The Mind

Can the Mind Really Be Just a Shaddow of the Brain?

Now what about the notion that our conscious awareness is merely a shadow of the real activity of the brain that is doing the actual work, that consciousness itself is not significant? If consciousness mirrors in some fashion the physical activity of the brain, then that activity must somehow resemble consciousness. There must be one-to-one parallels between what physically happens in the brain and what happens in our minds.

The first and obvious difficulty is that there is nothing in the world of physical law as presently understood that in any way resembles the peculiar kind of unity of diverse elements that is characteristic of consciousness. But there are other difficulties as well.

Remember that if consciousness changes the world the way common sense imagines it to, it requires value, awareness and agency. Value must act through awareness. We must not only feel pain, for example, but have an awareness of what is causing the pain and how to avoid it. We must be aware of the world around us. How does that come about?

Our awareness of the outside world is almost certainly indirect; the view known as naïve realism is not correct. Naïve realism holds that we directly perceive objects in the outside world; the contrary is that the actual object of perception is a construct in our own minds—in our brains. The reasoning is that science teaches us that information in the form of light waves and other impulses sent out from (or reflected from) things in the outside world, and the things themselves, are what is conveyed to our brains. It is not reasonable to believe that our brains then reach back out to somehow capture those things themselves.

Bertrand Russell provides an excellent presentation of this argument in his An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth: Naïve realism leads to physics, and physics, if true, shows that naïve realism is false. Therefore, naïve realism, if true, is false; therefore it is false (126). It is important to realize that this emphatically does not mean that the outside world does not exist, but because it declares our knowledge to be indirect and thus imperfect and uncertain, many people cannot bring themselves to accept it. It is that need for certain knowledge at work again.

We should not let this uncertainty upset us too much. Most of the time the assumption that our minds give us an accurate representation of reality serves us quite well. But it does tell us something interesting about the nature of our brains and our minds. Awareness is essentially self-awareness. If, as most people assume, the mind is identical with stuff that happens in the brain (although we are presently clueless about how that happens or can happen), then our minds (or our brains functioning as our minds) construct representations of the outside world out of the stuff of consciousness. The strange phenomenon of “phantom limbs” experienced by amputees suggests that even our awareness of our own bodies resides entirely in our brains.

So in some sense that we do not understand, our awareness is our brain's awareness of itself. But much of that awareness is either composed of representations of things not the brain or our mental manipulations of those things. What we are mostly aware of is the outside world (or rather our mind's construction of that world) and what we think about it, feel about it, and propose to do about it.

This suggests two important conclusions: first that consciousness is difficult or energy-consuming, and second that it is important to life to devote that consciousness awareness to a representation of the world around us. If awareness were easy, why would it be so limited? And being limited, why is it limited so much to representing the world outside? Even our awareness of our own bodies is mostly limited to organs that interact with the environment. We are generally unaware of other organs unless there is a problem: when something needs to be done.

In other words, everything that we know about consciousness suggests that we need it for survival. That is momentous. It means that minds change matter. And that means that the laws of physics—those governing how matter changes—are incomplete or wrong. How is that possible? We do not know. For many people it is unthinkable, and they reject it out of hand. But in doing so that they are rejecting logic and the facts, something scientists take pride in never doing.