Are brains transmissive? Rouleau excerpt #6

Rouleau writes: The Ingersoll Lectures, which have been hosted by the Divinity School at Harvard University since the 1890s, are delivered every year between the end of May and the beginning of December on the subject of human immortality. Consistent with requests made when it was originally endowed, lecturers can be professors, clergymen, or laypeople but should not be limited to any one group. Notable thinkers and scientists including William Osler, Alfred North Whitehead, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, and Stephen Jay Gould are among the long list of distinguished speakers associated with the Ingersoll Lectures series. While the specific topics vary according to expertise, many lecturers have offered insights on the survival of human consciousness following bodily death.

In 1897, the famous “Father of American psychology” William James – who was also a notable physician, philosopher, and psychical researcher with a profound interest in the paranormal – delivered the second annual Ingersoll lecture entitled “Human Immortality: Two Supposed Objections to the Doctrine”. In his lecture, the transcript of which was published in 1898, James outlined what I submit is the definitive case for the survival of human consciousness. The main arguments put forward in the lecture are as relevant today as they were then; however, over a century of neuroscientific research has provided the benefit of empirical support, which makes his argument significantly more compelling. As I am convinced William James’ formulation of the problem of survival is critical to appreciating the proposed solution, I will summarize his lecture and its implications here. Once the concept is characterized, the remaining sections of the essay will be comprised of a systematic description of the empirical support for James’ hypothesis.

William James structured his groundbreaking lecture as a reply to two reasonable objections to the doctrine of human immortality. The first objection to which he replied is the same we concerned ourselves with in the previous section: If the brain is the seat of consciousness, how can it survive brain death and decay? After re-stating the objection, James began with a throat-clearing about the dependence of memory, thought, and consciousness on the brain:

The first of these difficulties is relative to the absolute dependence of our spiritual life, as we know it here, upon the brain. . . . How can the function possibly persist after its organ has undergone decay? . . . Every one knows that arrests of brain development occasion imbecility, that blows on the head abolish memory or consciousness, and the brain-stimulants and poisons change the quality of our ideas. . . . various special forms of thinking are functions of special portions of the brain.

When we are thinking of things seen, it is our occipital convolutions that are active; when of things heard, it is a certain portion of our temporal lobes; when of things to be spoken, it is one of our frontal convolutions. . . . For the purposes of my argument, now, I wish to adopt this general doctrine as if it were established absolutely, with no possibility of restriction. . . .Thought is a function of the brain.

Having firmly adopted the position that thought – including consciousness – is a function of the brain, James accepted the challenge of reconciling its survival with death. To that end, he explained why most of his contemporaries believed immortality, or the survival of consciousness after bodily death, was impossible and why their reasoning was flawed:

The supposed impossibility of its continuing comes from too superficial a look at the admitted fact of functional dependence. The moment we inquire more closely into the notion of functional dependence, and ask ourselves, for example, how many kinds of functional dependence there may be, we immediately perceive that there is one kind at least that does not exclude a life hereafter at all. The fatal conclusion of the physiologist flows from his assuming offhand another kind of functional dependence and treating it as the only imaginable kind.

Next, James described three types of functional dependences: productive, permissive, and transmissive. He argued that objections to human immortality – the survival of consciousness after death – are based upon the widely-held assumption that brain functions including consciousness are consequences of productive function. That is, the function is “inwardly created” or caused by endogenous neurobiological events – as is the current dogma in the modern field of neuroscience. He elaborates:

When the physiologist who thinks that his science cuts off all hope of immortality pronounces the phrase, ``Thought is a function of the brain,'' he thinks of the matter just as he thinks when he says, ``Steam is a function of the tea-kettle,'' ``Light is a function of the electric circuit,'' ``Power is a function of the moving waterfall.'' In these latter cases the several material objects have the function of inwardly creating or engendering their effects, and their function must be called productive function. Just so, he thinks, it must be with the brain. Engendering consciousness in its interior, much as it engenders cholesterin and creatin and carbonic acid, its relation to our soul's life must also be called productive function. Of course, if such production be the function, then when the organ perishes, since the production can no longer continue, the soul must surely die. Such a conclusion as this is indeed inevitable from that particular conception of the facts.

