By sheer coincidence, more on the brain for your weekend delight.
Julian Baggini has an intriguing article The self: why science is not enough in the New Scientist. I have a subscription to the dead tree version, where it carries the title “I am only me for practical purposes…” It begins:
THE nature of the self, identity, and human values used to be the preserve of philosophers, but over recent decades psychologists and neuroscientists seem to have thoroughly colonised the territory.
Certainly there has been plenty on the so-called problem of consciousness, the sense of self, the relationship between the physical brain and thought and emotion and even the relationship between the brain and political views.
Regrettably the article is behind the paywall, but through the magic of google, rightly or wrongly, it’s available here. As the man says there are many nuggets packed into a short article.
One such is this:
…the higher functions of self – self-consciousness, for example – are not independent of the lower functions, like the basic awareness of one’s environment, but incorporate and depend on them. So the higher functions of the evolutionarily newest part of the brain, the cerebral cortex, require the more primitive instinctive and emotional functions of the limbic system (amygdala, hippocampus and hypothalamus) and the automatic bodily regulation functions of our “reptilian brains” (the brain stem and cerebellum).
there is no place in the brain where “it all comes together”, no locus of the self in one part of the cerebrum. A sense of self turns out to be something that emerges as the result of most parts of the brain working together.
One implication of this is the impossibility of pure reason, divorced from emotion and, I would suggest, values and aesthetic judgement. The domains of experience are not separate but interpenetrate each other.
The article ends with a king hit on the problem of the self. Clinical neuropyschologist Paul Broks told Baggini, “I don’t think the self is ultimately a scientifically tractable question.” Baggini then comments:
The main reason is that the very notion of a science of the self depends on us identifying its subject – the self – from the perspective of first-person experience. Science can correct false beliefs about what sustains that experience, and it can explain what makes such experience possible, but it cannot change what it means to be a self without erasing the very data it depends on.
As an analogy, perhaps, you can’t take an aerial shot of a car when you are inside driving it.
I do agree with him when he says:
Each of us is merely a bundle of [embodied] thoughts, sensations and experiences.
And with the Buddha
who believed that there is no abiding self, just a series of connected conscious experiences.
As we proceed with our day we have little snatches of self awareness and reflection on self which contribute to our self concept and our evaluation of ourselves. But there is nothing objective about it. Short of clinical depression we can train ourselves to think positively of ourselves. Our sense of self is built up over time from the continuity of our mental life.
I suspect also that we are capable of two or more streams of consciousness, and perhaps one can monitor the others. I remember Paul Davies telling Phillip Adams about reading a book aloud to his child and then realising that his mind was actually engaged in solving a problem in physics.
The same Paul Davies was also full of awe that an immaterial, substanceless thought could give an executive command to physically move our arm or leg.
Two problems here. Firstly, Davies just doesn’t get it. Thought is not disembodied, rather it it is a physical event. That’s why I added the word “embodied” to Baggini’s summary statement above.
Secondly, as Baggini reports, it has been found that our decisions are made before we are aware of making them.
Which raises the free will conundrum.
I think the problem here is that there is never a still point. We are molecules in motion, always becoming rather than just being, all the while embedded in a world in constant motion. Analogies are dangerous because they can distract, but its like driving a car and having to find directions without ever stopping. But to carry the analogy through, we find our way in a world where the geography changes around us, and where we have come from, our past, is subject to constant re-mapping.
But recall the bit further up the statement about the unity of thought and feeling. Our executive thought functions can review our emotions and feelings, can school them into different channels or change their character through choice. We have a conscience.
As Baggini said, choices are made by the brain at work. Perhaps the problem arises because the limbic system and the ‘lizard brain’ plays a critical role that makes us uncomfortable because of our ideological predispositions.
In my view we are condemned to be free, it’s just not easy.
I think this is the most important sentence in the article:
“To that debate, neuroscience adds nothing.”
I’ll rephrase it: Billions upon billions of dollars spent on crappy fMRI studies and it’s taught us essentially nothing that we didn’t already know in many areas. You can add education, learning, and cognition to the list (I can think of other areas too).
Conrad,
Science, and the validity of any particular scientific research, isn’t always about the new.
Confirming the known is as important a finding as teasing out the unknown.
Bigbob,
if you can tell me any paper ever that has used fMRI and has told us anything about, say, the processing of language that we didn’t know before (I think I can fairly evaluate things in this field), I’ll impressed. If you can’t, then then I’ll point out that the $10 billion dollars that has been spent on fMRI doing studies on language where we apriori knew you wouldn’t learn anything (or however much it really is) could have been better spent on other areas of science or spentkeeping all the philosophy departments now getting closed down open.
You beauty and thanks for this Brian. I’m going to be outrageous and put in a plug: anyone who is inteseted in testing these ideas about the self against a radical new understanding of the Dharma (the Buddha’s teachings) minus the mysticism (karma, rebirth) couldn’t do better than here in Sydney.
