BROOKFIELD UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST CHURCH
Our Brains, Our Minds and Our Hearts.
By John Kennison
Sunday, September 16, 2018
The study of minds and brains probably goes back to Rene DesCartes, a philosopher who was born over 400 years ago. He had an amazing ability to doubt which made it difficult for him to find something to believe in. He could imagine that he didn’t have a physical body. He could even imagine that the physical world was an illusion. But he couldn’t doubt that he had a mind because the act of doubting requires a mind. Since he had a mind, he existed. He wrote, “Cogito Ergo Sum” which means “I think therefore I am”. And DesCartes found it a comforting fact that he and presumably other humans are thinking, feeling and mentally aware beings. DesCartes went on to make a distinction between purely physical phenomena and mental phenomena –a position called “dualism” which is still hotly debated among philosophers today.
Daniel Dennett, a contemporary philosopher, disagrees with dualism. He claims that consciousness is purely physical --he does not distinguish between what we call the mind and the physical object called the brain. He says that when you look at the brain there is “Nobody home” --that is, there is no magic box, and no single place which receives information and analyzes it. Instead, information coming from our senses is distributed throughout the brain and throughout the body.
I am not going to try to settle the question of dualism versus materialism. Either way there is a mystery. Either there is a separate, mysterious world of thought, or physical objects have amazing possibilities that can produce our conscious awareness. Dennett argues that computers, if sufficiently complex, can have minds in the same way that humans do. (This principle is called the strong A.I. hypothesis, where “A.I.” stands for “Artificial Intelligence”.) Whether we choose to believe in dualism or in the strong A.I. hypothesis or in some other explanation, our consciousness is an awesome feature of our human life, that we usually take for granted.
Douglas Hofstadter is a materialist philosopher and a friend of Dennett’s. Hofstadter wrote a book called, I am a Strange Loop, (soon, I will give you a clue as to why Hofstadter thinks he is a strange loop). The book ties the concept of consciousness to the notion of a self and gives a fuller explanation of how a machine could become conscious. To start with, it has to have and to work with a concept of itself. A thermostat is a simple, purely mechanical object that doesn’t seem to think at all and certainly has no need of a sense of self. So it can’t be conscious. Even a computer that does the accounting for a large corporation might just be a large, non-conscious number cruncher which doesn’t need or use any concept of itself. How about the computer inside a self-driving car? Well it depends on how it’s programmed. The car may take a lot of measurements then use a formula, that humans have worked out, to see how hard it should apply the brakes (or the accelerator) and to find the precise angle for the position of the steering wheel. Such a car would just be another number cruncher and would not be conscious, by Hofstadter’s criterion. But what if we humans got lazy and didn’t want to go to the trouble of providing the car with the formula.
Could we devise a car that would work out its own formula? I think we can, but when the actions of the car are based on a formula, and the creation of the formula is itself an action of the car, there can be unintended consequences: We have created a loop and it is well-known that some loops (called strange loops) can exhibit unexpected behavior –sort of like the behavior of conscious beings. And that could be dangerous. Imagine such a car in the garage, dreaming of how nice the Massachusetts Turnpike is, then noticing that someone left the garage door open. The car might consciously back out of the garage and head off to the wide, inviting lanes of the Mass Pike.
Next Hofstadter asks an innocent sounding question: Suppose we could travel at the speed of light by using a teleportation machine, which scans us, makes an exact copy of every cell in our body and radios this information to another location where our body is reconstructed. But, suppose the machine destroys our original body. Is the process safe? Should one take advantage of it? I thought I knew the answer to that one. If my consciousness is a physical thing, and if my physical body and therefore my brain are destroyed that would mean the death of me, the death of my concept of myself and the death of my consciousness. I would never experience moving at the speed of light. But Hofstadter goes on to imply that those who give this smart-aleck answer are “Cartesian Egotists”. One of the pitfalls of DesCartes’ theory of duality is that we might be tempted to believe that the only thing that matters is what happens in our brains. But our mental awareness includes the stimulation we get from interacting with nature and with others.
We are not one-person shows --our brains can, and in some sense must, exchange information, motivation, and spiritual uplift with others. We must even take risks to connect to others—far too often, we make the mistake of being more protective of ourselves than is good for us. Focusing on ourselves can give us goals in life that lead to worry, depression and a sense of alienation. Our brains and minds tend to bond with other brains to form social groups, family groups, and spiritual groups. Could these groups become conscious? Sometimes we seem to sense the spirit of a group —could this be an indication of group consciousness? There is evidence that groups sometimes make better decisions than individuals. And groups do seem to think as suggested by the term “Group-think”. But some researchers in group dynamics report that group-think often represents the views of the group’s leaders. I don’t know if group consciousness exists –but maybe a better question is how do we keep our individual minds from being overrun by group-think or by the thinking of dominant people we interact with? As UU’s, I think we do a good job of respecting everyone’s freedom to think differently from us. And sometimes we can go beyond mutual respect to the ability to cooperate and to even make deeper connections to people with radically different ideas.
