Nicola Staff asked 3 years ago
Unfortunately, this is a highly biased and highly superficial analysis of the question being posed but sought through very narrow means. This is the problem with all who are narrow-minded, their narrow-mindedness keeps them trapped within a small body of knowledge, it happens to be all they know, and are unable to use that as a springboard to go outside the box, so to speak, to envision anything new or even more vast in nature than the narrow confines they have created for themselves. This is typical of the materialists, who follow the scientific method to dissect things into ever-smaller component parts, looking at each selectively and singly, and sometimes in isolation, in an attempt to understand the whole. Sometimes, this is simply impossible; if you take out a critical component and everything shuts down, one cannot conclude that that particular component represents the whole and is the sum total, the be-all and end-all of, in this case, consciousness. Nor can one see some moderation or alteration of perception, or the way in which consciousness behaves, with the alteration of a small component part of the brain and draw any truly meaningful conclusion about consciousness, its origin, and its role in things from what happens from that perturbation.
The best analogy we can give you for ease of understanding is likening the brain to a television set, as that is basically a receiver of a signal. In the case of the brain, it is consciousness acting on the brain, and the functions of the brain and its component parts are to make sense of the energy of consciousness as a signal of the intentions desired. It is experienced in various ways, at various levels of the brain, in part as a working of the mind, and in part as effects going out to impinge on the body, as a result perhaps of conscious intentions for something to happen, such as an athletic feat or something quite prosaic about grooming oneself in the morning on awakening. If you impinge on the brain and take bits and pieces away, or suppress them, something might happen that is very reproducible, but that says nothing about the origin or intention for that behavior to be exhibited and demonstrated through the workings of the mind or body, and reported to investigators observing the individual understudy. So you could take a television set apart piece by piece and look at what happens to the content being displayed, with respect to picture and sound, and draw conclusions about the functional role of those components in the overall performance of the television set, but that will only speak to the output that is discernible from scientific observation and will tell you little about where the actual information being displayed originates and how it got to the television set to be displayed.
When it comes to the brain and consciousness, and its consequences, science is completely in the dark about the true origin of consciousness and makes a sweeping generalization, that because perturbing the physical anatomy of the brain in various ways will affect conscious awareness, particular thoughts, and exhibition of many aberrant responses, it must be the case that consciousness is arising in those component parts of the brain itself, when in fact they are simply a processing center of some kind to convey, or perhaps integrate, incoming information via the energy of consciousness itself to impinge on the brain to make things happen. So the person is aware of their consciousness at work, the brain is only a receiver of consciousness and a kind of display and relay mechanism to act as an interface between consciousness and the physical being. It is not the origin of consciousness, so all of the scientific observations obtained by dissecting the brain through electrical stimulation, ablation of some brain areas, as done in animal studies, or observing experiments of nature causing brain damage, do not tell the whole story.
When an area of the brain is damaged by illness or accident, and seeing a deficit, that proves nothing about the origin of the consciousness giving rise to what would be normal human behavior and thought, only that a particular part of the brain is necessary to experience or exhibit that conscious signal. Science will have to look beyond the body to truly understand consciousness. They are turning the data and the question on its head to go back to the source of most readily observed manifestations of consciousness, that is the brain and physical body, and summarily dismiss from studies of that locale anything that is reported by individuals as happening beyond the body itself, as their consciousness might go out and roam beyond the body, as happens in the dream state and in various paranormal phenomena, very accurately called "out-of-body experiences." This is true of the so-called "near-death experiences" of many who have witnessed things they could not have known without consciousness leaving the body for a time during a coma state and recalling it later on. Studies of that kind are also going to where consciousness is producing measurable and verifiable phenomena. To stay within the brain, and attempt to observe the workings of consciousness, limits what can happen dramatically, in truly getting to the root of the question and adding anything meaningful to the discussion, other than reinforcement of prior assumptions, that nothing happens beyond the body itself, and the brain, in particular.
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