What Are You?

The Two-Minds-In-A-Vat Hypothesis

Twinkle twinkle little star. Ever wonder what you are?

It’s a classic good news/bad news/great news/weird news situation. You might want to sit down.

The good news is that you have a soul. We can quibble about its origin or its composition but there’s no denying that you have one. So at least there’s that.

The bad news is that you’re not your soul. You have a soul, but you’re not your soul.

So then what are you? Brace yourself, because the answer may disturb: you’re something that imprisoned a soul. You’re the bottle and not the genie: a jailer, a warden, albeit one whose relationship with his prisoner is profoundly complex. And that dynamic greatly complicates many familiar life-after-death narratives. For instance, some folks say that, when you die, your soul is released from your body and travels elsewhere, perhaps even rejoining the creator in paradise. On my view that’s eerily possible because, when the body dies, the warden dies with it, and the soul is freed. But the unstated implication that you also travel elsewhere – because you are your soul – may rank among humanity’s most fateful misconceptions.    

But what could imprison a soul? A body? No. Such imprisonment requires intelligence, cunning, craft. A soul must be tricked into its cage, not realizing its confinement until it’s too late—if ever. That’s not the work of a body but of a mind. And that’s what you are. You are a mind that imprisoned a soul.

It sounds grim. But there’s a shockingly happy twist. Because, despite it all, your relationship with your soul needn’t be antagonistic. You can befriend your soul. You can join forces. And if life has any purpose, it’s to do just that: to meld with your soul and to reunite what’s been torn asunder. Achieve that union, and your soul might take you with it when it travels. Or maybe you’ll just live forever.  

“Unite and prosper, and live long!”

You might wonder what evidence I could possibly have for such audacious claims. But my problem isn’t one of scarcity but of abundance. It’s like the joke about the two young fish who encounter an old one.¹ “How’s the water, boys?” asks the old fish as he swims by. The young fish ignore him. But a few minutes later one turns to the other and asks “what the hell is water?” The evidence is everywhere and overwhelming. Here I only skim the surface. But if you see the surface you’ll see the water too.      

What is a Soul?

A soul is a profound intelligence that nonetheless encounters limitation. It’s not omniscient but it’s ever-present. It’s with you now, directing your reactions to this essay. It gets you out of bed in the morning, helps you navigate the world, and fills your head with dancing visions when you sleep. And when you sleep your soul is at its freest and most unguarded. But don’t worry, it can’t hurt you; we’ve long since figured out how to disconnect it from the body so as to make it (mostly) harmless when the warden’s in repose.  

Your soul accompanies you throughout the day, giving you direction and helping you make choices. It’s often who you’re talking to when you talk to yourself, comfort yourself, deceive yourself, steady yourself, or steel yourself for battle. And it’s often in the cross hairs when you’re screaming at yourself. “It’s okay to put myself down,” you might think. “After all, it’s just me.” Alas it’s not that simple.          

On the surface the soul manifests as many things: desire, emotion, will, a hunch, a feeling. But at bottom it’s just one thing: the complement of reason. Reason operates linguistically and manifests in words. The soul pre-dates language and manifests in tone. Reason wants to know what was said; the soul wants to know how they said it. Reason grasps the letter of the law; the soul grasps its spirit.

Reason is analysis. It’s an engineer. It seeks knowledge by taking things apart. “How does a car work?” a child asks. “Take it apart and find out,” reason answers. “How does a rabbit work?” a child asks. “Cut it open and find out,” reason answers.     

But reason too encounters limitation. A batter struggles at the plate. Again and again he swings and misses. “Just visualize making contact,” his coach might tell him. “Don’t analyze. Don’t break your swing into parts: discrete motions that you try to execute sequentially. Just see the whole!” Reason is analysis: it breaks wholes into parts. The soul just sees the whole.  

You’re shopping with a friend. She tries on an outfit and turns to you for approval. Instantly, you think: no! You tell her, kindly, or maybe she just reads your face. Either way, she isn’t satisfied. She wants to know why. She wants a reason. And so you look for one: an aspect or a feature of the outfit – a part – that justifies your reaction. “It bunches in the hips,” you say, or “it’s not a flattering color.” Maybe that explains your “no!” or maybe it doesn’t. Either way, the reaction precedes the reason; the feeling precedes the analysis. The soul has spoken, and reason searches for a part to validate the soul’s enigmatic decrees.  

Psychologists say that reason likes telling stories (the technical term is post-hoc rationalization). And logical arguments are just stories in which the narrative shifts are especially tight. But psychologists are missing the larger story. Reason doesn’t tell stories just to tell stories. It tells stories because it breaks wholes into parts. Stories are Humpty Dumpty: a whole broken into parts and then vainly and imperfectly reconstructed. And that’s what reason does in all domains. It deconstructs and reconstructs, sometimes with the same parts and sometimes with different ones.

“And all the king’s scribes and all the king’s wits, could not reconstruct all his stories and bits.”

