Chapter 12
Minds and Brains
This question of the relation of the soul to the body, or of the mind to the brain, is one of the perennial problems of philosophy. In this chapter I begin by summarizing the two main schools of thought: materialism or physicalism on the one hand, and dualism or interactionism on the other. The hypothesis of formative causation transcends this long-standing debate, and shows a new way forward. It enables us to see that the mind is far more extensive than the brain, extending beyond it through fields. The easiest way to grasp how this interpretation differs from materialism and dualism is through the nature of vision.
Materialism versus dualism
Materialists believe that the mind is in the brain: mental activity is brain activity. One form of materialism treats mental activity as an epiphenomenon of the activity of the brain, rather like a shadow: the conscious mind is an effect of the physical activity of the brain, but it is not a cause; it has no function at all, and everything would go on just the same without it. Another form of materialism asserts that mental activity and brain processes are simply different aspects of the same reality. They can be spoken about in different ways – just as the evening star and the morning star are called by different names, to use a favourite example – but they are in fact identical.
An essential feature of materialism is that it assumes that the physical world is causally closed; in other words, physical processes cannot be subject to causal influences from the soul, self, consciousness, or spirit, or indeed from anything that is undefinable in physical terms. What we think, say, and do is in principle fully explicable in terms of the physico-chemical processes in our brains, which are governed by the ordinary laws of nature. We have no genuine free will because there is nothing in us that is free or capable of altering what happens for purely physical reasons. In so far as chance events within our bodies play a part in our decisions or creativity, they do not represent freewill or choice; they are merely random.1
The main alternative to materialism since the time of Descartes has been dualism or interactionism, according to which the mind – or ego, soul, psyche, spirit, or conscious self – somehow interacts with the body through the brain. The view can be phrased more dynamically by saying that conscious mental activities interact with the physical activity of the body through processes in the brain. Such interaction has been thought of by means of a variety of analogies: for example the mind is like the driver driving the car, like a pianist playing a piano, with the brain as a kind of keyboard, or like the software of a computer interacting with the hardware of the brain. This last analogy can be taken further if the conscious self is compared to the programmer, the source of the software through which he interacts with the computer hardware (Fig. 12.1).
Figure 12.1 Top: The computer analogy for mind-brain interaction. A: The mind is compared to the software. B: The software corresponds to the programs of the unconscious and conscious mind, and the conscious self to the programmer. Bottom: C: The ‘physicalist’ interpretation of the conscious self as a subjective aspect of the morphic fields interacting with the nervous system. D: The ‘interactionist’ interpretation of the conscious self as interacting with the morphic fields, which interact with the nervous system.
Although materialism is the orthodox worldview of modern science, interactionism has been vigorously defended by a number of philosophers, including the philosopher of science, Karl Popper,2 and supported by many scientists, including the quantum physicists Werner Heisenberg and Wolfgang Pauli,3 and the neuroscientists Wilder Penfield,4 John Eccles5 and Roger Sperry.6
Many materialists or physicalists think of the mind-brain relationship in terms of the computer metaphor, with the mind like the software and the brain like the hardware. But interactionists use the same analogy. This information or program paradigm is, in fact, closer in spirit to dualism than to traditional monistic materialism.
The hypothesis of formative causation introduces the idea of morphic fields, which interact with the nervous system and play a role similar to the programs or software in the computer metaphor. These fields provide a new context for the traditional physicalist-interactionist debate, and can be interpreted in the light of either philosophical theory. Figure 12.1 illustrates this diagrammatically. In the spirit of physicalism, the conscious mind can be regarded as a subjective aspect of the morphic fields that organize the activity of the brain; these fields can be experienced as it were from within. The conscious mind is not something over and above these behavioural and mental fields; it somehow exists within them. Or, in the spirit of interactionism, the conscious self can be supposed to interact with these fields, perhaps by containing them and including them, and may also serve as the creative ground through which new fields arise.
These two interpretations parallel the two interpretations of the computer metaphor in which the conscious mind is regarded either as an aspect of the software, or as analogous to the conscious programmer who interacts with the computer through the software.
