The Brain is Not the Self

How the brainiacs undermine themselves

Those who think, on the basis of scientific experiments, that the self is just the brain undercut themselves. By their own words they admit that what they claim to be the self has no direct contact with the world. The world to them is just images—even illusions.

You can reach out and touch the material of the physical world [… ] But this sense of touch is not a direct experience. Although it feels like the touch is happening in your fingers, in fact it’s all happening in the mission control center of the brain. It’s the same across all your sensory experiences [ … ] your brain has never directly experienced the external world, and it never will. (Eagleman 2015: 40 f.)

But that means that those who make their claim about the self would have no direct contact with other scientists, their instruments, etc. In fact, it means that they would have no direct contact even with brains, considered as objective existents. This in turn means that the “brainiacs” have no access to anything that could prove their thesis. It is a clear case of reaffirmation through denial.

Making statements about brains, using equipment, and the work of others presupposes that we have live in the world where they exist and we know it. But that-which-lives-in-the-world is the self, the bodily self. Therefore, if talk of brains is meaningful in any way, our whole person must be the self.

But what of the particular evidence offered by the brainiacs? For example, what of the experiment with the rubber hand? In that experiment, the subject places his hand under a table where it is stroked. At the same time, a rubber hand is placed on the table where he can see it and stroked to the same tempo. Eventually, the subject’s sense of his own body shifts into the rubber hand. Doesn’t that illusion say that the body-image, and thus the “body” is really “in the brain,” implying that the brain is the true self? We could just respond, leaning on reaffirmation by denial, that the brainiacs are misconstruing such experiments and leave it at that, but that would not be satisfying.

Before I address the rubber hand scenario, I will offer a general principle that covers all such situations. In her work on epistemology, Ayn Rand said that consciousness has identity (pp. 79 - 82). In other words, consciousness is not magic and it’s not a mirror of nature. The knowability of reality depends on certain mechanisms of the senses and the brain. These didn’t evolve to foil clever experiments but to help us navigate the world. Experiments like the rubber hand no more prove that consciousness and selfhood are purely artifacts of the brain than optical illusions prove that we don’t know where our home is. Hard cases make bad law.

But perhaps this is not really that hard a case. What seems to be demonstrated in the experiment is that vision dominates touch when it comes to hands. Given the importance of eye-hand coordination in which the eye leads the hand, this might not be surprising. As Alva Noë concludes about rubber hand:

Now, in one sense this is clearly an illusion. After all, you really are being touched on your right hand under the table. But in another sense there’s no illusion—or rather, the mechanisms at work in this illusion, if we want to call it that, are those of normal, successful perception. (p. 74)

Brainiacs routinely use the existence of sensory illusions like rubber hand to support their notion that the body is not part of the self. If a person can be made to feel that a rubber hand is part of their body, then we should be skeptical about his feeling that the self is coextensive with his body, leaving only the brain that creates the illusion to be the true self. In neurologist V.S. Ramachandran’s words “Your own [subjective] body is a phantom, one that your brain has temporarily constructed purely for convenience.” (p. 58) But this argument depends on an erroneous view of illusions.

As Thomas Fuchs writes:

The sensory illusions repeatedly cited since antiquity to justify skepticism are also based on the fact that perception does not merely provide “1:1 impressions” or “photographic images” of physical stimuli, but rather enables us to orient ourselves in the environment, to recognize real things, and to deal with them. Perception therefore produces, for example, constants of form or color even where the field of perception is discontinuous or distorted (for example, we do not see an inclined rectangle as a rhombus, but always as a rectangle; a red rose remains red even at dusk, etc.). It emphasizes contrasts, distinguishes foreground and background, completes ambiguous contours to form gestalten, and compensates for perspective distortions. The resulting so-called illusions are thus based on highly meaningful adaptations of perception to the requirements of a living being of medium size who is mobile and who orientates itself in the world. (p.178)

The rubber hand illusion doesn’t prove is that the brain is the self; at most it just proves that consciousness is not “pure” and godlike. But we should have known that already.

This is not a trivial issue. People who believe that the brain is the self are likely to have an unhealthy relationship with the world and other people. Fuchs calls the belief “neuro-solipsism.” (p. 148) I have not done any psychological research on the subject, but it seems plausible that any kind of solipsism will not be conducive to healthy relationships. Furthermore, based on what I’ve observed, the belief seems to entail an unwholesome pre-occupation with brain chemistry and the modification thereof.

It also seems likely that the claim would also travel with some kind of rationalism. And again, while I really do not have a robust sample to work from, my limited exposure to authors who embrace the thesis leaves me with the impression that they are glib and gleeful about shattering what they see as other people’s illusions. But that could be unfair.

In any case the brain-is-self thesis fails and should be replaced with the healthier notion that a person is a “whole-bodily” being, able to gather valid knowledge and share the world with other people. That would have to be better than believing you’re a prisoner in your own skull.