Consciousness,
the Brain, and Free Will
Interview with Arie Bos MD
Arie Bos
by Frans Kusse MD
On a mild and dreary fall afternoon in November 2023, I had an appointment with retired family physician and author Arie Bos at his beautiful, authentic farm on the outskirts of Amsterdam. To meet people in their own surroundings is always special. In an upstairs room in the farmhouse, converted into a study, we had a philosophical conversation.
I had gotten to know Arie a long time ago as an enthusiastic doctor, a GP who was always readily available to his patients, and willing to investigate different therapies to support his patients in their healing process.
He became a GP in turbulent times. AIDS made its appearance in Amsterdam and Arie counseled many a patient suffering from AIDS, at that time a deadly disease. Writing is in Arie's blood and his first book was about AIDS.
Besides his practice, he spent his evenings studying the science of the human mind. When most people were watching television, he wrote some books that had a great impact on people in the integrative world in the Netherlands who wanted and could see beyond a materialistic approach to consciousness (“How Matter Became Mindful” 2008; "Thinking Outside the Brain Box: Why Humans Are Not Biological Computers," Translated by Philip Mees (Floris Books, 2017); and "Use Your Brain!" (2018).
Figure 1. Pyramidal tract at the level of the spinal cord. The interneuron inhibits by means of GABA
What Sort of Beings Are We Really?
“When I was studying medicine at the Free University of Amsterdam--I was a sophomore and was eating a sandwich outside in the sun during the break--a girl came up to me who turned out to be a sophomore psychology student. She told me that for her studies she had to interview people about why they had chosen their particular study subject. To my own surprise I heard myself answer “Because I want to know what kind of beings we really are.” When of course the answer should have been: “I want to help sick people.” Which is also what I wanted, so to me my answer seemed to come out of the blue. Till then I hadn't really thought about it that way, but it turns out this question remained a guiding theme throughout my life. Medical school didn't answer it. This type of question actually didn't come up at all.”
Was this the First Time this Question Came Up For You?
“I was raised in a conservative protestant family and this question didn't come up during my upbringing. As it goes in religion, things were simply accepted the way they were. During my medical study the question subsided. I was busy studying ... Only when confronted with life and death did it come up and I would ask myself: What are we humans actually doing here? So for instance during my first year when pathology alerted me to what all could go wrong: I wondered how on earth could it be that most everything is going well? Also that question went unanswered as did further related questions: What is life on earth? How is it even possible? And when we further think about it: how is it possible for anything to be here at all? So the question became bigger and bigger, and then again I had to limit myself. Otherwise I would have had to go back all the way to the big bang.”
Anthroposophy
“The question resurfaced when I was introduced to anthroposophy through Reiny, my wife. She had an internship at a Waldorf School and I too came into contact with the teachers. This gave me the hope that maybe I could come closer to an answer. Anthroposophy tremendously increased my interest in science. What struck me was the contrast between the cynicism among my GP colleagues--perhaps a way of hardening themselves against the woes of our profession--and the positive mood I encountered among anthroposophical doctors. There was no gossiping but rather sharing of what one was good at. I found it very special.
I saw how they gave out little bottles with pills and the like. My attitude had been precisely to keep people out of the medical circuit as much as possible, because it rarely made them feel better, unless they were seriously ill and absolutely needed it. But to use medication even for minor ailments I actually felt was ridiculous. Until I understood that ordinary medicine works against something and these medications were for something. Then I realized that it could make sense.
To make a long story short, I became interested in anthroposophic medicine. Anthroposophic physician Robert Gorter held a series of lectures and after attending these lectures I approached him to ask if I could come and observe in his practice. I was already a GP in a health care center in Amsterdam-Osdorp and took off a day a week for that. I was really impressed by what happened there and that's how I got into this way of thinking.
Evolutionary Theory and Spirituality - Are We Our Brain?
“To understand what sort of beings we really are and looking at evolutionary theory, we can ask ourselves: are we just hairless apes? And what about spirituality, has that also developed in evolution? May be some animals are very spiritual. Are we entirely biologically determined or is there something else that drives us? About twenty years ago I wrote an article for Medical Contact (Dutch journal for physicians) about neuroscience’s leaning to the idea that we are our brain. It was not published at the time because “no neuroscientist would say such a thing.” The journal’s science editor even called to tell me it was a nonsensical accusation.
