Neuroscience & Consciousness

Neuroscience and consciousness to begin this segment on neuroscience and consciousness. We must understand, and it has been mentioned in other videos in the class, that current neuroscience is no different from any of the other sciences in that it assumes matter is primary and consciousness is secondary.

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Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):

Neuroscience and consciousness to begin this segment on neuroscience and consciousness. We must understand, and it has been mentioned in other videos in the class, that current neuroscience is no different from any of the other sciences in that it assumes matter is primary and consciousness is secondary. In other words, consciousness is an epiphenomenon of the brain, as is the mind. In earlier videos, the primacy that we believe to be accurate is that consciousness is fundamental. Peter Russell, in his documentary, says, the fundamental nature of reality is actually consciousness. Peter Russell, a physicist and philosopher in this same documentary, says, consciousness may be fundamentally the essence of the entire universe, but our focus here is on the neuroscience. The difficulty then for neuroscience is that it is bound by the assumption matter is first explaining something so complex as consciousness in how it's derived from or emerges from this jelly-like substance in our head, is arguably the most complex task in science.
(01:22)
In the world of neuroscience, they've made amazing progress In the study of brain activity, neuroscientists can tell what part of the brain operates, what parts of the body. They understand how seizures take place, where they take place, where memory is stored. They even understand how certain behaviors take place as a result of brain activity. The brain is an extraordinarily complex organ with millions of circuits and neurons and tens of trillions of nerve connections. But what no one has ever been able to figure out is how does the brain function, explain feeling, or more to the point, how can we explain experience in neurological terms? How does the electrochemical process of the brain give us the experience of physical touch or pain? You cannot look or measure someone's experience. Only the physical manifestations of the experience new, expensive, and more powerful equipment has helped the modern neuroscientist with these tasks. Functional magnetic resonance imaging systems near infrared spectroscopy or electroencephalograph are examples. There have been studies of the brains of people with significant meditation in their background. Non-meditators compared to the meditators, have intense activity on the rational processing side of the brain, whereas Speaker 2 (02:59):

The meditator's brains seem to have less activity in this area and more activity in the central area called the God spot. Even Alexander, who is a neuroscientist and medical doctor, is also the author of Proof of Heaven and other books is also a leading proponent of consciousness. First, Dr. E Alexander suggests that consciousness is independent of the brain and that death is a transition phase into another realm. He says, researchers tested theories about the electromagnetic field of the human heart using machines that measure faint magnetic fields, such as those that are often used in MRIs and cardiologic tests. Remarkably, the heart's tural shaped field is 60 times greater than that of the brain, and its magnetic field is 5,000 times greater than that of the brain. He goes on to say, the heart actually sends more information to the brain than the brain sends to the heart.
(04:06)
But the task of neuroscience and consciousness has been underestimated. Science is all about what it can observe. Even if the subatomic particles in physics are not observable such as neutrinos, they leave a path that can be observed and thus it can be studied. But how can you measure awareness? Researchers in a recent study showed that people in a coma who were told to play golf or to clean the house have demonstrated that the brain activity responsible for those behaviors continues to operate as if the person were actually performing the activity. Answering the question, who is listening to the conversation in your head begins to touch the difficulty of this task. What is aware of the conversation, the thoughts, what is aware of the body? What is aware of your experience? We know consciousness does exist because we can ask these questions and recognize this awareness is present, but science hasn't been able to explain consciousness from a neuroscience perspective because awareness is not measurable.