See

discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/229604457

Are We Our Brains?

Article in Philosophical Investigations February 2009

DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9205.2008.01366.x

CITATION READS

1 37

1 author:

Stephen Burwood
University of Hull
13 PUBLICATIONS 73 CITATIONS

SEE PROFILE

Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:

A phenomenological lifeworld study of people with eating disorders aged 60 and above. View project

All content following this page was uploaded by Stephen Burwood on 18 May 2017.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

Philosophical Investigations, 32 (2), 2009, pp.113-133.

ARE WE OUR BRAINS?

Stephen Burwood, University of Hull

What if you were middle-aged and were offered the chance to trade in your sagging
flesh for a much younger and more pleasing model? This macabre possibility (which, I
confess, seems at once both repulsive and enticing to a middle-aged philosopher) forms
the premise of the Hanif Kureishi short-ish story The Body. At a metropolitan, middle-
class party, the central character Adam is introduced to the idea of Newbodies: older
people who, for a price, have had their brains surgically removed and transplanted into
the bodies of young people who have, unfortunately, passed away. The procedure is of
dubious legality and it becomes clear that the passing away of the young is not always
natural or timely. A black market develops for the supply of bodies and, in the way of
such things, it does not appear to be too concerned about how they are obtained. After a
series of hedonistic adventures as a Newbody, our protagonist is himself pursued by
another, wealthy Newbody who wants Adams (or rather, at this point, Leos) newly
acquired, muscular and handsome frame for a dying brother.
Apart from this grisly scenario, Kureishi explores the unexpected disappointments
and regrets this new form of immortality might bring and touches upon the fundamental
questions of self-identity that it implies. From a purely medical point of view, the idea of
such a brain-body swap is considerably less far-fetched than it would once have
seemed.1 Nonetheless, I want to insist that Kureishis tale and the idea of the brain being
the self is philosophically contentious and not philosophical commonsense. It might be
somewhat surprising that this is something that has to be insisted upon; but it is. The
idea has become a common enough supposition in popular science journals and has
crept into the public consciousness enough for people to sometimes unreflectively
describe themselves in these terms.2 But it has also become a contemporary
philosophical conceitalmost to the point where a tone of incredulity is likely to meet an
expression of dissent.3
The story supposes that the real me is not the whole embodied human being you
would normally encounter from day to day but an isolatable partin this case an
isolatable anatomical part, my brain. Thus, the storys central assumption implies a form
of dualisma dualism of brain and body-sans-brain that one might characterise as a

1
Though I do not think we need take seriously the company BrainTrans Inc., who claims to be able
to offer the procedure Kureishi describes (anyone feeling particularly adventurous should see
http://216.247.9.207/ny-best.htm). The operation they offer is a snip, so to speak, at a mere
$499,000. Whether BrainsTrans Inc. was Kureishis inspiration I do not know. For more serious
consideration of the possibilities, see the career of the Cleveland, Ohio neurologist and sometime
Papal advisor Robert White.
2
It is now not uncommon for people with certain forms of body dysphoria, such as transsexuals, to
describe their condition in such terms. Thus, the claim might be that the real individual is a womans
brain trapped inside an alien, male body so that surgery is seen as an attempt to make the persons
body morphology congruent with his/her brain gender.
3
See, for example Michael Gazzanigas opening reply to Shaun Gallagher (Gallagher & Gazzaniga
1998). Gazzanigas reply reminds me of an episode of the TV show Friends, The One With Joeys
New Brain. Joey, who is a soap opera star, reveals that his character is to have a brain transplant.
Frustrated by the scepticism shown to this storyline by Ross, a palaeontologist, Joey exclaims, Why
is it so difficult for you? I thought you were a scientist.
Cartesian materialism or even a crypto-Cartesianism (Bennett & Hacker 2003, 111).
Despite obvious differences, the brain-is-self thesis shares certain affinities with the
more familiar form of Cartesianism. For example, we still have the idea of an essential,
core self, separable from the body; but here it is a material core self separable from the
rest of the body, instead of something more elusive or esoteric. And, once again, the
body is externalised and objectified; its status reduced to no more than the mechanical
structure of limbs that Descartes sometimes takes the body to be (Descartes 1985, 17),
instead of something that is an integral part of my being as a subject. As with traditional
forms of dualism, the body (here specifically the body-sans-brain) appears to be only
contingently associated with the essential, core self and thereby the human subject. It is
as if the body-sans-brain is little more than a tacked-on life support apparatus and
sensory link for the brain.
Let us assume that the minded individual is essentially an embodied individual; in
other words, that traditional forms of dualism are not true. The question this new form of
dualism puts into stark relief is: In what sense is the minded individual essentially
embodied? More specifically, in order for the minded individual to be embodied, is it
enough for him or her to be embrained rather than fully embodied? To put this slightly
differently, is it enough to be what we might call biologically embodied rather than
embodied in a richer sense as an embodied subjectivity?