Ah well, here goes because the above article presents exciting breakthrough thinking here on LP.
The human conditon is one in which lower order functions of the mind can dominate people’s actions by causing such potent feelings that the rational capacities of higher order thinking are overridden. This is especially and classically the case where people suffer from trauma. In my own case the trauma was early age (0-5 years) which meant that the memories of the events were stored in pre-cognitive memory ie, memory systems to do with the autonomic functions. Integrated cortex level memory didn’t exist at a sufficient level for conscious memory to be readily accessible.
So the memories, such as they were, were literally stored in my brain/body system and manifested themselves in my body. Because of this, as an adult, events, the behaviours of others and particular structures of subjecive meaning (feelings of powerlessness) were enought to spark liminal feelings within me powerful enough to tigger very strong flight of fight reactions. I’ll provide the wiki definition of liminal for clarity: a liminal state is “a psychological, neurological, or metaphysical subjective state, conscious or unconscious, of being on the “threshold” of or between two different existential planes”.
Try living with that. If you are unlucky you will be diagnosed as suffering some form of mental illness. If you find a good therapist it’ll be called complex PTSD and a bad one will call you a male BPD. If you’re really unlucky you’ll end up staying at Her Majesty’s Hotel.
On a broader socio-historical front it appears to me that modernity is very much a project of bringing into being specific forms of subjectivity in which there is good integration between lower order functions and cerebral cortex capacities for rational thought/action. The starting point here is Norbert Elias’ The Civilizing Process which traces out the changes in intersubjective behaviour that mark the shift from pre-modern to modern sensibility.
The point that I want to emphasise is that while neuroscience is discovering the absence of self it is vitally important for anyone entering this domain to commit to and integrate with an ethical/moral framweork. It could the Dharma, it might be taking the message of Christ seriously or you could even wander the dark forests of Teutonic philosophy and lock into the Kantian imperative; the 12 steps will do especially ‘when you’ve done the right thing, do the next right thing’. This is necessary because, absent ethics and morality, the realisation of ‘selflessness’ can rapidly lead to nihilism and extreme instrumentalisation of others.
Thanks again Brian for an excellent post. Those of us who’ve survived trauma are on the ‘bleeding edge’ of this research and experience. If your in the same space I’d recommend the work of Bessel van der Kolk, talking therapy and meditation. On a final personal note I’ll add that the cause of my trauma informed my resolute opposition on prior threads to Henson’s sexualised images of children. To head off possible criticism on the basis that my opposition was my ‘trauma talking’ I’ll state that my own therapist raised that with me but gave it away when I replied that you wouldn’t disqualify returned soldiers from opposing war; in fact most people honour returned soldiers who oppose war. Survivors of CSA are entitled to the same respect.
Isn’t the mystery here that we don’t know how, e.g. the capacity for sight results in the identification by the observer of, say, native mint bush along a forest trail.
Oh well. Look, it ispossible to train your mind to apprehend the directive to act before it is enacted even down to routine matters like walking. Its called mindfullness training.
@7, exactly, the brain must act according to patterns programmed in already, which patterns are constantly being rewritten according to the multitude of sensory inputs, too many for the conscious brain to evaluate.
I suppose ‘free will’ is a construct to describe the conscious workings of the brain which are able to input and organise from a sense of self. That’s all just musing by the way.
For those discussing the physicality (or not) of consciousness: check out some of David Chalmers work (for the philosophically inclined, I think he was the originator of the p-zombie; link to his webpage here).
He denies that physical laws can completely describe the world we live in, and that we need a set of psychological laws which describe consciousness. The argument he uses is fairly subtle, and relies in part on the concepts of emergent properties, i.e. he denies that consciousness is emergent from synapse physics.
“Its called mindfullness training.”
I prefer ‘overthinking’.
Thanks for a terrific post Brian, and the link. It seems to me that there is a great deal of ‘chicken vs egg’ stuff in the debate between neuroscience and philosophy. I’m pretty much on Baggini’s side in all of this – neuroscience (science generally I’m inclined to believe) is very good on ‘how’, and conflates this into ‘why’ which it has no epistemological basis for doing.
My main feeling is that without neuroscience very few people would be talking about David Hume in relation to these matters. Now a lot more people, expert and lay, are in the conversation.
FDB: yes, that is one way of conceiving it. However, ‘overthinking’ emphasises rationality at the expense of feelings. That is, the cerebral cortex dominates the lower order brain functions which can lead to serious problems (ie, not being aware of feeling states). The alternative is to integrate the functions of mind so that cortex functions are aware of feelings and feelings are treated with respect by the cortex. Tricky, eh?
Ahh Hume, the man who advised us
Science has been wrong before but seemingly we must forgive it of all past sins and elevate science to the only thing capable of explaining the world.
I believe in ghosts…