to the subsequent false recollection of having performed these actions.” In this instance the researchers found that imagining the action vividly, but just one time, could produce the false memory. Moreover, imagining someone else performing the action led to just as many false memories as imagining doing it oneself.

In his book Remembering, British psychologist F.C. Bartlett summed up the rather unsettling scientific consensus about memory. Ehrman summarizes:

On the basis of a large number of studies, Bartlett showed that memories are not snapshots stored in some location in the brain later. The brain doesn’t work like that. Instead, when we experience something, bits and pieces of its memory are stored in different parts of the brain. Later, when we try to retrieve the memory, these bits and pieces are reassembled. The problem is that when we reassemble the pieces, there are some, often lots of them, that are missing. To complete the memory we unconsciously fill in the gaps, for example, with analogous recollections from similar experiences .…

The problem is that there is precisely no way to know when your mind is filling in the gaps and when it has retrieved the information from this or that part of the brain.

At every point of this memory process something can go wrong: at the point at which you perceive something (… you may not notice everything, for example); when you store it (as your mind decides which parts to stick away to access later: it may do a very partial job of that); and when you retrieve it (as your mind pieces it all back together: it may be missing lots of pieces and to make the memory seamless it fills in the gaps with other recollections).

The net result of Bartlett’s experiments is that when we remember something, we are not simply pulling up an entire recollection of the past from some part of our brain. We are actually constructing the memory from bits and pieces here and there, sometimes with more and sometimes with less filler. In the process of this construction project, which we are undertaking virtually all the time, errors can happen. There can be massive omissions, alterations, and inventions of memory.

Some people would argue that while this may be true of trivial memories that are easily forgotten, it cannot be true of powerful, vivid memories of dramatic events in our lives. These memories, at least, must be preserved with considerable accuracy. And in fact, this was the prevailing view at one time. But not anymore. Ehrman:

A very famous article published by psychologists Roger Brown and James Kulik in 1977 argued that when we experience a highly unexpected, emotional, and consequential event we have a special memory mechanism that stores indelibly on the brain. It is almost as if the mind says, “Take a picture of this!” And it does so. Brown and Kulik called these “flashbulb memories.” When you recall such memories, they claimed, your mind says “Now print!” and the memory flashes back, as clear as day and as accurately as when you first experienced it ....

There has been an intense research on flashbulb memories since Brown and Kulik first proposed the phenomenon, however, and their original view appears to be wrong. Yes, such memories are highly vivid. But just because a memory is especially vivid does not mean that it is especially accurate. Many of us have a hard time believing that, at least when it comes to our own vivid memories. But it’s true, and has been shown repeatedly .…

The day after the space shuttle Challenger exploded on January 28, 1986, [psychologists Ulric Neisser and Nicole Harsch] gave 106 students in a psychology class at Emory University a questionnaire asking about their personal circumstances when they heard the news. A year and a half later, in the fall of 1988, they tracked down forty-four of the students and gave them the same questionnaire. A half year later, in spring 1989, they interviewed forty of these forty-four about the event.

The findings were startling but very telling. To begin with, seventy-five percent of those who took the second questionnaire were certain they had never taken the first one. That was obviously wrong. In terms of what was being asked, there were questions about where they were when they heard the news, what time of day was, what they were doing at the time, whom they learned it from, and so on – seven questions altogether. Twenty-five percent of the participants got every single answer wrong on the second questionnaire, another fifty percent got only two of the seven questions correct. Only three of the forty-four got all the answers right the second time, and even in those cases there were mistakes in some of the details. When the participants’ confidence in their answers was ranked in relation to their accuracy there was “no relation between confidence and accuracy at all” in forty-two of the forty-four instances.…

Instead, when confronted with evidence of what really took place, they consistently denied [what they were told] and said that their present memories were the correct ones. In the words of the researchers, “No one who had given an incorrect account in the interview even pretended that they now recalled what was stated on the original record. As far as we can tell, the original memories are just gone.”…

Or as a very recent study, by psychologists Jennifer Talarico and David Rubin, has shown, “[Flashbulb memories] are distinguished from ordinary memories by their vividness and the confidence with which they are held. There is little evidence that they are reliably different from ordinary autobiographical memories in accuracy, consistency, or longevity."

