{"id":2090,"date":"2014-09-08T11:35:20","date_gmt":"2014-09-08T15:35:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/intentchopra\/?p=2090"},"modified":"2014-09-08T11:35:20","modified_gmt":"2014-09-08T15:35:20","slug":"getting-real-about-brain-science-a-challenge-to-the-current-model-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/intentchopra\/2014\/09\/getting-real-about-brain-science-a-challenge-to-the-current-model-part-2.html","title":{"rendered":"Getting Real About Brain Science\u2014A Challenge to the Current Model (Part 2)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Getting Real About Brain Science\u2014A Challenge to the Current Model (Part 2)<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

By Deepak Chopra, MD,<\/em> Bernardo Kastrup, PhD, <\/em>Menas C. Kafatos<\/em>\u00a0 PhD, and Rudolph Tanzi, PhD.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Brain research could someday hit a dead end if we do not address the basic question of what the brain truly is. Assuming that we know what the brain is won\u2019t work\u2014not forever. In the first part of this series the assumptions of neuroscience were held up to the light, and it turned out that almost everyone in the field believes, without question, that the brain is a physical object that produces thoughts and feelings. Without this physical object ticking away inside our skulls, we wouldn\u2019t have a mind–so the currently dominant belief system goes.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

It seems outrageous, then, for philosophy to come along and say, no, you don\u2019t know this at all. You are stating a working assumption as if it were a fact.\u00a0 Change your assumption, and all the beautiful data that has been gathered by brain science, although still very useful, will look entirely different. As one scientific paradigm breaks down and a new one replaces it, all assumptions become vulnerable, all knowledge becomes open-ended. There are a lot of unstated assumptions in the current view.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Let\u2019s imagine that a brain scientist has been backed into a corner by this argument. He can always say, \u201cDon\u2019t bother me. I\u2019m an expert, and I know what I\u2019m doing.\u201d But if the cornered brain scientist takes the argument seriously, he can push back on several rational fronts. He might say the following:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cYou claim that the old paradigm doesn\u2019t work anymore, but thousands of useful findings are being produced. There\u2019s no end in sight. Treating the brain as the thing that creates the mind is enormously productive. You can\u2019t deny it.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

True, but imagine a sailor before Copernicus. \u201cThe sun still rises in the East and sets in the West. Because that\u2019s a fact, my ship can go anywhere in the world navigating by the sun. You can\u2019t deny it.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The sailor thinks he\u2019s talking about a fact of reality, as does the brain scientist. As long as a paradigm is useful, it won\u2019t collapse. But this doesn\u2019t mean its assumptions are undeniable. The Copernican revolution took place when someone looked beyond practicality and saw that putting the sun at the center of the planetary system gave much better calculations of how the moon, stars, and planets moved. (It actually took the later work of Galileo and Newton to make the Copernican system more precise than what came before.) \u00a0In the case of brain science, there will be much better knowledge about the mind once we question the assumption that the brain is a physical thing that produces mind. Here are the reasons for why the brain-as-mind model is crumbling.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

    \n
  1. The model is self-referential.\u00a0 The very thing you need to define (the brain) is also the thing doing the defining.<\/li>\n
  2. Quantity isn\u2019t the same as quality. Water feels wet. You can\u2019t explain this quality by weighing water, breaking it down into its elements of hydrogen and oxygen, or splitting oxygen and hydrogen into even smaller bits. The experience of wetness will elude you no matter how many measurements you take.<\/li>\n
  3. Experience consists of a constant stream of qualities. At this moment you see colors, feel temperature, detect movement in the air, and so on. No amount of brain measurements will get at any of these qualities, just as weighing a liter of water will never tell you why it feels wet.<\/li>\n
  4. Mapping the brain is not sufficient to understand a qualitative experience, since everything we know about the brain is an experience<\/em>. \u00a0The brain is gelatinous, dark, gray, moist, and zapping with tiny electrical shocks. Those qualities are simply there, like the hardness of a rock. You can\u2019t get beyond them, and yet you need to if you want to know what\u2019s real<\/em>.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

     <\/p>\n

    This last point is the toughest, so let\u2019s go into it. The sun is bright. The brain is dark. Is the brightness of the sun produced by the darkness of the brain? Neuroscience says it is, but clearly it can\u2019t be. \u00a0If you put the brain to your tongue, it will have its own taste. But in that taste you won\u2019t find sugar, salt, chocolate, fish and chips, etc. As long as you stay inside the brain\u2019s thingness, the vast range of color, taste, sight, sound, and smells that constitute our experience of reality cannot be explained. \u00a0Many cultures have a saying that the eye cannot see itself. This is a metaphor that applies to the brain: If everything we know is produced by the brain, we are trapped inside its processes. Any attempt would be just another brain process.<\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n

