| | Ellen quoted the following passage from Dennett's Consciousness Explained:
And the trouble with brains, it seems, is that when you look in them, you discover that *there's nobody home*. No part of the brain is the thinker that does the thinking or the feeler that does the feeling, and the whole brain appears to be no better a candidate for that very special role. This is a slippery topic. Do brains think? Do eyes see? Or do people see with their eyes and think with their brains? Is there a difference? Is this just a trivial point of 'grammar' or does it reveal a major source of confusion? The idea that a *self* (or a person, or, for that matter, a soul) is distinct from a brain or a body is deeply rooted in our ways of speaking, and hence in our ways of thinking.
I have a brain.
This seems to be a perfectly uncontroversial thing to say. And it does not seem to mean just
This body has a brain (and a heart, and two lungs, etc.).
or
This brain has itself.
It is quite natural to think of 'the self and its brain' (Popper and Eccles, 1977) as two distinct things, with different properties, no matter how closely they depend on each other.
The point that I have been making is that the self or the I refers to the total person, not simply to some part of the person. In other words, it does not refer simply to the mind and/or the brain.
Dennett asks what it means to say, "I have a brain." He says that it does not seem to mean that the body has a brain. But that's because of the mind-body dichotomy; it's because people typically think of the mind as something separate and distinct from the body, when in reality, the mind is a part of the body. Therefore, you could indeed say that the statement "I have a brain" means, "This body has a brain, etc," as long as you recognize that "this body" includes the mind -- that we are not talking about a mindless body. And of course, the statement does not mean, "This brain has itself," since again, the self is not synonymous with the mind and/or the brain.
Perhaps, an analogy will help. Suppose I said, "My car has an engine." Do I simply mean, "My car's engine has itself"? No, I mean that the whole car has as an engine. Similarly, when I say that "I have a brain," I mean that the whole person has a brain.
There is a sense in which you could say that a certain part of the brain (the cerebrum) thinks, just as you could say that legs run or that hands write, but all you're really saying is that it is the person who does these things with his or her brain, legs or hands. Just as there is no such thing as disembodied legs and hands performing actions, neither is there such a thing as a disembodied mind or brain performing them. It is the entity itself that performs the actions via its parts, organs and faculties.
- Bill
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