This last point may be of particular relevance to parapsychology, since the events described by case subjects are often remembered with extreme vividness and clarity – a fact that naturally leads investigators to assume that the memories are reliable. Sometimes, of course, such memories are reliable; if memory always failed, it would serve no useful purpose, which is hardly the case. But failure is common enough that the accuracy of eyewitness testimony and personal recollection cannot be assumed; and for that matter, false testimony should not be blithely taken as evidence of dishonesty or intent to deceive.

The Challenger explosion

In terms of parapsychological fieldwork, the best results are probably obtained when a person's observations are noted while the event is in progress (for instance, by taking stenographic notes during a séance) or immediately afterward, or when some form of audio or video record of the event itself can be preserved. When dealing with personal recollections of experiences that happened some time earlier, no matter how vividly they may be described, researchers need to maintain at least a degree of skepticism. Even corroborating testimony from other witnesses may not be enough to establish the truth of the story; as we've seen, a majority of people remembered seeing news footage that never aired.

And even when a witness whose honesty seems to be beyond reproach insists on the truth of his or her story despite attempts to debunk it, researchers should still bear in mind that most of the students who were re-questioned about the Challenger disaster not only remembered it wrongly but would not change their minds or admit that their memories were in error even when confronted with the original questionnaires they had filled out.

It has often been remarked that psi is a tricksterish phenomenon – subtle, shape-shifting, hard to pin down. It may well be the case that memory itself is similarly nebulous, frustrating, and elusive.

Blood simple

Materialism is a badly flawed philosophy, at least when taken as a comprehensive explanation of reality. As a partial explanation, it fares much better. I've sometimes used an analogy with the history of physics: Newtonian physics was once seen as offering a complete picture of reality, but then was superseded by quantum physics, which subsumes classical physics while going beyond it. Newton wasn't wrong — he was right in a certain (very large) context — but his description of the world was incomplete and therefore unhelpful in certain areas. Materialism, too, is right in a certain context — it has immense explanatory and descriptive power in dealing with large areas of reality — but it is incomplete and leads its proponents into error when they go too far afield. It, too, needs to be subsumed within a larger system of thought that can address those parts of reality that materialism is unequipped to face.

Materialists often tout the track record of scientific and technological success in recent centuries as proof that materialism works. But this argument misses the point. No serious person denies that materialism works. Classical physics also works; using nothing but Newton's laws, it is possible to chart a course for the moon and land a spacecraft there. But just as classical physics breaks down when dealing with black box radiation or the double slit experiment, so materialism breaks down when dealing with psi phenomena, after-death communications and experiences, and consciousness itself — not to mention spirituality, love, art, and morality, among other things that materialism is at a loss to explain (and prefers to ignore, debunk, belittle, or dismiss). It is not that materialism doesn't work, but that it works only in certain limited (albeit large and important) areas. Outside those areas, it fails. Materialism is like the proverbial drunk looking for a lost item under a lamppost; even though he didn't lose it there, it's the only place where there's enough light to see.

Old Mutt 'n' Jeff cartoon strip illustrating the "streetlight effect" 

All of which brings us, naturally, to Silicon Valley billionaires who want to become vampires.

Say what? No, really. There are such people. Peter Thiel, who recently made news as the first openly gay person to address a Republican convention, is one of them. Well, he doesn't actually say he wants to be a vampire. But he does want to extend his life indefinitely, and he hopes to do it with chronic infusions of younger people's blood.

Now, let's just stop and take a look at this little notion. And let's assume it could really work (doubtful). What are the practical implications?

This planet's human population is already growing out of control. The only thing holding it in check is mortality. If everyone became immortal, the population would surge to hopelessly unsustainable levels. Unless, of course, people stopped having children altogether, in which case the present generation would be the last generation. Neither alternative sounds appealing.

But of course the would-be vampire billionaires already know this. They are blissfully unconcerned, because they have no intention of making everybody immortal. Immortality is for the special people, the movers and shakers — you know, them. It's not for the hoi polloi. They can continue dying off as usual. Who will miss them? One hamburger flipper or landscaper is the same as another.

No, the gift of immortality will be enjoyed only by a select few, who already enjoy massively concentrated wealth. But what of the morality of using young people's blood to keep septuagenarians and octogenarians and nonagenarians forever youthful? Pish posh — morality is a fable told to keep the masses in line; it doesn't apply to the superman. What, then, of the sheer creepiness of it? Well, perhaps it is creepy. Perhaps it is even a bit insane. But anything is justified, if the goal is to stave off death.

Because death is the end, utter extinction, eternal oblivion, and it must be postponed as long as possible, no matter the means or the cost.

