What if mind doesn’t emerge from the brain? What might that mean for science?

The emergent view or production model of the mind-brain that is dominant in science and philosophy today is increasingly being questioned. What if the brain doesn’t actually produce the mind or consciousness?

Image: Norbert Kundrak on unsplash. We think. We have thoughts, ideas, visual images, emotions. Does all that come from the interaction of neurons in our brains. Or, is it possible that consciousness is something more, even something outside our physical matter? What might that mean for science––and us?

The dominant view in philosophy and science today is that consciousness emerges from the brain. The brain produces it as an accidental consequence of the physical laws of matter. This is the bottom-up view of consciousness. The top-down view considers consciousness to be related to the brain but not to emerge from it. It is “something more,” whether that means the mental is a separate substance from the physical (substance dualism) or that mentality is somehow embedded in physical matter (panpsychism) or a property of matter (property dualism).

Readers of this Top-Down or Bottom-Up series will most likely detect my own orientation. Most of these posts have summoned scientific and philosophical evidence for the failure of physicalism to be the complete and exclusive explanation of what is real. This failure, as I have tried to demonstrate, goes far beyond the issue of consciousness. It includes the physicalist explanations for the very nature of our material world, as in quantum mechanics, and physicalist theories of genetic mutation and natural selection as the complete explanation…