Author’s note: My co-author Denyse O’Leary and I discuss the science of our mind, soul, and our immortality in our new book, The Immortal Mind, out now.

About 20 years ago, I cared for a little boy I’ll call Joey. Joey was born with a severe handicap — hydranencephaly. It happens when a baby in the womb has massive strokes that lead to the death of both hemispheres of the brain, including the cerebral cortex.  

Some kids with hydranencephaly have tiny remnants of cerebral cortex. But for most, the only brain tissue left is the brainstem, the diencephalon and the cerebellum — lower parts of the brain that, according to modern theories, cannot enable consciousness.

At birth, these babies appear surprisingly normal, but as they grow they are severely handicapped with a kind of cerebral palsy. They never learn to speak or walk and usually can’t even sit up by themselves. But they are fully conscious.

Joey was a friendly child, prone to laughter, delighted in his family and friendly to the doctors and nurses who cared for him. He would cry when he was frightened by medical procedures and he displayed a broad range of appropriate emotions.

He was unequivocally conscious — without a cerebral cortex and even without brain hemispheres. 

So this one handicapped child disproved nearly all of the theories of consciousness held by modern neuroscientists.

So How Should We Understand Consciousness?

Neuroscientist Mark Solms highlights the contradiction of current theory that Joey’s consciousness represents. He proposes that the brainstem (shown at right), which Joey did have, is the source of human consciousness.

I disagree with Solms about the adequacy of the brainstem to fully account for consciousness, although it is clearly necessary for arousal and alertness. For example, damage to the brainstem can lead to various problems with movement and alertness.

But I believe that children with hydranencephaly are conscious because all human beings have a spiritual soul, and it is by virtue of our soul that we are conscious. The brain cortex (the cerebral cortex) plays an important role in many things — movement, perception, emotions and memory — but our basic consciousness, our experiences and our existence as subjects instead of objects, is a power of our soul, and is not generated by brain tissue. Our human soul is spiritual, and by its nature it is immortal.

How Do Materialist Theories Account for Consciousness?

Materialist theories of consciousness attempt to explain our subjective experience — the fact that I am an “I” and not just an “it” — as arrangements of matter. They deny that there is any immaterial aspect to us; on their view, we do not continue to exist in some form after death and the dissolution of the body.

Such radical viewpoints — that we are meat machines — are for the most part recent developments in science and philosophy. Historically, most people, including laypeople, natural scientists, philosophers and theologians, and adherents of all major religions, have clearly recognized that we have spiritual souls of one sort or another.

The materialist fallacy that dominates modern neuroscience and philosophy of mind dates back to mathematician and philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650), who proposed that the soul and body are separate substances, a thinking thing (res cogitans) living in a material thing (res externa). As materialism rose in popularity over the next few centuries, materialists discarded the res cogitans(the soul) and proposed that we are merely material bodies.

Of course, it is difficult to explain how a brain, which is three pounds of meat, can give rise to a human mind. In other words, the mind‒body problem, as it is usually called today, is a problem specific to materialism.

It’s All in the Interactions…

To explain how the brain creates the mind, materialists argue that we are conscious because of interactions of various sorts in our brains. In the words of pioneering neurosurgeon and neuroscientist Wilder Penfield (1891–1976) from sixty years ago, materialists argue that the brain explains the mind completely. Thus, nearly all materialist theories of consciousness invoke cortical processing of one sort or another.

The cortex is the surface layer of the brain which contains about 15 billion neurons. In the materialist view, consciousness arises when this vast number of neurons interacts. Allen Institute neuroscientist Christof Koch’s Integrated Information Theory (IIT) proposes that it is the integration of information that arises from the enormous complexity of networks of cortical neurons that makes us conscious.

Its chief current rival, Global Workspace Theory (GWT) proposes that unconscious information from sensory regions of the brain is brought to consciousness in a “workspace” in the frontal lobes. Other theories, such as Higher Order Theory, Predictive Processing Theory, and Attention Schema Theory, among others, also invoke various kinds of integration of material processes in the cerebral cortex. In nearly all modern materialistic theories of consciousness, consciousness emerges from the cerebral cortex.

And Joey, who was clearly conscious, didn’t have a cerebral cortex. Perhaps the theorists will get back to me on that.

Image source: Discovery Institute.

Cross-posted at Mind Matters News.