Redefining Consciousness: Bridging the Gap between Mind and Body.
Have you ever thought about yourself, like who you are, what’s your identity? Is it your body that is you or do you have an inner abstract material? If such a thing is there, what’s it then? Is it soul, is it mind or is it, heart? What is it, to have a soul? Why do people often use the metaphor of a computer to describe a mind? Why is this belief so perfectly enrooted within human beings? Often you might have come across statements like, “Are you out of your mind?” or “Follow your heart, but take your brain with you.” or “May his soul rest in peace.” etc. Every religion believes in the presence of God. Many people are positive about the theories of an afterlife. Horror movies, depicting stories of ghosts and spirits are many of our favourites. But are these things real? It is the notion in many of us, that the body that we can see and touch and feel, is the mere earthly material whose significance and existence is only limited till one is alive and we possess in ourselves a supernatural or abstract material which does not perish but continues to live on, even after the material thing has given up. But is this belief valid? Do we really have any such immaterial substance within ourselves, which decides what we are? Are there any existences of supernatural spirits, which do not require the earthly body to exist?
The idea that the mind is different from the body is one of the oldest and the most popular theories of philosophy and it is known as Mind-Body Dualism or Substance Dualism or Cartesian Dualism. It is a doctrine that can be found in almost every religion and every philosophy and was supported by many renowned philosophers. For instance, Plato was one of the greatest advocates of Dualism during the ancient Greek civilization. Plato believed that there existed another world, a world of ideas, separate from the imperfect material world which we perceive through our sense organs. The Bhagavad Gita says when you die the soul changes bodies just like human changes clothes. According to a common Christian eschatology, when people die, their souls will be judged by God and determined to go to Heaven or to Hades awaiting the resurrection. However, it is the French philosopher René Descartes, who is widely considered as the most articulate and thoughtful defender of Dualism of all time.
Descartes considered that all animals are material substances with no inner consciousness, except humans. He believed that humans are too complex to be just bodies made of earthly substances. He argued that the term “Substance Dualism” comes from the fact that there exist two different kinds of substances within humans, the physical substance, that is our body, and the other one is a metaphysical substance, that is our soul or mind, which we cannot feel through our sense organs, which is not an earthly substance but is an abstract one instead. Descartes viewed the physical world as a machine, and he believed that God has infused some spiritual or mental substance called “soul” only within human beings. Another argument that Descartes had put forward was that he asked himself, what do we know for sure and what can we question? He proposed a new method to solve key questions by breaking them down into simpler understandable problems what he named as the Method of Doubt. To elaborate his argument he considered a case in which he questioned his basic knowledge, like where he was born or who his parents are? The answer to these questions that he posses might not actually be the right answers. It may so happen, that some person or a devil might have somehow brainwashed him into believing the answers that he knows. One might think he knows that the earth is million years old, but maybe that is wrong. Maybe someone has deceived him into believing that, whereas the earth may actually be just 100 years old. Likewise, the fact that he is a human might also be actually not true! Maybe he is a machine like any other animal. Maybe he is a computer simulation. But here Descartes pointed out that there is this one thing we cannot doubt of ourselves. We cannot doubt our own consciousness, we cannot doubt our own existence, because the moment when one is doubting his own existence, he is putting some thoughts, he is thinking and anything which doesn’t exist, anything which is just a material thing, cannot think, Descartes, argued. Thus his existence is proved only because he can doubt his existence, in other words, he exists because he thinks which is one of his most famous quotes as well as one of the most famous lines in the history of philosophy, “Cogito, ergo sum” which is Latin of “I think, therefore I am”. Since this activity cannot be performed by any other substance or any other creature, Descartes concluded that human beings exist not only as material substances in the form of bodies, but they also possess a metaphysical aspect, in the form of soul or mind.
