Who Am I and If So How Many? (5 page)

At least we have a rough idea today of how attentiveness takes shape and what happens neurochemically when we learn
something
. Technical progress in measuring devices has enabled neuroscientists to learn about these and other basic processes in the brain and clearly define the function of individual areas. Near the end of Ramón y Cajal’s life, in 1924, the German psychiatrist Hans Berger invented electroencephalography (EEG), which finally made it possible to measure electrical activity in the brain. In the 1950s, the introduction of sensitive microelectrodes refined the measuring field to enable researchers to observe the activity of individual neurons. The next step was the study of magnetic fields. Like all electrical currents, brain currents form magnetic fields. Since the 1960s, sensitive magnetic field sensors have been measuring these fields and computing the power sources in the brain, and magnetoencephalography (MEG) shows where the brain is particularly active. In the 1970s and 1980s, new methods made it possible to measure the recently discovered neurochemical processes in the brain. Since the 1990s, brain research has been able to work with beautiful color pictures of the brain. Today, imaging procedures such as Roentgen computer tomography and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) provide fantastic insights into the workings of our brains. Previously only electrical or chemical
processes could be shown, but the new devices can now measure the blood flow in the brain and furnish high-resolution images. For the first time, it is becoming possible to begin deciphering the limbic system, the seat of our emotions and feelings.

Many brain researchers are so enthusiastic about the new opportunities available to them that they believe their research will sooner or later put philosophy (and maybe even psychology) out of business. Neuroscientist William H. Calvin at the University of Washington calls consciousness ‘the Janitor’s Dream.’ To him, consciousness is a janitor who is uncomfortable being held down in ‘the dark basement of chemistry or the subbasement of physics’ and hopes against hope to emerge from this basement into its rightful place in a brightly lit penthouse. In a similar vein, neuroscientists often aim to leap up from the cells and proteins in the brain into the lofty realm of philosophy. But the jump from proteins to meaning is enormous. Even if brain research is well on its way to making sense of the centers and functions of the brain, the mechanism that produces mind, meaning, and intellect is still quite a mystery. Indeed, we know more about what we do not know than about what we do know. The more we learn about the brain, the more complex it appears.

The very personal elements of consciousness – our highly subjective experiences – remain a big mystery. Why something feels a certain way to us is hard to fathom. Personal feelings and passions cannot be explained by general neurochemical findings. Neither measuring devices nor psychological conversations convey the quality of an experience. Louis Armstrong was once asked what jazz is, and his response was spot-on: ‘If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know.’ Similarly, subjective perceptions of our experiences remain inaccessible to brain research. When jazz music is played, the MRI scanner indicates an increased blood supply to certain emotional centers of the brain, but it does not reveal how or why it feels the way it does.

Even so, neuroscience is today considered the discipline that can best reveal the foundations of our knowledge of ourselves and the
world around us. The reasons are clear: many more intriguing approaches now come from neuroscience than from philosophy. The question, though, is whether we can sort these out without the help of philosophy. Exploring the brain is a very peculiar and precarious undertaking, since it entails human brains attempting to discover something about human brains; that is, a system trying to understand itself, with the brain as both the subject and the object of the investigation. Aren’t neuroscientists doing exactly the same thing as philosophers, who have spent the past two thousand years thinking in order to understand their own thinking, only with a different method? Examining oneself with the tools of thinking and observing the process of thinking while doing so, to whatever extent possible, was long the predominant method of exploring the human mind. Its modern culmination occurred about four hundred years ago, one memorable winter’s eve …

The setting is cozy: a big, elaborate tiled stove and a
twenty-three-year-old
man clad in the heavy overcoat of an imperial soldier. We know his face quite well from a painting by the great Dutch portrait painter Frans Hals: the big dark eyes, the wide thin-lipped mouth with the merest hint of a smile, the trace of stubble, and the shoulder-length dark hair, a face as impish as it is melancholy, intelligent and lost in reverie. It was a winter’s eve in 1619, in a farmhouse near Ulm. Let us hear from the man himself:

Conversing with himself about his thoughts had a very ambitious aim. While the Thirty Years War was heating up – a war that
would lay waste to all of central Europe – this man was seeking peace, order, clarity, and absolute, ultimate certainty about himself and the world. First, he established a rule that he would not consider anything true that could not be recognized clearly and distinctly. And he cast doubt on everything that could be open to doubt. He would not trust his eyes, nor any of his other senses; it was too easy to be led astray. He groped his way forward skeptically. Even thinking could not be relied on. Maybe an evil demon was distorting his thoughts. But wait – isn’t there
something
that lies beyond any doubt? If I cast doubt on everything, he thought, I cannot doubt that I am doubting, and that I am the one doing the doubting. And if I know that while doubting it is I who am doubting, I must be
thinking
that I doubt. There is thus an undoubtable certainty, a first principle that precedes all others:
Cogito ergo sum
– I think, therefore I am! By the time the fire died down, this sentence had been conceived and expressed, and the world of philosophy would never be the same.

