When the brain gets damaged, the intellectual and brain functions get impeded. Doesn’t this prove that the brain produces consciousness?

Transcript

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Thank you.
Question? When a person’s brain is damaged and has to be surgically operated, say, to remove a particular part of the brain, or because of some disease or disorder, some part of the brain becomes dysfunctional, then at that time, that person’s intellectual faculties are affected. That person is not able to function normally. And in some cases, the person’s personality also changes.
So, isn’t this an evidence that our intellectual faculties, our personality are all coming from the brain and that there is no such thing as soul beyond the body and the brain? Answer? No. It is an undeniable fact that any damage to the brain, or any removal of a brain part, affects our functioning capacity. But this does not necessarily imply that the brain is the origin of consciousness.
The brain could equally well be the transmitter of consciousness. William James, who is considered the father of modern psychology, proposed this theory, and he gave the example of a prism. When light is filtered through a prism and brought out, if the prism is damaged, then the light will not come out the same way as it was coming earlier.
Now, somebody who did not know about the light and its existence separate from the prism, somebody who considered light to be limited to the color patterns that are seen on a wall or a floor as they emerge from the prism, that person would think that because when the prism is damaged, the light gets distorted. That means the light is produced by the prism. So, consciousness and brain have a relationship, no doubt.
But that relationship is not that the brain produces consciousness, but that the brain transmits consciousness. So, just as light exists separate from the prism, but it is routed through the prism and then comes in a multicolor format that can be seen by us, similarly, consciousness exists separately from the brain. It has its own self-existence separate from the brain.
But when it has to be expressed in the material realm, then it requires a material vehicle, a material tool. And that material tool is the brain. So, consciousness is routed into our brain and through our brain into our perception and our world.
And naturally, when the tool, the medium, the root is damaged, then the consciousness and its expression become accordingly affected. There are several other examples that illustrate the same point. If a TV is damaged, then the frequency, the program and the vibrations that are being transmitted into the TV and through the TV, transformed, so that they become visible as visual images for us, that transmissive effect will stop.
So, damage to the TV does not prove that the program is produced by the TV. Damage to the TV may have the result that the program is no longer seen on the TV, but that doesn’t mean that the TV produced the program. So, yes, scientists have found that specific parts of the brain are correlated with specific functionalities, and so damage to those particular parts affects those functionalities.
That is fine. There is no denying that. But it is wrong to say that the only interpretation of this is that the brain produces consciousness.
Rather, it could well be that the brain is transmitting consciousness. So now, if both these interpretations are possible from the observations that we can make, then which is the more tenable explanation? So, there are some striking cases, which are considered in the medical and scientific literature as anomalous, but they suggest the transmissive interpretation. Dr. John Lorber, who was an eminent scientist at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom, England, and was also a member of the Nobel Prize selection committee, nomination committee, he published an article in the science magazine with a provocative title, Is Your Brain Really Necessary? And in that article, he gave an overview of a significant number of cases in which the subjects had large parts of their brain lost and were still functioning normally.
So, in some of these cases, so in this article, neurologist Dr. Lorber reported many cases of people with extreme hydroencephaly. Hydroencephaly is a disease in which a person has water, cerebral spinal fluid, not around the brain, but instead of the brain. And generally speaking, the children with this disorder don’t live for more than a year.
At best, they live highly retarded lives. But he found multiple cases of people with extreme hydroencephaly, that means they had brain substance less than 5% of the normal, and still they had IQs greater than 100, and they function normally like other human beings. And in the University of Sheffield itself, there was a young student who had an IQ of 126, who graduated with first class honors in mathematics, was fully socially normal, and he had practically no brain.
A brain scan revealed that there was practically just a percent or two of the total brain substance that was supposed to be there in a normal person. And still, he was a mathematics first class degree holder, honors degree holder. So, how can these cases be explained? If the brain were just the producer of consciousness, then when there is no brain substance, there should be no consciousness, and then the person should not be able to function at all.
But here we have cases published in a journal as respected as Science, of people with practically no brain substance and having almost complete brain function. So, this indicates that the brain function is not essentially or indispensably dependent on the brain substance. The capacity to perform intellectual functions, brain functions, originates not in the brain, but somewhere beyond the brain.
