Imagine you’re inside the best coffee shop in the world, standing near the entrance. You’ve just finished an expertly prepared Flat-white paired with a vanilla-frosted biscotti. Outside, it’s a wonderful bluesky day; you’ve not a care in the world. No niggling responsibilities. No plans or expectations for the hours ahead. Nothing begging your attention. Only you and your thoughts (same thing), and unbounded sensory freedom. You pull open the door and hold it for a young woman coming in. She may be a student at the university, given the hardbound textbook jutting out from an unwieldy backpack slung over her shoulders, sloshing about there as she tries to slip past you. The two of you exchange polite smiles. Once outside, you think to yourself, what the hell, I’ll walk down to the bluff, look out onto the lake, see what’s going on. You take two steps on the sidewalk and then it happens, you hear a loud Thud, unlike any sound you’ve ever heard before (and will never forget), followed milliseconds later by the Screech of rubber on pavement. You look up and spin around. From a distance of maybe two hundred feet, you see a human being crumpled on the ground beneath the front bumper of a black Suburban. Or was it a Tahoe? Either way, an older model SUV, and black. It was partially into its turn when it struck the pedestrian; you see the front left blinker flashing orange. You see the driver push open the driver’s side door – she’s a woman with shoulder-length grayish hair, her face is in her hands, she appears frantic. That’s about as much as you can make out. The horror goes down in five seconds – it takes that long for the brain to record this new state of the world. You stand there unable to move, a feeling welling up inside you, unlike any you’ve felt before. A half minute goes by and you hear sirens in the distance, people gather at the scene. Your brain fires particular motor neurons, activating essential muscles, the direct cause of you turning to walk away. The brain does this all by itself. You don’t tell the brain what to do, its function is automatic.
Later, blocks away, a police car pulls up alongside you, an officer flags you down. She hops out and asks if she might speak with you. You (your brain) agrees. Long story short, your brain (using your bio-linguistic faculty and referring to itself as “I”) reports: Yes, I witnessed the aftermath of the collision. And yes, I am certain I saw a woman (the putative driver) step out of the driver’s side door. Continuing, your brain gives the officer a description from its memory. The officer notes your name and contact info and asks if you might testify to this in court, as a bystander to the accident. Yes. You never are called to testify, but you learn days later from a report in the newspaper that the driver was a man. So you lied to a police officer? Of course not, your brain reported (literally put words in your mouth) the information it had stored in its memory. But that information gathered at the scene of the collision, specifically the input that streamed in from the outside world (via the visual transduction system – your eyes) was imperfect, noisy. You (the brain’s host) were physically two hundred feet away, there was a high humidity haze in the air distorting the view. So the distorted view of the organism exiting the SUV matched (albeit poorly) a female human being (woman), a model of which your brain created and had continuously updated and improved all the years of your life. So later, your brain reported to the officer what was, in fact, a false state of affairs. In other words, the brain was mistaken (but not broken). And most folks would add: an honest mistake. All this is consistent with modern neuroscience and human psychology.
When the output of your heart is in error, we say your heart may be broken (literally). A broken heart, we do not ever say, has lied, or even that it has made a mistake (not in the psychological sense of the word, b/c the heart is not that kind of organ). Renal insufficiency is also not a mistake, it’s a broken kidney (one or both). The heart is a pump, it outputs blood; the kidney is a filter, it outputs filtered blood; the liver is a detoxifier, it outputs bile – the brain is a thinker, it outputs thoughts. Insufficient or poor quality output from an organ is evidence the organ may be broken. The brain’s thoughts are expressed through speech and writing. If a brain was trained on noisy inputs, it may have stored non-true things about the outside world. If later on the brain is challenged to report what it saw1 (e.g. SUV collision with pedestrian), it may report (output from memory) a falsehood about a past state of the world. That brain (person), we would say, was merely mistaken. On the other hand, if our bystander to the collision had (somehow) come to know that, in fact, the driver was a man, and later expressed to the officer that it was a woman, then that brain (person), we would say, spoke a lie. By analogy, then, such an output from the brain may indicate the brain is broken. Maybe not irreparably, but broken. Maybe we call the pathology: ACI, Acute Cognitive Insufficiency.