Now, Descartes’ doubting his own existence and considering that there is some abstract metaphysical substance within human beings only, might sound a bit too bizarre to you. But for a moment, think about how you describe your body. You describe your body as if you possess it. “My legs”, “My head”, “My hands”, as if your body is something separate from you that you have. Again, the idea that people can hop from one body to another is easily acceptable to us, at least in fiction. There are a lot of movies based on body-swapping, such as Mulholland Drive, The Change-Up etc. Even though we know that these are fictions, the body-switching process makes sense to us. We do not find these ideas absurd or hard to understand or confusing, rather with our naïve conception about self, we accept that there is a possibility that one can hop from one’s body to another’s. The famous novella “The Metamorphosis” by Franz Kafka opens with the line, “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” The conception of the soul being separate from the body, allowed early psychologists to accept the idea of many people inhabiting one body which lead to early theories of multiple personality disorder (MPD), now known as Dissociative identity disorder (DID). One of the manifestations of Dualism is the idea of Demonic possession, the idea that some evil soul might have taken the possession of someone’s body. Since it was considered that mind and body are two separate entities, it was very much possible for one to exist without the other. Corpses are examples of bodies without minds, similarly, people also argued the existence of minds without bodies, and this is what many people think about Gods or Angels, the existence of a super-intelligent mind without a body. The theory of afterlife is one of the most famous and most popular manifestations of Dualism. The idea that you can survive the destruction of your body is present in almost every religion and in almost every philosophy. Therefore many people both religious and non-religious believe that after a person dies, his soul remains alive. Some people believe that the soul takes birth in the earth again in the form of a human being, whereas some believe that the soul ends up in some spiritual world, where they are judged based on their deeds that whether they should end up in heaven or hell. But the main idea here is that the destruction of your body need not be the destruction of you because you are not your body. Thus the idea, that you are something separate from your body, is very clear and very natural to you.
Among many other pupils of Descartes, one particularly famous pupil was the Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia. Once, she wrote to Descartes asking, if we have this immaterial substance within us, then how does it affect changes in the physical body as clearly for any physical thing to move, it has to be moved by another physical thing. For instance, for a rock to move, it needs someone to push it, or any earthquake to shake it, that is, it needs some form impetus from any other physical object to change its position. Therefore in the same way, for human bodies, which are physical things, to move, it needs some sort of physical impetus. If thoughts are not physical entities, then how can they affect our physical state because it is a fundamental feature of our thoughts to cause our bodies to move? For example, if we know the answer to any question, we will raise our hand up, similarly, if we want to eat chocolate we will, put on our clothes and head off towards a chocolate shop. Thus, how can a metaphysical entity affect our physical body? This is what known as the Problem of Causation. Thus, perhaps the easiest way to get around this problem is by getting rid of the abstract factor and considering that there are just physical substances in the world. This is the view that is known as Physicalism or Materialism. Materialism considers that mind and body are made of just the same things and that all things, including thoughts and consciousness, are results of material interactions. Therefore, all thoughts such as one’s desire to have chocolate or one’s urge to tell the right answers or someone’s dream to go on a European trip are all just as material as one’s hairs are.
Besides the Problem of Causation, there were some more questions which Dualism could not answer. Just saying “It all happens in the immaterial realm” does not really answer questions like, “How do we learn languages?”, “What do we find sexually attractive?”, “How does memory work?” Therefore, dualism’s not having any definite answer to these questions made this theory weaker. Moreover, the time when Descartes was correct, the physical world had a very limited capacity. But now, we have a very good understanding of what physical things can really do. For example, in Descartes’ time, he could have never imagined a machine playing chess on its own, but now it is a very normal thing for a computer to do that. Thus, considering human beings much superior to other creatures and substances, and attributing special properties to them was very natural of him to do so. But that does not mean a computer does things anywhere near as well as people do. The way humans learn languages and the way a computer does it, are totally different. Humans perceive the semantic property of languages, whereas computers perceive only the syntactic property of them.
Now, let’s get distracted here for a moment, and talk about an incident that had happened in the 19th century United States. It is the story of a man named Phineas Gage. He was an American railroad construction foreman. His job was to clear away rocks so that they could lay down railway tracks. And to do so, his routine was to bore a hole inside the rocks, put blasting powder and a fuse in it, cover it up with dirt and sand, and take a tamping iron to tamp down the dirt and sand in the hole so that later they could set the fuse and cause the explosions. One day, things did not go the usual way. When he started tamping down the dirt and sand, the powder exploded and the tampering iron shot away from his hands and went into his face, entering through the left side of Gage’s jaw and moving in an upward direction, it passed behind the left eye, through the left side of the brain, and went out the top of his skull and landed several feet away from him. However, miraculously Gage was not killed at the spot. He had lost consciousness for some time, but then he tottered to his feet. He had to undergo a series of operations, he had got some infections, and he had also got sick. There were times when his life was at risk. But after some months, he was pretty much recovered, in certain aspects. He could still see, he wasn’t deaf, he wasn’t paralyzed, he could still speak, he didn’t lose any of his intellectual capacities and his memory was intact too. But in some aspects, he was unlucky too. After this incident, Gage was no longer Gage. The people who knew Gage explained Gage’s transformation like this — before the accident, Gage was, “the most efficient and capable man… a man of temperate habits… considerable energy of character… a sharp and shrewd businessman…”, but after the accident, they described Gage as, “fitful… irreverent… indulging at times in the grossest profanity… manifesting but little deference for his fellows…”. He eventually lost his job. He travelled through the states, taking up different jobs and engaged in different relationships. He ultimately ended up in an exhibit in a travelling circus, holding his tampering iron and telling people about this terrible accident, that how it went through his brain and changed his life.
