Rethinking Consciousness: Beyond the Material World

Shimon Marom is a Professor of Physiology and Biophysics. He teaches at the Faculty of Medicine at the Technion and has an important message for researchers of human behavior, which he discusses in his book "Psychoanalysis and Neurophysiology."

Marom writes: I want to dispel, at least a little, the smugness that has affected neuroscientists in recent years. Today's brain science, as reflected in scientific literature and lecture titles at professional conferences, has a new dream: to understand the origin of the mind from the material.

In 1909, philosopher William James met with the founder of psychology, Sigmund Freud, in New England. Freud was invited to America explicitly to lecture about his method in prestigious places, and as part of this, he met with the elderly philosopher and shared his explanations. According to Freud, all our mental phenomena are rooted in various biological events of the past. Freud depicted man as a sophisticated animal, and all his feelings, both good and bad, as stemming from biological complications in childhood. James reacted: "Freud is nothing but a dreamer. Scientists who surrender to the temptation to accept the possible as if it is necessarily true are themselves taking a path of belief, not of science."

More than a hundred years have passed, and there is still an intellectual trend to explain the human spirit as a kind of material result, but Shimon Marom shows in his book that these explanations do not hold water. There is no way to identify human behaviors genetically, biologically, or neurologically. All attempts to formulate shaky explanations that supposedly link biological phenomena with mental behavior only mislead and confuse and do not contribute to the study of the mind or to people suffering from mental issues.

It's time to change direction and study the mind as mind, as a non-material reality, focusing on mental phenomena and analyzing them as such, without linking and attributing everything to biological unknowns. Marom illustrates the depth of confusion we see in such research articles: "Open scientific journals, and you will find yourselves bewildered by the variety of scientific description levels of human behaviors. Imaging systems experts describe emotions in terms of increased activity levels in the brainstem. At the same time, geneticists report a correlation between a man's ability to form relationships and a variation in a gene involved in bodily fluid regulation. Alongside reports from neurophysiologists on the planning process of a typical simple hand movement (say – towards a glass of water) in terms of complex coordination of timing of electrical activity of thousands of neurons in the cortex, molecular biologists report identifying a 'memory molecule.' Neuropharmacologists describe the mechanism underlying mental diseases like schizophrenia and depression in culinary terms ('too much dopamine', 'too little serotonin'), while cell biologists demonstrate a correlation between an intracellular defect and severe mental disorders. The lack of a scale for correlation relevance combines with an unrestrained publication lust, resulting in articles filled with categorical errors."

What benefit is there to a person feeling emotional difficulty if we explain it to them with some imagined biological factor? The mind is a real, spiritual existence, and the processes it undergoes are independent and should be seen as such.

The attempt to view humans as machines is a mistake that even prevents the right help in cases of difficulty.