Reading Neuroexistentialism
As long-time readers know, my life and beliefs have been greatly influenced by existentialist philosophy, particularly the work of Friedrich Nietzsche and John Paul Sartre. Their ideas were informed by impressions they had of their personal experience, how if felt to them to be alive in their respective historic periods. Recent developments in neuroscience have bore factual fruit about human experience to which previous existentialists did not have access, and which challenge many of their underlying assumptions.
In Neuroexistentialism: Meaning, Morals, and Purpose in the Age of Neuroscience (2018) a range of essays by physicists, philosophers, psychologists, and cognitive scientists survey the traditional existential landscape in the light of recent neurological discoveries about the brain. This shifts the paradigm of relevant existentialism in ways that are both disturbing and enlightening.
According to editors Gregg D. Caruso and Owen Flanagan, existentialism is now in its “third wave” of development as a philosophy. The first wave consisted of the writings of Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, among others. It was generally characterized by “a displacement of ecclesiastical authority and a consequent anxiety over how to justify moral and personal norms without theological foundations.” The “second wave” was championed by the likes of Sartre, Camus, and de Beauvior and “was a response to an overly optimistic thought that emerged from the European enlightenment.” The current “third wave” of existentialism is more heavily influenced by the “disenchanting and destabilizing” received wisdom of neuroscience.
“In Being and Nothingness (1943/1992), Sartre rejects any and all forms of causal determinism – even the ‘psychological’ determinism which finds the immediate causes of action and choice in desires and beliefs of agents. Sartre’s existential freedom, or so-called radical freedom, maintains that I (as responsible agent) am not simply another object in the world. As a human being, I am always open to (and engaged with) things in the world: that is what Sartre means by saying that I am a ‘being-for’ itself (rather than a ‘being-in-itself, which is when one allows oneself to be determined by facticity).” (page 7)
“For third-wave existentialists, on the other hand, the reverse is the case: the possibility that we lack libertarian free will is what is disturbing and causes our existential anxiety. As the brain sciences progress and we better understand the mechanisms that undergird human behavior, the more it becomes obvious that we lack what Tom Clark (2013) calls ‘soul control.’ There is no longer any reason to believe in a nonphysical self which controls action and is liberated from the deterministic laws of nature – a little uncaused causer capable of exercising counter-causal free will.” (page 7 – 8)
“The scientific image is also disturbing for other reasons. It maintains, for example, that the mind is the brain, that humans are animals, that how things seem is not how they are, that introspection is a poor instrument for revealing how the mind works, that there is no ghost in the machine, no Cartesian theater where consciousness comes together, that our senses of self may in part be an illusion, and that the physical universe is the only universe there is and it is causally closed…Neuroexistentialism is one way of expressing whatever anxiety comes from accepting the picture of myself as an animal (the Darwin part) and that my mind is my brain, my mental states are brain states (the neuro-part). Taken together, the message is that humans are 100% animal.” (page 8)
That “free will” and “the Self” are largely illusions, that human beings are no more special than any other animal, within a universe with no predestined meaning or purpose, is a serious blow to traditional existentialism and, more broadly, to the entire project of self-understanding. I mentioned this before in my review of Being No One. This seismic shift in perspective, warranted by scientific research, seems rather bleak for those of us who realize, as Neil Young sang, “all my problems are meaningless, but that don’t make them go away.” How can we as individuals to get a foothold on the anxiety of our lives and our need for positive, proactive attempts at self-improvement if there isn’t a “me” to work on?
In his essay, Stephen J. Morse’s reductionism seems devastating. “Whether a person acts well or poorly is not up to them. Whether they feel joy or sorrow in response to their beneficence or harmdoing is not up to them. They cannot be morally praised or blamed for what they have already done or felt (although the action or emotional response may be judged good or bad itself), and they deserve nothing thereby. Whether they respond to moral address and concern is not up to them. Whether they are moved by the right sorts of moral and personal reasons is not up to them. Whether an intervention that addresses or bypasses their reasons is effective is not up to them. They may be reasons-responsive in theory, but reasons in HI’s vision are simply mechanisms for changing behavior and are no different in principle from any other mechanism doing so.” (page 347)
Another essay discusses the illusion we have about choice and control. “You may feel like you’ve made choices, but in reality your decision to read this article, and whether to have eggs or pancakes, was determined long before you were aware of it – perhaps even before you woke up today. And your ‘will’ had no part in the decision. So it is with all of our other choices: not one of them results from a free and conscious decision on our part. There is no freedom of choice, no free will.
