Great Illusion

by Paul Singh

  Science Literacy Books

  www.scienceliteracybooks.com

  Copyright © 2016 Paul Singh

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  No part of this book may be translated, used, or reproduced in any form or by any means, in whole or in part, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage or retrieval system without express written permission from the author or the publisher, except for the use in brief quotations within critical articles and reviews.

  Limits of Liability and Disclaimer of Warranty:

  The authors and/or publisher shall not be liable for your misuse of this material.

  The contents are strictly for informational and educational purposes only.

  Printed and bound in the United States of America

  ISBN: 978-0-9970541-2-5

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2015919226

  Illustrations by Mike Krome

  Dedicated to my wife, Gina and my children Ethan,

  Benny, and Sophie. Thank you for tolerating my

  insanity and loving me nonetheless.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Preface

  1. Only God's Will Who Am I?

  What is a Brain?

  A Uniquely Special Brain

  Minding the Mind

  How special are You?

  2. The Myths of Free Will, Consciousness and Self Living with Myths

  My Rendezvous with Truth

  Our Brains and Our Beliefs

  Consciousness of Dreams

  Wakeful Consciousness

  Believing is Seeing

  Attention

  Deceptive Memories

  Our Emotional Needs

  Cultural Delusions

  Our Cognitive Biases

  Statistics, Probability and the Brain

  The Myths of Free Will, Consciousness, and the Self

  Conclusion

  3. No Consciousness but Brain Exploring Consciousness Using Science

  The Conscious Brain

  When the Brain produces Consciousness

  What is Consciousness For?

  Evolution and Consciousness

  Inventing Consciousness

  4. No Self but Brain Finding an Identity

  Imitation Isn’t Just Flattery

  Discovering Our Selves

  The Story of Our Lives

  Living Self-lessly

  5. No Free Will but Brain Activity Freedom to Do Otherwise

  Freedom from Reality

  Freedom from Reasonableness

  Freedom is More than a Feeling

  Freedom from One’s Self

  Free Will and Morality

  6. The Quantum Myth of Free Will

  About the Author

  PREFACE

  I do not know of a book for a general readership that takes a direct stance on the identity of mind and the brain from a strictly scientific standpoint. Yet I will be the first one to admit that the debates about the nature of free will, consciousness, and the self are far from over. It is not, however, because we don’t know the answers, but because we are not at a stage of human evolution and progress yet for people to accept such radical ideas. Such truths are scary in the sense that they undermine our ordinary and commonsensical beliefs about human nature and seem to threaten values that we hold dearly—one of the most important of which is moral responsibility. I believe, however, that the truthfulness of a fact should be judged on its own merit rather than based on its social and emotional implications for the well-being of an individual or society. Truth should be acknowledged first and then solutions sought that will be implemented in light of the good and bad that truth has revealed, not the other way around. Truth is about truth and not about convenience or about making us feel good about ourselves.

  The conclusion that mind is identical to the brain is based on extensive brain studies conducted by thousands of neuroscientists over the last few decades, and my own experiments on consciousness in my personal lab agree with the scholarly consensus. The hypothesis that the brain is identical to the mind is what Francis Crick calls an “astonishing hypothesis,” and it is astonishing. Neither consciousness, free will, nor the self can exist independently of the brain. None of these entities has its own existence without the brain. This view is the overwhelming consensus in the scientific community. Once we understand that certain scientific principles undermine the widely held concept of “coherent consciousness,” the entire house of cards of free will and the self also collapse. Unfortunately, most people in the general population hold a very different view.

  Our understanding and appreciation of what most people refer to as “free will, “consciousness,” and the “self” is at the same stage of human progress that the theory of evolution was at the turn of the twentieth century when the theory of evolution was still being attacked by many scientists of the day. Yet it won out in the end—at least among the scientific community. There are, of course, millions of religious people in the United States who still don’t accept Darwin’s theory of evolution. It was only a matter of time before the new sciences of molecular biology and genetics confirmed Darwin’s theory of natural selection. And the same goes for the ideas presented in this book—all of which depend on the basic insight that the brain is identical to the mind. Every day that passes brings further scientific confirmation that the brain is identical to the mind and that free will, consciousness, and the self are illusions. As time goes by, the public (or at least most of the public) will come to accept these startling claims. This public acceptance will not, however, come from the new discovery of some new genius like Isaac Newton, but from the accumulated research of thousands of neuroscientists throughout the world.

