Our Brains, Our Selves by Masud Husain

Our Brains, Our Selves (winner of the 2025 Royal Society Science Book Prize, supported by the Trivedi Family Foundation)

Masud Husain, Professor of Neurology and Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Oxford and Professorial Fellow at New College, Oxford

Here an excerpt from the book's blurb: "Is it our background that creates our identities? Or our families, where we lived, how we were brought up and educated, the jobs we’ve held? Yes, all of the above, but more fundamental than any of these is our brain. This is never more evident than if we lose even a single one of our cognitive abilities. People who develop a brain disorder can find that their identity, their sense of self, can undergo dramatic changes.

Through the stories of seven of his patients, acclaimed Oxford University neurologist Masud Husain shows us how our brains create our identity, how that identity can be changed, and sometimes even be restored. ..."

How does an eminent neurologist get from noting that "People who develop a brain disorder can find that their identity, their sense of self, can undergo dramatic changes" to showing "how our brains create our identity"?? If our brain is in order, can we be assured that we will have all "our cognitive abilities"? Is the movement of the mind synonymous with cognition?  In BBC4's Start the Week on 08/11/2025 the author even claims that "the self is an emergent property of the brain". 

Whatever happened to the insight that the material brain is an organ of the self? Hence that, if the brain is damaged, the self itself has problems?

In conventional, dry logic this inversion in syllogistic argumentation is called confusing a necessary condition with a sufficient one. A necessary condition (a healthy brain) does not suffice as a sufficient condition (e.g. for generating an identity, a self). Why is this confusion absolutely necessary? Because the ostensible necessary condition is a material one, whereas our identity is a characteristic of our immaterial psyche (or soul or consciousness) with which modern, materialist-empiricist science — and neurology in particular — has insuperable difficulties coming to terms, imbued as it is with an absolute will to power over all kinds of movement, including that of the mind itself. This absolute will to power has to latch on to material causes to be effective.*

Without the dogma of material causes as ultimate causes of psychic phenomena, among others, modern science would suffer a fatal intellectual blow. Therefore it has to espouse logical nonsense. Why is it that nobody points out that modern science wilfully inverts normal logic? Because it is dangerous to do so. The dogma of a one-way causal track from matter to any other phenomenon, be it psychic, social or what-have-you, is an ontological foundation of today's historical world. Empiricist scientific methodology cannot detect the dogma because it is too shallow, being able only to rig the questions it investigates to be compliant with its preconceived dogma. 

Beware s/he who questions this shaky foundation! S/he will not be burnt at the stake on Campo dei Fiori like Bruno was in 1600, at the beginning of the Modern Age, but instead suffer the fate of being complacently ignored by the powerful institutions that be (e.g. Oxford) and by the millions they continue to induct into this topsy-turvy, tunnel-minded way of thinking. From their perspective, the questioner has to be regarded as some kind of nutter. You're a leper crying in the wilderness, and others make a wide berth around you.

Nevertheless, there remains an exit from this inverted modern world for those brave few intrepid and capable enough to revise their own beloved, quietly indoctrinated prejudices right down to the interpretation of the most elementary phenomena. Hard, slow work!

* Hence the collapse of the mind into the brain (conceptually) already in the 19th century and the incipient interpretation of brain activity as computation that today AI can emulate and surpass as we slide ever deeper into the dictatorship of the algorithmically driven cyberworld. Note that, according to the blurb, "Masud is Editor-in-Chief of Brain, a leading international journal of neurology. First established in 1878, Brain is widely considered to be the most influential publication in the field..." The second half of the 19th century is the age of declared, virulent positivism, the march of progress in the physical sciences and the emergence of controversial Darwinian evolution theory that spooked English Christianity.

Further reading: On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo De Gruyter, Berlin 2024.