Having rejected the conclusion that consciousness necessarily arises from a productive functional dependence of the brain, James then described permissive or “releasing” function, which is derivative of Newton’s first law of motion, where function is inevitable unless obstructed by a barrier. To clarify the point, he cited the example of a crossbow, where the release of the string returns the bow to its original shape, thus firing the arrow. However, we will be primarily concerned with James’ third type of functional dependence: transmission.

In James’ view, transmissive function is like a filter or sieve that, by dint of its own structure, organizes the shape and character of existing but separate forces into parcels, units, or subdivisions of the whole. Stating his thesis, William James considered the possibility that consciousness is dependent upon a transmissive property of the brain rather than a productive one. In his own words:

In the case of a colored glass, a prism, or a refracting lens, we have transmissive function. The energy of light, no matter how produced, is by the glass sifted and limited in color, and by the lens or prism determined to a certain path and shape. Similarly, the keys of an organ have only a transmissive function. They open successively the various pipes and let the wind in the air-chest escape in various ways. The voices of the various pipes are constituted by the columns of air trembling as they emerge. But the air is not engendered in the organ. The organ proper, as distinguished from its air-chest, is only an apparatus for letting portions of it loose upon the world in these peculiarly limited shapes. My thesis is now this: that, when we think of the law that thought is a function of the brain, we are not required to think of productive function only; we are entitled also to consider . . . transmissive function.

Staying with the metaphor of transmitted light, James then asked his audience to consider the possibility that “the millions of finite streams of consciousness known to us as our private selves” are part of one infinite Thought that, like white light through a prism, is shattered into an infinite spectrum of waves. Considering the possibility that brains selectively obstruct the transmission of consciousness, and that this process explains the unique features of human individuality, James described how his proposed mechanism might track changing mental states, death, and the survival of consciousness after brain decay:

According to the state in which the brain finds itself, the barrier of its obstructiveness may also be supposed to rise or fall. It sinks so low, when the brain is in full activity, that a comparative flood of spiritual energy pours over. At other times, only such occasional waves of thought as heavy sleep permits get by. And when finally a brain stops acting altogether, or decays, that special stream of consciousness which it subverted will vanish entirely from this natural world. But the sphere of being that supplied the consciousness would still be intact; and in that more real world with which, even whilst here, it was continuous, the consciousness might, in ways unknown to us, continue still.

William James conceded that no known mechanism at the time of his lecture could explain transmissive functional dependence in brains; however, he enjoined his audience to consider that a productive mechanism had also not yet been demonstrated – a fact that remains true today despite an embarrassment of riches with regard to correlational data (e.g., neural correlates of consciousness). James then concluded that the productive theory was only regarded as more likely than the transmissive theory because it was more popular – a point that also remains true today. Finally, he described some perceived advantages of the transmission theory:

Consciousness in this process does not have to be generated de novo in a vast number of places. It exists already, behind the scenes, coeval with the world. The transmission-theory not only avoids in this way multiplying miracles, but it puts itself in touch with general idealistic philosophy better than the production-theory does. . . . It puts itself also in touch with [Gustav Fechner’s] conception of a `threshold' . . . Before consciousness can come, a certain degree of activity in the movement must be reached. . . . but the height of the threshold varies under different circumstances: it may rise or fall. When it falls, as in states of great lucidity, we grow conscious of things of which we should be unconscious at other times; when it rises, as in drowsiness, consciousness sinks in amount. . . . [and] conforms to our notion of a permanent obstruction to the transmission of consciousness, which obstruction may, in our brains, grow alternately greater or less.