“…it is becoming increasingly clear that we are biological creatures, collections of molecules that must obey the laws of physics. All the success of science rests on the regularity of those laws, which determine the behavior of every molecule in the universe…True ‘free will,’ then, would require us to somehow step outside of our brain’s structure and modify how it works.” (page 282)
But Sean Carroll cautions that, even so, there is still a legitimate basis for existential exploration and application to our lives. “There is little doubt that modern science has thoroughly undermined any hopes for a higher purpose or meaning inherent in the universe itself. In contrast with an Aristotelian system, governed by teleology and cause-and-effect relations, physics now describes a world characterized by conservation of momentum and information, a world that moves and exists by itself, without any external guidance.” (page 305)
“The universe, vast and impersonal, does not provide us with meaning, out there to be discovered; but by striving for authenticity in our actions we can create meaning for ourselves.” (page 306) But how can we “create” meaning or “strive” to live authentically if there is no one to be the authentic creator? The answer lies in the fact that, where our Being is concerned, we labor under the misconception of singularity when we are something else entirely.
Michael S. Gazzaniga sums up the fact that the singular “Self” is an illusion (something Buddhism has professed for millennia). Rather, it is a “multiplicity” of competing motivations (something Nietzsche clearly surmised). Even though the idea of a solid “acting agent” is largely an illusion to us, each of us nevertheless possesses neurological mechanisms to navigate our multiplicity and give meaning and cohesion to our lives.
“We are a soup of dispositions controlled by genetic mechanisms, some weakly and some strongly expressed in each of us. Now, here comes the good news. We humans have something called the interpreter, located in our left brain, that weaves a story about why we feel and act the way we do. That becomes our narrative, and each story is unique and full of sparkle. So my question is: What’s wrong with being that – just that? Being self-aware narrators is what human brains do…We remain responsible because responsibility arises out of each person’s interaction with the social layer he or she is embedded in. Responsibility is not to be found in the brain.” (page 223)
He then gives us a ray of hope on how human beings, in spite of all this, can claim some sense of control over their lives. “Our ‘freedom’ is to be found in developing more options for our computing brains to choose among. As we move through time and space, we are constantly generating new thoughts, ideas, and beliefs. All of these mental states provide a rich array of possible actions for us. The couch potato simple does not have the same array as the explorer. Just as Daniel Dennett suggests, even though we live in a determined world, new experience provides the window into more choices, and that is what freedom truly means.” (page 233)
This paradoxical “freedom without agency” lies at the heart of neuroexistentialism. Neil Levy walks through how this new view of “diversified agency” works. “Contemporary cognitive science shakes our faith even in the existence of this agent. Instead, it provides evidence that seems to indicate that there is no one to choose values; rather, each of us is a motley of different mechanisms and processes, each of which lack the intelligence to confront big existential questions and each pulling in a different direction.
“While there are grounds for thinking that the picture is in some ways bleaker than existentialists suggest, it is, however, not hopeless. The unified self that serves as the ultimate source of value in an otherwise meaningless universe may not exist, but we can impose a degree of unity on ourselves.” (page 111)
“Minds do not consist of a central executive in addition to a multiplicity of inflexible and rather unintelligent mechanisms. Rather, the mind consists of nothing but such unintelligent mechanisms. There is no central executive: nothing which occupies a seat of power, and nothing which has sufficient intelligence to even understand what power consists in, let alone use it wisely.” (page 115)
“Certainly, there is little evidence for a central executive: what we are disposed to view as higher level cognitive processes are themselves subserved by specific modules, not by any equivalent of the CEO. This picture of the mind seems to threaten to dissolve the self into nothing but a collection of dumb widgets.
“The account of the mind as modular is deeply at odds with our folk psychological conception of ourselves as unified beings, delegating top-down to constitutive mechanisms. Instead, it reveals each of us as a multiplicity; more a community than a single organism. Worse, the community fractured: our modules have different goals and different values. The fractionation may be revealed by brain injury, but it also underlies entirely everyday behavior.” (pp. 116 – 117)
“There is direct evidence that agents make choices that are caused by representational mental states of which they are unaware, or of the influence of which they are unaware, and subsequently confabulate reasons for these choices. Unsurprisingly, given that we are multiplicities and the sense of our unity is fragile and partly illusory, agents often have implicit attitudes that diverge from their explicit attitudes.” (page 120)
“Our decisions and actions are always very significantly driven by systems inaccessible to us, which respond to information of which we are sometimes unaware; but information accessible to consciousness nevertheless plays an important role in decision and action, in virtue of its being conscious. That information is made simultaneously available to a large swathe of the modules that drive behavior, which then assess that information for consistency and coherence with representations proprietary to the module.” (page 121)
“The self…is a system, with causal powers and the capacity to act on the world. It consists of the set of consuming mechanisms which receive representational contents from consciousness and which output their own signals to one another as well as to consciousness, plus the workspace of consciousness itself. The unification of the modules which results in the existence of a self does not eliminate multiplicity or even inconsistency.” (page 122)
“The self we forge and maintain against the sometimes corrosive power of modules is yet dependent on these same modules for its persistence. It allows us to affirm a set of values and, for the most part, allows our big-picture values to guide our behavior. We remain vulnerable to subversion from modules, but we may limit its effects.