And here we circle back to materialism. The hopeful vampires think their project makes sense because they can imagine no reality beyond physical reality. They're unconcerned with morality because materialism has taught them that morality is an arbitrary construct. They're willing to go to insane lengths, even to risk social strife and political upheaval, because their number one priority is the perpetuation of the ego — the ego being the facet of the self that is most directly focused on and connected to the tangible physical world.

Now, I'm not saying we should sit back and accept whatever nature wants to do to us. This was the position of doctors who opposed anesthesia because, they thought, God intended man to suffer. It's the position of today's "deep ecologists," who want to undo most or all of the advancements of the scientific era and revert to a pre-technological lifestyle. 

But it's one thing to make life better for oneself and others. It's another thing to make the perpetuation of one's own life the be-all and end-all, trumping all other considerations. This impulse, I think, displays both a spiritual poverty and an embarrassing immaturity. Coming to terms with the inevitability of one's earthly demise is a big part of growing up. Adolescents, who typically think of themselves as immortal, are notorious for their self-involved thoughtlessness. The realization of mortality deals a blow to the ego which allows for the development of empathy and concerns larger than self. 

Adults who haven't accepted this reality are not really adults in the full sense. They cannot see past the boundaries of the ego. They're blind to a larger and more interesting world.

Could they see farther, they would regard the inevitability of death not as shocking, cruel, and unfair, but as normal and even comforting — a chance to rest after a long earthly struggle and to prepare for further growth and personal evolution. They would prepare themselves mentally and spiritually so as to make their transition as gracefully as possible. And they wouldn't be tempted to batten, leechlike, on the next generation in order to keep their physical bodies going on ... and on ... and on.

If Hollywood has taught us anything, it's that this plan rarely works out well. 

 

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. 

----

*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.”

Brainy thoughts

Vitor Moura has called my attention to an article by Donald R. Forsdyke of the Department of Biomedical and Molecular Sciences, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, which appears in the latest issue of the journal Biological Theory (available online behind a paywall). Its title is "Wittgenstein’s Certainty is Uncertain: Brain Scans of Cured Hydrocephalics Challenge Cherished Assumptions." 

Forsdyke, revisiting the work of British pediatrician John Lorber in the 1970s, finds a few more recent cases supportive of Lorber's controversial (to put it mildly) contention that very little gray matter is necessary in order to support normal mental function. Taking brain scans of hydrocephalics, Lorber found that in the most extreme cases, cerebrospinal fluid occupied "at least 95% of cranial capacity," leaving little room for brain tissue. Forsdyke writes: 

Shocking enough. But now for what really rocked the neuroscientists. Half of Lorber’s 60 cases were of above-normal intelligence (as determined by standard IQ tests). The central scans in the figure [reproduced below]—virtually indistinguishable from the severely impaired case on the right—are representative of this group. And doubtless a candid camera would have caught Lorber’s jaw dropping when, among them, he found a student who was ‘‘socially completely normal’’ and had a first class honors degree in mathematics.

The math student's brain was estimated to weigh between 50 and 150 grams, while a normal brain would weigh 1.5 kilograms (1,500 grams). 

Photo reproduced from the Discover blog post. The brain on the left is normal; the brain in the middle is that of a hydrocephalic patient who showed no sign of mental dysfunction; the brain on the right is that of a hydrocephalic who was severely impaired. 

For decades Lorber's conclusions were largely ignored. But in 2007, The Lancet reported that a married civil servant with two children displayed a "massive ventricular enlargement" in his scans — essentially the same condition Lorber had observed decades earlier. Shortly afterward, another case along the same lines was reported by Brazilian neurosurgeons. 

These cases remain exceedingly rare. Most hydrocephalics do not lead normal lives; their mental function is often severely compromised. But the existence of even a few such cases would seem to pose a challenge to the conventional wisdom in neurology. 

Before we go on, though, we need to take note of an opposing view — namely, that these cases are less dramatic than they appear. In Discover magazine's blog, a contributor with the screen name Neuroskeptic argues that what is mainly missing in these scans is not gray matter, but white matter:

There’s no question that some of these brains are very striking. But I don’t think we need to throw out the textbooks yet.

While the enormous “holes” in these brains seem dramatic, the bulk of the grey matter of the cerebral cortex, around the outside of the brain, appears to be intact and in the correct place – this is visible as the dark grey ‘shell’ beneath the skull. What appears to be missing is the white matter, the nerve tracts that connect the various parts of the cerebral cortex with each other, and with the other areas of the brain.

