Although neuroscientists believe all thought can be reduced to chemicals, they have never been able to combine chemicals in any way to produce a spontaneous thought, much less the 60,000 that spontaneously appear each day in the average human.
 
That's because we are not just a physical stimulus-response mechanism controlled and directed by an electrochemical computer made of meat—the brain. Consciousness is not an epiphenomenon, a by-product of cascading molecular interactions confined inside the skull.
 
By not possessing a precise location, consciousness can be likened to the quantum. It is best thought of as indeterminate and being everywhere at once.
 
Consider how the internet, man's most complex invention ever, can be likened to the brain. It consists of billions of computers electromagnetically linked together. One Intel processor measuring less than a square inch in just one computer has well over 1.5 billion transistors on it. All told, the Internet has about 1019 transistors interacting with one another like axons and dendrites in the brain. That's equal to the number of brain synapses (neural connections) in 10,000 people. Thus, the internet exceeds a single human brain by a factor of 10,000. For all its complexity, it's not conscious, nor does it have free will. It's robotically bound to and limited by the commands from human brains and physical laws.
 
On the other hand, our essence, our self-aware volitional identity, is holistic and extrinsic to the bounds of matter. This understanding helps us to better grasp many puzzling things, such as:

• Knowing fantastic detail in huge mathematical pictures, such as the ability of Akira Haraguchi to recite a number for pi out to 83,431 decimal places. (Also see the other fantastic abilities of people mentioned in chapter 34.)
• The transference of learned skills. For example, trace your name in the air with your left elbow, something you have never done before. The fact that you can do it suggests that skills are learned holographically and are not restricted to a particular spot in the brain.
• Recognition of a familiar face regardless of angle or part of the face viewed.
• Learning to ride a bicycle without memorizing every intricate detail of movement. We connect with things holistically, not by pieces.
• Seeing what is not there by constructing images, words and thoughts out of fragments—for example:

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The mind also projects itself like a magnetic field out to where the thing is which we perceive.

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Jean Piaget, a Swiss researcher, discovered that it's only with modern indoctrination that people come to believe their minds are in their heads. Primitive people and children under the age of about ten think that their minds extend out into the world around them. Penfield concluded from his research that patients thought of themselves as having an existence separate from the body. The Egyptians thought the brain was a cooling organ and unceremoniously dug it out of the skull through the nose in preparation for mummification. To them, the heart was considered a far more important organ for housing consciousness.
 
From first awareness, we have a sense of self. That identity does not change no matter how long we live or what food we eat to make our continuously regenerating brain. The inner person does not grow old, nor does it begin young. The inner person is not something that results from the growth of a brain.
 
In fact, everyday language reflects the sense that we are other than body when we say "my foot," "my heart," "my brain," "my thoughts,". . . The "my" is the real conscious self-aware "us;" the body is a physical machine "we" utilize for the physical realm.
 
The Source of Thought
 
Thoughts arrive unannounced through the course of every day and steal us away. Yet nobody has any idea what the source is of those 60,000+ thoughts each day.
 
No piece of matter can explain why thoughts spring to consciousness in the order they do and stay organized. We don't have several thoughts coming forth all at once or lapses with no thought at all. (With the exception of some meditative practices.) If the brain is just a repository of data, that would not explain how that data creates new ideas or what prevents it from spilling out randomly, making us quite crazy and functionless.
 
All of the millions of inventions throughout history that add up to the marvels of technology came from human thought. It's rationally and scientifically impossible that such incredible complexity, novelty, and creativity could spontaneously emerge from a soup of mechanical and robotic brain atoms. Mathematics, for example, fundamental to all these advances, is a purely intellectual phenomenon that cannot be tied in any way to the neurophysiologist's stimulus-response model of the brain.
 
We are dynamic, creative, adaptable, volitional, and spontaneous. Such elusive qualities of personality are not reducible to the data our brains can amass. Trying to localize these qualities and free will is like trying to find the structure of ambition.
 
Brain as Receive

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Unusual abilities, such as ESP, psychokinesis, clairvoyance, and remote viewing can best be explained by the understanding that consciousness exists extraneous to our material world. When engaged with the brain, this consciousness, which is connected to everything, uses the material brain in much the same way a garage door opener controller directs the motor to lift the door. The relationship between consciousness and brain is like that between a programmer and a computer, or a farmer and his tractor. Extraneous consciousness is the cause, not the result of thinking phenomena using the matter in the brain.

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The brain can also be likened to a television (receiver). When we turn the channel and see an elephant, that elephant is not actually in the television. The image of the elephant is sent to the television via invisible waves from a production company somewhere else on the globe. We can point stimulate the set (change the channel) and get innumerable messages and images, but not one of them originates from the television itself.
 