The Saturday after this phone call, an article appeared in Trouw (a Dutch daily newspaper) by Dick Swaab: “We are our brain.” That's when I knew I was on to something. I didn't believe one bit that we are our brains. I think we use our brains.
Yet, are there enough reasons to claim that? I started studying a lot, both in evolutionary theory, and in how genes actually function, whether they determine everything or are flexible, have plasticity so to speak. It turns out that they are flexible and that our brains do have plasticity. We ourselves can change both! I only made use of rigorous scientific research and I stayed with the questions, for years.”
A Math Student With Barely a Brain and Neglected Children
“A turning point for me was Paul Witteman’s television interview with Christine van Broekhoven, a world-renowned, Belgian neuroscientist. Paul Witteman showed her a brain scan of a genius math student who turned out to have very little brain tissue because he had hydrocephalus, just several millimeters of brain tissue was what was left against the skull’s inner wall. I thought: indeed, we are onto something! If we were our brains, he could not have an IQ of 127 and an even higher verbal IQ, and function perfectly normally. He was extremely intelligent. Christine van Broekhoven knew the example and said she didn't know how that was possible. Because no neuroscientist has been able to explain how conscious awareness would be produced by the brain.
Conversely, it is obvious that conscious awareness triggers constant changes in the brain, which we notice as brain plasticity.
And there is another example. If one carefully neglects small children, they develop microcephaly and become retarded. When they are then brought into a foster family before the age of 5 and raised normally they can catch up all right.”
Consciousness Uses the Brain
“Plasticity of the brain is a widely accepted phenomenon by neuroscientists, however, they do not believe that consciousness plays a part in it. In fact, according to the first and second law of thermodynamics that is an impossibility: matter cannot pass into something that does not exist and consciousness, according to most neuroscientists at the time, does not exist. It cannot be physically described. That would get in the way of the law of conservation of energy.
Quantum physicists, on the other hand, understand it. And I have found that medical practitioners can look more broadly than most scientists, who do not treat real people. Practitioners are generally more sensitive to the idea that consciousness uses the brain.”
Free Will
When we accept the concept that we are our brains as correct, as Prof. Dick Swaab claims, then we would not have free will either. The brain then controls everything and it responds, not “we.” Dick Swaab, during a lecture, talked about the “gay lobe” he had discovered and how that discovery had drawn the ire of the gay movement. They even dumped a pile of manure in his yard. This angered Swaab. Arie Bos, who was present at that lecture, then asked him, “But if we don't have free will they can't do anything about it, can they?” To which Swaab replied that we do have some free will ...
Dementia, Amyloid Plaques, and Sleep
In our conversation, we also take up the subject of dementia. There is a veritable dementia epidemic in the United States, and statistics show that the increase in dementia follows the increase in obesity and type-2 diabetes. This form of dementia is therefore also called type-3 diabetes. The formation of plaques due to the deposition of amyloid plays an important role. Excessive intake of sugar and carbohydrates appears to influence this.
“I have, of course, read Rudolf Steiner, the founder of anthroposophy, on the brain. He says all kinds of things about the brain that made me think: “Can that really be true?” He once mentioned, for example, that during the day we produce a waste substance in the brain that gets eliminated once we fall asleep. I had never heard of that before. But it turns out to be true, this refers to what we now call amyloid. It is produced during the day when we are fully conscious and is eliminated at night. Steiner had said that a hundred years ago and it is only now being discovered.”
Synapses, Plasticity, and Inhibition in the Brain
“Steiner also mentioned, a hundred years ago, that the interruption of the nerve impulse in the synapse makes it possible for us to use our brain. And again, it turned out to be true: we now know that brain plasticity is possible because we have synapses. I became more and more interested.
Successively I found out, and this is a subject I like to discuss in my lectures now, that the brain not only facilitates conscious awareness but that it also inhibits.
Steiner said of the motor nerves: “They don't initiate movement. In order to move, we have to be able to perceive movement.” We now call that propriocepsis. And indeed, there are some cases of people in whom propriocepsis has totally fallen away. The consequence is that either they cannot move at all, are paralyzed, at the same time their motor tract is completely intact. Or they move like a headless chicken and, while lying in bed, move aimlessly in all directions. Not exactly like a headless chicken of course: a headless chicken still walks in a somewhat coordinated way, but runs into things because it cannot see where it is going.
