You won't find consciousness in the brain

• 07 January 2010 by Ray Tallis

MOST neuroscientists, philosophers of the mind and science journalists feel the time is near when we will be able to explain the mystery of human consciousness in terms of the activity of the brain. There is, however, a vocal minority of neurosceptics who contest this orthodoxy. Among them are those who focus on claims neuroscience makes about the preciseness of correlations between indirectly observed neural activity and different mental functions, states or experiences.

This was well captured in a 2009 article in Perspectives on Psychological Science by Harold Pashler from the University of California, San Diego, and colleagues, that argued: "...these correlations are higher than should be expected given the (evidently limited) reliability of both fMRI and personality measures. The high correlations are all the more puzzling because method sections rarely contain much detail about how the correlations were obtained."

Believers will counter that this is irrelevant: as our means of capturing and analysing neural activity become more powerful, so we will be able to make more precise correlations between the quantity, pattern and location of neural activity and aspects of consciousness.

This may well happen, but my argument is not about technical, probably temporary, limitations. It is about the deep philosophical confusion embedded in the assumption that if you can correlate neural activity with consciousness, then you have demonstrated they are one and the same thing, and that a physical science such as neurophysiology is able to show what consciousness truly is.

Many neurosceptics have argued that neural activity is nothing like experience, and that the least one might expect if A and B are the same is that they be indistinguishable from each other. Countering that objection by claiming that, say, activity in the occipital cortex and the sensation of light are two aspects of the same thing does not hold up because the existence of "aspects" depends on the prior existence of consciousness and cannot be used to explain the relationship between neural activity and consciousness.

This disposes of the famous claim by John Searle, Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley: that neural activity and conscious experience stand in the same relationship as molecules of H₂O to water, with its properties of wetness, coldness, shininess and so on. The analogy fails as the level at which water can be seen as molecules, on the one hand, and as wet, shiny, cold stuff on the other, are intended to correspond to different "levels" at which we are conscious of it. But the existence of levels of experience or of description presupposes consciousness. Water does not intrinsically have these levels.

We cannot therefore conclude that when we see what seem to be neural correlates of consciousness that we are seeing consciousness itself. While neural activity of a certain kind is a necessary condition for every manifestation of consciousness, from the lightest sensation to the most exquisitely constructed sense of self, it is neither a sufficient condition of it, nor, still less, is it identical with it. If it were identical, then we would be left with the insuperable problem of explaining how intracranial nerve impulses, which are material events, could "reach out" to extracranial objects in order to be "of" or "about" them. Straightforward physical causation explains how light from an object brings about events in the occipital cortex. No such explanation is available as to how those neural events are "about" the physical object. Biophysical science explains how the light gets in but not how the gaze looks out.

Many features of ordinary consciousness also resist neurological explanation. Take the unity of consciousness. I can relate things I experience at a given time (the pressure of the seat on my bottom, the sound of traffic, my thoughts) to one another as elements of a single moment. Researchers have attempted to explain this unity, invoking quantum coherence (the cytoskeletal micro-tubules of Stuart Hameroff at the University of Arizona, and Roger Penrose at the University of Oxford), electromagnetic fields (Johnjoe McFadden, University of Surrey), or rhythmic discharges in the brain (the late Francis Crick).

These fail because they assume that an objective unity or uniformity of nerve impulses would be subjectively available, which, of course, it won't be. Even less would this explain the unification of entities that are, at the same time, experienced as distinct. My sensory field is a many-layered whole that also maintains its multiplicity. There is nothing in the convergence or coherence of neural pathways that gives us this "merging without mushing", this ability to see things as both whole and separate.

And there is an insuperable problem with a sense of past and future. Take memory. It is typically seen as being "stored" as the effects of experience which leave enduring changes in, for example, the properties of synapses and consequently in circuitry in the nervous system. But when I "remember", I explicitly reach out of the present to something that is explicitly past. A synapse, being a physical structure, does not have anything other than its present state. It does not, as you and I do, reach temporally upstream from the effects of experience to the experience that brought about the effects. In other words, the sense of the past cannot exist in a physical system. This is consistent with the fact that the physics of time does not allow for tenses: Einstein called the distinction between past, present and future a "stubbornly persistent illusion".

