Am 'I' my brain? A contemplation on consciousness
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Have you ever wondered what it is that makes you ‘you’? Why are you ‘you’ and not your sibling, or your best friend, or Leonardo Da Vinci, or a different person in a different place and time, or that stranger in the bus sitting next to you, staring outside the window? Or is that you?
Is your brain just a part of you or is your brain ‘you’? Of course, anatomically your brain is part of your body but let’s approach this philosophically because when it comes to consciousness it’s more philosophy than science.
Philosophers and neuroscientists have been trying to figure out consciousness for centuries but we still have no idea what exactly it is. Everyone has a different theory and definition of consciousness.
Cogito, ergo sum
When I was in my early teenage years, I was getting into books that introduced me to the fascinating world of science, philosophy, and literature. I was reading biographies of scientists and came across René Descartes (1596–1650). Of all things about Descartes, his famous quote “Cogito, ergo sum” which translates to “I think, therefore I am” stuck with me. It wasn’t because I was enlightened by it but because I thought it was a stupid quote. To my edgy teenage mind, it was a meaningless, vague quote that got so much fame just because some renowned person said it. I then thought to myself that if someday I became world famous, I will say something stupid, vague, and meaningless, and people would be wondering about the meaning behind it for centuries, and even interpret it as something profound.It wasn’t until my late teen years that I started pondering about consciousness and came across René Descartes one more time. With some reading into his philosophical notions, I came to understand that his famous quote wasn’t a stupid amalgam of vague words but a rather thought-provoking epistemology. Descartes believed that everything we assume to be true can be doubted, which led him to question his own existence. But then he realized that if he didn’t exist then he wouldn’t be thinking about his own existence. Hence, he concludes that he must exist because he’s capable of thinking. Descartes also believed in mind-body dualism (Cartesian dualism) which basically suggests that the mind and the body are two separate things, therefore, a mind could still exist without a body. Hence, his conclusion — anything that thinks, has existence.
Descartes is considered very important in the field of the study of the mind because he is known to be the pioneer of a systematic approach to the study of consciousness. Even today, his ideas still have substantial influences on philosophy and the study of the mind.
What is consciousness?
In simple terms, it is an individual’s awareness of themself and the world around them. Take yourself as an example; you know about your own existence, your feelings, thoughts, memories, and sensation of your body. Furthermore, you are also aware of the physical world around you: people, objects, air, temperature, space, and the effects of the environment on yourself. Are all living creatures sentient? Not in the conventional sense. Living beings without a centralized nervous system like bacteria, fungi, plants, etc are said to be non-sentient and they apparently operate only on instincts and reactions to physical stimuli, unlike sentient beings that operate on multilayered awareness of themselves and the environment.So where does consciousness emerge from? And why do we even have consciousness? It might seem like a simple question but the deeper you dig, the more baffling it gets. The obvious answer would be that consciousness stems from our brain or central nervous system, and its purpose is to help us better navigate the world to increase our chances of survival. But this answer raises more questions than it answers.
So, does this mean that ‘we’ are our brains? If consciousness stems from the brain then does that mean we don’t control our brain but instead the brain controls ‘us’?
Human brain: An extremely complex and powerful organic computer
The human brain has 100 billion neurons, each neuron connected to 10,000 other neurons. Sitting on your shoulders is the most complicated object in the known universe.
~ Michio Kaku
The human brain is an extremely complicated object that is capable of extraordinary feats beyond our conscious control and comprehension. It is more than a mere organic computer. Most of what the brain does is not our conscious choice. It controls all our body parts and maintains autonomous bodily functions, most of which are beyond our voluntary control. It forms new memories and changes the older ones, which is also mostly out of our conscious control. It also conceals memories deep in our subconscious that we cannot access under normal circumstances. In fact, our memories are volatile and unreliable, they keep updating as we experience new things in life.
You might remember watching Tom & Jerry while you were five, wearing a black shirt and black pants, eating cookies while it was raining cats and dogs. But it very well could be some other cartoon that you don’t remember existed. You could have been wearing a yellow onesie and eating candy, and the weather outside could have been barely gloomy.
Furthermore, our brain can also create the illusion of consciousness even when we are unconscious, like dreaming while we are asleep. So this begs the question, could we be unconscious right now? It is possible that you are currently dreaming all of this. Your brain could also be hallucinating this whole life that you are experiencing right now and you wouldn’t know if it’s "real" or not. You could have been in a coma for the last 5 years and your real life could have been very different from what you are experiencing now. What we experience as "reality" is not objective reality but a subjective experience of reality (perceived reality), as each individual experiences the world a little differently than others.
