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>"It turns out many ordinary medications don’t just affect our bodies – they affect our brains." I feel like perpetuating this mindset is the ultimate sin of m

>"It turns out many ordinary medications don’t just affect our bodies – they affect our brains." I feel like perpetuating this mindset is the ultimate sin of modern psychiatry and the entire industry of psychiatric pharmaceuticals - your brain is your body. It's not some special thing that sits apart from it. It is an integral part of the whole, no different than your kidneys or liver. People think they can take an antidepressant and it just "works" on their brain somehow. It affects absolutely everything.

kerkeslager 7y ago
I think the problem goes at least as far back as Plato and the allegory of the cave. Plato spread this concept that there was a difference between the body and mind or soul, and Western culture has never really recovered from the stupidity of that idea. There's really no evidence or justification for it. Your mind and your body are the same thing.
- darkerside 7y ago
  Modern philosophical thought and religion were built on that idea, and they were arguably inextricable from science in it's early stages. This is like someone people never fully recover from adolescence. Correct, it forms an integral part of who you eventually become.
  - kerkeslager 7y ago
    > Modern philosophical thought and religion were built on that idea, and they were arguably inextricable from science in it's early stages. So were lots of bad ideas. Science is a process of trial and error. This was an error. The hope is that you correct the errors, not make them an integral part of your belief system.
- ezequiel-garzon 7y ago
  Some people feel one’s essence is fundamentally different from one’s body, including the brain as part of the body. Not saying I support this notion, but to brush it aside as stupid or unjustified seems a bit hasty in view of the huge literature behind these issues. Moreover, doesn’t the notion of reincarnation in some parts of the Eastern world show it’s not restricted to Western culture? I’m sure there plenty more such notions outside the West.
  - kerkeslager 7y ago
    > Some people feel one’s essence is fundamentally different from one’s body, including the brain as part of the body. Not saying I support this notion, but to brush it aside as stupid or unjustified seems a bit hasty in view of the huge literature behind these issues. I don't think it is. Consider: someone decides to say something without evidence. It's obviously okay to brush this aside and just say "there's no evidence for that". Then hundreds of thousands of people read what that person said, and then decide to propagate the idea by saying it themselves, still without any evidence. You're claiming that at some point, the bulk of literature means we can't say it's a stupid idea any more? I disagree. Ideas are determined valid by the evidence or lack of evidence, not by how popular they are. In fact, when a stupid idea is popular, that's when it causes the most damage. So when there's a bulk of literature propagating a stupid idea, that's the time when it's important to say that it's a stupid idea. > Moreover, doesn’t the notion of reincarnation in some parts of the Eastern world show it’s not restricted to Western culture? You'll note I didn't say it was restricted to Western culture. I think Plato has a large part in spreading the idea in Western culture, but I'd guess he wasn't the first, and other people probably came up with the same idea independently.
    - ezequiel-garzon 7y ago
      What's the evidence that there is a brain or body in the first place, which is a big part of the original discussion? No, I don't mean that just because Plato said it cannot be "stupid", but you have clearly provoked the crowd bringing philosophy to the fore, and broadly speaking philosophy is where you stop having certain evidence for anything, as it precisely challenges anything deemed certain. Once the body is assumed and our senses trusted, if you find solid evidence it'll be about how the brain differs (or not) from the rest of the body, not about the presence or absence of a mind or soul.
      - kerkeslager 7y ago
        > What's the evidence that there is a brain or body in the first place, which is a big part of the original discussion? I'll sidestep this by saying that for my purposes, reality is just a theorized model of what our senses perceive. If we don't trust our senses, then it's possible none of the things we perceive exist, but who cares? The things we perceive as our brain and body can be modeled to predict what we will perceive in the future. > broadly speaking philosophy is where you stop having certain evidence for anything That's not how I define philosophy, but I won't get into a semantic argument about what philosophy is. I also think saying things are "certain" is almost always a mistake. All I'll say is that if that if you define philosophy as eschewing evidence, then I'm happy to dismiss all of what you consider philosophy. If you aren't able to produce evidence (empirical or logical) for the statements you make, then all you're doing is stringing together words into grammatically-correct but meaningless sentences, which is not a skill I care about by itself. I'm happy to say that I don't think all philosophers share your view that evidence is unnecessary, so there are many people who I would respect who I would also call philosophers. > Once the body is assumed and our senses trusted, I don't think we can assume that. Nor should we. Nor is there any value in doing so. Let's temporarily assume the opposite: let's assume our senses are lying to us. If that's so, I'd argue that our senses lie to us in consistent, predictable manners. I can predict how my senses will lie to me in the future based on how they are lying to me now, and how they have lied to me in the past. If I choose to tell my fake body to let go of a fake ball, my senses will lie to me and tell me that the fake ball falls toward the fake earth. Every fake morning, my senses lie to me and tell me that the fake sun rises. How would my situation differ if all this were real? If I really dropped a real ball and it really fell toward the real earth, would that be different? If a real sun rose in the real morning, how would that change my experience? In short, a falsehood so complete that it is completely indistinguishable from the truth is not meaningfully different from the truth. If I put my hand on a hot stove and sense pain, does it matter whether that pain is real or fake? I don't think it does. > if you find solid evidence it'll be about how the brain differs (or not) from the rest of the body, not about the presence or absence of a mind or soul. That's true, which is why minds and souls should be relegated to the fiction section of the bookstore, with ghosts, werewolves, elves, and all the other fictional things we don't sense with our senses. I'm not saying these things aren't fun to think about, they just shouldn't be considered as existent phenomena on which we base our beliefs and decisions.
