news

more

Why The Mind Is Not the Brain

Markus Gabriel on why the ‘mind’ is meaningless

17th July 2021
| Author of I Am Not A Brain and Why The World Does Not Exist, Director of the International Centre for Philosophy at the University of Bonn
2,595 words
Read time: approx. 13 mins

One of the youngest philosophy professors in Germany, Markus Gabriel teaches in 16 languages, dreads metaphysics and thinks that the philosophy of mind needs to tighten up. Author of ‘I Am Not A Brain’ and ‘Why The World Does Not Exist’, he will be debating Mind, Matter and Mechanisms with neurophilosopher Patricia Churchland and writer and former clinical neuroscientist Raymond Tallis at our London Festival HowTheLightGetsIn on 22-23 September. In the interview below, he talks about why he prefers the German term ‘geist’ to the English ‘mind’, how we should reclaim our rationality, and why we ought to stop making claims about what we don’t know.

Let’s start with the title of your latest book. Why is the mind not the brain?

The shortest argument goes something like this: there’s what philosophers call a mereological fallacy. Mereology is the discipline which studies the relation between wholes and parts. 

So imagine someone tells you that David Beckham didn’t score a goal, it was his foot. That would be an odd thing to say because Beckham couldn’t shoot for the goal without his foot, but it was the whole beast, so to speak, which shot the goal.

So, mental states like consciousness are states of an entire animal and not states of its parts. So it’s not true that the brain alone is conscious. You couldn’t be conscious without a brain, but that doesn’t mean that the brain and consciousness are identical.  

But the mainstream biological view is that as the central nervous system, the brain dictates to the rest of the body. So the foot just executes what the brain dictates.

That’s what you might think. The brain is not a conscious control centre. All the parts are connected in complicated ways. 

So, for instance, the mental state in which I am right now is that I’m trying to answer a question. I couldn’t answer a question without you asking me a question. The fact that you ask me a question is part of the mental state that I’m in. But this is nowhere in my body. It’s represented in my body – I need to have a working memory, but this conversation is nowhere in my body; it actually expands a much larger spacetime. Currently that’s England, Germany, as well as the communications networks – Skype etc. So my mental state is part of a larger network, it’s not just in my head. 

___

"Selves are so mysterious to us, because they are in the process of temporal and historical unfolding."

___

What you call ‘mind’ in English does not exist. The ‘mind’ is a historical artefact of misguided philosophical theorising in English. As a term, it does not refer to anything. Philosophers made it up as a technical term. But no one ever tells you what that means. If you look into any standard textbook, ever since John Locke, no one will tell you what it is. It’s not like philosophers have settled the term ‘mind’ and now they’re talking about the mind-brain problem. No two analytical philosophers share the same understanding of the most important term of their discipline. 

In German, we have this helpful term – ‘geist’, which roughly means ‘the bearer of mental states’. The brain alone cannot bear mental states. 

‘Geist’ to me seems closer to the term ‘culture’. 

Markus Gabriel
17th July 2021

Continue reading

Enjoy unlimited access to the world's leading thinkers.

Start by exploring our subscription options or joining our mailing list today.

Start Free Trial

Already a subscriber? Log in

Latest Releases

The psychology behind the culture wars

Therapy, psychedelics, and why the body keeps the score, with Bessel van der Kolk

The man who mistook reality for a fantasy

Join the conversation

Richard Peckham 25 January 2020

"Philosophy is the pure cult of rationality. Philosophy’s enemy is irrationality." Truly very interesting. I feel like "we" have stumbled onto an undiscovered continent, a vast uncharted real estate of consciousness. Recently I was moved to read James Dickey's 1970 novel, "Deliverance". As child of my culture, abandoning nihilism, I adhere to an ethos of stewardship and regeneration a lived experience with expectation of renewal of life. The earth turns, the seasons come and go, as nature goes life goes on. "Selves are so mysterious to us, because they are in the process of temporal and historical unfolding." So true.

Properly I was taught to endure all for resilience to ride out incidental and crushing adversity, following from the beginning a Western, Judeo-Christian narrative of loss, disaffection, alienation, escape and ending with redemption, searching success and survival, searching for meaning, the meaning of "existence", the meaning of suffering. I was swept away by Dickey's "Deliverance" a tale of four mediocre middle class white male urbanites' weekend canoe trip becoming a disaster of savage violence on the edge of a disappearing wilderness... and civilization and consciousness. In Dickey's novel there was no prototypical, mythical deliverance, only dying, suffering and surviving, the survivors limping home to carry on with their too familiar, uber-normal lives and farcical ambitions. Philosophy of consciousness is quite a landscape. To escape the real and to embrace the impenetrable, indestructible, wild, elemental self, child of chaos, child of experience, child of consequence, the crossed-up dramatist, to be the wild mother and mad father of our untold future. In any case life is inescapable. We do not seek it, being life, but we find it and we are found, by searching. Consciousness is all we have in common.

