Brain and Self
Brain and Self
I say “I have a heart”, “I have lungs”, etc. I am evidently saying that I stand in the having relation to organs in my body—possession, ownership. These things are not identical to me; they are extrinsic to me, not what I am. I also say “I have a brain”, as if expressing the same relation by “have”. That would be true if dualism were true—if I were an immaterial being standing apart from my brain. My relation to my brain would be like my relation to my heart—contingent, external. That was a view long held and may be assumed to have shaped our language. But there is a crucial difference between the two cases: for I am my brain but I am not my heart. Dualism is false about the self: the self simply is the brain. This is why the identity of the self tracks the identity of the brain, as in brain swap thought experiments. I will not defend this view here, but take it as given. My question is whether it is consistent with saying that I have a brain. I think the two propositions are inconsistent: you can’t be your brain and also have a brain. Since it is true that you are your brain, it must then be false that you have a brain. This idea is a result of dualist thinking, encouraged by the empirical character of our knowledge that our self is located in the brain (not, say, in the heart). Our language is logically misleading, but intelligibly so, since the identity in question is a posteriori. It is as if we said “Water has H2O”, suggesting a possession relation, while in fact water is H2O. The brain is certainly part of my body and distinct from it, but it is not part of my self, or possessed by me, or an accessory of mine. We don’t say “I have me” or “I have Colin McGinn”—I am those things. Similarly, I am my brain—but then I can’t have my brain. This has consequences for the way we think: I can say that I breathe with my lungs, but can I say that I think with my brain? That certainly sounds funny—I don’t use my brain to carry out acts of thinking, as if it is something separate from me. The truth is rather that my brain thinks, because I am my brain. We don’t talk that way, for intelligible reasons, but it is the literal truth. Nor do I perceive with my brain, or emote with it, or will with it—it does all these things, since I do and I am it. We could truthfully go around saying “My brain is thinking (perceiving, emoting, willing)” instead of “I am thinking etc.”. Our language would be more “logically perfect” (factually accurate) if we were to do that. We have made the a posteriori discovery that the self is the brain, as we have made the a posteriori discovery that water is H2O and the stars are giant lumps of matter (the stars don’t have these lumps as merely correlated entities). If I were to say “I am thinking but my brain is not”, I would contradict myself. I am not linked to my brain as I am linked to my other bodily organs; my brain constitutes me. Anything mental that I do, it does. We would do well to talk this way and not perpetuate an outdated dualism of self and brain. My stomach digests, my lungs breathe, my heart pumps, and my brain thinks. I don’t merely have a brain that enables thinking, while that act is something that only I can do. The brain is not an under laborer but the main actor. If so, I don’t stand in the possession relation to it; it is not something I am connected to, linked with, in principle separable from.
Then how should we understand the relation between self and brain? Is the possession relation alien to these things? That doesn’t follow, and I think we have reason to invert the traditional conception—my brain possesses me. Brains possess selves. My brain has me—I don’t have it. Why do I say that? I say it because the self is useful to the brain, part of its equipment, what it needs to survive. The brain has various parts and attributes that enable it to survive from day to day, which are vital to it biologically and humanly. We cannot survive and reproduce without an intact brain, and we cannot live as value-laden sentient beings without the brain. Life is valuable to us, and brains are needed for that. Let us speak of the “selfish brain”—a biological unit (analogous to the gene) that seeks to preserve itself. Organisms strive to keep their brain alive (if they have one, and brains are very common among animals). Thus, the human brain has various substructures with Latin names that must function for the brain to stay alive: these are the organs of the brain—and the brain hasthem. The human brain has a hypothalamus, for example. Among these organs are various mental faculties (comparable to bodily organs) that also help keep the brain alive. The brain possesses a faculty of thinking (seeing, feeling, remembering, etc.). It also possesses a self—an ego, a person. This entity also helps the brain survive—it wouldn’t have come to exist if it didn’t. So, the brain has a self. Not all of it is that self, however; some of the brain has nothing to do with mental activity. Strictly speaking, the self is identical to part of the brain—the part responsible for the mind. So, the brain is larger than the self, more inclusive; and this larger entity possesses a self. It is a biological unit with parts analogous to a body’s parts, and among these parts is a self or mind. We may therefore correctly speak of the brain as “having” a self. I could give my brain a name such as “Binky” and say “Binky has me” or “I belong to Binky” or “I am possessed by Binky”. It sounds funny (in both senses) but it’s true. My selfish brain is the possessor of a bunch of things, and I am one of them. My brain is a biological unit containing functional parts, and I am one such. In a certain sense, I am a servant of my brain (as the whole organism can be said to be a servant of the genes). Call this the “brain’s-eye” view of the self-animal world (as biologists speak of the “gene’s-eye” view of the biological world). From the brain’s perspective it is the pivotal entity.
