The Mind-Brain Problem, Part III
/Having presented one alternative model for the brain's relationship to the phenomenon of consciousness (something like brain as limiting/focusing/tuning device for consciousness rather than the sole/ultimate source of consciousness), a brief survey of how this idea developed in its contemporary incarnations may be helpful, as would a breadcrumb trail for the more sane, level-headed and fair minded of its proponents. Theories and thoughts outside of mainstream materialist scientific thinking on this topic comprise a murky swamp of hokum, fantasy, new-age cultishness and outright fraud.
There's no fraud quite as effective and damaging as spiritual / religious fraud and there's no charlatan as cunning, effective, dangerous and often disturbed and deluded as a spiritual / religious charlatan. Both frauds and charlatans are sadly all too prevalent and completely common in all the world's religious and spiritual traditions, major, minor, old age, new age and everything in between. Underneath all these forms of fraud and charlatanry lie the most base of selfish human desires: basic greed and lust for sex and power over other human beings. It's important to know that there are plenty who are, for their own gain, all too wiling to exploit other human beings' fear of death and desperation for proof that life does not stop at the inky shores of death. Many who do this are of course just as complex as any other human being and usually possess a mixture of drives and motivations, both good and bad, healthy and unhealthy, selfish and altruistic, like we all do. They often are caught and eventually destroyed in webs of their own making, at the center of which one might sometimes find evidence of a genuine unexplainable gift that has been exaggerated and abused across a lifetime's accumulation of character flaws and weakness in succumbing to unhealthy and destructive expressions of appetite and desire that may be afforded and indulged as a result of that giftedness. So, that's of course not so different from many other realms of human endeavor with predatory leaders who need to be checked and prevented from harming those they lead. But religiosity's most common tools of coercion, a leader's bewitching hocus pocus and cult of personality that can so effectively ensnare follower-victims, are of course typically given a much, much longer leash in all religious / spiritual settings than they would in other contexts. We would as a society be wise to be much more skeptical of all human leaders, and especially so with those of the religious / spiritual variety.
All this to say, on this topic especially, fools rush in where angels fear to tread. In giving any credence to a theory or model outside of the predominant materialist model, it is important to be careful not to endorse, en masse, or even in significant quantity, every cockamamie fantasy or snake oil salesman or saleswoman who claims to know the hidden truth about life and death, the great mysterious meaning of life or who would otherwise set themselves up as a teacher, healer, shaman, or medium and claim to grant access to this secret knowledge that there exists a vast immaterial and spiritual realm otherwise unaccessible to our human physical senses. And yet...and yet, to this humble seeker's jaded eye at least, here and there there seems to be the glimmering hope of the true marvel, evidence that might just point to our predominant materialist paradigm being simply wrong or woefully incomplete and evidence that consciousness might not be the accidental and bizarre byproduct of a merely material, random and meaningless cosmos, but is rather the foundational matrix of - the tathagatagarbha of, the very womb of, the very stuff of - reality.
William James (1842-1910), the great American philosopher and psychologist, often referred to as the "father of American psychology," was born into and lived through an era of human history in many ways even more replete with unconventional spiritual seeking and chicanery than this present age. He was faced with a similar dilemma of recognizing that the vast majority of his day's spiritualism, seance frenzy, theosophy and associationism were fraudulent hokum and yet still seeing that not all of the paranormal and fantastic phenomenon to which they collectively and generally attested could or should be summarily dismissed. In his words:
“If you will let me use the language of the professional logic-shop, a universal proposition can be made untrue by a particular instance. If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you mustn’t seek to show that no crows are; it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white.”
While the application of the "white crow" label (meaning a medium who wasn't a fraud or for whom fraud or delusion wasn't an equally or more plausible explanation for their alleged abilities than a psi-related explanation) to the seance trance-medium he made famous, Leonora Piper, was and continues to be controversial, the logic he articulated to frame his search seems sound. While fanatical skeptics, today's "new atheists" and others may shake their heads at this idea, as they would for the proverbial figure digging in a giant pile of shit, convinced there must be a pony in there somewhere, if one seeks to demonstrate that evidence exists to suggest that the accepted and predominant materialist paradigm may be incorrect, the logic guiding his quest is difficult to refute. It does seem to be simply enough to demonstrate that one piece of evidence outside the predominant explanatory paradigm may withstand scrutiny in order to call into question the explanatory paradigm - in that the paradigm itself has been proposed and established to be able to explain any and all reasonable evidence that may exist. If it can't explain all evidenced phenomena, it necessarily fails in being at once true and complete.
The chronicles of James' and his colleagues' quest for evidence of consciousness' survival of death at the dawn of contemporary Western psychology around the turn of the 20th century makes for truly fascinating reading, and I know of no better narrative of that quest than Deborah Blum's ignobly titled but incredibly enjoyable and well-written Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death. In so many ways, his, F.W.H. Myers' and their colleagues' scientific investigations at the dawn of contemporary psychology as an academic/scientific discipline into trance mediums and others is foundational for a thread of inquiry that has persisted at some surprising places through the 20th century and even to today. Any contemporary investigator worth a hearing owes much to them and their work in their early attempts at both unmasking the vast amounts of fraud and delusion in the subject material and in putting their finger on the white crow evidence and individuals that could withstand level-headed scrutiny.
The number of potential "white crows," or the pieces of evidence that suggest an alternative model of the relationship between the brain and self-aware human consciousness, have only increased since James' day and continue to steadily accumulate. I'll save a survey of the white crows that stand apart from the muck of what is the vast majority of spiritualist and new-age hokum for subsequent posts on this tangential topic, but will again steer us back to what are for me the primary concerns: 1) that getting the model for the relationship between the brain and self-aware human consciousness has to be an important prerequisite to the development of artificial super-intelligence, 2) that we don't yet possess a model comprehensive enough to explain all the available evidence and, 3) that an alternative (and often overlooked) model shows some promise as being a possibly superior explanatory paradigm for all the evidence related to self-aware human consciousness.