The Ravenous Brain: How the New Science of Consciousness Explains Our Insatiable Search for Meaning Read Online Free
normally do this within the first minute, with the other 4 minutes of trials seemingly only there for reassurance.
Once the family questions had been exhausted, the conversation resorted to outright chattiness: “So do you think England is going to win the world cup match tonight?” Knowing little about soccer, except for the quality of the England team, I frantically started playing tennis to indicate: not a chance . We continued to have a conversation like this for about half an hour, with me thinking in these 30-second chunks, and Martin looking at the pattern of brain activity, and knowing very quickly whether I had answered yes or no. Admittedly, with a question every 5 minutes, it was not the most efficient conversation I’d ever had, but let me emphasize what was occurring: This conversation was being carried out without one of us engaging in any form of speech, gesticulation, or writing. I was answering in my mind by pretending to do various things, and Martin was detecting my answers by looking at my brain activity, as I was thinking those answers . When the radiographer helped me off the scanner bed and removed the various wires and equipment that had surrounded me, I paused for a moment and thought: I have just participated in about the most definitive demonstration in existence that the mind is nothing more than the brain.
It’s not as if this were the first time I had believed this, of course, having been heavily swayed by the evidence of the personality changes my father endured when the right side of his brain was swollen and constricted. But even that didn’t diminish the impact of what I’d experienced. I had successfully undergone science’s equivalent of telepathy; Martin had watched the inside of my skull as if it were a film—right at the time when I was co-opting my imagination to project the right images onto this “movie screen” of my brain.
PHILOSOPHY VERSUS SCIENCE
This book is shamelessly about the science of consciousness. Every chapter except this one will explore the evolutionary background and psychological and neural mechanisms of our own experiences. But questions about the relationship between the mind and body have been fiercely debated in philosophical circles for well over two thousand years. In fact, only in the past two decades has there been a clearly visible consciousness research field. It would therefore be remiss of me in a book on consciousness to ignore the major philosophical debates, which are such a well-established ancestral influence on consciousness science.
I will firmly assert, however, that these philosophical arguments, which rely so heavily on abstract logic for ammunition, as they neglect the scientific enterprise, provide very limited insights into consciousness, and can be positively misleading.
I’ll be centering on two key questions. First, is there nothing more to consciousness than brain activity, as my time in the scanner implied, or is awareness somehow independent of brains, bodies, and the rest of the physical world? And second, are we as mental beings nothing more than biological computers, or is there something special about the sensations we experience, and the meaning we attribute to the world, that could never be captured in software form?
DESCARTES AND THE MIND-BODY DUALITY
The seventeenth-century philosopher René Descartes is the landmark father figure of the philosophy of mind. In his most famous work, Meditations on First Philosophy , Descartes contemplated the possibility that a “malicious demon of the utmost power and cunning” had deceived him about the existence of all external things, including his own body. This is essentially also the premise of the film The Matrix , in which the hero, Neo, goes about his daily life believing that he is living in a twentieth-century U.S. city, only to be woken up from this extended dream to realize that it was a simulated reality that devious computers had been generating and
Once the family questions had been exhausted, the conversation resorted to outright chattiness: “So do you think England is going to win the world cup match tonight?” Knowing little about soccer, except for the quality of the England team, I frantically started playing tennis to indicate: not a chance . We continued to have a conversation like this for about half an hour, with me thinking in these 30-second chunks, and Martin looking at the pattern of brain activity, and knowing very quickly whether I had answered yes or no. Admittedly, with a question every 5 minutes, it was not the most efficient conversation I’d ever had, but let me emphasize what was occurring: This conversation was being carried out without one of us engaging in any form of speech, gesticulation, or writing. I was answering in my mind by pretending to do various things, and Martin was detecting my answers by looking at my brain activity, as I was thinking those answers . When the radiographer helped me off the scanner bed and removed the various wires and equipment that had surrounded me, I paused for a moment and thought: I have just participated in about the most definitive demonstration in existence that the mind is nothing more than the brain.
It’s not as if this were the first time I had believed this, of course, having been heavily swayed by the evidence of the personality changes my father endured when the right side of his brain was swollen and constricted. But even that didn’t diminish the impact of what I’d experienced. I had successfully undergone science’s equivalent of telepathy; Martin had watched the inside of my skull as if it were a film—right at the time when I was co-opting my imagination to project the right images onto this “movie screen” of my brain.
PHILOSOPHY VERSUS SCIENCE
This book is shamelessly about the science of consciousness. Every chapter except this one will explore the evolutionary background and psychological and neural mechanisms of our own experiences. But questions about the relationship between the mind and body have been fiercely debated in philosophical circles for well over two thousand years. In fact, only in the past two decades has there been a clearly visible consciousness research field. It would therefore be remiss of me in a book on consciousness to ignore the major philosophical debates, which are such a well-established ancestral influence on consciousness science.
I will firmly assert, however, that these philosophical arguments, which rely so heavily on abstract logic for ammunition, as they neglect the scientific enterprise, provide very limited insights into consciousness, and can be positively misleading.
I’ll be centering on two key questions. First, is there nothing more to consciousness than brain activity, as my time in the scanner implied, or is awareness somehow independent of brains, bodies, and the rest of the physical world? And second, are we as mental beings nothing more than biological computers, or is there something special about the sensations we experience, and the meaning we attribute to the world, that could never be captured in software form?
DESCARTES AND THE MIND-BODY DUALITY
The seventeenth-century philosopher René Descartes is the landmark father figure of the philosophy of mind. In his most famous work, Meditations on First Philosophy , Descartes contemplated the possibility that a “malicious demon of the utmost power and cunning” had deceived him about the existence of all external things, including his own body. This is essentially also the premise of the film The Matrix , in which the hero, Neo, goes about his daily life believing that he is living in a twentieth-century U.S. city, only to be woken up from this extended dream to realize that it was a simulated reality that devious computers had been generating and
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