The Mind vs. Brain Debate (What is Consciousness?

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Instructor ResourcesThe Cuyamungue Institute ForumThe Mind vs. Brain Debate
(What is Consciousness?)
by Christina Sarich
The mind vs. brain debate has been going on since before Aristotle. He and Plato
argued that the soul housed intelligence or wisdom and that it could not be
placed within the physical body. In a well-described version of dualism,
Descartes identifies mind with the consciousness and self-awareness of itself,
with an ability to distinguish itself from the brain, but still called the brain
the seat of intelligence.
In yogic science, the mind is considered to be pure vibrating energy. It is an
element (non-physical by nature) which conducts “thought” faster than the speed
of light and retains all experience whether consciously addressed by the thinker
or not. It can create substance from nothing. It contains the aura, or energy
body and can project to other minds, and receive from them also. It communicates
in the language of feeling. It has a profound effect on the energy level of the
physical body, which temporarily houses it, and has the capacity to heal its own
physical house as well as that of others. It is often referred to as a Spark of
the Divine or as a wave on the vast limitless ocean of the cosmic ever-present
possibility of what is. Our minds, due to their nature as a spark or wave of a
much greater, infinite intelligence, are capable of unbelievable things.
In yogic science, the brain is simply a physical manifestation of the mind
itself. This is a complex idea to grasp. Let us look at one profoundly odd
phenomenon to try to understand the mind/brain difference.
About 80% of people who have lost a limb due to accident or illness report
feeling excruciating pain, burning, aching, or even as though this absent part
of their bodies is being crushed even when it is no longer there. This is often
referred to as the phantom limb. The sensations of pain are created by the brain
and are experienced no differently than someone with a present limb.
This incredible phenomenon has stumped doctors for over a hundred years. Only
now are they beginning to understand, partly through research by Dr.
Ramachandran, that “the touch signals from the entire surface of your body are
mapped on the surface of your brain – in a strip between your two ears called
your sensory cortex. The area that ‘feels’ your hand is very close to the area
for your face.”
To make a complex phenomenon simple, when patients that were blind folded were
touched on the face, they felt corresponding feeling of being touched on the
phantom limb, say on the middle index finger. The feelings are very specific. In
order to eliminate the pain felt by the patient with the missing limb, Drs.
Giraux and Sirigu have shown that merely training patients to imagine their
paralyzed arms moving in relation to a moving arm on a screen in front of them
can relieve phantom limb pain. That posits an interesting set of questions. Is
it the mind feeling the limb, or the erroneous assumption of the brain? Why
would the brain feel something that wasn’t there? Is this true consciousness?
Consciousness Beyond the Brain
The human brain has three principal structures. The largest is the cerebrum and
is the center for intellectual functioning or reasoning. The cerebellum is the
second structure, located at the back of the skull. It helps us to stand tall
and not fall over. It is in charge of balance. The third structure is the
medulla, a stem leading into the spinal column, which helps to handle
involuntary tasks like respiration. These three structures work together to help
carry out the role of cognition, but they are not mind itself. Mind is not a
physical entity.
Although it is theorized that memories in the brain are just stored chemical
structures such as in a neural network, some doctors are pointing to evidence of
awareness once the physical structure of the brain is considered “dead.” Dr.
Peter Fenwick has studied the phenomenon of near-death experiences in his
patients and documented people’s accurate descriptions of what is happening in
the room after they have flat-lined and been pronounced clinically dead.
Peter Fenwick, M.D., F.R.C.Psych., is Senior Lecturer at the Institute of
Psychiatry, Kings College, London, and associated with the Mental Health Group
at the University of Southampton. He is also Consultant Neuropsychiatrist at the
Maudsley Hospital and at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford. His studies have
shown that across cultural differences, sex, age and type of death there are
remarkable experiences reported with many similarities by patients who
experience near-death.
Some have argued that near-death experiences could have been caused by chemical
reactions in the brain due to drugs being given at the time of death; however,
“Thirty-seven percent of our respondents reportedly were receiving drugs at the
time of their NDEs, and 63 percent were not. So the theory that NDEs are all
drug induced could not be correct. About two thirds had their NDEs during
illness, operations, childbirth, or accidents. Two percent occurred in suicide
attempts and 20 percent in other circumstances that included anxiety states,
dreams, relaxation states, or quite spontaneously in the normal course of life.”
