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(These are excerpts from, or extensions to, the material published in my book "The Nature of Consciousness")
The Takeover of the Mind
No doubt most people feel
that their mind is more important than their body. People may be afraid of
losing a limb in an accident, but would still prefer that to losing
consciousness. A person who is lying in an irreversible coma is considered
“technically dead” even if her body is still alive. We don't mind the
transplant of an organ, even of the heart; but we would oppose a transplant of
the brain: most people would interpret a heart transplant on them as
"somebody is giving me her heart"; but they would interpret a brain
transplant on them as "I am giving my body to someone else". We can
envision a future in which minds will exist without bodies, but not a future in
which we would be happy to be bodies without minds. Ultimately, we are our minds, not our bodies. It is likely that this was
not always the case. There was probably a time when survival of the body was
more important than survival of the mind. The preeminence of the mind is a
recent phenomenon. The main goal of our ancestors was probably to protect their
bodies from predators and from natural catastrophes. If the body dies, the
individual (whatever an individual is) simply dies. Nature grants the body an
obvious preeminence over the mind, a preeminence that we have forgotten but
that was probably there for a long time during the evolution of the human
species. For a long time, the human mind may have been simply a means to
achieve the goal of protecting the human body. Nothing more than an
evolutionary advantage over other species in protecting the body. Just like
some animals have a fur to protect them from cold weather. Then, somehow, that
evolutionary advantage became the predominant part of the individual. To the
point that we declare “dead” somebody whose body is alive but whose mind is
not. There has been steady progress towards turning the tables: the mind has
slowly taken over the body, and now we think of an individual as her mind
(whereas we still think of a dog as its body, regardless of whether it has a
mind or not). Historically, ancient
civilizations don't seem to have appreciated how awesome the human mind is, and
don't seem to have realized how "low" non-human things are. For
example, ancient Greeks believed that the rivers were children of a god. Today,
it may sound strange to think of a river as a "living being", because
we know that most of its water changes all the time and we know that its water
comes from melting snow and rain, and so forth. But isn't that true of humans
too? Don't we change cells all the time? Don't we take in energy and matter
from outside (as food)? Doesn't a river have a personality? Other than the fact
that rivers live far longer than us, it is not so obvious that having a mind
makes humans all that different from rivers, as we today believe. The first part of the
mystery is why and how minds became more important than bodies. The second part
is, in a sense, proof that the mind is a recent accident: we ask ourselves what
is the mind (a rather strange question: what am I?). When we ask what is the
mind, we implicitly assume that the body is a given. The body is a given and we
wonder what the mind is. We don’t take the mind for granted and wonder what the
body is and why we have bodies. We are bodies that wonder about their minds,
not minds that wonder about their bodies. At some point, minds happened to
bodies. And now bodies use their minds
to wonder “how did that happen” and “what is my mind”. The quest for a rational
explanation of the human mind has always started with the task of defining the
relationship between mind and matter: is our mind made of matter? Is it made of
a different substance? What differentiates the mental from the non-mental? How
do our mind and body relate? Is our mind inside our body? Is our mind born with
the body? Will it die with the body? Does it grow with the body? These days, having learned quite a bit about
the brain and being reassured by countless psychological experiments that our
brain is the main entity of the body responsible for our thinking, we are
mostly interested in the specific relationship between brain and mind: what is
the relationship between the neural and the mental? How does the mental
originate from the neural? And, finally, what is in the
mind? (Edited in 2013 by Sean Champagne from Piero Scaruffi's book and subsequent revisions) |
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