“…we have to face up to the recognition that our self-knowledge is severely restricted, our propensity to confabulate a constant, and unity a fragile and ever-threatening achievement. We must recognize that we can never be confident that our most important choices were not influenced decisively by facts we cannot endorse or that the reasons we entertain are the reasons for which we act. That is a dizzying prospect. In our embodied existence, we find as much reason for anxiety as Sartre found in absolute freedom.” (page 123)
Walter Glannon points out that, despite a lack of central agency, we as individuals still possess some degree of choice and control in our lives, even if it is sifting through a multiplicity. “Despite sounding counterintuitive, some degree of constraint from unconscious processes in subcortal regions of the brain on conscious thought and motivation is not only compatible with but necessary for behavior control. Spence states that ‘the human capacity for volition, for voluntary control, or the apparent expression of ‘willed’ actions, is subject to multiple constraints’ in the neural networks mediating this capacity.” (page 150)
“We are more than our brains, though, and neural function does not determine that we perform some actions rather than others. Our behavior is constrained by brain structure and function in important respects. The idea of constraint and associated neuroscientific explanations of behavior may raise worries about whether they leave any room for individual choice based on the causal power of our mental states. These worries are unfounded. Brain and mind are not distinct entities but interdependent processes of human organisms living and acting in the world. Neural and mental functions interact in a constant process of bottom-up and top-down circular causation involving reentrant loops running to and from subcortical and cortical levels of the brain and unconscious and conscious levels of the mind. There is both brain-mind and mind-brain causal interaction.” (page 158)
“We do not ‘find’ meaning in the brain, any more than an existentialist ‘finds’ meaning in the world. Rather, we construct it from the actions we perform on the basis of our brain-enabled mental capacities.” (page 159)
So, while neuroscience informs us that we have no free will and that we lack the sense of singular agency that we mistakenly believe we possess, there are nevertheless mechanisms within our modular brains that allow us to create individual narratives for ourselves out of which we can build meaning and authenticity for our lives. We can expand our capacity for experiencing freedom by enriching our lives with a diversity of experiences from which the multiplicity can choose, thus broadening (and to some extent guiding) our experiences.
It is rather bleak to incorporate the findings of neuroscience with our intimate experiences. The “third wave” of existentialism deconstructs who we think we are, splintering it into sometimes competitive, sometimes disassociated fragments. We have less control and we are far less solid than we would like to believe. Much of the traditional approach to existential issues (Sartre, for example) is actually just an illusion. That is unsettling. But, as the quotes above indicate, it is not hopeless. It is overly simplistic to view ourselves as puppets at the whims of our modular brains teaming with diverse inner processes. We can and do construct narratives. We can and do experience greater freedom through an open and curious approach to the world.
This actually has much in common with Nietzsche’s sense of Self as a multiplicity of drives. I plan to explore this more in a future post. Neuroexistentialism is a splendid survey of a seemly desolate neuro-landscape, one that greatly limits human capacity and control over our behavior and our experience of life. It is not very helpful or useful to us because it causes more anxiety than it solves. What is required of us who experience this anxiety is a new understanding of our capacities for behavior and experience.
The essayists in this book demonstrate our illusions and limitations, but they also offer a level-headed consideration of how we can still find meaning and purpose and freedom in our lives. First, we have to let go of the idea of a singular “me” or “I”. Next, we must observe and engage with our inner capacities for creating narrative and context. The only individuals who are truly imprisoned by these findings are those who gravitate toward closed systems of interpretation (pretty much anything “orthodox”) rather than discovering how to open ourselves to more dynamic possibilities of being human.