    This seems to give our cornered brain scientist a way out. \u201cAha, if I can\u2019t get outside my brain, neither can you. So I don\u2019t have to consider anything you say.\u201d This would be a solid refutation if no one could go beyond the brain. Likewise, if fish couldn\u2019t jump out of the sea, they wouldn\u2019t be able to find out whether the ocean is wet. Forever trapped inside the thing they want to examine, they hit a dead end.<\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n

    So brain science can\u2019t be challenged unless we can get outside the brain. Copernicus made his breakthrough by getting outside the limitation of seeing the sun rise and set every day. But he didn\u2019t get outside the brain, which is much harder to do, nor did Einstein, Heisenberg, and other modern geniuses we look to to explain reality. But they actually said one profound thing that current brain science does not always consider: The world is in the mind, not the other way around.<\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n

    In order to get outside the brain\u2014meaning outside the picture of reality that the brain produces\u2014requires a new paradigm. That\u2019s really the nub of the matter. The old paradigm is comfortable staying inside the brain, using its processes to explain everything else, giving the brain a privileged position in the entire universe: it\u2019s the one physical object that can think. This is like giving God a privileged position in the Book of Genesis\u2014God is the one thing in the universe that didn\u2019t have to be created.<\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n

    The new paradigm stops turning the brain into God. It\u2019s obvious that the brain had to be created, and whatever did that isn\u2019t the brain. Once this obvious fact is accepted, a better set of ideas can be accepted at the same time.<\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n

      \n
    1. The brain, being an ordinary physical object, doesn\u2019t create mind, which isn\u2019t physical. (Is it just gray gel infused with chemicals and electromagnetic signals that makes you love your children or want to look good on your next date?)<\/li>\n
    2. Something beyond the brain creates the experience of the world. The brain, in fact, is just another experience, so it is disqualified as the creator.<\/li>\n
    3. Once you throw out the brain as the creator of experience, it\u2019s plausible that the mind creates experience. There\u2019s no reason to disbelieve this, and every reason to believe it, since all experiences are mental.<\/li>\n
    4. Getting outside the brain is easy once you accept that the mind is running the show.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

       <\/p>\n

      Our cornered brain scientist is someone with intellectual integrity. He\u2019s not going to squirm away by refusing to listen or stubbornly insisting on false assumptions. We have him sweating now, but he hasn\u2019t run out of denials. \u201cClever thinking, but you have no facts in your new paradigm. You just have ideas, and without facts, backed up by experimental data, an idea might as well be a fantasy.\u201d<\/p>\n

       <\/p>\n

      This would be true if mind were just another assumption like assuming the brain can think. Clearly mind isn\u2019t an assumption. Mind is our portal to the real. In fact, the mind is the only <\/em>portal to the real. You can\u2019t step outside it. \u00a0Yet facts are necessary to science\u2014meaning measurements and data\u2014which makes it hard for philosophy and its method of pure thinking, to make headway. In the first post we focused on an article in the journal Cell<\/em><\/a> that defended the brain as the one and only route to explaining consciousness. The rationale behind the article was that in time, the mass of findings collected about the brain will improve, becoming more sophisticated and complex, and thus the riddle of consciousness will be unraveled, thread by thread. So the story goes. But science is also based on theory, and we still have no viable theory demonstrating that the mind is produced by neural circuitry in the brain.<\/p>\n

       <\/p>\n

      To believe that the riddle of consciousness will be unraveled is to mistake a correlate for a cause. It\u2019s absolutely true that every mental event has a corresponding physical event in the brain. The way the process looks carries valid information about the process. <\/em>Flames carry valid information about combustion because they are the way combustion looks when observed from the outside; not the cause of combustion. In exactly the same way, brain states carry valid information about subjective experience because they are the way subjective experience looks when observed from the outside. But they are not the cause of subjective experience.<\/em><\/p>\n

       <\/p>\n

      And it doesn\u2019t matter how complicated the correlations get. A major focus in neuroscience is to assess cross-talk among various areas of the brain with increasing granularity, on the underlying assumption that this will get us closer to understanding consciousness. But will it? This would be similar to stating that the integrated circuitry inside your TV creates your favorite show. This we know would be an absurd assumption, as absurd as the Earth being flat just because the ground near us to appears flat.<\/p>\n

       <\/p>\n

      Instead of looking upon back-and-forth communication between different brain regions\u2014so-called \u2018reverberation\u2019\u2014as a cause<\/em> of consciousness, the new paradigm would view it as a mechanism of amplification <\/em>of certain contents of consciousness.<\/p>\n

       <\/p>\n

      Insofar as it increases the footprint of certain subjective states, reverberation can indeed be viewed as a form of amplification. Instead of looking upon different neural processes as either conscious or unconscious, one would see them as either amplified<\/em> or obfuscated<\/em>, respectively.\u00a0 The moment certain contents of consciousness become amplified, they naturally obfuscate other contents, the way the sun obfuscates the stars at noon. Obfuscated contents are still in consciousness, for the same reason that the stars are still in the sky at noon. Instead of looking upon decisions that precede (amplified) awareness as the deterministic outcome of unconscious neural processes, one would see them as choices made by (obfuscated) consciousness.<\/p>\n

