Herbert Wildon Carr

“ Whatever therefore the nature is of the processes that are going on in the cells and fibres of the cerebral cortex, it is impossible that we should be aware of a real world outside of the brain and also that that awareness should be produced or manufactured in the brain. If we really could believe that our mind was produced in and by our brain, that the brain cells manufactured it or constructed it out of movements sent to it from the skin and sense organs, we could have no assurance that we had any knowledge of reality or that there was any reality to know. ”

“ How do we know that there is a world outside of our body of which the body is a part? Because a certain process has taken place in a certain portion of our brain. And how do we know that this process has taken place? ”

“ On the other hand, the brain can have neither memory nor imagination, for all that it is, it is at every moment. In this lies the true reason why we cannot think that brain produces mind, it would be imagining that space produces time. It would mean that a present activity produces its own past and future. Nor can we escape the absurdity by supposing that the brain does not create the memory but preserves past impressions and ideas in nerve cells or nerve tracks and sets them free or revives them in response to stimuli. ”

“ If it were, if part of mind were not always something of which we are unconscious in exactly the same sense that the material reality we perceive is always a part of a reality we are not perceiving, then the arising of consciousness at a particular juncture would be as inexplicable a miracle as that of the sudden existence of the fully armed goddess. ”

“ It is possible, in the sense that it avoids the actual absurdity of parallelism, but like parallelism it is a metaphysical theory that goes far beyond any known facts of experience and that throws no light whatever on the facts.
The fact which we have to recognize, and which there seems to be a natural disinclination in the human mind to recognize, is that mind and brain are absolutely incommensurable. They are two realities which meet—that is certain for we never have one without the other—but they meet like the circle and the tangent at one point only. ”

“ There are two kinds of response to a stimulus—one immediate and automatic, the other conscious and willed. It is only those stimuli that are transmitted to the cerebral cortex, and only some of these, that give rise to consciousness; consciousness seems to occur just at the moment when the movement in the fibres reaches the cerebral cortex; some of these movements, not all, give rise to consciousness. If a movement gives rise to consciousness it occurs when a stimulus reaches the cortex and before it passes from the brain to the muscles to issue in actions. ”

“ The brain is not a gland but it is an organ of such complexity and perfection that it is impossible to conceive a limit to its power.
There are two reasons that seem to everyone who has studied the problem, unanswerable. One is that it is impossible to explain anything as an effect unless we can regard it as strictly commensurate with the cause, and mind is not commensurate with cerebral process. ”

“ In ordinary discourse we use the words brain and mind as interchangeable terms, because it is quite evident that where there is lack of intelligence there is deficiency in the brain and where there is a high degree of intelligence there is a correspondingly high development of brain. The immense advance in recent times in our knowledge of the physiology of cerebral process serves more and more to emphasize the entire and absolute dependence of mind on brain, and particularly of the higher processes of mind on the development of the cells and fibres of the cerebral cortex. ”

“ And it seems impossible to doubt that it is the brain that produces the mind and not the mind that produces the brain, because the brain is an organ that develops continually throughout life and performs a multitude of other functions besides that of turning the excitation of its cells and fibres into sensations and perceptions, a function that seems to be intermittent and only called into activity at definite times and in special circumstances. ”

“ We may grant at once that so far as the first difficulty we have noticed is concerned, the conception of the mind as an epiphenomenon of the brain is a possible one. It may be that there are after effects of brain processes which though the direct effect of physical movements and of the conversion of energy, are yet not themselves an absorption of energy and do not therefore become an actual calculable part of the causal chain. We could explain in this way why consciousness is not measureable in terms of physical movement, although a product of physical movement. ”

“ The brain is there but not the mind, for you are imagining extension without duration and mind has no extension. Imagine on the other hand a section through the whole of duration, the mind is there but not the brain, for matter only exists simultaneously in a present, you cannot imagine matter without extension. The mind is therefore essentially a time continuity and the brain essentially a space continuity. Restrict the mind to the actual condition of the brain at any given moment and there is no mind. ”

“ Many people think that our nature is a combination of two realities, a soul and a body, and that the mind belongs to the soul, which is immaterial or spiritual, while the brain belongs to the body, which is material. ”

“ Take them in their union and we see at once what the brain is—a great exchange office or switchboard, where the stimuli that come from the outer world are received and switched on to their responsive movements. We see also what the mind is, it is the whole scheme of our activity, and we see how it functions by bringing the field of our activity to consciousness. ”

“ It seems then it must be the brain which gives the special character of our sensations to consciousness, for we have only to send the brain a stimulus through the optic nerve to get sight, through the auditory nerve to get sound and so on, and this notwithstanding that the stimulus has in itself none of the things which we distinguish as sensible qualities. ”

