Paradox.” Indeed, it should be no more than a very few years before we can ask a brave philosopher to enter a suitable scanning device so that we can discover which brain-cells best distinguish the conditions that we wish to detect.
In other words, to understand how feelings work in more detail, we’ll have to stop looking for simple answers, and start to explore more complex processes. When a ray of light strikes your retina, signals flow from that spot to your brain, where they affect other resources, which then transmit other kinds of reports that then influence yet other parts of your brain.[210]
At the same time signals from the sensors in your ears, nose, and skin will travel along quite different paths, and all these streams of information may come to affect, in various ways, the descriptions the rest of your mind is using. So, because those pathways are so complex and indirect, when you try to tell someone about what sensation you feel, or what you are experiencing, you’ll be telling a story based on sixth-hand reports that use information that has gone through many kinds of transformations. So despite what some philosophers claim, we have no basis to insist that what we call our ‘sense of ‘experience’ is uniquely direct.
The old idea that sensations are ‘basic’ may have been useful in its day, the way the four kinds of ‘atoms’ of antiquity were supposed to be elementary. But now we need to recognize that our perceptions are far less ‘direct,’ because they are affected by what our other resources may want or expect. This might relate to the fact that we sometimes clearly ‘see’ objects, which do not ‘really’ exist.
We like to attribute ‘qualities’ to stimuli—instead of to the more complex activities that they influence in the rest of our brains. Consider the two different feelings that you get when I first touch your right hand and then touch your left. How would you describe the difference between those two kinds of sensations? In some ways, they seem different, yet in other ways they seem similar. To compare them you would need to use descriptions that your resources have made, and that comparison will depend on the details of how those resources were built (or have learned) to process those two kinds of evidence. Such a process must involve quite a few different levels and stages, perhaps extending to some self-reflection. This suggests that what we call ‘qualities’ might mainly reflect the ways we assess the relations
What would it mean to express what you’re feeling?” Perhaps it is no accident that, literally, ‘expression’ means squeezing. But when you try to “express yourself”, there is no single thing to squeeze; a typical human mental state is too complex to project through our tiny channels or language and gesture. However, your brain is equipped has many resources, each of which can make a description of some aspect of certain parts of your state of mind. Then, although some of these may disagree, you—that is, some of your language resources—can formulate some statement of “How I feel” by selecting from among those other descriptions—perhaps by simply choosing the one whose signals are the most intense.
But, of course you cannot describe your entire state, because this is something that’s constantly changing. At one moment you’re thinking about your foot; then your attention is drawn to the sky; next you notice a change in some sound, or turn to look at something that moves—
I sympathize with that quest for cement, but I can’t see how it could actually help because, whatever adhesive you might propose—such as a single central Self— you’d still be obliged to describe
§9-8. The Dignity Of Complexity
Citizen: I’m horrified by your idea—that a human being is just a machine—and worse, that it is programmed by a slipshod collection of sloppily organized parts and processes. No self-respecting persons would want to think of themselves as any such mess of contraption.
[This section should begin by re-stating the “Easy is Hard Paradox”: “If you wrongly insist that something is simple, then it will remain a mystery—because, if you are actually facing an intricate problem, then you are unlikely to find a path toward solving it, until you recognize how complex it is.”]
Perhaps the most popular concept of what we are assumes that we each have a central core—some sort of invisible spirit or ghost that comes to us as an anonymous gift. But we ought to give credit where credit is due, by recognizing how we came to exist.
We came from an tremendous set of experiments—octillions of trials and errors to which sextillions of creatures devoted their lives, each living and dying in various ways that each may have contributed to giving us a slightly more powerful brain. This struggle proceeded for thirty million centuries and—so far as we know—no other such large and magnificent process has ever occurred in the universe. Accordingly each human mind has resulted from an unthinkably vast history in which animal on earth (including those not in our direct ancestry) spent its life adjusting, adapting, testing, and eventually dying—to see which ones had offspring who best could thrive in all those past environments, which began in oceans and seas, and then extended to the tidelands and shores, and then to the forests, deserts, plains—and, eventually, to our self-made villages and towns. Yet most traditional accounts of our origins make no mention whatever about this prodigious saga of sacrifice—and some institutions have even aimed to suppress any lessons about the eons through which we developed our bodies and brains.
It seems wrong to me to dismiss our minds as though they came as gratuitous gifts. For if, as many of us suspect, our intelligence is unique in this entire universe, then we also must be responsible to all those creatures who died for us: we need to ensure that the minds which we bear do not go to waste through some foolish mistake.
§9-9. Some Sources of Human Resourcefulness
We can credit our human resourcefulness to processes that developed over the vastly different time spans of our genetic endowments, cultural heritages, and personal experiences.
If you find a big book about the brain, and examine the index at the end, you will see a list of names of hundreds of different parts of the brain— each of which is known to have appreciably different functions. Each those ‘centers’ or ‘regions’ contains a good many millions of brain-cells which also come in several varieties. Our scientists know a certain amount about what certain of those brain parts do but, generally, the details about how most of them actually work are still largely shrouded in mystery.