However, some white matter is still visible as the pale grey layer that borders the holes. The big question is whether this layer of white matter is sufficient to connect up the grey matter and allow it to function normally. There doesn’t seem to be much of it, but on the other hand, we really don’t know how much white matter is strictly necessary.

I wonder also if the white matter might be denser than normal i.e. if the fibers were packed together due to being gradually compressed by the expanding fluid spaces?

After pointing out the need for more research, Neuroskeptic concludes: 

In my view, these cases probably won’t require us to rethink neuroscience, although they do raise the issue of how much white matter is necessary. It may be that much of our white matter is redundant, which would be interesting, but not on a metaphysical level.

Getting back to Forsdyke, he devotes the rest of his article to arguing that the Lorber-type cases call into question the information-storage models of the brain. He rejects the idea that the brain can demonstrate unlimited plasticity: 

... there must be rules for redundancy and plasticity. There must be limits. It is a matter of elementary logic that, at some stage of brain shrinkage, these explanations must fail. The drastic reduction in brain mass in the hydrocephalic cases seems to demand unimaginable levels of redundancy and/or plasticity—superplasticity. How much brain must be absent before we abandon these explanations and admit that the standard model, however incarnated, will not work?

The plasticity explanation is essentially what Neuroskeptic relies on. The skeptical argument is that the brain has so much "redundancy and/or plasticity" as to achieve "superplasticity" (Forsdyke's words). Thus even a loss of 95% of brain tissue is not necessarily catastrophic, as long as a "shell" of gray and white matter (the latter possibly compacted) remains intact. For Forsdyke, this explanation pushes plasticity/redundancy past the breaking point. 

Instead, he's partial to a different, though admittedly speculative, idea: 

Information relating to long-term memory is held outside the brain. Since most nonneural tissues and organs appear unsuited for this task, this extrapolates to long-term memory being outside the body—extracorporeal! Amazingly, this startling alternative has been on the table for at least two decades. A Georgetown University professor of computing science has sketched out how it might work (Berkovich 1993, 2014). A 10th century Arabic philosopher-physician even had a version (Avicenna 1631) ...

With respect to long-term memory, a stand-alone computer can be regarded merely as a terminal for manipulating data, and one retrieves from, and store files at, some remote location by way of the Internet. There are imaginative attempts to relate this to the workings of individual brains (Al Shargi and Berkovich 2009). The brain is seen as a receptor/transmitter of some form of electromagnetic wave/particle for which no obvious external structure (e.g., an eye) would be needed. Considering the universe as a holographic information storage device, and invoking the ‘‘spooky’’ physical principle of ‘‘non-locality’’ (Rudolph 2008), a ‘‘possible ‘hardware’ implementation’’ has been described (Berkovich 1993).

While various versions are considered in more detail elsewhere (Clark 2008; Noe ̈ 2009; Forsdyke 2011), they all fall far short on evidence. However, the rare hydrocephalic cases described here suggest that we should be cautious when tempted to cast aside the astonishing idea of personal information—long-term memory—being stored elsewhere ...

And, of course, when speaking of extracorporeal memory we enter the domain of ‘‘mind’’ or ‘‘spirit,’’ with corresponding metaphysical implications. ... Perhaps we should return to 1867 and harken to an exchange between two of Charles Darwin’s contemporaries, Robert Chambers and Alfred Russel Wallace: ‘‘My idea is that the term ‘supernatural’ is a gross mistake. We have only to enlarge our conceptions of the natural, and all will be alright’’ (Wallace 1905, pp. 285–286). We chuckle on learning how spiritualists duped such characters. Yet the possibility now emerges of at least some grains of truth amidst the dross that we poor creatures, imprisoned within the second decade of the 21st century, can understand no better than those imprisoned in the latter decades of the 19th could fathom ‘‘the missing five ounces’’ (Romanes 1887; Forsdyke 2014, 2015). 

Though I don't think spiritualists necessarily "duped" the early researchers (my opinion is that some spiritualists were genuine and others were fraudulent, and many of the early researchers were quite adept at discerning between them), I welcome Forsdyke's willingness to look beyond the existing paradigm. As he himself says, it is somewhat astonishing that these cases have excited so little interest or curiosity. And even Neuroskeptic writes, "I’m surprised that more research hasn’t been done into this issue." 