This man, who revolutionized philosophy one winter’s eve at the start of the Thirty Years War, was René Descartes. He came from a noble family. Descartes’ father was a magistrate who served in the parliament of Brittany in Rennes. His mother died in 1597, a year after his birth, and Descartes spent his childhood with his grandmother. At the age of eight, he enrolled in a Jesuit school – a grueling experience, but he graduated at sixteen with a splendid classical and mathematical education. The gifted student studied law in Poitiers, then enrolled at an academy for young noblemen in Paris to catch up on all he had missed out on in life. He learned fencing, dancing, riding, etiquette, and other indispensable skills, although he did not have the foggiest notion what he would do with them. (Two decades later, he would have an opportunity to put one of these skills to good use in a duel.) When he was twenty-two, eager for adventure, he entered the service of the Dutch general Maurice of Nassau, which taught him a great deal about the natural sciences, but Descartes did not think much of life in the army. He traveled aimlessly through Denmark and
Germany, then joined the army once again, this time under Duke Maximilian of Bavaria. He took part in the conquest of Prague, where he also viewed the workplace of the astronomer Johannes Kepler, which made him realize that he wanted to become an enlightener who would introduce clarity into the dark mysteries of the sciences. Brimming with self-confidence, he dreamed of a clear, logical, and ‘universal method to discover the truth’ – and he, Descartes, would be the one to find it.

In April 1620, while he was still in Ulm, the
twenty-four-year-old
met the mathematician Johannes Faulhaber and solved a highly complex mathematical puzzle. Descartes delighted in pointing out that the puzzle had confounded the smartest minds of the era. The time was ripe for him to start finding simple and elegant solutions to an array of problems. One year after his meditation in the farmhouse, he gave up life as a soldier, which he disliked, and headed to Loretta, after which he traveled through Germany, Holland, Switzerland, and Italy. In 1623, Descartes moved to Paris and established contact with the intellectual circles there. He was a frequent guest at dinner parties, but he was not particularly sociable. After several years, he left Paris and moved to the Netherlands, which boasted the greatest intellectual and religious freedom on the Continent, where he hoped to write the magnum opus he had been planning for quite some time. He had little contact with the outside world, apart from a lively correspondence, particularly with women. He funneled all his energy into his ‘Treatise on the World’ – but the work was never published. In 1633, he learned that his Italian colleague Galileo Galilei had been forced to recant his new scientific ideas about the cosmos and the world before the Inquisition. The Catholic Church was a dangerous adversary, even for a man like Descartes, who believed in God, but a relatively abstract God that he sought to prove as the highest principle. Although the Netherlands was more tolerant than Italy or France, Descartes was on his guard, continually changing his residence. He wrote studies of geometry, algebra, and physics and gained an excellent reputation as a mathematician. He
waited until 1637 to publish the book that grew out of his musings some eighteen years earlier, in which he had reduced the world to a stove-heated room and a now famous line: ‘I think, therefore I am.’ He called this slender volume
Discourse on the Method of Rightly
Conducting the Reason, and Seeking Truth in the Sciences.
Descartes took the precaution of publishing the book anonymously, but his identity soon got out. Fame was now his, but his arrogance and his deep-seated distrust made him bristle at criticism. His following books, which employed very similar arguments, provoked
vehement
opposition in Leiden and Utrecht, causing Descartes’ unease to escalate into paranoia. He had recurrent fantasies of moving to England, and he made a series of quick trips to France. In 1649, Descartes accepted an invitation from Queen Christina of Sweden, with whom he had been corresponding. But his stay in wintry Stockholm cost him his life. The queen insisted on early-morning philosophy lessons in an unheated room, and in February 1650, the fifty-three-year-old succumbed to pneumonia.

What had Descartes achieved? First of all, he had introduced a method: to accept as correct only what is proved by an unassailable case built up step by step. And he had made the ‘I’ the center of philosophy. Philosophers before him had attempted to find out how the world is ‘in itself,’ but Descartes chose a very different approach: I can find out about the world ‘in itself’ only by fathoming how it becomes manifest to my thinking. Everything I know about the world I know not by any objective bird’s-eye view, but solely by way of the thinking in my head. Friedrich Nietzsche later called Descartes ‘the grandfather of the Revolution, who granted authority to reason alone.’