1. A Serious Candidate for the Self?

Among those philosophers who have explicitly held the brain-is-self thesis are John
Searle and, more hesitantly, Thomas Nagel. Searle, for example, says that each of us is
precisely a brain in a vat (1983, 230); the vat in our case being our skulls and, by
extension, the rest of our bodies. Searle also appears to think that it is quite reasonable
for us to say things about our brains which we would normally say only about people;
such as This brain is conscious or This brain is experiencing thirst or pain (1984, 22).
Nagel has also argued that there is an important sense in which we are our brains. At
least, he has argued the brain must be considered as a serious candidate for being the
self (1986, 41), because it is the seat of a persons experiences. He expresses this
thesis, he says, with mild exaggeration as the hypothesis that I am my brain (ibid., 40).
Given that Nagel himself concedes that the conception is hard to internalize, what
possible reasons are there for thinking we are our brains?
Perhaps the most intuitively appealing reason is the one understood but unspoken
in Kureishis story: that my body-sans-brain is fungible in a way my brain is not. If I am
severely brain-damaged, for example, the strong intuition is that it is no use to me if I am
given a donor brain. In a medical crisis, anyones heart would do but not anyones brain.
This suggests that the survival of my brain is necessary for my survival whereas the
survival of my body-sans-brain is not. As Nagel puts it, it is the brain that is essential to
my existence, for I could lose everything but my functioning brain and still be me the
brain is the only part of me whose destruction I could not possibly survive (1986, 40). Of
course, the story also assumes that the survival of my brain is sufficient for my survival
whereas the survival of my body-sans-brain is not; so that, as brain-donor rather than
brain-recipient, I would survive the procedure. In a medical crisis, it seems only my brain
will do; but it will do very nicely.
One can see the philosophical appeal of all this. It gives voice to a widespread
feeling that the brain plays a unique role in mindedness (paying due deference to the
brain sciences) and, perhaps more importantly, neatly captures in one go both
psychological and physical continuity. Fundamentally, the brain-is-self view favours
psychological continuity as the principal criterion of self identity but gives this a
materialist twist, thereby ensuring a form of physical continuity as well. Pared down to a
simple syllogism, the argument appears to be as follows: I am my mind; my mind isin
some important sensemy brain; therefore, I am my brain. So, in Kureishis story, Adam
continues to be Adam, even in his new body (as Leo), as Adam is Adams brain. And
Adam is Adams brain because Adam is his mind, and his mind isin some important
sensehis brain. So, the story assumes that, while Adams body-sans-brain is
something that can be discarded and replaced by a new model, his brain cannot be so
replaced as it is his brain that embodies his mind.
There are, of course, different ways we could unpack that key phrase in some
important sense. For Searle, the brain-is-self claim is rooted in the distinctive causal
powers of the brain. A key component of Searles biological naturalism is the claim:
Conscious states are entirely caused by lower level neurobiological processes in the
brain. Conscious states are thus causally reducible to neurobiological processes (2004,
79). So, Adam is Adams brain because Adam is his mind, and his brain is, uniquely and
exhaustively, causally responsible for his mind. As a causal reductionist, Searle appears
quite happy to rule out, in advance, the possibility of a prosthetic brain or other artificial
replacement and claims that, although such an idea is conceptually viable, it is
empirically absurd to suppose that we could duplicate the causal powers of neurons
entirely in silicon (1992: 66). Perhaps he is right; though, to my mind, this causal
chauvinism may well turn out to be rather premature. The truth is that we simply do not
know at the moment and, in what might prove to be a discomfort for Searles position,
what he claims is absurd is precisely what some biomedical engineers are currently
attempting to doand apparently with some, albeit (so far) very limited, success (see
Berger et al 2001). In any case, even if what he says were true, it is quite a leap from
that to thinking of ourselves as our brains.
What is required is an additional principle, demanding that we identify ourselves
with whatever item in the world has the requisite causal powers or otherwise underlies
mindedness. Nagel expresses it thus; I am whatever persisting individual in the
objective order underlies the subjective continuities of that mental life I call mine (1986,
40). As it stands, this leaves it open whether this persisting individual in the objective
order could be the brain or something elseperhaps even something made of silicon
but Nagel thinks that, as a matter of fact, the available evidence points towards it being
the intact brain.
Nagel is not always as clear as he could be about what he means by underlies.
Sometimes he sounds like Searle and appears to suggest that the brain is essential
because it is what causally realizes the mind. Thus, he says that the mind is a biological
product (ibid., 31), that it is the intact brain which is responsible for the maintenance of
our memories, the unity of consciousness, etc. (ibid., 41), that my mental life depends
entirely on certain states and activities of my brain (ibid.) and that, when it comes to the
self and personal identity, the actual cause is what matters (ibid., 44). But, in fact, this
cannot be what Nagel means for he also says that he favours a dual-aspect theory, in
which one thing can have two sets of mutually irreducible essential properties, mental
and physical (ibid., 31), and one aspect is not the cause of the other, they are simply
distinct modes of apprehension.
Normally, what is said to be the bearer of these two aspects has been the person;
understood as the entire, living human being. What Nagel suggests is that it should
instead be understood as the intact brain. So, for Nagel, to say I am my brain is not to
equate myself with a mere physical object, for the brain, he argues, is not just a physical
system but is the bearer of psychological ascriptions as well. On this view, the brain is
the person as it is the brain that has both physical and mental aspects. In some ways,
this cerebral dual-aspect theory helps us understand the otherwise peculiar claim made
by Searle that it is perfectly reasonable to say such things as This brain is conscious or
This brain is experiencing thirst or painthough, of course, Searle is not himself a
dual-aspect theorist. If the intact brain is the person, rather than merely being what is
causally responsible for mindedness, then perhaps such statements make sense. The
advantage this move offers a self-is-brain theorist with non-reductionist sympathies is
that it guarantees the indispensability of the brain as certainly as, say, the reductionist
identity claims of central-state materialism or even a causal reductionism. If my brain is
the person and the proper subject of psychological ascriptions, then my brain is who I
am. And if this is the case, then it is clearly irreplaceable; either by another brain, as
Nagel notes, or by a biomemetic prosthesis.
But do we have any reason for accepting that the brain is the person? In fact, while
this cerebral dual-aspect theory guarantees the brains indispensability, it does so by
doing violence to our intuitions about what grounds psychological ascriptions and what
sort of facts we take to be important in determining who or what we are.

