Does Brain=Mind

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There doesn't seem to be any doubt that there is some relationship between the brain and the mind. For instance, if you drink alcohol, your mental state changes. If you damage various parts of your brain, various functions can be disturbed. Something is going on between the brain and the mind. Just what is the relationship, though?

In a review V.S. Ramachandran's new book, The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human, Colin McGinn sums up the issue quite nicely:

"Does psychology stand to brain anatomy as physiology stands to body anatomy? In the case of the body, physiological functions—walking, breathing, digesting, reproducing, and so on—are closely mapped onto discrete bodily organs, and it would be misguided to study such functions independently of the bodily anatomy that implements them. If you want to understand what walking is, you should take a look at the legs, since walking is what legs do. Is it likewise true that if you want to understand thinking you should look at the parts of the brain responsible for thinking?"

If you want to know how walking works, of course you study the legs. But is it so simple with the mind and the brain? As the title of the review state, "Can the Brain Explain Your Mind?" Here are some issues when it comes to this topic...

- Are the brain and the mind the same thing?
- Are psychological state reducible to brain states?
- If the brain is completely responsible for mental function, then once death occurs and the brain decomposes, it is not possible for there to be any form of afterlife (unless, perhaps, there is a soul).
- If various brain disorders impair human functions to such a great extent, what implications does this have for the meaning of life?

Take Capgras syndrome, which is discussed in the review. In this disorder, individuals will recognize the face of a family member or friend but be convinced the individual is an impostor. Ramachandran theorizes that this occurs because the visual system is in tact; however there is a problem with the nerve connections between the visual processing area of the brain and the area of the brain responsible for emotion. Therefore, the individual recognizes the face but doesn't "feel" the emotional connection that is felt with someone close, and therefore, in an unconscious process, the person (or brain) assumes that the friend cannot be the friend and is therefore some sort of "fraudulent twin."

This is extremely weird, of course. And we may rightly ask what this says about the meaning of life. If someone suffers from this problem, how can he or she have what we would consider a meaningful life? Through various sorts of physical flukes, there are countless people who experience weird mental impairments that damage their ability to have a "normal" life. Is this part of god's plan? Will things will be corrected in some sort of eternal afterlife? Or will the person die, that will be it, and the fact that he or she had some sort of disability - schizophrenia, capgras, mental retardation, etc. - will have just been bad luck in a disinterested universe.

Also, if the brain is so weird and so many odd disturbances occur, can we extrapolate and wonder if everyone is experiencing delusions of which we are not aware? My old friend, Sigmund Freud, talking about religion, once said "no one who shares in a delusion ever recognizes it as such." Perhaps this goes for religion, but why not all of human life?