Me

Mel Thompson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138152632
• eBook ISBN: 9781317488415
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

'Who am I?' In a world where randomness and chance make life transient and unpredictable, religion, psychology and philosophy have all tried, in their different ways, to answer this question and to give meaning and coherence to the human person. How we should construct a meaningful 'me' - and to make sense of one's life - is the question at the heart of Mel Thompson's illuminating book.Although Thompson begins by exploring the workings of the brain, he shows that if we are to consider the nature of the self, it is not enough to argue about such things as how mind relates to matter, or whether neuroscience can fully explain consciousness. Such an approach fails to do justice to the self that we experience and the selves that we encounter around us. We need to engage with the more personal, existential questions: how do I make sense of my life? And am I responsible for the person I have become?Thompson investigates the gap between what we are and what others perceive us to be to ascertain whether we are genuinely knowable entities. He explores the central dilemma of how one can have a fixed idea of 'me' to shape and direct one's life when, in a world of constant change, events will rob us of that fixed idea at any moment. Perhaps we would be better to let go of the need for 'me', asks Thompson, but would a self-less life be possible, or desirable?Drawing on the writings of literature, philosophy, religion and science, as well as personal reflection and anecdote, Thompson has written an engaging and thought-provoking work that recaptures the notion of 'me' from the neuroscientists and situates it at the heart of finding a place in the world.

1. Getting beyond our neurons

The conversation around the table seems distant now. From time to time I make an effort to listen to what is being said, but it does not last. A feeling of dullness settles on me; I’m becoming bored. My eyes remain open, my ears still hear the conversation, but now I start thinking of what I will do tomorrow. I consider various options, silently talking to myself; the monologue seemingly going on within my head. Without entirely losing my present experience (I have not actually fallen asleep) my mind superimposes other scenes over that of the assembled company at the table. I am remembering, planning, enjoying a fantasy that is more real and vivid to me than my present experience. But suddenly I am aware of someone leaning across and asking me a question. “I’m sorry,” I say, unable to hide my inattention, “I was miles away”.

But where was I? Clearly, I was still in the same physical position; my body had not shifted, but my mind had loosened its connection with the ongoing stream of present experience and was ranging over a terrain of its own, visualizing people and places, some already known to me, some imagined. In my mind I was elsewhere. I know I am this physical body – that’s not in doubt; and I have not left the table. Asked where I am, others could point to me without hesitation. This body is what they identify as “me” (along with all its habits, including daydreaming). But is my body really “me” or am I something quite different, merely hiding within this physical shell?

Let’s start our enquiry by stating the obvious. I am a physical being. Bounded by my skin, I am a complex biological organism, a constantly changing and developing set of systems that maintain me as a living thing. My blood circulates, my lymph drains, my digestive system processes food and provides nutrients to keep me going. Like all living things, I exist by receiving nourishment from the outside world. My life expectancy, once deprived of oxygen, is a few minutes at most. Whirring away within my head is that miracle of organic complexity, a human brain. It consumes a substantial part of my energy, and controls my physical systems. Without the constant contact that it has with the rest of my body I am dead, as the guillotine or noose effectively illustrate. We know that we are physical bodies, but are we more than that? Is there something about being “me” that goes beyond what can be analysed in terms of the functioning of my brain and the rest of my body? The view that we are nothing more than the body is termed materialism.

Daniel Dennett argued in Consciousness Explained (1991) that the mind is the brain and that there is only one sort of stuff, namely physical matter. What we experience when we experience ourselves is simply matter, whirring into life as neurons connect with one another. There is no ghostly or private “self” or “mind”: that is an illusion generated by the sheer complexity of the brain, and one day a perfect neuroscience will tell us all that we need to know about ourselves. Indeed, in Freedom Evolves (2003), he caricatures the idea of souls, calling them “spectral puppeteers”, externally manipulating physical bodies.