Movement impulses originate in the body: in the spinal cord, not in the brain, also in humans, but we stop to correct them by using our motor tract: the motor cortex mainly inhibits (Figure 1).
The motor and sensory cortex lie on opposite sides of a cleft, the central sulcus, in the brain, and nerves from both sides go down together in the pyramidal tract to the spinal cord where the alpha motor neurons are. These alpha neurons in the spinal cord stimulate the muscles. Alpha neurons can stimulate muscles without interference from the cortex, which is what happens in a reflex movement.
The impulse that comes from the motor cortex mainly stimulates interneurons that produce GABA, which inhibits the alpha neurons. So Steiner was right there too.”
The Brain, Control, and Free Will
“The uncoordinated impulse to move comes from the body and motor nerves coordinate the movement through inhibition. Inhibition controls movement, and that has everything to do with our free will. Because free will is not that we just do whatever we want, whatever comes to mind, but that we know how to control ourselves. That we can do things in an organized way. For example, if one has to pee it makes it possible not to pee right away wherever we are. That's a simple example but the same applies to higher functions, right up to the moral sphere.
We regularly have to hold ourselves back, not to just let go. And it's very important for us humans that we are able to hold back.
Inhibition does not start till after birth. At birth a sudden huge turnaround takes place in the body and inhibitory interneurons are generated. To begin with babies move in an uncoordinated way and all kinds of reflexes from earlier on in evolution are still present, such as walking and swimming reflex movements.
Compared to animals in evolution, humans have the greatest number of inhibitory and mirror neurons. That again has to do with the question, “What sort of beings are we really?” There's a weird gap between the human and animal worlds.”
Differences Between Left and Right Brain
“Iain McGilchrist is an English psychiatrist who has written two books. One of them, The Master and his Emissary, is about the left and right hemispheres of the brain. He makes it very clear how different they are--we can also see this macroscopically--and that they have different tasks. That also started earlier on in evolution. The left hemisphere is concerned with survival by looking for food and focusing on that. Possibly by manipulating so we can conjure up food, as some animals do by using tools, for example. And the right hemisphere has the intention to keep an eye on (predators in) the environment, the whole, and helps us understand something as a whole. That, too, is important for survival. Through a lot of steps we may conclude that the left hemisphere enables us to think in a reductionist-mechanistic way and the right hemisphere allows us to think holistically and consider things possible that we haven't immediately seen proven.
Now the left hemisphere happens to be the verbal hemisphere. It has “won out” in our time, at least in science. In our Western culture in general, the left hemisphere has gained the upper hand.
The right hemisphere uses the contralateral areas of speech for music and for prosody, the way we say things. People in whom the right hemisphere does not work well do not understand poetry, music, irony, or humor. Anything that does not express a literal meaning.”
Hemispheres and Inhibition
“The left hemisphere inhibits everything that is not directly perceived. It represents reality, while the right hemisphere presents us with reality. That’s why the left hemisphere prefers theory above experience. And it actually inhibits the right hemisphere. The other way around is also true to a certain extent, but certainly in Western culture the left hemisphere has become so domineering that it inhibits a lot. Jill Bolte Taylor, professor of neuroanatomy, suffered a hemorrhage in her left hemisphere. And when the left hemisphere shut down--normally it babbles all the time--she had a spiritual experience. She could see wholeness and see how everything is connected. The breakdown of left hemispheric function, though, also was the reason she couldn't use her phone because the numbers didn't mean anything to her.
The right hemisphere is always interested in new things. And when it gets used to them, it moves them on to the left hemisphere. The left hemisphere is like, “Oh, I already know that.” Rupert Sheldrake calls that nothing-but-erism. This makes it comprehensible how we've come to think so mechanistically.”
Brain Death and Organ Donation
“In a very recent book, Erasing Death, Sam Parnia describes how he has resuscitated cardiac arrest patients. Parnia does not think after five minutes “there's no point anymore,” but he resuscitates for an hour because he can give mechanical chest compressions. When we do it manually we don't last that long. And the people he resuscitates often just walk out of the hospital, sometimes after having been resuscitated for an hour.
