Thinking About Our Thoughts: The Mind-Brain Distinction

I've lately been reading James LeFanu's Why Us? How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves. LeFanu is a British medical doctor and science journalist who doesn't buy the materialist line that we are merely biological machines programmed by our genes and running on chemical reactions in the brain. My college philosophy professor argued that the mind is an allusion. The brain is all. Thought is nothing more than biochemical reactions in the brain. He pointed out that scientists can see the brain lighting up as they process information from the sense. I was stumped or should I say my chemical reactions were curbed.

LeFanu points our that we don't experience the world like a machine, but as a self. We don't just process sense impressions, but we tell ourselves what to think and how to think. This is how we "take every thought captive" (2 Cor, 10:5) and overcome disorders like OCD. The brain doesn't work like a computer storing information and pulling it up out of digital files.

The brain constructs the world we experience from neurons bombarding our senses. That world of color, sound, smell, taste, and touch comes from the impact of colorless, mute, odorless, tasteless, and intangible neurons. Our brains translate the interaction into a lively world for the self to navigate. The self presides over all this by giving attention to certain impressions, thinking about them, and then "presumably" storing those thoughts somewhere in the brain.

Using brain scans, cognitive scientists have show that the brain memorizes in one part but recalls that memory from another part. So where was the memory stored and how can it be conjured up decades later from a part of the brain that was not lighting up during the act of memory creation? This has baffled researchers.

There is a qualitative difference between computation and consciousness. Ever increasing levels of programming and computation by ludicrous speed computers will only ever be able to simulate consciousness.

The optic nerve doesn't simply photograph an image from the outside world but creates the images of  world outside. Lefanu says, "The brain perceives the world 'out there' by fragmenting the visual image into thirty separate specialized 'maps' scattered throughout the visual cortex ... arranged in a hierarchy of fourteen different levels" (202-03). One map might clarify what it is, say a cat, by noting its color, shape, and size. Another map might tell where it is located, say in a tree. If the cat is moving, say from the limb above to the earth below, the brain has to repeat this process moment by moment. Since the cat is never the same as it twists through the air in order to land on its feet, the brain must continually be able to categorize it as a cat.

"Attributes such as form, colour, and movement" are "handled by separate structures of the brain" but how is it all assembled into the same image and categorized by the brain? One scientist says, "It obviously must be assembled, but where and how, we have no idea" (206). It must also associate the images of the cat with mewing or in this case screeching received by the auditory nerve. It seems the brain is hardwired to know the world. It must "be born with an innate knowledge of how the world works." It seems that Descartes was correct about us being born with innate ideas. The linguist Noam Chomsky asserted that children must be born with a "'language acquisition device', ... by which they could make sense of the babble of sounds around them" (189).

It turns out that the brain has billions of neurons and creates trillions of synapses and can do upwards of a quadrillion computations per second. We don't just have the equivalent of one supercomputer in our heads that will soon be surpassed in our cyborg future. Charles Jonscher, a computer scientist from Harvard says, "The true comparison would be a figure more like twenty billion computers" (187). Daniel Levitin, the author of This Is Your Brain on Music, has speculated that there are more states of mind possible than there are atoms in the known universe.

All this begs the question of how we know that the rich experience of the outside world of cats and trees and mountains and oceans is true. If it is subjectively created by the brain from interactions with subatomic particles, then how do we know it is a reliable representation of the objective world outside ourselves. How can we trust our senses? How can we believe our eyes and ears?

Lefanu doesn't go there, but the only basis for confidence in the senses is the Christian doctrine of creation. Our senses can reliably know the world we experience, if and only if they were created to know that world by a loving creator who made both to correspond. I suppose that one could say that we know it is true because it is successful. But that begs the question of why we would find success between two separately evolving systems? G. K. Chesterton wrote:

Reason itself is a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all. If you are merely a skeptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question, "Why should anything go right; even observation and deduction? Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape?" The young skeptic says, "I have a right to think for myself." But the old skeptic, the complete skeptic, says, "I have no right to think for myself. I have no right to think at all." There is a thought that stops thought (Orthodoxy, Chap. 3).

Materialism is self-defeating and cannot explain something as basic as self consciousness. The mind cannot be reduced to the brain without calling self consciousness an illusion. A brain thinks but the mind tells it how. With all of our intelligent design capabilities we can only mimic the self with our "artificial" intelligences. Even if we could create self-conscious beings like ourselves would it disprove intelligent design? Not unless we are sub-intelligent.