Brains? We Don't Need No Stinkin' Brains!

It was Robert Kennedy's death, as I remember, that made me an atheist at age fourteen.

It was not the problem of evil—not “How could God allow this?” I understood the concept of free will well enough. It was a comment in some news story that, if Kennedy survived, at best, he would be “a vegetable,” given the serious damage to his brain.

This led me to the thought that the spirit or consciousness was too closely tied to the brain to allow for any life after death. Or for beings of pure spirit, like God.
By age eighteen, I had changed my mind completely. I had no choice—by then, I had had direct personal experience of God. But I’d also seen through what I thought by then was an obvious fallacy. So I was a bit surprised recently to hear one of the “new atheists”--I think it was Richard Dawkins--use the same argument: that people cannot think or even be without brains, and this proves that the soul cannot exist without the body.

The fallacy seems so simple, to me at least. The same observed phenomenon, of a “vegetative” state, could be equally accounted for by assuming the brain were the sine qua non of consciousness, or that it was only the conduit or bridge through which the soul was able to influence the body. Calling a lack of response “vegetative” merely illegitimately presupposes the former.

But it turns out I was not quite right. In fact, there seems to be legitimate empirical evidence emerging that the “conduit” or “bridge” hypothesis is the more probable one. For example, an article in yesterday's National Post cites a number of people who “woke up” hours after being declared brain dead, with the “loss of all brain function,” and in at least one case with no blood supply to the brain. This at least makes the link between brain and mind a bit more ambiguous: it seems to me that, even if the brain as an organ survived intact, if all activity ceased and then resumed, and the brain is the creator of consciousness, the consciousness that arose then should be a new one, with no memories and no continuing sense of self.

Otherwise, where did it go in the interim?

An accompanying article reports on a study (http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/NEJMoa0905370)
bearing directly on the proverbial “vegetative” state. A British/Belgian team has discovered that, with sufficiently sensitive equipment for detecting brain wave activity, such “vegetables,” despite “devastating brain damage,” can actually answer questions about their past lives, correctly. In other words, they are not vegetables at all. They are perfectly conscious and apparently mentally intact. What is gone is the ability to communicate with their bodies and so with the outside world.

Only some patients have responded in this way. But, knowing that some people with severe brain damage are still conscious, it becomes entirely possible that all the rest are too—but either less able to communicate, or less able to detect our attempts at communication.

Occam’s razor now comes into play: we know that at least some “vegetables” are conscious and mentally intact. We do not know if any are not. The simplest, and therefore more probable, hypothesis is that they all are.

Had enough? For there are also scores of cases of people living normal lives, and scoring within the normal intelligence range—or even above it—with “no detectable brain.”

In other words, the onus seems clearly on those who would deny the possibility of a spirit or mind existing without a brain to demonstrate their case; even the purely empirical evidence, such as it is, seems to go against them.

Even if all this were not true, reducing thought and consciousness to a physical wad of soggy tissue or the electrical impulses coursing through it is a nonsensical concept in philosophical terms: as obvious an error as sitting down in a restaurant and eating the menu instead of ordering the meal, meanwhile looking out the window at the sky in hopes of seeing time flying by. While one may be related to the other in some mysterious way, they obviously exist and are on different planes.