2. The Notion of Objective Completion

At the root of the issue is another principle to which Nagel is committed: that the concept
of the self is open to objective completionso that our real nature, as he insists on
calling it, is not immediately obvious to us and may be revealed only through empirical
investigation. What Nagel therefore apparently means by underlies is, not simply that
the brain causes the mind, but that it fills in what he calls the blank space in our concept
of the self, completing our subjective idea of ourselves with the realisation of what item
in the objective world we are.
Firstly, almost despite himself, Nagel succumbs to the temptation of thinking that
empirical investigation provides us, not with the completion of our concept of self, but
with its determination. In fact, the term underlies gives the game away: despite his overt
subscription to a dual-aspect theory, there still seems to be a privileging of the physical
here, so that the mental and the physical are not really considered as different but
equally fundamental. The physical brain is thus not simply the objective counterpart to
our subjective notion of the self (as a consistent dual-aspect theorist might have it) and
so merely fills in a blank space in our conceptualisations. Rather, using Nagels own
words, it is what I really am, or what I in fact am, or my real nature, or my true
nature.
So, the idea is that we discover our true selves by discovering which persisting
individual in the objective order we are and we do this by establishing what the physical
basis of consciousness is. This just seems plain wrong. Of course, there is much we
have not known about ourselves and which we have discovered, including the fact that
neurological processes in the brain are an important part of the story of how it is that we
are sentient, conscious beings. Furthermore, such discoveries may indeed fill out our
identity conditions and in tricky cases (as with comas or someone in a persistent
vegetative state) may help us decide whether, so to speak, the person is still present.
But they cannot tell us who or what we really or truly arethis is not something that
can be revealed by such a project.
We should not expect empirical investigations to provide the final answer to what
constitutes the self. This does not rule out these empirical investigations having another
kind of relevance that may impinge upon a discussion of the self; viz., establishing
elements of the physical causal base for our psychological capacities. Therefore, the
proper goal of such investigations is to discover what kinds of functional and physical
organisation enable mindedness and selfhood, not to reveal their true essence.
There is also something distinctly odd about the idea that I can discover which
persisting individual in the objective order I am. As Nagel concedes, this leaves open
the possibility that our true nature clashes with our intuitive conception of ourselves,
perhaps radically. If we grant this possibility, it is rather dizzying to think just how
mistaken we could be about ourselves. What if our empirical discoveries revealed that
only a tiny fraction of the brain is required to physically ground the continuity of our
subjective lives? The problem here is that, as there seems to be no phenomenological or
conceptual constraints on the results this purported process of empirical discovery will
deliver, it is hard to know where to stop once we narrow the self down from the whole
embodied person (cf. Glover 1988, 84).
In any case, do I not already grasp what persisting individual in the objective
order I am? We do not first think of ourselves as part of the world and then discover
what or where in the world we arethese truths are dialogically intertwined. To think of
myself as part of the world just is to think of myself as having a perspective on the world
and this is already to think of myself as embodied in the world. In other words, it is
already to think of myself as a persisting individual in the objective order. Furthermore,
this is already to think of myself as embodied in a certain way: not as a mere biological
object or its mechanical replacement but as a fully embodied human being, an
intentional agent pursuing my projects in the world.4 It is tempting to say that if I know
anything, it seems to me that I know this. I already know what persisting individual in the
objective order I amI am this body I call my own, of which my brain is only a
component part.5
The brain-is-self thesis seems to me to be a good example of just how a principle
such as Nagels notion of objective completion can go awry. In particular, what Searle,
Nagel and other brain-is-self theorists get wrong is in thinking that neurobiological
processes alone can and do embody mindedness and selfhood.

3. The Visceral and the Epithelial Body

There are good reasons why the idea that we are essentially our brains is difficult to
internalize, reasons which mean that difficulty should not be dismissed lightly. One set of
reasons are phenomenological: the brain belongs to the hidden and elusive realm of the
visceral, which is largely characterized by anonymity. The viscera are part of what
Merleau-Ponty refers to as a margin of almost impersonal existence: the humdrum and
taken for granted rhythms of existence that sustain me but nonetheless represent a
prepersonal cleaving to the general form of the world (1962, 84). Therefore, there is a
sense in which my viscera really do underlie my subjectivity in a way that my surface or
epithelial body does not. Despite being the most intimate part of me, of all of my body
they are most like the body as object rather than the lived-body with which I am more
familiar: there is something unknown and almost alien about the viscera.
This anonymity is due to the fact that the internal organs are subject to what Drew
Leder terms depth disappearance: they are an experiential absence or, at best, an