And that, the Bhagavad Gita explains, is the Atma. Now, of course, someone may argue that these cases are exceptional. These are so few, one in thousands of them.
And why should one make a big hue and cry about such exceptional cases? Why shouldn’t one infer from the normal standard cases that when the brain is damaged or is removed, the functionality of the person is affected. So, therefore, the brain produces consciousness. The history of science shows that it is only the exceptional observations that are not explainable by the mainstream school of thought at a particular time.
It is those exceptional observations that lead to significant advances in life. In science, rather. So, when Copernicus proposed his heliocentric model of the solar system, at that time, Ptolemy’s model was being used.
And Ptolemy’s model was able to explain with reasonable degree of satisfaction, except for that periodically some epicycles had to be introduced and some other adjustments had to be done. So, now, if somebody had neglected this repeated tinkering with the orbit that had to be done, then a further advancement in science would never have taken place. At the turn of the 20th century, Newton’s laws of physics were considered bedrock truth.
And scientists as respectable as Kelvin said that for the future generations, the physicists will mostly be unemployed. Because their job will be just to fill in the details. Because everything practically has been explained.
Actually, there were only two things, minor things, which they felt at that time minor, were not being explainable by Newtonian physics. One was the phenomena of blackbody radiation. And the other was the inability to explain the origin and the nature of gravity.
Newton’s theory, Newton’s law of gravity could measure, tell us how much gravitational force would be. But it couldn’t explain where was the origin and what was the nature of gravity. Now, Kelvin considered these to be just extreme, exceptional, minor observations, which were only minor problems.
But these two problems led to the development of two of the most significant and game-changing fields in modern physics. From the blackbody, phenomena of blackbody radiation, to explain it came the field of quantum physics. And from the phenomena of, from the need to explain gravity, gradually emerged the phenomena of relativity as postulated by Einstein.
And they have redefined, if not revolutionized, our understanding of physics. So, Newtonian physics even now holds true, but within a limited realm. It doesn’t hold true at the subatomic level, where we need to take shelter of quantum physics.
And it doesn’t hold true at extremely high speeds and for large bodies, for where we need to take in relativity. So, if scientists at the turn of the 20th century had just stuck to the observations that confirmed the existing thought patterns, then no advancement in science would have taken place. Similarly, the materialistic explanation of consciousness, the brain produces consciousness, may seem to explain some phenomena, may seem to explain majority of the observations that we see.
But, it is only when we consider the extreme cases, that we can get a true nature, insight into the true nature of consciousness. Because after all, the brain really doesn’t explain consciousness. A neurosurgeon can look at all the neuronal cells and their synaptic connections in the brain of a subject.
But the neurosurgeon cannot understand one thought, one desire, one dream of the patient, by just looking at the neuronal connections. So, there is obviously a huge gap between neuronal functionality and conscious experience. And that gap has nowhere been bridged by materialistic science.
So, the bridging of that gap in human knowledge will take place when we look at the extremes, at such exceptional observations which challenge the materialistic mainstream paradigm. So, the very fact that consciousness can exist, even in one person, if it were, without having adequate brain substance, would be enough to call for a revision of the theory. And we have not one, but a significant number of cases.
So, therefore, the interpretation that the brain is the transmitter of consciousness, actually explains both what is considered standard observations, that when the brain is damaged, the person’s brain capacity is impeded, and the exceptional observations that people without brain can also function. Whereas, if we stick to the materialistic theory, that the brain produces consciousness, then we may explain one set of observations, but we cannot explain the other set of observations, where people without brain substance are able to function also normally. Therefore, the non-materialist understanding of consciousness, which has had eminent proponents, including Nobel laureates, Dr. Willem Pinfeld, Dr. Charles Sherrington, and Dr. John Eccles, all these are neuroscientists, eminent neuroscientists of the last century, and all of them are Nobel laureates, they are not just run-of-the-mill scientists.
And all of them have called upon the need for a non-materialist explanation of consciousness. So, therefore, the brain is the transmitter and not the producer of consciousness, as both eminent scientists as well as scientific observations confirm. Thank you.