Programs of the brain
Chreodes within morphic fields are like programs: they are structures of organization and are purposive; they are directed towards goals. The need for some such concept is made very clear by the way in which the computer metaphor has come to dominate modern thinking about the organization of mental activity. Much of this thinking can be translated into the terminology of formative causation simply by substituting the phrase morphic field for program. John Z. Young, for example, after many years of research on the nervous system proposed that the lives of human beings, like those of animals, are governed by sets of programs.
Some of these programs may be called ‘practical’ or physiological and they ensure that we breathe, eat, drink, and sleep. Others are social, and regulate our speaking and other forms of communication, our agreeing, and our loving and hating. We also have long-term programs, those that ensure continuing not of ourselves but of the race, programs for sexual activity and mating, programs for growth, adolescence, and indeed, for senescence and dying. Perhaps the most important programs of all are those used for the activities that we call mental, such as thinking, imagining, dreaming, believing and worshipping.7
Young quoted the definition of ‘program’ from Webster’s Third New International Dictionary as ‘a plan of procedure; a schedule or system under which action may be taken toward a desired goal.’ He emphasized that these programs of the brain are ‘plans of action’ chosen in advance to meet particular kinds of situations.
Clearly the concept of such programs goes far beyond a reductionistic analysis of the physics of nerve impulses or the molecular biology of nerve cells. Indeed, a holistic approach to the organization of the brain’s activities seems unavoidable, and phrases such as integrated patterns and organized systems abound in the literature on the functioning of the brain. Even Francis Crick, the doyen of molecular biology, was forced to the conclusion that the activity of various brain mechanisms must depend on ‘some kind of overall control system.’8
Advocates of general systems theory emphasized that the integrative activities of the brain need to be understood in terms of the dynamics of self-organizing systems.9 Again the computer analogy predominates:
The brain is a communication mechanism which is used and directed by the self-organization of information. It has no more to do with this information than the computer with the information it processes. Although the comparison between brain and computer should not be carried too far since, to some extent, they represent very different principles, it may be useful to also distinguish between ‘hardware’ and ‘software’ in the brain. The network of neurons, then, represents the ‘hardware,’ and its possibly multilevel self-organization dynamics the ‘software’.10
If this is regarded as a form of materialism, it is not the traditional monistic kind, but the modern dualistic kind which accepts the primacy of information over matter and energy, the acceptance of which Norbert Weiner and others argued is essential for the survival of materialism in the modern world (see above). This modern dualistic approach has been summarized as follows:
What mentality depends on is not a particular physical substrate, but the functional organization of the processes that it makes possible. There is still no need to invoke mystical properties in explaining the mind, but this approach can be informed by the theory of computability.11
And so we come back to computers and the ambiguous programming metaphor.
Attempts to model the workings of the brain influenced, and in turn were influenced by, the field of artificial intelligence.12 The hope was that advances in computing techniques would enable better models to be made of ‘information processing’ within the nervous system; and conversely that better models of the nervous system would lead to new insights that further the development of artificial intelligence. But even when there was the greatest enthusiasm for the possibility of artificial intelligence, doubts remained:
How does the analogy of the computer account for cognition? Most neurobiologists, it must be acknowledged, are suspicious of the analogy, but have little to put in its place. But the computer people are also at a loss to know just how far to take the analogy … [T]he artificial-intelligence community has slipped into the habit of asserting that the only proof that perception and cognition have been understood is that they (or somebody) can construct a machine that will replicate the process. The strategy is sensible enough: if a machine that will replicate the process of human vision can be built, a demonstration of its power would persuade all kinds of people that the problem of vision had been tackled seriously. Sceptics will, however, complain that simulation is not the same as understanding.13
The problem here is comparable to that faced by computer models of morphogenesis: just what do the models correspond to? No one imagines that a developing organism or a human brain actually is a digital computer made of silicon chips and other inorganic components. The plausibility of these models depends not on any physical resemblance of computers to organisms, but on the clear-cut distinction between software and hardware. The organizing, goal-directed programs are concerned with form, pattern, interrelationship, and information. They are not reducible to the interactions of the electrons, atoms, and molecules that make up material structures. These goal-directed programs are in fact like morphic fields.14 The principal difference between the two concepts is that the programs are supposed to be ‘written in genes and brains’15 and stored as memory traces, just as the memory of computers depends on storage devices such as magnetic discs, whereas the morphic fields are not written in brains, but become present by morphic resonance. The program theory and the hypothesis of formative causation thus lead to very different interpretations of the nature of memory.
