Consciousness in split-brain patients

Striking finding on consciousness:https://t.co/ZMY7gGuyRd pic.twitter.com/0cFCn8PlYP

— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) June 4, 2020

Still Not Living in a Computer Simulation

https://www.proginosko.com/2019/05/still-not-living-in-a-computer-simulation/#more-3785

Case studies in terminal lucidity

Provides some empirical evidence for dualism:

https://notendur.hi.is/erlendur/english/Apparitions/lucidity%20paper%202012.pdf

Brains in a vat

By the same argument, ‘vat’ refers to vats in the image in vat-English, or something related (electronic impulses or program features), but certainly not to real vats, since the use of ‘vat’ in vat-English has no causal connection to real vats (apart from the connection that the brains in a vat wouldn’t be able to use the word ‘vat’, if it were not for the presence of one particular vat — the vat they are in; but this connection obtains between the use of every word in vat-English and that one particular vat; it is not a special connection between the use of the particular word ‘vat’ and vats). Similarly, ‘nutrient fluid’ refers to a liquid in the image in vat-English, or something related (electronic impulses or program features). It follows that if their ‘possible world’ is really the actual one, and we are really the brains in a vat, then what we now mean by ‘we are brains in a vat’ is that we are brains in a vat in the image or something of that kind (if we mean anything at all). But part of the hypothesis that we are brains in a vat is that we aren’t brains in a vat in the image (i.e. what we are ‘hallucinating’ isn’t that we are brains in a vat). So, if we are brains in a vat, then the sentence ‘We are brains in a vat’ says something false (if it says anything). In short, if we are brains in a vat, then ‘We are brains in a vat’ is false. So it is (necessarily) false.  Hilary Putnam, ‘Brains in a vat,’ Reason, Truth and History, (Cambridge 1981), 14-15. 

i) Even though this is a famous science fiction scenario, in the future it may be a realistic scenario:

https://pittsburgh.cbslocal.com/2018/05/17/pig-brain-reanimated-ethics/

ii) As an anti-skeptical argument, I don't think Putnam's argument succeeds. The argument, if successful, is counterproductive. It would mean that even if you are a brain in a vat, you won't be in a position to recognize your predicament because you lack the language and concepts to entertain that possibility. But surely that's the non plus ultra of global skepticism. 

iii) However, I don't think his argument works at another level. It's true that to recognize your predicament as a brain in a vat, you need an external frame of reference. However, the lab could have a camera trained on the transparent vat, with tubes and wires. That information could be fed into the brain so that a disembodied brain could see itself in the vat, with the neurointerface. 

iv) From a Christian standpoint, the source of consciousness is the soul, not the brain. And even if (ex hypothesi) brains were harvested in the womb and deposited in the vat, spending their entire lives in the vat, God could reveal himself directly to the embrained but disembodied soul–just as God intervenes in human history. Take revelatory dreams, where God gets right inside the mind of the dreamer. If need be, God could enter the mind of the embrained but disembodied soul. Bypass the neurointerface. Make himself known from within.  

Tse on Harris

Peter Ulrich Tse is a neuroscientist (PhD, Harvard) as well as an atheist (naturalism). Tse writes the following about Sam Harris:

Eddy, I just read your incisive review of Harris' book. I agree 100%. Please do not take Harris to be speaking for neuroscience or neuroscientists. As far as I can tell he does not lead a lab and is not a tenured or tenure-track professor of neuroscience at any university, although he did get a PhD in Neuroscience from UCLA after getting a BA in philosophy, according to wikipedia, and has a couple of scientific papers using MRI to look at religious belief in the brain. He seems to primarily be a writer of provocative books who has some background in neuroscience. But judging from the way he writes about brain events in his pugilistic pamphlet 'Free Will,' it is not a very nuanced view of the astounding complexity of causation among neurons. I think most people in the neuroscience trenches running experiments day in and day out would have assumed he was more of a philosopher or public debater than a professor of neuroscience.

A map of the soul

https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2017/06/a-map-of-the-soul

Jonathan Swift and terminal lucidity

I've written about terminal lucidity before:

http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2014/08/terminal-lucidity.html

Some additional cases:

http://www.deanradin.com/evidence/Nahm2011.pdf

And here's a striking historical example, regarding Jonathan Swift, who suffered from senile dementia as he got older:

By 1732 he was noticing a serious deficient in short-term memory: "I often forget what I did yesterday, or what passed half an hour ago."  