- fit2rule 7y ago
  Metabolism. How the chemistry of your body interacts with itself. I know for sure I have 'episodes' when I've got acid in the wrong parts of the gut. I also 'feel' the stages of stool composition, and there are definitely relics of unhealthy eating in my mood swings. One thing though, is I never take pharmaceuticals, as I wish my body to be a picture of my life balance, which I believe are two separate realms completely (body/life). Instead I do everything I can to eat well, and give my body the sport it needs. This isn't easy, but everyone's got their own body, and its own needs. If you pay attention, it'll tell you what it needs. The brain, or at least my brain, is a nice soft spongy joystick for controlling the rest of it. It feels good to throw around a bit, but you gotta take care of what its attached to, as well. A good day in the surf is how I charge my mind up, anyhoo...
- jotm 7y ago
  I believe the mind, or soul, is indeed in the brain. But it's also separate. It's more like software controlling the hardware. Take self control and attention. How many people struggle with it, procrastinating? You want to do something, you know you have to do it, you like doing it... But you don't. Because your brain doesn't listen to your mind. Because the brain is mostly a primitive autonomous system and needs to be constantly motivated, coerced, trained to do things that it technically doesn't need to (why do anything besides eat, survive, reproduce?) Take away what we call the mind/soul, and we're just a basic animal, running reactively on instinct and reflexes.
  - kerkeslager 7y ago
    > Take away what we call the mind/soul, and we're just a basic animal, running reactively on instinct and reflexes. Yes, that's correct, and I really don't understand what you think you've said that proves otherwise.
  - lanstin 7y ago
    I think the battle in procrastination is not between the brain and something outside but between different parts of the brain, one favoring a long term perspective and others favoring immediate gratification.
- koheripbal 7y ago
  Plato's allegory of the Cave is about the liberation provided by education, and self-awareness. How gaining understanding of your environment freed you from the limited reality it presented you. The initial usage of the story was to illustrate how political indoctrination could present a false reality to ardent followers "the shadows of cave fire for those raised in the cave", and how education could "open the eyes and show them the true light" (the fire in the sky/sun vs the fire in the cave). "...even if one was dragged out of the cave". This was later extended to demonstrate that if humans learned about their own emotions, they could learn to reason decisions, rather than allow emotions to guide them exclusively. Tangentially, this rough concept in early western philosophy evolved into the religion of the Sun, and had significant influence on early Christianity.
  - kerkeslager 7y ago
    I would caution you on ever thinking that allegories or analogies "demonstrate" anything. Analogies can be used to explain a model of a system, but they can't be use to prove that that model is accurate. Consider the analogy "arms are like wings". That's actually true in a lot of ways, but we can't simply assume that arms have all the properties of wings by analogy, otherwise we'd conclude that arms allow us to fly. That education improves our capabilities is fairly well proven via other means.
  - mcguire 7y ago
    Are you saying that two thousand years of nominalism vs. realism are based on a misunderstanding of Plato? (And, doesn't sun worship predate philosophy by a good bit?)
- aldoushuxley001 7y ago
  > Your mind and your body are the same thing. That is incorrect, but unfortunately a very common misunderstanding. The mind is highly correlated with the brain but it is not the brain. It’s easy to see this is the case because the brain is made up of a qualitatively different material than the mind. While the brain is composed of biological cells / chemistry / atoms, the mind is composed of things like sense-perceptions (like colours, smells, sounds, etc), emotions, etc. Which is to say that the mind is composed of material that is fundamentally different from the brain. Of course they’re highly correlated but they are in fact separate entities composed of different materials. You may say that the fundamental materials of the mind are reducible to the same things as the brain, but that would be confusing correlation for the thing itself. Take for example the colour red, which is present in the mind but not the brain. Yes the brain enables the perception of red but it is not red itself. Eg a photon with a wavelength of approximately 620-750nm is often confused for red but in fact it’s just a photon which, when it hits the back of our eyes causes a chemical cascade from the relevant cone cells. So it’s abundantly clear this photon in itself is not red because it just causes a specific chemical cascade at back of our eyes. So is this chemical cascade red? No it’s just a chemical cascade that is highly correlated with red appearing in our mind. The right answer, I believe, is simply that red is highly correlated with specific pathways of chemical cascades in our brain. The point remains that the brain and the mind are separate and distinct entities made up of qualitatively different material. If you disagree with this assessment, please tell me what is red?
  - mcguire 7y ago
    "The mind is highly correlated with the brain but it is not the brain." ... in roughly the same way that a process is not a processor. Or a program, for that matter.
    - kerkeslager 7y ago
      Okay, if you're saying that the mind is just the sequence of events occurring inside the brain, I certainly won't argue that the sequence of events doesn't exist. However, I don't think that's what most people mean when they say "mind", and using the word "mind" brings with it a lot of baggage, so I'd prefer to use a more descriptive term, like "sequence of events".
- dr_dshiv 7y ago