Brains and extended minds
The morphic fields of perception, behaviour and mental activity are rooted in brain activity, but they are far more extensive than brains. An analogy is provided by a mobile phone. Its transmissions are rooted in the electrical activity in its circuits and electronic components. Yet it emits and receives radio waves that travel in electromagnetic fields extending far beyond the material structure of the phone. Similarly, the fields of perception and behaviour are intimately related to the activity of the brain, but they extend far beyond it, directed by attention and intention.
A few decades ago, scientists thought of brains as like telephone exchanges, with nerves linked to sense organs transmitting signals to the central switchboard, where switches connected them to other neurons that stored memories, or that triggered muscular or glandular activity. Old-style telephone exchanges have now been replaced by the computer metaphor: brains are like computers, and nerve cells work like transistors in an electronic network. But research on brain activity does not support these computer models, with their hard-wired circuits.
Instead, it reveals complex patterns of activity in large populations of neurons. These patterns can be detected either through brain imaging techniques, where different parts of the brain ‘light up’ as a result of the increased activity within them, or by measuring patterns of electrical activity through electrodes placed over the surface of the brain.
The neuroscientist Walter Freeman, of the University of California at Berkeley, spent many years investigating these patterns of activity, especially in relation to the perception of smells. He and his colleagues found that these patterns are not fixed, but change in accordance with the animal’s experience: ‘[B]rain activity patterns are constantly dissolving, reforming, and changing, particularly in relation to one another. When an animal learns to respond to a new odour, there is a shift in all other patterns, even if they are not directly involved with the learning. There are no fixed representations, as there are in computers; there are only meanings.’
Freeman argues that these meanings depend on intentions, which are often unconscious. He models the interpretation of meaning in terms of attractors.16 He proposes that the activity of the brain can be modified by meanings and intentions precisely because it is chaotic, in the sense of chaos theory.
‘[B]rains are drenched in chaos.’17
My suggestion is that morphic fields impose order and pattern on this sensitive chaos, and interact with the brain through their ordering activity. They contain an inherent memory, through morphic resonance. They also project out far beyond the brain through attention and intention.
Vision
The easiest way to grasp the idea of the extended mind is by thinking about the nature of vision.
In old-fashioned books of popular science, vision was illustrated through cutaway pictures of a man’s head, inside which there was a miniature cinema, with a picture projected onto a kind of screen inside the head, with a little person inside the brain looking at it.18 Of course, this view results in an infinite regress, for in order to see this representation, the little person inside the brain would need a screen inside his brain, and a yet tinier person to see the screen, and so on.
The popular science approach is dualistic, with a kind of ghost in the machine. For example in the Natural History Museum in London, in the Human Biology section in 2010 there was still a ghost-in-the-machine display called ‘Controlling Your Actions’. In a three-dimensional model of a man’s head, a see-through plastic window in the forehead revealed the cockpit of a jet plane, with two empty chairs for the pilot and his co-pilot in the other hemisphere. The commentary explained, ‘The cortex is the body’s control room. It receives information, processes it and decides on the best course of action. So the cortex in your brain is rather like the flight deck of an aircraft.’ Though carefully worded to avoid mentioning controllers or pilots, few visitors would expect a control room or a cockpit to make decisions without someone there to make them, even if the decider is invisible.
