Cloud consciousness: Ruickbie excerpt #26

Psychologist Leo Ruickbie reports in “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies:

The lack of direct evidence for consciousness as a product of the brain, leaves open the question of whether the brain creates or, in some sense, receives consciousness. As early as 1891, the Oxford philosopher F.C.S Schiller proposed that “matter is not what produces consciousness but what limits it and confines its intensity within certain limits.”

Henri Bergson       

The French philosopher Henri Bergson took a similar position when he theorized that mind was not reducible to matter, and vice versa. Like Schiller, for Bergson the brain channels the mind in biologically pragmatic directions, principally survival, but he was also finding his way towards a holographic theory before holography was known, by stating that “the part is the whole.” Bergson was influenced in his thinking by the reported experiences of life preview occurring on the brink of death. William James also suggested that as well as thinking of the brain as having a productive function, we should also consider that it may be a “permissive or transmissive function.”

Although, as James noted, the production model was “a little more popular,” the idea of transmission continued to be researched and explored. The influential British psychologist Sir Cyril Burt argued:

A comparison of the specific micro-neural situations in which consciousness does and does not arise suggests that the brain functions, not as a generator of consciousness, but rather as a two-way transmitter and detector; i.e., although its activity is apparently a necessary condition, it cannot be a sufficient condition, of conscious experience.

Aldous Huxley found these theories useful for making sense of his experiences with psychedelics, comparing the brain to a “reducing valve” for “mind at large.” Further research in the field has strengthened the observation that psychedelics seem to have the ability to turn off the brain’s filtering of consciousness, giving access to mystical states and/or higher dimensions (which may or may not be the same thing). But there is still a demarcation between drug states and other altered states, for example, Greyson cites a case of LSD overdose and an attempted suicide using opioids where the drug-induced hallucinations demonstrably affect the physical brain but not the mind during an NDE.

Any theory that might support survival does not have to account for those things that appear not to support survival. For example, a woman changes behavior due to Alzheimer’s and where once calm and pleasant becomes violent and disorderly, thus if the mind is independent of the brain, then this would not happen goes the argument. However, even if the mind is independent of the brain, we still know that for physical existence the brain is very necessary, or else we would not have it.

A malfunctioning brain due to disease does not rule out the independence of the mind, but simply shows that the reception of consciousness can become impaired to the point where we seem to be dealing with a different person. We have no insight into what is going on with regards to that original, pre-disease consciousness, therefore the condition tells us little, although we often assume much from it. Such theoretical objections based on dissimilar cases do not undermine the empirical evidence we have for the continuation of consciousness beyond the body (alive and dead). It would be like arguing that because oranges and apples are both fruits, and oranges are orange, that apples cannot be red or green.

Modern neuroscience often uses information technology analogies to explain the working of the mind–brain. We can do that, too, but we will need something different from what I call the ‘fleshbot’ model. If the brain is the receiver of mind, then mind can be thought of as ‘in the cloud,’ and consciousness is like cloud computing, allowing us to see a possible model for consciousness to be non-local and in two places at once (the here-and-now and the here-after). After the permanent failure of the receiving instrument, consciousness simply continues in the cloud. We could call this ‘cloud consciousness,’ but we could also call it the consciousness dimension – we are just grasping for the best metaphor to represent this possibility to ourselves. The problem is where is the cloud and how does it work? 

 

Leo Ruickbie, “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies. Ruickbie teaches psychology at Kings College and the University of Northamptom in the United Kingdom. Footnotes have been deleted from these online excerpts from his essay. The entire essay may be downloaded at the Bigelow site https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.