  I like reading ignorant things like this because it helps show why we really need more classical education in society. If you'd actually read some Plato, as opposed to summaries, I'd be shocked if you could keep the same belief. It's just so damn good for thinking with. But prior to Plato, the Pythagorean Philolaus wrote that sensation/experience comes from the interaction between the soul (greek: psyche) and the body. Soul, here, is not the experiencing thing but the immaterial forms. (Summary: an example of an immaterial form is the concept of a triangle — a real and meaningful form but separate from any material instance). This Pythagorean view of the soul is compelling and has similarities with the idea of computational logic being fundamentally separable from the media of computation. The same logic can run on silicon or some water pump computer. So, from this, if mind is what we'd call the experience, then it isn't just the body. It is the material body interacting with the soul (the "computational" forms).
  - kerkeslager 7y ago
    > If you'd actually read some Plato, as opposed to summaries, I'd be shocked if you could keep the same belief. I guess that means you're shocked.
    - dr_dshiv 7y ago
      You mean you've read some Plato? That's great. I'm most inspired by Phaedo, Gorgias and Timaeus. I think it's really important to stay attuned to the Pythagorean tradition, which seemed to be Plato's largest philosophical influence.
      - kerkeslager 7y ago
        I've read The Republic. There wasn't anything in there that inspired me to read more of his work. I think Plato and a lot of other early writers should be studied as historical figures, but we should also recognize that they were products of their time. Plato got it wrong more often than he got it right, not because he was stupid (he wasn't), but because he didn't have the benefits of thousands of years of previous thinkers to refine his ideas against. But we do have that benefit, and we should use it. We have the opportunity to stand on the shoulders of 21st century giants, and we miss that opportunity if we choose to stand on the shoulders of philosophers in the infancy of philosophy. Even where ancient philosophers got things right in their theories of the mind, it was mostly just lucky guesses, without the benefit of modern neuroscience to validate those guesses. And neuroscience itself is in its infancy: our theory of the mind should be expanding every day as new discoveries are made.
- seisvelas 7y ago
  My Python code ultimately runs on a circuit, but it feels lacking to say that my program is the circuitry. The program itself only has meaning inside of my mind, and in fact could exist equally well on paper. It exists conceptually even if it never manifests physically. So where do concepts like this exist, given that they don't exist as matter? What do we mean when we say that something like 1+1=2 is true - that that truth exists - and would exist even if there wasn't any matter to have 1 and 1 of? The more you look at it, the more it looks like truths and ideas are even realer than the material world. After all, the only thing we know of the material world is what we experience of it in our mind. That was Plato's point, that the material world is a shadow of the real, immaterial world of thoughts, ideas, and truths. Similar argument patterns permeate most ancient philosophies. The meme is that mind is the ultimate reality, of which the materialistic worldview is a surprisingly fragile inverse.
  - lanstin 7y ago
    Google embodied cognition - while it is true semantics can be separated from the physicality of the incarnation of the system for simple software things, it seems likely any digital representation of the mind will include a lot of data about the material facts of wet brains, chemicals, diffusion, weird coincidences between same gene pathways affecting multiple systems and all.
  - netwanderer3 7y ago
    I like your analogy and do have a similar view in that the total consciousness level of all humans combined, at any given point in time, creates a separate universe of our own. This total consciousness level has its own rules and principles created by us which also evolves over time. It shapes all of our belief systems, actions, behaviors, etc. throughout various human civilizations in history. It operates almost like a mind of the entire human race just hovering above all of us. This concept is pretty abstract but like you said, at any given point in time this total soul may not exist physically, but it does exist conceptually in our exclusive reality and it too constantly evolves together with us.
    - kerkeslager 7y ago
WilliamEdward 7y ago
True, and the rest of the body (particularly the gut and genitals) produces chemicals that function within your brain. The brain and body inform eachother.
flavor8 7y ago
I mean making a distinction between mind/consciousness and body is one thing, and while I wouldn't, those of a religious bent might try to justify it. Making a distinction between brain and body is just sophomoric. The BBC unfortunately seems to have content-farm mistakes like this fairly frequently in their online writing.
xiphias2 7y ago
Even if the brain is not apart from the rest of the body, there is a special thing between the two: the blood-brain barrier, which is actually quite hard to cross with medications, and poses a real challange in curing brain diseases.
- doitLP 7y ago
  Sure but the list of drugs that cross that barrier is long. Everything from antibiotics to statins. And even if they didn’t, the body is a tightly interconnected system. Taking an antidepressant to “selectively affect serotonin” in the brain? Whoops, turns out your gut has at least as many serotonin receptors as the brain. Taking a statin to reduce cholesterol (which it does very well but with an NNT > 200 for heart attacks and NNT > 300 for stroke)? Whoops, it causes transient global amnesia and personality changes and diabetes in a lot of people. And 40% of the US Adult population we’re on statins in the mid 2000s.
  - xiphias2 7y ago
    I believe you, but I just wanted to read up about where serotonin receptors are expressed in the human body in what amount, but the Wikipedia page on serotonin receptors didn't write about it. I'm not in the medical field, but try to keep up just a little bit to have some basic knowledge, but it's quite hard as often I see that Wikipedia is many years behind. At the same time medical articles take a lot of time to read, as they are much less accessable.
  - sizzle 7y ago
    Very interesting claims, please share the citations.
    - doitLP 7y ago