Descartes had provided an answer to the question of how I know who I am: it is by virtue of my thinking. This answer was far superior to any previous one, notwithstanding the fact that Saint Augustine had framed it in similar terms back in the fourth century. Over time, however, the shortcomings in his line of reasoning began to emerge. The statement is not as devoid of preconditions as Descartes had thought. To formulate my doubts about
everything in this world, I require adequately functioning
language
. But Descartes did not open language to doubt, and he was unconcerned that words, sentences, and grammar can also mislead us. Some philosophers criticized Descartes’ failure to distinguish between logic and reason. Is something logical necessarily rational? Aren’t the two meanings being conflated? A third point of criticism is that Descartes went to great lengths to explore
thinking
, but he did not have much to say on the subject of
being
.

This last objection is precisely the point we need to probe. Descartes was an enormously influential philosopher, one of the most influential of all time. Although he was greeted with hostility at first, he came to represent many new ideas about the body, the brain, and the mind. But as skilled as he was in exploring thinking, we now recognize that his weak spot was in conceptualizing the human body. The body, he argued, is really just a useless appendage attached to the head. He got a kick out of informing his readers that bodies are a mere assemblage of limbs that add up to a mechanical device. The organs of the body, in his view, function like seventeenth-century water gardens: nerves
correspond
to water pipes, brain cavities to storage containers, muscles to mechanical springs, and breathing to the ticking of a clock, all controlled by a little man in the brain, namely the pineal gland. Explaining the human body as a physical mechanism was all the rage in the natural sciences, and Descartes was quite adept at it. Virtually overnight he became the chief ideologist of a new attitude toward the body, and when confronting his mostly religious critics he came across as rational, modern, and
progressive
. If Descartes were alive today, he would surely have become a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence – or a prominent neuroscientist.

It is intriguing to imagine how Descartes would have perceived the relationship between the mind and the body if he had lived during the twenty-first century. What would he reply to his four-hundred-years-ago self if he were now to go on a meditation retreat and undertake a clear and level-headed quest for the
ultimate certainties about man and the world? Let us imagine what would happen:

Spring
2007. A white wooden bungalow with a large front yard and lovely green lawn on the outskirts of Boston. This is the home of neuroscientist René Descartes, Jr. He is sitting in his living room near the fireplace. His attire is casual: corduroy pants, checked shirt, sweater. He leans back on his sofa and tells his story:

‘I am in the United States, where my career has taken me after France and the Netherlands. I’ve just returned from an NIH conference in Washington. The new semester hasn’t started yet, and I’m not distracted with lectures and exams, so I have the leisure time to indulge in my own thoughts. And since I have decided to cast doubt on everything that is not clear and unequivocal and not subject to full determination and representation, which is the only path to the truth, I feel compelled to start by doubting the false unsubstantiated “certainties” that philosophy has introduced. Let’s start with the disastrous separation between mind and body that my alter ego may not have invented, but did establish quite radically in philosophy. The fact is that mind and body cannot be separated, and attempting to do so gets you nowhere. The brain is not hardware that comes equipped with mind software; rather, both interact in an inseparable and highly complex manner. The proposition “I think, therefore I am” may be famous, but it has an unfortunate connotation. Not only does it say that I know about myself and my existence only by means of thinking, but it also suggests that thinking and the awareness of thinking are the actual foundations of existence. And since this thinking is supposed to take place in strict separation from the body, the proposition underscores the radical division between the spiritual mind and the biological body. No neuroscientist today would subscribe to what my alter ego wrote back then:

If this were true, the mind would be a spirit within a machine, but it is not, because there is no separate and distinct place called “mind” in the brain. That would be about as absurd as, for example, imagining a place called “university” separate and distinct from buildings, streets, lawns, and people.

‘Neuroscience has now established that neither feelings nor complex mental functions can be separated from the structure and activities of the biological organism. If they could, neuroscientists attempting to understand the workings of the mind would have no need to examine regions of the brain, mark electrical connections, or identify chemical substances. Of course one cannot claim to have identified the mind simply by pinpointing a brain region and listing a couple of substances. Human consciousness is the product of the body’s interaction with its environment. To understand our mind, we have not only to situate it in the brain instead of in a disembodied space, but also to find a way of understanding it as part of the organism as a whole. Our senses, our nerves, and our neurons all act in concert with the outside world, with what we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch. The question of how I know who I am can thus be answered along these lines: I know who I am because my senses relay signals to neurons in the brain, where they extend along complex circuits, so complex that something wonderfully complicated and abstract results: insight into my own thinking and a notion of my existence.’

That is how the modern neuroscientist in Boston sees the matter, but his worn-out predecessor from the Thirty Years War has one final ace up his sleeve: Did the neuroscientist really answer the question of how I know who I am? To fathom how my brain functions, and to describe how my senses and my neurons convey a picture of myself to me, I have to think these thoughts. All these
things, no matter how concrete, thus originate as thoughts and ideas in my head. From that point of view, there really is something to the statement ‘I think, therefore I am,’ but not because thinking constitutes my being or that the only thing that counts is thinking, which is incorrect. But it
is
correct to say that my thinking is the only window into my existence.