When i recognize you as another experiencing subject like myself, i assume that you have a world just as i do. This world, when you focus on it, is full of myriad creatures and wonderful life in full color and exquisite detail. But the most amazing circumstance of all is that the whole show, including your amazement, is all going on inside your head. Your experience is generated by (arises from, is the feeling of, ….. ) the functioning of your brain.
Now, i don’t know this in the same way that i ‘know’ my own world of experience. It’s a theoretical model, part of a virtual reality scaffolded by language. But it’s the only model that makes sense of the evidence – especially the case studies collected by neurologists, which demonstrate poignantly the dependence of normal mental functioning on an intact brain. When the brain is malfunctioning or damaged in some way, its owner’s experience will be altered in a correlated way. How can we doubt that experiencing is a performance of the brain?
And since i have recognized you as a subject like me, i have to believe that my experience – my world (including ‘you’!) – is also a product of brain dynamics. I have no experience of my brain, of course, because my brain is too busy doing the experiencing to also take a role in my world. (The one thing the spotlight can never illuminate is the spotlight.) In my world, my knowledge of my brain’s activity is a theoretical model just like my knowledge of your brain’s activity. Our shared, consensual world, insofar as it is mediated by language, is the mutually reinforcing network of these models. We can maintain this virtual world because we can talk about these models among ourselves, and apply them pragmatically, with predictable results in the real world, the one in which we live and move.
Your actions in my head,
my head here in my hands
with something circling inside.
I have no name
for what circles
so perfectly.
…
This moment this love comes to rest in me,
many beings in one being.
In one wheat grain a thousand sheaf stacks.
Inside the needle’s eye a turning night of stars.— Rúmí (Barks 1995, 278)
But just as the spotlight is unable to illuminate itself, as indeed we cannot see or feel the brain in motion, others can see that spotlight and other spotlights can illuminate that spotlight. Similarly, I think that the brain as complex and hidden as it is, can be experienced when we socialize. That is the beauty of the “other” so to speak. We can learn and envision ideas through contact, observation and experience with others.
Yes indeed, Linda! Your comment encapsulates much of what i tried to say in Chapter 2 of Turning Signs, and some later chapters as well.