      1) NNT meta analysis (one of a very large body of literature): https://www.thennt.com/nnt/statins-persons-low-risk-cardiovascular-disease/ https://www.thennt.com/nnt/statins-persons-low-risk-cardiova... 2) Best I could find in 2 minutes. Will look for the studies. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gut-second-brain/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gut-second-brain/
derekp7 7y ago
I read that as They don't just affect our hardware, but also our software.
- anamexis 7y ago
  Right, but the point being made is that there is no distinction between the two.
hprotagonist 7y ago
“I used to think that the brain was the most important part of the body. Then i realized who was telling me that...”
- mikro2nd 7y ago
  I used to think the brain was the most important part of the body. Then my arsehole clenched shut for a week...
  - quickthrower2 7y ago
    Hope you tore it a new one!
    - vanniv 7y ago
      This joke is also very deep. "You" might tear "it" a new asshole. Almost as if, in some important and meaningful way, "your ass" was a fundamentally different entity than the "you" that has agency to act
dpark 7y ago
> It's not some special thing that sits apart from it. It is an integral part of the whole, no different than your kidneys or liver. Except it is. The brain is a part of your body and the two are tightly integrated. Yet the brain is also not simply another organ. If you lose half of your liver, your personality might change due to the trauma, but you will still be you. If you lose a kidney, you’ll live on as if little happened (assuming modern medicine stops you from dying of infection). If you lose half your brain, you’re probably dead, and if not, you’ll be drastically impaired the rest of your life. You’ll also likely experience drastic personality changes. The brain is part of the body but it is also special. To my knowledge it’s the only organ with a dedicated blood barrier. It’s also the only organ that modern medicine can’t keep “you” alive without. If your body is on life support but you are “brain dead”, then “you” are gone. Your heart can be replaced with a pump. Your kidneys can be replaced with dialysis. Your stomach can be replaced by a feeding tube. Yes, all of these are pretty poor alternatives but they affect quality of life. They don’t end life. If modern medicine could replace your brain with a computer, no one would consider this a lifesaving intervention. No one says they’ve lost a parent to kidney failure while the parent is still alive. Many people have said they’ve lost a parent to dementia while the parent is still alive.
- jp555 7y ago
  do you mean the brain as in what's contained in our skull or also the central nervous system which would include controlling (both automatically and consciously) everything else, as well as sensing all of what we define as reality?
  - creamynebula 7y ago
    I don't think there is proof that consciousness originates in the brain, or in anything material for that matter.
    - jp555 7y ago
      well that's ironic. :P
- 7y ago
hhas01 7y ago
“perpetuating this mindset is the ultimate sin of modern psychiatry and the entire industry of psychiatric pharmaceuticals” O-kaaaay. But, as the science kids all say: [Citation required] (Please note Scopie’s Law is now in full effect.)
- banads 7y ago
  >Citation required https://youtu.be/twhvtzd6gXA https://youtu.be/twhvtzd6gXA >"Depression may be related to an imbalance of natural chemicals between nerve cells in the brain. Prescription Zoloft works to correct this imbalance."
  - hhas01 7y ago
    So, sharks selling surboards. Not exactly PubMed though, is it?
    - banads 7y ago
      At least 70% of the DSM-5 Task Force had financial ties to those sharks selling surf boards https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSM-5#Criticism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSM-5#Criticism
cassowary37 7y ago
>"I feel like perpetuating this mindset is the ultimate sin of modern psychiatry and the entire industry of psychiatric pharmaceuticals" Hmm. Modern psychiatry is usually accused of the opposite. Also interesting that leading comment on an article about how many (non-CNS) meds have CNS effects becomes yet another opportunity to criticize antidepressants. HN community's hostility to treating brain diseases (while emphatically supporting people with brain diseases) is perplexing.
robbiep 7y ago
The interesting bit here is that literally everything you do or eat affects this. For example your diet is going to get broken down into micronutrients and for a lot of these molecules, while they are circulating, there are a lot of receptors that they are going to bind to and modify function on. And then there is exercise (or lack thereof) and all of the even-further away components (personal relationships, sleep etc) work on your brain and state of mind too. When I was in Med school I came across this joke - apparently the effect size of antidepressants decreases with phase 3 trials, trending back to placebo. So the joke goes that as soon as a new antidepressant comes out, they need to use it before it stops working. The deeper question here is whether the initial effect size was simply due to chance, and so the effect size of antidepressants is simply placebo and it was poor studies that let them get in the wild in the first place
- joe_the_user 7y ago
  Certainly, "who" a person is, is a dynamic process. However, I strongly suspect that things like nutrition, social interactions and sleep are things we're adapted to self-modulating, so these are ways we can "consciously shape ourselves", give the old-us the opportunity to create the new-us. But a drug with an unexpected affect on personality seems like the opposite of this.
dr_dshiv 7y ago
I take issue with the idea that we have some intrinsic essentialist self/soul/atman that constitutes "who we are" — such that it could be changed. If taking antidepressants makes one less neurotic, does that mean we have been fundamentally changed? Doubtful. The illusion of the self is socially useful and pervasive, but there isn't much to support it.
noobdood 7y ago
Yes. The word "psychosomatic" exists for a reason.
colordrops 7y ago
To take it further, an even greater sin is perpetuating the idea there is a static "you". "You" are a conglomerate of coordinating and competing systems and are ever changing.
zzzeek 7y ago
actually a big chunk of this article is about cholesterol-lowering statins being linked to mood disorders, a medication which purportedly has no psychiatric impact at all. The reliance the medical industry has on statin drugs cannot die fast enough for me.
- joe_the_user 7y ago
  Indeed, Statins seem to be handed out like by doctors as a fix for high colesteral. I recall that the final verdict is they increase life expectancy so they're effectively just a treatment for a disease marker.

