Even if there were a seat of the soul that controls our body, how could we explain the relation between these two types of substance, the one immaterial and the other material? In other words, how could an immaterial substance act on a material one? It’s not clear how this could work. Descartes’s way of solving the mind–body problem, by suggesting a soul that controls the body through the pineal gland, crosses the boundaries between what we know about mental states (that they are immaterial) and what we know about physical states (that they are material). If something nonmaterial could act directly on something material, this would require a mechanism beyond our natural understanding. It would have to be supernatural.
And yet this is exactly what all of us experience on a daily basis. We don’t just believe that we are different from our bodies, but rather, as Bloom points out, that we occupy them, we possess them, we own them. Again, this is an illusion that the brain creates for us. For example, when you cut yourself, you feel the pain in your finger, but it is in fact in your brain. When you take a painkiller, it works by altering the chemistry of your brain, not your finger. And yet you feel pain in your finger. Patients unfortunate enough to lose a leg or an arm through amputation often experience their missing limb.32 Just like real limbs, these ‘phantom limbs’ get itchy and can be tickled, but they too are an illusion. They are a product of a brain that has failed to update the loss of a body part in its overall map. As if some controller Numskull is looking at the schematic for the factory floor and has not realized that one section has been closed down. The brain areas previously responsible for receiving signals from the missing limb continue to fire away as if the limb were still connected. These examples prove something very disturbing. The brain creates both the mind and the body we experience. A physical thing creates the mental world we inhabit.
This experience of mind is personal and unavoidable. The Harvard psychologist Dan Wegner thinks that the experience of conscious free will in our minds may work like Damasio’s emotional somatic marker.33 Remember how emotions help us in our decision-making by giving us a sense of certainty? Wegner thinks that the experience of conscious free will works in a similar way. My body may tell me that it wants a slurp of coffee, but I experience the decision as my desire to have a drink. This enables me to keep track of my decisions by enriching them with a feeling of control. This is why we have the experience of purposeful decision-making and conscious appraisal. We need to take note of events for future reference. But we would be wrong in assuming that our mental experience at the time is responsible for the decisions we make.
Is all human mental life like this? What about plans for the future, such as schemes for revenge, humanitarian goals, and the need to crack jokes or write popular science books? In what sense could a conscious automaton be responsible for the whole gamut of mental life and aspirations that seems aimed at a future that has not yet happened? The fact that human activities and mental experiences are complicated is not under question. But in the same way we look at complex structures or behaviours in the animal world, such as building a spiderweb or constructing a wasp nest, and wonder how things so complicated could have evolved in creatures to which we don’t attribute minds, then we must equally entertain the possibility that humans are just more sophisticated life forms – forms that are capable of making plans and anticipating outcomes. The factors that feed into these processes that lead to complex mental lives in humans are diverse and multifaceted. The mental experiences that accompany such processing are undeniable, but we don’t need to evoke a mind that exists independent of and separate from the physical brain to explain them.
Even as a scientist aware of the problem of substance dualism and why Descartes’s solution is necessarily wrong, I still cannot ignore the overwhelming sense of my own mind as separate from my body and in control of my body, but ultimately I know it is a product of my body. How do the two interact? That’s the mind–body problem. That’s what keeps me awake at night. If all my daily conscious experience of a ‘me’ residing in my head like a Numskull boss were actually true, then it would require a supernatural explanation to make sense of it. That’s because we have no natural explanation of how something that has no physical dimensions can produce changes in the physical world. This is why the mind–body problem is one of life’s great mysteries.
MIND MY BRAIN
The mind–body problem simply does not appear on most people’s radar. It is not a problem until someone points it out or you read books like this one. People have a vague notion that the mind and brain are somehow linked, but rarely do they stop to ponder how the two could actually talk to each other or how something nonphysical could interact with something physical. Most humans have experienced the consciousness of their own minds from an early age, even before they discovered they had a brain. Therefore, it’s not surprising that young children can tell you more about their mind than they can tell you about their brain.34 However, they rarely use the word ‘mind’, but rather use ‘me’, ‘my’, and ‘mine’. It’s a natural way to describe oneself. The brain, on the other hand, is something they have to learn about, and that comes with science education.
You can find out how much children learn about the brain by asking them a series of ‘Do you need your brain to . . . ?’ type questions. By the first year of school, most children, like adults, understand that brains are for thinking, knowing, being smart, and remembering. However, they still feel they have a mind in control of and separate from their brain. For example, they do not regard the brain as being responsible for feelings such as hunger, sleepiness, sadness, and fear. From the child’s viewpoint, ‘It is me who is sad, me who is tired, and me who is hungry.’
These responses tell us that children regard feelings as more personal than thoughts. This is because feelings affect us in a direct emotional way. When we are sad, we feel the pain, the misery, or the despair. It is ‘me’ that suffers. When we are happy, we feel the elation, the excitement, or the contentment. Feelings are like an emotional barometer of change that we can compare from one moment to the next. It makes a lot more intuitive sense to say that I am a lot happier than I was yesterday than to say that my body and brain are producing different types of mood experiences from one day to the next.
More telling of children’s dualism is the way they consider the origin of actions. Actions are controlled by the mind. So kicking a ball or wiggling my toes is a decision made by me, not by my brain. These sorts of answers reveal that children are indeed intuitive dualists. When asked, ‘Can you have a mind without a brain?’ all six- to seven-year-olds said yes. Science education does little to alter this belief: most fourteen- to fifteen-year-olds agree that the mind does not depend on the brain.
My hunch is that most adults also think the mind can exist without the brain. They may know the scientific position that the mind is a product of the brain, but as we saw with people’s understanding of natural selection, knowing the correct answer does not make it feel right. Adults who accept that the mind depends on the brain are likely to still make the same mistake as Descartes in thinking that the immaterial mind acts directly on the material brain.
ROBOCOP
When Officer Murphy was terminally wounded in the sci-fi film Robocop, he underwent radical reconstructive surgery to make him into a powerful cyborg.35 His brain survived, but his memories were wiped clean so that he could become Robocop. His colleagues treated Robocop as a machine, but his former partner, Officer Lewis, detected that there was still something of Murphy present. Over the course of the movie, the cyborg eventually regains traces of his memory to become Officer Murphy again. This tale of human identity is a familiar theme in fiction. A travelling salesman wakes up to find himself transformed into a giant verminous bug in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, but he is still Gregor Samsa because he has Gregor Samsa’s mind. The replicant in the sci-fi modern classic Blade Runner is convinced that she is human because she has childhood memories, but the Tyrell Corporation, which created her, also fabricated her childhood.36 It would appear that the hallmark of human identity is a mind full of memories. Maybe that’s why most people say they would save a family album full of recorded memories from a burning house.