Barry Dainton - Philosophy In Transit Self

You wake up feeling normal. Its only when you get to the bathroom that you notice theres something amiss. As you look in the mirror, you see your all-too-familiar face staring back alas, its not looking quite its best at this early stage of the day. A few moments pass before you notice something very peculiar: there are what look to be two short antennae sticking out of the top of your head. You give one of them a tug but theres no trace of give. Trying to come to terms with your new adornments, you brush back your hair and notice something else. On your forehead, just below your hairline, a rectangular area of skin is missing and has been replaced by what looks to be a piece of glass. Moving closer to the mirror, you see that the covering is fully transparent. You cant see far into the dark interior, but it is almost as if someone has fitted an inspection window into your head.

You leave the bathroom and go back to your bedroom, where you find an envelope on your dressing table. Clearly typed on its front are the words, YOUR MISSING BRAIN. On opening the envelope which you do with understandable haste you find this message:

Dont be alarmed! You dont need to know who we are, but you do need to know that were the ones who have kidnapped your brain. If you follow our instructions and do as we ask you will receive an email from us shortly your brain will be returned to you intact.

With rapidly mounting horror, you switch on your computer. While its starting up you return to the mirror and take a closer look at the glass panel in your forehead. You use a small pen torch to shine a light inside, and you can now see what your skull contains or doesnt contain. Your brain is indeed missing. In its place, at the centre of your otherwise empty cranium, is what looks to be a small electrical device, connected by bundles of electrical wires to your eyes, ears and down into your neck, to what must be the top of your spinal cord.

Your computer is now operational, and you soon find the promised email, including a link that you immediately click, and which reveals a video feed showing a vat of bubbling fluid. A brain is floating in the vat, connected via bundles of electrical cables to a computer. The accompanying audio commentary claims that the brain in the vat is in fact yours, and goes on to reveal the purpose of the antennae in your head: the electronic device in your skull, to which they are connected, is a radio transceiver, which is allowing electrical messages to flow back and forth between your body and your disembodied brain (wherever, exactly, it happens to be). These connections allow your body and brain to communicate in just the way they would for all practical purposes if your brain were sitting in your skull, and connected to your spinal cord and sensory organs in the normal way.

Worried though you are by the predicament you find yourself in, the sheer strangeness of the situation is not lost on you. Your brain may be miles away from your head, but everything feels exactly as it normally does. Your senses are all working normally: if you pinch yourself it hurts; and your physical coordination is unimpaired. As it happens, you are a neuroscientist, and you are fully aware of the deep and pervasive ways in which our minds depend upon our brains you are no stranger to the multifarious ways in which damage to our brains can impact upon our ability to function normally. In fact its been many years since you felt anything less than 100 per cent confident in the notion that, for all intents and purposes, we are our brains. Since you do believe this, and you also believe that your brain is no longer in your body but floating inside the vat you can see on the computer monitor, this much is clear: you should feel yourself to be in the vat, along with your brain. After all, thats where your thinking is really taking place. But, try as you might, you cant really bring yourself to believe this. Or, at least, you can manage to believe that your brain is no longer in your head. But accepting this has no effect on where you seem to be located: you seem to be exactly where you are normally situated, i.e. at a point an inch or so behind your eyes and between your ears. You keep thinking, Im not here, but there, in the vat! several times over, willing yourself to believe it. But to no avail. You continue to have the vivid sense that you are indeed here, and that your brain is very much elsewhere.

This is an entertaining, albeit outlandish tale. But its also a thought-provoking one. In fact, thought experiments of this sort play an important role in philosophy, and with good reason. There is much to be learned from situations which dont occur in real life, but which are nonetheless imaginable. For example, the thought experiment just outlined, the essentials of which derive from a famous article by the philosopher Daniel Dennett, raises a good many issues. For one thing, it suggests that the relationship that exists between you and your brain is not as straightforward as you might have assumed. But it also brings into clear relief a simpler and more fundamental question: what are you?

That you exist is something you can be reasonably certain of as certain as you can be of anything, surely. But what kind of thing are you, or any of the rest of us? When you think What am I?, who (or what) is doing the thinking? Few questions have greater resonance than this one, but down the ages few questions have proved to be more controversial, or as difficult to answer.

An initial response to the question, at least for anyone considering it in the twenty-first century, would be to say that its obvious what we are: we are human beings, biological entities, members of the animal species Homo sapiens. Although this is the scientifically respectable answer, it is by no means the only possible one, or even the most popular. Many people think that, while of course we have biological bodies, we are more than just organisms. We also have souls that allow us to survive the death of our physical bodies. Just over 70 per cent of people in the United States believe they have a soul, and the figures are only slightly lower for the UK and Germany, while they are a good deal higher in Africa and India. Presumably most of these people would say that we dont just have souls, but that, fundamentally, we are souls. For whatever else it may be, for a soul to be worth having (or wishing for), it must be something which permits ones personality, intellect and conscious mental life to continue after the death of ones body. A soul of this sort is, in effect, a mind, and its not something you have in the way you have a sore foot; a soul is something you are