Unlikely that conciousness emerged from the brain

Psychiatrist Elio Frattarnoli in Healing the Soul in the Age of the Brain writes: “As for the idea that consciousness must be biological because it ‘emerged’ through the biological process of natural selection, the truth is that consciousness is entirely different from any biological function that has emerged through natural selection. It cannot be explained the way biological functions can―as a result of genetic mutations producing new proteins producing new biological processes producing a new function. No doubt brain processes that are necessary to support consciousness did emerge in this way through natural selection. But they are only the necessary biological conditions for consciousness, not its sufficient causes.

Frattarnoli reminds us that neuroscientist Wilder Penfield, who mapped the neocortex of patients with epilepsy, reported: “The only sort of conscious experience he was able to evoke electrically was the passive experience of something happening to the patient or impinging on his awareness―what Penfield called ‘brain-action.’ This was not at all what he had expected. He had started out with the materialist assumption that all conscious functions and experiences must be controlled by the brain and would therefore be affected by the brain events he evoked with his stimulating electrode. But what he discovered instead was a presiding awareness in the patient that was utterly separate and unmoved by any of these brain events―that could recognize, remember, compare, and report on the various conscious experiences evoked by Penfield’s electrode but was itself unaffected by them.”

Frattarnoli concludes that consciousness: “simply cannot be explained in physical, chemical, or biological terms. Without a direct causal link between brain processes and consciousness, there is no persuasive reason to believe that consciousness emerged from the brain, or through natural selection, at all. Since it is a phenomenon of a fundamentally different order from any brain process, it would be much more logical to assume―if we are going to assume anything―that consciousness emerged from a source outside the brain.”