There are several mental health conditions that put the bizarreness of the brain in a new perspective. You might be familiar with the mental health condition called Dissociative Identity Disorder, also known as split personality. People with this condition have more than one distinct identity (or multiple ‘minds’ if you will). It is like multiple people living in a single body/brain. There was a 1978 criminal case of multiple felonies charged against Billy Milligan, where it was claimed that his other two personalities committed those crimes, not Milligan himself. Milligan was acquitted based on the same claim and was committed to a psychiatric hospital.
There is also a bizarre condition called Depersonalization/Derealization Disorder which causes the patient to feel like they are an outside observer of their own feelings, thoughts, and body, often having the feeling of floating outside their body. They may also believe that things aren’t real and that they may be in a dream or movie. Additionally, they may also experience distortion of their environment, time, and their own body. For example, they may feel like time slowing down or the surrounding looking bizarrely otherworldly.
There’s another equally bizarre if not more, condition called Alien Hand Syndrome which causes patients to believe that their hand is a separate autonomous entity with its own personality. People with this syndrome lose control of their affected limb as if it is being controlled by some external force. So this can also cause their hands to be in opposition to each other. This could lead to some interesting situations like one of your hands fighting with another while trying to vote in an election. As an extreme case, it has also been reported that the affected hand had tried to strangle the patient.
The above-mentioned mental conditions further corroborate the bizarre nature of our brains. So is there a distinction between ‘you’ and your brain? When you decided to click on this article, did ‘you’ or your brain make that decision? There are many things our brain does without our conscious choice or awareness. Therefore, it can be argued that, what we think is our conscious decision, very well could be an illusion or an impression created by our brain to justify the decisions it made. However, I don’t have any idea why consciousness even exists. It could merely be a byproduct of the neural activities in the brain. I think consciousness is something like the little brother who gets handed down a disconnected controller while the older brother keeps playing the game but the little brother keeps pushing the buttons thinking he is actually playing the game.
You might remember watching Tom & Jerry while you were five, wearing a black shirt and black pants, eating cookies while it was raining cats and dogs. But it very well could be some other cartoon that you don’t remember existed. You could have been wearing a yellow onesie and eating candy, and the weather outside could have been barely gloomy.
Furthermore, our brain can also create the illusion of consciousness even when we are unconscious, like dreaming while we are asleep. So this begs the question, could we be unconscious right now? It is possible that you are currently dreaming all of this. Your brain could also be hallucinating this whole life that you are experiencing right now and you wouldn’t know if it’s "real" or not. You could have been in a coma for the last 5 years and your real life could have been very different from what you are experiencing now. What we experience as "reality" is not objective reality but a subjective experience of reality (perceived reality), as each individual experiences the world a little differently than others.
There are several mental health conditions that put the bizarreness of the brain in a new perspective. You might be familiar with the mental health condition called Dissociative Identity Disorder, also known as split personality. People with this condition have more than one distinct identity (or multiple ‘minds’ if you will). It is like multiple people living in a single body/brain. There was a 1978 criminal case of multiple felonies charged against Billy Milligan, where it was claimed that his other two personalities committed those crimes, not Milligan himself. Milligan was acquitted based on the same claim and was committed to a psychiatric hospital.
There is also a bizarre condition called Depersonalization/Derealization Disorder which causes the patient to feel like they are an outside observer of their own feelings, thoughts, and body, often having the feeling of floating outside their body. They may also believe that things aren’t real and that they may be in a dream or movie. Additionally, they may also experience distortion of their environment, time, and their own body. For example, they may feel like time slowing down or the surrounding looking bizarrely otherworldly.
There’s another equally bizarre if not more, condition called Alien Hand Syndrome which causes patients to believe that their hand is a separate autonomous entity with its own personality. People with this syndrome lose control of their affected limb as if it is being controlled by some external force. So this can also cause their hands to be in opposition to each other. This could lead to some interesting situations like one of your hands fighting with another while trying to vote in an election. As an extreme case, it has also been reported that the affected hand had tried to strangle the patient.
The above-mentioned mental conditions further corroborate the bizarre nature of our brains. So is there a distinction between ‘you’ and your brain? When you decided to click on this article, did ‘you’ or your brain make that decision? There are many things our brain does without our conscious choice or awareness. Therefore, it can be argued that, what we think is our conscious decision, very well could be an illusion or an impression created by our brain to justify the decisions it made. However, I don’t have any idea why consciousness even exists. It could merely be a byproduct of the neural activities in the brain. I think consciousness is something like the little brother who gets handed down a disconnected controller while the older brother keeps playing the game but the little brother keeps pushing the buttons thinking he is actually playing the game.
