Transcending the Brain

In Scientific American, Bernardo Kastrup has an excellent article on “Transcending the Brain”. There is a fair amount of speculation in the piece, but it’s of the sort that I gravitate towards:

Despite significant advances in neuroscience, consciousness remains a vexing mystery. Because the qualities of experience seem to be irreducible to physical parameters, a hypothesis that has been garnering attention is that consciousness is fundamental and spatially unbound, the brain corresponding to a dissociation or localization of its contents…

Do some forms of impairment correlate with an enrichment of consciousness or cognitive skill?…

As it turns out, there are reliable reports in the medical literature of—yes—bullet wounds to the head, stroke, concussion, meningitis, and even the progression of dementia leading to expanded cognitive and artistic skills…

[I]t is well known that psychedelic substances induce powerful experiences of self-transcendence. It had been assumed that they did so by exciting parts of the brain. Yet, recent neuroimaging studies have shown that psychedelics do largely the opposite. Moreover, “the magnitude of this decrease [in brain activity] predicted the intensity of the subjective effects.” In other words, the less activated the brain becomes, the more intense the psychedelic experiences…

Such similarities suggest that normal brain function corresponds to a dissociation or localization of the contents of consciousness, and that certain forms of impairment of brain function reduce this dissociation or localization, thereby leading to expanded awareness and self-transcendence. The implications of this hypothesis for both neuroscience and neurophilosophy are far-reaching.

This entry was posted in Philosophy of Mind. Bookmark the permalink.