Are we our brain?

This is another trick question, but one almost universally misunderstood by literally everyone from the man on the street to Nobel Prize winners.

A spectacular account of the problems and much more is given in the Shurangama Sutra. Some say this was not actually given by Buddha, and represents developments in Indian thought after Buddha, but that does not matter for those wishing to expand their minds.

In brief though the trick lies not in which we think of the 'brain', but what we think of the 'I'. When people usually try and examine the question "Am I my Brain" they assume they know what the I is and they go examining all the neurons, computations, physics etc of the brain. A moment examining the 'I' will show where the problem lies.

Science has never found the 'I' and so has never found the owner of the brain. And they won't because there is no owner of the brain. There is just the brain. So what are we trying to find out when we ask this question?

We don't ask am I my 'arm' so why do we ask am I my 'brain'?

It is a modern development of the idea of a soul. When someone dies the arm is visibly left behind but something very dramatic is lost. This used to be called the soul. It is now called the "self." But they are indistinguishable.

Self is not to be confused with identity. I and my neighbour may have a car. We drive to the pub for a drink and then learn that a car has been stolen from the car park. It makes a very big difference whether it is his car or mine that is taken. The identity of the car that is taken is a real thing and it matters (under Western property ideas anyway). In the same way as you car and my car are different we expand this to say your brain and my brain. If your brain dreams it is noticeably different from if my brain dreams. Likewise if you close your eyes it is different from if I close my eyes. There appears to be something here in that what happens to you and yours is different from what happens to me and mine. But notice this yours and mine is not to do with the brain it expands to everything from brain to eyes to arms to cars.

So I am quite separate from my brain. That is how I can even call it my brain! And it gets weirder. After I am dead my will is read out and my property is distributed to other people, but it is still my property. We even talk of Darwin's Theory of Evolution - it still belongs to him more than a century after his death. Darwin has long out lived his brain!

So as usual time is short, but hopefully this has started to tease apart the confused elements of this question to show that it doesn't make sense.

Much more can be said here and I'll probably examine again (its been done before in this blog) the deep issues of existence and what it is to exist and die at all.