Do we have free will?
Let’s do a simple experiment. Move your hand and fingers in some weird way, like making a fist, twisting your wrist, and then releasing it. So when you decide to do that, did you first wish it, and hence your wish commanded the brain to do it, so the brain sent electrical signals in the muscles of your hands and fingers to make it happen? Or was it that the brain just made your hands and fists do it and then made you believe that it was your will?
Let’s think of the brain/body as a complex organic robot. Our body is constantly experiencing physical stimuli like light, sound, smell, temperature, pressure, gravity, motion, friction, magnetism, and electric charges. We are also experiencing other, more complex environmental factors like people, animals, objects, structures, nature, etc. All of these factors stimulate the plethora of neutral networks inside the brain in certain ways depending on how they are wired together. The stimuli further change the wiring of the neurons. The way our neurons are wired vastly makes a difference in how the stimuli lead to a neutral decision. And the way our neurons are wired is affected by our past experiences, the environment we grow up in, our memories, and the exposure to environmental stimuli themselves. So millions of stimuli we receive from our environment combined with memories, habitual patterns, and past experiences all lead to outputs like a certain emotion, jogging of certain memory, change in mood, heart beating faster, or moving your hand to catch a ball hurling towards your face. You could feel different kinds of emotions depending on numerous environmental factors, from the Earth getting closer to the Sun, to listening to different genres of music. When you decide to take a sip from your water bottle, it involves millions of stimuli and other factors of your own brain and body which play into that decision. But it could just be an autonomous response instead of a conscious one. Our consciousness might just be a complex reaction to millions of stimuli.
Let's take a stroll through another speculative road. What if a character in a video game you’re playing, thinks they are real? When you press buttons in your game controller, the character will climb off their horse, go to the ledge of the cliff, light a cigar, and then stare at the beautiful country below. What if the character thinks that they decided, of their own free will, to climb off the horse, walk to the ledge of the cliff, light a cigar, and enjoy the great view? The character might be thinking, the weather is wonderful and the vantage point has a great view, and they might also be feeling grateful to be born into this world to enjoy that moment. The character might think whatever they are doing is of their own free will while in actuality, an external agent is controlling the character and making decisions for them. The world that this character is living in, is just a digital recreation but to that character, it might be real.
There is no conclusive idea of what consciousness is. These are merely my speculations, based on my limited knowledge of neuroscience and philosophy related to consciousness, so I could be wrong on some of the aspects I have written here.
Metaphysics and Mind
Let’s ponder something more abstract. When you look at something, who actually “sees” it? And how do we even “see” it? This may sound very trivial but let me try to elaborate on it. When we look at the portrait of the Mona Lisa, the light rays bounced from the portrait enter our eyes, and hit the retina which stimulates optical nerves, sending signals to our brain, and the brain processes and interprets the signal to form an image in our mind. But “seeing” the image is actually neurons firing in certain patterns in the visual cortex of our brain. So how do we “see” the image when it’s just neurons firing some electrical charges in our brain? It is almost impossible to conceive this notion, as it transcends the scientific thought process and hops to the metaphysical realm.There are several other abstract theories that sprout from this line of thought. What if there’s some kind of metaphysical dimension where our mind resides and through some process, it connects to our physical brain? That is, our consciousness could be some metaphysical being existing only as a mind that is capable of connecting to and controlling the conscious part of the physical brain. When a body dies, consciousness might connect to a different brain/body but we probably won’t remember the previous body or life experiences because memories wouldn't be preserved without a physical brain.
Similarly, we could be in a simulation and our consciousness could also be simulated to make us think that we are “real”. A character in a videogame could also feel conscious but they would be deluded that they are in a real physical world instead of being in a digital simulation. Likewise, we wouldn’t be able to tell if we are real or just a simulation. Moreover, it wouldn’t make much of a difference as long as the simulation runs smoothly.
But what is “real”? Does being a simulated consciousness make us any less real than being a sentient organic robot? What if when we go to sleep, we actually wake up in the “real” world and our dreams are actually our real life? Conversely, this life we are experiencing could be a dream. However, the attainability of lucid dreams puts a big hole in this hypothesis, where people dreaming are aware that they are in a dream and could even control aspects of it.
What would it be like being a different person instead of you? You hadn’t existed for billions of years but by some extremely minute chance (probably one in quadrillions) you were born, hence “you” came to exist. After a few decades ‘you’ will cease to exist again forever. Will “you” exist again someday? Or have “you” ever existed before? Can one’s mind hop to a different brain/body through some metaphysical process (reincarnation if you will) and get to experience the same “you” again? I’ll leave you with this existential enigma.
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