Never mind about the insane model called the “Big Bang” or the squidgyness of quantum physics. If you want goofy, look at current consciousness theory.
They insist (with no proof of any kind) that consciousness is brain-based. It’s like saying the musicians you hear on radio are in your receiver set, not in the remote studio standing in front of microphones!
Of course I can’t PROVE that your particular radio set doesn’t have a bunch of tiny humans in it, making music! But I can easily DEMONSTRATE that they don’t need to be there to get music on the radio.
Forget the brain. It’s the radio tuner, that is all. Yes, we need to look after it; treat it well; feed it well. Otherwise the messages stop coming out.
Consciousness is something else entirely. It’s non-material. Lunatic science says it can’t be; it’s all in the brain. But since science doesn’t even consider non-material existence, much less have a means for testing its presence, how would they know?
Yesterday I read a LAUGHABLE article about consciousness.1 The “scientists” (sneer), said it must just come down to perception and emotions. There is no YOU, they say. Well, we can’t photograph this “you”, so it doesn’t exist, they say. Has anybody touched or photographed gravity? No. So it doesn’t really exist.
But apparently it’s allowed to “exist” because they need it to make their crazy model of reality work.
But they don’t allow YOU to exist because… well, because it’s inconvenient to have you there, is basically what they are saying.
“Consciousness looks like it’s largely about perception and emotion; it’s not about thought or higher more human capacities,” says pseudo-boffin Jesse Prinz, a “philosopher” at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York.1
Well it could be true… IF THERE WAS NO SUCH THING AS LOVE, INTUITION, REASONING, LOGIC, OR ANY OTHER HIGHER HUMAN CAPACITY. Can this guy read? Has he ever watched a Shakespeare play or read a Dickens novel?
This is pseudo-science degenerated to the disgusting folly of saying (basically) if we can’t figure out how it works or what it’s for, we’ll pretend it isn’t there. Problem solved.
These are the pseudo-scientists, mind you, who say that homeopathy is a fraud; love has no meaning, other than sexuality; God and angels don’t/can’t exist; nutrition is bunk; intuition is self-delusion; Nature has no purpose and all change is random chance; and talking to other people nicely is a waste of time and you should kill or eliminate them, if they get in your way (Darwinism).
The problem (OK, the scientists are the actual problem) originates in the idea that nothing exists anywhere, except physical “stuff”. Whenever challenged with something that doesn’t fit this “stuff” model, they just dismiss it as a delusion (love, telepathy, remote viewing, etc.)
Even hard-science philosophers like Rupert Sheldrake are up against it with these dudes. Sheldrake talks about a non-material field he dubbed “morphic resonance”. It’s universal, timeless and non-locational. No such thing say the scientists. Their response to Sheldrake’s evidence?
It’s a fraud, fake, a delusion. They sneer at his careful studies, ban his talks and want to burn his books… What contradictory evidence? I see no contradictory evidence!* Whoops, there was a chink in our armor… bury it quickly, take down the website, ban the author on Wikipedia… phew! That was a close call.
*If you are not sure about my haverings at this point, Lord Horatio Nelson famously put a telescope to his blind eye, announced “I see no ships” and promptly sailed into battle against orders—and yes, he won, hands down!
Anyway, back to the idiot-science ravings that prompted this harangue from me! I was reading a recent article in New Scientist, a British journal that sometimes carries interesting ideas, but is sometimes so nuts it’s not worth reading.
There are two gross faults in this article Why Be Conscious? Firstly, they assume consciousness needs a brain. Anyone who has had an out-of-body experience knows that’s not true. And that it remains completely unproven that ANYTHING exists outside consciousness. The old idea that the physical universe is there anyway, even without the human mind present, is absurdly naïve and has been disproven by every act of reasonable science. Yet they cling to it like gospel.
The problems biologists and philosophers are having making evolution work is that they conceive of the mind only as a derivative function of the brain. Therefore consciousness has only existed for a few thousand years.
Plants can’t be conscious; they don’t have a brain. Cleve Backster’s rock-solid polygraph evidence that plants can perceive and react?2 Faked. How do they know that? It must have been.
Cleve Backster was a careful scientist and worked most of his life for the CIA and the police.
The whole concept of consciousness as a divine, spiritual or just non-material phenomenon is lost to them. Why? It can’t be. Why? Because it’s in the brain. How do you know? Because it can’t exist outside the brain. What if it does, do you have a new theory to cover that? The idea is preposterous.
And so on and on goes science, “proving” its theories by ignoring all evidence that suggests their model might not be correct.
Apparently there is a new kind of science around. We don’t look for facts anymore. We just invent a theory, then doctor the “evidence” to fit it, and eliminate all contrary facts, by stating they are false. Well, contrary evidence must be fake because our unproven theory is undoubtedly correct!
Nice work if you can get it. But it’s not science. It’s not truth. It’s a pathetic judgment on low-life intellectuals, who would rather justify their ignorance and attack critics, than learn to be wise!
One interesting fact emerged, even during this stupid article for New Scientist: animals which display focused attention (aka. subjective experience) need to sleep. Other creatures do not. From which I conclude that bananas never sleep! [just joking; but the plant kingdom presumably does not need sleep].
Meantime, here’s a good line of argument for non-material mind: did you know that the conscious part of our brains can only handle about 40 bits of information per second, while our “subconscious” minds can process 11 million bits of information per second?
If the deeper layers of the true mind are indeed non-material, this is a disconnect you could easily predict. Nothing in the brain—no part of it—is capable of anywhere near 11 million bits per second. Are you kidding? Every synaptic gap between brain cells take 200- 300 milliseconds to cross.
Hence my title. Studies of consciousness are the dumbest science ever, to date.
Have a laugh, anyway!
References:
- New Scientist, 13 May 2017, vol 234 no. 3125.
- Backster C, Primary Perception, White Rose Millennium Press, Anza CA, 2003.