Im wondering that if we are the brain why we cant control things like pain and our immune system.
In: Biology
The brain is only part of the system that controls the body. The body is like a whole colony of co-dependant organs that keep each other alive and work together for some mutual functions. Ours brains don’t have access to all of those functions, likely because they don’t need to. In some cases the best the brain can do is foster conditions for the result it wants to occur.
You could think of it like a farmer, if the farm was an extension of themselves. The farmer can till land, plant seeds and water them- but despite all their power and authority over the environment actually commanding the seeds is something they can’t do. They don’t have access or tools to make that happen.
In a similar fashion you can go work out, feed your body and sleep well but can’t spontaneously grow muscles by mental power alone.
In a similar way, we can’t turn our immune system or pain systems on or off, they’re outside of our control. My best guess as to “why” is that if a baby was born with that interconnectivity they’d accidentally cause themselves a lot of damage, or even die.
You are not just the brain. You are the whole body process. You are even the parts that don’t feel like you. The brain is like a hypervisor, showing you just enough to keep you living. The rest of you is automated. Your consciousness are just the parts that need more processing, like vision, decision making, emotion processing, etc.
I think it’s a big philosophical assumption to say that personhood is specifically inside our brains.
Fully no, but you can do a lot with conditioning your subconscious and refining your conscious behaviors. Those things are good enough for positive outcomes.
Autonomous behavior came first. The mechanism to provide a degree of conscious control over part of your body evolved when it was of value to survival. The mechanism – the sensors and the central nervous system wiring and the brain cells to control it all cost material and energy. If there were no benefit it wouldn’t have evolved.
You get benefit from being able to hold your breath, or your pee, or your poop, presumably because you survived better if you’re running away from a predator if you don’t stop to pee. You might more successfully hide from a predator if you can hold your breath.
Everything that you have conscious control over also had to develop a default mechanism that would normally make you consciously do the things that have been done autonomously in prior versions. We call these feelings. I feel I need to pee. This more expensive wiring that has to have a return on investment. And yet more wiring to weigh the alternative conscious behaviors. Which is more important running away or peeing or mating or eating, in the particular circumstance I’m in?
I guess there was never a return on investment on the ability to hold your heartbeat.
Because if we could, we’d fuck it up immediately.
Pain is important. You generally need to know if you’re hurt, and pain is a pretty clear way for the body to communicate that. If you could turn it off, everyone would have it off all the time, and people would die from the most treatable injuries/illnesses just because the body’s natural alarm system didn’t function.
Imagine you could alter your heart rate. The internet would be filled with sketchy forums with “how to overclock your heart and maximise your potential” type posts, which would probably cause heart failure pretty soon in anyone who tried it.
Actually, there’s a very good reason for not evolving such things. It’s the same reason why when you drive a car, you don’t control each spark in the engine, you don’t control when the cooling fan turns on and off.
Even if there were a “spark now” indicator, it would be an overwhelming task.
Similarly ot would be an overwhelming and often too slow task to control your body. Where would the level of control be? Do you really want to control each digesting cell in your body? Or just a big patch of cells in your guts? Do you want control over the immune system but not the liver? Or the liver too?
You see, making a high level decision for things that work fine when automated would make it risky. What if you don’t feel like being a bit sick and you don’t turn on the immune system, but then the virus kills your liver? What if you accidentally call for too much fever? Or you stop your heart?
People living without pain are in continuous hazard of harming themselves unnoticed. They must consciously check themselves for wounds and often die of unnoticed accidents (like, cooking yourself alive on the sun unnoticed). Evolution doesn’t give you this decision because who would turn on pain when you can turn it off? But then you endanger yourself, so if evolution ever gave this decision, that species went extinct.
As of yet in this point of our evolution as a species, that characteristic hasn’t emerged as a beneficial factor in passing our genes onto successive generations.
This is the generic answer for why we are what we are in virtually every way.
More specifically, suppose that was a characteristic of some predecessor human. Apparently it didn’t give them enough of an advantage in producing offspring, otherwise it would have persisted to this day. You can speculate why that wasn’t an evolutionary advantage (ie they didn’t understand how to use it and left themselves vulnerable to injurious pain or harmful disease), but ELI5 shouldn’t be for speculation.
You aren’t your brain. You’re in your brain. You are an emergent property of your brain. You’re the result of the signals in your brain, but not the brain itself. You’re the software, the brain is the hardware. This is most evident with anesthesia, where we can turn you off without turning you brain off. You have some manual control, but not a lot. Your body is a big bag of self-propagating chemistry, and a lot of that needs to be on auto-pilot. Breathing, heartbeat, digestion, kidney function, skin growth… Being able to stop your own heart would be a bad feature. If you had to do all the things manually that your body does on its own, you’d have no time to be you, you’d be too busy managing youself.
Also, your immune system is kinda doing it’s own thing in you. Your central nervous system has no way to control it voluntarily. In fact, neuronal tissue is forbidden territory for your immune system. They do communicate and share some info, but are pretty independant of each other.
You said it – we are the brain. But brain isn’t us. “We”, as entity (however you imagine it), are subject to brain. Brain is not our subject, even though we work well together and can make it do a lot of tricks.
If you work at a company, as an employee, you’re the company. If you didn’t do the work, there wouldn’t be a company. Because company is defined by your work. Let’s say, company owns a restaurant and you’re the only chef. If you didn’t make food, it wouldn’t be a restaurant because nobody gets to eat.
But if company got rid of you, it wouldn’t cease to exist. It could hire another chef. A bit similar with brain. If you were in coma or paralyzed or whatever, brain would still go on. If you lost your brain, you’d be dead. Brain is like a driver and you’re the car, not vice versa. You’re taking the driver around, but they’re driving. Without a driver, car is useless, but driver without a car is still someone.
Latest Answers