Danijelversic Danijelversic 4 October 2019

I red a lot of negative prejudice about what he sees as reality. Telling that if we dont trust our "rational deliberations, you’re full of biases" is wrong because than Trump is not an idiot is not just a typical example of bias and arrogance but he should know that there is no "global rational deliberation" . Every single study in behavioural psychology has proved that people interprete events subjectively.

Danijelversic Danijelversic 4 October 2019

Wow. I have never red such a mistaken view about buddhism. The teaching of no Self has nothing to do with what he is saying.

Robert Bullock 3 December 2018

I agree Alix. He grossly misstates the Buddhist view of no self. Besides that, the great insight is that whatever reality is, it is beyond anything we might describe it as, beyond any identity we might assign it.

Alix Sharkey 6 October 2018

Gosh, this is a terribly naive and confused understanding of "Buddhism."
Herr Gabriel says, "That’s why selves are so mysterious to us, because they are in the process of temporal and historical unfolding. They can change. This is what Buddhists get wrong."

First, this statement implies that "Buddhists" all believe the same thing in the same way. This sloppy categorization betrays confusion, because you might as well talk about "Frenchmen" as if they all believed the same thing in the same way. Clearly, that's a ludicrous proposition.

But let us it, very generously, to mean something like, "Buddhists claim there is no truly existing self." Very well, then. How would we define a self? Let's take Herr Gabriel's characterization: "I think I have a self but my self is just not finished. Personal identity is a four dimensional thing. That means I will have been all the thoughts that I will have had. To be precise, Markus Gabriel, the system that I am, is everything that is true of Markus Gabriel. That includes me currently having two hands, me having died at a certain point and so forth. That is my self. Currently I am not yet identical with myself. Because I’m not finished. Once I’m finished I will have identity."

Clearly, we have a contradiction here. Herr Gabriel has a self — but it is not finished. Do I have a house if it has no roof? Do I have a PhD before my thesis is written and accepted? Most people would say not. So Herr Gabriel's assertion of his validly-existing self is as convincing as my assertion of my unfinished villa on the isle of Capri. Don't worry: I have started it, at least in terms of asserting to myself that is under construction.

Herr Gabriel also contradicts himself, when he says, "Once I’m finished I will have identity." I'm assuming he is using 'identity' and 'self' as synonyms, otherwise his argument is coherent in basic terms. However, if so, he himself states there is no self until the moment of death. A neat paradox, if we're being generous. An absurdity, if we're not.

Finally (for our purposes, since there is much more flimsy thinking here to be pulled apart, such as the risible notion that we are somehow "all the thoughts we will have had), Herr Gabriel declares that, "The truth in Buddhism is that there is no substantial being that you find by looking in the mirror. If I look in the mirror, I don’t see myself; I see a part of myself. But Buddhism exaggerates this point and says that there is ‘no self’ and that nothing is identical to itself."

What Buddhism actually says is more akin to, "There is no inherently and independently existing self, since everything is in a state of flux at all times, on the molecular level as well as one the level of consciousness."

So this is why Herr Gabriel has it all back to front when he states "That’s why selves are so mysterious to us, because they are in the process of temporal and historical unfolding. They can change. This is what Buddhists get wrong."

Buddhists say there is NOTHING BUT CHANGE. And that only a trick of consciousness creates the illusion of self. In fact, Buddhists will tell you — if you can surmount your prejudices for a few moments — that consciousness CANNOT EVEN EXIST WITHOUT CHANGE.

Imagine: if there were a permanent self (or even a permanent non-self) that became conscious of a blue door, how could it every NOT be conscious of that blue door. Permanence would mean it being permanently conscious of that blue door for eternity, since that is the only philosophical definition of permanence that has any meaning. So having perceived a blue door, an inherently existing consciousness would never be able to tear itself away from that singular dreary phenomenon.

Logically, it is only the NON-EXISTENCE in absolute terms of a self that allows consciousness to tear itself away from the blue door, and look at the far more attractive form of the young lady walking through it.

No wonder the European tradition of philosophy is so widely mocked.