If You Think You Aren't Your Brain, Your Brain Is Lying

            I was just a little overdressed on Thursday. I probably could have gone without the leather jacket as I rode to and from Philosophy class because it was pretty toasty.

            I sat outside the lecture hall for a few minutes, doing some writing. As usual I chatted with James as we waited after 11:00 for the other class to break up. He said that he would be starting to study the Islamic philosophers that day. I suggested that it should be interesting but he warned that I might like it because it’s more dry and logical than the European stuff. He stated that it’s more up his alley. James has told me before that he does pure math without numbers.

            I had forgotten that our TA, Cilia was doing her lecture today. It occurred to me while she was setting up that maybe she makes her own dresses and skirts. They look well made and of quality material but they don’t look like something one would actually find on a rack in a store. They look somewhat out of time. They are somewhat feminine but comfortably conservative. I could picture her multi-tasking with her academics and a sewing machine.

            She gave her talk on the Islamic philosopher, Avicenna. He was born around 980 in Bukhara in what is now Uzbekistan. He was not only an Islamic scholar but also a mathematician, a doctor and an advisor to several rulers. Although he was the pet intellectual of many men in power, these were dangerous times and his employers kept getting conquered.

            Avicenna is most famous for his theory that the soul is separate from the body, referred to as “the Flying Man”. He is similar to Plato in that he speaks of an immaterial part of the soul and like Aristotle in that he thought knowledge depends on the senses.

            The soul can persist after death and the body is like a beast of burden. The goal of the body is to carry the soul to knowledge but after fulfilling that task the body is useless. For Avicenna, the soul explains why we are different from rocks. Plants, puppies and humans all have souls but the soul is not just life. It is the first perfection of the body. It is not necessarily separate from the body and it may be a kind of a body.

            Aristotle saw the soul as the form of the body. The soul as form is the arrangement that makes the body talk and smell but the soul is not wedded to the body.

            Avicenna doesn’t call it form but rather perfection. Perfection can give capabilities but it is separable. She showed an image of Captain Hook from a cartoon version of Peter Pan, but she called him “Captain Cook”. She said that the captain of a ship makes the boat capable of sailing and a car needs a driver. The driver gives the car capabilities but the driver can leave the car.

            Avicenna says that the soul is the nexus and the connection for the senses. The soul organizes experiences. We distinguish things by objects but with not just one faculty. One sees light and colour but one cannot hear with the eyes. The faculty that processes the senses is different from reason. The faculties of love, hate and desire are all in a different part of the brain.

            The soul explains why all of my experiences are mine and affect each other. Smell, desire and rational faculties are different objects. The self is at the center of a spider web and binds multi-faculties to my experience.

Avicenna says that rocks and the body are not self aware and so the nexus cannot be the body. He says that bodies receive and assumes that we know that the intellectual part is immaterial. The body can’t gather the material and the immaterial. The self is like a racecar driver. The driver is aware and in control of the body.

I am not my whole body. If the self were identical with the body then if I were to lose part of it then I would cease to exist.

Cilia said the Flying Man is like the character Eleven of the show Stranger Things in a sensory deprivation chamber. What if one had never had any experience before the sensory deprivation chamber? Avicenna would say that Eleven would still be aware of herself.

The key premise is that self-awareness is basic and primitive. If I know X but not Y then X can’t be the same as Y. Self awareness is baked into every experience. You never get confused if you are the one having the experience. You can doubt experience but not that you have them.

Avicenna says without the senses and body awareness I have persistent awareness of myself but not my body, so I am not my body.

I am not one of my organs. I perceive myself and my perception of myself includes perceiving that organ but I can perceive myself without perceiving that organ. Nothing can be both perceived and not perceived. So I am not an organ.

What if I am not my soul either? Avicenna thinks that if I say the soul is what does it all you would recognize it but you would not think of the brain that way.

Objection: The Masked Man Fallacy.

Lois Lane knows who Superman is and she also knows who Clark Kent is but she does not believe that they are the same person. Therefore Superman is not Clark Kent. The context is opaque because she doesn’t have all of the information. I may not know everything about me. Self-awareness does not penetrate far enough.

Peter Adamson suggests that in the Flying Man thought experiment we don’t just know That we are but What we are. Therefore, since I can know What I am without knowing What a brain is, being a brain is part of what I am. He says primitive self-awareness will extend so that we know. To be a self may mean to be aware of the self. If I know What I am but I don’t know What my brain is then I am not a brain.

Avicenna says that a necessary property may not be essential. What is essential to a triangle, for example, is that it is solid and has three sides. What is necessary to a triangle is that its interior angles equal 180 degrees. We know in kindergarten that a triangle has three sides but only later do we learn about the angles. So the body could still be a necessary property, and if it is the self might perish with the body.

After class I had a little over three hours before I had to be at work, and since I know that if I don’t sleep before working in the afternoon then I will be dozy while posing, I headed home to do just that. When I got there I had time to sleep for about an hour but I couldn’t sleep at all. Since I was wide awake after half an hour of resting I got up and had lunch, then I did some writing before it was time to leave.

I was scheduled to work at the Village by the Grange campus across the street from the main OCADU building. The instructor that was just finishing up was Sylvia Whitton, who I’ve known since the 80s. We chatted a while before Candida Girling, the teacher that I was working for arrived. 

Candida looks like she might be a bit of a hippy and she’s about my age or a little older. I learned from an internet search that she’s from South Africa but I didn’t detect an accent so I assume that she’s been away from there since childhood.

She had me pose clothed because she has some students that won’t come to class if there is a nude male model. At first she just had me pose without the students drawing me as she instructed them in lighting and the moods that different types of poses evoke. She asked me to pose as if I was watching a hockey game so I leaned forward with a certain amount of tension that she seemed to think really looked like someone watching a hockey game. She had the students walk around to find the best angle and then to explain why they thought it was the best angle. Then she had each student assume the pose that I was taking. The next pose was a standing pose and she had the students measure how many heads tall I was.

During my break I was sitting on the edge of the stage reading “Passing” by Nella Larsen and Candida said that it would be great if I posed right there with my book, so I got lots of reading done.

The story is set in the late 1920s and the main character is a Black woman named Irene, who could pass for White but has never really tried. She runs into Clare, an old friend who she has not seen for many years. She finds out that Clare has not only been passing for White all this time, but her husband, the father of her children, doesn’t even know. On top of that her husband is a hardcore racist who frequently talks about how disgusting Negroes are and how he would never want to even know one.

That’s as far as I got before it was time to leave. Candida let me go an hour early because she needed to talk to her class about a project. She told me I was an excellent model and got the class to applaud for me at the end.

On the way home I stopped at Freshco. I got a couple of bags of black grapes, a few Courtland apples, three clementines, a tomato, a pack of chicken drumsticks, a pack of Italian sausages and a box of spoon size shredded wheat.

I watched another episode of Mike Hammer. So far it’s not horrible, but nothing to write home about.