4
I argue this in more detail in a forthcoming article, Disclosing a World: Spatiality, Embodiment and
Motility.
5
Assuming, rather precariously, that a claim that I know such a thing makes any sense at all; or,
conversely, that I do not know it; or am uncertain about it; or may be mistaken about it; or, indeed,
can discover it (see Wittgenstein 1969).
ambiguous presence (Leder 1990, 53-56 & 39-45). That is to say, not only are my
viscera hidden from others, by being concealed within a superstructure of skin, bones
and muscle tissue, but also from mepartly because, being so concealed, they are not
objects for my own exteroceptive senses, such as sight and touch, so that I do not
perceive them (except in extremely deleterious circumstances); partly because their
associated interoceptive sensory awareness is muted and indistinct, spatially ambiguous
and discontinuous, so that I am only vaguely aware of them; and partly because they are
resistant to my intentional motor control, so that I do not and cannot act from them.
If all this is true of the viscera in general, it is particularly true of the brain. The
brain is subject to a unique degree of depth disappearance that is both quantitatively and
qualitatively different to that displayed by any other bodily organ. The simple fact is that,
phenomenologically, the brain is no more essential to the self than the pancreas or the
spleen. As Paul Valry observes, Words are more a part of us than our nerves, we only
know our brains by hearsay (cited in Starobinski 1989, 372). Encased within its skull,
the brain is normally unavailable to any of the exteroceptive powers and this is
complimented by the fact that the brain is itself remarkably insensitive (so, headaches
and other maladies of the head have little to with the tissue of the brain itself). Rather
than being even a vague presence, imprecisely felt, like many internal organs, the brain
is completely absent in interoception as well as exteroception. In addition to its
comprehensive absence in sensory experience there is also the brains evident motor
disappearance. I cannot exercise any direct control over the operations of my brain and,
although it is responsible for regulating the functions of the viscera and other bodily
systems, this regulation is itself automatic and beyond my ability to command.
The reason why all this is significant in the present context is because of an insight
of Freuds. When Freud famously claimed that The ego is first and foremost a bodily
ego (1961, 26), what he meant was that our sense of ourselves is ultimately derived
from bodily sensation. Freuds insight was twofold: (i) that our sense of self is not the
sense of a pure subjectivity but is the sense of a sensual body and (ii) that this sense of
a body is not simply structured by material or causal considerations. It is the second
aspect that concerns us here. According to Freud, what is important is not the body as it
in fact is, the body as described by anatomy or physiology, but the body as invested
with meaning for us. In this meaningful body, certain parts take on a significance relative
to others and this significance is determined by their comparative sensitivity and the
degree to which we endow them with affect (i.e. they are subject to emotion and desire).6
Thus, our sense of self is a sense of a bodily schema moulded by pleasure and pain
through the bodys interoceptive and sensitive capacities.
For Freud, then, the self (ego) is not merely a surface entity, but the projection
of a surface derived from the bodily sensations of the epithelial body. We might not
want to buy in to all of what Freud says, yet there is a kernel of truth in his idea that our
sense of self is both formed and shaped by the sensory life of the surface body. At least,
there is a partial truth here. It is also the case that it is by means of the surface body that
we present to the world and to others. I have already alluded to how our sense of who
and what we are is tied to fact that we are purposive agents. Here, I wish to focus on the
way we bodily present to others. Freud was less emphatic than he should have been

6
Freud suggests, as an analogy, the anatomists cortical homunculus which maps the bodys
sensory capacities onto the brain structure known as the post-central gyrus. This diagrammatic
representation is now known as the sensory homunculus. It hangs upside down over the side of the
brain and has exaggeratedly large hands (especially thumbs), lips, tongue and, of course, genitalia.
This representation is heuristic and is not meant to be taken literally, even as an inner
representation.
about the social dimension in the formation of our sense of self. The significance certain
parts of my body have, even where this is moulded by sensation, is undoubtedly
conferred finally through my relations with others and the interest they take in these (cf.
Gilbert & Lennon 2005, 57). My body schema, and thus my sense of self, is shaped by
the shared significance and privileging of certain body parts, something from which the
experience of pleasure or pain cannot easily be divorced.
Generally, philosophers have not been particularly attentive to how ones body as
a whole enters into and shapes our sense of self: how, for example, the replacement of
exterior parts such as the hands or the face challenges our sense of who we are. Nor
have we been attentive as we should be to how the type of body one has, and the
reactions of others to this, moulds our very being in the world and how we experience
and engage with the world and otherseven to the point of determining ones posture
and the success of ones intentional actions (e.g. Young 1980). The influence of others
on the formation of ones sense of self is perhaps most clearly seen when that influence
is malign, as with racism, gender or disability.
For example, with respect to racism, Franz Fanon gives a vivid account of how
ones bodily schema develops, not merely as a result of sensory feedback, but also in
reply to the responses others make to ones body and the cultural representations that
encode and influence these responses (1986). According to Fanon, the effect of this
process is a massive psycho-existential complex, in which these representations may
be taken up and internalised by black people. This internalisation (or, as Fanon prefers,
epidermalisation) results in an internal conflict in which ones very sense of self is
brought into question so that a lithe and fluid engagement with ones environment and
others, what he terms a real dialectic, is disrupted. One is tempted to make the point,
which I cannot resist, that it is perhaps easier for some of us than for others to believe
we are our brains and that our epithelial bodies play no part in what we essentially are.7
The problem for the self-is-brain thesis is that my brain fails to be part of me on
either of the foregoing registers: the sensory or the social. Although it is undoubtedly part
of my physical being that underlies my sensori-motor capabilities, it is itself a sensori-
motor nothing that does not project anything of itself: it does not appear in exteroception
or interoception; nor is it the locus of any pleasure or pain. Nor does it, perhaps more
importantly, present to the world, except as part of the human organism as a whole.
Hidden away in its skull, my brain does not feature in my relations with others, occupies
no social space and so has no inter-personal significance. The simple fact is that, being
unavailable for thematization, either for myself or for others, my brain cannot play a part
in the formation of my sense of self. To be embodied in a brain in the way suggested
would be, per impossibile, to be embodied in a mere biological organ.
Consequently, the brain is not directly tied to the attribution of mindedness or
selfhoodeven if it is a key part of what physically grounds these. Rather, all these
things are true (or are significantly more true) of the surface body and its features, form
and behaviour.