Around 1734 there is a marked change in Swift's correspondence. Depressed, lonely, and sick he was all too aware that his faculties were fading. The number of personal letters diminishes rapidly, partly because many friends were now dead, and partly because the strain of composing them was too great…Swift was finding it difficult even to write accurately, and when he read over his letters, he was appalled at the number of blunders.  

By the fall of 1742, Swift's disability was so advanced that his food had to be cut up for him…At one stage an acute infection, orbital cellulitis, caused an eye to swell alarmingly, and the pain was so great that he had to be forcibly restrained from tearing at it. The episode did provoke a moment of lucidity, as Mrs. Whiteway reported: "What is more to be wondered at, the last day of his illness he knew me perfectly well, took me by the hand, called me by my name, and showed the same pleasure as usual in seeing me. I asked him if he would give me a dinner; he said 'to be sure, my old friend'…But alas! this pleasure to me was but for short duration, for the next day or two it was all over, and proved to be only pain that had roused him." 

By now, according to Faulkner, Swift "forgot all his friends and domestics, could not call any of them by their names, nor for clothes food, or any necessities he wanted." Leo Damrosch, Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World (Yale, 2013), 460, 466

A transgender dilemma

Ryan points out that appealing to neuroanatomy to provide scientific evidence for transgenderism generates a dilemma for transgenderism. It presupposes that there are male and female brains in the first place; that these represent the norm; that if there's such a thing as a transgender brain, then that would be deviant.

Conversely, if transgender brains are more frequent than commonly recognized, why assume differences in neuroanatomy correspond to differences in men and women?

http://unapologetica.blogspot.com/2015/06/transgenderism-and-brain-activity.html

Dembski on NDEs

Hi Jeremy,

Thanks for alerting me to this article in your email to me (and others). I enjoyed reading it. That said, I’m not sympathetic to your approach or conclusions.

It seems that you are putting forward a false dichotomy: brain activity vs. objective experience of heaven. As a nonmaterialist, I don’t see consciousness as ultimately reducible to brain activity (I think you give neuroscience way too much credit). Thus it seems that people, especially in circumstances of extremity such as near death, could have access to a nonmaterial realm that at the same time provides them information they might not have accessed through some material chain of causation. (I address this general point at length in my forthcoming book BEING AS COMMUNION: http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781472437853 ; I also address NDEs directly there.)

For you, a boy seeing his deceased sister who was lost through a miscarriage is him subconsciously piecing together items of information that he received from his parents and other sources through normal chains of material causation. But what if such information never got to him? It’s speculation on your part that the information had to get to him through “normal channels.”

The NDEs that have persuaded me most are those where patients access information about their setting (usually a hospital) to which they would have had no direct access. Now one can always argue that these are not controlled experiments, and so there might have been some access after all. This is how James Randi and other skeptics deal with all psi phenomena. And I see you taking the same tack. The type of skepticism that you seem to be buying into is dealt with, in my view, effectively in Dean Radin’s THE CONSCIOUS UNIVERSE. The take-away lesson for NDEs for me is that people do have access to sources of information that are not reducible to purely material explanations (and thus at odds with a materialist neuroscience).

As for the insights people with NDEs have about heaven, one can hold them up to theological yardsticks and find them wanting. But I’m not sure that invalidates them. I’ll grant you that none of these experiences that I’ve seen recorded or written about have provided information that would unequivocally implicate the supreme being of the universe (as a mathematician, for instance, I would like very much for an NDE to provide a proof of the Riemann Hypothesis or the Goldbach Conjecture).

But let’s not forget that the Bible itself doesn’t provide such slamdunk information of an afterlife. Jesus had more than an NDE — he actually was dead and came back. When he came back from the dead, why was he unrecognizable? As people saw him after his resurrection, did he always look the same? Did his apparent age stay fixed? The Bible doesn’t say. But it does seem to indicate that every time people saw him, they had to do more than a double-take to make sure it was him — they actually had to interact with him.

