Who Needs A Brain? – 2

The Flight Of Consciousness

Part 1 of this long article lies here

There is a curious scientific principle I refer to often: it can’t be true, therefore it isn’t. For most scientific intellects, they seem to think of it as some kind of magical axiom that can be trotted out to cover anything which disturbs their worldview (Zeitgeist) or challenges the status quo.

Of course they said it about heavier-than-air-flight, out-of-body experiences, telepathy, quantum biology and thousands of other applications in life where—in their view—the effect could not happen and therefore it didn’t. No need to look at the evidence: there couldn’t be any!

Well, it’s a handy, if lazy, way of looking at truths. The trouble is, these thinkers are never disturbed by concrete evidence of something contrary to their worldview; you cannot shift these people with mere facts! They have fixed prejudices which will never change. As someone wittily said (Thomas Kuhn, I think), the only way anything moves forward is when the old guard dies off and new people come onto the scene who are not prejudging the more advanced view.

So it is with the idea that consciousness does not need a physical matrix, such as a brain or even a computer. It just is! Viewpoint is a matter of choice and a person can accept their viewpoint as peeping out at the world from behind a pair of eyes in their skull. Or the person can say “I am not in my body; I don’t need my body to perceive”. When such a person is good at it, they can “see” just as well as with eyes.

So out-of-body experiences and remote viewing are not just possible but would be expected. Near-death-experiences (NDEs) have something of the same characteristics, where the person is consciously aware but clearly not working from the brain or the normal sensorium of sight, touch, smell, etc. Continue reading

The Delusion Of Being You!

My attention was grabbed by an article in New Scientist, which revealed that experiments were being done in which a robot was controlled by thought alone. The human subject in a laboratory was wired to a functional MRI (fMRI) scanner, which read his intentions according to which parts of the brain cortex were lit up (in stimulation). This notional action was then relayed as instructions to a robot, thousands of kilometres away, which made the movement that the lab experimenter was thinking about.

Shades of the Avatar movie!

We all know we are on the brink of the era in which we can control computers by means of our thoughts; I even wrote about it in my 1999 best-selling book Virtual Medicine. Well, that day is come…

Moreover, we may soon reach a time when we can use a computer-controlled surrogate body to trek across the Sahara, shoot the rapids in the Grand Canyon, have dinner in Paris with a friend and even go to the moon.

This beats “virtual reality” to Hell and back!

True Embodiment

Tele-operated robots, those that can be remotely controlled by a human, have been around for decades.

This new approach goes way beyond that. What was truly remarkable about this experiment was that the human subject began to feel he actually WAS the robot. He felt it was part of himself. We call that embodiment.

Let’s learn more: Continue reading