The Atheist's Guide to Reality_ Enjoying Life Without Illusions - Alex Rosenberg [102]
Why do we all think of the location of this “I,” this self, this person as somewhere behind the eyes? A nice thought experiment (of philosopher Daniel Dennett’s) shows why. Imagine that your brain is removed from your body and placed in a vat, with wireless transmitters implanted at all the ends of all the nerves leading out of the brain. Wireless receivers are implanted in your now empty skull at the nerve endings from your body. So, your brain is still able to completely control your body. Now, your body is standing in front of the vat that contains your brain. Your eyes are open and you are looking at your brain in the vat with the antennae protruding from it.
First question: Where is your point of view? Introspection answers: It remains where it was before the brain was removed from your body, somewhere behind your eyes (even though that location is in the hollow skull). You just can’t force yourself to relocate your point of view into the vat. Second question: Are you in your brain being looked at from your point of view? That feels totally wrong, and it shows that introspection doesn’t locate us where our brain is. It locates us—our selves, souls, minds, persons—at our POV, somewhere behind the eyes.
This self is supposed to continue to exist through all the changes in our body over the course of our lives. If all those switches envisioned in movies, literature (Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, for example), and myth make sense, then the self can’t be a material thing. It can’t be a lot of fermions and bosons or anything composed of them. In fact, it can’t be anything but a geometrical point (no length, no height, no depth, no parts, no mass, no charge) perpetually located somewhere in the middle of our head. That, at any rate, is what introspection tells us forcefully and persistently about the self, soul, mind, person.
Mainly because it’s so hard to shake introspection, people have accepted the existence of the self distinct from the body practically forever and in every culture. The existence of the self was so certain that neither philosophy nor psychology, when it got going as a science, was challenged to explain how such a nonphysical self could control the physical body. This problem only gets serious once it begins to look like physics fixes all the facts, including the facts about the mind.
Meanwhile, there is a big payoff to leaving unchallenged introspection’s confidence in a nonphysical self or person: it gets us life everlasting. If introspection is right about the self, then it’s easy to show that it must be immortal and can outlive our body. This is the conclusion almost everyone has always wanted. The argument goes like this: not spatial, therefore no parts; no parts, therefore can’t be taken apart, can’t be divided into parts, splintered, crushed, melted away, evaporated, changed, harmed, nuked, or destroyed by any physical process. It’s immortal, or at least not threatened by anything physical.
Of course, this conception of the self as a nonphysical object leaves completely unexplainable how it controls, directs, or moves the body. Having no parts to rearrange makes it impossible to explain how over time each of our selves changes in moods, character, personality, wants, and values, not to mention beliefs. Change requires some rearrangement, in parts or of parts or by parts. But there are no parts to rearrange in a geometrical point.
Most advocates of the nonphysical self have been happy enough with the immortality payoff not to obsess about the incoherence it carries with it. They are not troubled by the problem of how there could be a particular thing that has neither parts nor mass nor charge, that doesn’t take up space at all, but that can change itself in the way the mind, person, or soul is supposed to change minute to minute, day by day, year by year.
Scientism tells us that all this nonspatial, nonphysical self,