Since the 1980s, the predominant academic approach has been to suppose that vision depends on computational processing and on the formation of representations inside the brain. David Marr summarized this position as follows:
Vision is the process of discovering from images what is present in the world, and where it is. Vision is therefore, first and foremost, an information-processing task, but we cannot think of it as just a process. For if we are capable of knowing what is where in the world, our brains must somehow be capable of representing this information – in all its profusion of color and form, beauty, motion and detail.19
Most of the metaphors of cognitive science are derived from computers, and the internal representation is now commonly conceived of as a ‘virtual reality’ display. The neuroscientist Jeffrey Gray put it succinctly: ‘The “out there” of conscious experience isn’t really out there at all; it’s inside the head.’ Our visual perceptions are a ‘simulation’ of the real world, a simulation that is ‘made by, and exists within, the brain’.20
The idea that our visual experiences are simulations inside our heads is often taken for granted. But it leads to strange consequences, as the philosopher Steven Lehar pointed out.21 The simulation theory says that when I look at the sky, the sky I see is inside my head. This means that my skull must be beyond the sky! As Lehar put it:
I propose that out beyond the farthest things you can perceive in all directions, i.e. above the dome of the sky, and below the solid earth under your feet, or beyond the walls and ceiling of the room you see around you, is located the inner surface of your true physical skull, beyond which is an unimaginably immense external world of which the world you see around you is merely a miniature internal replica. In other words, the head you have come to know as your own is not your true physical head, but only a miniature perceptual copy of your head in a perceptual copy of the world, all of which is contained within your real head.22
However, the theory that there is a representation of the external world within the brain is not universally believed within academic circles. The more that is known about the eyes and the brain, the less likely the internal representation theory seems. The resolving power of the eyes is limited, especially outside the foveal region; each eye has a blind spot of which we remain unaware; the eyes are in frequent motion, rapidly shifting (saccading) from point to point in the visual field three to four times a second; and recent work on ‘change blindness’ and ‘inattentional blindness’ shows that we often remain unaware of large changes in the visual field. As the philosopher Alva Noë has summarized the problem: ‘How, on the basis of the fragmented and discontinuous information, are we able to enjoy the impression of seamless consciousness of an environment that is detailed, continuous, complex and high resolution?’23
The most radical solution to this problem is to suppose that the visual world is not an illusion, and is not inside the brain at all. The visual world is where it seems to be, in the external world. The leading pioneer of this approach was James J. Gibson in his ‘ecological’ theory of perception. He saw vision as involving the whole animal, closely linked to the guidance of action. For Gibson, perception is active and direct. The animal moves its eyes, head and body, and it moves through the environment. Visual perception is not a series of static snapshots, but a dynamic visual flow. Because perceivers are familiar with regular correlations between this flow and the visual properties of the environment, they are able to ‘pick up’ information from the environment by ‘direct perception.’ As Gibson put it, ‘Information is conceived as available in the ambient energy flux, not as signals in a bundle of nerve fibers. It is information about both the persisting and the changing features of the environment together. Moreover, information about the observer and his movements is available, so that self-awareness accompanies perceptual awareness.’24
In the ‘enactive’ or ‘embodied’ approach developed by the neuroscientist Francisco Varela and his colleagues, perceptions are not represented in a world-model inside the head, but are enacted or ‘brought forth’ as a result of the interaction of the organism and its environment: ‘[P]erception and action have evolved together … perception is always perceptually guided activity.’25
The psychologist Kevin O’Regan likewise rejects the need for internal representations of the world: the world can be used as an external memory, or as its own model. 26 We can look again if we need to; we do not need a detailed model of the environment inside our brains. As Noë has summarized it: ‘The enactive, sensorimotor account explains how it can be that we enjoy an experience of worldly detail which is not represented in our brains. The detail is present – the perceptual world is present – in the sense that we have a special kind of access to the details, an access controlled by patterns of sensorimotor dependence with which we are familiar. The visual world is not a grand illusion.’27