Even our individual brains are combinations of a left hemisphere and a right hemisphere that have, hopefully, learned how to cooperate. When the tissue that connects the hemispheres is cut, cooperation sometimes breaks down. One person whose brain hemispheres were disconnected found it hard to shop in a supermarket. When her right hand put an article into the basket, her left hand, controlled by the other hemisphere, replaced the article back on the shelf. Another person found herself slapped by her own left hand every time she used an expletive. The right hemisphere controls the left hand but does not control speech. If the right hemisphere is offended by the speech coming from the other hemisphere, it can normally register its displeasure by sending a message of disgust along the tissue that connects the hemispheres. If that tissue is cut, the right hemisphere needs another way to register its objections. But in most cases the two hemispheres figure out a way to cooperate even when the connecting tissue has been cut, and the two hemispheres can create an overarching consciousness.
Abby and Brittany Hensel are a pair of Siamese twins who occupy what looks like a single body with the two heads. But they can make that body walk and run, they can ride a bicycle and type on a keyboard, coordinating all of their fingers. They can drive a car even though each brain controls only half of the body and only half of the car. The spiritual lesson is that human beings have an amazing capacity for cooperation. And we deeply enrich our lives by giving of ourselves to the people we meet—by going beyond cooperation to connection. And how worried should we be about taking a trip in that teleportation machine? The philosopher Derek Parfit puts it this way:
My life seemed like a glass tunnel, through which I was moving faster every year, and at the end of which . . . was darkness. When I changed my view, the walls of my tunnel disappeared and I now live in the open air, less concerned about my own life and more concerned about the lives of others.
Parfit’s glass tunnel reminds us that the older we get, the faster the years go by, until we reach oblivion, or whatever. And while we all have a survival instinct, it takes more than survival to fully live. Even if we think we are doing a good job of keeping ourselves alive, that doesn’t count for much in terms of what makes life meaningful, of what makes life sweet, of what keeps us from being depressed or alienated or unfulfilled, of what makes life worth living. What does sustain us is our ability to connect to others. And while I still would be squeamish about putting my body in one of those teleportation machines, I am energized by the thought that interacting with another provides an opportunity to extend our awareness in ways that give life meaning. And what we create with others will be a part of us that goes beyond our brains and beyond our petty goals and maybe that part will be all that survives when our bodies and brains have passed away.
Benediction:
We can choose to live our lives as if in a glass tunnel that leads to darkness, or we can, to at least some degree, make the walls of that tunnel disappear and live in the open air, less concerned about our own survival and more concerned with enriching the lives of others.
By John Kennison
Sunday, September 16, 2018
The study of minds and brains probably goes back to Rene DesCartes, a philosopher who was born over 400 years ago. He had an amazing ability to doubt which made it difficult for him to find something to believe in. He could imagine that he didn’t have a physical body. He could even imagine that the physical world was an illusion. But he couldn’t doubt that he had a mind because the act of doubting requires a mind. Since he had a mind, he existed. He wrote, “Cogito Ergo Sum” which means “I think therefore I am”. And DesCartes found it a comforting fact that he and presumably other humans are thinking, feeling and mentally aware beings. DesCartes went on to make a distinction between purely physical phenomena and mental phenomena –a position called “dualism” which is still hotly debated among philosophers today.
Daniel Dennett, a contemporary philosopher, disagrees with dualism. He claims that consciousness is purely physical --he does not distinguish between what we call the mind and the physical object called the brain. He says that when you look at the brain there is “Nobody home” --that is, there is no magic box, and no single place which receives information and analyzes it. Instead, information coming from our senses is distributed throughout the brain and throughout the body.
I am not going to try to settle the question of dualism versus materialism. Either way there is a mystery. Either there is a separate, mysterious world of thought, or physical objects have amazing possibilities that can produce our conscious awareness. Dennett argues that computers, if sufficiently complex, can have minds in the same way that humans do. (This principle is called the strong A.I. hypothesis, where “A.I.” stands for “Artificial Intelligence”.) Whether we choose to believe in dualism or in the strong A.I. hypothesis or in some other explanation, our consciousness is an awesome feature of our human life, that we usually take for granted.
Douglas Hofstadter is a materialist philosopher and a friend of Dennett’s. Hofstadter wrote a book called, I am a Strange Loop, (soon, I will give you a clue as to why Hofstadter thinks he is a strange loop). The book ties the concept of consciousness to the notion of a self and gives a fuller explanation of how a machine could become conscious. To start with, it has to have and to work with a concept of itself. A thermostat is a simple, purely mechanical object that doesn’t seem to think at all and certainly has no need of a sense of self. So it can’t be conscious. Even a computer that does the accounting for a large corporation might just be a large, non-conscious number cruncher which doesn’t need or use any concept of itself. How about the computer inside a self-driving car? Well it depends on how it’s programmed. The car may take a lot of measurements then use a formula, that humans have worked out, to see how hard it should apply the brakes (or the accelerator) and to find the precise angle for the position of the steering wheel. Such a car would just be another number cruncher and would not be conscious, by Hofstadter’s criterion. But what if we humans got lazy and didn’t want to go to the trouble of providing the car with the formula.
