Who Are You?
If minds are brains, we need to rethink common conceptions of the nature of persons and the self. The
religious idea of the immortal soul provided an appealing picture of the self as a spiritual entity, but
overcoming the soul illusion requires a dramatic shift in how we view ourselves. The empiricist
philosopher David Hume argued that there is nothing more to the self than a bundle of perceptions, but
our thinking seems more unified than just a series of sensory experiences. Immanuel Kant sought such
unity in transcendental selves that make all experience possible, but there is no more evidence for
such entities than there is for souls. Can understanding the brain tell us anything about the nature of
persons and start to answer the troubling question of who you are?
The Brain Revolution requires a major conceptual shift about the self, from viewing our selves as
things to viewing them as complex processes. The neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux eloquently writes:
In my view, the self is the totality of what an organism is physically, biologically, psychologically, socially, and culturally. Though it
is a unit, it is not unitary. It includes things that we know and things that we do not know, things that others know about us that we
do not realize. It includes features that we express and hide, and some that we simply don't call upon. It includes what we would
like to be as well as what we hope to never become.
LeDoux describes how the brain employs both parallel plasticity, which is learning occurring in
diverse brain systems, and convergence zones, which are regions where information from diverse
systems can be integrated. This combination explains how the self can possess a unity in diversity.
Thinking of the self as a complex neural system takes us far from common sense, and further
departures are required. A full theory of the self remains to be developed, drawing not only on
neuroscience but also on social psychology, which discusses such topics as self-regulation, selfesteem,
and cultural variations in self-concepts. In Chapter 5, I will argue that full understanding of
emotions and other aspects of the self requires attention to mechanisms that operate at four different
levels, including the molecular, psychological, and social as well as the neural. The discussion of
moral responsibility in Chapter 9 will treat persons as inherently part of their social worlds,
requiring attention to social relations as well as neural mechanisms. Claiming that minds are brains is
compatible with the social character of persons and the self.
Conclusion
I may be wrong that minds are brains. Perhaps I will be amazed after my final, fatal heart attack to
discover that I can still think without my body, and will realize that this whole book has been a
mistake. Less drastically, new evidence may arise in the form of many well-controlled experiments
concerning communications from the dead or paranormal powers that cannot be explained by any
hypothesis assuming that only matter and energy exist. Then the Brain Revolution that overturns our
dualist conceptual scheme would not need to proceed, and people would be able to feel secure in
their view that there is more to us than our bodies. Religion and commonsense dualism could
legitimately survive. We would not have to give up the highly appealing conceptual scheme that offers
us immortality, a caring God, free will, and our experienced centrality to the universe.
But currently available evidence suggests otherwise. This chapter gave a quick sketch of why the
best explanation of mental processes such as perception, memory, learning, and drug experiences is
that they are processes of the brain. I refrained from going into a lot more detail about how the brain
supports these kinds of thinking because I wanted the reader to grasp the overall structure of the
argument that minds are brains. Much more detailed explanations can be found in chapters that follow
and in the extensive literature in cognitive neuroscience.
In contrast, I described the dubious nature of proposed evidence for dualism based on
communications from the dead, near-death experiences, and parapsychological capacities such as
extrasensory perception. The one serious psychological phenomenon that might seem to require
dualist explanation is consciousness, but we will see in Chapter 5 that neuroscience is beginning to
understand how brains can have conscious experiences. Thought experiments about zombies provide
no impediment to adopting the hypothesis that mental processes are brain process, nor do concerns
with the computational and embodied nature of thinking.