The philosopher Henri Bergson anticipated the enactive and sensorimotor approaches in emphasizing that perception is directed towards action. Through perception, ‘The objects which surround my body reflect its possible action upon them’.28 He rejected the idea that images were formed inside the brain:
The truth is that the point P, the rays which it emits, the retina and the nervous elements affected, form a single whole; that the luminous point P is a part of this whole; and that it is really in P, and not elsewhere, that the image of P is formed and perceived.29
William James likewise rejected the idea of images inside the brain. He took as an example the reader sitting in a room, reading a book:
[T]he whole philosophy of perception from Democritus’ time downwards has been just one long wrangle over the paradox that what is evidently one reality should be in two places at once, both in outer space and in a person’s mind. ‘Representative’ theories of perception avoid the logical paradox, but on the other hand they violate the reader’s sense of life which knows no intervening mental image but seems to see the room and the book immediately as they physically exist.30
As Whitehead expressed it, ‘sensations are projected by the mind so as to clothe appropriate bodies in external nature’.31
The psychologist Max Velmans argues in favour of a theory of this kind as part of his ‘reflexive’ model of consciousness. He discusses the example of a subject S looking at a cat as follows:
According to reductionists there seems to be a phenomenal cat ‘in S’s mind’, but this is really nothing more than a state of her brain. According to the reflexive model, while S is gazing at the cat, her only visual experience of the cat is the cat she sees out in the world. If she is asked to point to this phenomenal cat (her ‘cat experience’), she should point not to her brain but to the cat as perceived, out in space beyond the body surface.32
How could this projection possibly work? Velmans discusses the process as follows:
I assume that the brain constructs a ‘representation’ or ‘mental model’ of what is happening, based on the input from the initiating stimulus, expectations, traces of prior, related stimuli stored in long-term memory, and so on … Visual representations of a cat, for example, include encoding for shape, location and extension, movement, surface texture, colour, and so on … Let me illustrate with a simple analogy. Let us suppose that the information encoded in the subject’s brain is formed into a kind of neural ‘projection hologram’. A projection hologram has the interesting quality that the three-dimensional image it encodes is perceived to be out in space, in front of its two-dimensional surface.33
Velmans makes it clear that the idea of holographic projection is only an analogy, and stresses that he thinks perceptual projection is subjective and non-physical, occurring only in phenomenal as opposed to physical space. Nevertheless, these projections extend beyond the skull and generally coincide with physical space.
Perceptual fields
My own hypothesis is that projection takes place through perceptual fields extending beyond the brain, connecting the animal with that which is seen. Vision is rooted in the activity of the brain, but is not confined to the inside of the head.34 Like Velmans, I suggest that the formation of these fields depends on the changes occurring in various regions of the brain as vision takes place, influenced by expectations, intentions and memories. Velmans suggests that this projection takes place in a way that is analogous to a field phenomenon, as in a hologram. I suggest that the perceptual projection is not just analogous to but actually is a field phenomenon.
We are used to the idea of fields projecting beyond material bodies, as in the case of magnetic fields around magnets, the Earth’s gravitational field around the Earth, and the electromagnetic fields of mobile phones around the phones themselves. There is nothing unscientific or dualistic about extended fields of influence pervading material bodies and reaching out beyond their surfaces. I suggest that minds likewise extend beyond brains through fields. Perceptual fields are morphic fields.
Are perceptual fields real, or are they virtual? They are real in the sense that they are localized in space and time; they resonate with and have effects on the systems under their influence. They impose patterns on the probabilistic activity of nerves and networks of nerves. They interact with other morphic fields, such as those of a person or animal being stared at. But they are virtual in the sense that they are fields of probability or potentiality. They can be modelled mathematically in multidimensional spaces, as in René Thom’s models of dynamical attractors within morphogenetic fields.
To understand the sense of being stared at, we need a further postulate, namely that these perceptual fields interact with the fields of the person or animal on which attention is focussed. Ex hypothesi, all people and animals have their own morphic fields, so this interaction would require an action of like upon like, a field-field interaction.35 Physics already provides many examples of field-field interactions, as in gravitational, electrical, magnetic, electromagnetic and quantum matter fields.
