The human brain is a complex machine - a multifaceted network of several highly specialized mechanisms working in relationship, interpreting and navigating reality. It is the command center of the body, simultaneously coordinating cognition, logic, emotion, motor skills, vital organ function, cellular growth etc. It is a computer with a complexity we are only beginning to understand. And yet, for all the breakthroughs in neuroscience the question of self-awareness - this entity of "I" continues to elude us.
There was a time when the brain was thought to be a useless mass of jelly with no particular function, similar to the appendix. The heart, was then misconstrued to be the center of self-awareness and intelligence. With the development of modern medicine and anatomy we were able to witness first hand the different processes that occur in the brain and how it responds to reality. But even more fascinatingly, science is now beginning to discover how reality is shaped by the brain.
We all live in relative worlds. And even though the general consensus is that there is this one objective world out the that we are all a part of, closer inspection reveals quite the opposite. And this is quite simply illustrated by the following example. When you look at a chair, photons of light reflecting off the chair's surface enter your retinas and are transmitted in the form of electrical impules (information) through your optic nerves into your brain. The brain then interprets this information by generating a visual image in the mind of the chair. Other parts of the brain then refer to this mental image of a chair to further analyze/dissect as is necessary. Now, chances are a chair is not going to inspire so much sensational mind activity although test it out the next time you take a trip down to ikea. Regardless, at all points of time all you ever have access to is the image of the chair and not the chair itself. In fact, there is no way to verify that the "chair" even exists other than by making the assumption that our image corresponds to an identical reality.
In fact, quantumn theory insists that there is no such thing as a 'reality' out there. There is only potentiality. Everything exists in waves of potentiality which, once observed, collapse into an object or event. The question is does the collapse happen 'out there' or 'in here' (in our heads)?
What is a photograph? Now I'm talking about the old school photos, the ones you had to diligently develop in a dark room. A photograph is nothing more than a chemical reaction. Light enters the lens of the camera causing a sort of patterned imprint on the film called a negative. This negative when developed through a chemical process then produces a "positive" image of the scene witnessed. Now imagine you go to Banff and take a picture of Lake Louise and show it to your friends and families once back. They begin to oooh and aaah about how beautiful it looks. Why are they ooh-ing and aah-ing? Are they that inspired by a mundane chemical reaction on a piece of paper? No, its because they don't see a chemical reaction they experience the image of it in their minds which is identical to the image you have in your mind except yours was derived from a completely different source.
Now one may argue that trying to compare actually being in Banff versus seeing a photo of it is ridiculous and you would be right from that perspective. But the only reason they don't compare is because the scope of the two experiences don't match up. After all a photograph is a tiny 2 dimensional object compared to hundreds of square miles of rugged wilderness. However, my point still stands. If you were to somehow increase the scope of the "photograph" to say a 3D hologram in a super IMAX environment with all the smells, sounds and other visual inputs necessary to mimic the banff experience you would have come remarkably close to forming an exact replica of the image in the brain. Or approach it the other way around. Imagine a friend blindfolds you in toronto and takes you on a plane to Alberta, puts you in a car and drives you to a specific vista point above Lake Louise. Then he places a black box over your head with a rectangular cutout roughly the size of a standard photograph. Then plugging your nose and ears, he removes the blindfold from only one eye, for exactly one minute and allows you ro see Lake Louise without allowing you to move your head within the limits of the box. If that is the extent of your experience of Lake Louise, the image generated in your brain would be nearly identical to a photograph of the exact same scene. Now these are 2 obviously different realities, one physical, the other chemical, generating identical images in our brain. As a result the memory of Lake Louise would be no different. In fact, the conclusion scientists are coming to these days is that the reality we take to be objective is really virtual or simulated.
True reality if it even looks like anything would be indecipherable - waves of potentiality collapsing into electrons - even time and space are only relative having no real existence within potentiality. The human brain is a mechanism with a capacity far beyond anything we can imagine. Not only does it interpret reality, it actually creates it.
