Ben writes:
...and that it will take some learning about how the brain works in order for you to understand why.
Ok...let's tackle this one topic...
It seems to me that you're basically conclusing that mind (or consciousness) is a function of matter -- matter that has attained a certain degree of organization.
Am I correct with that assumption?
If so, some neurosurgurians in the field has concluded otherwise.
For example, Wilder Penfield actually changed his mind on this very topic based on his own investigations into neurological connections. Penfield is actually considerd the father of modern neurosurgury -- and he, like you, actually started off with the idea that consciousness somehow emanated from the neural activities of the brain.
Penfield writes:
Through my own scientific career, I, like other scientists, have struggled to prove that the brain accounts for the mind.
But through performing surgery on more than a thousand epileptic patients, he encountered concrete evidence that the brain and the mind are actually distinct from each other, although they clearly interact.
Lee Edward Travis writes:
Penfield would stimulate electrically the proper motor cortx of conscious patients and challenge them to keep one hand from moving when current was applied. The patient would seize his hand with the other hand and struggle to hold it still. Thus one hand under the control of the eletrical current and the other hand under the control of the patient's mind fought against each other.
There is positive evidence that consciousness and the self are not merely a physical process of the brain. We have experimental data where people's brains are electrically stimulatd in order to cause them to move their arms or legs, turn their heads or eyes, talk or swallow. And invariably the patient (each one) would respond by saying something like, "I didn't do that. You did."
In other words, the patient clearly thinks of himself as having an existence separate from his body. In fact, no matter how far Penfield probed the cerebral cortex, there was no place that he could find where an eletrical stimulation of the brain would cause a patient to "believe" or "decide".
There's been a lot of subsequent research beyond Penfield's research too.
For example, when Roger Sperry and his team studied the differences between the brain's right and left hemisphere, they too discovered that the mind has a causal power independent of the brain's activities. The work of Roger Sperry (and John Eccles) has shown us that the movements of consciousness trigger the patterns of neural events.
Another study showed a delay between the time an eletric shock was applied to the skin, its reaching the cerebral cortx, and the self conscious perception of it by the person. This too suggests that "the self" is more than just a machine that simply "reacts" to stimuli as it receives them.
Think about dreaming itself.
How exactly do researchers know that there are a certain eye movements when people are dreaming?
They had to wake them up and ask them. Researchers could watch the eyes move and read a printout of what was physically happening in the brain. They could correlate certain brain states with eye movements, but they they didn't know what was going on in the mind.
Researchers can certainly know about the brain by studying it, but they can't know about the mind without asking the person to reveal it. It seems to me as though this is because "conscious states" have the feature of being inner and private whereas "brain states" don't.
The details of the neurophysiology of the brain can easilly be viewed as merely footprints (in a physical medium) of non-physical, non-genetic supersensible realities connected to the activity of human consciousness. In fact, it seems as though the evidence currently points towards the view that consciousness exists independently of the brain.
As one researcher exploring the possibility of life after death explained it, the brain might serve as a mechanism to manifest the mind - much in the same way a television set manifests pictures and sounds from waves in the air. If an injury to the brain causes a person to lose some aspects of his mind or personanilty, this doesn't necessarilly prove that the brain was the source of the mind. All it shows is that the apparatus is damaged.
Consequently, as recent research into autistic behavior has noted, their consciousness is quite intact all along. In fact, they're often quite aware of what's going on. It's the neurological wiring that messing up their physical actions -- not their consciousness messing up their physical actions.
Observe:
Mind Tree Poems
How Does the Autistic Brain Work?
Incidently, the research of Ramachandran is rather interesting. I'll read more of it when I have a chance. From such observations, some have drawn the inference that the left temporal lobe is either (a) the seat of a God-given human faculty for experiencing the divine or (b) the seat of religious delusions.
However, I will note that Ramachandran is also careful to note that patients may in fact be experiencing God ” so who can say? Either way -- the brain still appears to be somewhat separate from consciousness.
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