In the most extreme form of this approach, called “eliminative materialism”, mental phenomena, including our thoughts, feelings, intentions, hopes and so on, do not exist: they are simply ways of describing neural activity. And if neurobiology could show exactly how each part of the brain controlled feelings, thoughts and so on, there would be no need for any further explanation of what we call mind. Essentially, we are the trillions of mindless robots toiling away in our brains, and nothing else. Materialism tends towards scientism: the claim that the use of the scientific method is the only way of understanding our world. By contrast, this book will argue that science – however valid in its own terms – is not the most useful tool for understanding “me”.

Some thinkers demonstrate their views in unusual ways. In the Abbie Museum of Anatomy at the University of Adelaide, there is a curiously philosophical exhibit: a brain. It is not philosophical in itself, of course, but the caption below it reads, “Did this Brain Contain the Consciousness of U. T. Place?” Place, a professor of that university who took a particular interest in the philosophy of mind and who died in 2000, argued for a materialist view. Perhaps, in a science-fiction future, his brain may be hooked up to an equally sophisticated but living computer, and Place will be reconstructed. My guess is that all that could ever be found behind that glass is an elaborate computer, without an operating system or software: impressive but quite unable to run.

I am a physical body, but one that is related to the rest of the world through my senses. My sense of touch is located all over my skin, particularly in my hands, but the other senses – sight, smell, taste and hearing – are located around my head. I tend to think of myself as inhabiting my head. It is from my head that I get my sense of direction, locate myself within the world and move around. The head, and particularly the face, is also the means by which I communicate with others. Every tiny facial gesture expresses something that I am thinking. There is no scope here to dwell on how absolutely amazing the head is (to appreciate that, there is no better book than The Kingdom of Infinite Space by Raymond Tallis). So should I define “me” simply in terms of what happens inside my head?

Thoughts and feelings relate to more than neural activity: tears may be produced, muscles may cause people to tremble with fear, sweat may break out, sexual organs may prepare themselves for an anticipated opportunity of action. Perhaps all of these things may happen at once! The emotional life of a human being involves the whole body. The brain may control our life, but does that imply that we are “nothing but” brain activity? I have a dilemma, and therefore worry about what to do; my body reflects the resulting anxiety. But is that dilemma initiated by brain activity? Of course not. The brain responds to external circumstances, conveyed to it through the senses. It reacts to the situation that “I” find myself in as I engage with the world. “I” am the one that gives my brain the dilemma. Even if “I” cannot be pinpointed in space and time – that is, even if I can find no separate place for “me” within my skull that is not already occupied by brain matter doing its work – it is still the fact that I am in the world, relating to others, that gives the processing engine of the brain something to chew on. That “me” is myself in my world.

Exploring the way in which the brain responds to these stimuli, analysing its operation rather on the computer model, is termed “functionalism” and is an approach taken by Hilary Putnam and others. The brain receives signals from the sense organs, processes them and initiates appropriate responses. I put my hand too near the fire: my brain receives messages to the effect that nerve endings in the hand are being damaged, and it responds by contracting my arm muscles to remove my hand from the flame. Functionalism therefore gives a way of mapping out what the brain does. We cannot “see” thought in the firing of neurons; all we can measure is the pattern of stimulus and response that is going on. Taken beyond the simplicity of this example, the functionalist approach moves towards explaining the process of sifting experience and relating it to memory, responding to things in the present on the basis of my experience of the past. I’ve tasted that before, didn’t like it then, so won’t eat it now: functionalism offers a common-sense view of what we all do all of the time.

Relating to the rest of the world involves a whole range of mental phenomena that the nineteenth-century Austrian philosopher Franz Brentano described in terms of “intentionality” Willing, hoping, loving, hating: these activities are directed to something outside ourselves; they cannot happen without being “about” something; they refer beyond themselves. The object of their attention need not exist physically – I could be in love with a fantasy – but the intentional stance is real and is the mark of intelligent life. In 1890, the philosopher and psychologist William James described it in this way in the first chapter of his The Principles of Psychology:

The Pursuance of future ends and the choice of means for their attainment, are thus the mark and criterion of the presence of mentality in a phenomenon. We all use this test to discriminate between an intelligent and a mechanical performance. We impute no mentality to sticks and stones, because they never seem to move for the sake of anything, but always when pushed, and then indifferently and with no sign of choice. So we unhesitatingly call them senseless.