Because perceptual fields stretch out and link the perceiver to the thing perceived, they may help explain the sense of being stared at. Most people have had the experience of turning round feeling that someone is looking at them from behind, and finding that this is the case. Most people have also had the converse experience. They can sometimes make people turn around by staring at them. In surveys in Europe and North America, between 70 and 97 per cent of the people questioned said they had had personal experiences of these kinds.36 There is now extensive experimental evidence that this phenomenon is real.37
Many animals also seem to have this sense, and this kind of sensitivity may well have been favoured by natural selection in the context of predator-prey relationships. An animal that could feel when a potential predator was looking at it would have more chance of escaping than one that was insensitive.38
Body images and phantom limbs
Just as our images of the things around us are located where they seem to be, outside the brain, so is our image of our body.
The conventional theory is that your body image is inside your brain. If you feel the pressure of your bottom on a chair, or a pain in your knee, these sensations are not located where they seem to be, but are inside your head. By contrast, I suggest that these feelings are just where they seem to be. They are not all compressed into the brain.
The contrast between the brain theory and the field theory is clearest in the case of phantom limbs. When people lose a limb as a result of an accident or amputation, usually the limb feels as if it is still there. It is a phantom, but it feels real.
These phantoms persist indefinitely. People who lost limbs in the Second World War told me 50 years later that their phantoms were as vivid as ever. Leo Unger, for example, had both feet badly damaged by a land mine when fighting in Norway in 1944. Both his legs had to be amputated below the knees. ‘From the very first day, I have always had the feeling that my legs and feet were still in place. Early on I had severe phantom pains that felt like balls of fire going down my limbs and off my toes. After twenty years I seldom got that feeling, but I do often feel the bones in my feet were just broken, just as they were when I was wounded.’
Many people with phantoms can move them around, just as if they were real. For example, people who have recently had an arm amputated find themselves trying to pick up the telephone with it, before they remember that their arm is no longer made of flesh and blood.
Some phantoms shrink with time. But this does not usually happen when people wear artificial arms or legs. The phantom fills the artificial limb and it ‘usually fits the prosthesis as a hand fits a glove’.39 If someone whose phantom has shrunk starts wearing a prosthesis, the phantom usually grows again to fit it.40 In fact, phantoms play an important part in people’s adaptation to artificial limbs, and make it much easier for them to use them. In the medical literature, it is usually said that the phantom ‘animates’ the prosthesis. As one researcher expressed it, ‘the lifeless appendage is animated by the living phantom.’41
Medical attempts to track down phantoms within the nervous system have shown them to be remarkably elusive. At first, the predominant hypothesis was that phantoms were produced in the brain because of impulses from nerves in the remaining limb-stump, particularly in nerve nodules at the cut ends of the nerves, called neuromas. Impulses from the neuromas were supposed to travel up the spinal cord into the brain, generating sensations in the sensory regions of the cerebral cortex that were then ‘referred’ to the missing limb. This theory was tested repeatedly in surgical attempts to relieve pain in the phantoms, by cutting off neuromas, or severing the nerves from the stump at the roots, next to the spinal cord. Unfortunately for most of these patients, the phantoms persisted, and the pain was not cured.42
The stump hypothesis faced another serious problem. It could not explain how some people born without limbs experience phantoms of their missing limbs when there is no injury to the nerves.43
Another hypothesis was that the phantoms arose from excessive nerve activity within the spinal cord because the nerves were missing their normal input from the limb. In accordance with this idea, surgeons cut nerve pathways within the spinal cord to try to relieve phantom pain. But the phantoms and the pain persisted.44
In addition, the experience of paraplegics does not support the theory that phantoms arise from excessive nervous activity in the spinal cord. Paraplegics are partially paralyzed because they have a broken spinal cord, with no feeling or control of the body below the break. They often experience phantom legs and even phantom genital organs. They may also experience phantom pain in the legs or groin, even though no nerve impulses from these lower parts of the body can cross the break in their spinal cord.45
The source of phantoms was therefore sought even deeper in the brain. Hopeful surgeons removed areas of the thalamus and sensory cortex that would have received nerve impulses from the missing limb in valiant attempts to relieve phantom pain, but the pain generally persisted, and so did the phantom.46
The quest led yet deeper. One hypothesis proposed that the body image was generated by a complex nerve network within the brain, called a neuromatrix, supposedly ‘hard-wired’ in the nerves. This neuromatrix ‘generates patterns, processes information that flows through it, and ultimately produces the pattern that is felt as the whole body’.47 The trouble with this theory is that it is virtually untestable. To try to remove a phantom by destroying the neuromatrix ‘would mean destruction of almost the whole brain.’48
Another hypothesis located the source of phantoms in the ‘remapping’ process in areas of the brain that previously received nerve impulses from the amputated organs and now no longer do so.49 The sprouting of new nervous connections within the brain may shed light on some aspects of phantoms, but it cannot explain their existence in the first place, because they appear immediately after amputation, long before any remapping has had time to occur.
