I am Not a Brain

Philosophy of Mind for the 21st Century

Markus Gabriel, Christopher Turner

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781509514786
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Many consider the nature of human consciousness to be one of the last great unsolved mysteries. Why should the light turn on, so to speak, in human beings at all? And how is the electrical storm of neurons under our skull connected with our consciousness? Is the self only our brain's user interface, a kind of stage on which a show is performed that we cannot freely direct?
In this book, philosopher Markus Gabriel challenges an increasing trend in the sciences towards neurocentrism, a notion which rests on the assumption that the self is identical to the brain. Gabriel raises serious doubts as to whether we can know ourselves in this way. In a sharp critique of this approach, he presents a new defense of the free will and provides a timely introduction to philosophical thought about the self – all with verve, humor, and surprising insights.
Gabriel criticizes the scientific image of the world and takes us on an eclectic journey of self-reflection by way of such concepts as self, consciousness, and freedom, with the aid of Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nagel but also Dr. Who, The Walking Dead, and Fargo.

1
What is at Stake in the Philosophy of Mind?

At first glance, nothing seems more obvious than that mind is at stake in the philosophy of mind. But I have already argued that the mind is not a thing, a natural kind out there in the universe, whose nature we need to study in some natural scientific way. In the last century, in particular, a new approach emerged to the fact that we are creatures who are aware of their surroundings by perceiving them, who have feelings, thoughts and dreams, etc. This new approach is called “philosophy of mind”¹ and was presented in paradigmatic form in Bertrand Russell’s influential book The Analysis of Mind.² What is called Philosophie des Geistes in German, even today by many authors in the German-speaking world, stems from the discipline of the “philosophy of mind” in the English-speaking world. However, in German, Bewusstseinsphilosophie [philosophy of consciousness] would be a more accurate translation of “philosophy of mind,” which I would like to use in order to be able to distinguish this new orientation from previous currents of thought. Philosophers from Hegel to Habermas suggested a distinction between philosophy of consciousness and philosophy which deals with mind in the sense of Geist. This distinction is obscured by the decision to come up with a unified category, the mind, and think of it along the lines of consciousness. Consciousness is, roughly speaking, a subjective process that, for all we know, is somehow connected with the fact that we have a suitable brain. In order to be able to sketch the outlines for my contribution to the revival of self-conceptions in terms of Geist, I will distinguish philosophy of consciousness and philosophy of mind. Philosophy of consciousness, then, corresponds to the mainstream discipline called “philosophy of mind” in the English-speaking world, and philosophy of mind, as in the title of this book, refers to an investigation into human mindedness, into the invariant capacity to produce self-conceptions and its differentiation into conceptual modules, such as consciousness, self-consciousness, thought, representation, will, etc.

What is problematically new in philosophy of consciousness is not so much to be found in its content but, rather, consists in the fact that the philosophy of consciousness typically assigns the philosophy of mind in general the task of seeking the answer to a specific question: What marks something out as a mental state or a mental event? For, if we ever want to make progress on the mind–brain problem, it seems a good move to carve out the concept of a mark of the mental so that we know what to relate to what. Notice that the concept of a brain is also more complicated than is presented by standard discussions. Usually, we speak of a “normal” healthy adult brain, for which we have a map on which we find the neural correlates of specific mental functions, such as the visual cortex with its subregions. However, this brain is really a model of a brain and not the kind of thing everybody has within their skulls. Brain science can only ever work out a model of the brain on the basis of very limited samples, and it tells us that brains have plasticity – that is, they can be highly individual and even change the function of some areas in order to replace other areas, etc. Yet, for the rest of this book I will simply play along and assume that we know how to individuate a brain. Hence, I will not try to attack neuroscience on that front and simply grant the concept of the brain.

This leaves us with the task of finding a “mark of the mental,” as the saying goes, something which helps us to distinguish mind and brain first on a conceptual level in order to find out how they hang together in the natural world (if they do!). The mark accepted by many turns out to be consciousness, which is why the philosophy of mind has been concentrated one-sidedly on a single capacity of the human mind: consciousness.

The question referred to, concerning the mark of the mental, arises against the backdrop of the modern presumption that much of what we once may have considered in terms of mind turned out to be purely natural. Here once more the modern struggle against superstition comes to the fore. While it may once have been believed that the heavenly bodies move in regular paths and constellations in order to transmit the messages of the gods, in modernity we have finally realized that the universe contains no such messages for us. It is meaningless in that it does not contain messages and is not driven by any mind. The regular movements of the heavenly bodies can be explained mechanistically, and neither intention nor mind of any other kind is behind such an explanation. I have no intention to deny this.

Yet, according to this view, the mind was progressively banished from the universe or nature until it was resurrected in the shape of philosophy of consciousness. Mind has turned into consciousness, which, in turn, is supposed to rest on essentially subpersonal, non-conscious processes encapsulated in our brain. Some associate this progressive banishment with secularization, and thus with the disappearance of religion in favor of that which is not religious, above all scientific explanations, something supposedly characteristic of modernity. However, the question here is whether we even have criteria for something that can be considered as mental, and under what conditions a religious and a scientific explanation are really incompatible.

Mind in the universe?