So, if people have NDEs and claim to glimpse heaven, I’m not ready to dismiss it because the visions don’t match up with some objective scene, as we might require of people if we were to ask them to describe Central Park in New York. I personally don’t have a problem with subjective features conditioning our view of heaven. It may even be that we can consciously shift or simultaneously experience aspects of heaven in multiple ways. Granted, this is pure speculation. But such considerations lead me to be more open to these experiences of the afterlife than you are.

http://jeremyroyalhoward.com/2014/05/11/are-near-death-experiences-genuine-visits-to-the-afterlife/comment-page-1/#comment-6

Mapping the brain

RK: Right now… our most complex machines are still on the order of a million times simpler than the human brain. Although we’re making very strong progress in reverse engineering of the human brain — in fact we’ve made some very strong progress even since my book came out two years ago–we still don’t have maps or reverse engineering of 99% of the human brain. We’ll get there because brain scanning, our ability to reverse engineer the human brain, as well as computation, communication and miniaturization are all growing exponentially. 

http://www.kurzweilai.net/nerd-of-the-week-ray-kurzweil

Even if we suppose mind is reducible to brain, I don't think his analysis works. We can only map the brain at scales large enough to be detectable. But matter has an underlying subatomic structure. That pattern can't be mapped. We hit a wall in terms of our inability to detect physical entities below a certain scale. 

The basic principle is that bigger things are composed of smaller things. The question is how far down that goes. Where does it bottom out? Does it bottom out? Is matter infinitely divisible? Is there a smallest physical unit? 

We can only map what we can scan. To my knowledge, brain scans only map macro brain structures. 

You can put slices of a brain under a microscope, but a dead brain doesn't give you all the information you need to map the brain. 

High-energy physics would kill the brain. If you put a human inside a collider, what comes out won't be alive. 

And even then, we still hit a limit. The part of the brain we perceive is the effect of elementary particles we can't perceive. It's a larger pattern, caused by smaller patterns–like nested Russian dolls. Dolls inside dolls inside dolls. 

This is why we can't prove string theory. Even if strings were the ultimate physical constituents, they are too small to detect, because we must use something physical to detect something physical, and what we use is bigger than what we hope to detect. 

The structure of the brain we can scan is generated by structures that elude detection. So the resultant map is a very coarse-grained map that misses all the finer details. Like low resolution photography. 

That's not to knock brain scanning technology. It contributes to medical treatment. But we can only take it so far. 

Falsifying naturalism

The threshold for disproving naturalism is exceedingly low. That's because naturalism is a universal negative. It only takes one good counterexample to blow it to smithereens. 

Consider physicalism. If cognition is reducible to brain events, and all mental activity is located inside the head, then the mind can't possible act at a distance or know things at a distance (in time or space). Hence, it only takes a few well-attested counterexamples to falsify physicalism.

Technically, naturalism isn't synonymous with physicalism. It's possible for a naturalist to be a Platonic realist, Cartesian dualist, idealist, or panpsychic. But physicalism is the default position of most naturalists. Most naturalists fight tooth and nail for physicalism. And there's a reason for that. They appreciate what a threat to naturalism it would be to make allowance for knowledge or action at a distance. If the mind can know things or effect things apart from a chain of physical causes, then there's no presumption against God, angels, demons, discarnate souls, miracles, heaven, or hell. They can't afford to make that concession.

There's an abstract atheism that infidel apologists like to project. That atheism is merely nonbelief in God or gods. By the same token, Jeff Lowder likes to compartmentalize things as much as possible, carefully partitioning atheism, naturalism, and physicalism.

That's prudent from a tactical standpoint. Exposing as little of your flank as possible. Making yourself a small target. 

But that kind of abstract atheism is like an experimental lifeform that can't exist outside laboratory conditions. It's very artificial. 

Defending nihilism

Here are some replies I gave in response to a commenter on this post:

http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2015/03/quest-for-nihilism.html

brownmamba:

"First, if you're willing to make the quest for truth to be a complete joke by removing a major contender, why not just deny the premise that atheism entails nihilism instead."

Your objection is hopelessly superficial. If atheism implicates moral and existential nihilism, then it's atheism that makes the quest for truth a complete joke. Indeed, a bad joke.

"In other words, instead of putting your head in the sand regarding ontological questions…"

What's wrong with putting one's head in the sand if moral and existential nihilism supply the frame of reference? Your nearsighted disapproval confirms the fact that you fail to grasp the intellectual consequences of the issue under review.

"Second, your last paragraph seems to imply that you think the quest for truth should be limited to the Bible."

In context, I'm responding to Licona. The question is whether there's a fallback to Christianity.

