QUESTION OF THE MONTH
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Prize Question for July 2010
On Wed, Jul 28, 2010 at 16:56:12
Ronny asked this question:
Human Test Tubes?
If this website is anything to go by depression appears to influence a lot of people into looking to philosophy to provide some answers to their issues with life. It appears I am one of those people although I am not naive enough to expect a definitive answer to any of my questions. I simply feel the need to express a thought that has dogged me since being offered medication for my depression.
My depression was explained to me, when initially diagnosed, as being due to low levels of certain chemicals within my body and medication would go some way to help correct this imbalance. Coming from a medical background up to graduate level, I was well aware of the complexities of human physiology. However, having had depression explained to me in such a manner I began to question whether everything we are as human beings is not a result of a series of complex chemical reactions? Light passes into my eye where a chemical reaction converts this to a signal passed to my brain where further chemical reactions occur and I am present with an image. Sometimes the images we perceive can produce what we describe as an 'emotion'. Could emotions therefore be seen as the end point of a chemical cascade? Are 'feelings' also end points of chemical processes? I hear a sound which is converted, via a mechanism within the ear, to a chemical reaction to produce electrical signals within the brain. Further chemical reactions branch away from this and the end point can be a stimulation of further physiology and a 'feeling' is produced. Does repetition reinforce a certain chemical pathway so that we develop the same 'feeling' or 'emotion' to the same stimulus? Is that how we come to 'like' or 'dislike' something?
These questions made me wonder whether it is ever truly possible to therefore control 'feelings' or 'emotions'? Once that chemical cascade starts can we influence it? Then again, while writing this I am having 'thoughts' that I feel I am controlling and if I expand my premise to the process of 'thinking' as being a chemical process occurring within the brain, am I not influencing these chemical reactions?
Once again, I don't feel naive enough to think I am the only person ever to have considered whether the body is not one large test tube full of complex chemical reactions with mind numbing interactions that will never be truly understood.
However, what do we become if we view ourselves in this way? Is our feeling of self or the belief that we make our own decisions in the way we interact with the world the result of a series of chemical processes?
Response from Geoffrey Klempner
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