Mereological Fallacy

Ecology of the brain

Ott, M. (2026, March 14). Ghost in the Machine: Brain Predicts Images Before We See Them. Neuroscience News.

The mereological fallacy, or the fallacy of false localisation, is one which occurs in modern neuroscience, neuropsychology, psychiatry, and related fields. The fallacy at its base is the assumption that specific parts of the brain retain causal efficacy in the initiation and production of human experiences. This presumption rests upon the evidence which suggests that when disruption or damage to certain brain areas occurs, there proceeds consequential damage to a form of conscious experience. That is, damage to the frontal lobes results in damage to a person’s ability to control their limbic impulses for pleasure; damage to ‘language areas’ results in the inability for speech production or comprehension. This identification of a specific area with a specific kind of experience is popularly known as a ‘neural correlate of consciousness.’ Yet neuroscientists, when asked about the prevalence of such a correlate, will be ambivalent and hesitant to suggest there has been such a discovery, while at the same time implicitly presuming this is the case, in a kind of cognitive dissonance. The association of a specific brain area with an experience, as noted in damage cases, is a clear sign which points to causal efficacy, and thus to an indication of a neural correlate of consciousness. Why, then, are many neuroscientists hesitant to address this disparity?

The disparity lies in the mereological fallacy. When investigating the effects of a damaged brain, one presumes that the damaged area and the consequent change in the person’s experience are related in such a way as to assume that the area itself is the host or origin of the experience, often addressed in computational terms as a ‘function,’ such as language, vision, cognition, and the like. This, however, may not be the case at all. Just because damage to a certain brain area may bring about a qualitative change in experience does not prove that the area damaged is the locus of the experience. Rather, if anything, it indicates that when this area is damaged, the change in experience occurs, with no call to the localisation of a locus. This holds even if we move from single areas to whole networks: you cannot concretely tie a network to the emergence of the conscious experience it is said to represent, aside from the changes to behaviour that follow from damaging it. The loss of speech following damage to a given network does not prove that speech is emergent of that network. It could very well be that the area or network in question merely permits speech, and that when damaged, the signal is no longer able to get through, rather than the network producing the speech in the first place. Though the mereological fallacy lies at a deeper place than this: the fallacy that modern neuroscience falls into is the assumption that an understanding of the gestalt experience of being a conscious being can be interpreted or analysed by way of the specific areas of the brain, running on the assumption that the whole is nothing more than the sum of its parts. This is clearly not the case, given that we have no explanation for the presence of mind, or mental activity, in any functionalist account. The locus of consciousness cannot be explained through an analysis of the brain. This is evidenced by the fact that, despite enormous research into the brain and developments in imaging technology, we still fall short of any understanding of the origin of the nature of consciousness. We cannot explain consciousness, and by the same measure we cannot determine, with any authority or truth value, whether it is a material phenomenon arising from a material substrate at all. What we can say is that consciousness arises, at minimum, as an emergent property of what it is to be a human being. This ties in with the principle of embodiment: to be an alive being perceiving and interacting in a world presupposes the principle of embodiment. An analogy for the necessity of an embodied approach to an understanding of consciousness lies in the fact of information. Today we live in an information-rich age, where computers surpass computational expectations set only a trivial period of time ago. Information is a substrate of data which informs us of something, hence the term ‘inform-ation.’ To be informed assumes that there is an entity to be informed, namely a living being. This act of informing highlights the necessity for embodiment: without an embodied being to perceive and be aware of information, one could not be informed.

This is strange, because in the modern world, technology and information are almost seen as prior to conscious apprehension, as though information were superior in some sense to cognition. Yet is it not true that in order to perceive anything there must be someone to do the perceiving? Otherwise information is impossible. The notion of informing does not make sense in a world without a conscious being to be informed. This point holds true against the argument for neuroconstructionalism, whereby the brain is said to construct the reality in front of our eyes by creating representations of the qualia of consciousness for some kind of Cartesian homunculus, what Daniel Dennett, borrowing Gilbert Ryle’s phrase, mockingly calls the ‘ghost in the machine.’ Dennett uses the term to ridicule precisely this picture, not to endorse it, but the picture persists in neuroconstructionist thinking all the same: a supposed conscious entity which resides outside of our experience of consciousness, yet one which permeates the veil into our illusory world of ‘appearances.’ You may note the relation between the Cartesian subject and the Buddhist tradition of the world of appearances: the material world is simply an illusory form which is to be transcended into the ultimate form of the mental, that matter is mental, the essential form of idealism. However, the neuroconstructionalist argument goes further than this in its claims about the nature of consciousness. It supposes that the material substrate of the brain, through the sense organs, receives ‘data’ which is void of any distinctive qualities, ‘formless’ or ‘dry’, and then subsequently interprets the data through the filter of the mind into the colourful, qualitatively differentiated world we perceive. This claim goes against our experience as embodied beings; it negates our very experience of being a human being in a world, and replaces it with an empty, deadened world which is somehow ‘made up’ by the brain.

