A civil servant missing most of his brain challenges theories of consciousness | Hacker News Reader

A civil servant missing most of his brain challenges theories of consciousness

qz.com

34 pointstomhoward16 comments

"And yet the man was a married father of two and a civil servant with an IQ of 75, below-average in his intelligence but not mentally disabled."

75 is pretty far below average - one in 20 of the population - and the fluid had been building up slowly over a 30 year period. I'm wondering what he was like to speak to just before seeking medical attention (and what happened next)...

I take the general point about being able to function normally in society given such horrendous damage.

What about this case: http://www.drjudithorloff.com/Free-Articles/Is-Your-Brain-Ne...

>He cites the case of a student at Sheffield University, who has an IQ of 126 and won first-class honors in mathematics. Yet, this boy has virtually no brain; his cortex measures only a millimeter or so thick compared to the normal 4.5 centimeters.

EDIT: Here's the paper itself, Is Your Brain Really Necessary?: http://www.rifters.com/real/articles/Science_No-Brain.pdf

>Lorber divides the subjects into four categories: those with minimally enlarged ventricles; those whose ventricles fill 50 to 70 percent of the cranium; those in which the ventricles fill between 70 and 90 percent of the intracranial space; and the most severe group, in which ventricle expansion fills 95 percent of the cranium. Many of the individuals in this last group, which forms just less than 10 percent of the total sample, are severely disabled, but half of them have IQ's greater than 100. This group provides some of the most dramatic examples of apparently normal function against all odds.

Well, yes, that student is pretty amazing. Must be a way of measuring the connection density as implicitly suggested by another poster - neural network perhaps squashed together but structure preserved?

He was still smarter and more versatile than most chimps, dogs, or any artificial "intelligence" built so far.

a severely distorted brain does not, in any way, "challenge theories of consciousness" (as if we have a clear enough theory to be challenged by this).

the cells and connections are there, and function "well enough"

It certainly challenges theories of consciousness that point to specific parts of the brain as responsible for the phenomenon. Same for theories of consciousness that point outside the brain or ones that look at consciousness as something pre-existing.

It leads weight to those theories that claim consciousness and the self are emergent phenomena (meta abstractions) and do not really "exist" below a certain level of complexity/abstraction which doesn't have to be physiological (e.g. neurons) but also something emergent, software rather than hardware.

Interestingly, this messes extremely well with buddhism and non-duality in hinduism and the various annihilatory experiences that one can produce via these practices (but also meditation and certain psychedelic drugs).

It is also interesting for those who follow AGI/deep-learning and especially those who treat these two fields as an orthogonal dichotomy claiming that one can't lead to the other, no matter the computational resources we have at our disposal. If consciousness and self-awareness are emergent phenomena, there is nothing that, in theory, mechanistically forbids AGI.

> It certainly challenges theories of consciousness that point to specific parts of the brain as responsible for the phenomenon. Same for theories of consciousness that point outside the brain or ones that look at consciousness as something pre-existing. It leads weight to those theories that claim consciousness and the self are emergent phenomena (meta abstractions) and do not really "exist" below a certain level of complexity/abstraction.

If all the parts are present and connected (albeit stressed), how does that mean that they are not responsible for a particular phenomenon, or mean that consciousness is not emergent?

I don't understand your reasoning.

Even if we assume that all the parts are present and connected (not clear), surely having 90% reduced neural availability would lead to observable defects (e.g. psychosis, dissociative disorders/schizophrenia) if the neurons were directly responsible for consciousness.

Yet this doesn't seem to be the case here (and in the other example someone else mentioned in this thread) which leads weight to the theories that treat consciousness as meta and emergent.

Does he really miss 90% of his neurons, or has the fluid simply squashed them towards the perimeter of the skull?

if it was slow and over time brain degradation, maybe his brain had enough neural plasticity to reorganize the network for efficiency.

That's what I was thinking as I read this. It's still amazing that the brain could have that much neural plasticity, but I think if you simply removed 90% of someone else's brain you would see much different results (likely death).

That said, it makes you wonder what genes/proteins make the human brain develop/keep consciousness even with so little material to work with, while other animals don't develop it.

It is not at all certain that other animals do not develop consciousness. John C. Lilly's work with dolphins for instance points to a different conclusion.

There are also other animals (parrots, elephants, various apes) that are widely believed to possess self-awareness if not near-human levels of consciousness.

I'd be interested in reading a follow up study in terms of how the Frenchman has reacted to the discovery that 90% of his brain is missing.

If Cleereman's suggestion that

>“Consciousness is the brain’s non-conceptual theory about itself, gained through experience—that is learning, interacting with itself, the world, and with other people”.

Then the patient's discovery may affect his cognitive awareness, an interesting example of Schrodinger's cat.

I thought modern neuroscience agrees that all parts of the brain are contributing to consciousness?

The man was examined in 2007 and the plasticity thesis is from 2011.

How much energy does a squashed brain use?

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