So, why are we talking about this story here? From the story of Phineas Gage, we learned something about the relation between personality and the function of the brain. It illustrates that the brain is the source of our mental life. And so it is because of the brain that who we are and what we are. Thus this incident is one of the most important practical examples in support of Materialism. This idea is very nicely explained by the British biologist Francis Crick, in his theory, The Astonishing Hypothesis as “You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules”. Thus it could now be said, that the mind is the brain, or the mind is what the brain does, or mental life emerges from the brain.
If for a moment, we put aside all of these philosophical and abstract reasons, we can see there are numerous pieces of evidence which prove that mental life emerges from the brain. We all know that getting hit on the head can cause us to lose consciousness or can affect our memory. It is very obvious in our everyday life that coffee or alcohol can inflame our passions. Therefore, in the 21st century, it has become quite evident that physical events that affect our brain, which in turn affect us. Moreover, today, we are surrounded by technologies, with the help of which we can have a direct look into the brain and keep track of its activities. For instance, if someone is put into an fMRI scanner, it can be told whether he’s thinking about music, or if he’s feeling a desire for sex, or if he wants food, etc. Today, we know that the Subcortical Structures include part of the brain, like the Medulla which plays a critical role in transmitting signals between the spinal cord and the higher parts of the brain and in controlling autonomic activities, such as heartbeat, respiration, blood pressure, swallowing etc. It also includes the cerebellum which coordinates voluntary movements such as posture, balance, coordination, and speech, resulting in smooth and balanced muscular activity. It contains the hypothalamus, which is considered to be a link structure between the nervous and the endocrine system, its main function being to maintain the homeostasis of the body. However, we’re mostly interested in the cerebral cortex, the part which makes our psychology distinctive, and the part that makes us human. This is the part where most of the interesting things take place. This is the part which is responsible for attention, perception, awareness, thought, memory, language, and consciousness. Fish don’t have any cerebral cortex, reptiles and birds have a little, whereas primates, such as humans, have a lot of cerebral cortex. Just as we know that different parts of the brain controls and deals with different parts of our body, and thoughts, and senses, likewise it is also observed that damage to different parts of the brain also causes different mental and physical disorders. For example, in Apraxia, a person faces difficulty in performing a movement or task despite having the desire and physical capability to carry it out because of the inability to coordinate basic actions. Then there’s Agnosia, where a person losses the ability to identify or recognize objects or people and it is caused by damage to the parietal, temporal, or occipital lobe of the brain. Therefore, it is evident, that damage to any part of the brain, in turn, affects some very intimate and very important parts of ourselves. Thus, with the level up to which our knowledge of the brain is developed and with all the scientific and technological pieces of evidence, it is very difficult for us to cling to the idea of Dualism.
Now that we have discussed a great deal about identity, dualism, materialism, and seen various pieces of evidence against dualism, let’s try to make some inferences here. We can now see that, Dualism is absolutely invalid. We understand that there are no two substances like mind and body. The brain = the body. The fact that our thoughts are made of the same substances as our nails are, is very true and very real. So you might believe in the existence of souls or Gods or devils or angels or spirits etc. but as we saw, if materialism is right, not only don’t we have any such spiritual things like souls within us, but also the existence of mental life without bodies stands null and void; in other words, there is no existence of God or devil or angels. Moreover, you might believe that after a person dies, his body is destructed but his soul lives on eventually ending up in heaven or some spiritual world or get reincarnated back into the world. But, since there is no existence of the soul, the existence of an afterlife is also equally untrue. Every mental aspect of a person’s life, like memories, thoughts etc. dies away along with the body and nothing remains behind thus making the theory of afterlife false. Therefore, if someone is ever asked, about who he is, or what is his identity, the most basic answer would be, he is his body and his body only. However, I believe, and I firmly believe, that there is one thing that remains behind even after a person’s death; and that is his deeds. The legacy that one creates is what actually “abstract yet immortal”.