It is likely, therefore, that the broad area of “intentionality” holds the key to how we develop as persons in our interaction with the world around us, but for now let us return to the issue of materialism.

Of course, the study of consciousness has come a long way since James’s day, and the discussion of minds and brains is now set against a background of the cognitive sciences, where biology combines with psychology, linguistics and computer studies to explore the general ways in which our brains (seen very much as computers) relate to the world and create the experience of free, thinking, planning individuals. Indeed, as Dennett explained in an autobiographical article (2008), his aim was both to do philosophy and also to defend a specific empirical theory of consciousness. The question remains as to whether any scientific theory, since it is based on empirical evidence that needs to be tested and evaluated, is actually about “me” in the sense that we are to explore it.

However broad the context within which it is presented, the extreme materialist view that the mind is identical to brain activity makes exactly the same sense as saying that a Van Gogh painting is made up of trillions of tiny particles of paint and nothing else. The essence, significance and reality of a work of art cannot be revealed by the analysis of paint and canvas. Phenomena – whether observed or simply experienced inwardly – have a scale and arena within which they operate. Given an incorrect scale, they make no difference, and effectively they do not exist. A Van Gogh does not exist at a level of paint particles. Likewise, any explanation of human consciousness and self-awareness works at a level other than that of individual neurons.

This is illustrated by another major problem for the materialist view: our experience of freedom. If everything in the universe, including our brains is part of a causally determined mesh of physical particles, there seems to be no room for freedom, spontaneity or actions based on feelings and intuitions. Everything, it would seem, is pre-determined and externally caused. My freedom, indeed my experience of myself, is an illusion.

From the strictly scientific point of view, the idea of freedom is difficult to contemplate. Naturally enough, we do not understand all the causes that operate at any one time, but we assume that there will always be sufficient causes, and one day we may find them. Where we appear to exercise freedom, it can therefore be assumed that, with hindsight, it should have been possible to predict every single choice. And it’s no good trying to cheat at this: the sudden decision to change one’s mind is as predictable as the more obvious first decision.

John Searle, in Freedom and Neurobiology (2007), suggests that this gap between the experience of freedom and the assumption of determinacy will one day be resolved through a developing understanding of neurobiology. If we can frame the question about our experience of freedom carefully enough, it will one day be possible to examine it using scientific, empirical methods. None of this rings true to me. Even if there is a level of quantum indeterminism that accounts for freedom, this does not solve the problem; it merely pushes it into the future when science will know more than at this moment. Quantum indeterminacy might argue for an element of randomness at the heart of our neurologically controlled actions, but it cannot argue that our experience of freedom is, at bottom, the result of random determination. Why not? Because the experience of freedom is exactly the experience of weighing options, considering benefits or harm to be achieved, considering preferences. It is the point at which I, as an experiencing subject, can choose and thereby make a real difference in the world. The experience of freedom is not of a tiny indeterminate gap within which my freedom can act, but of a massive open goalmouth of freedom, with deter-mining factors trying to stop me shooting in the direction I wish, like defenders in a football match. Sometimes I am frustrated in my quest for freely chosen action; sometimes I succeed in scoring. But I cannot see how we can honestly disclaim all responsibility for our overall choices in life. Pleading hormones, upbringing and economic circumstances will only get us so far when our choices have been judged unwise and land us in trouble; pleading neural activity will make little difference.