Authentic meaning based on the facts of neuroscience is to be found through new channels of openness, acceptance, and curiosity. Out of this we expand the choices available to our multiplicity of brain modules and thus experience the greater range of freedom and vibrant discovery that is essential for personal growth. In light of all our illusions, that is a refreshing insight even if there is no “singular person” to appreciate it.
In Neuroexistentialism: Meaning, Morals, and Purpose in the Age of Neuroscience (2018) a range of essays by physicists, philosophers, psychologists, and cognitive scientists survey the traditional existential landscape in the light of recent neurological discoveries about the brain. This shifts the paradigm of relevant existentialism in ways that are both disturbing and enlightening.
According to editors Gregg D. Caruso and Owen Flanagan, existentialism is now in its “third wave” of development as a philosophy. The first wave consisted of the writings of Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, among others. It was generally characterized by “a displacement of ecclesiastical authority and a consequent anxiety over how to justify moral and personal norms without theological foundations.” The “second wave” was championed by the likes of Sartre, Camus, and de Beauvior and “was a response to an overly optimistic thought that emerged from the European enlightenment.” The current “third wave” of existentialism is more heavily influenced by the “disenchanting and destabilizing” received wisdom of neuroscience.
“In Being and Nothingness (1943/1992), Sartre rejects any and all forms of causal determinism – even the ‘psychological’ determinism which finds the immediate causes of action and choice in desires and beliefs of agents. Sartre’s existential freedom, or so-called radical freedom, maintains that I (as responsible agent) am not simply another object in the world. As a human being, I am always open to (and engaged with) things in the world: that is what Sartre means by saying that I am a ‘being-for’ itself (rather than a ‘being-in-itself, which is when one allows oneself to be determined by facticity).” (page 7)
“For third-wave existentialists, on the other hand, the reverse is the case: the possibility that we lack libertarian free will is what is disturbing and causes our existential anxiety. As the brain sciences progress and we better understand the mechanisms that undergird human behavior, the more it becomes obvious that we lack what Tom Clark (2013) calls ‘soul control.’ There is no longer any reason to believe in a nonphysical self which controls action and is liberated from the deterministic laws of nature – a little uncaused causer capable of exercising counter-causal free will.” (page 7 – 8)
“The scientific image is also disturbing for other reasons. It maintains, for example, that the mind is the brain, that humans are animals, that how things seem is not how they are, that introspection is a poor instrument for revealing how the mind works, that there is no ghost in the machine, no Cartesian theater where consciousness comes together, that our senses of self may in part be an illusion, and that the physical universe is the only universe there is and it is causally closed…Neuroexistentialism is one way of expressing whatever anxiety comes from accepting the picture of myself as an animal (the Darwin part) and that my mind is my brain, my mental states are brain states (the neuro-part). Taken together, the message is that humans are 100% animal.” (page 8)
That “free will” and “the Self” are largely illusions, that human beings are no more special than any other animal, within a universe with no predestined meaning or purpose, is a serious blow to traditional existentialism and, more broadly, to the entire project of self-understanding. I mentioned this before in my review of Being No One. This seismic shift in perspective, warranted by scientific research, seems rather bleak for those of us who realize, as Neil Young sang, “all my problems are meaningless, but that don’t make them go away.” How can we as individuals to get a foothold on the anxiety of our lives and our need for positive, proactive attempts at self-improvement if there isn’t a “me” to work on?
In his essay, Stephen J. Morse’s reductionism seems devastating. “Whether a person acts well or poorly is not up to them. Whether they feel joy or sorrow in response to their beneficence or harmdoing is not up to them. They cannot be morally praised or blamed for what they have already done or felt (although the action or emotional response may be judged good or bad itself), and they deserve nothing thereby. Whether they respond to moral address and concern is not up to them. Whether they are moved by the right sorts of moral and personal reasons is not up to them. Whether an intervention that addresses or bypasses their reasons is effective is not up to them. They may be reasons-responsive in theory, but reasons in HI’s vision are simply mechanisms for changing behavior and are no different in principle from any other mechanism doing so.” (page 347)
Another essay discusses the illusion we have about choice and control. “You may feel like you’ve made choices, but in reality your decision to read this article, and whether to have eggs or pancakes, was determined long before you were aware of it – perhaps even before you woke up today. And your ‘will’ had no part in the decision. So it is with all of our other choices: not one of them results from a free and conscious decision on our part. There is no freedom of choice, no free will.
