The logical error in assuming the brain creates all of our conscious experience
Consciousness is definitionally the most fundamental concept. The brain should be explained in terms of consciousness, not the other way around.
Many articles on the Freedman et al. 2023 paper “Enhanced mind-matter interactions following rTMS induced frontal lobe inhibition” (published in the mainstream neuroscience journal Cortex, and which as the title suggests found evidence that inhibiting the brain’s frontal lobes results in amplified “micro psychokinesis” ability i.e. the ability to direct the output of quantum random number generators) make a logical error in assuming that if psychic abilities were possible, the brain must originate them.
In order to do science, we express our ideas in terms of concepts. A “concept” is ultimately a collection of mental sensations (e.g. images flashing into your mind, a feeling, a word popping into your head, etc) that we give a name. In other words, the building blocks of all concepts are mental experiences. The sense of “being conscious” is the most fundamental mental experience, without which mental experiences do not exist. It follows that the sense of being conscious is the most primitive “concept”. Any answer to the question “what does it mean to be conscious” would at some point rely on a pre-existing understanding of what it means to be conscious.
The claim that brains “create” consciousness is synonymous with claiming that brains are the only source of the patterns within our conscious experience. All neuroscientific evidence to date shows that a functioning brain is capable of creating signals within consciousness. None of it establishes that a functioning brain is the sole object capable of creating signals within consciousness, particularly in light of the great deal of evidence from near-death experiences that show it is possible to have vivid conscious experiences even when the brain is minimally active due to losing its power (i.e during cardiac arrest). What’s more, subjects who have out-of-body experiences during cardiac arrest are able to describe their own resuscitations significantly more accurately than those who do not have out-of-body experiences; speculating that the brain can generate vivid, detailed and accurate experiences while oxygen deprived is like claiming a VR headset can generate an accurate representation of the external reality event when its power source is cut.
Psi abilities are properties of conscious agents. We should not assume they are properties of brains simply because all the individuals who participate in psi experiments have brains; doing so is equivalent to collapsing two concepts because they co-occur, and between these concepts, “being conscious” is a far more primitive concept than “brain”.
As for those who claim there is “no evidence” of psi abilities: you have confused the concept of “evidence” with the concept of “proof”. This is as precise as collapsing the concept of “probability > 0” with “probability = 1”. If you actually look at the evidence, the probability turns out to be quite close to 1, but if you are insisting on a probability of 1, you have to realize that you can always choose to adopt a biased worldview according to which such probabilities cannot be 1.
