- Jan 28, 2003
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I think with my brain. My brain is made of molecules. Therefore, molecules, when arranged in a certain way, can think.
But how can that be? After all, you are alive, and you feel what it is to be alive. You are experiencing conscious awareness. How can this awareness be nothing more than the result of molecules and elementary physical particles?
Your conscious awareness might seem to you to be something immaterial that is telling the molecules of your body what to do. And yet, as I wrote at Is There Life after Death, there is abundant evidence that the physical brain is indeed the thing that thinks. There is no soul inside running the show. The brain is in control.
Your brain does the thinking. And it creates the appearance that there is a person in charge controlling everything. Rather, what you have is a mass of neurons acting in parallel. But within that mass of neurons, some ideas rise to attention and drive the body. They create the story that the attention is in charge, but it is only there for the ride. The many neurons acting in parallel are in charge. I discuss this at How Can Molecules Think?
But how can that be? After all, you are alive, and you feel what it is to be alive. You are experiencing conscious awareness. How can this awareness be nothing more than the result of molecules and elementary physical particles?
Your conscious awareness might seem to you to be something immaterial that is telling the molecules of your body what to do. And yet, as I wrote at Is There Life after Death, there is abundant evidence that the physical brain is indeed the thing that thinks. There is no soul inside running the show. The brain is in control.
Your brain does the thinking. And it creates the appearance that there is a person in charge controlling everything. Rather, what you have is a mass of neurons acting in parallel. But within that mass of neurons, some ideas rise to attention and drive the body. They create the story that the attention is in charge, but it is only there for the ride. The many neurons acting in parallel are in charge. I discuss this at How Can Molecules Think?