“What at first appears to be supernatural is shown in the end to have a rational, physical explanation.” (Chris Frith: Making up the Mind. How the Brain Creates our Mental World. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007, p. 39, FN 24)
I have just finished reading this wonderful, insightful book and I would like to share with you what seems to me to be most important (and not just because one of his chapters uses the affirmative of the title question of my last book: Do We Know What We Are Doing?):
I was struck yet again at the beauty and liberating force of scientific understanding, as opposed to believing in metaphysical Überbau: you don't believe what appears to be the case, you go, check, triangulate and peak behind the obvious and find ways to measure things you thought immeasurable. And, suddenly, it is there and makes sense: no need for absurd and difficult theories (such as dualism between brain and mind, physical and mental world).
Of course we are physical beings and everything we do, think, feel etc. is mediated and created by the brain, but not on its own but in interdependent, systemic interaction with the outside world, other brains and experience. We don't like this fact very much that we are far from being autonomous, independent selfs, “I's”, apart from the world. So the brain creates this illusion of us as independent agents, but we can show today that this is a creation of the brain on the basis of an unending interchange with the world via our senses, via our communication with others. We are always modelled and modified by this interaction, even if we believe to be independent. What we are and who we are, we are through our learning from and interaction with the world and others, not through some inner entity which doesn't exist.
Yet Frith shows convincingly that these illusions created by the brain in no way mean that there is no outside world and no way of knowing. On the contrary, these abstracted models of the world our brains create are necessary for us to live and survive, since they allow as to do what every good scientist does all the time: using the model of the world we have we interpret our sensory input, what others say and constantly check whether the models predict what we see and hear and feel correctly, or if we need to adjust our models, refine them, make them better.
So, understanding our brains and how they create our minds better might help us not just to fight back our illusion of the autonomous self in order to understand the interdependence of being alive with others, but it might also give us a good model of how we should try to approach understanding and knowledge: not that we believe in any fixed system of explanations or in any master or in any holy book, but that we continually recheck, refine, and debunk: what seems difficult to understand, what seems way beyond rational explanation – this is what history and progress of scientific understanding teaches us – sooner or later turns out to be explicable. It was not some more-than-human entity with which explanation resides. It was simply and humbly that we had not be careful or ingenious enough to find the right explanation.
So, as I said many times before: scientific understanding is the only game in town. Fearlesss enlightenment rather than fearful belief. Or, to quote Frith and Horace:
"A real scientist wants to make her own, independent check on the measurements reported by someone else: "Nullius in verba" is the motto of the Royal Society of London: "Don't believe what people tell you, however authoritative they may be."
Or: Nullius addictus iurarae in verba magistri: "I am not bound to swear allegiance to the word of any master." Horace, Epistulae. (Frith, 2007, 6)
But, anyway, don't take my word for it, read Frith.