You might find yourself convinced by this as an abstract argument, but uncomfortable with the conclusion—it seems counterintuitive, conceptually perverse. Let me try to assuage this unease with a thought experiment. Suppose we reach a point at which brain transplants have become common: bodies fail and we can now place brains in new bodies that prolong life indefinitely for the brain transplanted. Suppose too that these are placed in a transparent dome through which they are clearly visible. In addition, plastic surgery on brains has become commonplace to enhance their appearance (they were never pretty), perhaps accompanied by cerebral jewelry and makeup. The crucial role of the brain in producing personhood has long been commonly accepted. Brains have names and people regularly talk as if brains have minds in them; it has become fashionable so to talk. Wouldn’t it then be quite natural to think in the way I have been recommending? The brains (=people) want to survive, which is why they pay for a transplant, and they readily speak as if brains house selves. Folk ontology has changed in such a way as to make brains salient and recognized for what they are—persons in their own right. Some brains may choose to live out their days detached from a body and just floating in a vat—they are not thereby declared non-persons. People say “You look good today” when coming across a recently buffed and powdered brain glowing with good health. People think of themselves as brains and they do not refrain from speaking of the attached self: “The self of my brain is behaving well today, no more going off on tangents, thank God”. No one ever says “I have a brain” anymore, because the obvious retort is “What do you mean? You are your brain—get with the program!” Or suppose on a distant planet a life form has evolved that consists just of a brain in a shell. It lives parasitically in trees and reproduces by division. Inside is a mind that serves the organism well (it selects good trees to perch on). Wouldn’t we say that this species of creature has a mind (other similar species might not)? These brain-like organisms contain or have a self. But isn’t that what we normal humans actually and centrally are–selves in a brain? We are brain-selves—carbon-based neural selves. Isn’t it about time that common sense caught up with science—as our astronomical beliefs have? The earth revolves around the Sun; the self revolves around the brain. Isn’t that what scientific ontology is telling us? Talk of “having a brain” is antiquated mumbo-jumbo, misleading at best. I once had a brain, or should I say, it once had me—to paraphrase the Beatles (Norwegian Wood). It is just not true that you have a brain, but it is true that your brain has you.[1]
[1] Someone might try to contrive a sense in which “I have a brain” is consistent with identity with my brain—say, “There is a brain inside my skull”. But this does not preserve the analogy with “I have a heart”, which relates me to something not identical to me. No, the original sentence says, or presupposes, that I am not identical with my brain, i.e., that dualism is true. But it isn’t.
A comment, not directly about brain and self, but about the unity of the self. The comment arises not from your — as usual — interesting reflections (above) but from your interview with Robert Kuhn. You mentioned (I think) that no one challenges the phenomenological unity of the self. What about the case of Mrs Gradgrind? As I recollect when asked, on her deathbed, if she was in pain, she replied “I think there’s a pain in the room somewhere, but I’m not sure that it’s mine”. It sounds like the unity of her self was unravelling.
I don’t recall that interview, but the case sounds like an intentional incoherence–how is it possible that she doesn’t know whether a certain pain is hers? It’s about “immunity to error through misidentification” (as Shoemaker called it).
The quote is from Charles Dickens, ‘Hard Times’, Book II, Chapter 9. Mrs Gradgrind’s daughter asks her whether she is in pain, and Mrs Gradgrind replies: “I think there is a pain somewhere in this room, but I couldn’t positively say that I have got it.” This remark is discussed (I’m told; I haven’t checked) by Martha Nussbaum in ‘Poetic Justice’ and Jonathan Lowe in ‘Subjects of Experience’, p. 189
The thinking here seems to me to provide some reason to question the view that, as you say, you don’t defend here but take as given – that you are your brain, and to prefer some version of Animalism. But not, admittedly, a powerful one.
Yes, dualism is false; but it doesn’t follow from the falsity of dualism that the self is the brain (I realise that you don’t say that it does). Since this is so, it is possible that I should have a brain even though dualism is false. One way in which this possibility would be realised is if Animalism were true: if I were a certain animal – a human being that has a brain in exactly the same sense in which it has lungs, kidneys, eyes and ears, a heart, and so on.
Of course, there are well-known problems faced by animalists about whether their view can respect (or give adequate reasons to reject) intuitions about the way in which, as you say, the identity of the self seems to track the identity of the brain – the especially difficult ones being intuitions about brain transplants, about conjoined twins of different kinds, and about the possibility that a person might be reduced to brain-in-vat status, stripped of the rest of his/her body. But some of us think that those problems may have adequate solutions – or anyway, ones that leave the animalist position no worse off, and perhaps rather better off overall, than any alternative view of what we are. And if so, the issues raised here about how to speak about the relation between me and my brain all vanish, I think. I do have a brain, because the animal that I am has a brain, in the same way that it has lungs and kidneys. And I think with my brain, rather as I breathe with my lungs (and other parts of my body), walk with my legs, and so on.