1 Neuroscience maintains that conscious experience is not possible during
physical unconsciousness, so that leads to the question of mind or consciousness
being something alive beyond the confines of brain death.
More double blind, randomized, controlled trials on many aspects of spiritual
medicine are being conducted, many with the focus of determining the locality of
consciousness. But with the ideas of Fenwick and others, the medical world is
not the only field of science asking questions about consciousness. Physicists
have been asking this question too. In his last autobiographic paper, Einstein
wrote: “. . .the discovery is not the matter of logical thought, even if the
final product is connected with the logical form.”
Two other philosophers seconded Einstein’s feeling. Neither Hume nor Kant
understood Newton’s laws as laws of the Universe. Hume thought that there really
were no natural laws for the reason that all theories claiming that fact are
underdetermined and subject to rebuttal. Kant would say that Newton’s laws
concerned only the appearance of things and not things as they really are,
therefore, all things are not laws of the universe but products of human
thought. To Kant, Newton’s laws were “transcendental” but not transcendent.
Quantum mechanics is now struggling with these same philosophical questions,
which all lead back to an understanding of consciousness. The emergence of
quantum mechanics forces physicists to be become philosophers again.
One of the basic premises of quantum study is that the quantum (of energy) is
indivisible. In Neils Bohr’s words, there is “an indivisible wholeness, an
unanalyzable wholeness. At the moment of observation, the observer and observed
make a single, unified whole.” 2 The wave/particle theory also describes the
presence of greater intelligence at least insofar as understanding the power of
the mind. Not only is intelligence not relegated to the workings of the brain,
it is not even relegated to the atoms and quarks we observe. When looking at
waves and particles and their behavior physicists find that they act differently
once observed. Consciousness, in fact, may create them.
Further, Max Born’s colleague Pascual Jordan declared that observations not only
disturb what has to be measured, they produce it. In a measurement, “the
electron is forced to a decision. We compel it to assume a definite position;
previously it was, in general, neither here nor there, it had not yet made its
decision for a definite position….We ourselves produce the results of the
measurement.”3
So is consciousness merely the collection of chemical functions in our brains,
of neuronal networks of billions of cells communicating with one another, or is
it even more complex, existing not just outside the brain, but completely
separate from it? Does the brain’s functioning proscribe the ability of
consciousness to exist without this physical apparatus? Kant, Bohr, Einstein and
others would say no. It seems philosophy and science have circled around
themselves to return to the same house on the cul-de-sac.
Consciousness or mind is not matter. But even quantum mechanics is having a hard
time describing consciousness.
In the Quantum Mind Theory, supported by the well-known mathematical physicist
Roger Penrose, it is assumed that large-scale quantum coherence is necessary to
understanding the brain and mind. Quantum coherence is a state of balance when
two quanta’s individual frequencies are in constructive interaction.
The main argument against the quantum mind is that the brain is warm, wet, and
noisy and that the structures of the brain are much too large for quantum
mechanics to be important. Consequently, it is difficult for coherent quantum
states to form for very long in the brain, and impossible for them to exist at
the scales on the order of the size of neurons. These issues have led Penrose to
argue that consciousness is not a consequence of interactions between neurons in
the brain but arises as from microtubules within cells, which are much smaller
and for which quantum effects could be significant. This was originally the
theory of Stuart Hameroff.
On the other hand, a system does not cease to be quantum because it is wet and
noisy. And then, what was previously dismissed as “noise” in the brain has
recently been discovered to be complex signals. Then again, if the brain is
fractal in character, it may well exhibit sensitive dependence on initial
(quantum) conditions. Given the fractal character of dendritic arborizations,
brain function may depend on self-similar processes at lower spatio-temporal
scales. Or, neural form follows quantum function. If all matter consists of
quantum fields, as Dyson makes explicit in his Scientific American article on
“Field Theory,” then the brain just is a collection of such fields.4
In a recent article in EnlightenNext Magazine, Stuart Hameroff, MD describes
microtubules as a possible quantum-physics-based solution to the question of
consciousness, ” Microtubules are molecular assemblies; they’re cylindrical
polymers composed of repeating patterns of a single peanut-shaped protein called
tubulin that can flex “open” and “closed.” The tubulin proteins self assemble
into these beautifully elegant hollow cylinders with walls arranged in hexagonal
lattices. . .neurons need a lot of microtubules. If you look inside a single
neuron, there are hundreds of microtubules composed of something like one
hundred million tubulin protein subunits. You could say the neurons are actually
made of microtubules.” Hameroff supposes that although heretofore scientists
believed that communication between neurons was the basis for consciousness, the
presence of microtubules may actually explain the physical basis for
consciousness.5
Even though there are one hundred billion or so neurons in our brains, there are
100 times as many microtubules in every neuron. So, every neuron has
consciousness or at least some structure to support consciousness. This brings
us to the question, yet again, of how to get mind out of matter. Sir Roger
Penrose believes that consciousness involves something non-computable. This is
described in Gödel’s theorem. Gödel’s are actually two theorems of mathematics.
