Recently on BreakPoint, John Stonestreet said, “you are your body.” Meaning that we Christians understand that the human person is an embodied being; our bodies aren’t prisons we escape at death. He was right, of course. I say this because I don’t want you to misunderstand what I’m about to say: You are NOT your brain.
Let me explain. Much of modern science uses sloppy language that seems to attribute personhood to the central nervous system, conflating matter with mind, electrical signals with thoughts, and tacitly denying free will and even consciousness. You hear it every time a speaker at a TED conference or a host on the Discovery Channel talks of our brains “wanting,” “thinking,” or “deciding” things.
As Michael Egnor writes at Evolution News and Views, this is a “mereological fallacy,” the error of ascribing to the parts what only the whole can do. For example, stomachs do not eat lunch. Neither do fingers perform sonatas. People do these things. “The brain is an organ,” writes Egnor. “[it] floats around in spinal fluid inside the skull.” It is not a person. And therefore, it is not you.
But try explaining that to the New York Times. Citing a talk by Princeton neuroscientist Michael Graziano, the Times takes up the tired refrain that consciousness is just an illusion produced by the brain, “a con game the brain plays with itself.”
Our very sense of self, the Times rhapsodizes, that “ghostly presence” inside our heads, is just so much “data processing.”
“The machine mistakenly thinks it has magic inside it,” Princeton’s Graziano is quoted as saying.
Continue reading BreakPoint – New Science Trends: Why Human Beings are More Than Our Brains