kerkeslager 7y ago

I think the problem goes at least as far back as Plato and the allegory of the cave. Plato spread this concept that there was a difference between the body and mind or soul, and Western culture has never really recovered from the stupidity of that idea. There's really no evidence or justification for it. Your mind and your body are the same thing.

darkerside 7y ago
Modern philosophical thought and religion were built on that idea, and they were arguably inextricable from science in it's early stages. This is like someone people never fully recover from adolescence. Correct, it forms an integral part of who you eventually become.
- kerkeslager 7y ago
  > Modern philosophical thought and religion were built on that idea, and they were arguably inextricable from science in it's early stages. So were lots of bad ideas. Science is a process of trial and error. This was an error. The hope is that you correct the errors, not make them an integral part of your belief system.
ezequiel-garzon 7y ago
Some people feel one’s essence is fundamentally different from one’s body, including the brain as part of the body. Not saying I support this notion, but to brush it aside as stupid or unjustified seems a bit hasty in view of the huge literature behind these issues. Moreover, doesn’t the notion of reincarnation in some parts of the Eastern world show it’s not restricted to Western culture? I’m sure there plenty more such notions outside the West.
- kerkeslager 7y ago
  > Some people feel one’s essence is fundamentally different from one’s body, including the brain as part of the body. Not saying I support this notion, but to brush it aside as stupid or unjustified seems a bit hasty in view of the huge literature behind these issues. I don't think it is. Consider: someone decides to say something without evidence. It's obviously okay to brush this aside and just say "there's no evidence for that". Then hundreds of thousands of people read what that person said, and then decide to propagate the idea by saying it themselves, still without any evidence. You're claiming that at some point, the bulk of literature means we can't say it's a stupid idea any more? I disagree. Ideas are determined valid by the evidence or lack of evidence, not by how popular they are. In fact, when a stupid idea is popular, that's when it causes the most damage. So when there's a bulk of literature propagating a stupid idea, that's the time when it's important to say that it's a stupid idea. > Moreover, doesn’t the notion of reincarnation in some parts of the Eastern world show it’s not restricted to Western culture? You'll note I didn't say it was restricted to Western culture. I think Plato has a large part in spreading the idea in Western culture, but I'd guess he wasn't the first, and other people probably came up with the same idea independently.
  - ezequiel-garzon 7y ago
    What's the evidence that there is a brain or body in the first place, which is a big part of the original discussion? No, I don't mean that just because Plato said it cannot be "stupid", but you have clearly provoked the crowd bringing philosophy to the fore, and broadly speaking philosophy is where you stop having certain evidence for anything, as it precisely challenges anything deemed certain. Once the body is assumed and our senses trusted, if you find solid evidence it'll be about how the brain differs (or not) from the rest of the body, not about the presence or absence of a mind or soul.
    - kerkeslager 7y ago
      > What's the evidence that there is a brain or body in the first place, which is a big part of the original discussion? I'll sidestep this by saying that for my purposes, reality is just a theorized model of what our senses perceive. If we don't trust our senses, then it's possible none of the things we perceive exist, but who cares? The things we perceive as our brain and body can be modeled to predict what we will perceive in the future. > broadly speaking philosophy is where you stop having certain evidence for anything That's not how I define philosophy, but I won't get into a semantic argument about what philosophy is. I also think saying things are "certain" is almost always a mistake. All I'll say is that if that if you define philosophy as eschewing evidence, then I'm happy to dismiss all of what you consider philosophy. If you aren't able to produce evidence (empirical or logical) for the statements you make, then all you're doing is stringing together words into grammatically-correct but meaningless sentences, which is not a skill I care about by itself. I'm happy to say that I don't think all philosophers share your view that evidence is unnecessary, so there are many people who I would respect who I would also call philosophers. > Once the body is assumed and our senses trusted, I don't think we can assume that. Nor should we. Nor is there any value in doing so. Let's temporarily assume the opposite: let's assume our senses are lying to us. If that's so, I'd argue that our senses lie to us in consistent, predictable manners. I can predict how my senses will lie to me in the future based on how they are lying to me now, and how they have lied to me in the past. If I choose to tell my fake body to let go of a fake ball, my senses will lie to me and tell me that the fake ball falls toward the fake earth. Every fake morning, my senses lie to me and tell me that the fake sun rises. How would my situation differ if all this were real? If I really dropped a real ball and it really fell toward the real earth, would that be different? If a real sun rose in the real morning, how would that change my experience? In short, a falsehood so complete that it is completely indistinguishable from the truth is not meaningfully different from the truth. If I put my hand on a hot stove and sense pain, does it matter whether that pain is real or fake? I don't think it does. > if you find solid evidence it'll be about how the brain differs (or not) from the rest of the body, not about the presence or absence of a mind or soul. That's true, which is why minds and souls should be relegated to the fiction section of the bookstore, with ghosts, werewolves, elves, and all the other fictional things we don't sense with our senses. I'm not saying these things aren't fun to think about, they just shouldn't be considered as existent phenomena on which we base our beliefs and decisions.
fit2rule 7y ago
Metabolism. How the chemistry of your body interacts with itself. I know for sure I have 'episodes' when I've got acid in the wrong parts of the gut. I also 'feel' the stages of stool composition, and there are definitely relics of unhealthy eating in my mood swings. One thing though, is I never take pharmaceuticals, as I wish my body to be a picture of my life balance, which I believe are two separate realms completely (body/life). Instead I do everything I can to eat well, and give my body the sport it needs. This isn't easy, but everyone's got their own body, and its own needs. If you pay attention, it'll tell you what it needs. The brain, or at least my brain, is a nice soft spongy joystick for controlling the rest of it. It feels good to throw around a bit, but you gotta take care of what its attached to, as well. A good day in the surf is how I charge my mind up, anyhoo...
jotm 7y ago
I believe the mind, or soul, is indeed in the brain. But it's also separate. It's more like software controlling the hardware. Take self control and attention. How many people struggle with it, procrastinating? You want to do something, you know you have to do it, you like doing it... But you don't. Because your brain doesn't listen to your mind. Because the brain is mostly a primitive autonomous system and needs to be constantly motivated, coerced, trained to do things that it technically doesn't need to (why do anything besides eat, survive, reproduce?) Take away what we call the mind/soul, and we're just a basic animal, running reactively on instinct and reflexes.
- kerkeslager 7y ago
  > Take away what we call the mind/soul, and we're just a basic animal, running reactively on instinct and reflexes. Yes, that's correct, and I really don't understand what you think you've said that proves otherwise.
- lanstin 7y ago
  I think the battle in procrastination is not between the brain and something outside but between different parts of the brain, one favoring a long term perspective and others favoring immediate gratification.
koheripbal 7y ago