"The problem is that the Bible makes claims and touches upon issues that cross into scientific territory."

Which I never denied.

"For example, the order of creation found in Genesis. What happens when something like fossil evidence refutes such claims? (Which it has.)"

i) To begin with, I don't assume that the sequence in Gen 1 is strictly chronological. For instance, the relation between Day 1 and Day 4 seems to be a deliberate anachronism.

ii) In principle, the fossil record could be a part of God initiating the story in medias res–just as historical movies begin at a certain point in the ongoing history of the world, but have an implicit backstory.

"Moreover, take the doctrine of the soul. What happens if we look around and find nothing but physics?"

Evidently, you fail to grasp the hard problem of consciousness. Likewise, you're evidently ignorant of empirical evidence for the independent existence of the soul (e.g. OBEs, NDEs, apparitions).

"I can't help but feel that there's a reason as to why there is no consensus on what the Bible teaches;why when someone like Issac Newton tries to extract scientific knowledge from it, it's to no avail; why sections making predictions, such as the Book of Revelations, are so vague that even sophisticated believers, such as William Lane Craig, have no idea what it means."

Which contradicts your contention that the Bible makes claims which cross into scientific territory. Can't have it both ways. Either the Bible is too vague to clearly teach anything or else Bible teaching is clearly wrong.

"If by nihilism, you mean…"

I said what I meant by nihilism by including adjectives: "moral" and "existential." To elaborate:

Ethical nihilism or moral nihilism rejects the possibility of absolute moral or ethical values. Instead, good and evil are nebulous, and values addressing such are the product of nothing more than social and emotive pressures. Existential nihilism is the notion that life has no intrinsic meaning or value, and it is, no doubt, the most commonly used and understood sense of the word today. 

http://www.iep.utm.edu/nihilism/#H1 

While nihilism is often discussed in terms of extreme skepticism and relativism, for most of the 20th century it has been associated with the belief that life is meaningless. Existential nihilism begins with the notion that the world is without meaning or purpose. Given this circumstance, existence itself--all action, suffering, and feeling--is ultimately senseless and empty. 

http://www.iep.utm.edu/nihilism/#H3 

In his study of meaninglessness, Donald Crosby writes that the source of modern nihilism paradoxically stems from a commitment to honest intellectual openness. "Once set in motion, the process of questioning could come to but one end, the erosion of conviction and certitude and collapse into despair" (The Specter of the Absurd, 1988). When sincere inquiry is extended to moral convictions and social consensus, it can prove deadly, Crosby continues, promoting forces that ultimately destroy civilizations.

http://www.iep.utm.edu/nihilism/#H4

Back to brownmamba:

Postmortem ichthyological cognition

This may illustrate one of the hazards of using fMRI scans to show that minds are reducible to brains:

...we completed an fMRI scanning session with a post-mortem Atlantic Salmon as the subject. The salmon was shown the same social perspective-taking task that was later administered to a group of human subjects. 

Either we have stumbled onto a rather amazing discovery in terms of postmortem ichthyological cognition, or there is something a bit off with regard to our uncorrected statistical approach. 

https://labs.psych.ucsb.edu/miller/michael/PDF/Bennett-JSUR-2010.pdf

Sam Harris's scientific credentials

http://shadowtolight.wordpress.com/2015/01/07/neuroscientist-sam-harris/

A Scientific Case for the Soul

I don't care for the section on evolution, but other than that, this is a useful analysis:

http://home.messiah.edu/~rcollins/Mind-Body%20Problm/Scientific%20Case%20for%20Soul.pdf

Arminian determinism

Joel Green is in the top-tier of Arminian NT scholars. Ironically, there's a sense in which Green is even more deterministic than Calvinists. As a physicalist, he espouses physical determinism (at least above the subatomic level). He believes our choices are reducible to brain states. What we take to be our conscious choices are usually the effect of subconscious brain states, over which we have no control. By contrast, Calvinism is committed to divine determinism, but not to physical determinism, and most Calvinists are substance dualists. 

(1) I am a Methodist, but regard my tradition's view of freedom as overdrawn. I make this claim based on both biblical and neuroscientific (and neuro-philosophical) considerations.  