There are also problems with notions of the self, with the initiation of action, and with free will. Some neurophilosophers deal with these by denying their existence, but an account of consciousness that cannot find a basis for voluntary activity or the sense of self should conclude not that these things are unreal but that neuroscience provides at the very least an incomplete explanation of consciousness.

I believe there is a fundamental, but not obvious, reason why that explanation will always remain incomplete - or unrealisable. This concerns the disjunction between the objects of science and the contents of consciousness. Science begins when we escape our subjective, first-person experiences into objective measurement, and reach towards a vantage point the philosopher Thomas Nagel called "the view from nowhere". You think the table over there is large, I may think it is small. We measure it and find that it is 0.66 metres square. We now characterise the table in a way that is less beholden to personal experience.

Thus measurement takes us further from experience and the phenomena of subjective consciousness to a realm where things are described in abstract but quantitative terms. To do its work, physical science has to discard "secondary qualities", such as colour, warmth or cold, taste - in short, the basic contents of consciousness. For the physicist then, light is not in itself bright or colourful, it is a mixture of vibrations in an electromagnetic field of different frequencies. The material world, far from being the noisy, colourful, smelly place we live in, is colourless, silent, full of odourless molecules, atoms, particles, whose nature and behaviour is best described mathematically. In short, physical science is about the marginalisation, or even the disappearance, of phenomenal appearance/qualia, the redness of red wine or the smell of a smelly dog.

Consciousness, on the other hand, is all about phenomenal appearances/qualia. As science moves from appearances/qualia and toward quantities that do not themselves have the kinds of manifestation that make up our experiences, an account of consciousness in terms of nerve impulses must be a contradiction in terms. There is nothing in physical science that can explain why a physical object such as a brain should ascribe appearances/qualia to material objects that do not intrinsically have them.

Material objects require consciousness in order to "appear". Then their "appearings" will depend on the viewpoint of the conscious observer. This must not be taken to imply that there are no constraints on the appearance of objects once they are objects of consciousness.

Our failure to explain consciousness in terms of neural activity inside the brain inside the skull is not due to technical limitations which can be overcome. It is due to the self-contradictory nature of the task, of which the failure to explain "aboutness", the unity and multiplicity of our awareness, the explicit presence of the past, the initiation of actions, the construction of self are just symptoms. We cannot explain "appearings" using an objective approach that has set aside appearings as unreal and which seeks a reality in mass/energy that neither appears in itself nor has the means to make other items appear. The brain, seen as a physical object, no more has a world of things appearing to it than does any other physical object.

Profile

Ray Tallis trained as a doctor, ultimately becoming professor of geriatric medicine at the University of Manchester, UK, where he oversaw a major neuroscience project. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences and a writer on areas ranging from consciousness to medical ethics

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527427.100-you-wont-find-consciousness-in-the-brain.html

Asides to the study of consciousness - including the fact that if you sever a patient's corpus colossum, the comms bus between the left and right hemisphere's of the brain, the patient experiences 2 selves.

Consciousness is like abiogenesis and prime mover. But while we don't know how it works yet this inability to explain consciousness does not guarantee an invisible eternal soul, the proof for which is inscrutable. 

It goes without saying that you can drink a bottle of scotch and kiss your consciousness goodbye any day of the week.

Most theists admit the brain is involved in consciousness but they'll insist there's some sort of mysterious interface to the soul that allows the physical storage of memories and the inputs of amygdala and cerebellum to

be accessed at a spiritual level.

I tend to think consciousness is an executive interface between brain centres, the body, and environmental inputs - sort of a NOS and a PS3 user interface in one - but this is outright speculation. What's important from the point of your discussion's

point of view is that your protagonist explain why consciousness is linked so forcefully to the physicality of the brain. Why brain disease impacts on personality. Why brain death results in the complete disappearance of the 'soul'.

Why brain damage impacts on observable executive behaviours including expression of morality and empathy and (hilariously) why brain damage is linked to spiritual transcendence.

http://www.miller-mccune.com/blogs/news-blog/brain-injuries-linked-to-spirituality-4062/

What's to say this line of thinking didn't offer an evolutionary advantage? People might not like that but it seems like a possible and natural explanation.

He believes in the Big Bang Theory and thus evolution.  He uses God as an explanation for those things that the Big Bang doesn't explain.     Thanks for your help.