Plato's allegory of the Cave is about the liberation provided by education, and self-awareness. How gaining understanding of your environment freed you from the limited reality it presented you. The initial usage of the story was to illustrate how political indoctrination could present a false reality to ardent followers "the shadows of cave fire for those raised in the cave", and how education could "open the eyes and show them the true light" (the fire in the sky/sun vs the fire in the cave). "...even if one was dragged out of the cave". This was later extended to demonstrate that if humans learned about their own emotions, they could learn to reason decisions, rather than allow emotions to guide them exclusively. Tangentially, this rough concept in early western philosophy evolved into the religion of the Sun, and had significant influence on early Christianity.
- kerkeslager 7y ago
  I would caution you on ever thinking that allegories or analogies "demonstrate" anything. Analogies can be used to explain a model of a system, but they can't be use to prove that that model is accurate. Consider the analogy "arms are like wings". That's actually true in a lot of ways, but we can't simply assume that arms have all the properties of wings by analogy, otherwise we'd conclude that arms allow us to fly. That education improves our capabilities is fairly well proven via other means.
- mcguire 7y ago
  Are you saying that two thousand years of nominalism vs. realism are based on a misunderstanding of Plato? (And, doesn't sun worship predate philosophy by a good bit?)
aldoushuxley001 7y ago
> Your mind and your body are the same thing. That is incorrect, but unfortunately a very common misunderstanding. The mind is highly correlated with the brain but it is not the brain. It’s easy to see this is the case because the brain is made up of a qualitatively different material than the mind. While the brain is composed of biological cells / chemistry / atoms, the mind is composed of things like sense-perceptions (like colours, smells, sounds, etc), emotions, etc. Which is to say that the mind is composed of material that is fundamentally different from the brain. Of course they’re highly correlated but they are in fact separate entities composed of different materials. You may say that the fundamental materials of the mind are reducible to the same things as the brain, but that would be confusing correlation for the thing itself. Take for example the colour red, which is present in the mind but not the brain. Yes the brain enables the perception of red but it is not red itself. Eg a photon with a wavelength of approximately 620-750nm is often confused for red but in fact it’s just a photon which, when it hits the back of our eyes causes a chemical cascade from the relevant cone cells. So it’s abundantly clear this photon in itself is not red because it just causes a specific chemical cascade at back of our eyes. So is this chemical cascade red? No it’s just a chemical cascade that is highly correlated with red appearing in our mind. The right answer, I believe, is simply that red is highly correlated with specific pathways of chemical cascades in our brain. The point remains that the brain and the mind are separate and distinct entities made up of qualitatively different material. If you disagree with this assessment, please tell me what is red?
- mcguire 7y ago
  "The mind is highly correlated with the brain but it is not the brain." ... in roughly the same way that a process is not a processor. Or a program, for that matter.
  - kerkeslager 7y ago
    Okay, if you're saying that the mind is just the sequence of events occurring inside the brain, I certainly won't argue that the sequence of events doesn't exist. However, I don't think that's what most people mean when they say "mind", and using the word "mind" brings with it a lot of baggage, so I'd prefer to use a more descriptive term, like "sequence of events".
dr_dshiv 7y ago
I like reading ignorant things like this because it helps show why we really need more classical education in society. If you'd actually read some Plato, as opposed to summaries, I'd be shocked if you could keep the same belief. It's just so damn good for thinking with. But prior to Plato, the Pythagorean Philolaus wrote that sensation/experience comes from the interaction between the soul (greek: psyche) and the body. Soul, here, is not the experiencing thing but the immaterial forms. (Summary: an example of an immaterial form is the concept of a triangle — a real and meaningful form but separate from any material instance). This Pythagorean view of the soul is compelling and has similarities with the idea of computational logic being fundamentally separable from the media of computation. The same logic can run on silicon or some water pump computer. So, from this, if mind is what we'd call the experience, then it isn't just the body. It is the material body interacting with the soul (the "computational" forms).
- kerkeslager 7y ago
  > If you'd actually read some Plato, as opposed to summaries, I'd be shocked if you could keep the same belief. I guess that means you're shocked.
  - dr_dshiv 7y ago
    You mean you've read some Plato? That's great. I'm most inspired by Phaedo, Gorgias and Timaeus. I think it's really important to stay attuned to the Pythagorean tradition, which seemed to be Plato's largest philosophical influence.
    - kerkeslager 7y ago
      I've read The Republic. There wasn't anything in there that inspired me to read more of his work. I think Plato and a lot of other early writers should be studied as historical figures, but we should also recognize that they were products of their time. Plato got it wrong more often than he got it right, not because he was stupid (he wasn't), but because he didn't have the benefits of thousands of years of previous thinkers to refine his ideas against. But we do have that benefit, and we should use it. We have the opportunity to stand on the shoulders of 21st century giants, and we miss that opportunity if we choose to stand on the shoulders of philosophers in the infancy of philosophy. Even where ancient philosophers got things right in their theories of the mind, it was mostly just lucky guesses, without the benefit of modern neuroscience to validate those guesses. And neuroscience itself is in its infancy: our theory of the mind should be expanding every day as new discoveries are made.
seisvelas 7y ago
My Python code ultimately runs on a circuit, but it feels lacking to say that my program is the circuitry. The program itself only has meaning inside of my mind, and in fact could exist equally well on paper. It exists conceptually even if it never manifests physically. So where do concepts like this exist, given that they don't exist as matter? What do we mean when we say that something like 1+1=2 is true - that that truth exists - and would exist even if there wasn't any matter to have 1 and 1 of? The more you look at it, the more it looks like truths and ideas are even realer than the material world. After all, the only thing we know of the material world is what we experience of it in our mind. That was Plato's point, that the material world is a shadow of the real, immaterial world of thoughts, ideas, and truths. Similar argument patterns permeate most ancient philosophies. The meme is that mind is the ultimate reality, of which the materialistic worldview is a surprisingly fragile inverse.
- lanstin 7y ago
  Google embodied cognition - while it is true semantics can be separated from the physicality of the incarnation of the system for simple software things, it seems likely any digital representation of the mind will include a lot of data about the material facts of wet brains, chemicals, diffusion, weird coincidences between same gene pathways affecting multiple systems and all.
- netwanderer3 7y ago
  I like your analogy and do have a similar view in that the total consciousness level of all humans combined, at any given point in time, creates a separate universe of our own. This total consciousness level has its own rules and principles created by us which also evolves over time. It shapes all of our belief systems, actions, behaviors, etc. throughout various human civilizations in history. It operates almost like a mind of the entire human race just hovering above all of us. This concept is pretty abstract but like you said, at any given point in time this total soul may not exist physically, but it does exist conceptually in our exclusive reality and it too constantly evolves together with us.
  - kerkeslager 7y ago