Forsdyke quotes philosopher Marek Majorek as being startled by the cognitive dissonance of experts reporting on the hydrocephalic cases without registering much of a reaction. Majorek wrote, 

Yet it seems that the report should have been supplied with a large red title stating something to the effect ‘‘A major medical miracle: normal life with half a brain!’’, published not only in an academic journal but on the first pages of every major newspaper in the world, and extensively discussed in professional journals. 

More than thirty years after Lorber's work, these anomalous cases still have not been explained. Perhaps even more astonishing, there seems to be very little interest in explaining them. They are unwanted, inconvenient scraps of data, duly reported and quickly filed away. 

Hmm. Maybe he didn't need a brain, after all!

Light reading

I don't completely grok this, but it's way cool. Scientists say they have taken the first photo that shows light as both a particle and a wave. 

Here's the photo:

The particles are at the bottom of the image, and the wave is at the top. 

And here's the article, which includes a cute little animated video to help explain things.

The narrow margin

Since this is said to be the season of miracles, here's an excerpt from John C. Lennox's God's Undertaker, which neatly summarizes some of the evidence for the apparently miraculous fine-tuning of the cosmos.

After briefly discussing the “abundant supply of carbon” made possible by the very specific resonance of helium and beryllium nuclei (“if the variation were more than 1 per cent either way, the universe could not sustain life”), Lennox moves on to other matters: 

In terms of the tolerance permitted, this [carbon] example pales into insignificance when we consider the fineness of the tuning of some of the other parameters in nature. Theoretical physicist Paul Davies tells us that, if the ratio of the nuclear strong force to the electromagnetic force had been different by one part in 10¹⁶, no stars could have been formed. Again, the ratio of the electromagnetic force-constant to the gravitational force-constant must be equally delicately balanced. Increase it by only one part in 10⁴⁰ and only small stars can exist; decrease it by the same amount and there will only be large stars. You must have both large and small stars in the universe: the large ones produce elements in their thermonuclear furnaces; and it is only the small ones that burn long enough to sustain a planet with life.

To use Davies' illustration, that is the kind of accuracy a marksman would need to hit a coin at the far side of the observable universe, twenty billion light years away. If we find that difficult to imagine, a further illustration suggested by astrophysicist Hugh Ross may help. Cover America with coins in a column reaching to the moon (380,000 km or 236,000 miles away), then do the same for one billion other continents of the same size. Paint one coin red and put it somewhere in one of the billion piles. Blindfold a friend and ask her to pick it out. The odds are about one in 10⁴⁰ that she will.

Although we are now in realms of precision far beyond anything achievable by instrumentation designed by humans, the cosmos still has more stunning surprises in store. It is argued that an alteration in the ratio of the expansion and contraction forces by as little as one part in 10⁵⁵ at the Planck time (just 10^-43 seconds after the origin of the universe), would have led either to too rapid an expansion of the universe with no galaxies forming or to too slow an expansion with consequent rapid collapse.

Yet even this example of precision-tuning is completely eclipsed by what is perhaps the most mind-boggling example of all. Our universe is a universe in which entropy (a measure of disorder) is increasing: a fact which is enshrined in the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Eminent mathematician Sir Roger Penrose writes: “Try to imagine the phase space … of the entire universe. Each point in this phase space represents a different possible way that the universe might have started off. We are to picture the Creator, armed with a 'pin' – which is to be placed at some point in the phase space … Each different positioning of the pin provides a different universe. Now the accuracy that is needed for the Creator's aim depends on the entropy of the universe that is thereby created. It would be relatively 'easy' to produce a high entropy universe, since then there would be a large volume of the phase space available for the pin to hit. But in order to start off the universe in a state of low entropy – so that there will indeed be a second law of thermodynamics – the Creator must aim for a much tinier volume of the phase space. How tiny would this region be, in order that a universe closely resembling the one in which we actually live would be the result?”

His calculations lead him to the remarkable conclusion that the “Creator's aim” must have been accurate to one part in 10 to the power of 10¹²³, that is 1 followed by 10¹²³ zeros, a “number which it would be impossible to write out in the usual decimal way, because even if you were able to put a zero on every particle in the universe there would not even be enough particles to do the job.”

Faced with not one, but many such spectacular to examples of fine-tuning, it is perhaps not surprising that Paul Davies says, “The impression of design is overwhelming.” [pp. 70, 71]