Sacred statements about consciousness

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Tatiana Chernigovskaya Soviet and Russian scientist in the field of neuroscience and psycholinguistics, as well as the theory of consciousness, doctor of biological sciences, professor. Honored Scientist of the Russian Federation:

“The science of the brain and consciousness today is like the seaside of the era of the great geographical discoveries. Psychologists, biologists, mathematicians, linguists - all stand on the shore in a state of "just about." Everyone peers into the horizon, and everyone already understands that there is something there, beyond the horizon. The ships are equipped, some have even sailed away, expectations are high, but no one has yet returned with the booty, has not redrawn the map of man's ideas about himself, and even before the cry "Earth!" still far…"

Donald Hoffman is Professor of Cognitive Sciences, Philosophy, Information and Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine:

“We tend to think that perception is like a window into reality as it is. Evolutionary theory tells us that we misinterpret our perceptions. Instead, reality is more like a 3D desktop designed to hide all the complexity of the real world, and it helps us to adapt. The space as you perceive it is your desktop. Physical objects are just icons on the desktop.

What does this have to do with solving the riddle of consciousness? It opens up new possibilities. For example, perhaps reality is some kind of huge machine that triggers our conscious experience. I have doubts about this, it still needs to be investigated. Perhaps reality is a kind of huge interactive network of mediators of consciousness, simple and complex, which evoke conscious experience of each other. In fact, this is not as crazy an idea as it seems at first glance, and now I am studying it."

The role of the brain as a source of consciousness and thinking is questioned by the neurophysiologist, Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences Natalya Bekhtereva:

In her book “The Magic of the Brain and the Labyrinths of Life,” she writes: “Deepening in brain research, including on the basis of fundamentally new technologies that have not yet been created, can provide an answer to the question of whether there is a brain code for thinking. If the answer (final!) Is negative and what we observe is not the code of thinking proper, then the rearrangements of impulse activity, correlated with the zones of the brain activated during mental activity, are a kind of “code for the entry of a link into the system”. If the answer is negative, it will be necessary to revise the most general and most important positions in the problem "Brain and psyche". If nothing in the brain is connected precisely with the subtlest structure of our thinking, then what is the role of the brain in this process? Is this just the role of "territory" for some other processes that do not obey the brain laws? And what is their connection with the brain, what is their dependence on the brain substrate and its state?"

At the same time, it has been scientifically proven that consciousness is always associated with processes occurring in the brain and does not exist apart from them.

The brain is a vital organ. Even his insignificant damage can cause serious harm to a person, cause loss of consciousness, amnesia, mental disorder. At the same time, cases of severe brain damage, including congenital malformations up to the absence of a brain, have been documented in medical practice, in which, however, a person continued to live and function normally.

In medical practice, enough cases have been attested about people living without a brain, which forced us to reconsider the accepted dogmas in neurophysiology.

Practical cases

There is 16th century evidence of a boy without a brain. The boy died 3 years later after a severe skull injury. Autopsy did not find his brain.

In the 19th century, Professor Hoofland (Germany) described and documented an amazing case in detail. He had the occasion to open the cranium of a very elderly man who died of paralysis. Until the very last minutes, the patient retained his mental and physical abilities. The result led the professor to extreme confusion: instead of a brain, there were 28 grams of water in the deceased's skull.

In 1940, Dr. Augusto Iturrica, in his report at a meeting of the Bolivian Anthropological Society, spoke about a 14-year-old boy who was in his clinic with a diagnosis of a brain tumor. The patient remained conscious and sane until his death, only complaining of a severe headache. During the autopsy, the doctors were extremely amazed. The entire cerebral mass was separated from the inner cavity of the cranium and looked rotten long ago. Blood had no access to her. In other words, the boy simply didn’t have a brain. For doctors, the normal functioning of the boy's consciousness remained a mystery.

1980 year. An article was presented in the American magazine "Science" which described an interesting case no less than the previous one. A young student went to the hospital with mild discomfort. The doctor who examined the student drew attention to the excess of the norm, the volume of the head. As a result of scanning, the student, like the clerk, was found to have hydrocephalus, but his intelligence level was many times higher than the norm.