If the brain somehow constructs reality in this sense, how does it do so, given that the brain itself is enclosed inside a cranial cavity, excluded from an outer world? To speak of the brain as creating reality, forming the shape and colour of our world, or, for that matter, doing anything which contributes to our lived experience as a being, assumes a form of cognitive dissonance, a hyper-rationalisation of what is experienced, a logicising-away of experience into an abstract realm of representations. ‘The brain makes you feel sad,’ ‘the brain is making you do this.’ No, you are feeling sad, you are doing this, as an embodied, holistic being. The bifurcation of body and mind occurs as a result of the Cartesian dualism which arises out of neuroconstructivism. This duality is nothing more than a schizophrenic splitting of lived experience into an abstract cerebral realm, which loses continuity between the body and the mind. In mathematics, if we take for granted the equations of Einstein, or assume general relativity or Newton’s laws to be ‘true reality’ and our lived experience to be somehow less ‘true,’ we do a disservice to truth. Nietzsche famously recognised this denial in his Zarathustra, where he speaks of the problem with ascribing primacy to cerebral abstractions. As he put it, the problem of the philosopher was to yield to a ‘bifurcation of spirit’, though Nietzsche was a materialist, this nevertheless does not detract from the point made. The emphasis on the ‘realness’ of experience is important in an age which dispels the lived experience and inordinately raises ideology to the status of ‘true’ reality, to the realm of abstractions. Here, however, I feel called to note that ideation and abstraction, the capacities of the human mind to imagine, are inherently natural, and I am not speaking of them as somehow an aberrant feature. Rather, it is the balance between the lived and the abstract that is called to attention, a balance which has clearly gone out of whack. McGilchrist recalls the story of the Master and his Emissary, the tool and the toolmaker: the tool of rationality and logicism has become dominant over the maker of the tool.

Neuroconstructivism also speaks to our ability to perceive another’s state of mind, as theory of mind rests upon the notion that we interpret another’s state based on an ‘internal representation’ of how it would be to be them. Yet neuroscientists do not explain what an internal representation consists of, because they cannot. The notion of an internal representation is impossible, as it assumes the brain to be perceiving something outside of itself, which implicitly defies the constraint of a brain being indeed enclosed within a skull, unless one is to ascribe some kind of ‘magical’ power to the brain, lying outside of what is actually experienced. Internal representation is itself a kind of magical form which has no reality in and of itself, except when related to an experience, as an internal representation presupposes something which is represented, namely the state of another. Would not an empathetic approach lead to a more truthful statement about theory of mind, whereby we recognise another’s state by way of experiencing the other as another embodied being, implicitly relating to their humanness?

Internal representations have no reality in themselves, only as experiences of a conscious embodied being.

References;

The Master and His Emissary. McGilchrist, Iain. The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. Yale University Press, 2009. (New expanded edition, Yale University Press, 2019.) Wikipedia

The Matter with Things. McGilchrist, Iain. The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World. Perspectiva Press, 2021.

Ecology of the Brain. Fuchs, Thomas. Ecology of the Brain: The Phenomenology and Biology of the Embodied Mind. Oxford University Press, 2018. - Fuchs acknowledges that the brain is regionally specialized, but he also considers that none of the region is capable of producing processes of consciousness

Neural Correlates of Consciousness. Metzinger, Thomas (ed.). : Empirical and Conceptual Questions. MIT Press, 2000.

The Ghost in the Machine. Koestler, Arthur.. Hutchinson (UK) / Macmillan (US), 1967.
Consciousness Explained. Dennett, Daniel C. . Little, Brown and Co., 1991.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. Penguin Books, 1978.

The Concept of Mind. Ryle, Gilbert.Hutchinson, 1949.

Ghost in the Machine: Brain Predicts Images Before We See Them [Image]. Ott, M. (2026, March 14). Neuroscience News. https://neurosciencenews.com/files/2026/03/visual-image-prediction-neuroscience.jpg