Great Illusion

by Paul Singh

  As I reach out my hand to pick up a hammer and then hammer a nail into a piece of wood, all I need to be aware of is what my hand is doing, how it is swinging the hammer, and whether the nail is going where it should go. The last thing I want to do is to be paying attention to how my brain is coordinating all this activity. That’s why there are no neurons assigned to sensing what all the other neurons are doing, why small children don’t develop self-conscious attention spans until they are older, and why humans didn’t figure out that the brains inside their skulls were so important until the medical arts were invented less than four thousand years ago. Indeed, as late as the seventeenth century Descartes speculated that thought might actually be located in the heart.

  The brain doesn’t have the job of “speaking up” and revealing what it does, and the conscious awareness that the brain does produce cannot automatically seem organic or even physical. Only through studying the brain scientifically can we explain why we aren’t normally alerted to innumerable details about what our brains are doing as we go about living our lives. In a way, projecting what is sensed and thought into an alternative sort of reality was something that the human brain had to do as intelligence grew. And that ability got strengthened by the development of language long ago, as we learned to talk about each other’s intentions, beliefs, and perspectives.

  By the time Homo sapiens emerged, the human brain had already evolved to the level where one person could understand some things about what another person believed. What philosophers call “Theory of Mind” is crucial for the high level of social cooperation we display, and probably evolved some two or three millions years ago as small groups of Homo ancestors survived better when they could anticipate what others would do. This led to greater cooperation. By being able to sense when another needed a command to get going the right way or to stop doing something that should not be done, a Homo erectus would be able to take appropriate action. Homo sapiens displays this anticipatory and guidance ability in abundance, to the point where we seem quite prescient about each other concerning a familiar group task. Recent experiments performed on elephants, dolphins, and chimpanzees show that this ability of knowing that there are other minds and taking cues from them also exists in intelligent mammals that evolved millions of years before us. The development of millions of mirror neurons may be responsible for the greatly accelerated progress that our species has made in a relatively very short time, considering the vastness of geological deep time.

  This capacity for anticipating others’ intentions and actions automatically lends itself to the common sense notion of mental perspective. People easily grasp the difference between what they personally believe is happening and what another person thinks is happening instead. Put another way, what I think is true isn’t automatically what you think is true. You might think differently than I think, maybe by knowing more about things, or less things, or by believing I am mistaken. This capacity for tracking beliefs is so important for our species that our brains have evolved to do it by acquiring it very early in life; nearly every child born in any society typically masters it by age four. Once a child has this realization about belief differences, he or she can think about what others are thinking about. I can “mind” not only what I am doing and thinking, but I also can “mind” what you are doing and thinking. Each person has a somewhat different set of beliefs and intentions from the next person, and when every human has this “minding” ability, language can provide a way for people to talk about what each other thinks. No one can literally observe what someone is thinking, or what they believe before they are asked. That’s why my estimate of what you think about matters is just an estimate, like a hypothesis.

  My “theory of mind” is hypothetical in a double sense. First I have to first imagine that you have your own intentions and ideas, and then I also have to make good guesses about what you specifically believe from situation to situation. Because people have habits of thought as well as habits of action, predictions about what people believe can be fairly accurate over time if you spend a lot of time with them. Language also lets us say one thing and think another, so monitoring each other for deception is important too.

  All this thinking about what other people are thinking and planning brings people to a point where an efficient method is needed to keep track of all this information. I have to remember not only what I think about the world but also what other people (probably) think about the world. My inventory for others’ beliefs about the world will hopefully overlap a great deal with mine (we do share the same local habitat and social life), but I cannot blindly presume that what I believe is what everyone believes. Because I can tell how I keep separate inventories of beliefs, one for myself and set of other beliefs for other people, I can also figure out that other people are all maintaining the same inventories for themselves and others. That’s why I think that you have beliefs about what I believe, and also that I think that I have some beliefs that you may not know about. Essentially, I have come to understand that you have your “minding” of things, and I have mine. Reduced to a noun for convenience, you have your “mind” and I have my “mind.”

  Language isn’t required for all this social cognition busily anticipating others’ actions based on their observed habits. But language is extremely useful for telling other people what you think about matters, and what you expect from the way others think about those matters. I can say, “You shouldn’t think that way,” when someone is going to make a mistake. Also, I can try to persuade others to agree with what I think. People can compare what they think, using phrases such as “I believe that . . . .” In the English language, there are plenty of nouns for mental entities, such as “emotion,” “belief,” idea,” and “mind.” Many languages also use nouns for these matters, but some don’t. Combining adjectives, verbs, and adverbs in various ways is quite sufficient for expressing what needs to be said about others and oneself. And minor differences in the wording can be important. I can, for example, praise the band’s saxophone player by saying “He’s got soul” or by saying “He is playing soulfully.” The choice of words cannot be taken literally and the context of the statement is crucial to understanding it.