Similarly, choices and initiation (other than reflexes) do not originate within the brain matrix. They come from elsewhere. The brain processes them and directs the body to obey them. Causation is downward from a nonmaterial consciousness, not upward out of the material brain.

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Mind Is Not Brain
 
Mind function can occur in the virtual absence of brains.
 
No Brain—In children with hydrocephalus, the fluid buildup can squeeze the cortex (the outer "smart" layer of the brain) to the point that there is almost no evidence of cortex at all. But most of these individuals do not lose self-awareness or choice. Although hydrocephalus can result in various problems, mental development may be normal. In one case, a 26-year-old student with hydrocephalus had an IQ of 126 and received honors in mathematics. He had virtually no brain other than a thin layer less than a millimeter thick. (Search boy with no brain, on the internet and YouTube.)

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Brain Attrition—Each day a human loses about a thousand brain neurons. Some 80% of the neural mass is dissolved by age 14. In spite of this considerable disruption and wasting, consciousness maintains its integrity. Not only that, great intellect can be developed in the adult years as the brain mass continues to shrink.
 
Body Turnover—If a person is mere matter, that would mean we come from our food and leave via the toilet. Parts of the body turnover in a few days, while the skeleton takes a decade to refresh itself. The consistency of a person, through several atomic changeovers during a lifetime, speaks to something outside of matter that's the source of that constancy.
 
Animal Experiments—Rats with massive portions of their brains removed continued to run a previously learned maze efficiently. Salamanders that have had their brains sliced, flipped, shuffled, and with parts deleted and even minced retained certain behaviors.
 
Brain Excision—Patients who have a part of their brain removed due to tumors may suffer no loss of self-awareness.
 
Head Injury—Victims of accidents with large portions of their brains damaged may still perform functions believed to be controlled by the damaged or missing parts.
 
Blind Sight—People who have had a part of their visual cortex surgically removed or damaged, lose sight in a portion of a visual field. One patient was tested with things placed in the blind field and asked to guess what they were. Accuracy was near 100%. The mind can see when there is no visual portion of the brain to permit vision.

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Inferred Sight—Some individuals who are blind insist that they can see quite well, apparently visually conscious of the inferred surroundings. You can test your own ability to see by inference. In this drawing note that you will see a white triangle even though most of the borders are not drawn.

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Phantom Limbs—People who have had limbs removed, are born without them, or have a section of the body anesthetized, can experience the motor and sensory sensations of the part missing or anesthetically blocked. Research has shown that these sensations don't originate in the brain or in severed nerve endings at the point of amputation. Out of body and near-death experiences (discussed in the next chapter) are, in effect, whole body phantoms.
 
Mind Outside Animals
 
In the absence of a controlling physical brain, the characteristics of mind and intelligence are displayed throughout nature.
 
Compass termites build huge stone-like monoliths. The mound is a few inches thick, about 12 feet square, and perfectly oriented north-south. This permits the knife-like edge of the mound to decrease exposure to the overhead hot noon sun, while its broad faces capture the heat from the rising and declining sun. Its elaborate internal honeycomb structure has thousands of shaft valves to facilitate air conditioning so that the internal temperature and humidity remain constant. A single termite has no idea how to build such a thing. As a group, they have the mind—X that out—genius, to do it perfectly. Since that genius of the colony mind does not reside in any single termite, it must lie outside of them.

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Similarly, with outside temperatures dropping to well below freezing, and humidity at 30%, the inside of a beehive remains at 70 degrees and 90% humidity. No single bee has any idea how to do this. Bee genius comes from elsewhere.
 
African driver ants can number over 22 million in a colony. All of them are blind. There are specialized hunters, nest tenders, and fighter sentries that guard the river of ants as it flows through the jungle. Although these blind creatures can communicate to a degree by chemical pheromones, only an extrinsic colony mind could orchestrate all the ants to one unified colony purpose.

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A sea anemone has no brain, ganglia (nests of intermingled nerves), or even concentrated neurons, yet all its parts coordinate. Each tentacle also has a memory. If offered a trick non-food object, the tentacle will remember and reject it the next time it's offered. Only that one brainless tentacle, and none of the others remembers the trick. Intelligent feats are obviously not dependent upon a material brain.

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Mixotricha paradoxa are protozoa that digest the wood in a termite's gut. They have no nervous system and move with cilia that are themselves individual rod-like bacteria. There is no physical mind-controlling that hodgepodge. Other protozoa with no nervous system have been found to both learn and remember.
 
E. coli bacteria can evaluate 20 different chemicals at the same time, swim to the area where food concentration is increasing the fastest, reevaluate the environment every 4 seconds, and communicate with one another. Pretty smart for being one-celled and brainless.
 