Most of us could potentially experience a phantom arm if we wanted to, without suffering from any amputation or nerve damage at all, and certainly without remapping. Anaesthesia can produce phantoms in less than an hour. This commonly happens in patients who are about to undergo surgery on their arms, for which they are given local anaesthetics in the spinal cord. About 90 per cent of patients experience a phantom arm within 20 to 40 minutes of the injection of the anaesthetic into the brachial plexus, causing anaesthesia of the nerves running to the arm. When they close their eyes, they can move their arm around and lift it up, and also flex their hand and move their fingers. The arm feels completely real. Yet when they open their eyes they are usually amazed to see that their actual arm is lying immobile on the bed, while the phantom arm they experience is in a different position. Typically, when they realize the discrepancy, the phantom rapidly moves back into the real limb, fusing with it.50 The patient’s perception of the limb adjusts to reflect reality. As the anaesthetic wears off, the phantom disappears. Likewise, many patients whose legs have been anaesthetized experience phantom legs. When a patient is lying on his back, the phantom leg usually rises in the air above the actual leg.51
In trying to account for phantoms, medical researchers have returned again and again to concepts such as the ‘body schema’ or ‘body image’ somewhere inside the brain.52 But the theory that the body image is all in the brain is no more than an assumption. Attempts to find it there have been remarkably unsuccessful. The brain theory also goes against people’s own direct experience. It is far simpler to suppose that the body image and phantom limbs are located exactly where they seem to be.53
The existence of phantom limbs has breathtaking implications for ‘out of the body’ experiences. Several surveys have shown that about one person in five has experienced being out of the body, especially in moments of crisis.54 Typically, people find themselves separated from their physical body, as if they are in another body. For example, a man who had undergone an operation after general anaesthesia said, ‘I myself, freely hovering and looking downward from above, saw my physical body, lying on the operating table.’55 Rather than simply having a phantom limb, he had an entire phantom body, detached from his physical body. Such out-of-the-body experiences are common when people nearly die, as part of the ‘near-death’ experience.56 The neurologist Ronald Melzack concluded, after many years of studying phantoms: ‘It is evident that our experience of a body can occur without a body at all. We don’t need a body to feel a body.’57
I suggest that a phantom limb is the morphic field of the limb experienced from within. A phantom body is the morphic field of the body experienced from within. A really big question is whether the phantom body can survive the death of the physical body. I do not know the answer.
Extended minds and personal experience
In this chapter I have suggested that our minds extend beyond our brains. They do so even in the simplest act of perception. Images are where they seem to be. Subjects and objects are not radically separated, with subjects inside heads and objects in the external world. They are interlinked.
Through vision, the external world is brought into the mind through the eyes, and the subjective world of experience is projected outwards into the external world through fields of perception and intention. We are linked to our environment and to each other. Likewise, our minds pervade our bodies, and our body images are where we experience them, in our bodies, not just in our heads.
At first it may seem shocking to take our most direct and immediate experience seriously. We are used to the theory that all our thoughts, images, and feelings are in the brain, and not where they seem to be. Most of us picked up this idea by the time we were ten or eleven.58 Within institutional science and medicine, it is generally taken for granted, and most educated people accept it as the ‘scientifically correct’ view. Yet the mind-in-the-brain theory turns out to have very little evidence in its favour. It contradicts immediate experience. The recognition that our minds extend beyond our brains liberates us. We are no longer imprisoned within the narrow compass of our skulls.