Pinker Blank Slate

The idea of ghost in the machine left me with a name to call my own musings. The ghost in the machine idea, explained in Pinker’s The Blank Slate, is the theory that our brain tissues hold and manifest human emotions, feelings, and personality traits. This theory knocks away the idea of true human souls and individualism. I have always considered the idea that our lives are held within our cells. I have read many studies where a person receives a donor organ and then takes on a personality trait of the donor. In some cases, the donor recipient craves the favorite food of the original individual. Now if our entire identity, all parts of us from our favorite foods to other things like our eye or hair color, was in every cell that would make a lot of sense. Pinker references another story that proves that our personality lays within ourselves when he talked about the identical twins that were separated at birth. It was said that, “Both of them kept rubber bands around their wrist. Both of them, it turned out on questioning, liked to dip buttered toast in coffee, to flush the toilet before using it as well as after, and to pretend to sneeze in crowded elevators to watch the other people jump.” Now these aren’t super individualistic traits, but when you consider that these two people have the exact same cells and have all these traits in common, it does become very astounding.

This theory that you are who you are due to what is in your genetics is a heavy one. Not everyone is so into the idea that there is no human soul or individualistic personality that we have created on our own. It is a theory that makes us think about what really makes us human. No one likes to think of themselves as a well-functioning machine. No one likes to think that there is nothing but this endless machine that keeps spinning. As said in Pinker’s article, “the mind is entirely separate from the body, that holds out the hope that the mind can survive the death of the body, an idea whose appeal is all too obvious.” I know that I want to think some parts of me will live on and effect the universe years after my living body is gone. In the end though, it is just our brain trying to figure out its purpose and what it really means to be human.