Self Comes to Mind

anatomy is not designed to externalize them.
    For the time being, the mental state/brain state equivalence should be regarded as a useful hypothesis rather than a certainty. It will take a continued accrual of evidence to lend it support, and for that we need an additional perspective, informed by evidence from evolutionary neurobiology aligned with varied neuroscience evidence.
    Some may question the need for an additional perspective to make sense of mental events, but there are good justifications for an added perspective. The facts that mental events are correlated with brain events—and no one disputes that fact—and that the latter exist inside the brain, inaccessible to direct measurement, justify a special approach. Also, given that mental/brain events are certainly the product of a long history of biological evolution, it makes sense that evolutionary evidence be included in their consideration. Last, given that mental/brain events are possibly the most complex phenomena in nature, the need for special treatment should not be regarded as exceptional.
    Even with the help of neuroscience techniques more powerful than are available today, we are unlikely ever to chart the full scope of neural phenomena associated with a mental state, even a simple one. What is possible and needed, for the time being, is a gradual theoretical approximation supported by new empirical evidence.
    Accepting the hypothesized mental/neural equivalence is especially helpful with the vexing problem of downward causality. Mental states do exert their influence on behavior, as can be easily revealed by all manner of actions executed by the nervous system and the muscles at its command. The problem, some will say the mystery, has to do with how a phenomenon that is regarded as nonphysical—the mind—can exert its influence on the very physical nervous system that moves us to action. Once mental states and neural states are regarded as the two faces of the same process, one more Janus out to trick us, downward causality is less of a problem.
    On the other hand, rejecting mind/brain equivalence requires a problematic assumption: that somehow it would be less natural and plausible for neurons to create mappings of things, and for these mappings to be fully formed mental events, than it is for other cells in the organism to create, for example, the shapes of body parts or to execute body actions. When cells in the body proper are placed together in a particular spatial configuration, according to a plan, they constitute an object.
    A hand is a good example. It is made of bones, muscles, tendons, connective tissue, a network of blood vessels and another of nerve pathways, and several layers of skin, all put into place according to a specific architectural pattern. When such a biological object moves in space, it performs an action, for example, your hand pointing to me. Both object and action are physical events in space and time. Now, when neurons arranged in a two-dimensional sheath are active or inactive according to the inputs they receive, they create a pattern. When the pattern corresponds to some object or action, it constitutes a map of something else, a map of that object or that action. Grounded as it is in the activity of physical cells, the pattern is just as physical as the objects or actions it corresponds to. The pattern is momentarily drawn in the brain, carved in the brain by its activity. Why would circuits of brain cells not create some sort of imagetic correspondence for things, provided the cells are properly wired, operate as they are supposed to operate, and become active when they should? Why would the resulting momentary activity patterns necessarily be any less physical than the objects and actions were in the first place?

INDEX
     
The page references in this index correspond to the printed edition from which this ebook was created. To find a specific word or phrase from the index, please use the search feature of your ebook reader.
Page numbers in italic refer to captions.
    abstract images, 70–71
    acetylcholine, 193 , 225
    action potential, 303
    addiction, 272, 282
    admiration, 125, 126–29
    Adolphs, R., 329 n 12, 341 n 12
    agency, 165, 185, 206 , 209, 335 n 11
    akinetic mutism, 237
    Alkire, M. T., 336 n 5
    Alzheimer’s disease, 229–33, 337 n 14
    amnesia, 237–38
    amoeba, 33, 257–58
    amygdala
anatomy, 306, 309, 311
in as-if body loop mechanism, 102, 103
in emotional processing, 112
in fear response,