All start repeating ourselves, over and over and over. There's vast evidence that consciousness or what theists call 'soul' is directly related to activity in the brain. There is no evidence of a soul aside from the fact we inadequately understand the neuroscience behind consciousness. To take this knowledge gap and posit a mighty god existing outside the universe, outside of time and beyond our knowable reality is an exercise in wishful thinking. There is no proof of a soul. There is no proof of a god. We cannot talk about things outside the universe without making assumptions about things it's not possible to know.  

Tell your friend that "in all fairness" it cannot be "equally true" that despite no evidence to the contrary there are any components to the human body or to the prime mover that could be described as spiritual. And ask for a definition of spirit while you're at it. What is your mate insisting actually exists, and what are its properties given no one has ever seen one?

The article posted by Atheistextremist is interesting...
In my opinion, trying to analyze the consciousness with mind is like trying to see your own face by intensive staring forward without mirror. The correct way might be to step out of it and stop analyzing. Stop thinking, for a moment. If you walk home, and then at home you still move your legs like walking, that's insane. But so it is with mind. If scientists would meditate and thereby experience altered, thoughtless states of consciousness, they would know, that consciousness is not thinking, not neural activity. "Cogito ergo sum" is bullshit. Patients with severed corpus callosum perhaps experienced two selves, but I experienced in meditation NO self at all!

We usually think of ourselves as conscious. But in fact, in our daily life we are not more conscious, than in dream. We don't remember details, things we did in the past or yesterday, and there is very little we actually remember about our surroundings. Our mental abstraction of reality is mistaken for reality, and scientific abstraction is not different. Scientific opinion is subjective too...
The example from article, perceiving a table for instance, isn't very good. "Big table" or "small table" are again abstractions of reality, not the reality itself. Let's say, if I see a table, register it consciously in detail, but have no opinion about it whatsoever, (not even scientific opinion about molecules of celulosis in wood) then it's perhaps what neuroscience needs.

What is the soul? Certainly not activity in the brain. Most of people doesn't even have soul, or better said, contact with it. The soul makes the difference between good computing skills and universal intellect, between systematic routine towards the goal and spontaneous knowledge. It's also significant by granting the person an unusual strength of character or charisma. Brain is a biologic sensor, computer and archive of memories, but it's the soul that determines, how effectively, flexibly and purposefully are these assets used. Most of people have a tiny awareness and great subconsciousness, but light of the soul reveals more consciousness, at the expense of subconsciousness. Ensouled person is therefore confronted with much more than most of people.
The bottomline is, that it's very unlikely that an ensouled person would get properly tested under fMRI, they're too rare and scientists don't know what to search for anyway. They usually mistake the soul for emotionality.

Looks like cognitive dissonance to me.

The above answers were probably the wrong way to answer the question, though, for a layman audience.  Technically right, but people might not get it.

Try this way:

First off, you are obfuscating the issue by compounding two things- consciousness and conscience- these are different issues.

Conscience is well evidenced, and logically explained by evolutionary psychology by game theory.  We know how and why we care about each other.  That is a non-issue for atheists, and does not at all express or imply any supernatural cause.

A quick Google search reveals this site as a potential learning aide for you, if you do not understand the logistics of game theory:

http://www.gametheory.net/students.html

Secondly, regarding consciousness, and your proposition of "evidence from ignorance":

When something is unexplained, it isn't evidence of anything save the fact that we haven't explained it.  In these cases, we develop hypotheses for explanations.

The idea of a "soul" might be ONE of these hypotheses- that does NOT a theory make it.

There are billions, if not an infinite number of other potential hypotheses to explain this unknown, and they range from Quantum mechanical effects, to the flying spaghetti monster.

To be "fair", your hypothesis doesn't have a 50-50% chance of being right, even if you subscribe to the bunk idea that the chances of a hypothesis being right can even be evaluated without evidence, because there are not simply *two* possibilities- to be fair, it would be a 1/infinity % chance of being right, given the sheer range of potential hypotheses.

If you know anything about math, that's effectively zero- pretty inconsequential, eh?

That's why evaluating the "chance" of a hypothesis is meaningless.  A theory, on the other hand, can be evidenced by making predictions about behavior which can be empirically true or false- increasing the chance of its truth, or helping to debunk it.

The moment your concept of a "soul" starts to make testable predictions about human behavior is the moment we can start to talk about it as a theory- and it can join the MANY legitimate theories on the subject; which variably discuss matters of mechanical brain function.