4. Externals and Internals

What grounds our psychological ascriptions, according to Wittgenstein, are not facts
about our neurology or any hidden biological processes or causes but facts about our
surface or epithelial selves. At least, this is one way of interpreting his famous assertion,

7
I argue the same point , in more detail, with respect to traditional dualism in Burwood 2008. There I
also provide a fuller description of Fanons account of racialised embodiment.
only of a living human being of what resembles (behaves like) a living human being can
one say: it has sensations; it sees; is blind; hears; is deaf; is conscious or unconscious
(Wittgenstein 1953: 281). What I take Wittgenstein to be saying here is that there is a
truth of behaviourism; viz., that there is a non-contingent link between the psychological
and its expression in behaviour. This link, which he sometimes characterises as
grammatical, is not reductive (the error of behaviourism) but constitutive. That is to say,
that our grasp on what it is to be in pain, or to be angry, or to be pensive, etc., partly
consists in our grasp of their natural expression. Certain characteristic expressions (in
appropriate contexts) are constitutive of our understanding of psychological concepts.
Although in glossing resembles as behaves like, Wittgenstein sounds as if he is
simply equating the two, there is more to what he says than that. Behaves like implies
resembles in that, in order to behave like a living human being, a putatively minded
being must look like a living human being and, in turn, this means its bodily architecture
(its anatomy and physiology) must be sufficiently alike to that of a living human being.
Here the issue becomes less clear as, apart from considerations of bodily form,
sufficiently alike might mean functionally similar or compositionally similar or possibly
both and Wittgenstein does not help us out in deciding which.
What is clear is that he thinks it is surface bodily features and behaviour that are
important. When his imaginary interlocutor challenges him with But you cant recognize
pain with certainty just from externals, Wittgenstein responds with, The only way of
recognizing it is by externals (1980a, 657). It should be no surprise that externals, as
Wittgenstein calls them, should play this unique role in underpinning our psychological
ascriptions as it is these externals that form the warp and weft of our relations with
others and are the grounding of our social practices, including our shared language of
psychology. On the other hand, it is extremely difficult to see how internals, such as our
neurological states, could ever play such a role, even if they were tightly bound by strict
correlations to externals. Of course, if some very general facts of anatomy were very
different, so that our neurological states were somehow available to each other, they
might play such a role; but then they would be externals in their own right and part of our
epithelial selves.
Among the important surface bodily features Wittgenstein draws our attention to is
the face. The face is the soul of the body, he remarks at one point (1980b, 23) and at
another that we can literally see the consciousness in it, and a particular shade of
consciousness. You see on it, in it, joy, indifference, interest, excitement, torpor and so
on. The light in other people's faces (1967, 220). The human face is so expressive that
one might think that there is enough appropriate behaviour to make the ascription of
thought and experience on the possession of a face alone. To be endowed with a
suitably human-like face would seem to be virtually sufficient for a putatively minded
being to have consciousness attributed to it.8 That is not to say that possession of a face
is strictly necessary; but marginal casessuch as Wittgensteins wriggling fly (1953,
284)are marginal precisely because they only very modestly resemble the human
form, especially in this key respectyes, the fly has eyes (albeit inexpressive compound