In 2002, a girl from Holland underwent a serious operation. She had her left brain hemisphere removed, which is still believed to contain speech centers. Today, the child amazes doctors by the fact that he has mastered two languages perfectly and is learning a third. Dr. Johannes Borgstein, observing the little Dutch woman, says that he has already advised his students to forget all the neurophysiological theories they are studying and will continue to study.

In 2007, a British medical journal wrote an article called "The Clerk's Brain". It told the absolutely fantastic story of a French clerk who sought medical help. A 44-year-old resident of Marseille had a leg pain. As a result of long examinations in order to find the cause of the disease, the doctors prescribed a tomography (brain scan), as a result of which the doctors found that the clerk did not have a brain, instead of brain cells, the bulk of his head was occupied by cerebrospinal fluid. Hydrocephalus or (dropsy of the brain) is a well-known phenomenon in medicine, but the fact that a clerk with such a disease functioned quite normally and his IQ was no different from that of a normal person amazed the doctors.

Another case, an American named Carlos Rodriguez, after an accident, lives practically without a brain. He had more than 60% of his brain removed, but this did not affect his memory and cognitive abilities.

These facts force scientists to admit the fact of the existence of consciousness independently of the brain.

Research conducted by Dutch physiologists under the direction of Pim van Lommel.

The fact that consciousness exists independently of the brain is confirmed by the results of a large-scale experiment published in the most authoritative biological English journal "The Lancet". “Consciousness exists even after the brain has ceased to function. In other words, Consciousness "lives" by itself, absolutely independently. As for the brain, it is not thinking matter at all, but an organ, like any other, performing strictly defined functions.

Peter Fenwick of the London Institute of Psychiatry and Sam Parnia of Southampton Central Hospital.

Dr. Sam Parnia says: “The brain, like any other organ in the human body, is made up of cells and cannot think. However, it can function as a thought-detecting device…. Like a television receiver, which first receives the waves entering it, and then converts them into sound and image. Peter Fenwick, his colleague, makes an even bolder conclusion: "Consciousness may well continue to exist after the physical death of the body."

John Eccles, the leading modern neurophysiologist and Nobel laureate in medicine, also believes that the psyche is not a function of the brain. Together with fellow neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield, who has performed over 10,000 brain surgeries, Eccles wrote The Mystery of Man. In it, the authors explicitly state that they have no doubts that a person is controlled by SOMETHING outside of his body. Professor Eccles writes: “I can experimentally confirm that the workings of consciousness cannot be explained by the functioning of the brain. Consciousness exists independently of it from the outside."

Another author of the book, Wilder Penfield, shares Eccles' opinion. And he adds to what has been said that as a result of many years of studying the activity of the brain, he came to the conviction that the energy of the mind is different from the energy of brain neural impulses.

Two more Nobel Prize and neurophysiology laureates David Hubel and Thorsten Wiesel have repeatedly stated in their speeches and scientific works that in order to assert the connection between the brain and Consciousness, one must understand that it reads and decodes information that comes from the senses. However, as scientists emphasize, it is impossible to do this."

John Rappoport

Official science insistently asserts that the brain consists of the same elementary particles as everything else in the universe - rocks, chairs, comets, meteors, galaxies. According to traditional physics, elementary particles do not possess consciousness. But then there is no reason to believe that the brain also possesses consciousness Consciousness is inherent in the brain no more than in the rock.

All the arguments of official science in favor of the brain being the "seat" of consciousness are empty and absurd. And this takes us beyond the limits of scientific and philosophical materialism - to the need to recognize the immateriality of consciousness."

Rupert Sheldrake is a British writer, biochemist, plant physiologist and parapsychologist who put forward the theory of the morphogenetic field.

"Fundamental to materialism is the assertion that matter is the only reality. Therefore, consciousness is nothing more than a product of brain activity. It is either like a shadow - doing nothing" epiphenomenon "- or just a term by which in conversations we mean a product of activity However, current neuroscience and consciousness researchers disagree on the nature of the mind.

(Journal of Consciousness Studies), publish many articles that reveal deep problems in materialist doctrine. The philosopher David Chalmers has called the very existence of subjective experience a "difficult problem." But it is difficult because subjective experience does not lend itself to mechanistic explanation. By examining how the eyes and the brain respond to red light, we completely discard the experience of its perception."

