Stranger and Stranger: The Neuroscience of How Mind and Cosmos Communicate

Consciousness and Its Attributes

A small but growing body of rigorous scientific research on the nature of consciousness threatens to challenge some of the most basic assumptions in fields as diverse as medicine, cognitive science, neuroscience, and even physics. The research area is psi research, and it is rapidly identifying a range of consciousness-related phenomena that are anomalous in that science has not yet developed an explanatory model to account for them. As the reality of these phenomena is a fundamental part of the narrative I will be outlining, this chapter briefly reviews some current approaches to consciousness research before reviewing the evidence for the reality of the anomalous attributes of consciousness as well as the extent to which these phenomena are consistent with our current understanding of the laws of physics. Hint: They aren’t.

Consciousness Exiled and Its Tentative Return

The discipline of psychology emerged in the late nineteenth century with a principal focus of studying the psyche or consciousness. William James, the father of American psychology, considered the study of consciousness central to the discipline. Yet over the period of the first sixty years, the topic of consciousness was progressively marginalized to the point that it was effectively banished from academic psychology research in Western Europe and the USA. This was primarily a consequence of the rise of behaviorism, focusing on observable behaviors rather than subjective experiences. This approach, however, faced criticism for neglecting the study of mental processes. As a response, the cognitive revolution of the 1970s revitalized interest in mental processes, giving rise to the study of perception, memory, and decision-making, all of which contribute to our conscious experiences.

As the neural mechanisms that mediated various sensory and perceptual processes such as vision, sound, and touch became better understood, it was widely assumed that it would be only a matter of time before science finally understood how consciousness arises from brain activity. This eventually led to the return of the study of consciousness as a legitimate area of academic research.

The notion that consciousness is simply an emergent property of the brain is probably the most widely held view among neuroscience researchers. This view is often paraphrased as “consciousness is what the brain does.” While this view dominates neuroscience, and especially cognitive neuroscience, challenges have emerged from within the philosophy discipline. The most prominent of these challenges has emerged from the writings of the philosopher David Chalmers [10] in what he terms the hard problem of consciousness.

Chalmers considers that the scientific research approaches on consciousness can be summarized in two brief statements: “the easy problem of consciousness” and “the hard problem of consciousness.” The easy problem of consciousness is the understanding of the neural correlates of consciousness. In other words, when we hear and see a singing bird, what brain areas and networks are activated every time we perceive this event? By contrast, the hard problem of consciousness concerns the question of how neural activity in the brain gives rise to the subjective sense of being conscious.

What does being conscious mean? Philosophers and cognitive neuroscience researchers generally agree on a specific set of attributes that denote subjective consciousness. These include: a sense of self, perceptual experience or qualia (such as redness of a rose), cognition, and intent.

The hard problem is the subject of controversy, with some philosophers and researchers denying that it is even a problem. Of those who accept the premise of the argument, two broad philosophical approaches are apparent. One is that the hard problem will be solved given enough research funding and time. The other view, held by Chalmers and others, is that the hard problem is insoluble no matter how much research is undertaken into the neuroscience and physics of consciousness.

While outlining a detailed review of these approaches is beyond the scope of this book, a brief outline is included to provide context for the introduction of scientific findings and speculations in subsequent chapters.

The former approach is based on a fundamental assumption that consciousness is solely a consequence of brain activity. In turn, the brain being a physical system means that consciousness can be reduced to brain activity, and hence physics. This is what is termed a physicalist or materialist monist approach to the nature of consciousness. At the time of writing, two models of consciousness are considered the leading contenders for the physicalist monist view of consciousness. These are the Global Workspace Model [11] and the Integrated Information Theory (IIT) of consciousness [1, 42].

Panpsychism, an alternative approach, argues that consciousness cannot be reduced to physical, and hence, brain processes. Proponents of this approach account for the phenomenon of consciousness by proposing that consciousness is an intrinsic aspect of reality and that all physical systems (particles, fields, etc.) include an element of consciousness along with the usual physical attributes such as mass, charge, and momentum [12]. The attributes of consciousness described above are then thought to emerge when physical systems of sufficient complexity, such as the human brain, emerge. A major unanswered question for panpsychism is how the consciousness of each elementary particle in the brain somehow combines to yield the attributes of human consciousness [12].

with maintaining a stable physiological state (e.g., controlling blood pressure, blood oxygenation, etc.), we now know that there are a host of cognitive and emotional processes that we lack conscious awareness of yet have a powerful effect on our attitudes and behavior. Freud introduced the concept of the unconscious, and modern cognitive neuroscience research has confirmed the existence of an enormous array of cognitive and emotional processes below the level of awareness, and yet they have a profound effect on our thinking, feeling, and behavior.

The philosopher, neuroscientist, and psychiatrist Ian McGilchrist points out that our conscious experience of the world is determined by the left hemisphere [25]. By contrast, we are unaware of the perceptions and insights arising in the right hemisphere. While the role of these unconscious processes is an enormous topic and their proper consideration is well beyond the scope of this book, there is one aspect of this topic that warrants mention. This is the phenomenon of creativity. Creativity is discussed in more detail in chapter 4; however, one feature of creativity warrants specific mention: The actual process by which novel and useful ideas are generated is now recognized to be an unconscious process. We only become consciously aware of a creative idea when it enters our conscious awareness.

Going forward, when I use the term consciousness (designated by the lowercase Greek ψ), I include all of the cognitive and emotional processes that are subliminal or below our level of awareness. In other words, conscious awareness is a part of the larger phenomenon of consciousness or ψ.

Anomalous Attributes of Consciousness

While there is little argument as to the reality of the above four attributes of consciousness, over the last fifty years, a large body of research has pointed to a range of what have been termed anomalous attributes of consciousness. The term anomalous is typically used to indicate that these features are difficult to explain in terms of our current understanding of brain function and even...