8
If all that was left of someone was her living face, would we regard them as still present? See the
recent episode of Doctor Who, Love and Monsters, where this possibility is assumed, and compare
this to the earlier episode in the same series, The Idiots Lantern, in which a persons face is
seemingly regarded as her essence. David Cockburn has suggested that There is a sense, or a
number of senses, in which a person is localized or concentrated in the face and that this fact may
underlie the dualist's and the materialist's penchant for isolating an essential subject and drawing a
distinction between the person and his or her body (Cockburn 1985, 492).
eyes) and yes, it has legs (but six! and their movements are too mechanical and also
lacking in expression).
I think Wittgenstein is largely right in what he says here, yet an excessive focus on
externals may veil they way internals inform our judgement on whether an attribution of
mindedness is appropriate or not.9 For example, I do not think Wittgenstein would be
indifferent to the power of Shylocks appeal. This was, not only Hath not a Jew eyes?
and other externals such as hands, dimensions, senses, and so on, but also organs and,
not least, If you prick us, do we not bleed? (Merchant of Venice III.i.59-64). Whether a
putatively minded being is made of flesh and blood as we are is not entirely irrelevant in
deciding whether it is a conscious being (cf. Radford 1981). At least, were it not made of
flesh and blood, this may be enough for us to consider it a marginal case. Similarly,
despite what Wittgenstein says about how brain processes may be irrelevant to thinking
(1967, 608), it seems to me that our empirical discoveries make the brain an essential
part of the general context for ascribing mindedness. It is no longer plausible for us to
claim with Henry More that this laxe pithe or marrow in mans head shows no more
facility for thought then we can discern in a Cake of Sewet or Bowl of Curds (More
1662, 34). The absence of a brain in a putatively minded being, as with the absence of
other internals, would certainly be extraordinary enough to render the case problematic
and doubtful.
Nonetheless, even with this caveat in place, the fact remains that particular
psychological ascriptions are tied to the features and functions of the surface body, not
to those of an internal organnot even to one as closely linked to cognition and
sentience as the brain. The puzzle one feels at the suggestion that the brain is the
proper bearer of psychological ascriptions is the same difficulty Merleau-Ponty has in
making comprehensible to himself the idea that significance and intentionality could
come to dwell in molecular edifices or masses of cells (1962, 351). In denying that this
is comprehensible, he concludes, and only in this severely restricted sense, traditional
Cartesianism is right. Similarly, Wittgenstein asks, How could one so much as get the
idea of ascribing a sensation to a thing? and unhelpfully points out, One might as well
ascribe it to a number! (1953, 284). To try and think of the brain as conscious is to try
and think of a mass of cells or mere thing as conscious. Incapable of expression or of
occupying any social space in the way the whole living human being does, the brain is,
pace Nagel, a mere biological organ and cannot be the person.
Therefore, the brains facility for thought and its place in the general context for
ascribing mindedness does not make it the proper bearer of psychological ascriptions in
the way Searle assumes and Nagel claims. One cannot shake the feeling that Searles
odd way of speaking is nothing more than a crude category mistakea way of speaking
which attributes to an internal biological organ states that are rightly attributable only to a
person or other sentient being as a whole.10 One wants to protest with Erwin Straus
when he says, It is man who thinks, not the brain (1963, 158); perhaps adding as well,
It is man who drinks, not the brain. My brain cannot be thirsty, not even in the
secondary sense that my car or my aspidistra can be thirsty. And artificially narrowing
the ascription to experiencing thirst (an unnatural locution that is, I presume, an attempt

9
That his work contains an understandable but perhaps undue focus on the sensori-motor surface
body is a charge that has also been made against Merleau-Ponty (Leder 1990, 62-68).
10
A mistake that has recently been termed the mereological fallacy in neuroscience (Bennett &
Hacker 2003). Mereology, Bennett and Hacker explain, is the logic of part/whole relations. They
present this as a more fitting description of what Anthony Kenny termed the homunculus fallacy
(ibid.: 73): a form of conceptual confusion avoided by Aristotle but stumbled into by Descartes (ibid.:
15 & 29).
to make the ascription somehow more particularly psychological) does not help Searles
statements or Nagels claim make sense.
Nonetheless, the brain-is-self theorist might still retort, even if the brain is not the
bearer of psychological ascriptions, and so is not the person as Nagel claims, Kureishis
story and other body-swap thought experiments show that the brain carries the burden
of personal identity and is sufficient in determining this. Let us now look more closely at
this claim.

5. The Inauthenticity of the Newbody

In Kureishis story, Adam is drawn to the possibilities of being a Newbody by the sense
of dissociation aging can engenderKureishi describes how Adams pride and sense of
himself had emigrated and how his body had become for him an embarrassing friend I
no longer wanted to know. This sense of dissociationwhat Merleau-Ponty termed a
case of disintegration, where the soul and the body are apparently distinct (1965,
209)helps Adam externalise and objectify his body-sans-brain. My body had already
become just an object to be worked on says Adam or, as one of the other characters
observes, it is something we wear like a suit of clothes. Yet a brain transplant would be
something rather more than a sartorial makeoverlike a ghoulish episode of the
television programme What Not to Wear. Nor would such a procedure be merely a case
of a nip and tuck taken to an extreme. Should Adam so casually assume he would
survive if his brain were transplanted into a donor body?
As I have already said, our sense of ourselves develops in reply to others and their
response to our embodiment. Similarly, our sense of who others are is intimately tied to
their bodies as a whole; their appearance, behaviour, demeanour, and so on (the
idiosyncratic tone of voice or accent, the wry smile, the twinkle in the eyes, the infectious
laugh, the commanding presence, the healthy complexion, the slightly odd walk, the tall-
persons stoop, etc.). It is impossible to think of a someone without thinking of them in
terms of such bodily characteristics. In a perceptive passage, Kureishi explores the
uncanny experience of meeting a Newbody for the first time:

I found myself studying his face. How should I put it? If the body is a picture of the
mind, his body was like a map of a place that didnt exist. What I wanted was to
see his original face, before he was reborn. Otherwise it was like speaking on the
phone to someone youve never met, trying to guess what they were really like
(2002, 19).

