Ethics, science, and the brain
So you're saying that people have free will above and beyond their brains. But if it's our brains that govern what we think and what we do, what is the separation between a person's brain and the person?
The concept of a person is generated by the brain in some mechanism that we're all trying to figure out. We certainly know the parts of the brain where there are devices that build a narrative and a story about who we are. It's the left-brain interpreter, I've called it, and it's somewhere in the left hemisphere.
So the left hemisphere of the brain tries to seek an explanation for the pattern of behavior in ourselves or others, and you build up theories around this. It is through those theory-building mechanisms that we come to have a belief about who we are and what we're like, and who other people are and what their intentions are.
Now, when I'm talking to you, I'm not thinking that I'm talking to your brain; that's just not how we go around thinking about the world. The phenomenon that we immediately confer on each other personhood?that sense of awareness that we're doing that, that's the deep, core hard problem in the field.
Is it a problem for neuroscience or philosophy?
Neuroscientists want to solve it, but the quip has been through the years that for humans to understand consciousness is kind of like a nematode trying to understand a dog. It's just not going to happen. It's just too much, too complex. But I don't think that way necessarily. I think you just keep chiseling away at the problem, one issue at a time, and something will arise from that that makes sense.
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