       <\/p>\n

      Indeed, what the Cell<\/em> paper calls \u2018consciousness\u2019 is, under this alternative way of seeing, simply a particular, amplified segment<\/em> of consciousness. The so-called \u2018unconscious\u2019 is, in turn, merely the obfuscated segment of consciousness\u2014there is no actual unconscious. This is easy to see: For the past several minutes your breathing\u2014the feeling of the air flowing in and out of your lungs\u2014has been an obfuscated content of your consciousness, which now becomes amplified as you read this sentence. Were you truly unconscious of your breathing just a moment ago? Or was the consciousness of your breathing merely obfuscated while your focus was on reading this article? What the Cell <\/em>paper calls \u2018unconscious\u2019 neural processes are simply what obfuscated processes in consciousness look like from the outside.<\/p>\n

       <\/p>\n

      Now we can solve one of the world\u2019s great mysteries. How can mystical experience\u2014seeing angels, connecting with God, hearing the voice of your soul\u2014be real? There is no problem with them being real if, like breathing, other experiences are obfuscating, or blocking them out. Remove the obstructions, and consciousness can naturally include so-called mystical experiences.<\/p>\n

       <\/p>\n

      If you enter an expanded state of consciousness, as saints, swamis, seers, yogis and according to many scientific accounts dying persons are said to do, your reality shifts. \u00a0Suddenly you experience certain things that were always there but blocked from view. The fact that the reality we experience is different in different states of consciousness indicates that reality is consciousness-dependent. Saints feel God\u2019s presence everywhere; swamis have detected the self that is beyond ego; seers perceive what lies behind the veil of appearances; yogis rest in pure Being. \u00a0And dying persons, in fact those who clinically died but came back, report experiences that are quite similar to one another\u2019s. These are facts in their states of consciousness. Something real is known, and on that knowledge a solid foundation can be built, leading to a revolution in science.<\/p>\n

       <\/p>\n

      Hearing this, our cornered brain scientist would probably be dazed and confused. He might sink to the floor with his head in his hands. \u201cYou\u2019re destroying real science with your damn philosophy.\u201d After a while he\u2019ll recover his composure, at which point he\u2019ll go back to his normal way of doing things\u2014but then where is his intellectual integrity?\u00a0 The new paradigm may look outrageous from the viewpoint of the old. Even so, it\u2019s the duty of science to take it seriously. This is how science progresses, by shunning hidden dogmas and stolid belief systems. Outworn assumptions are reaching their expiration date. We need to admit this to ourselves and move on. A higher, more useful science is waiting in the wings.<\/p>\n

       <\/p>\n

      Deepak Chopra<\/strong>, MD is the author of more than 80 books with twenty-two New York Times bestsellers including Super Brain, co-authored with Rudolph Tanzi, PhD. He serves as the founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing.<\/p>\n

       <\/p>\n

      Bernardo Kastrup<\/strong> has a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering and has worked as a scientist in some of the world’s foremost research laboratories, including the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and the Philips Research Laboratories (where the “Casimir Effect” of Quantum Field Theory was discovered). He has authored many scientific papers and four philosophy books: Rationalist Spirituality, Dreamed up Reality, Meaning in Absurdity, and Why Materialism Is Baloney. This latter book is a grand synthesis of his metaphysical views. Bernardo has also been an entrepreneur and founder of two high-tech businesses. Today, he holds a managerial position in the high-tech industry. In parallel, he maintains a philosophy blog, an audio\/video podcast, and continues to develop his ideas about the nature of reality. Bernardo has lived and worked in four different countries across continents. He currently resides in the Netherlands.<\/p>\n

       <\/p>\n

      Menas C. Kafatos<\/strong>\u00a0is the Fletcher Jones Endowed Professor of Computational Physics at Chapman University. He is a quantum physicist, cosmologist, climate change researcher, and works and writes extensively on consciousness and the above fields. His doctoral thesis advisor was noted M.I.T. professor Philip Morrison who studied under J. Robert Oppenheimer. He is co-author with Deepak Chopra of the forthcoming book, Who Made God and Other Cosmic Riddles. (Harmony)<\/p>\n

       <\/p>\n

      Rudolph Tanzi, PhD<\/strong> is the Director of the Genetics and Aging Research Unit and Vice-Chair of Neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital. He is also serves as the Joseph P. and Rose F. Kennedy Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Tanzi co-discovered three of the four known Alzheimer\u2019s disease genes and currently directs the Cure Alzheimer\u2019s Fund \u201cAlzheimer\u2019s Genome Project.\u201d He is co-founder of several biotech companies, including Prana Biotechnology. He also co-authored the popular trade books \u201cDecoding Darkness\u201d with Ann Parson and the New York Times Bestseller, \u201cSuper Brain\u201d with Dr. Deepak Chopra.<\/p>\n

       <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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