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Preface
My brain releases me from dull, repetitive task of recognising the things in the world around me, and even saves me from needing to think about how to control my movements.
I can concentrate on the important things of life: making friends and sharing ideas. But, of course, my brain doesn't just save me from tedious chores. My brain creates the „me“ that is released into the social world. Moreover, it is my brain that enables me to share my mental life with my friends and thereby allows us to create something bigger than any of us are capable of on our own.
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For a while psychologists pretended to be real scientists by studying only behaviour: making objective measurements of things like movements and button presses and reaction times. But studying behaviour is never enough. It misses out on everything that is interesting about human experience. We all know that our mental life is just as real as our lives in the physical world. Now we psychologists are back studying subjective experience: perception, recollections, intentions. But the problem remains: the mental things that we study have a completely different status from the material things that other scientists study. The only way I can know about the things in your mind is because you tell me about them.
A science that explains how the brain creates the mind.
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Brain activity can indicate that mental activity is occurring and, to that extent, provides an objective marker of subjective experience. But brain activity is not the same as mental experience. What the brain imagining experiments reveal so starkly is the seemingly unbridgeable gap between objective physical matter and subjective mental experience.
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I can see the activity of your brain with a scanner, but I can't see into your mind. The mental world, we all believe, is quite distinct from physical reality. And yet in everyday life we are at least as much concerned with other minds as we are the physical reality. Most of our interactions with other people or interactions between minds, not between bodies. You are learning about my mind by reading this book. I am hoping to change the ideas in your mind by writing this book.
How the brain creates the world
So is this the problem for psychologists? We try to study mental life and mental events, while the real science is concerned with the physical world? The physical world is utterly different from the mental world. We have direct contact with the physical world through our senses. But the mental world is private to each one of us. How can such a world be studied?
In this book I shall show that this distinction between the mental and physical is false. It is an illusion created by the brain.
Everything we know, whether it is about the physical or mental world, comes to us through our brain. But our brains connection with the physical world of objects is no more direct than our brains connection with the mental world of ideas. By hiding from us all the unconscious inferences that it makes, our brain creates the illusion that we have direct contact with objects in the physical world. And at the same time our brain creates the illusion that our own mental world is isolated in private.
Through these two illusions we experience ourselves as agents, acting independently upon the world. Over the millennia this ability to share experience has created human culture, that has, in its turn, modified the functioning of the human brain. By seeing through these illusions created by our brain, we can begin to develop a science that explains how the brain creates the mind.
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There can be changes in the activity in my brain without any changes in my mind. On the other hand I firmly believe that there cannot be changes in my mind without they're also being changes in brain activity. This is because I believe that everything that happens in my mind (mental activity) is caused by, or at least depends upon, brain activity.
So, if my belief is correct, the chain of events would be something like this. Light strikes the sensory receptors in my eye causing the receptors to send messages to the brain. This mechanism is pretty well understood. Then the activity in the brain somehow creates the experience of colour and shape in my mind. This mechanism is not understood at all. But, whatever the mechanism, we can conclude that my mind can have no knowledge about the physical world that isn't somehow represented in the brain. I can only know about that world through my brain. So perhaps the question we should be asking is not, „How do I know about the physical world?“ Instead we should ask „How does my brain know about the physical world?“
(I am a materialist. But I admit that I sometimes sound like a dualist. I talk off the brain not telling me everything you knows or deceiving me. I use such phrases because this is what the experience is like. Most of what my brain does never reaches my consciousness. This is the stuff that my brain knows about, but I don't. On the other hand I am firmly convinced that I am a product of my brain, as is the awareness that accompanies me.)
Chris Frith
Neuroscience
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