Each brain creates an image of the world based on sensory input which it then constantly references as reality. Since each brain is separate for the next it follows that each person's image of the world is completely self contained and separate from the others. We literally live in separate worlds. This all sounds kind of interesting in theory but it paints a pretty bleak picture. Because if we are actually that separate and disconnected what does it say about human relationship?
Thats where I come in. No, not me Shiv, but the "I" the sense of Self : of self identity. This new paradigm of reality affords an opportunity to revisit the whole idea of how we approach ourselves and our identities. Because its this "I", the elusive scoundrel, that has been giving philosophers and scientists a run for their money for centuries. According to scientists, there is a function of the brain dubbed as the "Interpreter" (image of Nicole Kidman comes to mind) that is the storyteller of the mind. He's like that old uncle or senile grandfather who told the same stories to everyone as they tried desperately not to nod off, fabricating it a little bit each time until not only was he the one who poisoned Hitler but he also bought baby jesus a PSP for his first birthday. Its ludicrous I know, but the Interpreter is the "fabricator" of reality: making 'sense' of nonsense, using causality to link events and objects and filling in the gaps in between to form a seamless continuity: a story of ME. In fact, this sense of I is so discontinuous and full of holes it doesn't take a whole lot to expose it.
Most of what we believe ourselves to be is derived from perception and memory. We've already talked about how unreliable perception is, but memory is even faultier. Not only does memory use perception as its very foundation but all it really is the perception of a perception. If the very mechanism of perception is subjective then each iteration exponentially increases the likelihood of error. Try a simple activity - think about your day yesterday. Plain and simple - start at the beginning, from the moment you woke up and now try and recount exactly what you did, felt and thought on a minute by minute basis for the entire day. How accurately can you recount your day? A hundred per cent accuracy would mean your story of how your day went would take nearly exactly as long to recount as your actual day went. Most of us would be lucky if the story would take even 5 minutes, some of you particularly attentive ones may get up to 20 mins. But in a 16 hour day recollecting 5 mins means that you are able to effectively recall only 0.5% of your day. 99.5% of it falls into a black hole. Your memory is so unreliable and full of loopholes it would make the government of India look like one of the most honest and efficient institutions on the planet. And yet we believe in the relaibility of our own minds. We believe in its reality. Would you ever buy a piece of swiss cheese that is 99% hole and 1% cheese?
So then why do we believe the story? Why do we believe these realities our minds conjure up. If we are living in the Matrix, why then like brave but emotionally challenged protagonist Neo are we not able to break the spell of illusion?
There is a particular episode of the Simpsons where Bart is given a label-gun for his Birthday. What clever Bart does is he walks around the house labelling each and every item he sees with the words "Bart Simpson" including all the furniture, the refrigerator and even the dog. When questioned by Lisa who is far too wise for his nonsense as to why he claims ownership of all these items his response is because it says so on the label.
That is exactly what the sense of 'I' is. It is not a thing per say, not an object suspended in space. If you were asked to point to yourself you would most likely point to your body but soon you would realize that the body is an instrument that belongs to you and serves you but isn't "you" per se. So then you may point to your brain, the command center. With a little more introspection you would see that the command center is once more a complex mechanism but where is the commander? Interestingly, studies in Neuroscience have revealed that the command center functions quite autonomously and there is no such 'commander' to be found. There's no one in control, no one in charge. Its a phantom, a hoax. This so-called 'I' can't be found. And yet if there is one thing that each and everyone of us would defend to our dying breaths is "I know that I exist!" The world would be united in their chagrin, men and women, liberals and fundamentalists, protestors and corporate fatcats, oil companies and green peace activists alike would show their solidarity on this one issue. Because to undermine the existence of the "I" is to pull out the rug from beneath everyone's feet equally and unanimously.
(to be continued...)