  My life-long research has confirmed what modern science has shown—that free will, consciousness, and the self are illusions. I realize that science cannot yet answer all our questions, but science is the only reliable way to know what we know. All scientists know that scientific knowledge is provisional. But they also know that the methods we use to prove or disprove theories are the only dependable methods of understanding our universe. All other methodologies of learning, while appropriate to employ in situations when science cannot guide us, are inherently flawed. Reasoning alone—even the reasoning of great intellects—is not enough. It must be combined with the scientific method if it is to yield genuine knowledge about the universe.

  What persuades most people has little to do with the logical and scientific support for a claim. Most people, including philosophers and the so-called skeptics themselves, become persuaded not by scientific evidence but by emotional and non-evidential aspects of arguments. Before modern science turned its attention to the brain, it was very reasonable to believe in the independent existence of consciousness, free will, and the self. But given what science now tells us about the mind, it is no longer reasonable to believe that consciousness, free will, and the self exist independently of the brain. Such beliefs are superstitions—and superstitions are often accompanied by religious beliefs (in the immortality of the soul, for example). Superstitious and religious beliefs are examples of what Daniel Kahneman calls the “framing effect.” Framing effects refer to the different ways we have of presenting the same information to evoke different emotions. What is so special about the scientific method is that it is the only reliable way to keep emotions out of the picture and get us as close to the truth as is humanly possible. The framing effect is important in medicine, media, and politics—areas in which people are confronted with controversial issues where the framing of the issue makes all the difference. The goal of science is to be as objective as possible and not to manipulate the data through clever framing devices.

  Traditionally, religious and philosophical
concepts of free will, consciousness, and the self have been the exclusive concerns of philosophers. This is unfortunate because it is science, not philosophy, that will ultimately give us answers to these questions.

  Most of our beliefs are formed not by rationally considering the evidence for and against them, but by subconscious absorption of input from our environment, including all the non-rational components of our experience. Thoughtful reflection, comparison, and assessment of the data—the principle activities of scientific approach to arriving at conclusions—play little or no role in the acquisition of too many of our beliefs. Even scientists can become the victims of irrational and superstitious beliefs when they fail to exercise their critical thinking skills by being sufficiently skeptical.

  Many books on the mind-body problem are really nothing more than self-help books and offer little genuine information on how the brain really functions. This book is definitely not a self-help book. It is a book that explains the scientific evidence for thinking that the mind is identical to the brain (including the central nervous system).

  Many popular books have been published recounting the amazing discoveries about the brain in the last few decades. So why another one? The reason I wrote this book is to provide the general public with an accurate and accessible account of recent discoveries about the brain that provide overwhelming proof that free will, consciousness, and the self are illusions. My book is thus meant to be both explanatory and argumentative at the same time. This is something, I believe, which distinguishes my book from most of the popular books on the brain. In this book I will clearly state and defend the naturalist view that consciousness cannot exist apart from the nervous system, that there is no such thing as a unified and nonphysical self, and that free will is an illusion.

  My purpose in this book is to inform the reader about the brain and its operations without technical language, and to surprise the reader with its message that life goes on just fine without the need for philosophical and religious superstitions associated with the ideas of free will, consciousness, and the self. I hope that this book will contribute to a better understanding of the human brain—an understanding that is essential to an effective criminal justice system and, indeed, to effectively functioning institutions of all kinds. I am convinced that the survival of our species depends on our developing a genuinely scientific understanding of the workings of the human brain. Once we understand how the brain works we can work with it, not against it.

  Let us briefly define what I mean by free will, consciousness, and the self—the three great illusions produced by the brain. By consciousness, I am referring to the qualitative aspect of experience that everyone is aware of upon awaking from a deep sleep. There is a nearly universal consensus on the core definition of consciousness as first-person subjective experience. Consciousness, in other words, is what it is like to be someone or something. A rock has no consciousness because a rock has absolutely no first-person subjective experience. Dogs and cats obviously have consciousness, but once we get to ants or spiders it is difficult to know one way or the other. But there is no good reason to believe that they don’t.

  The point is that consciousness is any qualitative first-person experience. The feelings that you get when you pinch yourself, drink a glass of water, or feel bored are examples of consciousness. Consciousness is certainly a fact (you who are reading this sentence are obviously conscious at this moment), but modern brain research suggests very strongly that consciousness cannot exist without a brain. Rene Descartes was wrong; consciousness is not a mental substance that exists independently of material substance.

  Traditionally, the questions of free will, consciousness, and the self have been the concern of philosophers, not scientists. Philosophers and theologians have been arguing about these questions for millennia and have failed to find answers. Although it is correct to say that we have barely touched upon the perplexing complexity of the human brain, we have come far enough in our understanding that we can declare with confidence that these three entities—free will, consciousness, and the self—do not have any independent existence of their own independent of the human brain. Their illusory existence is dependent upon the brain just like a mirage is dependent upon the brain and possesses no independent reality of its own.

