More than a brain: human mindscapes

Abstract

In vain we force the living into this or that one of our moulds. All the moulds crack. They are too narrow, above all too rigid, for what we try to put into them (Henri-Louis Bergson, 1998 [1911], p. x) What is it to be human? There is a growing tendency nowadays to think that we are, rather than simply, have, a brain. Why is that? It appears that the image of the active brain becomes the new metaphor for the mind. There is nothing inherently wrong about metaphors. The history of human thought is full of them. Nonetheless, they can form all pervasive epistemological barriers when mistaken for the way the world necessarily is. I take it that no sensible person would deny the fact that we also are, or at least have a body embedded in the world. Although one could argue that our plastic brains may have the tendency to become who we are, there seems to be little doubtat least from an anthropological perspectivethat we remain, and always have been, more than our brains. Still, the allure of the brain image is hard to resist. What are we then? In Landscape of the Mind and Aping Mankind we are offered much to think about, and even more to doubt, concerning our current wisdom and entrenched assumptions about the evolution and whereabouts of the human mind. Here I cannot hope to engage with everything that is worthy of discussion in these rich and provocative treatments. I shall content myself with exploring and assessing a few central threads in their arguments and the implications that each has for the way we think about thinking, and about how we come to think that way. It helps to start with the commonplaceDarwinian evolution. Both books agree that so far as