Also, Dr. Rupert Sheldrake notes that the research of our mind went in two opposite directions. While the realm of research for most scientists is within our brain, it looks beyond it.

According to Sheldrake, author of countless scientific books and articles, memories are not located at some geographical point in our brain, but in a kind of field that surrounds and pervades the brain. The brain itself directly plays the role of a "decoder" of the flow of information produced by each person in contact with the environment.

In her article “Mind, Memories, and the Archetype of Morphic Resonance and the Collective Unconscious,” published in Psychological Perspectives, Sheldrake compares the brain to a television, drawing analogies to explain how mind and brain interact.

"If I break your TV, it will not be able to receive certain channels, or I break a part in it so that you can only see the image, but there will be no sound - this does not prove that the sound or images are inside the TV."

Nikolai Ivanovich Kobozev (1903-1974), a prominent Soviet chemist, professor at Moscow State University, in his monograph "Time" says things that are completely seditious for his militant atheistic time. For example, such: neither cells, nor molecules, nor even atoms can be responsible for the processes of thinking and memory; the human mind cannot be the result of an evolutionary transformation of the functions of information into the function of thinking. This last ability must be given to us, and not acquired in the course of development; the act of death is the separation of a temporary tangle of personality from the flow of current time. This tangle is potentially immortal …

Nikolay Viktorovich Levashov

Russian writer, publicist, researcher, full member of four public academies.

"It is a well-known fact that modern" science "has never been able to find consciousness in the neurons of the brain! Scientists have discovered only a change in the ionic balance in neurons, which manifests itself in weak electromagnetic radiation from the brain, which is neither thought nor consciousness of a person. mental activity of a person, the activity of the brain is practically no different, which buried all the hopes of scientists to identify different phases of the action of human consciousness.

At the same time, it is curious that neighboring neurons of the brain DO NOT interact with each other at the level of physically dense neurons, no matter how paradoxical it may sound! Each neuron in the brain is a cell that is SEPARATED from other similar cells by its cell membrane, like a military fortress by a stone wall. And through this "stone wall" nutrients from the blood plasma from the blood plasma enter the neuron from the intercellular space for the life of this separate fortress cell, and slags come out. And information enters each neuron SEPARATELY - through special processes of neurons - axons, at the ends of which there are certain receptors, which serve as suppliers of information to the neurons themselves. So if there are no contacts between the axons of different neurons in the brain, then there is no exchange of information between them. However, man thinks (and not only he is alone), and, having failed to find an explanation for this natural phenomenon, modern science preferred to no longer pay attention to this inconvenient question, but to confine itself to general phrases that are obvious without any science."

Voino-Yasenetsky Valentin Feliksovich Russian and Soviet surgeon, scientist, author of works on anesthesiology, doctor of medical sciences, professor

In his howling last, autobiographical book "I fell in love with suffering …" (1957), which he did not write, but dictated (in 1955 he was completely blind), no longer the assumptions of a young researcher sound, but the convictions of an experienced and wise scientist-practitioner:

1. The brain is not an organ of thought and feeling;

2. The spirit comes out of the brain, determining its activity, and all of our being, when the brain works as a transmitter, receiving signals and transmitting them to the organs of the body.

"There is something in the body that can separate from it and even outlive the person himself."

In the early 80s of the last century, during an international scientific conference with the famous American psychiatrist Stanislav Grof, one day after Grof's next speech, a Soviet academician approached him. And he began to prove to him that all the wonders of the human psyche, which Grof, as well as other American and Western researchers, discover, are hidden in one or another part of the human brain. In a word, there is no need to come up with any supernatural reasons and explanations if all the reasons are in one place - under the skull. At the same time, the academician loudly and meaningfully tapped himself on the forehead with his finger. Professor Grof thought for a moment and then said:

- Tell me, colleague, do you have a TV at home? Imagine that you have it broken and you called a TV technician. The master came, climbed inside the TV, twisted various knobs there, tuned it. After that, will you really think that all these stations are sitting in this box?

Our academician could not answer anything to the professor. Their further conversation quickly ended there.