When food becomes scarce, the tiny brainless underground slime mold, Dictostylium, will gather in a group of about 100,000. They then decide to form into one organism, a tiny slug that wriggles its way up through the ground mulch. Some of these slugs then become a stalk, others at the top become spores so they can spread with the wind to new food sources. That process is orchestrated with no nerves and no brains.

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Shoals, flocks, and swarms of fish, birds, and insects will move like one gigantic organism with no crashes and no clear leader. Millions of Indonesian fireflies spread over miles will synchronize their flash. There is no identified material seat of intelligence that directs these multitudes.
 
Plants, without brains, communicate and have memory. For example, trees being foraged or invaded by insects will send a message of warning to fellow trees miles away. In response, the trees receiving the message will increase the production of tannins and other chemicals that are noxious and toxic to the attackers. Roots of plants also communicate back and forth with brainless soil fungi and other microorganisms.
 
Mind Outside the Human Body
 
The human body doesn't consciously control whatever it is that keeps it alive. Something immensely intelligent must govern, coordinate, and direct the trillions of functions performed by trillions of cells (we're like a moving ant colony) going on at any given second in the body. No physical command center can be found anywhere in the body.
 
The human brain and nervous system can be thought of as a colony of worker neurons, communicator neurons, interconnecting and supporting glial cells (microglia, astrocytes, oligodendrocytes, etc.), and a variety of other specialized cells (Schwann, ependymal, satellite, etc.). The command center of the nervous system "colony" apparently lies outside of the body since no specific material locus can be identified as the leader.
 
Human organs are also like colonies. There are billions of liver cells, but no identifiable controller of which liver cell will do which function, how the shape of the three pounds of liver is maintained, and what liver cell goes to which exact spot on which lobe during embryological development. The intricately coordinated mass of liver cells process about a liter of blood each minute, performs over 500 different chemical reactions, converts food to chemicals that can be used by body cells, and clears the blood of toxins—to begin the list of functions. Nobody has ever found a liver brain, nor have they explained how all the liver cells get along so well. There are no wars, insurrections, slackers, social programs, or revolutions, just harmony and peace generation after generation (unless we assault it with improper living, eating, or drugs). On top of that, if up to half of the liver is damaged, it will regenerate itself.
 
The lauded DNA turns out not to be some self-actuating program explaining life, but only a recipe for the use of amino acid ingredients (protein/enzyme components). DNA or other nucleic acids do not explain why all the ingredients in the trillions of creatures on Earth assemble as they do into whole functioning organisms. No physical entity has been identified that controls life's components, turns them on and off, and measures their dose. Since these machinations are far more complex than even our brains can comprehend, they are best accounted for by a super-, and supra- intelligence.
 
Brainless (actually half-witted—containing only half the genetic material of a body cell) spermatozoa swim miles (on human scale) to find a brainless (half-witted) egg to form a fertilized whole-witted, but brainless zygote the size of this period. This in turn divides trillions of times and some of the brainless cells become livers, some tongues, some fingers, and some brains that proceed to reason that their intelligence comes from non-intelligence.
 
The heart has qualities that are often ascribed to the brain, such as emotion, love, and intelligence. Dr. Gary Schwartz, at the University of Arizona, reports that there are over 70 documented cases of individuals receiving heart transplants getting far more than they bargained for. Sonny Graham received a heart from Terry Cottle who had shot himself. Sonny became infatuated with Terry's widow and married her. Twelve years later he shot himself. A young boy who wrote poetry and songs died in a car crash. His heart was donated to a girl named Danielle, who, upon hearing a song the young boy had written, immediately knew the words to it. A young boy who loved classical music died with his violin on his chest. The recipient of his heart developed a love for classical music. A lesbian who was fond of burgers received the heart of a man-crazy vegetarian lady. The recipient then developed an aversion to meat and married a man shortly after that.
 
This constitutes more evidence of our holographic nature and that mind is both extraneous to and perfuses the body just like it does a flock of birds and ant colony. (Internet search Dr. Cowan cosmic heart.)
 
The idea that mind is imbued within and at the same time extraneous to our material reality has been intuitively concluded as far back as the Greek philosophers and before. Words that describe this include animism, panpsychism, enminded, and idealism. Quantum physics buttresses this by revealing that matter at its most fundamental level appears to dissolve into something akin to a timeless mind. Moreover, the design in nature infers inherent mind as do all paranormal, and preternatural phenomena.
 
Mind is not dependent on matter, but rather matter depends upon a preexistent and timeless mind. That means our physicality would have a pre-body history. That also means we would have a post-body future.