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.
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