  In some cultures, there are very few language resources available to refer to what a person is thinking about before they speak or act. The people of those cultures, like people everywhere, still have anticipations about what others are thinking or planning. However, some cultures do not have a way of saying that people have “minds,” as if all one’s thoughts and beliefs could be contained within some container or inner space. It is a peculiarity of Western languages that they happen to treat “minds” like objects. This is entirely the work of metaphor and projection. We “make up” our mind or we can “lose” our mind, and we “acquire” or “drop” beliefs like we can put coins in or take them out of our pockets. We even think that these entities have their own causal powers, as if a belief can “make” someone do something. Some cultures regard thoughts as so powerful that they can travel from person to person to control their behavior, while other cultures imagine that a person’s mind can leave the body, travel about a little, and then return to the body.

  Rather than take our own familiar linguistic conventions to be “right” and laugh at strangely mistaken or superstitious ways of other cultures, we should realize that there are many cultures just like there are many “minds,” and that ultimately it’s just a matter of having one imaginative perspective or another. Assuming that each of us has a will or a mind that controls our conduct is equally as imaginative and superstitious as assuming that each of us has an associated ghost which leaves our dead body to haunt the village. There is no need in the first place to assume that there really are entities like beliefs, ideas, and choices which have their own reality. We enjoy conscious awareness, we do think about things a lot, and we should be carefully minding what we are doing. But language cannot determine, any more than intuition, whether a consciousness, a will, or a min
d is an actual thing that exists independently of the brain.

  How Special Are You?

  You are special because your unique brain lets you have a perspective on the world and life that no one else will ever quite have, and your own beliefs and knowledge about the world have a crucial role to play not only in your life but also in the life of your society. There will never again be any brain just like yours, no one could ever acquire the same judgment and wisdom that you possess, and societies cannot function without the special talents and experiences of its individual members. You are valuable and irreplaceable.

  There are many stories, found in nearly all societies that can tell you how you are truly even more special. Whether they are embedded in traditional legends or sacred scriptures, rehearsed by village elders or preached by powerful priests, these stories have a way of conveying the notion that there must be something about you that is not merely bodily or intellectual at its core. Not only can you hear about animals or physical things having their own mentality or spirituality in such narratives, you will be informed that your thoughtfulness and personality are much more than you might have guessed, and that there is an inner self or spirit responsible for your consciousness and intelligence. However this essential core is identified and by whatever label it is named in the many languages used by different cultures all around the world, these legends and myths suggest that there is more to you than your body, and perhaps more to life than you had expected. Aspects of you will die permanently, but something of you may go on, in some form or another.

  How such ideas about a more permanent self or soul got started, we may never know for sure. Ideas about invisible matters, matters so deep within you that your own intuitions may not reveal them, which have powers to transcend bodies and even death, would require plenty of language to convey and teach. Lost in prehistoric time, the first languages must be unspeakable for us now, and we won’t be able to recover many details about what our distant ancestors were thinking. There are a few extremely old indigenous languages still spoken today, and their speakers can recite legends and myths which must go back tens of thousands of years. All of the oldest folk tales mention things like spirits, souls, demons, ghosts, and gods, and hint at the possibility of an afterlife.

  Because science arrived late to the human scene, non-scientific explanations had plenty of time to get entrenched in so many stories that humans have long been telling themselves, and the concepts in those stories got embedded in the languages we all learn to speak as children. Languages do evolve, words shift meaning, and new words substitute for outdated ones, but so much in language gets preserved across centuries. For people today, “mind” has most of the same meanings that “spirit” had millennia ago, and most people today expect mind to share in the same destiny as spirit. But what seems like undeniable common sense, confirmed by our intuitions and assumed by the ordinary words we speak, is really just a built-up web of imaginative notions that developed over the long course of ordinary human events, hardened by regular use as people lived out their mundane paths in life. Those notions and fabulous stories conveying them have made many people feel extremely special, perhaps so special that it can seem as if the whole of creation is really about them.

  Your brain is quite real. What the brain is busily doing in so many special ways must be largely hidden from awareness. Our innate curiosity can raise good questions about what is going on. After that, however, only science can responsibly investigate what the brain actually does and how it accomplishes all the special things it can do. The true story of the human brain is more amazing than anything imagined before.

  Further Reading

  Bellah, Robert N. Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.

  Ehrman, Bart D. Lost Christianities: Christian Scriptures and the Battle over Authentication. Chantilly, VA: Teaching Courses, 2002.

  Fortey, Richard. Trilobite: Eyewitness to Evolution. New York: Random House, 2010.

  Whiten, Andrew, and David Erdal. “The Human Socio-cognitive Niche and its Evolutionary Origins,” in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. (2012): 2119—29.

  Free will, consciousness, and the self are myths. A myth is a widely held but false belief, and religions of the world are primarily responsible for such folklore. Dualist philosophers have reinforced these myths over the millennia. But modern science has refuted these myths, and the evidence is piling up higher and higher every day that they are myths.