However, as it stands, your "soul" will never make it past the hypothesis stage, due not only to its utter failure to make any testable prediction, but also to the simple, logistical evidence against a soul, which makes it a failed hypothesis.

As to that logistical evidence, we can arrive at it Socratically:

From where do you propose your soul came?

Legitimate theories have roots in well established materialistic determinism.  Lets see if you can match that, or if you default to the illogical concept of a prime-mover.

Really? That's what he wrote? That's so dumb I thought even theists had stopped using it. Besides the descriptive fail as to what science can and can't explain, it's a fallacy and a very obvious one. Argument from ignorance: I/science/whoever can't explain something, therefore [insert stuff I like to be true] is true.

That demonstrates a total lack of understanding of Science.

There is no specific relation between the Big Bang theory and evolution, apart from them both being scientific theories.

The Big Bang is about the origin of our observable universe of stars and galaxies, evolution is about the way life diversifies and adapts to its environment. He probably things evolution is about the emergence of life in the first place, which it isn't, but it is a very common misconception among Theists.

God does not offer an ultimate explanation for anything, unless we can also explain God. So 'God' just makes things overall harder to explain, by introducing something totally beyond anything we observe, with nothing but negative evidence , ie stuff we can't explain.

http://www.psych.ubc.ca/~ara/Manuscripts/AtranNorenzayanBBS.pdf

He is guilty of the fallacy of reification -- he assumes that, because he conceives of the "soul," it actually exists.

You don't "feel" things in your soul. Feelings have been mapped to specific physiological activities. Also, disorders such as sociopathy (extreme lack of empathy) have been shown to have a genetic component, further bolstering the hypothesis that our mental "selves" are really just our physical "selves."

If the sensation of thinking means there's a soul, the sensation of pain may well mean there's demons. Seriously. I mean, you feel the pain, don't you?

Further, even if we were to postulate a "soul," there is no method by which to judge exactly what a "soul" is. There is no way, for instance, to judge if the soul is immortal, or if the soul is part of a larger object, or anything else. Not only is there no evidence for the soul, the profound lack of evidence also leaves us completely ignorant about what a soul might even be.

Thanks for giving me a name for that habit people have of insisting their weird and wild comprehensions exist in actual fact. Reification. Nice one.

So what I gather from this is that, my everyday thoughts including love, frustration, and the willpower to quit drinking are mundane psychological manifestations. While my soul is only expressed rarely and has something to do with living in civilized society. Or are you saying that things like willpower are of the soul? I can see the difference between what would be described as animal instinct vs reason, morality, and will, but I think you are unnecessarily attributing it to supernatural sources. Scientists ignore the soul because the "soul" is a poor hypothesis at best. Science can only deal with the material world and the soul only as far as the soul is a chemical or electrical impulse. Only so far as the the physical actions of individuals or groups, benevolent or malevolent.

I still mostly can't understand what you are saying. Probably my fault. Of course you are speaking with the assumption that there is a new component to who I am, and I have no concept of this. I know where my impulses come from. I know where willpower to overcome them comes from. I don't require a new brain that exists independent of my current brain. My first brain is more than adequate.

 So, in short, the reasoning goes like this:

"Consciousness" is not the same thing as "Brain activity."  

We can't explain what consciousness "is."

Therefore, God.

The basic problem is in understanding our inability to explain consciousness.  Your interlocutor is confusing disciplines.  As scientists examine the brain, they discover more and more correlations.  They see that neural activity over here indicates this state of consciousness.  Supposing that one day, scientists have a complete map of the human brain, they will be able to explain in great detail exactly what activity in the brain corresponds with what aspect of consciousness.  (And unconsciousness!)  But even if that happens, they will not have answered the question:  What is consciousness?

They won't have even tried to answer it, either.  The job of a neuroscientist is to discover how consciousness works, not to solve the philosophical problems associated with assigning consciousness to a class of "things."  And that's really what this whole thing boils down to, isn't it?  Gee, consciousness isn't the same as a brain, but the brain sure does seem to have a lot to do with being conscious... I mean... I've never been conscious when I didn't have a brain, and every time I take the brain out of a lizard, it isn't conscious anymore.  But if consciousness isn't a brain, and it isn't electricity, and it isn't anything I can think of a word for, what is it?

The search for a "soul" is a category error.  Plain and simple.  "Consciousness" is a symbol we humans use to represent a process.  To be conscious is to travel forward through time.  It's a process.  It's not a "thing," like a brain or a baseball.  We can also say that consciousness is an "emergent property" if we like.  Things that contain brains which do this process have the property of consciousness.