One can see how there might be something inauthentic about a Newbody. We are left
guessing what the person is really like. Indeed, we might legitimately wonder whether
there was a fit between the person we knew as Adam and the Newbody Leo. It seems
extremely unlikely that Adam would remain fundamentally untouched by a change as
radical as a change of body. It is not just that Leo apparently has the same beliefs and
memories as Adam but that these sound strange when given voice on Leos lips. We
may feel that there is a profound incongruity here: that Adams personality, and perhaps
other aspects of his psychology, is not given ready expression in Leos body.
One might argue, as does Wittgenstein, that the psychological is given ready
expression only in a living human bodyor something sufficiently similar to it. But is an
individual psychology given ready expression only in a particular body? This intuition
challenges the idea that the psycho-bodily continuity provided by my brain is sufficient to
ensure my survival. It is an idea not normally considered in body-swap thought
experiments, and is perhaps an intuition not widely held, but it is not entirely fanciful
(after all, in the dramatic arts, casting decisions are crucial to the success of a
production). Bernard Williams hints at it only to recommend setting it aside (1973, 46).
Consideration of character and mannerisms, he nonetheless concedes, imposes
limitations on our ability to imagine body-swap cases. How deep do these limitations
run?
What Williams says suggests that so long as the original Adam (body-recipient)
and the original Leo (body-donor) were sufficiently alike, physically and psychologically,
the difficulty of a fit between Adam and the Newbody Leo may not arise (cf. Garrett,
1998/2004, 2). Perhaps there is something in this. For example, although it never
seemed remotely plausible to me that the actors John Pertwee and Tom Baker were
both incarnations of the same person, Doctor Who, it is almost believable that
Christopher Ecclestone and David Tennant (the most recent actors to play the part) are
one and the same person. Ecclestone and Tennant are much more alike than the other
two, both physically and in terms of the temperaments and personal qualities they
portray. On the other hand, in The Christmas Invasion, the episode directly after the
Doctors latest regeneration (from Ecclestone to Tennant), his assistant Rose (played
by Billie Piper) still insists on referring to the former incarnation as the proper Doctor.
So, despite the evident similarities, it is difficult not to regard the changling Doctor Who
(Tennant) as some sort of an interloper.
Thus, what counts as sufficiently alike is not easy to determine. It is not specified
by Williams and we can understand why: the level of complexity here is overwhelming.11
The marvellous thing about human beings is that they are very rarely alike, at least in
detail. Consider the variety of quite different body types and facial configurations as well
as personalities, attitudes, abilities, affective dispositions, beliefs, desires, and so on.
Nonetheless, some degree of similarity does seem to be required for the success of a
body-swap thought experiment and we should take note of this. Perhaps the litmus test
should be if someones identity is assured across a change of very different bodies.
Unfortunately, the greater the difference, the less plausible the thought experiment.
It has been suggested that a future incarnation of Doctor Who should be as a woman.
This would certainly pose a more interesting challenge to the viewer trying to accept the
idea of the Doctors survival. In Kureishis story the original Adam and the Newbody Leo
have less markedly different physiques, but physiques that are different nonetheless.
Does Leo then have the same abilities as Adam? What about the same attitudes? Or the
same personality?
With respect to abilities, the story tends to accentuate the positive; by focussing,
for example, on the new or rediscovered abilities a body change may bring, such as
Adam-cum-Leos restored agility and libido. But, there would also be significant losses.
We would not expect, say, a piano-playing or Spanish-speaking recipient simply to carry
these accomplishments with him into an unmusical and Anglophone donors body,
certainly not without loss of fluency. Undoubtedly, Adam-cum-Leo would not find in his
new fingers or new lips and tongue the plenitude of his thoughts vital expression, as
Merleau-Ponty might have said (1965: 209). These are examples of practised skills
whose smooth performance requires the bodys habituation to the tasksomething that
may be recoverable, to a greater or lesser degree, but not straightforwardly transferable.
The notion of habituation is a difficult one to consider in these circumstances, as

11
For an ironic play on two people being sufficiently alike, see Scott McGhee and David Siegels
1993 film Suture. In it identical twins are played by actors from different racial groups; Mel Harris
(whiteAmerican) and Dennis Haysbert (AfricanAmerican). Other characters in the film comment
on how difficult it is to tell them apart.
Williams notes. His own example concerns a prosthetic leg (1973, 49-50): if the body
donor had a false leg to which he had become accustomed, would the recipient find it
uncomfortable?
This is the sort of detailed outcome it is difficult to determine in advance. There are
others. What if the donor body was of a different sex or a different race from the
recipient? It is not just a question of the biological influence of the donors body on the
recipients transplanted brain; though this is likely to be considerable, especially in the
case of something like a change of sex. (With his brain awash with hormones from a
new endocrine system, for example, the body-recipient is very likely to have changed
moods, attitudes, preferences, and so forthperhaps even adopting those similar to the
body-donor.) Such a change would also be a radical transformation in the conditions
which determine ones social and political milieu and thus ones perspective on the
world. As we have already noted, ones whole mode of bodily being in the world is
shaped by how these different bodies are received by others so that, again, the social
place occupied by ones body is key.
The question is: Are such qualitative shifts identity changing? There is no easy
answer to this; but it might well be Yes if such shifts are radical enough. In the normal
course of events, changes in personality, even if these were fairly dramatic, would not
override other considerations (not least continuity of ones bodily being as a whole); but
a total body-swap is not in the normal course of events. Nonetheless, there is still the
strong intuition that, even with body-swap cases, what would remain is a residual
continuity of consciousness, tied together by memorya diachronic psychological unity.
It is a fine judgement whether this alone is enough to preserve or even constitute an
identity: if all else was different, it would certainly be a very thin notion of a self.
What does seem clear, however, is that without even a pared-down psychological
continuity a brain-based criterion of identity loses its appeal. Imagine, for example, that
the process of transplantation inevitably resulted in a total and irreversible amnesia, so
that there is no diachronic psychological unity. Are we still tempted to say that Adam
survives as Leo? In such circumstances, the brain just seems to be an anonymous bit of
organic matter, in the way of all viscera. The whole living body, by way of contrast, is
never just an anonymous bit of organic matter; not even where the person is in a coma
and certainly not when suffering from a complete memory loss. Whereas the continuity
of the whole living body (especially key surface features such as the face) provides us
with a non-trivial sense in which we would accept the continuance of the person across
such a psychological break, the brute physical continuity of the brain by itself does not.
The brain alone just does not seem able to carry the burden of identity in the way that
the whole body can.

