How the Mind is the Brain’s Clothing that Mistakes Itself for a Spirit

Making sense of the illusion of our inner self

Here’s the folk view of the self that’s been prevalent in Western societies for several thousand years: the self is an immaterial spirit that possesses the physical body, including the brain, and that controls the body to generate culture, technology, social progress, and the like.

Here’s the modern scientific view of the self: the self is mainly the brain, or perhaps the gut-brain axis, and the mind is something the brain does, a pattern of neural activity that emerges to carry out certain functions, such as controlling the body’s movements, communicating with fellow humans, and managing the environment.

Here’s my philosophical synthesis of those two views: the true inner, hidden self that we know exists is the brain, not an immaterial spirit. The brain and the gut are hidden inside our body, whereas our main sense organs point outwards, feeding that inner self information to process. But because our innards are hidden from us, which is to say from themselves, we don’t consciously identify with them. When we think of ourselves, we don’t think of our brain, for instance, not even if we’re a neurologist.

Instead, we identify indeed with something that feels immaterial and that we’ve commonly called a “spirit” or a “soul.” Nowadays, we think of it as the mind, the conscious self, or the person or personality. But regardless of how we promote and mythologize it, what we identify with is, as scientists point out, something our innards do, an emergent mental program they’ve devised to carry out certain functions.

That’s another way of saying that our inner physical self — especially the nervous system and the intestinal microbiome — developed the mental self we identify with as a kind of tool, as a vehicle or a system of communication, self-modification, and control.

Again, the folk view is that our true, inner self is a spirit that derives from a transcendent, supernatural realm, from “the Heavens” (before we came to understand that outer space is just as natural as our earthly territory). We identify with that so-called spirit, not with the brain. But what this immaterial self is is a pattern of conscious activities that the brain evidently uses to negotiate with itself and with the outer world.

We’re functional intermediaries, not immortal interlopers.

The standard, naïve folk view is that the mind is the main tool-user. You the conscious person decide what pieces of technology to purchase, use, or invent. But that can’t be the full story since it discounts the role of the brain.

Somehow, rather, our physical body must be the primary tool-user, the source of behavioural modernity (of the cultural expressions of symbolic thought). And the most important piece of technology that the body developed is the mind/self/person, that is, the so-called supernatural spirit which is indeed an illusion. The illusion is that the conscious self is primary because as Rene Descartes pointed out, it’s primary to consciousness. We’re not internally and directly aware of the brain, so we discount it as the seat of our activity.

We identify instead with what our control centers do, with the personal, encultured mind that we think of as our true, familiar self. Our personal name applies not to our brain, let alone to our feces-filled intestines, but to that ethereal self that seems to inhabit our body. That self is something like software, like a program for translating neural patterns into mental, behavioural, and cultural ones.

The self we identify with thinks and feels, in folk psychological terms, and it adheres to cultural norms, such as the artificial laws of the land. But we must be erring or oversimplifying in presuming that those thoughts and feelings are the primary tool-users, the main architects of civilization. On the contrary, that mental self is itself an artifact of the gut-brain axis. The self we identify with is being used, in turn, not by God, an angel, or any other supernatural interloper, but by our innards (and eventually by our cultural products, as in the case of benighted folks’ mass mind mentality).

As I explain elsewhere, we identify with our conscious mind rather than with our brain not just because we have no direct access to our innards (unless we try to tear our body apart in looking for them, dying in the process). On top of that, we identify with that qualitative self because the transition between thoughts and feelings becomes second nature to us, given our childhood trainings and the gut-brain’s constant directions.

The brain identifies with its mind in the way we identify with our car when we’re driving, or in the way a hermit crab might identify with its found shell. The car becomes an extension of the driver’s body because the driver is overly familiar with carrying out the function of driving it. Likewise, the brain is so used to thinking and feeling that it identifies with those programs, not with neurons and intestines.

We’re tool users (gut-brain axes) that identify with their main tools, with the mental, personal self that translates neuronal patterns into semantic ones that appeal to other individual and collective programs.

Cognitive scientists seize on the computer as a metaphor for the mind, in which case the gut-brain is the hardware, and the mind is the software. But software is a program made up of instructions, recipes, or algorithms for taking some input to some designated output. That is, software is a technique for carrying out an objective.

We program computers to help us perform certain tasks. Likewise, parents, teachers, and genes program children, but eventually children grow up to be relatively autonomous self-programmers. The encultured brain, then, settles into a mental architecture, making itself feel at home in a worldview, in a personal way of thinking and feeling. That’s our character, the signature of our mental activity.

The adult body learns how to think for itself, but the pattern of that thinking is more like the indispensable tool than the tool-user. More precisely, the mental pattern familiar to our conscious self is the tool that deems itself the master because all it knows is that storm of neural and intestinal outputs, not the innards themselves.

If the body wears outerwear such as shirts and pants, it wears innerwear, too, to clothe its innards with personal and social patterns of mentality. The outerwear keeps the body warm, dry, and fashionable. And made up of models, plans, prejudices, fears, longings, and the like, the innerwear gives the self-alienated, autonomous human brain a stable home in the wilderness.

Inevitably, then, human consciousness is alienated, even if it lacks the philosophical concepts and meta-perspective to appreciate why it’s driven by alienation and by Faustian curiosity and a cancer-like urge to colonize and humanize the inhuman, wild terrain.

The gut-brain axis is the heart of the self that can’t experience itself as such, so we’re inherently hidden from our true selves, in part, because of the nature of perception. When human mentality evolved from that of our animal ancestors, we became relatively autonomous thinkers and planners. Rather than stewing in angst as they might have realized they had no clue how their innards work, our prehistoric ancestors developed a more intuitive, manageable self, the “innerwear” of their minds and personal selves.

We identify with that mental clothing to serve as the interface between our innards and the outer wilderness. The innerwear is an artifact like a pair of pants, something the body generates so it can act like a person rather than an animal. And we mistake that artifact with which we identify for a supernatural spirit sent by God to inhabit our body. We think the tool uses the tool-user, as though the tail could wag the dog.

Likely, the mind is more sophisticated than a dog’s tail, so the brain generates the mind to interact with itself. In our case, then, the tool can affect the tool-user, as the placebo effect shows. We can train the brain, rewiring it to adapt to personal or cultural expectations. But that’s a far cry from saying the readymade mind swoops into the body from a faraway land, piloting the brain in some secret cockpit.

The mystic wants to say that material bodies are illusory, and that what’s primary is consciousness or spirit. The more scientific explanation of the self posits an illusion, too, namely this illusion that the mind is an immaterial spirit, an illusion that arises because consciousness is self-alienated, lacking any access to its physical substrate, to the brain and the intestines which are hidden from view.

The mind that seems to float in the head is the proverbial babe that’s lost in the woods. To feel more at home, lost as we seem, we make up comforting stories. As minds, we’re not the tools or clothing of this physical body. No, this ghostly mind is the tool-user, and we just ignore our substrate and think of humans as personal selves, not as bodies that devise selves as intermediaries.

What a tangled web we weave…