You Are Not Your Brain

When does personhood begin? In a recent online debate on abortion, Steven Bonnell (known online as “Destiny”), a prominent liberal influencer, posited that personhood begins “between that 20-28 week point whenever the…structures of the brain are all in place and they begin to communicate with each other such that you would have some conscious experience.”

Bonnell’s position betrays what philosopher and clinical neuroscientist Raymond Tallis has colorfully labeled “neuromania.” Neuromania operates off the premise that brain activity is a sufficient condition for understanding human consciousness. As such, what constitutes being human can be captured entirely in neural terms. Tallis (an avowed atheist) sums up the view succinctly when he writes, “‘Neuromania’ is the view that ‘we are our brains.’” It is a position he is strictly against.

It is beyond dispute that neuroscience has much to teach us about ourselves, at least insofar as we are physiological beings. Well then, how far can neuroscience take us in the quest to understand what it means to be human? Far, I suppose. But not nearly far enough. For as Pope Benedict XVI observed, “Science…while giving generously, gives only what it is meant to give.” 

Behind the reductive anthropologies that so enthrall our post-Christian culture is, ironically, the influence of seventeenth-century Christian philosopher René Descartes. Separating the mind from the body as independent but causally connected substances, Descartes held that personhood resides entirely in the res cogitans, the mind. Further, Descartes concluded that the mind “will have its principal seat in the brain.” Man, then, is a divided being. As Tallis puts it, “Cartesian dualism would seem to make us impotent ghosts in self-propelling machines.”

Following Descartes, a mechanistic conception of nature began to permeate the mind of not only the scientist but also the philosopher. Here, the metaphysical view of man was overridden by a new and updated mechanical view. Man was newly conceived as a machine—something, like the rest of nature, to be manipulated and used. 

The significance of this modern anthropological turn is tremendous. As Karl Jaspers writes,

The image of the human being that we hold to be true becomes itself a factor in our lives. It determines the ways in which we deal with ourselves and with other people, it determines our attitude in life and our choice of tasks.

Frank Herbert, the author of the acclaimed Dune saga, writes, “Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” How true. Yet, it is the belief that humans themselves are machines to be manipulated that is the real crux of our current predicament.

After the Cartesian turn, the next regression was to a “mind-brain identity theory” where mind and brain were proposed as being numerically identical. Here emerged the early sparks of neuromania. E.O. Wilson contentiously sums up the notoriety of the aforementioned identity theory in his celebrated book Consilience: “Virtually all contemporary scientists and philosophers expert on the subject agree that the mind, which comprises consciousness and rational process, is the brain at work.”

But on the contrary, it is not all that difficult to find an “expert on the subject” who would disagree with Wilson. Raymond Tallis is one. Another is the distinguished Australian neurobiologist and researcher Max Bennett. Following Wittgenstein, Bennett argues that when we invoke the mind in our speech, we tend to do so in analogical terms. We use phrases like “mind your step” (watch where you are going) and “keep that in mind” (remember that). This suggests that the mind is not one isolated “thing” like blood, or oxygen, or a neural synapse. Rather, the mind—or soul, if you like—is better thought of as “a range of psychological capacities.” Or as St. Thomas would say, a range of psychological powers and the seat of rational life. It is not itself a distinct substance as Descartes thought.

The mind cannot be “the brain,” for whereas the brain is a thing, the mind is not. More than that, he is also uniquely a subject—a person. He is self-conscious, free, rational, and thereby responsible for his actions. But he is also not less than his body. The human being is, as French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty put it, an “embodied subject.” The mind cannot be “the brain,” for whereas the brain is a thing, the mind is not. More than that, he is also uniquely a subject—a person.Tweet This

St. John Paul II sums up the significance of this reality in Love and Responsibility, writing:

As an object, a man is ‘somebody’—and this sets him apart from every other entity in the visible world, which as an object is always only ‘something’. Implicit in this simple, elementary distinction is the great gulf which separates the world of persons from the world of things.

The human being is more than the sum of his parts: he is a subjective object. Raymond Tallis marvels at how superfluous human subjectivity seems to be for survival and reproduction of an organism. Why should subjectivity ever emerge in any organism, no matter how complex its nervous system? He writes,

[Subjective] experience seems to bring little to the party…The distinct value of subjective experience—of feeling what impacts on me and feeling what it is like to be a certain organism—so that the “it is” of the organism becomes the “I am” of the person seems elusive.

Like even Tallis admits, being a subject means being unlike anything else in the world. Man senses his own agency, the responsibility that checks and motivates his actions, and the responsibility that others have toward him. He is aware that he is a body but, also, that he is more than that. And all of these intuitions lead to a certainty: that he is more than merely his brain.