What makes you, you? Philosophers have long debated the relationship between the material body and the mind. You probably wouldn’t say that your entire essence could be summed up in just your physical body, and yet, do you exist without your body? Descartes famously came to the conclusion that because he knew that he was thinking, he knew that he existed. And long story short, his idea of himself was rooted in this thinking, and it was not essential that he had a body. We are very closely connected to our body, but it is not what makes us, us. It is our mind.
But what does it mean to think? Neuroscientists might talk about the neurons in your brain and how they communicate in response to each other to form thoughts. Our thoughts are the result of neurons responding to one another in complex patterns. Maybe like a computer: the mind is the software loaded on the brain’s hardware. But here’s a famous thought experiment, called the Chinese room argument. Say you are locked in a room, with a book of rules equating English words with Chinese characters. A Chinese person gives you questions in Chinese, and using the book, you can translate what he is saying and write a response, even though you never learned Chinese. To the person outside the room, it would seem you know Chinese. But you don’t. Therefore, can we equate the neurons in our brain with a computer that receives input and runs a program to give an output? Based on the Chinese room argument, there is something more to thinking and knowing than just being able to follow rules and give a correct output.
Neuroscientists investigate this by looking at the neural correlates of consciousness. Consciousness is the mystery here. It is that almost undefinable something that seems to magically arise from our brain, and makes us able to think and be ourselves. It definitely seems we need neurons to have consciousness, but people with neurons can also lose consciousness. One famous study found that neurons can actually reflect (cause?) what a person is consciously perceiving. Participants looked at an image through special glasses that projected a red pattern to one eye and a different green pattern to the other. So the brain was receiving the exact same visual input the whole time, but people’s perception of what they were seeing randomly switched between seeing a red pattern and seeing a green one. Participants responded when their perceptions switched, while their brain activity was being recorded. Their brain activity did change depending on which pattern they were perceiving at that moment. This is important, because it showed that the neurons were reflecting the change in conscious perception, even though the physical stimulus input to the brain never changed.
While we will never be able to fully unravel the magic of our brain, neuroscientists are slowly working to find clues to where this mysterious consciousness comes from, if that is something that can be determined.