James then dedicated some attention to the important point that transmissive brains could account for phenomena that are conceptually marginalized by the assumption of productive functional dependence. Specifically, he listed several psi phenomena that are made mechanistically plausible by the adoption of a theory of transmission:

The transmission-theory also puts itself in touch with a whole class of experiences that are with difficulty explained by the production-theory . . . [such] as religious conversions, providential leadings in answer to prayer, instantaneous healings, premonitions, apparitions at time of death, clairvoyant visions or impressions, and the whole range of mediumistic capacities, to say nothing of still more exceptional and incomprehensible things. . . . On the transmission-theory, they don't have to be `produced,'--they exist ready-made in the transcendental world, and all that is needed is an abnormal lowering of the brain-threshold to let them through. . . . All such experiences, quite paradoxical and meaningless on the production-theory, fall very naturally into place on the other theory. We need only suppose the continuity of our consciousness with a mother sea, to allow for exceptional waves occasionally pouring over the dam.

William James ended his lecture by addressing the second of the two objections to the doctrine of immortality: If immortality is true, and consciousness continues after death, the number of immortal beings would be unimaginably large. He quickly dismisses the objection as a failure of imagination before summarizing his view, which is potentially inclusive to all living organisms across time and space:

For my own part, then, so far as logic goes, I am willing that every leaf that ever grew in this world's forests and rustled in the breeze should become immortal. It is purely a question: are the leaves so, or not? Abstract quantity, and the abstract needlessness in our eyes of so much reduplication of things so much alike, have no connection with the subject. For bigness and number and generic similarity are only manners of our finite way of thinking.

One important point that James did not discuss was the intercompatibility of functional dependences. Based upon his descriptions, productive and transmissive functional dependences should be able to co-exist and interact within the same system. Indeed, just as James cites examples of objects or devices that express one form of functional dependence – the prism, the pipe organ, and the tea kettle – it is immediately apparent that there are equal numbers of such devices that can be said to have multiple functional dependences. Clock radios, for example, are dependent upon both electric circuits (James cites internal circuitry as productive) and the reception of transmitted information by way of their antennae. A clock radio does not create music de novo – it is a conduit for information that, when coupled to a speaker, can transduce electromagnetic waves into mechanical vibrations that are perceived as organized patterns of sound. If the clock radio were to fall and shatter or be unplugged from its power source, the electromagnetic equivalent of the music as radio waves would “survive”. Repairing the device or re-establishing its power source would seem to resuscitate the music that had never really been lost.

Therefore, it is also possible that brains, with their numerous and complex internal structures, are functionally multi-dependent, expressing both productive and transmissive properties. Just as the information content of music is preserved in the case of a broken radio, it is conceivable that the information content of experience is preserved upon the death of the brain. In this way, the highly predictive contemporary models of neurobiology do not need to be abandoned to reconcile consciousness with transmission and survival but may instead require a modest amendment.

James’ functional dependences may also be less distinct than described. After all, while he points to “steam as a function of the tea kettle”, “light as a function of the electric circuit”, and “power as a function of the waterfall” as examples of productive functional dependences, it is unclear why the causes of these processes cannot equally be attributed to external events. Is the electricity running through the light bulb’s circuit not a function of the power generator, which is a function of the waterfall, which is, in turn, a function of gravity? While it is useful to consider the proximate cause as the starting point of any process, further examination will always lead to the discovery of an ultimate cause outside of the system itself. Therefore, the concept of productive dependence is likely an artifact of our perception rather than an actual property of systems and this illusion has defined our intuitions about how brains function. In fact, all functions of the body are subject to this misapprehension. Muscles do not create heat – heat is a biproduct of twitching cells, which is itself a product of chemical reactions driven by reactants or their precursors that were at some point ingested as food. The iron in our blood that facilitates oxygen transport throughout the body was synthesized in the core of a star, not the body. Albeit a minor digression, it should always be remembered that the ultimate causes of all bodily events are not found within the body at all.

 

James, W. (1898). Human immortality: Two supposed objections to the doctrine. Houghton, Mifflin.

Nicolas Rouleau, PhD, a neuroscientist and bioengineer, is an assistant professor at Algoma University in Canada. He received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies "An Immortal Stream of Consciousness" in response to its search for "scientific evidence for the survival of consciousness after permanent bodily death." Footnotes and bibliography are omitted from these excerpts from his essay, but the full essay is available online at https://www.bigelowinstitute.org/index.php/contest-runners-up/.