"You would have to be remarkably resistant to brainwashing to resist the claim - endlessly repeated - that we are our brains. The notion that our consciousness, the self to which successive moments of consciousness are attributed, our personality, our character, personhood itself, are identical with activity in our brains is so widely received that it seems downright eccentric to profess otherwise." - Raymond Tallis "Aping Mankind"
I do now.
For some, those analogies are anathemas. "How could that be true?", they cry. "Science is a process," they argue. "It's a collection of models which best fit the observations we make of the world around us. It is driven by research and evidence. We don't need faith to believe it. The evidence is there!"
The problem comes when atheists start to defend science like it can never be wrong. They really do start to sound like Christians defending the Bible, or Muslims defending the Qur'an. Science for these people isn't the nebulous constantly shifting and improving body of "best models we have at the moment" we all know it is, for them it's rigid, and certain. No more so than the people who have come to believe the all-pervasive, yet pseudo-scientific belief that "we are our brains" and therefore we do not have conscious free will.
I can already hear many of you shifting in your seats and a few gasps of air have been gasped in an incredulous manner as that last bit sank in. Yes, I did say that the evolutionary psychologist position that we are our brains is nonsense. It is a scientifically religious concept, or Scientism if you like.
If you want to believe that we humans are only a by-product of trillions of sodium-potassium exchanges in the neuronal matter of our brains then fine, stop reading now and go grab a coffee, or have a lie down. For those of you who aren't fooled by this homeopathic account of consciousness and actually want to understand where I'm coming from, strap in.
When I suggested this idea to an atheist on Twitter recently I was immediately branded a "closet-Creationist", accused of being insane, Called "Mr Black and White" (whatever that means), and because I have a disability which affects my memory (I'm not kidding) I was called a liar. Apparently he's all for us being our brains until faced with the evidence that one key component of fibromyalgia (which I suffer from) is memory-loss, which according to him I don't suffer from, instead I'm just choosing to lie to him. If we are our brains, as suggested, I cannot lie to him. I cannot reasonably be held responsible for any action I take because, according to him, I am the victim of an evolutionary drive to do whatever it is I'm currently doing. So, even if I was I would not be lying to him, my brain would be. I'm absolved of all guilt. So the statement "there are no murderers, only victims of brain activity" is also a valid according to this neuromaniac. It rather makes you wonder doesn't it? But, this does illustrate one underlying principle of Neuromania, similar to a condition we see in theists all the time, which we call "cherry-picking of facts!"
What do we get when we point out that God wasn't a nice guy in the Bible?
Lots of Bible passages cherry-picked to show he was (or that Jesus was) and personal insults.
What do we get when we point out contradictions in the text of the Bible?Lots of apologetics, and links to websites and blogs and videos teaching us ignoramuses why these contradictions aren't contradictions. And personal insults.
What do we get when we claim Jesus was likely a mythical god and not a real person?Lots of Bible passages claiming to describe him as real, links to the Gospels, more videos, articles written by believers and so on. Oh... and personal insults.
Guess what I got when I told this fellow that neuromania was a thing and we are not just our brains?
You guessed it... Cherry-picked studies, links to books and videos which supported his views, and the aforementioned incredulity and ad hominem attacks... exactly what we've all come to expect from theists.
People who think science is awesome (myself included) must also realize that science isn't definitive. There are many faults with it. Almost every study suffers from a degree of bias. Most scientists go to great length to iron out these biases, or at least own up when their sample-size isn't as big as they'd like, or when people dropped out of the study, or when something didn't otherwise go to plan, or even when they weren't meticulous enough, but there are people who perform studies with such tunnel-vision that they publish without noticing even the basic flaw in their methodology, or results. Their premise is incorrect to start with, or their conclusions are all wrong at the end.
One of the key "we are our brains" (WAOB) studies is Libet's experiments which showed that our brains "light up" on an EEG moments before we are aware of the desire to move a hand. This suggests that the brain activates our hand movement before we are even aware that we have actually made the decision to move it. This study was flawed for a number of reasons but it completely forgot that it is entirely possible that the area of the brain controlling the hand movements lit up because it had been told to, by the mind of the subject being studied. A conscious decision activating the brain which fed-back a confirmation code, which the participants mistook as the decision itself, which then led to the hand being raised.
