I often hear people saying that I am a complex, biological computer which is located between my ears. I am my brain…my central nervous system…that is me.
Or is it?
Fictional stories increasingly today suppose that my mind…or me…is not just my brain. Rather, I am contained within my brain…like a file on a hard drive. And so, before my body dies…my mind will be able to be saved, uploaded to the cloud. I’ll be able to survive the death of my body. Russell T Davies touched on this in his recent series “Years and Years.”
These ideas suggest either – I am my brain, or – I am contained within my brain, but can be relocated elsewhere if necessary.
I think both of these extremes is mistaken, and I’ll tell you for why.
1 – I Am My Brain
Daniel Dennett has expressed this idea, saying “mind … is the brain, or, more specifically, a system or organization within the brain that has evolved [like our] … digestive system has evolved … the human mind is something of a bag of tricks, cobbled together over eons.”[1] I am my physical brain, physical matter, and chemical biological processes at work. Dennett is basically essentially that “You, your joys and sorrows … sense of identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells.”[2]
Is there a problem with this idea? I think there are MANY problems with this idea. Here’s one.
Let me ask you a question. Does the truth matter to you? Do you need to know where you stand? Do you hate fake news? Do you hate it when people lie to you, and do you try your best to tell the truth? Well – why? Because if my brains just a biological computer…that’s an odd state of affairs.
I say that because if we are our brains, then we result from physical processes. A bit like digestion (Dennett even makes this comparison!) But if my thinking is no different to my digestion…then consider this. The words “true” and “false” are meaningless for digestion. Physical processes are just physical processes. If that’s the situation in our digestive tract, then it’s also the situation in our brains too. Right?
Well hang on. Say I’m a Christian and you are an atheist. Well – then those beliefs are simply how our particular brain chemistry behaves. So what?
But of course – we cannot leave it that way. Truth matters to us. We want to know that we are believing true ideas, and we aren’t being misled by a lie. But if we are just physical…that simply should not be the case! But if we are MORE than just our physical brains…and there’s more to the universe than just stuff…then perhaps that’s why truth is so important to me.
So – that’s one reason I don’t buy that I’m just my brain.
2 – I Am Contained Within My Brain
This idea treats me like a file on a computer disk. What’s that? Well, it’s data, represented as ones and zeros on the disk. So – this idea presupposes that everything about me can be encoded digitally as ones and zeros (or in some other encoding scheme).
The problem is – this idea is confused. I do actually contain information, and my mind can assimilate and use information. So – I cannot just be information. Me – my person – must transcend information in a significant way.
What do I mean? Well first, my body is composed of cells, and those cells are like biological factories teeming with … you guessed it … information. The DNA molecule holds a lot of it.
But also, I assimilate information. As I write this blog, I am generating information that didn’t exist before. And as you read it, you are assimilating that information and considering the arguments that are contained within it. So – me as the producer and you as the receiver – we are both personal minds, who deal in the currency of information.
Consequently, we cannot therefore be decomposed down to information alone. Sure, someone could scan our bodies into a computer. But we would not be there afterwards, though a detailed map of our physical makeup could be.
This idea of me being contained within my brain – mistakes me “the person” from the information that I deal in and am composed of. It requires me to be physical again, and decomposable to my component parts. But – as we learned before – my mind cannot be physical, this makes no sense.
So – if both these ideas don’t describe reality, what are we then? Well – I think the strongest argument can be made for this:
3 – I Am a Body With a Brain and also a Mind, or Immaterial Soul
J P Moreland argues the following:[3]
- I’m aware of myself as distinct from my body. When we shake hands, you aren’t meeting my hand, rather you are meeting me, and we are interacting physically.
- If I was only physical, then you could describe all there is to know about me from the outside in. But, you can’t.
- I appear to have free will and moral responsibility.
- I am the same self over time, even though I age and my body changes (I gather gray hairs, nose hairs, etc) This suggests I’m not my body or my brain, I am my soul.
If J P Moreland is right, then I am NOT just my brain. I am an immaterial self.
So this suggests that its possible I can survive apart from my body. But I won’t survive as decomposed information. I am an immaterial person with a future on the other side of death.
Surely that’s worth using my mind to think about?
[1] Daniel C. Dennett, Breaking the Spell Religion as A Natural Phenomenon, (Penguin Books, 2007), 107.
[2] Mark D. Linville, The Moral Argument, In The Blackwell Companion To Natural Theology, edited by William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 433.
[3] J. P. Moreland, The Soul Why It’s Real and Why It Matters, (Moody Press, 2014).
Photo by Robina Weermeijer on Unsplash
