Is the self located in the brain?

Answer Podcast

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Where am I? This question might sound like the question of a jet-lagged person who is traveling and doesn’t know where they are. However, if we consider this question as applying not to our body location but the location of our consciousness, the seat or source of our consciousness, this question becomes far more complex and elusive. Dr. Wilder Penfield, a Nobel laureate neurosurgeon based in Canada, who is considered by many as the father of neurosurgery, spent nearly 40 years trying to find the answer to this question.
He probed various areas of the brain to find out where the initiator of action lay. According to current mainstream scientific opinion, the brain is deemed as the source of consciousness. But which particular area of the brain is actually the source of consciousness? So Dr. Penfield decided to do experiments to find this out.
So he had a subject and he told the subject to raise their hand. Now scientists know fairly well which part of the body is coordinated with which part of the brain. So when they monitored, Dr. Penfield could see that when the hand was raised, a particular part of the brain was activated.
And he asked the subject, what happened? I raised my hand. He told the subject, put your hand down. Subject put his hand down and that particular part of the brain got deactivated.
Now there are techniques by using electrodes and other electrical probes that certain parts of the brain can be externally activated. So then in the second part of the experiment, Dr. Penfield artificially externally activated that same part of the brain. And the subject’s hand went up.
He asked the subject, what happened? My hand went up. Did you raise your hand? No, I did. You did.
And then he let go. He activated that part of the brain. My hand fell down.
What happened? My hand fell down. Did you put your hand down? No, I did. You did.
Dr. Penfield repeated the same experiment while activating other parts of the brain. And when other parts of the brain were activated, different memories, thoughts, ideas, desires were triggered in the subject. Oh, I remember some incident that happened so many years ago.
I feel like doing this. But no activation of any part of the brain made the subject feel that they were raising their hand or putting their hand down. To understand the implication of the experiment, let’s consider a setup of a computer with a printer.
The computer has a print button. It’s my computer. And as soon as I press the print button, the printing hand starts moving.
Now, in the first case, when the print hand is moving, that is like the subject’s hand moving up. So a particular part of the brain is activated. That part of the brain is like the print button.
In the second case, the print button is pressed by an external agent, Dr. Penfield. It’s like you come and press the print button on my computer. And my hand starts moving.
Dr. Penfield raised the question, who pressed the print button in the first case? The brain is simply the channel by which the action is rooted and executed. The particular part of the brain is not the source of action, is not the initiator of the action. After 40 years of experiments like this, Dr. Penfield concluded his findings in a book called The Mystery of the Mind.
And there he said, the brain is like a computer, but it is programmed by something outside of itself. There are other neurosurgeons, Charles Sherrington, Richard Eccles, and other John Eccles, they all have arrived at a similar conclusion that the source of consciousness is extra cerebral. That consciousness does not lie beneath the brain.
Now, the brain is normally considered indispensable. One reason why people feel that consciousness originates in the brain is because when certain parts of the brain are damaged, then certain corresponding functionalities are impaired. If the speech center of the brain is damaged, the person can’t speak.
But this possibility was anticipated and responded to over a hundred years ago by the eminent psychologist William James, when he said that the brain may well be the transmitter of consciousness and not the originator of consciousness. Suppose we have a prism and the light enters into a prism, it gets reflected into a pattern. If the prism is damaged, then the multicolor pattern will not come.
The damage of the prism does not cause the light to originate. The prism didn’t cause light to originate and so the damage to the prism doesn’t cause the light to stop originating. In both cases, light is coming, but it doesn’t manifest in the same way.
And there is another dramatic finding which substantiates the idea that we are not located in our brain. Dr. John Lorper published a paper in the science magazine called Is Your Brain Really Necessary? He documented a phenomenon called Hydroencephaly, in which children had cerebrospinal fluid not around their brain, but instead of their brain. There were children who had no brain substance at all in their cranial cavity.
There were some children who had less than 50% brain, some who had less than 25%, some who had less than even 5% brain. And yet these children, several of them lived normal lives. Lorper found that at the University of Sheffield, there was a maths graduate with an extremely high IQ, who had a master’s degree in mathematics and when a brain scan was done, his brain was empty.
So, although these cases are few, they point to something very important. William James told a principle long ago, if you want to disprove the fact that all crows are black, all that you need to do is find out one white crow. So, to disprove, to challenge the idea that consciousness originates in the brain, all that we need is just one case of a person without brain who has normal consciousness.
So, these two distinct, one universal, one specific findings, the finding by Dr. Penfield that the source of consciousness is not lying in the brain and the second by Lorper and others that consciousness exists and functions even in the absence of the brain suggests that we do not lie in the brain. Where do we lie? Where am I? To understand the answer to this question, please join us for our next session. Thank you.