One of the most debated topics in spirituality (and beyond) involves the origins of consciousness. Most neuroscientists agree that it’s emergent—the physiological systems of the body create what we call “consciousness.”Derek revisits his 2018 conversation with Michael Gazzaniga, whose 1961 studies on split-brain patients revolutionized the discipline of neuroscience.Show NotesNeuroscientist Anil Seth: ‘We risk not understanding the central mystery of life’VS Ramachandran: 3 Clues to Understanding Your BrainDecoding the Brain’s Cacophony
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Hello, Matthew here from the Conspirituality Podcast Team.
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One of the most contentious topics I've encountered in all of my years studying religion and working in the wellness industry is consciousness.
In fact, it's about as debated a term as religion itself.
In his book, The Bonobo and the Atheist, primatologist Frans de Waal sums up the challenge of defining religion.
To delineate religion to everyone's satisfaction is hopeless.
I was once part of a forum at the American Academy of Religion when someone proposed we start off with a definition of religion.
However much sense this made, the idea was promptly shot down by another participant who reminded everyone that last time they tried to define religion half the audience had angrily stomped out of the room, and this in an academy named after the topic.
Consciousness also faces such issues.
I fall on the side of many neuroscientists that state consciousness is an emergent phenomenon.
That is, the physical properties of the human body produce the state of mind we call consciousness.
The religious and spiritual alike sometimes decry this idea, turning instead to some form of Cartesian dualism, as if a ghost lives in this machine of flesh for a time being before escaping when biology stops working.
It's an odd situation we find ourselves in.
Very often the burden of proof is placed on those that feel consciousness is emergent by asking for irrefutable evidence that it's body-dependent.
From my perspective, that burden should be put on the dualist.
We have millennia of biological research and a few centuries of neuroscience literature to support the idea of emergence.
Just because we don't know the exact mechanisms for the construction of consciousness does not mean they don't exist.
There are plenty of theories to choose from in terms of defining that construction, but as I said, most researchers agree on the general parameters.
My favorite area of research is memory.
In my last book, I devote an entire chapter surveying the literature of memory formation and its evolutionary purpose, but let's consider a basic example.
Diseases of dementia.
We know that as we age, we're likely to become more forgetful, and that in its extreme, memory loss is likely associated with the buildup of amyloid plaques.
Is Alzheimer's entirely dependent on these plaques?
We don't know.
Right now we know that people who suffer from Alzheimer's have a large number of plaques, and that many interventions aim at reducing plaque buildup.
Is the formation of plaque due to inflammation, or do these plaques create inflammation?
What role do environmental conditions play?
How about genetics?
Diet?
Exercise?
There's no consensus which is how science works.
Especially daunting is the notion that it could be a combination of factors, which is often the case with complex diseases.
The important aspect to note is that the interplay of biological and environmental forces helps us identify the issue.
Nothing metaphysical.
And I have nothing against metaphysical musings.
In fact, I think it's a necessary function of a healthy imagination.
And memory plays a role in this as well.
One distinction between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom is our complex ability to speculate about the future.
Interestingly, our ability to predict the future involves the very same neural circuitry as those implicated in memory.
Both skills involve a time that is not the present moment, and plenty of research has shown how memories influence our present state of mind as well as our perception of the future.
Now, while these seem like unremarkable skills, they are the foundation of civilization.
Without a mechanism for dreaming forward what's possible, societies would have never been constructed.
Not only can we envision a future, we've acquired the skills necessary to go out and build it.
And even though this seems pedestrian today, that wasn't the case for millions of years of our development, an evolution dependent on the healthy functioning of our particular nervous systems.
One big criticism about the concept of emergence is that it strips the poetry away from existence and therefore any sense of meaning.
This could only be said by someone that has never read the neuroscience literature.
Both Julian and I have shared our love for Vyas Ramachandran, for example, a man who both understands the biological restraints of consciousness while also treating art as a crowning achievement.
You can be scientific and not lose poetry, music, literature, all of the wonderful things that we experience.
University of Sussex professor Anil Seth is another example.
In his new book, Being You, he argues that humans are highly evolved prediction machines that are constantly hallucinating the world and the self.
A precedent exists here as well.
Rodolfo Linnaeus posited consciousness rooted in prediction over 20 years ago, while the hallucination model dates back at least to early studies on LSD in the 1950s.
Albert Hoffman's curious acid is responsible for the widespread acceptance of neuroscience as an academic field.
In a recent interview, Seth explains his goal with his latest book.
The reason I'm interested in consciousness is intrinsically personal.
I want to understand myself and, by extension, others.
But I'm also super interested, for example, in developing statistical models and mathematical methods for characterizing things such as emergence.
And there is no personal component in that.
All right, I won't get too ahead of myself here.
Before Conspiratuality, I produced an occasional podcast called Earthrise, where I interviewed people I wanted to talk to, or sometimes I just talked into the microphone for a half an hour.
It was good trading for this pod, to be honest.
Now I've let that podcast go, though on occasion I've pulled old interviews relevant to spirituality, as I did in our episode on traditional Chinese medicine when I chatted with Sea of Shadows director Richard Lett-Khani.
Since consciousness is such a debated topic in spirituality, for this bonus episode I'm revisiting my conversation with a giant of modern neuroscience.
Michael Gazzaniga's work on split-brain patients changed the entire discipline in 1961.
You might have seen that chart about how the left side of the brain is responsible for verbal and speech processing and the right side deals with spatial processing.
You can thank Michael for this work.
Brain specialization was predominantly speculative before his research.
I was fortunate enough to get to talk to him about emergence and other topics after the publication of his 2018 book, The Consciousness Instinct, unraveling the mystery of how the brain makes the mind.
It's not often you get to chat with a giant in the field that you happen to be very passionate about.
