Self Comes to Mind

to activity in a discrete brain area but rather to the result of massive recursive signaling involving multiple regions. And yet, as I will argue in Chapter 6 , the explicit aspects of certain mind contents—a specific face, a certain voice—are likely to be assembled within a particular collection of brain regions whose design lends itself to map assembly, albeit with the help of other contributing regions. In other words, there is some anatomical specificity behind the making of mind, some fine functional differentiation within the maelstrom of global neuron complexity.
    As one struggles to understand the neural basis of mind, one may well ask if the foregoing is good news or bad. There are two ways of responding to that question. One way is to feel somewhat discouraged by so much booming, buzzing confusion and despair that a clear, well-lighted pattern can ever be gleaned from the biological mess. But one might also embrace complexity wholeheartedly and realize that the brain needs the seeming mess in order to generate something as rich, smooth, and adaptive as mental states. I choose the second option. I would have a hard time believing that a discrete map in a single cortical region could, by itself, ever allow me to hear the Bach piano partitas or behold Venice’s Grand Canal, let alone enjoy them and discover their significance in the large scheme of things. As far as the brain is concerned, less is more only when we wish to communicate the gist of a phenomenon. Otherwise, more is always better.

4
The Body in Mind
     
The Topic of the Mind
     
    Before consciousness came to be regarded as the central problem in mind and brain research, a closely related issue, known as the mind-body problem, dominated the intellectual debate. In one form or another, it permeated the thinking of philosophers and scientists from Descartes and Spinoza to the present. The functional arrangement described in Chapter 3 makes my position on this problem clear: the brain’s map-making ability provides an essential element in its solution. In brief, complex brains such as ours naturally make explicit maps of the structures that compose the body proper, in more or less detail. Inevitably brains also map the functional states naturally assumed by those body components. Because, as we have seen, brain maps are the substrate of mental images, map-making brains have the power of literally introducing the body as content into the mind process. Thanks to the brain, the body becomes a natural topic of the mind.
    But this body-to-brain mapping has a peculiar and systematically overlooked aspect: although the body is the thing mapped, it never loses contact with the mapping entity, the brain. Under normal circumstances they are hitched to each other from birth to death. Just as important, the mapped images of the body have a way of permanently influencing the very body they originate in. This situation is unique. It has no parallel in the mapped images of objects and events external to the body, which can never exert any direct influence on those objects and events. I believe that any theory of consciousness that does not incorporate these facts is doomed to fail.
    The reasons behind the body-to-brain connection have been presented already. The business of managing life consists of managing a body, and the management gains precision and efficiency from the presence of a brain—specifically, from having circuits of neurons assisting the management. I said that neurons are about life and about managing life in other cells of the body, and that that aboutness requires two-way signaling. Neurons act on other body cells, via chemical messages or excitation of muscles, but in order to do their job, they need inspiration from the very body they are supposed to prompt, so to speak. In simple brains, the body does its prompts simply by signaling to subcortical nuclei. Nuclei are filled with “dispositional know-how,” the sort of knowledge that does not require detailed mapped representations. But in complex brains, the map-making cerebral cortices describe the body and its doings in so much explicit detail that the owners of those brains become capable, for example, of “imaging” the shape of their limbs and their position in space, or the fact that their elbows hurt or their stomach does. Bringing the body to mind is the ultimate expression of the brain’s intrinsic aboutness, its intentional attitude regarding the body, to phrase it in