The brain and consciousness

Canadian psychologist Barry Beyerstein published an article with the same title as this post, and an additional subheading that indicates that he is opposing extrasensory perception (ESP), telekinesis (TK) and other supposedly paranormal phenomena. However, he takes the opportunity to attack the existence of the human soul and the existence of God (although he never names God), and launchs a confession of faith in the identity of mind and brain (Psychoneural Identity, PNI); i.e., the monist theory, although he does not say whether he prefers the reductionist or the emergentist version of monism. In support of this, he offers the following arguments:

Theories about self-consciousness

Svetlana before the mirror
Painting by Karl Briuliov

As I have said in other posts in this blog, the question of self-consciousness is more philosophical than scientific. In this regard, two great philosophical theories have coexisted since time immemorial:

·         Monism: Everything we can perceive, including consciousness, can be explained in terms of a single component: matter, in the broadest sense of the term, which also includes energy. In turn, monism can be classified into two different theories:

o   Reductionist Monism: It asserts that the entire functioning of the universe has a bottom-up explanation. In other words, if we knew enough about elementary particles and their properties, we could explain everything, including self-consciousness.

o   Emergentist Monism: It asserts that the lower level does not explain everything that happens at the higher level, since there are properties (including self-awareness) that only have a top-down explanation. That is to say, complex systems can have a behavior unpredictable in the bottom-up direction.

Downloading consciousness

If we could download our consciousness in a computer or a robot, we could go on living indefinitely inside the hardware and thus achieve immortality. This is what some futurists and supporters of transhumanism hold. But is there any chance that this will come true?

If this were possible, we could also keep backup copies. Thus, in the event of an accident, the dead person could be retrieved and put back into operation with minimal memory loss. As usual, science fiction arrived there first, as in Cory Doctorow's novel Down and out in the Magic Kingdom.

Physics and Free Will

In the January 2021 issue of Physics World appeared an article entitled Why free will is beyond physics. This article, written by British science writer Philip Ball, is clearly anti-reductionist and says things like these:

“Free will” is not ruled out by physics – because it doesn’t stem from physics in the first place.

If physics can disprove free will, then it must override everything else too, even evolution.

But is free will really undermined by the determinism of physical law? I think such arguments are not even wrong; they are simply misconceived. They don’t recognize how cause and effect work, and by attempting to claim too much jurisdiction for fundamental physics they are not really scientific but metaphysical.

Science or philosophy

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

In a previous post, speaking about intelligence, I mentioned that there are four incompatible philosophical theories that try to explain the phenomenon of human consciousness. I summarize them briefly here:

1.     Reductionist monism or biological functionalism: The mind is completely determined by the brain and by the network of neurons that makes it. The human mind is an epiphenomenon. Freedom of choice is an illusion. We are programmed machines.

2.     Emergent monism: The mind is an emergent evolutionary product with self-organization, which has emerged as a complex system from simpler systems made up by neurons. Some argue that the underlying structures cannot completely determine the evolution of the mental phenomena. These, however, would be able to influence the underlying structures.

3.     Neuro-physiologic dualism: Mind and brain are different, but they are so closely connected that they make up a unit, two complementary and unique states of the same organism.

4.     Metaphysical dualism: Mind and brain are two different realities. The first is spiritual and non-spatial, capable of interacting with the brain, which is a material and spatial substance. Both entities can exist independently of one another, although the body without the mind eventually decomposes.

The problem of human intentionality

A few weeks ago I had in another blog a debate that confronted me with three militant atheists who stood for materialist monism, which holds, among other things, that we are determined by our neurons, that consciousness is an irrelevant epiphenomenon and that free will is an illusion. In another post in this blog I have touched on that topic, mentioning the four philosophical theories that try to explain the conscience, one of which is materialist monism.

This is the argument I offered to defend dualism against materialistic monism:

Let’s tackle the problem of human intentionality. When I say: I'm going to lend money to the bank, so I’ll be paid interest, I’m saying that the reason why I’ll lend money to the bank is to get interest. This is the kind of cause that Aristotle called a final cause, because it is the goal toward which my action is directed, something that is located in the future. On the other hand, materialist monism says that the only cause of our actions is in the electric discharges of our neurons. This is what Aristotle called an efficient cause. Therefore, to explain the same phenomenon (my lending money to the bank), we are suggested two different causes: my intention and the sparks in my neurons, this second located in the present, the first in the future. Is this possible?

On intelligence

In his book On intelligence Jeff Hawkins writes this:

Francis Crick wrote a book about brains called The astonishing hypothesis. The astonishing hypothesis was simply that the mind is the creation of the cells in the brain. There is nothing else, no magic, no special sauce, only neurons and a dance of information... In calling this a hypothesis, Crick was being politically correct. That the cells in our brain create the mind is a fact, not a hypothesis. We need to understand what these thirty billion cells do and how they do it.

Wonderful! On the one hand, he states that it is a fact, not a hypothesis, that the neurons of the brain create the mind. On the other, he accepts that we don’t know what they do, or how they do it. How does Hawkins know this for a fact, not a hypothesis? By infused knowledge? How was he able to detect that fact? Are there any arguments to support it? He gives none, he just asserts. Is this good science?