And all of this is fine.  It's a damn fun philosophical puzzle to solve.  But in the end, that's what it is.  It's the quest to figure out why our language and mental faculties have so much trouble understanding or even finding words to express our understanding of what it is to... be.

But no, the cognitive difficulty in quantifying consciousness is not an excuse for inventing a whole new class of things which magically interact with the material world while somehow leaving no measurable impact on the material world.

I have not gone a day without a drink in the past four years. That is until last week. This was not an amazing feat of will power for me. I never really liked alcohol to begin with. Drugs of any sort are not attempts to experience the "soul" like some hippie folk claim. They are simply intoxicants. They create altered states of thought, perception and emotion. They may feel like you have entered another plane of existence. But to the sober observer, it's all too obvious.

I get what your saying in a poetic sense. You are boiling down an extremely complex system output to a word which you call the soul. But it is just a mundane output. Change the chemical levels and you get different outputs. Arguably, you become a different person temporarily or permanently. This thread is about "which part of the brain is responsible for the soul?". The use of the word soul in this context is for simplicities sake. I still haven't heard a definition of what a soul is. Luminon: your definition seems to be more what it is not. You are so certain that the brain couldn't be the source. Why not? Why does there have to be this dualism? Why does there have to be more than the physical world. Seems perfectly adequate to me.

Dark matter, dark energy, multiple dimensions, are all aspects of the 'physical' universe. they are detectable by their physical effects on other, more familiar aspects of the universe.

'Dark matter' is , as far we know, actually more 'tangible' than any form of 'energy', including the forms of energy we deal with on an everyday basis. Can you 'touch' the energy contained in a magnetic field? You can certainly feel its effects, such as when we bring a piece of iron close to a strong magnet. What makes the things you are arguing any different, apart from the fact that they have not been shown to be detectable in any consistent manner?

Matter is at least three-dimensional - 'one-dimensional' matter would indeed by intangible and beyond experience.

If being 'intangible', ie not something we can touch as a physical object, or even see except by its effects on physical objects, sometimes very subtle effects, puts something in the category of the 'esoteric' or whatever, then much of what science deals with everyday is in that category. Have you ever 'touched' a quark?

The presence of all those things, their effects, are detectable by physical instrumentation. In fact, science has detected far more things about the universe than any 'esoteric' discipline, things that no-one ever dreamed of, because they are way outside any ability of our mind or body to 'sense' in any way as specific entities, so it is far more successful than any 'woo' techniques at revealing 'hidden' and 'intangible' aspects of reality that our minds can barely comprehend in any direct way.

Just what do you feel justifies putting something in these other categories, justifying 'dualism' or higher order 'isms'? Is it just that the occultist can 'detect' them and science can't? Although you seem to be saying that they are aspects of things that science has already detected. 

What makes the 'soul' more than a metaphorical way to refer to our conception of all those things you attribute to 'it'. Why do you feel it has to have some actual quasi-physical aspect to it? It IS just those aspects of our individual 'personality' and behaviour, collectively considered.

It used to be identified with our actual breath, which is why the word 'spirit' comes from the same root as 'respiration' (breathing). It was our 'intuition' that identified the 'soul' with the expired air from our lungs, and that turned out to be an error, so intuitive judgements are a poor guide to real understanding.

Then 'intuition' told us that the heart was the seat of the soul and our consciousness, and the 'brain' was just some organ for cooling the blood, or performing some other lowly function.

It is like the God concept, continually retreating from more 'physical' conceptions, such as very powerful immortal physical beings who lived on inaccessible mountain tops, or beyond the actual 'dome' of the sky. As scientific revelations continue to encompass more of things that were once considered aspects of the 'supernatural', as beyond the 'mere' physical realm, the ideas of 'God' and the 'soul' have become ever more abstract and 'non-physical', retreating further into those remaining aspects of reality that we have still not quite got a 'scientific' handle on. While Science has revealed whole new areas and details of 'physical' reality and its behaviour, such as Quantum and Relativistic aspects that no-one previously dreamed of. Only a scientific approach can uncover such extremely counter-intuitive things, precisely because they are NOT detectable by our intuitive 'senses', although our whole mental world is no doubt ultimately a product of the interactions of such aspects of the physical.