The point is, however, nothing for an animalist like me to get excited about; and that is because how we talk about such relations – including whether we think of them as relations between distinct things or as identities – is so obviously a product of traditional thought, and such thought is dominated by mistaken dualist assumptions. That we speak about the relation between ourselves and our brains in a certain way is not, therefore, any good reason to believe that we stand in a relation to our brains that is consistent with the truth of the language used. And so, it is not a good reason for accepting Animalism any more than it is a good reason for accepting dualism. But, equally, it is not a good reason for believing that we do not stand in a relation that is consistent with the truth of that language. And the falsity of dualism doesn’t make it reasonable to reject views like Animalism on which the ordinary language statements do come out true. The ordinary-language statements that we make and that have their historical roots in dualist assumptions may be false and misleading, as they will be if you and I are brains; but they may be (albeit accidentally) true and non-misleading, as will be the case if (as I believe) you and I are human beings that in the ordinary case, at least, have brains as parts as opposed to brains.
Last sentence:
…as opposed to being identical with brains.
Do people remain human beings if parts of their body are replaced by prostheses? A brain in a vat is still a human brain and a being of sorts. You don’t need legs to think but you do need a brain.
Yes, of course – though (also of course) I do worry about the problem of whether and where there may be limits. The/a flipside to the second part of your comment is that a headless body is also still a being of sorts, and that you don’t need a brain to pump blood, or to do many of the other things that human beings do. Animalists have to be anti-Lockeans about personal identity – that seems to me obvious – and as anti-Lockeans they do and must reject the idea that psychology is specially relevant to being a creature of the kind that each of us is.
John Foster distinguishes between “subjects of mentality” or “mental subjects”, and “items of mentality” or “mental items”. I am a mental subject (by virtue of being a substrate of mental items); and if “I am my brain” (McGinn), then the brain I am is a mental subject—in which case every mental-item-representing, psychological predicate true of me is true of a brain.
However, it has been argued by Max Bennett & Peter Hacker that to ascribe mental properties to brains (alone) is to commit a category mistake and a mereological fallacy. They think the brain qua organ of mentality isn’t also the (whole) subject of mentality. You seem to disagree with them.
“It is our contention that this application of psychological predicates to the brain makes no sense. …The brain is not a logically appropriate subject for psychological predicates. Only a human being and what behaves like one can intelligibly and literally be said to see or be blind, hear or be deaf, ask questions or refrain from asking.
Our point, then, is a conceptual one. It makes no sense to ascribe psychological predicates (or their negations) to the brain, save metaphorically or metonymically. The resultant combination of words does not say something that is false, rather it says nothing at all, for it lacks sense. Psychological predicates are predicates that apply essentially to the whole living animal, not to its parts. …The organs of an animal are parts of the animal, and psychological predicates are ascribable to the whole animal, not to its constituent parts.
Mereology is the logic of part/whole relations. The neuroscientists’ mistake of ascribing to the constituent parts of an animal attributes that logically apply only to the whole animal we shall call ‘the mereological fallacy’ in neuroscience. The principle that psychological predicates which apply only to human beings (or other animals) as wholes cannot intelligibly be applied to their parts, such as the brain, we shall call ‘the mereological principle’ in neuroscience. Human beings, but not their brains, can be said to be thoughtful or to be thoughtless; animals, but not their brains, let alone the hemispheres of their brains, can be said to see, hear, smell and taste things; people, but not their brains, can be said to make decisions or to be indecisive.”
(Bennett, M. R., & P. M. S. Hacker. Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. pp. 72-3)
“The brain is the organ of consciousness, not the subject of consciousness—unless I am myself my brain. The nose, similarly, is the organ of smell and not the subject of smell—unless I am myself my nose.”
(Chisholm, Roderick M. On Metaphysics. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. p. 126)
Neurons are in the brain but not in the nose.
Utter rubbish.
“Some brains may choose to live out their days detached from a body and just floating in a vat—they are not thereby declared non-persons.”
Suppose your brain starts out in a vat and never has a body. No eyes, no ears, no touch, etc. Is it still you? Is it even worth calling a mind?
I don’t think you understand the brain in a vat scenario: by hypothesis the brain receives inputs from sensory nerves and sends out motor signals. It is stipulated to have the same brain states as an embodied person. We could also set it up as head in a vat: a human head but no body.