6. Conclusion

My aim in this paper has been to destabilise the brain-is-self thesis, a position that has
become to be regarded in some quarters as philosophical commonsense. We feel there
ought to be a certain, fixed answer to the question Who survives the brain transplant?
and no doubt, if such medical procedures were common, lawyers would demand one. A
widely held view is that it is clearly the brain-donor who survives. However, is this really
so apparent? Our notion of personal identity has not developed in a world where the
strange chimera that is Adam-cum-Leo has been a fixture. Consequently, we are liable
to fall into all sorts of confusions in attempting a definitive answer to this question. Of
course, our intuitions concerning personal identity could change as a result of medical
developments: no doubt our conceptual landscape would look significantly different if
brain transplants and total body-swaps were in the normal course of events. However, it
is not for us, here and now, to legislate what these changes should be or to insist that
they must result in a particular conclusion. Even if such extraordinary circumstances
became ordinary, one could not blithely assume that identity would follow the brain.
My contention has been that it is the epithelial body that enters into the formation
of our sense of self and that largely bears the burden of personal identity as well as
playing the key role in grounding our psychological ascriptions. Lacking any sensori-
motor or social presence of its own, it appears that the brain by itself cannot underlie
selfhood; but only as part of the whole living human being. Given this, Adam has got
himself a new body might be only one possible response to the scenario Kureishi
describes, and not necessarily or always the obvious one. We might decide that Adam-
cum-Leo constitutes someone entirely new. Alternatively, in certain circumstances, one
might even find the following response plausible: Leos had a severe head trauma; but
its okay theyve given him a brain transplant. Hell never be his old self, of course; but at
least hes alive. Our investigations into the physical causal base for our psychological
capacities therefore need to look beyond neurology and we need to broaden both our
conception of what constitutes a self and what enables mindedness. If the minded
individual is embodied, this must mean more than being embrained

Department of Philosophy
University of Hull
Cottingham Road
Hull HU6 7RX
s.a.Burwood@hull.ac.uk

References

Bennett, M. R. & P. M. S. Hacker (2003). Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience.

Oxford: Blackwell.
Berger, T. W., M. Baudry, R. Diaz Brinton, J.-S. Liaw, V. Z. Marmarelis, A. Y. Park, B. J.
Sheu & A. R. Tanguay Jr. (2001). Brain-Implantable Biomimetic Electronics as the
Next Era in Neural Prosthetics, Proceedings of the IEEE 89 (7): 993-1012.
Burwood, S. (2008). The Apparent Truth of Dualism and the Uncanny Body,
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences,
Cockburn, D. (1985). The Mind, the Brain and the Face, Philosophy 60: 477-493.
Descartes, (1985). The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, volume II, trans. J.
Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, D. Murdoch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fanon, F. (1986). Black Skin, White Masks, trans. C. L. Markmann 1967. London: Pluto
Press.
Freud, S. (1961). The Ego and the Id, trans. J. Riviere, 1927. The Standard Edition of
the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, J. Strachey (ed.). London:
Hogarth Press, Vol. XIX, pp.3-66.
Gallagher, S. & M. Gazzaniga (1998). The Neural Platonist: Michael Gazzaniga in
Conversation with Shaun Gallagher, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 5 (56):
706717.
Garrett, B. (1998/2004). Personal Identity, in E. Craig (ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of
Philosophy. London: Routledge.
Gilbert, P. & K. Lennon (2005). The World, the Flesh and the Subject. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.
 Glover, J. (1988). I: The Philosophy and Psychology of Personal Identity. London:
Penguin.
Kureishi, H. (2002). The Body and Seven Stories. London: Faber and Faber.
Leder, D. (1990). The Absent Body. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith. London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1965). The Structure of Behaviour, trans. A. L. Fisher. London:
Methuen.
More, H. (1662). An Antidote Against Atheism, 3rd edition, in A Collection of Several
Philosophical Writings. Printed in London by James Flesher for William Morden,
bookseller in Cambridge.
Nagel, T. (1986). The View From Nowhere. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Radford, C. (1981). Life, Flesh and Animate Behaviour: A Reappraisal of the Argument
from Analogy, Philosophical Investigations, 4 (4)
Searle, J. R. (1983). Intentionality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Searle, J. R. (1984). Minds, Brains and Science: The 1984 Reith Lectures. London:
British Broadcasting Corporation.
Searle, John R. (1992). The Rediscovery of the Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Searle, John R. (2004). Mind: A Brief Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Starobinski, J. (1989). The Natural and Literary History of Bodily Sensation, in J. Crary,
M. Feher, H. Foster & S. Kwinter (eds.), Fragments for a History of the Human
Body. London: Zone Books, volume 4, pp.351-405.
Straus, E. W. (1963). The Primary World of Senses, trans. J. Needleman. Glencoe, IL:
The Free Press of Glencoe.
Williams, B. (1973). Problems of the Self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wittgenstein, L. (1953). Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Wittgenstein, L. (1967). Zettel. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Wittgenstein, L. (1969). On Certainty. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Wittgenstein, L. (1980a). Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Volume II. Oxford:
Basil Blackwell.
Wittgenstein, L. (1980b). Culture and Value. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Young, I. M. (1980). Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body
Comportment, Motility, and Spatiality, Human Studies 3: 137-156.

View publication stats