CHAPTER
If you could look right inside a brain and see everything that was happening
there, would you then understand consciousness?
Identity theorists say yes: the mind and the brain are identical. If we could observe
brain activity in sufficient detail and at many different levels of organisation, then
we would understand everything that the brain was doing, and since conscious-
ness is the activity of brains, it follows that we would understand consciousness.
As philosopher Dan Lloyd puts it, we would find ‘that there is in fact just one sys-
tem, and that the neural version and the phenomenal version are simply different
labels applied to one underlying Reality’ (2004, p. 299).
Some eliminative materialists say yes, too. By definition, eliminative materialists
eliminate mental properties like qualia: they claim that the mental states we
assume to exist actually do not. Although there is no reason why eliminative
materialists should necessarily think that the brain must provide the whole solu-
tion, many do, arguing that what the mind does is nothing more than what the
brain does.
‘Extended minders’ and other theorists of embodied cognition say no. They insist
that neural activity alone cannot provide any answers, and that we need to take
the rest of the body and the environment into account too. ‘You are not your
brain’, says Alva Noë. ‘Consciousness does not happen in the brain. That’s why we
have been unable to come up with a good explanation of its neural basis’ (Noë,
2009, p. 5). We must include the person’s history, the world around them, and
the whole body’s interactions with that world. From this perspective, the mistake
of neurocentrism is a form of the mereological fallacy of ascribing to part of an
‘The entire brain
is sufficient for
consciousness’(Koch, 2004, p. 87)‘Consciousness does not
happen in the brain’(Noë, 2009, p. 5)Neuroscience and the correlates of consciousness