“…it is becoming increasingly clear that we are biological creatures, collections of molecules that must obey the laws of physics. All the success of science rests on the regularity of those laws, which determine the behavior of every molecule in the universe…True ‘free will,’ then, would require us to somehow step outside of our brain’s structure and modify how it works.” (page 282)
But Sean Carroll cautions that, even so, there is still a legitimate basis for existential exploration and application to our lives. “There is little doubt that modern science has thoroughly undermined any hopes for a higher purpose or meaning inherent in the universe itself. In contrast with an Aristotelian system, governed by teleology and cause-and-effect relations, physics now describes a world characterized by conservation of momentum and information, a world that moves and exists by itself, without any external guidance.” (page 305)
“The universe, vast and impersonal, does not provide us with meaning, out there to be discovered; but by striving for authenticity in our actions we can create meaning for ourselves.” (page 306) But how can we “create” meaning or “strive” to live authentically if there is no one to be the authentic creator? The answer lies in the fact that, where our Being is concerned, we labor under the misconception of singularity when we are something else entirely.
Michael S. Gazzaniga sums up the fact that the singular “Self” is an illusion (something Buddhism has professed for millennia). Rather, it is a “multiplicity” of competing motivations (something Nietzsche clearly surmised). Even though the idea of a solid “acting agent” is largely an illusion to us, each of us nevertheless possesses neurological mechanisms to navigate our multiplicity and give meaning and cohesion to our lives.
“We are a soup of dispositions controlled by genetic mechanisms, some weakly and some strongly expressed in each of us. Now, here comes the good news. We humans have something called the interpreter, located in our left brain, that weaves a story about why we feel and act the way we do. That becomes our narrative, and each story is unique and full of sparkle. So my question is: What’s wrong with being that – just that? Being self-aware narrators is what human brains do…We remain responsible because responsibility arises out of each person’s interaction with the social layer he or she is embedded in. Responsibility is not to be found in the brain.” (page 223)
He then gives us a ray of hope on how human beings, in spite of all this, can claim some sense of control over their lives. “Our ‘freedom’ is to be found in developing more options for our computing brains to choose among. As we move through time and space, we are constantly generating new thoughts, ideas, and beliefs. All of these mental states provide a rich array of possible actions for us. The couch potato simple does not have the same array as the explorer. Just as Daniel Dennett suggests, even though we live in a determined world, new experience provides the window into more choices, and that is what freedom truly means.” (page 233)
This paradoxical “freedom without agency” lies at the heart of neuroexistentialism. Neil Levy walks through how this new view of “diversified agency” works. “Contemporary cognitive science shakes our faith even in the existence of this agent. Instead, it provides evidence that seems to indicate that there is no one to choose values; rather, each of us is a motley of different mechanisms and processes, each of which lack the intelligence to confront big existential questions and each pulling in a different direction.
“While there are grounds for thinking that the picture is in some ways bleaker than existentialists suggest, it is, however, not hopeless. The unified self that serves as the ultimate source of value in an otherwise meaningless universe may not exist, but we can impose a degree of unity on ourselves.” (page 111)
“Minds do not consist of a central executive in addition to a multiplicity of inflexible and rather unintelligent mechanisms. Rather, the mind consists of nothing but such unintelligent mechanisms. There is no central executive: nothing which occupies a seat of power, and nothing which has sufficient intelligence to even understand what power consists in, let alone use it wisely.” (page 115)
“Certainly, there is little evidence for a central executive: what we are disposed to view as higher level cognitive processes are themselves subserved by specific modules, not by any equivalent of the CEO. This picture of the mind seems to threaten to dissolve the self into nothing but a collection of dumb widgets.
“The account of the mind as modular is deeply at odds with our folk psychological conception of ourselves as unified beings, delegating top-down to constitutive mechanisms. Instead, it reveals each of us as a multiplicity; more a community than a single organism. Worse, the community fractured: our modules have different goals and different values. The fractionation may be revealed by brain injury, but it also underlies entirely everyday behavior.” (pp. 116 – 117)
“There is direct evidence that agents make choices that are caused by representational mental states of which they are unaware, or of the influence of which they are unaware, and subsequently confabulate reasons for these choices. Unsurprisingly, given that we are multiplicities and the sense of our unity is fragile and partly illusory, agents often have implicit attitudes that diverge from their explicit attitudes.” (page 120)
“Our decisions and actions are always very significantly driven by systems inaccessible to us, which respond to information of which we are sometimes unaware; but information accessible to consciousness nevertheless plays an important role in decision and action, in virtue of its being conscious. That information is made simultaneously available to a large swathe of the modules that drive behavior, which then assess that information for consistency and coherence with representations proprietary to the module.” (page 121)
“The self…is a system, with causal powers and the capacity to act on the world. It consists of the set of consuming mechanisms which receive representational contents from consciousness and which output their own signals to one another as well as to consciousness, plus the workspace of consciousness itself. The unification of the modules which results in the existence of a self does not eliminate multiplicity or even inconsistency.” (page 122)
“The self we forge and maintain against the sometimes corrosive power of modules is yet dependent on these same modules for its persistence. It allows us to affirm a set of values and, for the most part, allows our big-picture values to guide our behavior. We remain vulnerable to subversion from modules, but we may limit its effects.
