Let me lay out the chain of reasoning that drives this challenge.
It starts with accepting the reality of this physically evolving Earth around me. I know I’m not imaginative enough to conjure up this vision of the miracle planet I live on. Seems to me, it has to be one or the other. If it’s real, it goes back billions of years, and evolution actually happened one day at a time.
Once that’s out of the way, the rest ought to be easy. Evolution, that is — change over time. First Earth, geology, and chemistry, working together with time — lots of time.
Then geology and chemistry figured out how to harness electricity, via the Krebs cycle and such.
I believe it’s honest to suggest this is the birth of biology. By and by, chemistry, geology, and biology created ever more complex “electrified” molecular components — that is, molecular biology — eventually figuring out how to colonize themselves. Up to here, it’s all pretty much spontaneous electro-magnetic interactions.
About the same time, that is, four billion years ago, something else astonishing happened. “Membranes” started showing up. I believe it is reasonable to suppose that this is where “awareness” made its first appearance. The membrane must know what belongs on the inside — and how much of it — also what needs to be excreted. It must also know what to allow in and how to keep the whole cell on an even keel, so to speak.
With growing complexity, sensing, processing, motion, and strategy become increasingly important. And we haven’t even made it out of the microscopic scale.
As creature bodies become ever more competent at basic survival functions, they have an increasing amount of processing space and energy available for doing more. We come from a line of animals with increasing skills, physical and mental. Consider our mammalian forbearers with their family bonds and ability to communicate and cooperate with each other. We are a continuation of that trajectory and gene pool.
This brings us to the title question and why I suggest that searching for the mind within the brain is a dead end.
Body + Brain + Interaction (interior & exterior) = Mind (consciousness).
Remove any of those and consciousness collapses. What are we left with?
A realization that our consciousness is best understood as an interior reflection of our body dealing with life. (See Solms, Damasio, Sapolsky, Wilson-Sloan, etc. for details.)
Everything we know and experience is filtered through our body and its many sensing organs and systems. Our body is the only connection to the physical world we have — be it a calculator or a lover. Our body is the instrument through which we present ourselves to the world, and our physical self is what the outside world is looking at and talking to.
Scientists have shown us how our senses work in excruciating detail. Our brain may be our central processing organ, but within our body scientists have discovered other discrete information processing centers, along our spinal cord; in our guts with the enteric nervous system; our immune system’s cytokine signaling; and the heart’s sinoatrial node.
Not to be overlooked is the newly recognized functions of fascia, the connective tissue between muscle bundles that sports curious communication channels running throughout our musculature, communicating with itself, and reporting — helping our brain know what our body is doing.
It’s mind boggling, and I bet I’m missing some, and that scientists still have some to discover.
When it comes to understanding the so-called “hard problem of what gives rise to subjective, qualitative experience,” we need to realize that it takes a whole lot more than simply a brain to create an experience. It requires a holistic, spot-on biological symphony.
The bat feels like the bat, and being there feels different from looking at the postcard, because it’s a whole-body experience — a series of momentary, unique, vital connections to the living experiences as they race through your living body.
Mind is the product of the entire body-brain system interacting with the living moment, interior and exterior. What else can it be?
Philosophically fixating on the brain as the source of consciousness feels to me like a reflection of our own all too human self-absorption, and it is emblematic of our general disconnect from the rest of this planet Earth that created us to begin with.
This is a good place to put in a plug for appreciating the Physical Reality–Human Mind divide, along with its cascading implications. Seems to me it’s a first-base concept, a prerequisite before the rest of our human condition can start making rational sense. Then we can start taking responsibility for the consciousness that our evolved biological body produces.
What do you think?
Thank you for your time and I hope interest.
