Q&A: Consciousness.
Consciousness.
Question
Hello Rabbi,
Do you have an opinion on the question of how a material brain creates consciousness and emotions? We see that emotions are activated by various chemical substances, and they can also be triggered by chemicals produced from nature or by emotionally moving experiences (like the birth of a son and the like). But clearly matter is not a soul; it has no desires or emotions. This whole idea that matter creates emotion sounds mystical, almost like enchanted objects. Does the Rabbi have an opinion on this?
Answer
I don’t have an opinion, and as far as I know nobody else does either. At present we have no understanding whatsoever of how this happens. By the way, that is true of every psychophysical connection. Nobody knows how a wound causes pain, or how encountering a lion produces a feeling of fear. At most, we can describe the physiological pathway of what happens, but in the end there is always a mental translation. We have no way of describing that transition. Is it mystical? I don’t think so, because to my mind, something mystical is something that departs from the rules. This does not depart from the rules; it is simply not understood or not known. Not everything that we do not know is mysticism. The electromagnetic field too was unknown until the end of the 19th century, and that still was not mysticism but lack of knowledge.
I would also note that sometimes the direction is the opposite of what you described: emotions and mental events create brain processes. As matter, we think by means of the brain, not that the brain creates thoughts.
Discussion on Answer
Clearly that is how he understood it, and that is exactly what I wrote. What seems to someone at a certain time to be mysticism later turns out to be lack of knowledge.
Hello Rabbi,
Regarding the remark at the end, “emotions and mental events create brain processes. As matter, we think by means of the brain, not that the brain creates thoughts.”
Does the Rabbi hold that there is a sharp dichotomy between body and soul / mental and physical?
I don’t know if it makes much difference, but why not say that emotions and mental events are created by / in brain processes, and likewise, that we think in the brain.
There is an external event, whose input creates an emotion, whose expression is both objective and subjective. The objective side is the expression of the neural and biochemical processes in the brain, and the subjective side is the experience itself.
When the emotional experience is expressed in physical processes in the brain, and the feeling is a subjective experience, the essence of the subject / the mental / soul / the self / that experiences the emotion cannot be understood. But the subject does not come before the physical; the mental does not create an emotion in the brain. Rather, the emotion is created in the brain and I feel it; it comes together.
Isn’t that so?
I tend toward dualism, because matter pure and simple does not create sensations and does not experience them. When you say that experiences are expressed as subjective sensations, who is it that senses those sensations? There is some consciousness within which this happens. So too with all our mental functions, which take place in the soul and not in matter.
As an anecdote on the margins, since you already mentioned the electromagnetic field—
I seem to recall that Rashba wrote in a responsum (against Maimonides) that one may believe that occult properties work, since iron too is drawn to the magnet from afar in an incomprehensible way and without any contact between them. That is, he understood the action of a magnet as mysticism (or perhaps the opposite—as nature in the case of occult properties…).