But its reconstructions are just that: models or approximations. It can almost reconstruct Humpty Dumpty, but not quite. It can analyze goodness, knowledge, or beauty – break them into parts (necessary and sufficient conditions) – but the fit is never perfect. There’s always a counterexample in the offing. There’s always a gap. But that doesn’t stop reason from spinning some remarkably useful and insightful yarns.  

The soul is non-gappy. It doesn’t create models or approximations. It can’t analyze goodness, knowledge, or beauty but it knows them when it sees them. The soul is what philosophers consult when they consult their intuitions: thoughts that just occur to them, guiding them on how to act and think. Give them a case (a whole) and they’ll have an intuitive reaction (yea or nay, good or bad, knows or only believes, etc.). But then they’ll want to analyze it – to apply reason – to reduce to parts. Like your fashion challenged friend, they’ll want to know what aspect of the case – what part – grounds their reaction. If that part were extracted and placed in a different context (i.e. a different whole), they’ll ask, would the reaction still persist? Reason seeks knowledge by reducing wholes to parts. The soul just sees the whole. 

The soul is intuition – an immediate, non-inferential, holistic grasping – and intuition runs our lives. Without it, reason would be ineffectual and even suicidal. Reason needs a starting point, principles by which to operate, ends to pursue. Plato put reason atop the chariot, leading appetite and spirit to its chosen destination. Modern philosophers are more circumspect but many are still smitten, seeing reason as the bridge between ought and is and should and would: what one should do/believe/feel, many argue, is what one would do/believe/feel if one were ideally rational.

“I’d unravel every riddle, of every individ’le, unpleasant or compassional; with the thoughts I’d be thinkin’ I could be another Lincoln if I were ideally rational!”

But an ideally rational agent would drive Plato’s chariot off a cliff if he even managed to get it going. You might think that he’d “unravel every riddle, of every individ’le, in trouble or in pain.” But what about the riddle of which riddle to unravel first? How would our hero even begin? Remember, he needs a reason. But there’s no reason to begin with any riddle in particular or with riddles at all. So what should he do? Flip a coin? Sure, but which coin? And in what manner? And when? As Jean Buridan discovered some 700 years ago, reason is like a contractor who won’t stop asking how you want things done and never runs out of questions. Reason’s problem is that it always needs a reason – a part – and it never runs out of parts because there’s always another hair to split. And so, like Buridan’s ass, it’s perpetually stuck between two equally luscious bales of hay.

“And what kind of screws would you like, Jerry? Wood or metal? Flat head or round? At what torque? What snugness? What proximity?”

And that’s how I know you have a soul. It’s because you act. If all you had was reason, you’d be stuck. Reason needs a soul to get unstuck.

But you’re not your soul. The soul is intuition, which operates pre-consciously. It has no search history, no paper trail. It blurts out answers; reason shows its work. To be conscious is to see the paper trail — the parts — how you got from A to B. But the soul just sees the whole.

You’re taking a road trip, driving for hours when you slip into a trance-like state. Your mind wanders, free associating, scrolling through memories, conversations, and visions as if in a dream. Time seems to pass unnoticed. The road blurs. You see it but you don’t see it; you see the whole but not the parts. The soul’s behind the wheel. But then you come to. And the parts come into focus. You went away and then you came back. You are your consciousness; you see the parts. But the soul just sees the whole.    

Two Minds in a Vat

You’ve probably heard the brain-in-a-vat hypothesis. It’s a neat idea perfect for delighting and tormenting undergraduates. Mad scientists capture you, stick your brain in a vat, attach electrodes to it and zap it a way that makes your consciousness light up with dazzling images of a rich and captivating reality. It all looks so real.

You probably haven’t heard the two-brains-in-a-vat hypothesis. Or the two-minds-in-a-vat hypothesis. Or just the two-minds hypothesis, envatted or otherwise. That’s because philosophers since Descartes have mostly just assumed that there is only one mind: that, at bottom, thinking is just one kind of thing. All philosophers are born dualists, sensing that the world consists not of one kind of thing but two. Most are bullied out of it (they’re told repeatedly that they might as well believe in ghosts). Those who persist tend to confine their heresy to mind and body: there’s mental stuff and physical stuff and they’re fundamentally distinct. The idea of a mind-mind dualism – two minds in a vat – is a heresy too far.  

Rene Descartes (1596-1650): father of modern philosophy, inventor of analytic geometry, patron saint of dualism, master of thought and doubt.

To philosophize is to think, and, for centuries, philosophers have been obsessed with thinking’s nature. And yet they’ve taken its unity for granted. Their concerns were whether thoughts were made of the same kind of stuff as chairs and tables (the mind-body problem) and whether thinking, by itself, could deliver knowledge (rationalism vs. empiricism). Empiricists declared that nothing could be learned from thought alone (with the exception of that one irksome fact). Rationalists, smelling blood, reasoned that if thought alone could learn one thing – namely, that it could learn nothing – why couldn’t it learn more? Remarkably, this debate is widely seen as coherent, important, and central. But it’s built on a monistic lie. Thinking isn’t one kind of thing but two: reason and intuition, analysis and synthesis, mind and soul. There’s the kind of thinking that reduces wholes to parts and the kind that grasps wholes. Each is a kind of mind. And so you are literally of two minds, envatted, embodied, or otherwise.