They establish inherent limitations “of all but the most trivial axiomatic
systems for mathematics. The theorems, proven by Kurt Gödel in 1931, are
important both in mathematical logic and in the philosophy of mathematics. The
two results are widely interpreted as showing that Hilbert’s program to find a
complete and consistent set of axioms for all of mathematics is impossible, thus
giving a negative answer to Hilbert’s second problem.
The first incompleteness theorem states that no consistent system of axioms
whose theorems can be listed by an “effective procedure” (essentially, a
computer program) is capable of proving all facts about the natural numbers. For
any such system, there will always be statements about the natural numbers that
are true, but that are unprovable within the system. The second incompleteness
theorem shows that if such a system is also capable of proving certain basic
facts about the natural numbers, then one particular arithmetic truth the system
cannot prove is the consistency of the system itself.”
Hameroff used Penrose and Gödel’s findings with his own intuition to conclude
that it isn’t just a human observer which is required to collapse a state of
superposition (often called the Copenhagan interpretation of quantum mechanics),
but instead, superpositions naturally collapse themselves. In this model,
consciousness happens as a series of discrete events (these collapsing
superpositions in the quantum field) that we experience as consciousness. Still,
the conscious moment and the quantum wave function are one and the same event.
It goes back to Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Roger assumes that the
gravitational curvature of spacetime also occurs in this very small scale, such
as in the functioning of microtubuls in the brain. So, to these thinkers, mind
is not matter, but consciousness and matter are inextricably linked.
The yogic philosopher, Patanjali told us that “When you are inspired by some
great purpose, some extraordinary project, all your thoughts break their bonds:
Your mind transcends limitations, your consciousness expands in every direction,
and you find yourself in a new, great, and wonderful world. Dormant forces,
faculties and talents become alive, and your discover yourself to be a greater
person by far than you ever dreamed yourself to be.”
Regardless of whether mind is contained in the brain or exists beyond these
physical boundaries, it is evident that it is something quit immense. The spark
of an eternal fire or the wave of a vast ocean are apt metaphors to describe it.
The cosmic nature of mind has been described for centuries prior to Kant and
Plato, Descartes, Einstein, Bohr, and Socrates offered their musings. Mahatma
Ghandi told us, ” You can chain me, you can torture me, you can even destroy
this body, but you will never imprison my mind.” If mind is indestructible, and
vast beyond our perception, then do the semantics of its origins really even
matter? It is natural for the mind to want to know itself, and this era of human
development marks the ability for consciousness to know it is conscious. This
alone is an evolutionary leap.
Perhaps we can agree with David Chalmers, “. . .much of the work going on now in
neuroscience and psychology, where people are studying the relationship of
consciousness to neural and cognitive processes without really trying to reduce
it to those processes. . .[I agree with that.]” The brain vs. mind debate may
not be a question of either or after all, but a question of quantum reality: the
interweaving of mind and matter into one. This is the simple definition of yoga.
From the Sanskrit root “yuj,” meaning “to control,” “to yoke” or “to unite.”
Yoga derives from “yujir samadhau,” which means “contemplation” or “absorption.”
Perhaps we will yoke our mind with the body by the contemplation of
consciousness itself.
Christina Sarich
Christina Sarich is a musician, yogi, humanitarian and freelance writer who
channels many hours of studying Lao Tzu, Paramahansa Yogananda, Rob Brezny,
Miles Davis, and Tom Robbins into interesting tidbits to help you Wake up Your
Sleepy Little Head, and See the Big Picture. Her website/blog is Yoga for the
New World at http://www.yogaforthenewworld.comFrench

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