Could we devise a car that would work out its own formula? I think we can, but when the actions of the car are based on a formula, and the creation of the formula is itself an action of the car, there can be unintended consequences: We have created a loop and it is well-known that some loops (called strange loops) can exhibit unexpected behavior –sort of like the behavior of conscious beings. And that could be dangerous. Imagine such a car in the garage, dreaming of how nice the Massachusetts Turnpike is, then noticing that someone left the garage door open. The car might consciously back out of the garage and head off to the wide, inviting lanes of the Mass Pike.
Next Hofstadter asks an innocent sounding question: Suppose we could travel at the speed of light by using a teleportation machine, which scans us, makes an exact copy of every cell in our body and radios this information to another location where our body is reconstructed. But, suppose the machine destroys our original body. Is the process safe? Should one take advantage of it? I thought I knew the answer to that one. If my consciousness is a physical thing, and if my physical body and therefore my brain are destroyed that would mean the death of me, the death of my concept of myself and the death of my consciousness. I would never experience moving at the speed of light. But Hofstadter goes on to imply that those who give this smart-aleck answer are “Cartesian Egotists”. One of the pitfalls of DesCartes’ theory of duality is that we might be tempted to believe that the only thing that matters is what happens in our brains. But our mental awareness includes the stimulation we get from interacting with nature and with others.
We are not one-person shows --our brains can, and in some sense must, exchange information, motivation, and spiritual uplift with others. We must even take risks to connect to others—far too often, we make the mistake of being more protective of ourselves than is good for us. Focusing on ourselves can give us goals in life that lead to worry, depression and a sense of alienation. Our brains and minds tend to bond with other brains to form social groups, family groups, and spiritual groups. Could these groups become conscious? Sometimes we seem to sense the spirit of a group —could this be an indication of group consciousness? There is evidence that groups sometimes make better decisions than individuals. And groups do seem to think as suggested by the term “Group-think”. But some researchers in group dynamics report that group-think often represents the views of the group’s leaders. I don’t know if group consciousness exists –but maybe a better question is how do we keep our individual minds from being overrun by group-think or by the thinking of dominant people we interact with? As UU’s, I think we do a good job of respecting everyone’s freedom to think differently from us. And sometimes we can go beyond mutual respect to the ability to cooperate and to even make deeper connections to people with radically different ideas.
Even our individual brains are combinations of a left hemisphere and a right hemisphere that have, hopefully, learned how to cooperate. When the tissue that connects the hemispheres is cut, cooperation sometimes breaks down. One person whose brain hemispheres were disconnected found it hard to shop in a supermarket. When her right hand put an article into the basket, her left hand, controlled by the other hemisphere, replaced the article back on the shelf. Another person found herself slapped by her own left hand every time she used an expletive. The right hemisphere controls the left hand but does not control speech. If the right hemisphere is offended by the speech coming from the other hemisphere, it can normally register its displeasure by sending a message of disgust along the tissue that connects the hemispheres. If that tissue is cut, the right hemisphere needs another way to register its objections. But in most cases the two hemispheres figure out a way to cooperate even when the connecting tissue has been cut, and the two hemispheres can create an overarching consciousness.
Abby and Brittany Hensel are a pair of Siamese twins who occupy what looks like a single body with the two heads. But they can make that body walk and run, they can ride a bicycle and type on a keyboard, coordinating all of their fingers. They can drive a car even though each brain controls only half of the body and only half of the car. The spiritual lesson is that human beings have an amazing capacity for cooperation. And we deeply enrich our lives by giving of ourselves to the people we meet—by going beyond cooperation to connection. And how worried should we be about taking a trip in that teleportation machine? The philosopher Derek Parfit puts it this way:
My life seemed like a glass tunnel, through which I was moving faster every year, and at the end of which . . . was darkness. When I changed my view, the walls of my tunnel disappeared and I now live in the open air, less concerned about my own life and more concerned about the lives of others.
Parfit’s glass tunnel reminds us that the older we get, the faster the years go by, until we reach oblivion, or whatever. And while we all have a survival instinct, it takes more than survival to fully live. Even if we think we are doing a good job of keeping ourselves alive, that doesn’t count for much in terms of what makes life meaningful, of what makes life sweet, of what keeps us from being depressed or alienated or unfulfilled, of what makes life worth living. What does sustain us is our ability to connect to others. And while I still would be squeamish about putting my body in one of those teleportation machines, I am energized by the thought that interacting with another provides an opportunity to extend our awareness in ways that give life meaning. And what we create with others will be a part of us that goes beyond our brains and beyond our petty goals and maybe that part will be all that survives when our bodies and brains have passed away.
Benediction:
We can choose to live our lives as if in a glass tunnel that leads to darkness, or we can, to at least some degree, make the walls of that tunnel disappear and live in the open air, less concerned about our own survival and more concerned with enriching the lives of others.
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