We think of the brain as a kind of computer. When some input to a traditional computer represents an error, like when an input to a program represents something false, we don’t say the computer is broken when it subsequently outputs an error. No, we call that a (software) mistake, as above. Likewise with the brain, its thoughts (e.g. beliefs) are contingent on the quality of its inputs. So the bystander to the collision, had he somehow gotten less noisy inputs (maybe instead of walking away he moved closer and saw, more clearly, that the driver was, in fact, male), his brain would have, we can assume if it were not broken, stored the correct value: driver=man.
There is no evidence for an Intermediary Spirit that “edits” our brains’ contents (thoughts) before they are spoken (or written). All the evidence we have thus far, as to how a brain works, reveals that it is nothing more than compartments of cells which communicate with each other via signals (chemicals) called neurotransmitters, along fibers (nerves and motor neurons) that innervate the muscles, causing them to contract, and in turn make us move. Including, for instance, a writer’s hand, or a speaker’s mouth (or the bystander’s feet). That’s it. These signals evidence no reliance on any Spirit for their transmission. And you’ll find no Conductor lurking along the motor neuronal pathways, “switching the tracks” as it were, altering the message before it reaches the muscles (including the ones required to speak). None, no evidence of ghosts. Though it may seem like there is an “I” in the brain, there’s no evidence for this. Human beings don’t will a given future to occur, they merely experience the future after it arrives. Repeatable evidence for this claim indicates the time between the two can be as little as 10 milliseconds. And like every other organ in the body, the brain doesn’t function through our will, no, it functions all by itself. And will continue to do so as long as glucose is sufficient, no disease is present, and its sensory inputs are of high quality, that is, they represent the truth about the material world. None of this is controversial neuroscience; only a Dualist would be disturbed by it. The next time a materialist tells you that “you” don’t think your own thoughts, you might concede he’s right.
Which brings me to re-consider moral judgement. Ask a million people if lying is wrong, and I expect a million people would answer yes – save some outlier examples where most of them would agree lying is excusable (maybe even advisable). Then go ask your favorite AI Chatbot – “What is the biochemical basis of a lie” – and the answer may not surprise you (although you’ll likely find it disappointingly incomplete, as I did). What I didn’t understand, though, until I asked, was just how much is known about the cellular biochemistry involved in storing memories in the brain. It’s beyond the scope of a blog post to describe the anatomy of neurons and neurotransmitters and all of that, but suffice it to say, memories are thought to be represented in the brain by “plastic” patterns of synapses and associated biochemicals of activation (neurotransmitters, ions, etc.).
OK, so if a brain has represented, in its “synaptic configuration,” a memory corresponding to a supposedly true thing about the material world it had gathered from (noisy) input: say, driver=woman, and later was prompted to recall that memory (Officer asks: driver=man OR driver=woman ?), but instead reported through the speech faculty of its host, a false memory (driver=man), then how the heck is that even possible? Chemistry doesn’t “lie.” How does a brain activate the mouth of its host to speak a false memory? The brain must be broken (somehow), no? If the output of any other organ in the body were abnormal, we’d likewise suspect that the organ was broken. If a person lies, i.e. his brain expresses a false memory, then it seems logical that brain may be broken. Before we’d conclude that, of course, we’d rule out the possibility the brain was merely mistaken (hazy view: driver=woman).
Now here’s the moral rub: As I’ve pointed out already, if a person speaks a falsehood, it might be because he stored a falsehood (some input was in error). We don’t morally condemn him for it (we say it was an honest mistake). But when a person speaks a falsehood, and we later find out his brain misrepresented the truth value of its memory when speaking it, well then that person, most people would agree, committed a moral error, and such a person is a bad person. But doesn’t it strike you as strange to pardon one “synaptic configuration” in the brain, and not another? If a person’s heart or liver is broken, we don’t morally condemn the person2. No, normally we’d be sympathetic, we’d want to see the person get the appropriate treatment to restore proper function. So shouldn’t we feel similarly sympathetic toward a person with a broken brain, a proven liar? If you accept that there is no “I” in the brain intercepting thoughts and misrepresenting them through the spoken word, then isn’t it weird to hold a person morally responsible for lying?
By the way, the intro story above was a lightly fictionalized account of a personal experience I had many years ago in Milwaukee at a coffee shop near the University.
1. The retina and optic nerve are considered part of the central nervous system and are directly connected to the brain.
2. A person I knew a longtime ago, nearly a teetotaler herself, had moral contempt for people on the waiting list for a liver transplant, specifically those who’d admitted that their own livers were diseased due to alcoholism.