“ The brain is material and therefore spatial, it is a certain disposition of material elements. This disposition of elements changes but only externally by influences that affect the disposition, but not the elements themselves. It is a delicate organization easily thrown out of balance or destroyed, but what is essential to its existence is material organization. On the other hand, mind is not spatial but temporal, its essential nature is a duration which conserves the past in memory. ”

“ Interaction supposes that the mind actually supplies energy to the body and that psychical reality undergoes conversion into physical reality. It is clear therefore that it is the first, rather than the second of the two difficulties we have stated, that is the real stumbling block to this theory. ”

“ We might of course suppose, as some philosophers in former times supposed, that God performs a miracle every time we know anything, and that our only guarantee that there is any world independent of our knowledge, or that our knowledge is of a real world, is our faith in God that He does not deceive us. ”

“ So he supposed that God at the Creation had made the mind and the body as two clocks which always kept time and therefore seemed as though the state of one was simply dependent on the state of the other. ”

“ If we start with the light we say that it communicates to the retina a molecular motion which is transmitted by the optic nerve to the brain, from the brain by efferent fibres to the muscles controlling the iris and eyelid which, by contracting or relaxing as the case may be, cause the iris to close the aperture admitting light, and the eyelid to cover and protect the whole organ. ”

“ Physiologists tell us that there are the almost inconceivable number of something like 7000 million nerve cells in the brain of the newly born child and these, which neither increase nor decrease throughout life, undergo a development of interconnection by means of the branching fibres they send out in every direction. When through disease or malformation or any other cause this development is arrested we have mental deficiency or idiocy.
The brain is an organ of immense complexity and has a great deal more to do than only to turn stimuli into sensations. ”

“ But considered simply in itself and according to the rules we apply to all our deductions and inferences, if the mind is simply a product of the brain it is then something potentially present in the brain or present in the materials supplied to the brain before it is actually produced, and this something cannot be what is happening outside the brain or that did or will happen outside the brain. ”

“ WHY THE MIND SEEMS TO BE, AND YET CANNOT BE, PRODUCED BY THE BRAIN.
IF an electric current is applied to the closed eyelids we have a sensation of colour, if to the ears, a sensation of sound, if to the tongue, or nose, a sensation of taste or smell. What is apparently one and the same stimulus applied to different sense organs gives rise in the brain to different sensations. ”

“ When our sense organs are stimulated, the stimulus is conveyed by means of sensory nerves to the brain and there gives rise to sensation, the sense organs are sensitive to various kinds of stimuli, the stimulus to the eyes gives the sensation of sight, to the ears the sensation of sound and so on. ”

“ It is part of a complete nervous system and it is only a part of the brain that is concerned in mental process. A nervous system or something that closely corresponds to it seems to be a necessary acquirement of every living organism that moves freely, and its structure, however complex it may be in its higher development, is built up of a simple arrangement of cells and fibres that receive and transmit movement. Its function is to receive a stimulus and to transmit it to a centre where a responsive movement is prepared. ”

“ Then there is the mind-stuff theory, according to which there is a substance of which every mind is composed which is as universal as material substance, a stuff of which every molecule, atom and electron has its share. ”

“ But it is not only by experiments such as this that we make the discovery that there is a close and intimate relation between the mind and the brain, a relation which makes the mind dependent on the brain. ”

“ And the second is that the consciousness which arises in connection with cerebral process is not consciousness of cerebral process but of something which is altogether independent of cerebral process, something existing in a different space, it may be thousands or millions of miles away from the brain, and something existing at a different time, it may be ages before or even after the present moment at which the cerebral process takes place. ”

“ Yet this consciousness is certainly not independent of the process, for if it is why does it arise at one moment and at one moment only of the process? So it has been suggested that it may be an effect of a different kind, an effect that does not absorb energy or give out energy, but still a direct effect of the cerebral process. ”

“ This seems to indicate that in some way or another the movements that pass to the nerve cells of the cerebral cortex are there transformed into sensations, thoughts and ideas, into what we group together and think of as a different and separate kind of thing and call the mind. ”

“ We can explain the mechanism of the muscles and the supply to them of their energy, the anatomy of the retina and of the nerve fibres and the nature of their function, or on the other side we may explain the excessive light as due to the solar rays and these as produced by the rapid movement of the molecules in the solar mass. ”

“ To overcome it the hypothesis has been suggested that there may be in every case of conscious action a conversion of energy that exactly compensates itself—a simultaneous conversion of psychical into physical energy and of physical into psychical energy, so that the amount of each remains always constant. ”