Perhaps the greatest mystery of human experience is consciousness itself.
Today the fields of neuroscience and neurotechnology
provide astounding insights into the electrical
and chemical processes of the brain.
Consequently, institutional science proposes with confidence
that the brain alone creates conscious experience.
Yet despite all that science has learned,
the very source and essence of consciousness remains mysterious.
As discussed in previous videos, a growing body of scientific research suggests
that consciousness simply cannot be reduced to the components of the brain.
Thunderbolts colleague Dr. Michael Clarage shares with us his thoughts
on the enduring mysteries of consciousness beginning with the question:
has the theory that consciousness is confined to and generated by the brain,
been settled scientifically?
Science tells us that the cerebral cortex turns matter into consciousness.
There are however, these strange examples in medical history,
shocking, really exceptional cases that really call into question
everything that we think we know about the brain.
In very rough terms, the human brain is composed of 3 layers.
The most internal parts are sometimes referred to as the reptilian brain
since reptiles have mostly only this inner part developed.
And it controls the basics of eating, breathing, sleeping, moving, etc.
The second layer is usually called the mammalian brain.
It gets its name because most mammals have this second layer also developed
and it seems to be this layer is involved with herd instincts,
instinctive parental love, emotions such as those...
And then there's this outer layer of the brain
and then in human it's this giant cerebral cortex,
these double lobes that we are told makes us unique in the animal kingdoms
by allowing us to have such things as a sense of individuality,
logical thinking, the ability to have abstract concepts, etc.
But then you come across these odd cases.
And I found several of these in London medical journals from the 19th century.
And these people were described as completely ordinary,
responsible, hard-working, productive English citizens
but when they were examined after death it was found that their cerebral cortex
was as thin as a sheet of paper
and the rest of the brain cavity was just filled with fluid.
So we're forced to admit that to get on in life,
at least as a British man in the 19th century,
you don't need much of a cerebral cortex.
So if this massive outer part of our brain
is not necessary for the demands of ordinary life,
then what is it therefore?
It's difficult to convey how inadequate
contemporary neurology is to explain this question.
It's hard to overstate how inadequate the neo-darwinian notions
of random variation and natural selection are to explain this.
Our brains are completely over-engineered for the demands of daily life.
It's like someone says; "here, look at this device I built
for doing simple calculations of addition and subtraction."
And you look at it and you see the entire computer network used by NASA.
And you would say:
"I think this is a little over- engineered for addition and subtraction."
So what does this all mean?
I mean, does it mean that in the past our brains were required
to do much more difficult tasks?
Does it mean that each of us is walking around on this planet
with this vast unused potential sitting inside of us?
The materialist worldview states that the only reality in this world
is what we can see and touch and weigh in a scale.
And that all cause and all effect is material.
Now this is a very successful model of the universe
in the sense that it has powered the Industrial and Technological Revolutions
that have completely changed life on the earth over the last 300 years.
But what many people do not talk about, in all this,
is that the definition of what is material
has changed quite a bit over those 300 years
So picture yourself in 1850.
Michael Faraday, he's struggling to understand
these strange invisible forces of electricity and magnetism
and the effects being observed in the laboratory
cannot be explained by any known forms of matter.
And so, Faraday creates this idea, this model of a field
and in this case electric fields and magnetic fields
and you cannot see or touch this field.
You cannot hear it, you cannot weigh it in a scale.
And in 1850, that was pretty much the definition of a non-material cause.
And if you read the papers of Faraday and others that he was working with at that time,
they had a lot of reservations about the whole notion of introducing
what was then a non-material cause.
So now we fast forward to the present day
and that we see even the purest materialist accepts
this invisible non- material electric field
as a necessary part of the materialist description.
What has happened is that the scientific community
has changed the definition of materiality.
And I am okay with this.
And I firmly believe that 50 years from now,
we will know about forms of materiality that we cannot now imagine.
I think that many of the arguments about the brain and matter and consciousness
are either just (boring words) boring arguments about words or arguments
because some people do not know enough about the history of scientific ideas.
So today some people are arguing that you must explain
everything about consciousness in terms of what we currently know about biochemistry.
And well, that would be like telling people in Faraday's time
that they must explain everything in their lab
in terms of the physics of billiard balls.
Very few people today are brave enough to admit that
almost all the properties of consciousness
are not at all explained by what we currently know about biochemistry.
I myself do not argue about the dichotomy of material versus non-material
when discussing psychological functions like thought, feeling and sensation.
What we know now about biochemistry is insufficient to explain
even the most basic aspects of thought and feeling and perception.
We are in need of some new ideas about matter and materiality
in order to move this question forward.
Our current understanding of matter is insufficient.
A primary element of human identity is memory.
Neuroscience tells us that memories are physically stored in brain cells.
Does this simplistic theory really explain the complex mysteries of memory?
Yeah, so this question of whether memories are stored in specific brain cells,
this idea has been bounced around for decades and sometimes it's phrased as,
what is the material analog to a memory being formed?
Or what is the material trace to a memory being formed?
Or in this case, this recent article claiming that it's specific cells
that somehow store the memory.
I am fine with the idea that there are changes to the brain
that correspond to our memories.
That's how the brain works.
There are changes to the brain that correspond to learning a new skill.
There are changes to the brain that occur when you learn a new language
or learn how to play music.
So when you learn how to play the violin,
there are very clearly observable physical changes in the brain.
There's also though, very clearly observable changes to the hand
when you learn to play the violin.
The muscles, the nerves, even the blood vessels of the hand all change
when you learn how to play the violin.
And if you were to surgically remove those changes from the hand,
then the person could no longer play the violin.
So does that mean that the memory of how to play the violin resides in the hand?
I think this is worth pondering.
The most controversial aspect of consciousness research
seeks to test the validity of psychic phenomena.
We asked Dr. Clarage for his thoughts
on the scientific strength of so-called psy-research.
I often have problem with this, this whole set of questions
because really, there is an excess of evidence, there's a surfeit of evidence,
there are dozens of clear examples of experiments done by
Dean Radin, Rupert Sheldrake Dr. Gary Schwartz,
showing the non-locality of consciousness.
And these are double-blind studies with sound statistical analysis.
And in some cases, the few that I looked at,
some of their experiments, the results are more statistically certain
than the clinical trials have to be in order to get a new drug released.
So I don't know why such criteria would be okay to show that a drug works
but not okay to show that consciousness has some aspects of nonlocality.
And then also, there's my personal experience in this whole arena,
which I know that a lot of other people have.
I often know who's calling me before I pick up the phone.
I, now and then, get a very clear feeling of something
(that) intense that has happened to someone that I love
even though we're separated by a lot of space in between us.
And I don't think I need some
set of self-proclaimed materialists to tell me that I'm delusional
or that the other people I know are delusional
when (then), when this sort of experience
is actually something that forms part of the fabric of my daily life.
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