He is not left with many organ donors because “brain death” doesn't occur so often in his practice. Sam Parnia has lots of stories of people who have regained consciousness with a near-death experience. He explains that with the circumstance that the brain could not employ its inhibitory function. These people have gained sight of a real reality.
This raises the question of whether the brain is “dead” or is brain death rather a prognosis. Just like the headless chicken: it is not yet dead either. A dead chicken cannot run.”
Terminal Lucidity and Savants
“This is how I came to understand other phenomena, such as terminal lucidity: for a brief time period a sudden lucidity just before dying in people whose brains no longer function; and savants (people who show special characteristics in one area while otherwise being diagnosed as autistic or mentally retarded, ed.) who most of the time have a defect in their left hemisphere, so it no longer can suppress things in the same way. They also have access to knowledge that you and I don't have, namely answers to difficult calculations that they see before them as a landscape or they look around in a cathedral once, go home and can accurately draw it.”
“In Its Functioning, the Brain Skims Past Death”
“I began to understand these things ever better. Our memory is also inhibited, of course, and that helps protect us from too many stimuli and too much information.
Steiner said: “In its functioning, the brain skims past death.” I wondered what he could mean by that. Well, all cells in animal organisms are negatively charged outside their cell wall and positively charged inside. And what happens when they die? The polarization falls away. And how do nerves function? They depolarize, the polarization falls away–for a moment. They do exactly what dying cells do, too. Only, behind the depolarization wave polarization is restored--repolarization. So they have a kind of near-death experience, we might say.
Inhibition of the depolarization ensures that the cells don't get excitotoxic, because if the nerve is stimulated too long it doesn't almost die but actually dies. Inhibition prevents that.
Our Brain Does Not Allow Us a View of Real Reality
“Small children are just beginning to have inhibitory function and often remember past lives or even the time between lives. For example, I had a patient who told me about her little son who had crawled up to her when she was lying on the couch and told her “You know, before I was with you I met Grandpa (whom he had never known, because Grandpa had died shortly before he was born) and Grandpa said: go through that door because then you will come to very dear parents.” There are books about children who still could tell about their past lives, in which the facts they told have been verified. For example, a child who knew the name of his murderer in a past life.
At the moment I am fascinated by the inhibition principle in the brain and nervous system, because it aids me in my understanding that, normally, we are not granted a full view of real reality thanks to our brains. It used to be so that I was terribly interested in mirror neurons, because we need them for empathy, now I focus more on inhibition.”
Science and Values
“In the Companion Consciousness, the Brain, and Free Will I go into this in more detail. This does not discuss Rudolf Steiner's ideas but deliberates on the scientific literature on the subject.
Rudolf Steiner encouraged this: “Do not believe me but check things out for yourself.” That is science.
Science itself does not provide values. Science is basically value-free, and provides insights such that we can attach our own values.
Unfortunately, many scientists present their own opinion as scientific fact. For example, many scientific disciplines assume that life itself has no purpose, while actually we just ought to bring factual information in science such that people can form their own opinion about it without being influenced by the scientist's opinion.”
Arie Bos's book Consciousness, the Brain, and Free Will can be downloaded for free via: https://www.bolkscompanions.com.
Quantum physics and laws of nature
George Ellis, one of the most famous quantum physicists of today, states that the thought that conscious awareness affects matter does not violate any natural law when you know that all physiological processes depend on changing the form of proteins, which depends on quantum physics. He calls that downward causation. Particles do not exist in his view. Particles are themselves information.
Examples of how memories are passed on without brain cells
An interesting example is the flatworm, a sea worm, which can be cut into pieces and each piece will then grow back again into a complete flatworm. This worm has a head with ganglia and you can teach it to find the fastest way through a maze. If you cut off its head, a new head will grow and with that the worm will still know the fastest way out of the maze.
Something similar happens with the butterfly. If a caterpillar has learned to avoid a certain smell, the butterfly also knows how to avoid that smell, even though all the cells of the pupal stage of the caterpillar are destroyed before the butterfly develops.
Source: TIG – Tijdschrift voor Integrale Geneeskunde, Jaargang 39, nummer 1, 2024