Neuroscience says people aren’t things. We’re processes.

Who am I?

That's a big question. For the ancient Greeks, and many others, it's the biggest question. "Know yourself." An imperative.

Modern neuroscience is casting factual light on this philosophical issue. Well, not only philosophical. Religon, spirituality, mysticism — they also have explanations of what essential human nature is.

Usually, dualistic.

Meaning, supposedly there's the human body, which includes the brain. Then there's a mysterious something else. Soul, mind, psyche, spirit, some thing which inhabits, connects with, or otherwise associates with the body while we're physically alive.

But since that thing isn't physical, usually it is believed to survive bodily death. Bingo! After our last breath we find ourselves in heaven, hell, paradise, a bardo, or a host of alternative supernatural hypotheses.

As I often say on this blog, maybe.

Personally, I'd rather keep on surviving as something. Turning into nothing (nothing conscious, at least) after death isn't wildly appealing to me, to put it mildly. However, as noted in a previous post, Who am I? has the same presupposition as Do I have free will?

An "I." 

If there's no me, no thing which could become nothing, no thing which has a will (free or otherwise), then two gigantic Big Questions of Life shrink away into meaninglessness, in much the same way as Unicorn Behavioral Studies isn't a great field of study for a factually-inclined biologist.

These days I devour neuroscience books with the same zeal I used to read books about spirituality, mysticism, and esoteric philosophy. 

My current meal has been Michael Gazzaniga's "Who's in Charge? Free will and the science of the brain." It follows along in the familiar current of other neuroscience books, but Gazzaniga has a fresh and appealing way of conveying what has been learned about human nature.

Basically…

There's no evidence of the dualism so beloved by religions and mystics. No sign of the soul or any other form of consciousness separate from the brain. Nor is there a central controller, a top dog, a CEO, a boss, within the physical brain.

What scientists find there are processes, not things.

Yes, we humans feel like someone ("me") is in control, but this is an illusion caused by left-brain processes devoted to creating narratives about why things happen and what's going on in the world. Which often are wrong. Hey, that jerk at the end of the bar is laughing, at me! Asshole.

Gazzaniga writes:

A complex system is composed of many different systems that interact and produce emergent properties that are greater than the sum of their parts and cannot be reduced to the properties of the constituent parts.

…Relevant to our current question about feeling unified and in control is an important point that Northwestern University's physicist Luis Amaral and chemical engineer Julio Ottino make: "The common characteristic of all complex systems is that they display organization without any external organizing principle being applied." That means no head honcho, no homunculus. 

In his final chapter, Gazzaniga shares what John Doyle, a Cal Tech engineer, said to him:

Somehow we got used to the idea that when a system appears to exhibit coherent, integrated function and behavior, there must be some "essential" and, importantly, central or centralized controlling element that is responsible. We are deeply essentialist, and our left brain will find it.

And as you point out, we'll make up something if we can't find it. We call it a homunculus, mind, soul, gene, etc… But it is rarely there in the usual reductionist sense… That doesn't mean there isn't in fact some "essence" that is responsible, it's just distributed.

It's in the protocols, the rules, the algorithms, the software. It's how cells, ant hills, Internets, armies, brains, really work. 

It's difficult for us because it doesn't reside in some box somewhere, indeed it would be a design flaw if it did because that box would be a single point of failure. It's, in fact, important that it not be in the modules but in the rules that they must obey.

Love it.

There's more "spiritual" wisdom in this scientist's words than in the stacks of religious'y books I've read in my lifetime. It isn't different from what the wisest of sages have always said. Doyle just has solid reasons for his statements above.

Gazzaniga recognizes that we lack the proper framework for understanding who we humans really are. We're used to dealing with things, so we view ourselves as a thing that deals with other things. In a limited sense this is true, but mostly it is false.

What we are is… there's no is. At least, not in the way we usually think of things that are.

We are people, not brains. We are that abstraction that occurs when a mind, which emerges from a brain, interacts with that brain. It is in that abstraction that we exist and in the face of science seeming to chip away at it, we are desperately seeking a vocabulary to describe what it is we truly are.

…While reviewing material for this book, I realized that a unique language, which has yet to be developed, is needed to capture the thing that happens when mental processes constrain the brain and vice versa.

The action is at the interface of those layers.

In one kind of vocabulary it is where downward causation meets upward causation. In another vocabulary it is not there at all but in the space between brains that are interacting with each other. It is what happens at the interface of our layered hierarchical existence that holds the answer to our quest for understanding mind/brain realationships.

Those words probably don't make complete, or even much, sense to you. If so, I share your feeling. Even Gazzaniga, I suspect, doesn't fully understand what he wrote in the passages I just quoted. 

The brain still is largely a mystery. So are we humans. We're trying to comprehend what we are through the only tool we have: what we are.

Confusion is to be expected. Welcomed, even. I liked this quote on the next to last page.

No one knows more about the weaknesses in one's idea than the person proposing it, and as a consequence, one is always on the lookout. 

This is not a particularly easy state to be in, and I once asked Leon Festinger, one of the smartest men in the world, whether or not he ever felt inept. He replied, "Of course! That is what keeps you ept."