Re: "Who is the thinker of my thoughts?"

216.178.212.94 writes:

A short addition to Pierre’s post.

Thinking is tough to quantify because it’s entirely subjective. That is, we only know about someone else’s thoughts if they tell us about them. There’re still many unknowns in the area, but breakthroughs with new data seem to be happening every few weeks.

So how do we know that thoughts are produced by the brain?

(1) The earliest clues came from brain damaged people. If a certain part of the brain is damaged or destroyed, we lose specific abilities. Sachs writes a lot about such cases, damage cause by strokes, car wrecks, etc. and how it changes the lives of patients. You can actually predict with fair accuracy what abilities a person will lose if you know what part of the brain is damaged. More importantly, trauma can easily produce personality changes and other effects that would not happen if thought or personality existed outside of the brain cells. Nerve cells don’t regenerate, but sometimes the brain reroutes around the damaged area and the person returns to normal. Again, a very definite correlation between brain cells and personality/thoughts.

(2) Brain surgeons accidentally discovered that if they touched areas of the brain with electricity, it stimulated memories, smells, body sensations, etc. Again, specific areas of the brain produce specific effects. There is a definite 1-1 correlation between brain cell stimulation and subjective experiences, as reported by patients.

(3) New technology allows us to see the brain at work, the actual increase in electrical and chemical activity. Researchers ask subjects to perform a task, like working a math problem, then map the brains as they work. How do we know that the brain cell activity is not a side effect of thought rather than the producer of thought? Because cell activity begins before the thoughts do. For example, if you look at your right thumb and decide to move it, your brain has already sent the signal to the thumb before the "you" that processes information decides to move it.

That inner voice that we think of as "us" is actually a construct of many simultaneous brain activities. It’s sort of like the operating system in a computer. Many programs are running at the same time, but the "user" only sees the important things. When the brain crashes, due to fever, starvation, trauma, intoxication, etc., the "user" program is the first one to malfunction and we experience some of the background programs in a disorganized fashion.

Many religions encourage their members to experience being conscious but seeing behind the "user" program. They do this by sensory depravation (extreme mediation), starvation, exhaustion, and other ways to stress the body to the point where brain chemistry is messed up, but the person is still conscious. From this experience, we get the idea of life being an illusion (the "user" program) while the "real" events can only be experienced by muting the "self"

And so on.

So where we are now in research is that we have several definite physical connections between the brain and thought production but not a single verifiable example of thought existing without a physical brain. If you with the preponderance of evidence, thought is produced by the brain.

Fred Askew 

Russell's Response