Imagine a situation in which you are offered a new job that is challenging, well paid and interesting, but involves long hours and requires you to move house, causing problems for your partner and a shift in school for your children. You’ve always wanted this job, but you love the place where you live now, and think of the friends from whom you’d be separating yourselves. Your act of free choice is thus hedged about with a growing number of factors. And the more you think about them, the more they grow. What were the messages about home and family with which you grew up? Who might have inspired you to better yourself and establish your career? The number of influences spreads outwards in the present and backwards into your past. And there are many other people involved, all of whom have their own sets of values, interests and influences. Where do you stop? How can you ever know that you’ve taken everything into account when coming to your decision? This dilemma was referred to by Martin Heidegger as the “infinite background” problem: every choice implies an inexhaustible number of background influences. And it’s more complex than that, for those factors are constantly changing. In short, if we try to take everything into account, we will sink into a swamp of causes. In the end, we draw a line and simply jump one way or the other; we cannot weigh pros and cons any more or we will go mad. Hindsight may prove the decision to have been unwise, but in practice a choice has to be made.

Freedom in this situation is recognizing that certainty is never possible. It is recognizing and taking responsibility for a choice that cannot take everything into account. It cannot simply be the product of a mechanical process. We may search our neural databases until our brains hurt, desperately trying to weigh things up, but in the end no final answer is achievable, and we are forced to jump one way or the other.

Nobody can doubt that the functioning of the brain has a crucial factor in making us who we are. One has only to contemplate the sad reality of someone suffering from advanced dementia to see how fast the personality degenerates when the brain refuses to function properly. It is also, of course, true that one’s thoughts and feelings are susceptible to drugs that directly affect the brain. Equally, a thought can plunge us into despair or elate us; the recognition of something welcome and familiar can trigger off bodily sensations of pleasure and warmth. Body and mind interact: we are both, and it seems clear that neither can be properly understood without the other. But that does not mean that the self can be identified with the brain. Materialism doesn’t start to address the questions you might want to ask about the meaning and purpose of your life. If you feel confused, or sense that life is devoid of meaning or direction, having a neuroscientist tell you that it is all to do with activity in your cerebral cortex does not actually solve your problem. For philosophy to address issues about life and living, it must be capable of interpreting and illuminating the process of thinking and choosing in a way that makes a difference for us. If it doesn’t, it is little more than an intellectual indulgence.

As soon as we start to think about our own identity, a whole raft of questions appear. If my body gets old and decrepit, my career fails, my family falls apart and my friends desert me, am I the same person? Those things appear to define me, but are all liable to change. Clearly, I sense myself – including the inner voice that is most distinctively me – as inhabiting my head. Indeed, it is a fundamental fact of life that the perspective we have on the world comes from a point between and behind our eyes. We sense that we look out from that point. But reflect for a moment on the apparently empty space behind your eyes. You know very well that behind the soft jelly of your eyeballs there lie bony sockets, and behind them your brain, soft, grey, alive and energy-hungry. But you cannot see your own brain, nor can you be aware of its operations; all you sense is the world out there in front of you. But how do these experienced qualities, of colour, or shape, or texture (“qualia” to use philosophers’ usual term for them), relate to the world outside and to the brain within? Are you seeing the world as it is, or an image of the world that is being digitally screened in your head? You know, when watching a film on screen, that what you are seeing is a flat matrix of coloured pixels, yet the impression is of looking through the television or computer screen as though it is a window on to a world behind. Might our own perception of the world be thought of in the same way: as a representation within the brain that gives the illusion that what we are seeing is somehow outside ourselves?

Many of the discussions of qualia fail to recognize the origins of experience. Something “out there” appears to be red. The experience of red, as mediated to the cerebral cortex through the retina and optic nerve, in the form of electrical impulses within neurons, is our experience of red. There is no hidden cinema in our brain that screens a red image. And so, when we remember that colour, or talk about it, or see it again, that colour is what we see. When we look at the brain from an external point of view, there is no “red” to be seen.

I take a tin of tomatoes to the checkout at a supermarket. The label on the tin – a suitable tomato, red in colour – has been given a number and a barcode. At the till, the barcode is read and transmitted to the screen, which shows that I have bought the tin of toma-toes. If the checkout were real...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Getting beyond our neurons
• 2. The mind goes hunting
• 3. Roads to success?
• 4. The temptations of integrity
• 5. Living in cyberspace
• 6. Mapping one to one
• 7. Letting go
• 8. The illusion of “me”
• Postscript: where does that leave “me”?
• Further reading
• References
• Index