(2) I am not a determinist. However, I am convinced by the neuroscientific evidence that most of what we do as humans we do at a pre-conscious level (and thus at a level that does not rise to the level of the exercise of free will). I regard the biblical evidence as congruent with this understanding, and the material I discussed in Body, Soul, and Human Life suggests why this is so. 

http://www.evangelicaluniversalist.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=203

Minds and brains

http://www.harpercollins.com/author/authorExtra.aspx?authorID=30251&displayType=interview

The Closing of the Scientific Mind

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/the-closing-of-the-scientific-mind/

Brainwashed

http://ideas.time.com/2013/05/30/dont-read-too-much-into-brain-scans/print/

Rat nirvana

I'm going to comment on this article:

Although the experiments were done in rats, Borjigin thinks they have implications for the near-death experiences (NDEs) reported by one in five people who are resuscitated after their hearts stop. Although they were unconscious, unresponsive and clinically dead at the time, they come back with stories of bright lights, “realer than real” memories, and meetings with people they knew. Some scientists have dismissed these accounts outright. Others have taken NDEs as proof of a religious afterlife or a consciousness that lives on outside the body, as popularised in a recent bestseller of dubious provenance.
But Borjigin’s research suggests that these experiences could just be a natural product of a dying brain. That doesn’t make them any less real, but it does root them in the natural world, without the need for a “super-“ prefix.
http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/08/12/in-dying-brains-signs-of-heightened-consciousness/

Before proceeding, let's clarify the scope of my comments. I'm not going to comment on whether NDEs are evidence for the afterlife. Rather, I'm going to comment on whether these experiments are evidence that there is no afterlife. Is mind reducible to detectible neurological activity? 

Here's my problem with this sort of evidence. 

i) This isn't comparable to humans who were clinically dead, resuscitated, and describe their "postmortem" experience. Rats don't report back to us. 

ii) Tracking general brain activity doesn't explain the specific content of NDEs. 

iii) Likewise, a scientific 3rd-person description doesn't give us the 1st-person viewpoint. 

iv) We can't get inside the "minds" of rats, assuming they have minds. We don't know what they visualize, if anything, at the moment of death.

v) This leaves the "hard problem of consciousness" unsolved.

vi) I don't rule out that some animals may have rational souls. What do dogs dream about? I don't know, but I don't think dualism has to stop with humans. 

Suppose we had very sensitive neuroimaging techniques to scan brain states. Suppose we hooked up a test subject and scanned his brain states while he was having the following experiences:

1) Listening to music.

2) Dreaming.

3) Spontaneously remembering something.

4) Deliberately retrieving a memory.

5) Deliberately imagining something. 

Now, unless I'm mistaken, all of these experiences would show up on the neuroscan. The scan would reveal "heightened" activity "in" the brain. They'd all be very similar. 

Yet these neurological outputs have very different inputs. 

In the case of (1), that brain state is caused by an external stimulus.

In the case of (2), we might say that's caused by the brain.

In the case of (3), we might say that's "inside" the brain. Yet it's a brain state that corresponds to an external event, not just a neurological event. He's remembering something from the past. Something that really happened. And that's the source of the memory. The brain is not the source of the memory, but the past event.

In the case of (4), that could be the same memory as (3). But there's a difference. In the case of (3), the recollection was involuntary. He had a spontaneous flashback. In the case of (4), he willed himself to access that memory. He deliberately retrieved that memory. 

Does that mean his brain caused his brain state? But what's the difference between cause and effect if both are brain states?

Moreover, how does reducing all this to activity in the brain distinguish voluntary recollection from involuntary recollection? Both are (allegedly) brain states, but in the case of voluntary recollection, what causes that memory to surface in consciousness is the mental act of willing it. 

Likewise, dreaming and imagining are both said to be brain states. And they are both subjective. Figments of the imagination.  They don't correspond to objective reality.

Yet dreaming is involuntary whereas imagining is voluntary. If the test subject imagines something, he will cause a brain state that registers on the neuroscan. And that seems dualistic. It suggests a certain independence, where his mind causes a brain state. 

Of course, a physicalist would deny it, but in that case, how does a physicalist distinguish between two internal brain states where one is the effect of volition while the other is spontaneous? 

In addition, wouldn't all these different brain states simply register as heightened neurological activity on the scans, even though they are clearly distinguishable in terms of their sources and causes? 

Another simple example is pain:

If I'm hooked up to the scanners when a bee stings me, the scanners will register heightened brain activity. But even if the effect (pain) is a brain event, that doesn't mean the cause (bee sting) is a brain event.