No “I” anywhere in the brain – not necessary

The chemical process that I am watching outside where the low winter sun shines through the branches of the pollard willows. The distance is hazy, inside Schubert’s piano trio in E-flat major, performed by the Busch Trio more than 85 years ago. They kinda sound like they’re making music in a cookie jar, but oh, how heartbreakingly beautiful they play. That’s what you think: heartbreaking, while nothing is torn, and certainly not your heart, but an indescribable happiness takes hold of you, just to live now, on this Sunday afternoon. My existence. But it seems to me, for a few minutes, absorbed in existence, in a set of weather, winters, music.

WF Hermans was also aware that a person is nothing more than a chemical process like so many others, a reader recently wrote in a letter to the editor. You hear this often. Man is a complicated chemical process, not yet fully understood, but still. There is nowhere in man or in the brain an “I” or a “soul”. No, you don’t have to. The twelfth-century Cistercian monk Guillaume de Saint-Thierry once wrote that the soul somehow belonged to the body, “but without sitting inside and taking a seat in it, nor sitting outside and taking a seat there. square “. By soul, and consciousness or me too, we mean something elusive.

Neuroscience does not yet have an answer to the question of what consciousness is. A byproduct of brain activity, some researchers say with a shrug, not really interesting at all. Funny. For most people, this is exactly the one they live on. If what is so important to our lives cannot be described in a scientific model, it does not follow that we should stop talking about it, but that the natural sciences are not suited to describe all that a To be human.

The label “no science” may be functional in the discourse of neuroscientists, but that does not mean that we living humans should let our experiences take us away. Science can teach us something, insofar as we have not already established it by self-examination: that there is no continuous and unchanging “me” in us, for example. In fact, everyone knows this – how often people don’t say they have changed dramatically because of an event or an experience, or over time. It can feel like a previously established “I” has given way to a new one, but no one really sees or hears it that way.

It’s a fluid, this feeling that is ours. And indeed, brain damage can drastically change a person, so the material basis of personality is certainly clear. But that doesn’t mean we have to identify with chemical (or digital) processes.

‘Where am I?’ is the first question everyone asks when they wake up, even when they wake up in the morning. Sometimes the answer is faster than the question: here! In this bed, in this tent, on this mirror that I just bumped into the back of my head. The question could also be: where was I? Me, everything that feels ‘I’, was gone for a while, but now it’s back. many.

And also this Sunday afternoon, low fog, he is there, he almost ignores himself, that’s the best thing, he watches, he is moved by what these men played there so long and he feels one with everything.

Marjoleine de Vos is editor-in-chief of the NRC.