The Meme Machine

220 THE MEME MACHINE
nothing else, until I have learned with certainty that there is nothing certain in
the world.’ (Descartes 1641, p. 102). Amidst all his doubts, he concluded that
he could not doubt that he was thinking. Thus he came to his famous ‘Cogito
ergo sum’ – I think- therefore I am – and to what is now known, after him, as
‘Cartesian dualism’: the idea that that thinking stuff is different from physical, or
extended, stuff. Our bodies may be a machine of sorts but ‘we’ are something
else.
Dualism is tempting but false. For a start no such separate stuff can be
found. If it could be found it would become part of the physical world and so
not be a separate stuff all. On the other hand if it cannot, in principle, be found
by any physical measures then it is impossible to see how it could do its job of
controlling the brain. How would immaterial mind and material body interact?
Like Descartes’ ‘thinking stuff’, souls, spirits and other self-like entities seem
powerless to do what is demanded of them.
Nevertheless, a few scientists have developed dualist theories. The
philosopher Sir Karl Popper and neuroscientist Sir John Eccles (1977), suggest
that the self controls its brain by intervening at the synapses (or chemical
junctions) between neurons. Yet as our understanding grows of how neurons
and synapses work there is less and less need for a ghost to control the machine.
Mathematician Roger Penrose (1994) and anaesthetist Stuart Hameroff (1994)
Suggest that consciousness operates at a quantum level in the tiny microtubules
inside the membranes of neurons. Yet their proposal just replaces one mystery
with another. As the philosopher Patricia Churchland (1998, p. 121) observes
‘Pixie dust in the synapses is about as explanatorily powerful as quantum
coherence in the microtubules’. These attempts to find a self that lurks in the
gaps in our understanding just do not help, and few scientists or philosophers are
convinced by them.
The opposite extreme is to identify the self with the whole brain, or whole
body. This might seem appealing. After all, when you talk about Simon you
mean him – the whole body, the entire person. So why not say the same of
yourself? Because this does not get at the problem we are struggling with – that
it feels as though there is someone inside who is consciously making the
decisions. You can point to your body and say ‘that is me’ but you do not really
mean it. Let us try a thought experiment. Imagine for a moment that you are
given a choice (and you cannot say neither). Either you will have your body
completely swapped for another body and keep your inner conscious self, or you
will have your inner self swapped for another unspecified self and keep the
body. Which will it be?