what are you are you an emergent property or function of brain chemistry are you just a complicated arrangement of particles is everything you are just the result of the activity of neurons the popular narrative is that consciousness is somehow created by the brain and everything we think dreamer feel is just a result of brain chemistry however very little data supports this notion and evidence is piling up that consciousness is not the result of brain activity but something more there is no greater mystery than the hard problem of consciousness how do mental experiences and consciousness itself
emerge from nonliving matter how is it that an organ made of mitochondria filled cells like your liver or kidney is able to generate consciousness thoughts in a sense of the mind despite the narrative in today's society that the brain creates consciousness we simply have no way to explain how this happens in 2005 the 125th anniversary issue of science journal ranked this is one of the biggest questions left unsolved neuroscientist John Eccles writes nowhere in the laws of physics or in the laws of the derivative sciences chemistry and biology is there any reference to consciousness or
mind Colin McGuinn says the problem with materialism is that it tries to construct the mind out of properties that refused to add up to mentality yay Gwang Kim says how could a series of physical events little particles jostling against one another electric current rushing to and fro and so on blossom all of a sudden into a conscious experience why should any experience merge for molecular biological processes the fact remains there is no explanation of how the mind or consciousness could arise from physical properties and there was a large amount of data that suggests consciousness is
not a creation of brain processes it was decades ago that neuroscientist Wilder Penfield began to discover hints of this applying an electrode to parts of the brain he could force patients to do several things he could cause arms to move involuntarily vocalize involuntarily as well as recall memories but there was an important exception in his studies he could not force patients to act involuntarily in other words he could not stimulate the will there is no place in the cerebral cortex where electrical stimulation will cause a patient to believe or to decide I am forced to
conclude that there is no valid evidence that either epileptic discharge or electrical stimulation can activate the mind Penfield argued there was a causal force missing within the brain that could account for the actions and intentions of the mind he argued the mind was not in the brain chemistry and cannot be explained by it none of the actions that we attribute to the mind has been initiated by electrode stimulation or epileptic discharge if there were a mechanism in the brain that could do what the mind does one might expect that the mechanism would betray its presence
in a convincing manner by some better evidence of epileptic or electrode activation Penfield spent much of his career searching for the physical basis of consciousness within the brain but such a connection was never found and Penfield had to admit this endeavor had failed although to this day various theories exist based on correlations found in the brain no proof for a physical basis of consciousness has been shown to exist the main problem is correlations between the brain and the conscious mind are expected to exist even if consciousness doesn't reduce the brain activity or functions on substance
dualism or idealism we would expect correlations in the brain with consciousness so correlations alone do not show the brain creates consciousness that is confusing correlation with causation correlations are what needs to be explained they alone are not evidence the mind is emergent in fact researchers have pointed out even if the brain creates consciousness our current methods and Technology are incapable of discovering it so in some physicalists assert the discovery of correlations in the brain is evidence the brain creates consciousness they are not being accurate with regards to the implications and limitations of these discoveries another
problem that is plagued neuroscience is how unified perceptions emerge for example different parts of the brain store information about the color of an object and different parts store information about the shape of an object yet there is no place where the brain combines this information into a unified perception this is called the visual binding problem where do brains combine information to form one unified perception like we subjectively experience in reality in 2013 a paper was published in the Journal of cognitive neurodynamics titled the neural binding problems and demonstrated from various studies that the visual system
of the brain has been completely mapped and there was no place that could be responsible for unifying perceptions this is not to say it hasn't been found yet instead the paper noted after the entire visual system was mapped no area could potentially cause subjective experiences and unify perceptions to quote from the paper directly there is now overwhelming biological and behavioral evidence that the brain contains no stable high resolution full field representation of a visual scene even though that is what we subjectively experience the structure of the primate visual system has been mapped in detail and
there is no area that could encode this detailed information the subjective experience is thus inconsistent with the neural circuitry with the entire visual system map we can see it as unlikely the brain could give rise to a unified subjective experience and therefore cannot explain how our perceptions emerge other hypotheses about like the possibility of finding neurons but such a model has never been shown to have any empirical evidence let alone unify perceptions thus a core issue of mind our subjective experiences cannot be explained by looking at the brain alone the popular misconception that evidence shows
consciousness or the mind arises from the brain is not actually true there are several holes that need to be filled if this hypothesis is going to have any weight even Michael Shermer has to admit that many Sciences are non falsifiable in the neuroscience surrounding consciousness is classified as such however arguing from the incompleteness of physicalist theories is not enough luckily we do have evidence that suggests consciousness may not even be contained to the brain let alone reduce the brain chemistry first numerous studies have shown that mental force or focusing of the self has real discernable
effects on brain chemistry in other words we do have evidence the mind can actively change the brain chemistry instead of just being a creation or effect of the brain let's go over the fact that the more we study neuroscience the more we realize the brain is referred to as plastic meaning throughout our lifetime the brain will change and adapt as a result of experience new pathways are constantly forming and being remade in order to deal with environmental changes for example in 2006 two neuroscientists published a study which argued the subjective experience of interacting with other
people's faces modifies to face perception neurons in the receivers brain the subjective experience we have can cause real physical changes in the brain so our experiences are shaping our brain chemistry other studies from various researchers ranging from experiments on animals to working with stroke victims and patients suffering from dyslexia suggest the brain is plastic and can be remapped and changed in a 2001 study stroke victims some who have been living for over 17 years with disabilities underwent constraint induced movement therapy and it created cortical remapping in the brain so what we do our experience can