The first contrast that is prominent in the modern line of reasoning is that of nature and mind. In this vein, Russell ventures the claim that we should not make use of precisely this contrast, since otherwise the dualism feared and despised by nearly everyone will force itself upon us. This dualism is the thesis that the universe consists of two different kinds of objects or events: mental and natural. Most philosophers of consciousness today consider it untenable, because one must then assume that mental events would somehow have to impinge on the mechanism of the conservation and transformation of energy that belongs to purely natural processes. According to many contemporary scientists (but not according to Isaac Newton himself!), the laws of nature that teach us how the conservation and transformation of energy function tell us nothing about there being a mind that impinges causally on what happens. On the contrary, everything which takes place in nature or the universe apparently can be explained without recourse to a mind, since the laws of nature teach us that nothing can impinge causally on something without a transformation of energy/matter. Sure, this assumes that mind itself is not something material. If it were, by this logic it could easily impinge on what happens causally. Mind-matter has not yet been discovered, or so it seems. Thus one prefers to seek mind in the brain, because without the latter we would in fact have no conscious inner life, and therefore no consciousness, which the philosophy of consciousness ultimately considers to be the mark of the mental.

It is easy to imagine a perspective from which the mind-matter problem appears quite striking. Imagine Yonca would like to drink coffee. Accordingly, she goes to the kitchen and turns on the coffee machine. From the perspective of physics, we have no reason to assume that somewhere in Yonca’s body a vital force, a soul or a mind is diffused and guides her body into the kitchen. Were something like this the case, its interaction with the body would have been proven long ago, since such a mind can impinge on the material-energetic reality studied by physics only if it leaves material-energetic traces according to the laws of nature. This means that energy would have been put to use, which can be measured. From this perspective, it seems most natural that we have to look for Yonca’s apparent wish to drink coffee somewhere in the energetic meshwork of nature. Since, however, no soul is to be found there, but at most a brain, the question of how brain and mind are related to one another starts to look to make sense. We know from the description of the scenario that Yonca wants to drink coffee, and we know from the point of view of physics that this cannot mean that an immaterial soul interacts with her body without leaving any material-energetic trace. In this context, one usually invokes the principle of the causal closure of nature, which involves the claim that purely natural processes can never be interfered with by purely mental processes. Nothing which does not leave any material-energetic footprints can interfere causally with processes which require a material-energetic grounding in order to take place. This causes a problem if one wishes to distinguish mind from nature by the fact that the former is understood to be a non-material substance, a purely mental bearer of thoughts, and the latter is understood as the closed realm of the causal world, the universe or nature.

Within this framework, the American philosopher of consciousness Jaegwon Kim (b. 1934) asked somewhat derisively whether an almost immaterial mind, so to speak, could not still be somehow causally connected to our body. But then the question arises as to how the mind manages to accompany the body at great velocity. For example, how does the mind accelerate when an astronaut is sent into outer space? Can one measure it physically, or how does one conceive it? Could our body outrun our mind if only it were quick enough? Or is the mind fastened to the body somewhere, perhaps in the pineal gland in the brain, as Descartes, the greatgrandfather of the philosophy of consciousness, supposed?

The very idea of a causal closure of reality relies on the notion that there is a purely natural reality, an objective realm occupied by processes and objects such that everything in that domain can be apprehended, described and explained with scientific precision and objectivity. Let us call the realm of physical reality thus conceived the universe.

So far, so good. But what about psychology? Does it not examine something like the human mind with the aid of experiments, and thus also with scientific precision and objectivity? Yet, if this is the case, then the mind must belong to the universe. The contrast between nature and the mind that leads to a mind-matter problem quickly collapses. Notice that dualism looms large as soon as one supposes that there is a problem at all with the embedding of mind in nature. Hence, to be a dualist, one does not need to believe that there is a secret, non-material source of energy (the mind, the soul) which prowls around within our skull.

It is indeed correct that we do not find mind in the universe. But it does not follow from this that the mind does not exist! This only follows if we have an image of the universe as the only realm of what exists, as the one and only true reality. Yet such an image of the world is not scientifically or physically verifiable but has to remain a pure article of faith. At best, one can argue for it philosophically.

One prominent strategy at this point is to try to explain mind away altogether, which is called theory reductionism, in order simply to eliminate the problem we have outlined. This thesis has the name it does because we are supposed to reduce every theory that avails itself of mental processes into a theory in which the word “mind” no longer occurs. For instance, behaviorism attempted to translate all statements about mental processes into statements about observable, ultimately physical, measurable behavior, and flourished in the early days of reductive views. To be in pain meant only to exhibit pain behavior. The assumption that there are mental processes at all came to seem like a remnant of premodern superstition – a side-effect of the misguided attempt to find mind in the universe while considering the latter to be the one and only true reality.

In the spirit of Hegel

The search for a mark of the mental is largely occupied with the question of how mental states and events can have a place in a purely natural universe. But, in framing the question this way, it is assumed that we should accept a standard or paradigmatic concept of reality: physical reality. In presupposing this, we already oppose mental reality to physical reality by definition. The question then becomes how such a rift can be overcome or resolved.

Let us give this whole way of posing the question a name: naturalistic metaphysics. Metaphysics is the theory of reality as a whole, also called “the world,” “the universe,” “reality (full stop)” or “the cosmos.” Metaphysics deals with absolutely everything which exists, with the most encompassing totality of them all. If the world is iden...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Introduction
• 1 What is at Stake in the Philosophy of Mind?
• 2 Consciousness
• 3 Self-Consciousness
• 4 Who or What is This Thing We Call the Self?
• 5 Freedom
• Index
• End User License Agreement