The Atheist's Guide to Reality_ Enjoying Life Without Illusions - Alex Rosenberg [80]
Don’t misunderstand, no one denies that the brain receives, stores, and transmits information. But it can’t do these things in anything remotely like the way introspection tells us it does—by having thoughts about things. The way the brain deals with information is totally different from the way introspection tells us it does. Seeing why and understanding how the brain does the work that consciousness gets so wrong is the key to answering all the rest of the questions that keep us awake at night worrying over the mind, the self, the soul, the person.
We believe that Paris is the capital of France. So, somewhere in our brain is stored the proposition, the statement, the sentence, idea, notion, thought, or whatever, that Paris is the capital of France. It has to be inscribed, represented, recorded, registered, somehow encoded in neural connections, right? Somewhere in my brain there have to be dozens or hundreds or thousands or millions of neurons wired together to store the thought that Paris is the capital of France. Let’s call this wired-up network of neurons inside my head the “Paris neurons,” since they are about Paris, among other things. They are also about France, about being a capital city, and about the fact that Paris is the capital of France. But for simplicity’s sake let’s just focus on the fact that the thought is about Paris.
Now, here is the question we’ll try to answer: What makes the Paris neurons a set of neurons that is about Paris; what make them refer to Paris, to denote, name, point to, pick out Paris? To make it really clear what question is being asked here, let’s lay it out with mind-numbing explicitness: I am thinking about Paris right now, and I am in Sydney, Australia. So there are some neurons located at latitude 33.87 degrees south and longitude 151.21 degrees east (Sydney’s coordinates), and they are about a city on the other side of the globe, located at latitude 48.50 degrees north and 2.20 degrees east (Paris’s coordinates). Let’s put it even more plainly: Here in Sydney there is a chunk or a clump of organic matter—a bit of wet stuff, gray porridge, brain cells, neurons wired together inside my skull. And there is another much bigger chunk of stuff 10,533 miles, or 16,951 kilometers, away from the first chunk of matter. This second chunk of stuff includes the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, Notre Dame, the Louvre Museum, and all the streets, parks, buildings, sewers, and metros around them. The first clump of matter, the bit of wet stuff in my brain, the Paris neurons, is about the second chunk of matter, the much greater quantity of diverse kinds of stuff that make up Paris. How can the first clump—the Paris neurons in my brain—be about, denote, refer to, name, represent, or otherwise point to the second clump—the agglomeration of Paris? (Take a look at Figure 7.) A more general version of this question is this: How can one clump of stuff anywhere in the universe be about some other clump of stuff anywhere else in the universe—right next to it or 100 million light-years away?
FIGURE 7. The Paris neurons are supposed to be about Paris. How do they accomplish this trick?
There are several answers to this question we have to rule out. The Paris neurons aren’t about Paris in the same way, for example, that a picture postcard or a diorama or pop-up book’s three-dimensional layout is about Paris. They don’t in any way look like the Arc de Triomphe or the Eiffel Tower or the Place de la Concorde. They don’t have the same shape, two-dimensionally like the postcard or three-dimensionally like an architect’s model, of some part of Paris. The Paris neurons aren’t shaped like Paris or any part of it. They won’t look like Paris from any angle.
So what? The Paris neurons don’t have to share anything in common with what they