  The explanation of these three illusions lies in our evolutionary past, embryonic and child development, and, most importantly, in the human brain. It turns out that these illusions have been necessary all along because they clearly had survival advantage for our species. This story must be traced all the way back to when DNA replicated for the first time, and conferred on its duplicated copy a sense of being an autonomous living thing. Imagine a bacterium being able to sense itself as distinct from the other bacteria in order to ward off competition or predation. As evolution gave rise to more sophisticated organisms, the sense of individual identity also became more refined, culminating in the “souls” and “spirits” of humans, billions of years later. Living organisms developed a clearer sense of individual identity which distinguished them from the other organisms and gave them a better chance of survival. A sense of “self-identity” is not unique to humans; it existed in living organisms throughout billions of years of evolution and is a distinctive feature of the life on earth. This sense of identity reached its culmination in human beings. In this regard, the self was produced by a very prolonged neuro-behavioral evolution that has been taking place over billions of years. Human language undoubtedly played a vital role in the development of our sense having a self and a coherent consciousness.

  Consciousness does not imply the self-consciousness of a person, but anything that is self-conscious is obviously conscious. Human beings are conscious and self-conscious. Dogs and cats are obviously conscious but it is doubtful whether they are self-conscious. Some argue that to be self-conscious one must possess a sense of having a “self” and it is difficult to know if dogs and cats have a sense of self independent of their conscious experience. Modern brain research also indicates that the self, like consciousness, cannot exist separate from the brain. When we die the self dies too because there is no self separate from the complex neuronal activities in the brain. It is an illusion to think that consciousness and self-consciousness exist as mental entities independent of brain processes.

  Neuroscience is still in its infancy stage of figuring out how the brain generates consciousness and self-consciousness, but we know it is done all the time. The definitions of consciousness and self should be discussed together because there are so many similarities and overlaps between the two. The concept of the self (sometimes also called soul or spirit) is a broader concept than that of consciousness in that it includes the idea of consciousness. While consciousness may be an inherent part of the self, it is not identical to the self, although these terms have been sometimes used synonymously in Hindu religious and philosophical texts. These terms have also been used synonymously with the concept of “mind.” Some cultures and religions consider mind a separate entity from soul or consciousness. These definitions have varied, somewhat, in the history of different cultures at different times, but they have always overlapped in that they share some essential descriptive components. Definitions vary from culture to culture, from religion to religion, and from person to person. Terms are often used loosely by philosophers and theologians.

  Discussing so many variations of so many definitions, therefore, is not very useful and can be confusing. What is more productive is to focus on what is common and most fundamental to these definitions. When I use the term “the self” I am referring to the commonly held view, (Which finds its most forceful expression in Descartes), that each of us is essentially an “I” that exists independently of the brain and that can survive death. It is the view that underlies that conviction that when the body dies there is a “soul” or “spirit” (the real “I”) that survives death. My body will die, but I (the real me, the “self” that has experienced joys and sorrows and dreams and thoug
hts and so much more) will survive. The vast majority of people believe that there is such a self or soul, but such a belief contradicts the findings of modern science.

  The self has been looked upon by most religious cultures as an immaterial entity that exists inside all of us and that can exist even when the body dies. The fact that we have one body, leads us to think that we have one self—but this is an illusion. Moreover, this self that we think we have is understood as remaining the same self over time. And it is this permanent self that has consciousness and free will. This traditional view of the self as a mental substance that has conscious experience and free will and that continues to be the same self over time was rightfully rejected by John Locke several hundred years ago. Locke argued that the self does not have consciousness but is nothing over and above our experience of the continuity of consciousness. For Locke, the key to self-identity is memory. The self does not have memory; rather, it is memory (our memory of previous moments of consciousness) that constitutes our very “self.” Locke’s insight into the fictive character of the self agrees with the findings of modern psychology and neuroscience.

  Some philosophers and religious thinkers have also distinguished between consciousness and self in suggesting that animals can also have consciousness but only humans can have a self. Some have even argued that plants are conscious. If, they say, you were to watch the life of a tree or a parasitic plant in a high speed film, it would be clear to you that these plants are aware of their environment in the same way as we humans are. They seem to be communicating, exchanging information, cooperating with the other plants of their like, and moving just like us. It is not obvious to us because they move very slowly compared to how we live our lives. Hindus, Jains, and Buddhists have believed that souls are present in all animals and can transmigrate from one species to another.