“Why You Are Not Your Brain” Comments, Page 1

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14 Comments (3 Discussion Threads) on “Why You Are Not Your Brain”

  1. I think it is very strange. We need a psychotherapy that takes the organism in its environment (the person in their situation) seriously.

    We could then perhaps describe this relationship (which would get us beyond sterile arguments about nature and nurture and objective and subjective).

    I do think that consciousness may have degrees of complexity. It would be interesting to chart these – I suspect the development of a spinal cord would make a difference, and for people the development of language/tools.

    I’m not sure that we only apprehend reality directly, I think we do use representations and approximations – and sometimes learn that we are mistaken (which I think shows that there is direct apprehension).

    Thanks for a very interesting post.

  2. Nice one George! Thanks too!

    Evan, I agree that we use all kind of representations, but I think the key point here that Noe makes is that the essential basis of our whole ability to percieve and be consciously alive in the world is not representative. The mainstream neuroscientists he is arguing against would preclude any kind of ‘direct’ contact with reality, saying it is all based on one representational illusion constructed by our brain.

    I didn’t go into implications for psychotherapy in the post, but yes, it would be interesting to look at that.

    While arguments about anything at all have the potential to get sterile, personally I think that the ones about subject and object lie pretty much at the heart of existence, which is exciting to me – but maybe I am just a little strange :-)

    1. The idea that we don’t have direct contact is just silly – how would we ever conceive of a mistake?

      I wish scientists would do Philosophy 101 or something and spare us this nonsense.

      I think it should be possible to articulate the relation between subject and object. I think that would be interesting.

  3. I wouldn’t dismiss what neuroscientists have to contribute to philosophy… within the framework that everything is a representation my brain makes it would be possible to catch all kinds of mistakes, but not to look outside the framework. I don’t think that’s a philosophically impossible position to take…

  4. I don’t doubt it is possible to take that position philosophically.

    The ‘philosophy’ I have read from neuroscientists – and certainly the stuff you report here, doesn’t inspire me with its philosophical depth, or contribution to understanding of experience. Can you list the contributions it has made to philosophy?

    1. What interests me are the philosophical, psychological and spiritual implications of the research which is being done right now on the brain. I attempt to tease these out in my posts. That’s all :-)

  5. I had to chime in here because I think both of you have some very valid points. With respect to some of what Evan is saying, however, I must agree about the kind of nonsense that sometimes gets published in the name of “science.” There actually is a philosophy of science and it has some basic tenets. Most of these tenets haven’t been observed very well in the last 50 years, and the problem isn’t getting any better, it’s getting worse. A whole lot gets published because of its political or interest value as opposed to its true scientific merit. What we have as a result are volumes and volumes of papers and abstracts straining the shelves of libraries, and about as much genuinely useful knowledge that could fill the inside of a thimble.

    1. I guess institutional factors, like publish or perish, have a lot to answer for.

      I think there is something of a tension too between the generalities of scientific evidence and the personal needs of a therapy. The neatest way I have heard this put is by Bob Dick, “I hear lots about evidence based practice, but not a lot about practice based evidence”.

  6. I think that the phenomenon of individual personality predates the appearance/evolution of human beings. Even little puppies and kittens come into this world with individual personalities. Some are more aggressive, some are more passive, some are more friendly or curious and some are more fearful. And studies with chimps, bonobos and gorillas, parrots and dolphins would seem to indicate that these animals have individual personalities and preferences. Jane Goodall’s studies even appear to indicate that wild chimps can commit stalking behavior of fellow chimps with the object of premeditated murder, and one young adult chimp committed suicide out of despair when his mother died. I believe some well-documented studies with rhesus monkeys show that separating a newborn monkey from its mother and raising it in isolation from other monkeys results in what we would call insanity in a human being. So, me personally, I think that the idea of individuality and personality is not specific to human beings, and is evident in lower life forms.
    -Annie

  7. I would have thought the psychophysiological trauma research of the last 20 years or so has something to offer here.
    From personal experience I can testify to the the sense of ‘impotent outrage’ which I consider to be a reaction of the thinking parts of my brain (i.e. frontal cortex) to the ‘hijacking’ by my ‘animal brain’ when cortical functioning is bypassed in favour of an unconscious instinctual response because my sensory apparatus (e.g. sight, hearing, smell, touch) has registered (I choose not to say ‘perceived’) a possibly lethal threat. In instinctual terms, to ‘pause and consider’ i.e. to engage in thinking, may, in particular circumstances, be lethal, so ‘flight/fight/freeze’ kicks in.
    When my ‘animal brain’ takes over the show in this way, not only do I find myself physiologically overwhelmed by the consequences of the adrenaline rush, (and the often socially embarrassing consequences of some of the symptoms, especially without any sabre-toothed tigers to hand), but, after the initial internal tsunami, the bit of my thinking brain which begins to be able to observe what’s going on (even if not answer questions sensibly or think straight), also begins to get angry at having been sidelined, thus increasing the appalling sense of helplessness in relation to what is happening IN MY OWN BODY, and my loss of a sense of normal ‘control’ (imagined or otherwise!)
    For a while, there is (? almost) ONLY experience – that’s how it feels. Sometimes this is what people seem to want, and other times it isn’t. When a sense of choice i.e. a conscious decision, at least in some part (again, imagined or otherwise), is undone I notice that my circuits tend to go haywire. I don’t like it one bit.
    I recall seeing a video of a cat in a cage who’s amygdala had been tampered with years ago – I felt I understood the ‘fright and fight’ its whole body was so clearly expressing – it reminded me how my body reacts when I feel ‘unfamiliar’ to myself – or is it the other way around?

  8. I think this article is splitting hairs that don’t need to be split and the arguments actually seem to refute the hypothesis to me.

    By arguing that our brains just do, is even a stronger argument that we ARE our brains. Not the opposite.

    I have lost body parts — had parts of fingers detached, lost a spleen, etc — these losses do absolutely nothing to affect my overall consciousness which is clearly a function of the brain (and the bits connected to the brain, equally clearly your gut-brain influences your conscious experience as does the state of your intestinal flora! — the point isn’t to say only the neurons, glial, astrocytes, etc in your skull matter, but the total system).

    But all this says is that we ARE our brain – the two are inseparable.

    It does NOT follow from this, as the article seems to suggest, that organisms therefore must have a brain to have consciousness — other organisms, including bacteria mentioned, have OTHER systems that give them the ability to sense & react to their environment. They *are* those systems in the same sense as we are ours – at least to the extent that they have some kind of ‘conscious’ experience (and it isn’t at all clear that they do – consciousness very much seems to be a product of a very complex organ of information processing). And we can see the direct impact on that product in various types of brain damage – there is a HUGE body of knowledge about how the brain works based on observations of how it breaks down when damaged.

    The loss of consciousness is a lot more telling than the possession of it – our consciousness is a very fragile thing. Psychedelic drugs are the most obvious way to greatly perturb that system and observe profound effects. But the effects of anesthetics are equally informative in the observations of how we lose consciousness. There seems to be a threshold below which consciousness is just gone – it’s not one little piece of the brain but a product of the large-scale coordination between all the parts.

    How ‘consciousness’ is produced by/arises in the brain is still an unknown – time and the progress of science is the best way to resolve these questions.

    But to refute that ‘we ARE our brain’ you would need to show that there is something non-brain necessary for conscious experience. I don’t think that has been done yet.

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