The cul-de-sac of debating the identity of the mind and the brain

This post is just toying around with some ideas. I haven't worked mainly on the philosophy of mind or on folk psychology, although I have read a few bits and pieces (Sellars, McDowell, the functionalist folks, Smart, Davidson, etc.). I'm not committed very strongly to the view but it did seem fun to try and write it up quickly as a draft to help me think more on it. Comments are welcome.


There has been a really bad tendency in the last 50 years exemplified by scientists, psychologists - and some philosophers - to debate whether recent discoveries about how the workings of our bodies influence behavior (including hormones, heart and digestive mechanisms, the neural system, etc.) are really discoveries about what our mind is and how it works. This was a bad tendency in my view because it strengthened the idea that the right answer is either 'yes' or 'no'. Whereas in fact the question was misconceived and as such it has no correct answer. The result was fruitless debate in which scientists - not all of them of course only the not-so-smart-ones - were trying to show that a) when they understood how something in the body correlated reliably with some behavior they understood what has been traditionally called the mind, and b) that this showed that the mind is a bodily thing, some even saying that it is identical with the brain. Some even more impatient people added c) that due to these discoveries the job of the philosopher and the psychologist is obsolete now.

Charge c) is of course easily dismissed: besides trying to understand (human) behavior, action, the explanation and motivation of behavior, minds, etc. psychologists and philosophers - who are not the same - study a host of other things. Psychologists study group behavior, social interaction, the development and learning of children, language acquisition, and many-many other topics. Philosophers study the way in which science works, what counts as knowledge and as evidence and whether it should count as such, what is good reasoning, how we can come to know things at all, what exists, what are good rules of living together, what happiness means and what it is, and so on. What the mind is, has not been solved by any disciple yet, and even if the answer to this question would have been uncovered psychologists and philosophers would still be busy.

Of course, the question I'm criticizing was not a bad one for the reason that some people made the jump to c). Rather, it was a bad one because it made the assumption that what was meant by 'mind' was ever exactly identical with what neurology, psychology, and other behavioral sciences are giving us insight into right now. My claim is that we are understanding something new. We are getting genuinely new information, new ideas about what influences (certain specific aspects) of our behavior and how we should think about these influences and our behavior. Claiming that mentalistic terms like 'intention', 'will', 'thinking', and so on, were ever intended to describe the same as what recent research in the sciences is about is confused. Our new insights are not insights about some object which philosophers posited in earlier times. They never posited anything like that.

This confusion is easy to see if we think of the free will problem for a second. Some philosophers and scientists - again: the not-so-smart-ones - are locked in a debate. How can the will be free if there is universal determinism? If the will is not free nothing can be free, not even our will. On the other hand: if the will is not determined then does it just work randomly? That is not what freedom means either. Headache, headache either way. The least careful reasoners not only deny that there is no free will but that there is no will at all.
We have all experienced willing something and doing it. Whether that was free or not, willing is a distinctive capacity that we humans - and maybe other beings - posses. It is also certain that this capacity related to our biology - our evolution and specific material constitution - and it is different from other mechanisms which make us behave in certain ways. Nothing in this picture of having a 'will' makes it incompatible with naturalism, natural science, science in general, or even determinism. Average lawyers and judges, doctors and writers, and even compatibilist philosophers and psychologists have long ago recognized this and made use of the insight. Thanks to their hard work we now understand much more about the intricate maze of connected influences on our behavior which is human motivation, and one part of which is willing something.

Drawing an analogy with the confusions surrounding the will can help clear up the dazed picture some people have about the relation of the mind and the brain.

My hunch is - but this would require good work by historians - that the misguided debates about whether the mind is identical with some part of our body or a distinct thing, are the results of the long crusade on religion by popular scientists, such as Huxley (the older). Theses debates which go back to the 1850's, and even before that, have primarily aimed at undermining the authority and credibility of figures of the church who tried to rely on their position to justify obsolete views, and keep out of employment and influence those who disagreed with them, many of them young and talented researchers in (what became) the natural sciences. This situation resulted in a debate which had many fruitful effects. For example, it led to widespread secularization and the destroying of many harmful religious taboos, as well as a general awareness of knowledge of the natural world.
And it sadly also had a stifling effect on the mind of many scientists, philosophers, and  lay people. Many people thought as a result of these debates that all mistaken, old, obsolete ideas were de facto held by the Church or most Christians. Whenever they get the chance they try to attribute the worst and weakest positions to religion and then go on to show that those are improbable in the light of new scientific discoveries. Of course most of these champions of science don't know much about the actual work or views of either religious people now or earlier, nor about the views philosophers and other scientists hold or held in earlier ages. Some people lead their intellectual lives as if publish or perish also applied to the quality of their thoughts, and hence the more and the faster they go through ideas, the better results they would achieve.