WilliamEdward 7y ago

True, and the rest of the body (particularly the gut and genitals) produces chemicals that function within your brain. The brain and body inform eachother.

flavor8 7y ago

I mean making a distinction between mind/consciousness and body is one thing, and while I wouldn't, those of a religious bent might try to justify it. Making a distinction between brain and body is just sophomoric. The BBC unfortunately seems to have content-farm mistakes like this fairly frequently in their online writing.

xiphias2 7y ago

Even if the brain is not apart from the rest of the body, there is a special thing between the two: the blood-brain barrier, which is actually quite hard to cross with medications, and poses a real challange in curing brain diseases.

doitLP 7y ago
Sure but the list of drugs that cross that barrier is long. Everything from antibiotics to statins. And even if they didn’t, the body is a tightly interconnected system. Taking an antidepressant to “selectively affect serotonin” in the brain? Whoops, turns out your gut has at least as many serotonin receptors as the brain. Taking a statin to reduce cholesterol (which it does very well but with an NNT > 200 for heart attacks and NNT > 300 for stroke)? Whoops, it causes transient global amnesia and personality changes and diabetes in a lot of people. And 40% of the US Adult population we’re on statins in the mid 2000s.
- xiphias2 7y ago
  I believe you, but I just wanted to read up about where serotonin receptors are expressed in the human body in what amount, but the Wikipedia page on serotonin receptors didn't write about it. I'm not in the medical field, but try to keep up just a little bit to have some basic knowledge, but it's quite hard as often I see that Wikipedia is many years behind. At the same time medical articles take a lot of time to read, as they are much less accessable.
- sizzle 7y ago
  Very interesting claims, please share the citations.
  - doitLP 7y ago
    1) NNT meta analysis (one of a very large body of literature): https://www.thennt.com/nnt/statins-persons-low-risk-cardiovascular-disease/ https://www.thennt.com/nnt/statins-persons-low-risk-cardiova... 2) Best I could find in 2 minutes. Will look for the studies. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gut-second-brain/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gut-second-brain/

derekp7 7y ago

I read that as They don't just affect our hardware, but also our software.

