Understanding your brain: the contribution from Neurophilosophy

The brain is the North Pole of scientists and philosophers: still largely unexplored, contested across a range of disciplines and a source of rich resources. 

We might have a better understanding of how we think, decide and behave if we knew more about the composition and functioning of our brain, but much of it is uncharted territory. In recent years, a growing range of disciplines have begun exploring how our brains work, and one of the newest and most interesting is neurophilosophy, which posits that mental states, such as our thoughts, memories and feelings, have a physicochemical origin within the brain. 

For example, the happiness we experience when we see a loved one after an absence happens because our brain secretes certain hormones, specifically oxytocin and vasopressin, which make us more sociable, empathic and cheerful. These processes typically involve different areas of the brain: Neurons receive visual information through electrical impulses from the optic nerve; the ability to recall information is provided by memory, along with many other neuronal interactions or synapses, all of which take place within milliseconds. 

Mind and Body

Neurophilosophy is a contemporary attempt to address one of the recurring questions of philosophy down the ages: the relationship between the mind and the body, an area some thinkers have identified as the soul, that imaginary entity which outlives our corporeal being, an idea Socrates pondered shortly before his death. 

In short, neurophilosophy can help us understand who we think we are. For example, let’s say an accident or traumatic event causes amnesia and we can no longer remember anything about who we are: Our brain is the same, but have we now become another person?

Equally, as we grow older and we look back over our life, perhaps trying to make sense of it, we realize that there is no coherent pattern to our actions, that we have lived little more than a series of blended lives, and so we fall back on truisms such as “I was a different person then” or “I didn’t really know what I was doing.”5

Similarly, we can imagine a future in which human organs can be recreated using 3D printers at home and that our obsession to be in peak physical condition means we have already replaced 90% of our organs. In such a scenario, where our body has effectively been replaced, are we then a different person?

Discussion of these and similar topics related to free choice and personal responsibility would be complex and virtually limitless. A discussion at one of the first seminars I attended at the University of Oxford was about Gilbert Harman’s “brain in a vat” scenario:

A brain is submerged in a container, protected by amniotic fluid. The brain is connected by electrodes to a computer that transmits a series of stimuli and information to it. For example, during the day the brain receives images and other sensory information that makes it believe it is connected to a body and living a normal life: a regular workday followed by exercise, drinks with friends and finally a few hours before bed with the family at home. The brain doesn’t realize that the data and stimuli it receives are artificial. Is what the brain has “lived” real or imaginary? The brain in a vat would never know the reality of its existence unless the computer to which it is connected transferred images of the laboratory where the experiment was taking place or somebody found a way to tell it otherwise. 

Little wonder that the idea of our brains being tricked in this way has caught the imagination of writers down the ages.

Homer’s The Odyssey can be interpreted as a similar experiment carried out on Ulysses by the gods, who provoke any number of incidents to delay his return home.

The Biblical character of Job is a good man whose loyalty and faith are tested by every sort of calamity by Yahve and the Devil. In the end, Job is rewarded for his resilience, by which time he might be forgiven for questioning his faith.

More recently, in the movie Matrix, humanity lives in a reality generated by machines, while the cold war novel The Manchurian Candidate (photo below), later adapted into a film, tells the story of how an unscrupulous and ambitious US senator supported by other powerful men has had his son’s brain interfered with, along with others in his marine unit, so as to make him a hero who can then be manipulated when he is elected president. Fortunately, one of the Manchurian Candidate’s colleagues uncovers the plot and shoots him as he is celebrating his win in the primaries.

Rather than falling back on conspiracy theories, some people choose to make sense of their lives by rejecting the idea of free will entirely and instead believe in destiny, adopting a fatalistic approach whereby everything that happens to us is preordained. In turn, some of us learn to accept responsibility for our actions, even when things don’t turn out as we planned or hoped. There is an explanation for everything, and it is usually simpler than we think. Even things we can’t verify for ourselves are explained by laws and theories such as relativity; similarly, there are rules for social behavior we can acquire.

Returning to the fundamental question at the center of philosophy is: Who we are and how do our minds, the part of us that thinks, remembers, feels, cries and laughs, relate to our bodies. All these processes are triggered by the senses: touch, sight, hearing, smell and taste.

The two main currents of thought that have tried to address the question of how mind and body are connected are dualism and monism, two positions usually regarded as diametrically opposed, although there are views that combine both.

Dualism holds that the mind and the body are two distinct entities, but which can be connected. The dualist position rests on the belief that sensory experiences are very different from thought or rational analysis and that different faculties are used for their analysis. Believers of the existence of a soul that outlives the body—a religious rather than a philosophical position—are dualists. The best-known proponent of this thesis was the French seventeenth-century philosopher René Descartes (picture below) the father of modern philosophy, who proposed applying methodical doubt about any proposition until it was analyzed in the cold light of reason. Descartes traced a clear separation between res cogita (the mind) and res extensa (the body), deducing that both were joined in a part of the body called the pineal gland, which he located in the chest. He nevertheless believed there was a connection between mind and body, an idea most of us would intuitively accept, given our experience of how mood can affect our physicality and vice versa.

In contrast, Monism argues that mind and body are found in the same entity and have the same principle of action. This vision is consistent with the biological approach to morality proposed by Patricia Churchland, (photo below) one of the precursors of neurophilosophy, according to which the human brain is the engine of our thoughts and our actions as well as the recipient of all sensory experiences. In short, it is the central unit of operations of humans.

As has been scientifically proven, the organs of the human species have evolved over millennia, only adopting their current form and function relatively recently. Our brain doesn’t differ much in its composition from that of our ancestors who lived in caves, although social life has transformed exponentially, especially in the last twenty-five centuries. In other words, we have a brain designed to hunt and defend against predators that now has to function in a hypercomplex society with unlimited access to information and that requires interacting with people from far away.

Given the differences between dualism and monism, and taking into account the development of neuroscience, it is worth asking if there is any practical value in the more modulated versions of both options, between that of a dualist who defends the connection between mind and body, and that of a monist who understands that our sensory and mental faculties, although processed in the brain, belong respectively to different orders or categories. Cognitive psychologists like Daniel Kahneman argue that there are two systems of thought, one fast and instinctive, almost reflexive, and another that requires more processing time. We can answer the question “what is two plus two?” without thinking, while 24 × 17 will typically require some thought. Kahneman’s approach is similar to Plato’s analogy of how our mind is like a charioteer attempting to control two horses, one impetuous and fast—our instincts and passions—and another, more leisurely and calm, which balances impulse and corrects direction.

In sum, Neurophilosophy is a promising area to explain the rationale behind human behavior, linking biology with morality. This new discipline will bring new meanings to understand the North Pole of ourselves: our brain.

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