This infatuation with the fight against religion that some science-fans are carrying on can be partly seen to be responsible for trying to adopt some primitive materialism about the mind. This impulse drives views which claim that talk about the mind is always talk about an object - whether bodily or not. This view is as rude folk-materialist-physics can get. (Funnily enough, such views show remarkable similarity to the pre-socratic views according to which everything was just earth, or just water, etc. I doubt that many pop-scientists are happy about this fact, but that's the position they've maneuvered themselves into.)
If one adopts such a view then the mind can be seen as something to be grasped similarly to the way crystals are studied by people interested in their atomic structure. Habermas pointed out a good 50 years ago that there will be a point when science will take over the role of religion. There are fans, who don't understand much actual science, or anything else, and don't like to think, and who, at the same time, love to think that they own the truth, they are the educated, the up-to-date ones, the intellectuals. Such folks have successfully swapped one ideology for the other and would probably have been the most zealous religious bigots 200 years ago. Just as some believers have very simple view about God, picturing him as some sort of caring father sitting among the clouds, many science-fans think of science as one holy method solving all problems and leading always to a single objective view. This has of course not much to do with how science is practiced. Objectivity is aimed at and desirable, but everyone knows that debate, constant advancement, a plethora of practices and methods, and piecemeal arguments and testing is what brings things forward.

Now we are getting to the good bit: there surely was a mistaken folk approach to free will which held that the will's freedom is directly opposed to determinism. And there surely was at least one one view of the mind proposing that the mind is something immaterial floating around and carrying out all the cognitive functions and maybe is the place of emotions, and so on. But being hellbent on showing that such views are wrong only shows that one can't even understand the more interesting alternatives. And vulgar pop-scientists are trying to do exactly that.
What I propose instead is to take the meaning of 'mind' to be more like the meaning of 'will'. We talk about the will when we exercise certain capacities. We also talk about willful actions, acting out of one's free will, and we have a good idea that this means that we acted accordingly to our preferences, to consciously experienced motives, after deliberating, and so on (there are many criteria and some contextual factors also matter).
We can safely venture the claim that we use mentalistic terms like desired, wanted to, intended, aimed at, hoped that, and so on if and when certain features of the situation and what we know about the agent warrant this. We rely on behavior, sometimes on knowledge of the agent or other similar agents under similar circumstances (or knowledge or ourselves), we rely on observation and what we hear about (and maybe from) the agent, and so on. There are many sources that influence whether or not we call an action intentional, deliberate, whether we say someone hoped something, or planned something, or that A believed that p.
An idea that there is some free floating mind that does this thinking and causes the body to move isn't the basis of saying these things. We don't need to postulate any entity - bodily or not - which is the mind to understand how we talk and explain each others' behavior. What we need to understand is that thinking, talking and explaining each others' behavior is a complex system of qualifying specific instances of behavior in specific situations. And this is very much coherent with the natural sciences, with determinism, with advances in sociology, anthropology and psychology and our ordinary practices of holding each other responsible.