Think about that. There are a few scenarios worth considering:
One :
The areas of our brains which control hand movement lights up.
We become aware of the need to move our hands.
We move our hands.
Two:
The areas of our brains which control hand movement lights up.
We become aware of the desire to move our hands.
We decide to move our hands.
Three:
Our minds tell our brains to activate our hands.
The areas of our brains which control hand movement lights up.
We become aware of the decision to move our hands.
We move our hands.
In all three cases the EEG lights up moments before an awareness is felt and then the hand is moved. Exactly what Libet saw.
If your argument is that we move our hand exclusively because the brain tells us to and we have no conscious control over that action, you're ignoring the possibility that the brain is being told what to do by something outside itself and the decision was in fact entirely our own; and that deciding to do something involves the subconscious as much as the conscious parts of our minds, and the non-physical as much as physical parts of our brains. It's a bit like arguing that workers on the factory floor make the shoes their boss tells them to make, whilst forgetting that the factory output is controlled by market forces. If you only have a method for assessing the actions of the factory boss, you're missing half the picture aren't you? In the above second case the brain tells our hand to move and we decide to do it, so there is an active participatory control mechanism in place between the brain and the hand. In the third instance the brain is being controlled from somewhere else which cannot be examined.
You can only test for things you can test. Aren't we telling theists that all the time? We admit openly that we could be wrong. There might be a god. However, given that we cannot test for one it can be assumed that there isn't one. And yet, the WAOB crowd refuse to accept that, since we cannot test for the mind, we could be wrong about there not being one!
If we are our brains and we have no conscious control over anything we do, we cannot be any more in control when we are awake than we are when we are asleep. We cannot be any more in control when we perform neurosurgery to cure a person of epilepsy than we are when having an epileptic fit of our own. This makes no sense at all.
I hope you can all understand how ridiculous that notion is though, because our legal systems can. After all, I wonder how many WAOB fanatics would be willing to stand up in a Court of Law to defend a paedophile accused of rape and murder, by stating for the record that he is under the complete control of his brain, carrying out only evolutionarily dictated actions (or actions determined by damage to otherwise normal areas of the brain) and therefore cannot be held responsible, so should be allowed to go free without any punishment?
Any takers?
Let's be honest here for once, shall we? The WAOB concept is all fine in principle, but not a single one of us truly believes it when taken to its extremes, any more than we think a theist would truly believe in a god when we take her beliefs to their extremes. We know what we think of ourselves, we can direct other people to become aware of our emotions, of other things in our spacial environment, or talk in the abstract about so far incomplete ideas. We can experience guilt, which we may or may not chose to use to change future actions. We can fight our supposedly evolutionary preference for 0.7 hip-to-waist ratioed women, or women from our own class, caste or "race", to settle down with a rotund, or skinny lady from the opposite side of the colour spectrum to our own, just because she has a similar sense of humour, or likes the music of Schubert and knows how to make a great omelette! Yes, I do know that all of these things can be explained, it is claimed, by evolutionary psychology, but it really is just the scientific equivalent of theistic apologetics isn't it?
When we look for someone who is similar to us they say it's because of our evolutionary compulsion for tribalism. Yet, When we look for someone opposite to us they say it's because of our evolutionary drive to widen the genepool. I call this having a bell for every tooth. We can find "research" to support every position under the Sun, so why bother with any of it?
The bottom line is that I think, rather than the declaration "We are our brains!", the very best we can do, if we want to remain honest and, most of all, consistent, is make the claim that "We could be our brains!" And, if you decide that makes me a closet-Creationist, insane, or whatever else.
There's apparently nothing either one of us can do about that.
For an in-depth study as to why Neuromania is wrong, see Prof. Raymond Tallis' excellent book "Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity." This blog represents an incredibly simplistic view of the arguments against scientism. If you only go by what I've said, I really feel for you. You need to look for better evidence than what I've said. You, more than anyone, need to read Prof. Tallis' book. :)
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