Where do you think we came from? - Page 114

"When you die, there's no blood flow going into your brain. If it goes below a certain level, you can't have electrical activity. It takes a lot of imagination to think there's somehow a hidden area of your brain that comes into action when everything else isn't working.

These observations raise a question about our current concept of how brain and mind interact. The historical idea is that electrochemical processes in the brain lead to consciousness. That may no longer be correct, because we can demonstrate that those processes don't go on after death.

There may be something in the brain we haven't discovered that accounts for consciousness, or it may be that consciousness is a separate entity from the brain."

….  "Throughout history, we try to explain things the best we can with the tools of science. But most open-minded and objective scientists recognize that we have limitations. Just because something is inexplicable with our current science doesn't make it superstitious or wrong. When people discovered electromagnetism, forces that couldn't then be seen or measured, a lot of scientists made fun of it.

Scientists have come to believe that the self is brain cell processes, but there's never been an experiment to show how cells in the brain could possibly lead to human thought. If you look at a brain cell under a microscope, and I tell you, "this brain cell thinks I'm hungry," that's impossible.

It could be that, like electromagnetism, the human psyche and consciousness are a very subtle type of force that interacts with the brain, but are not necessarily produced by the brain. The jury is still out."

If anything it proves that the premise that the brain produces consciousness is on shaky grounds.  😆  Let me also add here  that the  conventional  understanding of the nervous system fails miserably to explain phenomena like telepathy, clairvoyance, distant healing , success rate  of acupuncture , placebo effect of drugs,  and many more.  Since we do not have any  scientific explanation  for such commonly observed  events  it could be worth it to treat any existing belief as a starting point for formulating hypothesis and work on it to  see where it takes us.  At least that approach would be more scientific than simply dismissing everything that is inexplicable.

The babies may or may not have awareness of their own state but they respond to sound even while in the uterus. Newborn babies do respond to pain stimuli  and can be seen to smile and even cry in their sleep. Do they dream? They spent half their sleep time in REM stage- about 8 hours.  What could they dream of? No clear answers there.

The cases mentioned in that article and also several others seem to indicate a state of consciousness  in absence of the electrochemical processes in the brain that are believed to give rise to consciousness. If that is true then a baby could have consciousness even before its birth. If consciousness exists before birth, during life and also  after death then it would be more appropriate to say that the consciousness acquired  the birth of a personhood and  subsequently got rid of that personhood   in the form of  death. Something akin to us taking on a user Id on IF and then terminating that Id at a later point in time. The creative ones might even go on for multiple Ids all at once possibly arguing with one's own conflicting points of view trying to reach a consensus with the self ! Sounds wacky enough?