  These entities can also be considered illusory by their very nature. My personal preference is to call them “myths” instead of “illusions” because the word “illusion” can get us sidetracked into needless metaphysical subtleties that lead nowhere. Many dualist philosophers are less interested in learning from on-going research in the natural sciences and are more interested in quibbling over definitions of words and rationalizing their way into understanding the world. They seem to magically come up with solutions to complex problems just based on their ruminations. They do not seem to believe that it is necessary for them to seek evidence to support their viewpoints with scientific studies of the brain. Scientists have to experimentally prove whatever it is that they claim is true, but philosophers do not seem to feel such a need

  Care has been taken to minimize the use of the word “illusion” in this book. Whenever the term is used, however, it simply means that the phenomenon is not what it seems to be for most of us. Similarly, when the term “delusion” is used in this book, it simply means a firm belief held by a person that does not change despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

  Living with Myths

  We live a significant part of our lives with illusions and delusions produced by our brains that evolved to survive, and survival meant becoming better adapted to the environment. Survival mechanisms have been the driving force in our evolutionary past, with natural selection being the driving force. Our ability to understand the world around us has not been the mainstay of human evolution. Over time, evolution gave rise to a very sophisticated neocortex, evolution’s latest addition to the brain and the very source of our critical thinking. The neocortex is the only thing we humans have that can help us transcend the brain’s inherent limitations. In other words, our ability to understand the brain lies within the brain.

  It should become clear to the reader by the end of this chapter, that it is only a combination of scientific skepticism and critical thinking (both functions of the neocortex) that can help us break through the mirages that evolution imposed on us primarily so that our species could continue to reproduce. Both scientific skepticism and critical thinking must be present to unravel the mysteries of nature. But logic and critical thinking that philosophers claim to possess are not sufficient, nor is scientific literacy. A logical thinker can get it all wrong if he does not have a good understanding of the physical and biological sciences. On the other hand, one is easily fooled if one has all the scientific knowledge but little or no common sense or logic. We can all be fooled at one time or another into believing nonsensical propositions, because inherent biases for superstition, meaning, essence, purpose, and reflex emotional responses are deeply embedded in our nervous systems. Our neocortex, the peak of human evolution, still plays a second fiddle to our limbic systems. We run most of our lives at the level of our crocodile, mammalian, and primate brains and use the most sophisticated part of the human brain, the neocortex, only sparingly. The neocortex is not an entirely independent entity in the brain but very much an integral part of the nervous tissue. It is so crucial to our being human because reason, common sense, and critical thinking are located in the neocortex.

  What has seemed to be an enigma to philosophers and to some scientists over the millennia is not that hard to decipher. Neurobiology and the psychological sciences have made big strides over the last few decades in understanding the brain. The independent existence of free will, consciousness, and the self
are illusions for one simple but profound reason alone, which is that the law of cause and effect disallows these entities to exist independently of the brain. Scientists well versed in physical and biological sciences understand that the laws of chemistry never violate the laws of physics, and that the laws of biology precisely follow the laws of both physics and chemistry. In turn, psychological or mental phenomena are very consistent with laws of biology. Neurobiologists are now aware of the corresponding neurobiological phenomena for most psychological and mental functions. Research in psychology conducted over the past few decades correlates conscious states with the specific corresponding regions of the brain, and we can explain neuro-biologically, neuro-anatomically and physiologically, the brain’s function behind each mental activity. These studies decisively confirm that mental phenomena are completely determined by the laws of physics.

  Some have naively used quantum mechanics to argue that the laws of modern physics prove that consciousness can exist independently of the brain. Such arguments are used by many dualist philosophers and some scientists to claim that the world is indeterministic according to the laws of quantum mechanics. The last chapter of this book is devoted to unraveling the free will myth that is frequently defended by appealing to quantum physics. Dualist philosophers also criticize science’s inability to solve what they consider the “hard problem” of consciousness. But it is fallacious thinking to assume that our current scientific knowledge should form the basis of all our conclusions and that this is as far as science can or will go.

  My Rendezvous with Truth

  I want to briefly describe a personal story as a backdrop to this chapter that explains how I came to believe that free will, consciousness, and the self are, in fact, myths. There is nothing wrong in believing in something as long as the belief is rooted in at least some available evidence and not entirely in speculation. My own story goes back to early 1990s when I was disappointed with the arrogance and authority of medical science. I noted in my own medical practice that when patients came to my office with chronic illnesses, I could not offer them much hope except symptomatic relief with pain and psych medications. I thought there had to be a better way. What is called “mind—body medicine” was becoming very popular at that time, and I was becoming a staunch follower of the new movement, having been born in India and having been influenced by similar spiritual notions since childhood. I had an inner struggle most of my early life between what I had been raised to believe as a Sikh in India, a country religious country, replete with many seductive, religious and philosophical traditions, and years of diametrically opposed training in the physical sciences and mathematics in the United States. The two sides of me did not get along. Living in cognitive dissonance is not a good feeling and it has to be resolved one way or another. My study of the human brain would later show me that most people ultimately resolve mental conflicts involving mutually exclusive beliefs in favor of their superstitious beliefs because that is what our brains were evolved to do.