It is our intuition which has failed to detect 99% of reality, whereas it is Science, including 'mainstream' Science, which deals with it everyday.

So now you want to bring it around and claim that at least some of these un-dreamed-of things are actually part of what the mystics and others have been sensing all along?

We can always assume that everyone's opinions are in fact scientific. The problem is that most of these hypothesis fail epically. Literally, the great attempts to discover the "soul" have failed over and over again for centuries. Definitively epic scientific failures.

A few comments:

Ancient astronomy was purely observational, and required only sufficient patience to record the apparent positions of identifiable objects consistently over a long period of time - the accuracy of their predictions are entirely unremarkable or amazing in that context.

The geometry and mathematics was similarly not all that amazing, just requiring a certain degree of care, and was at a pretty basic and essentially practical level, by even ancient Greek standards, let alone what we know now.

You haven't really responded to the observation that modern science has gone way beyond things that the human body can dream of or sense.

Oh and there is not a 'trinity' of forces, you omitted the most perceptible one after gravity, the electro-magnetic force.

Modern science is very good at gathering data systematically. But by no means it is the only method of knowledge. There are other methods with different advantages and drawbacks. The ultimate purpose is synthesis of them, resulting in advanced and perfected science. In my opinion the science's imperfections are so great, that I have to compensate them by studying alternative methods. Are you aware of these problems in science?

Ok, I concede that is what you said.

But that makes your statement still arguably mistaken, or at least selective, because if you really mean fundamental forces, we don't take into account recent efforts to connect or 'unify' the forces.

If you want to count the number of forces based on counting 'unified' forces as one, that has changed over time.

Arguably, there are five forces, but it is generally considered that since Maxwell showed how intimately electrical and magnetic forces are connected in our current state of the universe, that it is reasonable to treat them as one entity.

Whereas the electromagnetic and weak nuclear force predominate in very different domains at energy levels mostly available in our Universe today, so these are still regarded as distinct fundamentals, even though we have a theory showing how they are connected.

If you are going to continue that line of argument, there are only two forces, Gravity and Quantum Electrodynamics, which now unifies the Electroweak and Strong nuclear forces.

So if current efforts to achieve a Grand Unified Theory are successful, you will then only have one.

A friend of mine who is basically an atheist, as far as I can tell, is into Sitchen, as well as David Icke. I hadn't known about the Sitchen thing until he brought it up at a little get-together with another mutual friend recently. So I looked into Sitchen, and find him not at all credible. I have reason to mistrust my friend's logical faculties when approaching a number of these 'fringe' topics. The biggest shock I received was hearing him defend anti-vaccination, with such a blatantly fallacious argument that I was speechless for a bit. I basically bit my tongue, and said nothing, because I consider him quite a good friend, we have known each other for quite a long time, and once both worked at the same organization, and do share a number of other interests.

I think you would really be stretching things to find some real demonstration that esotericism really anticipated Quantum Theory or Relativity in any specific sense. So they missed it when Science discovered and explored major ideas that they had no conception of.

These 7 forces interacting with each other in many ways at all conceivable levels and frequencies create together all that exists. It is known that all of these came from a single source, and some call this source God, but not antropomorphically, or in worship. Study of these natural forces and learning to use them is the way to know their source.
Esotericism recognizes 7 qualitative dimensions, (barring spatial and time dimensions) and human being as multi-dimensional. The idea is, that our mental and emotional apparatus are counterparts of our physical body in these dimensions. In these dimensions there are the same natural forces. But at these levels they are known to us as emotion, thought, ideals, archetypes, etc. Esotericists know effects of these natural forces on psychology and living things. In this way, people's consciousness is more determined by physics than biology.

If we are capable of thinking and so on, it means we are capable of manipulating energy of thought. How skillfully is that done, depends on a thinker. Thoughtforms have tendency to precipitate into this material dimension, depending on their strength. Therefore, mind is creative. Of course, it must be a clear, focused mind with great ability of long-termed visualization. In such a way there can be precipitated a house, institution, social order, piece of art, scientific technology, style of life, personal future, and so on. It is not the only possible use of creative mind, but most frequent today.
 

That man may have been a hero. I do not dispute that. But if he imagined himself traveling into a proton, then that's all it was. An over active imagination. Good for him! Who cares and why would any rational human being believe it was reality?
*places gun to temple and cocks the hammer*