God Soul Mind Brain

can’t seem to help it. Somehow by his body language, or direction of gaze, or the rate of his babbling, the driver gives cues about whether he is aware of the stop sign, the pothole, the pedestrian. It is nerve wracking when he doesn’t seem to be aware of major obstacles. This experience is a familiar example of how we can build up in our minds a model of the specific items that are in or not in another person’s awareness.

    Another example is the common impression that someone is unaware of your presence. The lovelorn teenager Bill sits in class gazing wistfully at Susan. His brain constructs a model of Susan’s brain, and in that model, she is unaware of his presence. Sigh. Bill knows—he feels—her total lack of awareness of him. For all his certainty, however, he might be wrong. He is certain only because, like all of us, he has trouble distinguishing a perception from reality. How often have you been surprised to find out that someone was aware of you all along, when you were certain the person had no concept of your existence?

    On the flip side of the same example, have you ever felt that someone was much too aware of you? (Do I have food in my teeth? Is a twig stuck in my hair? Why is this person so hyper-aware of me?) You feel the awareness like a beam of energy. Of course it might turn out that he is reading the subway map on the wall right above your head. Your perceptual model, for all that it feels vivid, does not necessarily match the reality.

    When I watch a movie alone, my attention is focused entirely on the events in the movie. But when I watch a movie with a friend, the experience is suddenly different. Some part of my brain is dedicated to modeling my friend’s mind, essentially constructing a perceptual model of how she perceives the movie. Does she like this part? Is that part boring? Are the characters compelling from her point of view? My social perceptual machinery is actively constructing not just a model of her mind, but a model of how her mind models her environment.

The souls of dolls

    A friend of mine told me a story about her childhood. She had a favorite stuffed animal that she carried everywhere, talked to, and slept with. It was her companion. It had a personality and a soul to her. She went on vacation with her mother, and somehow Dipstick was left behind in the hotel. Her Dipstick was gone. (It is a heartbreaking story.) Her mother bought another animal of exactly the same make, but it was no good. It wasn’t the same. It was inert—it lacked the soul of the original. The social circuits in her brain had constructed a model of the mind, the awareness, the emotion, the personality of her friend Dipstick. Her perceptual machinery, however, was unable to attach that model of Dipstick’s soul to the new purchase. Even though the model was technically inside her brain, it could not be updated. The model was assigned to the old stuffed animal and could not be reassigned to a new one.

    I had a similar experience when I was about eight, but the tragedy had a different outcome. I had an action figure that I had made out of pipe cleaners. Its name was Mubbiton. For a while my childish world revolved around Mubbiton. I imbued him with a swashbuckling, egotistical, but all-the-same endearing personality. Unfortunately, he was accidentally thrown into the garbage disposal. I was quite down for a while. I tried making a new Mubbiton that looked similar to the first one, but it had no soul. It wasn’t the same creature. Then, already the budding brain scientist, I had an idea. I decided that Mubbiton, before he died, had invented a machine for storing his brain waves. The machine had to do with an old clock that I had disassembled and some pieces of dried spaghetti. Anyway, using the machine, I successfully transplanted the old Mubbiton’s brain waves into the new body. And presto, my friend was back. He was surprised to find himself in a new body, but overall delighted that his pipe cleaners were fresh and not so rusty. I continued to play with that darn toy for another three years before he was accidentally thrown out again. I wasn’t quite interested enough to resurrect him a second time.

    The point of this story is that my action figure had a soul, a mind, an intentionality, all perceptually real to me, and yet all parts of a model constructed in my brain, in my social circuits. Since his soul was in me, it survived the death of his body. With a bit of fantasy and