We firmly believe that the brain is the organ of thought. We know that because thats what it feels like
We used to know - or at least to think - that the heart is the seat of the emotions - because thats what it feels like: we have all had one of those Moon River moments when our lover comes near. It took science to show us that the heart is nothing more than a muscle & a pump which reacts to feelings only in a mechanical way
Science however supports our opinion about the brain, doesnt it? Through the miracles of modern technology, different bits can be shown to light up depending on what kinds of thoughts or thinking are going on
Wittgenstein once asked a friend why people used to think that the sun goes round the earth. Quick as a flash the friend replied Because thats what it looks like. Long pause, then So what would it have looked like if it looked like the earth goes round the sun ?
Is there another explanation for the way that the brain seems to light up on these scans?
Well, for analogy we can look to the old fashioned technology of the PABX telephone exchange. Bulbs lit up to signal incoming calls, but the bulb was not the call. It was simply a signal, a response to the person making the call which in turn summoned action by the telephonist to connect the line to the recipient. The whole system was there simply to facilitate communication between human beings, it was not responsible for, did not initiate, that communication.
Of course our newer technology does that too but at increasingly many removes. Not too many of us are now fooled into thinking that a voice talking to us necessarily implies the existence, at this very moment, of a real live human at the other end of the line, but we know that at some stage human agency created all those annoying messages
Anyone who has seen a new born baby knows that we come in to this world with certain qualities & characteristics, we are not blank sheets of paper on which our characters & personalities are to be written by upbringing & environment. Conversely, anyone who has seen a newly dead body knows that we are not simply the stuff of which we are made
We think that thought is central to existence - cogito ergo sum. But conversely, precisely because I dont think, all sorts of things go on, just as I expect. Not just those things such as breathing & digestion, but habits & routines such as driving, walking, playing the right notes on the piano. It was the English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead who pointed out that our parents & teachers have it precisely the wrong way round when they exhort us to think about what we are doing at all times, to concentrate. Human life depends on our maximising the number of things that we can do without thinking, so that we can concentrate our thought on learning new things. When something disrupts or interrupts our routine, when we have to think, then we get confused. Exactly where am I? How did the car get here? Why am I lying on my back? Why isnt the coffee jar in its usual place? Why hasnt the kettle boiled even though I switched it on?
We can explain the workings of the telephone exchange in great detail - or of the internet, or of the African drums. We have not in any significant sense explained what is happening to the humans connected to the system. We can have detailed telephone directories to list, or to analyse, the people who are connected to the system (eg Yellow Pages classifies people by whether they are a plumber, a doctor, a library). But this does nothing to explain why Mrs Smith calls Mrs Jones to relay the latest gossip
Have I just ended up in a Kantian position?
But the point I am labouring towards is that, if the brain is not the organ of thought, what is?
The implication must be that somehow its the whole of the body, the whole of our senses (does Roger Penrose, with his Emperors New Mind , bear on this point? Is that what his quantum theory is all about?). So what are the implications eg for brain death? What is life, indeed
And if, in some sense, its the whole of us, all our parts linked together by the telephone exchange of the brain, might our existence (consciousness?) also not depend on our links to others & to our environment? Truly no man is an island but, in Donnes original sense, just a piece of the continent
And when we die our molecules disperse & reassemble (Ilkley Moor ); do they take anything such as knowledge, experience, with them? This seems like one of those daft questions, close to ouija etc. But ouija is a leap from the thought to a certainty of conclusion. How would a scientist approach this kind of question. Might a true 'theory of everything' lead one towards these questions?
Of course, in one sense, this is just an old Greek idea, that common sense is just what the other 5 senses have in common. These days many seem to think that common sense means everything you knew by the age of 16, or those things for which the university of life provides the best education
