Sublime

Judgments of responsibility depend upon the overall complexion of one’s mind, not on the metaphysics of mental cause and effect.

The mindful person is sure to protest that the supposed “self” is a fiction in the first place: we know that it is, Harris declares, because “when we look closely, it vanishes.” But first of all, is this true? When I retreat inward and look closely, the spikiness I have always associated with myself prickles and persists. It’s here right now, delig

something radically contrary to common sense must be true about the fundamental structures of the mind and the world, while leaving us poorly equipped to determine where exactly the truth lies among the various weird possibilities.

Thus we see that if we take solipsism seriously – if we assume that it is true and that all valid explanations must scrupulously conform to it – it self-destructs.

Past philosophers have taken this observation and run with it, arguing that minds and brains are fundamentally distinct and separate phenomena. This is the view the philosopher Gilbert Ryle called “the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine.”1 But modern scientists and philosophers who have rejected dualism haven’t necessarily replaced it with a better

We all feel we are wonderfully unified, coherent mental machines and that our underlying brain structure must somehow reflect this overpowering sense we all possess.

In subsequent work he was able to locate neurological damage to the part of their brains that create and control our sense of body image. This damage had occurred at birth, or very early on. This meant that the brain could create a body image in a perfectly healthy person that was highly irrational. It seemed as well that our sense of self is far m

Dr. Eben Alexander, formerly a Harvard Medical School associate professor in brain surgery, states: “Depending on whom you talk to, consciousness is either the greatest mystery facing scientific enquiry, or a total nonproblem. What’s surprising is just how many more scientists think it’s the latter. For many—maybe most—scientists, consciousness isn

“you, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules”.