Session 3 - Am I Just My Brain?
Have you ever wondered what it is exactly that makes the real you? There is a popular scientific view that human beings are nothing more than their brains and yet intuitively this feels wrong. Sir Colin Blakemore, Professor of neuroscience at Oxford said back in 1976 that ‘the human brain is a machine which alone accounts for all our actions, our most private thoughts, our beliefs. All our actions are the product of the activity of our brains’. This is yet another manifestation of the widely held view that all there is is matter, the physical stuff of the world which we can touch and feel. However, there are profound implications of this world view because if we are nothing more than our brains then are we really free to choose? Perhaps all our life-choices are pre-programmed and if so, are we responsible for our actions? Further, how do we treat human beings who have faulty or damaged brains – are they truly human? And, in the brave new world of artificial intelligence are we really any different from a machine?
In this talk Dr Sharon Dirckx challenges this ‘physicalist’ worldview from a Christian point of view and seeks to tell a better story about the human brain and the human person. She reminds us that we have a mind and that we experience consciousness and asks how these concepts fit in with our understanding of the brain as merely a machine. She shows that there is a range of views on the mind-brain relationship which include the ideas that (1) the mind is the brain (in other words they are the same thing), (2) the brain generates the mind (and so the mind emerges from the brain), and (3) the mind is beyond the brain and they are fundamentally different. Dr Dirckx present scientific evidence that strongly suggests that the brain and the mind (human consciousness) are different from each other indicating that there are different aspects to the human make-up. She concludes with a series of challenging questions which go beyond the scientific and asks ‘Why is there consciousness?’, ‘Why do we have a mind?’, ‘Why can we think?’
Dr Sharon Dirckx (pronounced Dirix) has a PhD in brain imaging and worked in neuroscience research for ten years both in the UK and the USA. Sharon is a speaker, author and broadcaster, as well as an adjunct lecturer at OCCA The Oxford centre for Christian Apologetics. Her 2019 book entitled ‘Am I just my brain?’ is published by and available from the Good Book Company (Am I Just My Brain? – Sharon Dirckx | The Good Book Company).
The main themes covered in this study are: the brain as a machine, the implications of this view for human freedom, the implications of this view for understanding artificial intelligence; the nature of the mind and human consciousness; the nature of personhood – what it is that makes us who we are; dementia and personhood.
These notes are intended for private or small group study. Please watch each video clip and then consider the associated study questions. In order to give enough time for discussion it is intended that the session lasts between 60-75 minutes.
Want to watch the entire talk?
This session resource has been broken down into multiple parts in order to make it more suitable for group discussion. However, if you are interested in watching the full recording of the session, we’ve made the full talk available here.