The Mind
Our sense of who we are goes way beyond our physical form.
We are, intrinsically, our thoughts and feelings, our idea of ourselves. But who is thinking, and how? Is consciousness no more than biological brain function? Is there really anybody in there?
Are we the ghost in our own machine?
C
ogito ergo sum. “I think”, as Descartes had it, “therefore I am”. The Cartesian cogito, which is self, I, me, the one who does the thinking I’m doing (you too) when I’m thinking what I’m thinking.
Our brains are constantly at it, never letting up (and when they do, well, questions of existence and identity become somewhat moot… or reveal a greater truth?). As we perceive, reflect, emote, calculate, introspect, anticipate… neurons are all the while firing, pathways of communication activating in order for us to do whatever we wish (or sometimes not) to do.
None of us, Buddhist monk or philosopher of mind, conceives of ourselves as anything other than the intuitive “I” who has always been there with us, who has always been “me”. Some might call that soul or spirit. Neuroscientists call it “mind”, many of them only to proclaim it an illusion. How does immaterial mind extend from physical brain processes? This is what’s known as the Mind-Body Problem, or the “Hard Problem” of consciousness (the question, then, is not so much where each of us is going as who – or what – is doing the driving).
If mind is an illusion, what does that make us?
If mind is an illusion, what does that make us? Taking the notion to its extreme inevitability, we are machines of a sort. Thinking, feeling machines. Machines, it’s true, of astonishing complexity – but machines nonetheless. In consequence, then, all of our responses are programmed – our own sense of free will is also an illusion. Still, can’t an illusion, especially one felt so compellingly, can’t that be in itself a comfort?
The Secret World of The Mind will chart the divide between mental states and matter, causality and interaction, disembodied self and substance – cleaving always to the perhaps deluded sense we have of ourselves.
