The Footprint is NOT the Foot

The conflation of brain activity with thinking

Whenever I speak with friends and colleagues about topics like consciousness, materialism, free will, etc. it’s inevitable that the topic of neuroscience comes up.

The implied argument that my determinism-inclined peers seem to believe at some level goes something like this:

1. The discoveries of science allow us to have access to brain imaging. i.e. We can see different areas of the brain become active, depending on the kind of thoughts the observed subject is having.

2. The phenomenon of neurons firing and signaling energy is a physical one.

3. Therefore, consciousness is entirely/merely a physical thing (or consciousness can be explained entirely in physical terms, with the rest of our experience—the “nonphysical” part—being some kind of illusion)

A related extension of this line of reasoning is:

1. “ ”

2. We can see brain activity occurring just before or at the same time as when the observed subject reports experiencing thinking / decision-making.

3. Therefore, the physical brain energy is directly causing the precise thought and decision that the person makes, which means there is no free will.

Despite the allure of this kind of perspective, you may have already started to notice its limitations, as well as the a priori assumptions it relies upon.

Let’s remember for a moment that thoughts themselves are not directly observable (other than by the “I” Observer, which is you—and God, if you’re willing to make that kind of leap).

We can only observe the effects of other people’s thoughts, as they manifest through physical medium, such as patterns of neurons firing at the micro-level, or changes in body language at the macro level. But again, that is not the same thing as seeing the thought itself.

Falling short of direct observation, at best we could one day hope to simulate copies of other people’s thoughts, “transferring” them from one mind-brain to another.

We would, in theory, do this by identifying a pattern of neural activity in one brain and then stimulating that same pattern within another brain, hoping that the mind associated with the second brain experiences a “thought” in the same way that the mind associated with the first brain experienced it.

To put it simply, the point I’m trying to make here is that The Footprint is Not the Foot.

The footprint may give us a decent image of how the foot works. A set of footprints can allow us to infer patterns like what direction the feet were walking in. This is all well and good, and having access to footprints can be very exciting. . . but we shouldn’t jump the epistemological gun and think that we are observing the foot itself. A footprint does not represent comprehensive data that can fully account for the phenomenon of feet.

So it is with brain activity and thoughts.

Our instruments of empirical observation and measurement are bound to the material, physical realm. They can record, receive, and report on changes of the physical state. Based on our experience of mind-body connection, we then infer what those changes mean in the mental, metaphysical realm.

But such inferences go a step beyond the direct capabilities of the measurements that the empirical tools can themselves provide, and that is a critical distinction, which is all too easy for us to forget in our visually-dominant society.

By analogy, when you look at that snowy footprint, imagine that the snow layer represents everything that is physical, and that each snowflake is equipped with scientific measuring devices. When a foot steps onto the snow, these devices are activated and record the changes occurring onto the snow, which the foot is causing. But those devices do not observe the foot itself. And despite the usefulness of the data that the footprint provides, it will always be incomplete in its explanatory power of the foot.

When we think (including right now as you are reading these words), our thoughts leave a footprint onto the snow. . . they leave a imprint onto our physical network of neurons, and these changes in our neurons are what can be identified by scientific measuring devices. Much can be learned from what we see in the neurons. However, perfect understanding of neurons does not equate to perfect understanding of thoughts.

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We could go much further into discussions around materialism and free will, but I’d like to save an extended treatment for another time.

The only other thing I wanted to touch on is how causality applies to this analogy. Admittedly, with the footprint image, it’s a one-way causal relationship: the foot that is stepping creates the footprint in the snow, rather than the footprint causing the foot to make a step.

Of course, with the mind-body connection it’s not so straightforward. The totality of human knowledge seems to suggest that it’s a two-way relationship.

It’s a mistake to only think about the mind causing changes onto the body (thoughts causing changes in the brain activity). However, it’s equally a mistake to think only in terms of the body causing changes in the mind (brain activity causing changes in thoughts), as some materialists tend to do.

It’s not an either/or relationship but a both/and. It seems to both be true that A) Our physiological states influence what we think about, and B) What we think about influences our physiological states.

The exact interplay of this is a mystery (especially as it varies from person to person, as well as from situation to situation within a given person), and perhaps it will always remain as such. The only way I could see this being demystified is if we could attain a transcendent vantage point from which to make a system-wide observation.

i.e. You can’t know you’re in the “Matrix” unless you’re able to experience the vantage point of what it’s like being outside of the “Matrix”.

But getting access to that type of vantage point seems unlikely on this side of death.

For now, I think the following BONUS analogy may suffice 🙂: We can breathe without consciously thinking about it (parasympathetically), and we can also “take over” and control how we breathe, by consciously thinking about it. Is the breath affecting our thoughts or our thoughts affecting our breath?

It also the case that our brain wave frequencies (alpha, beta, theta, delta, etc) are deeply connected with our experience of consciousness with a similar, two-way kind of channel.

The practical insight here is to connect this difference (body=>mind vs mind=>body) to the idea of being reactive vs proactive. As we go about the rest of our week, let’s look for opportunities to embrace the latter flow of causality, so we can more effectively utilize our gift of Free Will.

—Drago