Are there any evidences that consciousness is extra-cerebral?

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So, are there any other evidences that consciousness is extra cerebral? Yeah. There is actually a paper published in Science magazine. It’s called title was Is Your Brain Really Necessary? And who is the author? I just get the name.
Anyway, that’s the title of that paper. And what they found is that there are people, Dr. Lorber, John Lorber, basically. So, he found that there is a particular neurological condition called hydroencephaly where people in their brain, they have excessive fluid and the brain substance is less.
Such people are not able to usually function well. But he found there are large number of small but significant number of young boys, young children, who had less than 5% of their brain. Less than 5% of their brain.
And still they were functioning normally. He gave a, he did a research of a student who was in University of Sheffield. And this student had exceptionally high IQ.
He got a Masters in Mathematics. And once he just did a brain scan, he found there is no brain in there. Just fluid.
Completely just fluid. That’s all. And it’s well documented research.
And usually when such cases came up, they were explained through the explanation of brain tissue redundancy. That means the same functions can be performed by multiple tissues. And say if one part of the brain gets damaged, tissue is not the right part basically.
So the other parts of the brain can do that function. That was the idea. But if the remaining part is just less than 5%, then that would mean that 95% of the brain is redundant.
Which is quite a serious claim which actually stretches credibility. So these are exceptions but then all scientific progress usually happens at the borders of science. At the start of the 20th century, physics, you know, Kelvin said that now all the major problems of physics have been solved.
For future generations of physicists, they’ll simply have to fill in the details and they won’t have much to do. But there are just two small problems at the horizon. One was blackbody radiation and the other was the behavior of subatomic particles.
And from those two came up quantum physics and relativity physics. They completely changed the landscape of physics. So the point is that although this kind of evidence of people not having any brain and still functioning normally, one temptation could be just to dismiss it as anomalous.
That’s not the standard. Yes, it is not the standard. But just the fact that it happens, how does it happen? If the brain were essential for our functioning, or not just essential for our functioning, if the brain were who we were, then if the 95% of the brain is not there, how could a person function? And structurally, anatomically, it’s not possible, but it happens.
So, there is also some very strong evidence of consciousness being extra cerebral. That it does not, now when you say consciousness is extra cerebral, it is the source of consciousness is extra cerebral. And so the understanding is that there is soul, from the soul the consciousness comes through the mind into the brain and then it comes into the body.
So, now usually it is said that whenever the brain part gets damaged, then certain functions are impeded. But that could very well simply be because the corresponding tool is damaged. Say for example, if on my computer, the print button is damaged, then I cannot print anything.
It’s not that I have got destroyed. I am still there, but because the print function is damaged, so I cannot move the print head, I cannot get printing function. So like that, certain parts of the brain are damaged, corresponding certain bodily functions may not happen.
But that does not mean that those functional capacities originated in the brain. There is a channel and because the channel is damaged, so it doesn’t work. So William James was a prominent psychologist and he said that the brain is the transmitter of consciousness, not the source.
Just like if a prism is damaged, then the color that goes through it, when color comes out of it will be distorted. The prism is damaged. Similarly, consciousness is like that light which comes into the prism of the brain.
And when a particular part of the brain is damaged, then what comes out is slightly distorted. So, if we consider from that perspective, the only evidence that we have for consciousness as originating from the brain, the only evidence actually is that when there is brain damage, those conscious functions are impeded. But there can be an alternative explanation for that.
And more importantly, if we look at it not from an experimental or empirical perspective, but from a conceptual perspective, you know, consciousness and brain states, they are just two separate categories. No matter how rigorously we study the brain, no matter how exhaustively we map the various synapses and various structural, microscopic structural aspects of the brain, at its very exhaustive, all that we will get is a list of chemical states. Okay, this cell is in this state, this cell is in this state, this cell is in this state.
But that does not describe consciousness at all. No. The conscious experience in the conscious experiencer is something else.
Now, researchers know when a person is dreaming that, you know, if a person is sleeping and then they are dreaming, by looking at the kind of brain waves that they are having, you can come to know okay, this person is dreaming right now. Now, no matter how sophisticated we make our senses, we will not be able to find out what the person is dreaming. And to find that out, we need to wake the person up and ask, what were you dreaming? So, there is in philosophy, this is called as the hard problem of consciousness.
The soft problem of consciousness is basically how to correlate various aspects of conscious experience with brain parts. And that can be solved by exhaustively mapping the brain. But the hard problem of consciousness is that chemical states and emotions are just two distinct categories.
Just two distinct categories. And why do we whenever we do something, why is there an experience associated with that? What is the locus of that experience? So, there is one of the most famous incidents in the development of artificial intelligence is when the world chess champion Garry Kasparov was defeated by the computer Deep Blue. Now, after that computer defeated Kasparov, Kasparov was devastated, holding his pictures of him, holding his hand in frustration.
Now, Kasparov was frustrated. The makers of Deep Blue were delighted. But Deep Blue, what was its emotion? It had no emotion at all.
So, Deep Blue did not even know that it had won a chess game. Basically, based on certain program that it had, it had done some moves. And that had led to a state which it may have labeled as I won the match.
But there is no experience of playing, no excitement at coming close to winning, no joy at winning. So, now that means everything that could be done by the human brain in terms of analyzing chess moves, everything can also be done by a computer. And in terms of analyzing chess moves.
And that can be done better by a computer. So, the computer can do it all without it experiencing anything. And why do we need to experience anything? Why do we have an experience at all? So, actually the more artificial intelligence advances, the more we are realizing the similarity in concept between the brain structure and a computer’s architecture.
But the more we are realizing also the difference between both of these on one side and our conscious experience on the other side. So, the hard problem of consciousness is actually becoming harder and harder as technology is advancing. We can replicate human behavior, but no matter how exhaustive becomes our technology, we cannot replicate conscious experience.
In fact, conscious experience we could say is redundant. Everything that we do in terms of functionality, a machine can do that. But we experience emotions.
So, that is not coming from a material side. That is coming from something beyond matter. And the locus of that is a spiritual core of consciousness.
That the Bhagavad Gita tells us is the Atma. Does that answer your question?