change the brain chemistry however this can be seen to go one step further and how individuals can act to directly influence and change the chemical makeup of the brain in certain ways this has been seen in the work of neuroscientist Jeffers shorts who published studies working with OCD patients and demonstrated how mental effort can rewire brain chemistry from brain scans Schwartz found that certain parts of the brain displayed abnormal activity however when he would have the OCD patients engage in intense mental effort and focusing through what he labeled as relabeling Riya tributing refocusing and revaluing
he found that patients who underwent this mental focusing therapy experienced considerable relief from OCD symptoms especially the more they engaged but also their brain scans indicated a realignment of the abnormal brain activity without any external intervention OCD patients were directly able to reorganize and change their brain patterns by intentionally modifying their behavior and thoughts but most importantly the changes in the brain resulted from what Schwartz called mindful attention consciousness and thoughts changed and modified the brain which would seem odd if the mine was just an emergent creation or property of the brain it seems like
it should be the result of brain chemistry not have any causal powers over the brain however it seems the mind is capable of manipulating the brain in modifying the person that we want to be schwartz is not alone in his research other researchers have found direct mental effort can produce systemic changes in brain functioning in that with training and effort patients can alter neural circuitry as one study put it cognitive behavioral therapy has the potential to modify the dysfunctional neural circuitry associated with anxiety disorders they further indicate that the changes made at the mind level
within a psycho therapeutic context are able to functionally rewire the brain citing other research neuroscientists Mersey niche and a charm say this leaves us with a clear physiological fact moment by moment we choose and sculpt how our ever-changing minds will work we choose who we will be the next moment in a very real sense and these choices are left embossed in the physical form on our material selves neuroscientist John Eccles argue that physicalist models like identity theory have a difficult time explaining this as mental events cannot generate neural events however Eccles reports direct observation of
voluntary movements by an agent that precede neural events and there is no evidence of prior neural activity if consciousness or the mind is purely physical or a function or property of the physical then it should always have a physical basis if the evidence indicates that doesn't seem to be the case thus he argues as well as citing additional research that we have evidence of top-down causation in these later studies only support this inference an objection that has argued is that it is possible the same thing could be demonstrated with external passive stimulation instead of internal
mental focusing that you can cause the same changes in brain patterns just through prompts or forcing a subject to engage in a certain activity however Schwartz anticipates this incites a study from 1993 where a neuroscientist Moore's NH demonstrated that passive stimulation alone simply cannot mimic the same results as internal mental focusing Jeffery Schwartz says when stimuli identical to those that induce plastic changes in an attending brain are instead delivered to an on attending brain there is no induction of cortical plasticity attention in other words must be paid thus the self or the mind has real
power that cannot simply be mimicked with non-sentient stimulation or external causes a similar idea can be seen in this study where subjects were shown erotic films some are told to mentally focus to prevent sexual arousal and through mental efforts areas of the brain that focus on sexual attraction did not light up nearly as much as those that just passively watched and so the active group was able to actively change the dynamics of their own brain activity instead of just being a slave to it thus the paper concludes ontologically the present findings suggest that humans have
the capacity to influence the electrochemical dynamics of their brains by voluntarily changing the nature of the mind processes unfolding in the psychological space thus the self or mind seems to be a real ontological substance that can influence and change things on its own instead of being an emergent effect or a property of the brain finally going beyond this another interesting piece of data is found in studies which have shown mental personalities can cause and create real discernible changes in the brain and body in 2015 a study was published on a woman who suffered from dissociative
identity disorder also known as multiple personality disorder some of her alters claimed to be blind whereas the woman herself was not legally blind however through diagnostic tests researchers were able to verify visual evoked potentials were absent in the blind personality States but were normal and stable in the seeing States when a sighted altar returned normal brain activity returned so the mental personality determined the brain state and could literally remove the ability to see within the subjects brain in another study researchers performed fMRI brain scans on di D patients and actors attempting to simulate dissociative identity
disorder the results showed clear differences in the brain patterns of the di D patients between the different alters but not in the brain scans of the actors demonstrating mental personalities create real extrinsic changes in the brain observable changes in handedness and handwriting have been observed between different alters Phillip Coons reported one patient who had at least ten different handwriting scripts among her 24 personalities the appearance of allergies have shown up and disappeared between different alters of the same subject such as food allergies as well as cat allergies rashes as allergic responses have been observed to
appear when one alter was in control but not another Scott Miller cited one study and performed another where an ophthalmologist who was blind as to which patients were simulators in which were di D patients he found there was clinically significant optical differences between alter personalities across the two studies on several different measures such as visual acuity manifest refraction eye muscle balance visual fields pupil size color vision corneal curvature in intraocular pressure the study was replicated in 1991 with more subjects and confirmed the results of the previous studies that di D patients display physical in clinical
differences between alters although not all the same differences were observed but this would be expected as different personalities would create different physiological changes that would not necessarily be identical across subjects for years researchers have reported numerous observable changes between different alters of di D subjects even including skin changes but if personalities are a creation of the physical neurons in the brain they should be the effect of the physical makeup not precede and modify brain activity in the physical body in various ways however if the mind or mental aspects of the person are not reducible to
the chemistry of the brain this data would be expected mine actually precedes matter and can change the material arrangements in limited ways thus the data is piling up from numerous areas indicating the mind is not an effect or function of the brain but a real ontological substance that is not only irreducible but a real and active force that can change and modify the brain as neuroscientist John Eccles said the data strongly reinforces our belief in the human soul in its miraculous origin we are not soulless zombies or the mere effect of a physical brain we
are conscious self-aware Minds that go beyond the physical and the scientific evidence supports this conclusion