“…we have to face up to the recognition that our self-knowledge is severely restricted, our propensity to confabulate a constant, and unity a fragile and ever-threatening achievement. We must recognize that we can never be confident that our most important choices were not influenced decisively by facts we cannot endorse or that the reasons we entertain are the reasons for which we act. That is a dizzying prospect. In our embodied existence, we find as much reason for anxiety as Sartre found in absolute freedom.” (page 123)
Walter Glannon points out that, despite a lack of central agency, we as individuals still possess some degree of choice and control in our lives, even if it is sifting through a multiplicity. “Despite sounding counterintuitive, some degree of constraint from unconscious processes in subcortal regions of the brain on conscious thought and motivation is not only compatible with but necessary for behavior control. Spence states that ‘the human capacity for volition, for voluntary control, or the apparent expression of ‘willed’ actions, is subject to multiple constraints’ in the neural networks mediating this capacity.” (page 150)
“We are more than our brains, though, and neural function does not determine that we perform some actions rather than others. Our behavior is constrained by brain structure and function in important respects. The idea of constraint and associated neuroscientific explanations of behavior may raise worries about whether they leave any room for individual choice based on the causal power of our mental states. These worries are unfounded. Brain and mind are not distinct entities but interdependent processes of human organisms living and acting in the world. Neural and mental functions interact in a constant process of bottom-up and top-down circular causation involving reentrant loops running to and from subcortical and cortical levels of the brain and unconscious and conscious levels of the mind. There is both brain-mind and mind-brain causal interaction.” (page 158)
“We do not ‘find’ meaning in the brain, any more than an existentialist ‘finds’ meaning in the world. Rather, we construct it from the actions we perform on the basis of our brain-enabled mental capacities.” (page 159)
So, while neuroscience informs us that we have no free will and that we lack the sense of singular agency that we mistakenly believe we possess, there are nevertheless mechanisms within our modular brains that allow us to create individual narratives for ourselves out of which we can build meaning and authenticity for our lives. We can expand our capacity for experiencing freedom by enriching our lives with a diversity of experiences from which the multiplicity can choose, thus broadening (and to some extent guiding) our experiences.
It is rather bleak to incorporate the findings of neuroscience with our intimate experiences. The “third wave” of existentialism deconstructs who we think we are, splintering it into sometimes competitive, sometimes disassociated fragments. We have less control and we are far less solid than we would like to believe. Much of the traditional approach to existential issues (Sartre, for example) is actually just an illusion. That is unsettling. But, as the quotes above indicate, it is not hopeless. It is overly simplistic to view ourselves as puppets at the whims of our modular brains teaming with diverse inner processes. We can and do construct narratives. We can and do experience greater freedom through an open and curious approach to the world.
This actually has much in common with Nietzsche’s sense of Self as a multiplicity of drives. I plan to explore this more in a future post. Neuroexistentialism is a splendid survey of a seemly desolate neuro-landscape, one that greatly limits human capacity and control over our behavior and our experience of life. It is not very helpful or useful to us because it causes more anxiety than it solves. What is required of us who experience this anxiety is a new understanding of our capacities for behavior and experience.
The essayists in this book demonstrate our illusions and limitations, but they also offer a level-headed consideration of how we can still find meaning and purpose and freedom in our lives. First, we have to let go of the idea of a singular “me” or “I”. Next, we must observe and engage with our inner capacities for creating narrative and context. The only individuals who are truly imprisoned by these findings are those who gravitate toward closed systems of interpretation (pretty much anything “orthodox”) rather than discovering how to open ourselves to more dynamic possibilities of being human.
Authentic meaning based on the facts of neuroscience is to be found through new channels of openness, acceptance, and curiosity. Out of this we expand the choices available to our multiplicity of brain modules and thus experience the greater range of freedom and vibrant discovery that is essential for personal growth. In light of all our illusions, that is a refreshing insight even if there is no “singular person” to appreciate it.
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