The view I propose leads then to the conclusion that the seeming contradiction between holding that people 'have' minds is perfectly coherent with making discoveries about all sorts of bodily processes having influence on the our behavior. These two types of explanation of behavior are not in competition. The bodily explanations can help us understand something entirely new about what is going on before, during, and after our behavior. They are not the same as the brusk but functional and useful everyday explanations that we normally make use of. And their area of application is much more specific in most cases.
The everyday folk explanations use 'reliable' categories because they work and have worked now for thousands of years. We get along, manage to coordinate our behavior - we managed to establish good scientific practice, mass societies, run cities, food and other resource chains, and to confess love and tell jokes. Alone for these reasons it would be surprising to find out that the way we qualify each others' behavior using mentalistic terms is wrong.
It would be equally magical if the mentalistic qualifications that we use - many of them having been around for thousands of years - would capture exactly certain specific bodily states or things. These qualifications are applied to complex instances of behavior in specific settings. If we look at someone while they behave, find that he behaves exactly as we already knew he would, and we also find that something went on in his brain, that does not mean that what went on in his brain was what we have meant all the time by the mental terms we applied to the person. We weren't talking about brain states in medieval Europe. We were talking about behavior in context.We weren't getting right neuroscience in advance, we were engaged in a different practice. It follows, that neuroscience isn't getting right 'what'  the mind is, it is just giving us info of what is going on in the nervous system in situations which we already know how to call and to explain. What neuroscience provides us with is a very deep and valuable information of some processes sustaining what we already know, namely human behavior. The new info we get from the sciences has tremendous clinical and therapeutic potential. But this still doesn't entail that there would be anything - bodily or not - that is 'the' mind.

What we are learning now about our brains, our bodies, our behavior is fascinating and new. It is not an old, crude theory of mind, it is not a different explanation of what the mind is, or whether or not it is material or not. Anyone still thinking in these terms is embedded in an outdated and misguided discussion that was fueled by the war for resources and positions between scientists and the men of church. What is happening now is something much more interesting and stunning: we are acquiring the elements of a new way of seeing what feeds into all the actions we perform from our nervous system and other parts of our bodies. This is not understanding in the sense in which one understand another person when we grasp their motivations for what they did after they explain their reasons to us. After all, learning that a certain hormonal reaction is going on when we fall in love doesn't change the fact that we fall in love. We didn't gain a new explanation of why we fell in love. What we did gain an explanation of is what processes in the body are going on when we fall in love.

Knowing that something in the brain contributed or partially constituted the causing and sustaining of an instance of a behavior - an action of waving goodbye for example - should not come as a surprise. Exactly the opposite. Most of us always knew that our body influences our behavior in many ways. When we are tired we are impatient, when we have a bad stomach we are grumpy, when we are near someone we are attracted to we become excited, and so on. What we did not know were the details, the specific steps of processes going on. We don't learn anything knew in terms of understanding someone else and their mind when we learn that their kissing us was preceded by certain chemical reactions. Still, we learn something about what happens in our bodies when someone who loves us kisses us. And that is also very interesting and a perfectly valid subject of study.

So, one might ask, what about the mind then? How do we learn about it? Well, there is not much to learn. It is our thinking about what to eat, our deciding to go out in the evening with out friends, our focusing on which words to use in the birthday message for granny, our remembering our childhood dog, or our cooking a pasta. These are all our exercising some of our abilities. We know these abilities well. Thinking, concentrating, remembering, feeling, deliberating, weighing up, imagining someone else's reactions and so on are familiar. Science doesn't add to this list or retract from it. It can tell us a lot more about what goes on when we say that these abilities are used by someone, nor when we say that someone acted in a situation freely.
My conclusion is that there is no need for debates about whether the brain is the mind, or whether science is giving us new explanations of our behavior, or whether we have a mind, and so on. We have a mind in as much as some of our behavior and the abilities involved in have mentalistic names, and what is going on when we think these terms apply is what we learn a bit more about with the help of science. Sadly, nothing more, but luckily, this is something enormous and exciting, and this is what we should emphasize. We are learning something new.

From the banal to the sensational...and back: brain science misinterpreted

Neurology is amazing: it enables serious scientists to study the brain and its interconnections with other bodily units, the external world, its internal connections. In turn they can use this data to understand how certain disorders, diseases, and injuries affect our main neural center. These results can then be used to help create treatments, medicine, etc.

But sometimes journalists overlook the obvious and think findings about the brain also give us some important insight, some explanations of why we are the way we are as persons. And when they do this they put the cart before the horse. (Note: scientists also do this occasionally.)

See this latest piece of scientific journalism: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/02/men-women-brains-wired-differently?CMP=fb_us

One cannot help but think of the Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal's excellent comic on such cases. 

The main idea presented as a great new finding is that the average female and male brain are wired in different ways, with male brains exhibiting more connections and more activity in parts usually responsible for coordination and perception, and higher modularity, whereas on average female brains exhibit more connections and activity in parts usually responsible for social skills and memory. 

