The Astonishing Hypothesis

Enduring mystery or not, Pinker joined other neuroscientists to declare the death of the soul. Francis Crick, a co-discoverer of the double helix structure of DNA, proposed the “Astonishing Hypothesis,” which states, “You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules” (Crick, 1994). So, was Crick a “mechanistic killjoy” or is there evidence that every aspect of consciousness is connected to the brain? Pinker proposed the following as evidence from the emerging science of consciousness that he asserts shows that consciousness is simply a function of the machine (p. 62):

• Neuroscientists can virtually read people’s thoughts by monitoring blood flow in their brains using MRI technology.
• Electronically stimulating the brain during surgery can cause hallucinations that the individual cannot distinguish from reality.
• Chemicals that affect the brain—like caffeine, Prozac, and LSD—changes how people think, feel and perceive.
• Severing the two hemispheres of the brain creates two consciousnesses in the same person, “as if the soul could be cleaved in two with a knife.”
• Near-death experiences “are not the eyewitness reports of a soul parting… but symptoms of oxygen starvation in the eyes and brain.”
• The executive “I” that controls our brain “is an illusion.” Consciousness is not a function of a single control point, but “a maelstrom of events distributed across the brain. These events compete for attention, and as one process out shouts the others, the brain rationalizes the outcome after the fact and concocts the impression that a single self was in charge all along.”