anamexis 7y ago
Right, but the point being made is that there is no distinction between the two.

hprotagonist 7y ago

“I used to think that the brain was the most important part of the body. Then i realized who was telling me that...”

mikro2nd 7y ago
I used to think the brain was the most important part of the body. Then my arsehole clenched shut for a week...
- quickthrower2 7y ago
  Hope you tore it a new one!
  - vanniv 7y ago
    This joke is also very deep. "You" might tear "it" a new asshole. Almost as if, in some important and meaningful way, "your ass" was a fundamentally different entity than the "you" that has agency to act

dpark 7y ago

> It's not some special thing that sits apart from it. It is an integral part of the whole, no different than your kidneys or liver. Except it is. The brain is a part of your body and the two are tightly integrated. Yet the brain is also not simply another organ. If you lose half of your liver, your personality might change due to the trauma, but you will still be you. If you lose a kidney, you’ll live on as if little happened (assuming modern medicine stops you from dying of infection). If you lose half your brain, you’re probably dead, and if not, you’ll be drastically impaired the rest of your life. You’ll also likely experience drastic personality changes. The brain is part of the body but it is also special. To my knowledge it’s the only organ with a dedicated blood barrier. It’s also the only organ that modern medicine can’t keep “you” alive without. If your body is on life support but you are “brain dead”, then “you” are gone. Your heart can be replaced with a pump. Your kidneys can be replaced with dialysis. Your stomach can be replaced by a feeding tube. Yes, all of these are pretty poor alternatives but they affect quality of life. They don’t end life. If modern medicine could replace your brain with a computer, no one would consider this a lifesaving intervention. No one says they’ve lost a parent to kidney failure while the parent is still alive. Many people have said they’ve lost a parent to dementia while the parent is still alive.

jp555 7y ago
do you mean the brain as in what's contained in our skull or also the central nervous system which would include controlling (both automatically and consciously) everything else, as well as sensing all of what we define as reality?
- creamynebula 7y ago
  I don't think there is proof that consciousness originates in the brain, or in anything material for that matter.
  - jp555 7y ago
    well that's ironic. :P
7y ago

hhas01 7y ago

“perpetuating this mindset is the ultimate sin of modern psychiatry and the entire industry of psychiatric pharmaceuticals” O-kaaaay. But, as the science kids all say: [Citation required] (Please note Scopie’s Law is now in full effect.)

banads 7y ago
>Citation required https://youtu.be/twhvtzd6gXA https://youtu.be/twhvtzd6gXA >"Depression may be related to an imbalance of natural chemicals between nerve cells in the brain. Prescription Zoloft works to correct this imbalance."
- hhas01 7y ago
  So, sharks selling surboards. Not exactly PubMed though, is it?
  - banads 7y ago
    At least 70% of the DSM-5 Task Force had financial ties to those sharks selling surf boards https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSM-5#Criticism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSM-5#Criticism

cassowary37 7y ago

>"I feel like perpetuating this mindset is the ultimate sin of modern psychiatry and the entire industry of psychiatric pharmaceuticals" Hmm. Modern psychiatry is usually accused of the opposite. Also interesting that leading comment on an article about how many (non-CNS) meds have CNS effects becomes yet another opportunity to criticize antidepressants. HN community's hostility to treating brain diseases (while emphatically supporting people with brain diseases) is perplexing.

robbiep 7y ago

The interesting bit here is that literally everything you do or eat affects this. For example your diet is going to get broken down into micronutrients and for a lot of these molecules, while they are circulating, there are a lot of receptors that they are going to bind to and modify function on. And then there is exercise (or lack thereof) and all of the even-further away components (personal relationships, sleep etc) work on your brain and state of mind too. When I was in Med school I came across this joke - apparently the effect size of antidepressants decreases with phase 3 trials, trending back to placebo. So the joke goes that as soon as a new antidepressant comes out, they need to use it before it stops working. The deeper question here is whether the initial effect size was simply due to chance, and so the effect size of antidepressants is simply placebo and it was poor studies that let them get in the wild in the first place

joe_the_user 7y ago
Certainly, "who" a person is, is a dynamic process. However, I strongly suspect that things like nutrition, social interactions and sleep are things we're adapted to self-modulating, so these are ways we can "consciously shape ourselves", give the old-us the opportunity to create the new-us. But a drug with an unexpected affect on personality seems like the opposite of this.

dr_dshiv 7y ago

I take issue with the idea that we have some intrinsic essentialist self/soul/atman that constitutes "who we are" — such that it could be changed. If taking antidepressants makes one less neurotic, does that mean we have been fundamentally changed? Doubtful. The illusion of the self is socially useful and pervasive, but there isn't much to support it.

noobdood 7y ago

Yes. The word "psychosomatic" exists for a reason.

colordrops 7y ago

To take it further, an even greater sin is perpetuating the idea there is a static "you". "You" are a conglomerate of coordinating and competing systems and are ever changing.

zzzeek 7y ago

actually a big chunk of this article is about cholesterol-lowering statins being linked to mood disorders, a medication which purportedly has no psychiatric impact at all. The reliance the medical industry has on statin drugs cannot die fast enough for me.

joe_the_user 7y ago
Indeed, Statins seem to be handed out like by doctors as a fix for high colesteral. I recall that the final verdict is they increase life expectancy so they're effectively just a treatment for a disease marker.