1. Steven Rose s.p.r.rose@open.ac.uk
Are you your brain?
Steven Rose

2. St. Augustine’s Questions
How does the brain/mind encompass:
Vast regions of space and time
Abstract thoughts, numbers
The idea of god
Logical propositions and false arguments.

3. Brain versus Mind? (Emily Dickinson, 1862)
The Brain - is wider than the Sky -
For - put them side by side -
The one the other will contain -
With ease - and you -beside
The Brain is just the weight of God
For - heft them - Pound for Pound
And they will differ - if they do
As Syllable from Sound
Emily Dickinson, c 1862

4. Three Neuro Decades 1990s – decade of the brain
2000s – decade of the mind
EU announces €1 billion for a ‘human brain project’ to build a virtual brain through computer simulation.
Obama announces BRAIN – a $3billion project tracking all the trillions of connections between nerve cells in the human brain (starting with mouse!) paid for by NIH, DARPA etc
Will help ‘epilepsy, depression, schizophrenia, autism, dementia..stroke, cerebral palsy….’ (and the military)

5. And the reach of the neurosciences grows ever longer
Neurolaw
Neurowar
Neuroeconomics
Neuromarketing
Neuroaesthetics
Neuroeducation
Neuroethics……….
And neuroculture??

6. But something seems to be going wrong
Levels of diagnosed psychic distress grow ever higher.
Huge scepticism over DSM5
No new drugs for depression, schizophrenia etc
Over many big pharma companies withdraw from CNS research to the safer ground of genomics
So is there something rotten at the heart of the neurotechnoscience enterprise?

7. The core assumption of modern neuroscience
Minds and consciousness are brain processes
To cure the mind one must cure the brain
But these claims are not uncontested

8. Brains and Minds: Four philosophical propositions
Dualism: Body/brain …. Soul/mind two different types of stuff
Identity: Brain/mind are two aspects of the same phenomenon
Epiphenomenalism: Mind emerges from brain
Mechanical materialism: Minds are ‘nothing but’ brains
NOTE! I am not going to agree with any of these!

9. Not all neuroscientists have been hard materialists
Descartes and the pineal gland
Sherrington’s enchanted loom
Sperry’s downward causation
Eccles and the liaison brain – the god of
the synapses

10. Some modern Dualists Edelman – you are your brain.. plus free will!
Libet - the 350msec gap and the brain’s ‘free won’t’
And some closet dualists – Dawkins, Pinker
‘only we can rebel against the tyranny of our selfish genes
‘if my genes don’t like it they can go jump in the lake’

11. 19th century materialists
Thomas Huxley: Mind is to brain like the whistle to the steam train
Moleschott, Vogt et al: The brain secretes thought like the kidney secretes urine; genius is a matter of phosphorus

12. Modern materialists Crick – ‘you are nothing but a bunch of neurons’
Kandel – ‘you are your brain’
Silva – ‘ruthless reductionism’
Gazzaniga – ‘the ethical brain’
LeDoux – ‘synaptic self’
Changeaux – ‘neuronal man’

13. And some philosophers follow suit
Churchland – neurophilosophy and ‘folk psychology’
Dennett – ‘consciousness explained’

14. Some problems for materialists
Subjective experience and qualia – how does conscious experience emerge from brain chemistry/physics
How did consciousness evolve (Darwin v Russell Wallace)
Free will and determinism – ‘my brain made me do it.’

15. But if this were true
Minds wouldn’t matter at all – we only need think brains
But minds do matter; we have self-awareness; minds have reasons, are conscious and are evolved properties of humans, with Darwinian survival functions. These are irreducible properties.
So we also have to assume that although there is a qualitative jump between us and our nearest evolutionary relatives (chimps, bonobos) that these and maybe other big brained animals have rudimentary forms of consciousness (Damasio; Nagel)

16. fMRI promises to solve the mind/brain question
Brain sites for every thought and feeling
‘A happy marriage between fMRI and experimental psychology can bridge the divide between mind and brain’

17. Phrenology – external and internal

18. ‘Psychopathic Brains?’

19. The Right and the Good: Distributive Justice and Neural Encoding of Equity and Efficiency*
Subjects making decisions re allocating meals to children in Ugandan orphanage
Quandary: to share limited food equally (equity) but inadequately, or giving enough food to chosen few (efficiency).
Result: ‘Insula encodes inequity, putamen efficiency’
*Hsu et al Science 320, , 2008

20. “Brain Fingerprinting”
“How do we determine if a person is a terrorist or spy? There is a new technology, that for the first time, allows us to measure scientifically if specific information is stored in a person’s brain. Brain Fingerprinting technology can determine the presence or absence of specific information, such as terrorist training and associations. This exciting new technology can help….
[by EEG recordings]
discover if a person:
Has committed terrorist acts
Has been trained as a terrorist
Is a terrorist leader…. (from the company website)

21. Brain sites for everything
Mathematical ability
Romantic love
Moral judgments
Voting tendency
Terrorist thoughts
Psychopathy
And of course consciousness

22. So what’s the problem? Overestimates the power of fMRI
Blood flow surrogate measure
Timescale (seconds )too long
Volume too great :50mm3 contains
5m neurons, 50b synapses 22km dendrites, 220km axons!
Mistakes activity for location

23. Romantic love, psychopathy – and a dead salmon

24. But there are more fundamental problems
These studies reify processes, thoughts and judgements – turning concepts from the social realm (efficiency, terrorism, psychopathy..) into localisable ‘things’ in the brain

25. So here’s a thought experiment
Let’s invent a cerebroscope

26. The cerebroscope
Detects the activity of every neuron in my brain millisecond by millisecond

27. The cerebroscope
So it will interpret my brain activity as Steven reading this caption, giving this seminar?

28. Or will it?

29. A more dynamic cerebroscope
Not only reads the present state of my synapses but has plotted them millisecond by millisecond from their formation.
So could you now ‘read off’ my mind from my brain?

30. I still think the answer is no
The experience may impose a unique pattern in my synapses etc, but can that pattern in turn be read as unique to the experience?
The pattern may show I am talking, but will it show the content of my speech?

31. Because But more fundamentally:
There’s more to the brain than wiring diagrams and neurotransmitters
Modulators, field effects etc
The brain is in the body
hormones, immune system
But more fundamentally:
brain and body are part of the biosocial world in which we are embedded

32. Minds are not Brains
Minds are to brains like legs are to walking. We don’t say ‘my legs are walking’ but that we use our legs to walk Similarly, it is we who have minds and consciousness, and we use our brains to think

33. Nor are our minds in our bodies (as St Augustine suggested)
Maybe as philosopher Gilbert Ryle suggested we don’t have minds (noun); instead we mind (verb).
Minding is a hybrid, not a reified brain process, though it requires the brain, but an ever-changing relationship between an individual and the physical social cultural and historical world;
Consciousness is relational, the dynamic product of present and past brain and body activity, life history and social context, a process, not a reified ‘thing.’