The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [59]
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The Believing Neuron
All experience is mediated by the brain. The mind is what the brain does. There is no such thing as “mind” per se, outside of brain activity. Mind is just a word we use to describe neural activity in the brain. No brain, no mind. We know this because if a part of the brain is destroyed through stroke or cancer or injury or surgery, whatever that part of the brain was doing is now gone. If the damage occurs in early childhood when the brain is especially plastic, or in adulthood in certain parts of the brain that are conducive to rewiring, then that brain function—that “mind” part of the brain—may be rewired into another neural network in the brain. But this process just further reinforces the fact that without neural connections in the brain there is no mind. Nevertheless, fuzzy explanations for mental processes are still commonly employed.
Force Mental: A Nonexplanation for Mind
When I was a psychology undergraduate at Pepperdine University we were required to take a course called physiological psychology, which today would be called cognitive neuroscience. It turned out to be a real eye-opener for me in the study of the mind because our professor—Darrell C. Dearmore, one of the clearest expositors of science I’ve ever had—bore deep into the core of the brain to reveal the foundational structure of all thought and action: the neuron. Before I understood how the neuron works, I was satisfied with fuzzy-word explanations for what was going on inside people’s heads, such as “thinking” or “processing” or “learning” or “understanding” together collected under the rubric of “mind,” as if these were causal accounts for brain processes. They are not. They are just words to describe a process, which itself needs a deeper explanation.
In the early twentieth century the British biologist Julian Huxley parodied the French philosopher Henri Bergson’s fuzzy explanation for life as being caused by an élan vital (vital force), which Huxley said was like explaining a railroad steam engine as being driven by its élan locomotif (locomotive force). Richard Dawkins brilliantly employed a similar analogy to parody intelligent design explanations for life. To say that the eye, or the bacteria flagellum, or DNA are “designed” tells us nothing. Scientists want to know how they were designed, what forces were at work, how the process of development unfolded, and so on. Dawkins imagined a counterfactual history in which Andrew Huxley and Alan Hodgkin, winners of the Nobel Prize for figuring out the molecular biophysics of the nerve impulse, in a creationist worldview attributed it to “nervous energy.”1
Inspired by Dawkins’s satirical dialogue, imagine if David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel—winners of the 1981 Nobel Prize for their pioneering research in brain circuitry and determining the neurochemistry of vision—had, instead of spending years getting down to the cellular and molecular level of understanding how the brain converts photons of light into neural impulses, simply attributed the process to force mental.
“Now see here, Hubel, this business about how photons of light are transduced into neural activity is a dreadfully thorny problem. I just can’t understand how it works, can you?”
“No, my dear Wiesel, I can’t, and implanting those electrodes into monkeys’ brains is truly unpleasant and messy, and I have the hardest time getting the electrode into the right spot. Why don’t we just say that the light is converted into a nerve impulse by force mental?”
What would force mental explain? Nothing. It would be like describing your automobile’s engine as operating by force combustion, which fails to capture what is actually going on inside the cylinders of an internal combustion engine: a piston compresses a vaporous mixture of gasoline and air that is ignited by a spark plug causing an explosion that drives the piston down thereby turning