Interview
The Mystery of Consciousness | Interview with Dr. Michael Clarage
Transcript, roughly, below:
Science tells us that the cerebral cortex turns matter into consciousness. What are your thoughts on individuals who have been described as having vastly below average cerebral cortex thickness ?
These shocking, exceptional cases really call into question everything we think we know about the brain. In rough terms the human brain is composed of three layers. The most internal parts are sometimes referred to as the reptilian brain since reptiles have only this inner part developed, and it controls basics of eating breathing and moving. The second layer, usually called the mammalian brain gets its name because mammals also have this layer, and it seems to be involved with herd instincts and instinctive parental love. And then there are the outer layers of the human brain, the cerebral cortex, which, we are told, make us unique in the animal kingdoms by allowing us to have a sense of individuality, have logical thinking, abstract concepts, etc. But then you come across these odd cases, like several I found in London medical journals from the 19th century. These were described a completely ordinary people, responsible, hard working, productive English citizens. But when they were examined after death, it was found their cerebral cortex was as thin as a sheet of paper. The bulk of the brain cavity was just filled with fluid. So, we are forced to admit that to get on in life, at least as a British man in the 19th century, you don’t actually need much of a cerebral cortex. So if this massive outer part of our brain is not necessary for the demands of ordinary life, what is it there for? It is difficult to convey how inadequate contemporary neurology is to explain this. Our brains are completely over engineered for the demands of life. It’s like someone says, here, come look at this device I built for doing simple calculations of addition and subtraction, and you look at it, and see the whole computer network used by NASA. And you would say, I think this is over engineered for addition and subtraction. Does this mean that in our past our brains were required to do much more difficult tasks?
The material description of the brain & consciousness
As a scientific community we have no idea, really, what consciousness is. You are highlighting here an old controversy about consciousness and the materialist paradigm. The materialist world view states that the only reality is the world that we can see and touch and weigh in a scale, and that all cause and effect is material. This is a 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. What many people do not talk about is that the definition of what is material has changed quite a bit over those 300 years. Picture yourself in 1850, Michael Faraday is struggling to understand these strange invisible forces of electricity and magnetism. The effects being observed in the laboratory cannot be explained by any known forms of matter. He creates the idea of a field, an electric field. You cannot see or touch this field. You cannot hear it or weigh it in a scale. In 1850 that was pretty much the definition of a non-material cause. And if you read the papers of Faraday and others from that time, they had a lot of reservations about whole notion of introducing what was then a non-material cause. Fast forward to the present day and 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 the scientific community changed the definition of materiality. I am OK with this. I believe that 50 years from now we will know about forms of materiality that cannot now be imagined. I think that many of the arguments about the brain and matter and consciousness are either arguments about words, which is boring, or arguments because some people do not know enough about the history of scientific ideas. Some people are arguing that we must explain everything about consciousness in terms of what we currently know about biochemistry. Well, that would be like people telling Faraday that he must explain everything in terms of the physics of billiard balls. Very few people today are brave enough to admit that almost all 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 and feeling and sensation. What we now know about biochemistry is insufficient to explain even the most basic aspects of thoughts and feelings. We are in need of some new ideas about matter and materiality in order to move forward. Our current understanding of matter is insufficient.
Memories are stored in specific brain cells
There are changes to the brain that correspond to our memories, just as there are changes to the brain that correspond to learning new skills. When you learn how to play the violin, there are very clearly observable changes to the brain. There are also very clearly observable changes to the hand when you learn the violin. The muscles, nerves, even the blood vessels of the hand all change when you learn to play the violin. And, if you were to surgically remove those changes from the hand, the person could no longer play the violin. So, does this mean that the memory of how to play the violin resides in the hand? This is worth pondering.
What are the best evidence for psi & non-locality of consciousness?
There is really a surfeit of evidence. There are dozens of clear experiments done by Dean Raden, Rupert Sheldrake, and Dr Gary Schwartz showing the non-locality of consciousness. These are double blind studies with sound statistical analysis. In some cases their results are more certain than the clinical trials that have to be passed to get a drug released. I don’t know why such criteria would be OK to show that a drug works but not OK to show that consciousness has some aspects of non-locality. And then there is my personal experience, which I know a lot of people also have – things like knowing who is calling you before you pick up the phone, or instantly knowing things about people you love even though you are far separated in space. I don’t think we need some militant materialist to tell us we are delusional when this is something that forms a quite ordinary aspect of daily life.
Do you know of Orch-OR? You should. Neuroscience isn't going to answer anything like this, it never will but Penrose and Hameroff can.