It sounds absurd.
Of course brains think.
Brain scans reveal patterns of activity associated with memory, attention, decision-making, language, and imagination. Damage particular regions and particular cognitive abilities disappear. Every modern neuroscience textbook assumes that thought is produced by the brain.
Surely the matter is settled.
Perhaps not.
The question is not whether brains are necessary for thinking.
They plainly are.
The question is whether thinking is the sort of thing that can be located inside a brain.
Those are very different claims.
Consider a conversation.
Two people speak.
Words are exchanged.
Questions are asked.
Ideas emerge that neither participant anticipated.
At what point, exactly, does the thinking occur?
Is it inside one brain?
Inside the other?
Half in each?
Or does the thinking emerge through the unfolding interaction itself?
We instinctively answer the first question because we have inherited a powerful image of thought as something hidden inside individual minds. The brain becomes a container within which thoughts are generated before eventually escaping into speech.
Neuroscience has often reinforced this picture by identifying the neural processes that accompany different cognitive activities.
These discoveries are remarkable.
But they do not demonstrate that thinking itself is located inside the neural tissue.
They demonstrate something slightly different.
Brains participate in thinking.
The distinction may appear trivial.
It is not.
Imagine attending an orchestra.
The performance depends upon violins, cellos, brass, percussion, a conductor, musicians, an audience, an acoustic space, and a shared musical tradition.
Suppose someone points to the first violin and asks,
"Where is the symphony?"
The violin is indispensable.
Remove it and the performance changes.
Yet no one imagines that the symphony resides inside the instrument.
The symphony exists only as an actualised performance.
Thinking appears remarkably similar.
Neurons fire.
Muscles move.
Words are spoken.
Gestures are made.
Objects are manipulated.
Other people respond.
New possibilities emerge.
Thinking is not hidden inside one component of this extraordinarily complex system.
It is actualised through the coordinated activity of the system itself.
Modern cognitive science increasingly points in this direction.
Researchers study embodied cognition, distributed cognition, ecological psychology, cultural evolution, and social interaction. They investigate how thinking depends upon bodies, environments, tools, languages, and communities rather than isolated nervous systems alone.
Again and again, the science becomes more relational.
Yet our explanations often retreat to the familiar language of brains producing thoughts.
Perhaps the difficulty lies in the image itself.
To say that brains think is rather like saying that lungs breathe.
Strictly speaking, lungs do not breathe.
Organisms breathe.
Lungs participate in breathing.
Likewise, brains do not think.
People think.
And people think through relations extending far beyond their nervous systems.
The language they inherit.
The conversations they enter.
The books they read.
The cultures they inhabit.
The environments they navigate.
The symbolic systems through which entirely new possibilities become available.
None of this diminishes the extraordinary importance of the brain.
Without brains, human thinking as we know it would not occur.
But necessity should not be confused with location.
Oxygen is necessary for breathing.
No one therefore concludes that breathing happens inside oxygen.
The same confusion quietly accompanies much contemporary neuroscience.
Neural activity becomes increasingly sophisticated.
Brain imaging becomes increasingly precise.
Correlations become increasingly detailed.
Then, almost unnoticed, participation becomes identity.
The brain is no longer one indispensable participant in thinking.
It becomes the place where thinking supposedly occurs.
The experiment itself has not demonstrated this.
The ontology has supplied it.
Relational ontology begins elsewhere.
Thinking is not an object hidden inside an organ.
Nor is it a substance flowing through neurons.
Thinking is an event.
It is the continual actualisation of possibilities through the coordinated relations among biological systems, symbolic systems, material environments, and other thinkers.
Brains are indispensable participants in that process.
They shape it profoundly.
They constrain it continuously.
They make it possible.
But they do not contain thought.
The mistake is understandable.
For centuries we have searched for the place where thought resides.
Perhaps the search itself has been misguided.
Perhaps thought is not located because it is not the kind of thing that has a location.
Like a conversation.
Like a symphony.
Like meaning itself.
Brains do not think.
Brains participate in thinking.
And once that distinction is recognised, the remarkable achievements of neuroscience become no less impressive.
They simply become part of a much larger story about how possibility becomes actual.
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