Are you your brain?

1. Are you your brain? Steven Rose s.p.r.rose@open.ac.uk

2. St. Augustine’s Questions • How does the brain/mind encompass: Vast regions of space and time Abstract thoughts, numbers The idea of god Logical propositions and false arguments.

3. Brain versus Mind? (Emily Dickinson, 1862) • The Brain - is wider than the Sky - • For - put them side by side - • The one the other will contain - • With ease - and you -beside • The Brain is just the weight of God • For - heft them - Pound for Pound • And they will differ - if they do • As Syllable from Sound • Emily Dickinson, c 1862

4. Three Neuro Decades • 1990s – decade of the brain • 2000s – decade of the mind • 2013 - EU announces €1 billion for a ‘human brain project’ to build a virtual brain through computersimulation. • Obama announces BRAIN – a $3billion project tracking all the trillions of connections between nerve cells in the human brain (starting with mouse!) paid for by NIH, DARPA etc • Will help ‘epilepsy, depression, schizophrenia, autism, dementia..stroke, cerebral palsy….’ (and the military)

5. And the reach of the neurosciences grows ever longer • Neurolaw • Neurowar • Neuroeconomics • Neuromarketing • Neuroaesthetics • Neuroeducation • Neuroethics………. • And neuroculture??

6. The core assumption of modern neuroscience • Minds and consciousness are brain processes • To cure the mind one must cure the brain • But these claims are not uncontested

7. Brains and Minds: Four philosophical propositions • Dualism: Body/brain …. Soul/mind two different types of stuff • Identity: Brain/mind are two aspects of the same phenomenon • Epiphenomenalism: Mind emerges from brain • Mechanical materialism: Minds are ‘nothing but’ brains • NOTE! I am not going to agree with any of these!

8. Not all neuroscientists have been hard materialists • Descartes and the pineal gland • Sherrington’s enchanted loom • Sperry’s downward causation • Eccles and the liaison brain – the god of • the synapses

9. Some modern Dualists • Edelman – you are your brain.. plus free will! • Libet - the 350msec gap and the brain’s ‘free won’t’ • And some closet dualists – Dawkins, Pinker • ‘only we can rebel against the tyranny of our selfish genes • ‘if my genes don’t like it they can go jump in the lake’

10. 19th century materialists • Thomas Huxley: Mind is to brain like the whistle to the steam train • Moleschott, Vogt et al: The brain secretes thought like the kidney secretes urine; genius is a matter of phosphorus

11. Modern materialists • Crick – ‘you are nothing but a bunch of neurons’ • Kandel – ‘you are your brain’ • Silva – ‘ruthless reductionism’ • Gazzaniga – ‘the ethical brain’ • LeDoux – ‘synaptic self’ • Changeaux – ‘neuronal man’

12. And some philosophers follow suit • Churchland – neurophilosophy and ‘folk psychology’ • Dennett – ‘consciousness explained’

13. Some problems for materialists • Subjective experience and qualia – how does conscious experience emerge from brain chemistry/physics • How did consciousness evolve (Darwin v Russell Wallace) • Free will and determinism – ‘my brain made me do it.’

14. But if this were true • Minds wouldn’t matter at all – we only need think brains • But minds do matter; we have self-awareness; minds have reasons, are conscious and are evolved properties of humans, with Darwinian survival functions. These are irreducible properties. • So we also have to assume that although there is a qualitative jump between us and our nearest evolutionary relatives (chimps, bonobos) that these and maybe other big brained animals have rudimentary forms of consciousness (Damasio; Nagel)

15. fMRI promises to solve the mind/brain question Brain sites for every thought and feeling ‘A happy marriage between fMRI and experimental psychology can bridge the divide between mind and brain’

16. Phrenology – external and internal

17. ‘Psychopathic Brains?’

18. The Right and the Good: Distributive Justice and Neural Encoding of Equity and Efficiency* • Subjects making decisions re allocating meals to children in Ugandan orphanage • Quandary: to share limited food equally (equity) but inadequately, or giving enough food to chosen few (efficiency). • Result: ‘Insula encodes inequity, putamen efficiency’ • *Hsu et al Science320, 1092-5, 2008

19. Brain sites for everything • Mathematical ability • Romantic love • Moral judgments • Voting tendency • Terrorist thoughts • Psychopathy • And of course consciousness

20. Neurolove

21. So what’s the problem? • Overestimates the power of fMRI • Blood flow surrogate measure • Timescale (seconds )too long • Volume too great :50mm3 contains 5m neurons, 50b synapses 22km dendrites, 220km axons! • Mistakes activity for location

22. Romantic love, psychopathy – and a dead salmon

23. But there are more fundamental problems • These studies reify processes, thoughts and judgements – turning concepts from the social realm (efficiency, terrorism, psychopathy..) into localisable ‘things’ in the brain

24. So here’s a thought experiment • Let’s invent a cerebroscope

25. The cerebroscope • Detects the activity of every neuron in my brain millisecond by millisecond

26. The cerebroscope • So it will interpret my brain activity as Steven reading this caption, giving this seminar?

27. Or will it?

28. A more dynamic cerebroscope • Not only reads the present state of my synapses but has plotted them millisecond by millisecond from their formation. • So could you now ‘read off’ my mind from my brain?

29. I still think the answer is no The experience may impose a unique pattern in my synapses etc, but can that pattern in turn be read as unique to the experience? The pattern may show I am talking, but will it show the content of my speech?

30. Because • There’s more to the brain than wiring diagrams and neurotransmitters • Modulators, field effects etc • The brain is in the body • hormones, immune system But more fundamentally: brain and body are part of the biosocial world in which we are embedded

31. Minds are not Brains Minds are to brains like legs are to walking. We don’t say ‘my legs are walking’ but that we use our legs to walk Similarly, it is we who have minds and consciousness, and we use our brains to think

32. Nor are our minds in our bodies (as St Augustine suggested) • Maybe as philosopher Gilbert Ryle suggested we don’t have minds (noun); instead we mind (verb). • Minding is a hybrid, not a reified brain process, though it requires the brain, but an ever-changing relationship between an individual and the physical social cultural and historical world; • Consciousness is relational, the dynamic product of present and past brain and body activity, life history and social context, a process, not a reified ‘thing.’