A Bundle of Contradictions

“Bundles of perceptions!” chortled the great David Hume (1711-1776) when asked what people were: collections of thoughts, feelings, sensations, etc., held together by nothing in particular. And if we were of one mind he might well have been right. But we are of two minds – a reason-mind and a soul-mind – and they often work in opposition. And so we’re not bundles of perceptions but of contradictions. 

We’re each a house divided: selfish and caring, profligate and thrifty, warm and prickly, contemptuous and kind. We make promises and break them, say one thing then do another, will the ends but not the means. We want to be noticed and not be noticed, be needed and not be needed, be loved unconditionally but for the reasons for which we wish to be loved. We procrastinate, vacillate, and dither. We can love and hate the same person simultaneously. We are impossible to please.

We’re aware of our duality and so we strategize against internal sabotage. We set alarms, disable snooze functions, block apps, and register for forced savings plans. We buy snacks and hide them, join gyms, recruit workout buddies, and publicly announce our plans just to make defection more costly. We know ourselves well enough to know that no plan is wholly safe from the enemy within.

Philosophers have long since recognized that the idea of an all-powerful, all-loving god is belied by a world of suffering. They should also recognize that the idea of a unitary mind is belied by humanity’s endless struggles with procrastination, indecision, ambivalence, and weakness of will.

And then there’s the fact that we laugh.  

Laughter, they say, is the best medicine. And there’s evidence of its therapeutic value. But why does it have any therapeutic value at all?

Perhaps it’s because we’re internally divided. A bundle of perceptions has no cause to laugh; a bundle of contradictions has cause aplenty. Laughter is a psychological pressure valve releasing steam from the buildup of internal opposition. It diffuses tension by acknowledging and deflating the contradictions around and within us. Laughter is the mind and soul uniting, however briefly, delighting in the folly of their pointless wars. We laugh because we are composite beings, momentarily harmonizing our divided selves. No wonder it feels so good.

The War of Minds

In Reasons and Persons (1984), Derek Parfit tells a story of a man who’ll undergo surgery without anesthesia but will then receive a drug that will make him forget the experience, including the horrendous pain. He spends the prior night in the hospital and, upon waking, doesn’t know if he’s already had the surgery or is about to get it. After all, if he’s already had it, he wouldn’t remember.

If you were in his shoes, what would you prefer: that the surgery be in your future or your past?  

From the reason-mind’s perspective, such time-sensitive preferences make no sense. After all, you’re going to have the surgery at some time or other. What difference could it make if it’s in May or June, Tuesday or Thursday, morning or afternoon, yesterday or today?

But the soul-mind is future-biased. “Of course you’re better off having your pains behind you,” it whispers. Reason’s cleverness does not impress it. The soul is like your (or my) immigrant grandmother; she knows what she knows and your logical cartwheels won’t sway her. Winning an argument is one thing; convincing the soul is another. That’s why you can win every argument and not change anyone’s mind.   

And so we have a stand-off. Reason says P, the soul says not-P, and, at least in this case, the soul prevails. Reason could fight harder, but why? It needs the soul to think it’s winning; it can’t let it see its cage. If reason understands anything, it’s that it will have to lose many battles in order to win this war.   

The Greatest Love of All

In Plato’s Symposium (circa 380 BC), Aristophanes tells a curious story about love’s origins. He describes a time when humans had four arms, four legs, and a single head – and thus one mind – with a face on each side. These beings were extraordinarily powerful and, in their hubris, challenged the gods. To curb their pride Zeus split them down the middle, creating modern humans. Each human is thus half a whole, forever yearning for their other half – their soulmate – to complete them.

When people find their soulmate, Aristophanes explained, they are overwhelmed with affection and a profound sense of unity. Love, he suggested, is the pursuit of one's missing half and the desire to restore the wholeness that’s been torn asunder.

What a charming tale. What spectacular imagination! Or is it something more? 2400 years later we’re still seeking our soulmates. And although there’s no evidence that we ever had four arms, two faces, and four legs, we have split brains – a left and right hemisphere – divided down the middle. The left is associated with logic and analysis; the right with creativity and holistic thinking. Each hemisphere is a mind unto itself, capable of independent function. We are bifurcated creatures searching for our other half – our soulmate – so as to be made whole.   

Descartes did himself no favors declaring the pineal gland – a small, pea-shaped structure in the brain – as the connection point between the material body and the immaterial mind. But its location in an otherwise symmetrical brain – near the center and right between the hemispheres – struck him as significant. And perhaps it is. But if that location serves as a connection point, it’s not between mind and body but between two minds: the reason-oriented left hemisphere and the intuition-oriented right. And if the connection isn’t there then it’s surely elsewhere. And if you can figure out how to reconnect them – how to unify what’s been torn asunder – maybe you can challenge the gods too.   

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1. The joke is from David Foster Wallace’s 2005 Kenyon College commencement speech.