The clever scientist - Ragini Verma - then goes on and makes a claim reaching the level of a first-year Introduction to Anthropology class: "If you look at functional studies, the left of the brain is more for logical thinking, the right of the brain is for more intuitive thinking. So if there's a task that involves doing both of those things, it would seem that women are hardwired to do those better," Verma said. Don't get me wrong: Verma seems to be clever and I respect their results about the differences. It is just the inferences she and her team makes based on these particular results that I debate.

There are three major problems with all this:

1. It is not any big news that there are differences in average activity patterns in male and female brains. There were many earlier experiments (not targeted usually at this difference for its own sake) that indicated this (remember for example Baron-Cohen's work on Autism).

2. That the brain can be easily divided into a logical and an intuitive half is only true if you use very confused, ambiguous notions of logic, intuition, and emotion. People doing serious work on theoretical or practical reasoning, on belief formation, on emotions, or on plan formation all know that there are many-many systematic rules involved in all of these processes and activities. It is not the case, as laymen usually suppose, that emotional reactions are unsystematic. It is also not the case that you can think 'anything', or that the decisions which you make aren't regulated by several steps of filtering in different pieces of information (perceptual inputs, preferences, risk assessments, etc.). Strictly speaking, there is nothing unreasonable or irrational going on in these processes.

How can we then make distinctions between them? Based on their functions. Where do we get the labels for the functions and the ideas for how they work? From everyday, folk psychology. And if you carve up your brain based on which parts realize these functions you will end up with a picture of the brain as doing exactly what people thought it is doing. ("Oh my god, it really is thinking!") This leads us on to my last point.

3. If you use folk scientific concepts to identify brain activities you have zero reason to be surprised when you discover that woman and man are like what we think woman and man are. Why so? Because our everyday views are largely correct (largely means that on average they can be applied successfully more than with bad results). That they are correct does not show that they are natural, or that it is good that things are this way. Feminists think it isn't, and they seem to have good reasons for this. Also, it does not mean that from women exhibiting more emotional reactions it follows that their decision making is more influenced by emotions than men's. This is an inference not warranted by the thesis that more emotional reactions can be observed in female behavior.

"So what," you might say "the results are still interesting". After all our stereotypes are confirmed. Maybe we are right and man and women are just naturally different exactly in the ways in which our second-half of the twentieth century stereotypes suggested. The experiment was done on young people (between 8-22 years old) so you could think cultural influences cannot have a very significant effect at that age.

Not so fast. This concept of 'natural' is highly problematic. The way we lead our lives nowadays is in no sense like what it was when our body (including our brain) reached its current level of evolution (of course evolution is going on, but not much changes in evolutionarily short times, like a couple of thousands of years). So, what our brain functions show isn't behavior that is natural in evolutionary terms, since we do not live according to our most basic behavioral patterns that were successful two-, five- or ten-thousand years ago. They show what was successful in the past, in very different environments and for very different lives. Surely no one advocated that just because some of the major evolutionary changes took place in our brains a few thousands (or tens of thousands of years ago) we should live the way we lived then.

The other thing is the studied age: by the age of 8, culture weighs in massively in the behavior and development of people. Many people working on child development show that after 5 the personality is pretty much in place. Studies about implicit gender bias show that at 5-6 years of age children are already affected by gender role stereotypes. So, the functional differences can be in part the sign of very flexible young brains working in different ways when exhibiting behavior appropriate to the different gender roles according to which they have developed. The functional areas responsible for certain ways of thinking and behaving in girls who follow the gender-roles adapted by them will be more developed than in males who follow male gender-roles and hence engage in different behavior systematically. And this is not a big finding. Anyone worth her wits could have told you this is what you will see at the end of the study. (How much money and time did we put into this research? Which useless research areas are the most expensive? Where should we make cuts?)

Of course the objection and the last question is not entirely fair. We still need lots of data about the brain in order to better understand its working. Therefore such a big scale study is useful in the sense that it gathered much interesting information that can be put to good use in research aimed at healing and therapy. It is only useless if you try to make it work as an explanation of behavior based on gender.

