“I think, therefore I am” is probably the most famous phrase in Western philosophy and certainly continues to cause the biggest problems for those studying mind and brain. In his thought experiment, Descartes systematically doubted everything, beginning with his sitting by the fire in his dressing gown – because he might be dreaming. He declared he could not doubt that he was thinking: thus his famous assertion.
From that flowed “dualism”, the view that the mind is special, made of some separate immaterial thing that can exist after death. This is the “ghost in the machine”, a separate “I” that can be identified with the soul, with consciousness, with free will and with that feeling that somewhere inside my head is a tiny me sitting at the controls.
Descartes’ contemporary, Princess Elizabeth of Holland, immediately pointed out the problem with that point of view: how can a separate immaterial me control a material body? Perhaps Descartes was playing a clever double game. He lived in an era when science was advancing rapidly but heretical ideas were dangerous. His philosophy may have been intended to reassure the Church that the soul was entirely their own and beyond investigation. Scientists could safely be left to get on with the body.
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Now it seems to be the soul that is dying. Descartes declared the human mind indivisible, but neuroscience has revealed its constituent functions. We truly are a machine of parts, without a central seat of consciousness. Much of the evidence comes from people with specific brain damage: those who lose the ability to recognise faces, people with blindsight who can name an object they cannot consciously see, and those with conditions in which the brain’s computational structure is revealed.
Even more unsettling, much thinking can occur without us being conscious of it. How we recognise objects is no more open to consciousness than how we run across a field. When we talk, we may know what we are saying, but we are not aware of exactly how we will say it until we hear it. Unconscious machinery takes care of all that – and can be biased by all kinds of factors of which we are never aware. Philosopher Patricia Churchland sums up the neuroscience view: “The mind that we are assured can dominate over matter is in fact certain brain patterns interacting with and interpreted by other patterns. Moreover, one’s self, as apprehended introspectively and represented incessantly, is a brain-dependent construct.”
Of course, not everyone will accept the neuroscientific interpretation. One of the biggest issues is free will. How are we to reconcile the feeling that we have free will and are responsible for the decisions we make with the mechanistic view that what we do is determined by the electrical and chemical workings of our brain? Is “my brain made me do it” going to be an acceptable standard defence for every crime?
The issue of free will is taken on by our first contributor, philosopher Daniel Dennett (“Free will, but not as we know it”). For him, free will is not only fully compatible with determinism but a product of evolution, and individual responsibility is real.
There is a bigger issue at stake for our second contributors, the Dalai Lama (“On the luminosity of being”). Christianity has great difficulty with the mechanistic view, as it calls for free will and an immaterial soul bound for heaven or hell. For Tibetan Buddhism, free will raises no special issue, as all phenomena are considered to come into existence as a result of causes and conditions. But the Dalai Lama considers that on a more subtle level of consciousness “brain and mind are two separate entities”.
Our third contributor, philosopher Owen Flanagan, who has worked with the Dalai Lama, considers that this consciousness must be realised neurally (“The colour of happiness”). And he provides his own results to show how the brains of people who practise Buddhist meditation change – and whatever your theory of the brain, that change seems linked to profound happiness.
