I initially thought I would really like this article on consiousness after death. I did not. The guy comes off as a complete crackpot, given my understanding of neurobiology. (Although I won’t dispute his overall point, nor would many here, I think, that we continue to exist for a bit after we are legally dead.) I would appreciate anyone who is so motivated to look up some things on why a lot of the things he says are completely bogus. I replied to the person who sent me this article with a fairly superficial analysis, but if anyone knows of some solid studies on this, I would like to know. I will paste what I’ve written below:
The guy sounds progressively more insane as the article goes on. And progressively more like he doesn’t know things that I learned in my intro to neurobiology class, which makes me question his credentials a bit.
That being said, he’s definitely correct in that the vast majority of evidence does not suggest that consciousness stops at the moment of death, and, in fact, suggests the opposite. I’m glad someone is doing the research into this stuff, but I do wish it weren’t this guy.
For some specifics:
“All the evidence we have shows an association between certain parts of the brain and certain mental processes. But it’s a chicken and egg question: Does cellular activity produce the mind, or does the mind produce cellular activity?”
This has been pretty conclusively proven. They’ve stuck electrodes in peoples brains and turned them on and forced them to raise their arms against their “will”. I don’t think this leaves much room for doubt in this instance.
“Scientists have come to believe that the self is brain cell processes, but there’s never been an experiment to show how cells in the brain could possibly lead to human thought. If you look at a brain cell under a microscope, and I tell you, “this brain cell thinks I’m hungry,” that’s impossible.”
Things like this makes it sound like he’s confused about the entire subject of neurobiology… That is impossible because no single cell is ever responsible for signalling that. Or anything close to that complex. Thoughts are interactions of whole complexes of cells. To take an analogy to the visual cortex, that would be like saying a single rod “thinks” that a laptop is in front of me right now, when that’s the combined activity of millions of rods (and cones) and the cells that are connected to them, and the layers and layers of abstraction and processing of that input that goes on beyond that. And the pruning of these branches makes a huge difference in all of this. The way you actually learn what a face is is that your face learns that neurons 5a, 5c, 5d, and 5e need to be firing while neurons 5b, 5f, and 5g aren’t means it’s likely a face pattern. (In turn, 5a is turned on or off by the combination of 4a, 4b, and 4c, and so on, etc.)
In a wild generalization, the way neurological development works, you start out with the neurological connections to pattern match anything you’re exposed to effectively anything (Say you’re exposed to things that look like Picasso paintings very very often, you’d get good at recognizing them and seeing them as normal). Those pathways that aren’t commonly used die, and you’re only left with the pathways that recognize the patterns that you’re exposed to a lot. Which is why you’re really good at recognizing faces (absurdly absurdly good, when you think about it) but don’t instantly analyze the same subtle details of, say, a couch.
“It could be that, like electromagnetism, the human psyche and consciousness are a very subtle type of force that interacts with the brain, but are not necessarily produced by the brain. The jury is still out.”
I honestly just think he’s pattern matching with the category “scientific sounding phrases”. Electromagnetism is the least subtle physical force (ie. the strongest), when you throw out the strong and weak nuclear forces. Gravity is actually the weakest force we know of, (it’s like 10 times weaker than magnetism I think?) but he sounds like an idiot if you replace “electromagnetism” with “gravity”. And rightly so. But he does it because, to the lay reader “electromagnetism” sounds mysterious and scientific, and “gravity” sounds dull and obvious.
And he never goes on to explain why we haven’t detected this “force” with any instrumentation, even though it would be wildly easier to detect than to fully explain the interactions of all of the neurons in our brain. “It could be” that deep inside the atoms and quarks of every cell in our brains there is a tiny midget who is controlling what they do with puppet strings. But the sheer insanity of that being the way the world actually works makes me believe that it is a priori so absurdly unlikely as to not be worth considering without some really conclusive evidence.
“All the evidence we have shows an association between certain parts of the brain and certain mental processes. But it’s a chicken and egg question: Does cellular activity produce the mind, or does the mind produce cellular activity?”
Say you want to raise your arm. Your intent will initiate the mental processes required. We don’t know how the subjective thinking of ”Ｒａｉｓｅ ａｒｍ！” initiates cellular processes. Intent may be related to a function of the parietal cortex, but how thinking something initiates cellular process we are unsure of. To this they refer.
The brain produces an electromagnetic field. They were hypothesising that the field has a reciprocal effect on the cells that produce it, and this effect is ‘consciousness’ or whatever our subjective experience communicates to initiate an action. Maybe when we can clone a human brain with green fluorescent protein we’ll find out all neurones initiate other neurones, thus we function. We don’t know yet.
I’d beware of dismissing an expert of a field in which one has no domain expertise—check or ask first. This is the corollary to trusting experts too much.
I initially thought I would really like this article on consiousness after death. I did not. The guy comes off as a complete crackpot, given my understanding of neurobiology. (Although I won’t dispute his overall point, nor would many here, I think, that we continue to exist for a bit after we are legally dead.) I would appreciate anyone who is so motivated to look up some things on why a lot of the things he says are completely bogus. I replied to the person who sent me this article with a fairly superficial analysis, but if anyone knows of some solid studies on this, I would like to know. I will paste what I’ve written below:
Say you want to raise your arm. Your intent will initiate the mental processes required. We don’t know how the subjective thinking of ”Ｒａｉｓｅ ａｒｍ！” initiates cellular processes. Intent may be related to a function of the parietal cortex, but how thinking something initiates cellular process we are unsure of. To this they refer.
The brain produces an electromagnetic field. They were hypothesising that the field has a reciprocal effect on the cells that produce it, and this effect is ‘consciousness’ or whatever our subjective experience communicates to initiate an action. Maybe when we can clone a human brain with green fluorescent protein we’ll find out all neurones initiate other neurones, thus we function. We don’t know yet.
I’d beware of dismissing an expert of a field in which one has no domain expertise—check or ask first. This is the corollary to trusting experts too much.