Note: I'm not saying there are no differences between males and females within the human species with a biological basis, or that all stereotypically female values are bad, or that there might be in a society specifically female or male values, or that all traditional gender-role based identities are evil. The claim I'm making is only this: if you look at how the brains of young people work on the level involved in most of their everyday activities (higher order functions and perceptual functions) very likely you will find exactly the differences that underlie the lifestyles and roles expected from them.

The authors of the study say: "Overall, the results suggest that male brains are structured to facilitate connectivity between perception and coordinated action, whereas female brains are designed to facilitate communication between analytical and intuitive processing modes." Well, the study does not show this. But it shows that female and male brains are so adaptive that they can easily work in the ways required to lead to behavior conforming to gender roles, boys will do more sports which will develop the coordination related areas more and girl will engage in more small talk and playing directed at emotional understanding. And the realizers of different behavior are different brain activities. I would bet that the same study in 20 years would show different results, if gender roles get less entrenched.

Why scientists who say 'we have discovered free will doesn't exist' don't say anything new

The problem of 'free will' in philosophy is not about your ordinary notion of 'free', which has to do with your political, personal, cultural, etc. freedom. It is a metaphysical thesis. The problem stems from the contradiction of two views that most of us find very plausible, but they also seem incompatible. The first view is that as material beings in this universe whatever happens to us is determined by natures causal processes. The other is that we are human agents who can decide what they do - and we usually think of decision as the power to determine what to do.

The clash is this: if we are determined by previously occurred physical/chemical/

/biological/take-your-favorite-natural-scientific-level-of-explanation causes then there is no more room to determine anything.

Philosophers in general aren't committed to a soul which would exist independently of the body and therefore wouldn't be affected by natural causes. But there are some who do. Someone holding such a view would be a libertarian and a dualist.

There are also another group of libertarians among professional philosophers, who don't think we have any part which exists independently of our bodies, but our biological working is so special that it gives rise to higher order processes and capacities, one of which is the ability to reason and decide. Some people try to give evolutionary accounts of how this might have developed, how it might work. There is lots of sophisticated work done on such theories in collaboration with cognitive psychologists. These people are libertarians and naturalists.

But in fact, most philosopher think the opposite: that we are beings whose behavior is determined causally. These people can be divided into two groups: compatibilists and determinists.

Compatibilists think something like this: there is no free will in the classical sense. But the thought that there is, is so deeply embedded in our social practices (law, schooling, choosing your job, spouse, house, etc.) that there are practices that make use of the idea. Accordingly, we have to understand these practices. So, we have to figure out how we think of morality, of action, of being free and how this relates to our attributions of responsibility. There seems to be a system to it, so there might as well be some implicit criteria controlling this behavior that can be uncovered.

Determinists are usually skeptics about any form of making sense of being free (be that a full-blooded or a practice-based sense). They try to explain why we think that we are free, or how we should conceive of our behavior and morals if there really is no freedom. 

So, when scientists, neurologists or psychologists announce again that they have discovered there is no freedom don't get scared. Many of us knew long ago what they 'discovered', in fact knew more and did more constructive work than they did. And even most of the experiments carried out so far to disprove the possibility of the libertarian philosophers being right suffer from serious flaws. On this see A. R. Mele's easy to understand book which is a serious study of the experimental data on free will since Libet's experiments up to about 2008.

I personally think that despite most experiments being flawed  and quite short-sighted, there isn't much chance to prove libertarian views right. If I would have to place my bets I would argue that all behavior has underlying biological processes that realize it, and which are determined. But I also think that there is a very interesting social practice related to our evolution, our emotions, our cultural development and our higher order abilities, and the notion of free will is a component in this practice.

If you want more goodness from heavy weight clever philosophers go read a bit on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and on Flickers of Freedom. And please, oh please, do not buy the books of the Sam Harris style amateurs, who are struck by realizing the possibility of determinism! They did not prove anything new. Just realized a very-very old point of philosophy and write about it in an amateurish way.  Of course this is not to say that they are not clever people or excellent researchers in their own field. Neither am I claiming that they are bad people who want to harm anyone. They are just ignorant of a lot of important work having been done in a field that they don't know much about.

It seems today every fifth neurologist feels bound to write a book about free will. They thereby make their more clever and subtle colleagues appear in a bad light as well. Also, if you are interested in good research done on actions on how behaviors and actions are caused on the neural level there is lots of amazing stuff about it, for example here.