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For me, the main question is not "Is there a separation between brain and behavior?" but rather "How do the brain and behavior interrelate?" While I recognize that many people enjoy the idea of an elusive mind (or soul or spirit), I'm not drawn to that idea. Moreover, I don't find it threatening to think that there is a biological basis for our behavior -- including interior, unseen activity, like thinking. The idea that we can observe and describe things biologically is appealing to me, not scary. Scientific observation doesn't take anything away from our higher-level functions; it doesn't place them into a tiny box or try to define them too clearly. As we talked about in class, describing things scientifically does not mean unlocking all their mysteries or granting scientists some all-knowing Truth.

I'm bothered more by Descartes' idea than by Dickinson's because it seems, to me, to accept too readily that there are things we can't even discuss or observe. I don't want to give our humanity any special value. Why can't we talk about it and examine it the same way we do other organisms? Yes, we are highly evolved creatures, but that doesn't mean we should take consciousness, decision-making, and other pre-frontal-lobe activities and place them in an "Untouchable" or "Unknowable" box.

At the same time, however, I do think it's important to remember to separate scientific discovery from assumptions and from truth. Saying that the mind might be a function of the brain says nothing about how complicated a process making the idea of oneself is or how much each of us differs in that and other processes. I'm intrigued by Emily Dickinson's formulation of the relationship between the brain and the sky -- between an individual and the world -- but do still want to probe deeper. I'm not satisfied just by saying, "Okay, the brain creates the mind and the sky. Throw everything inside and lock it up." I still want to explore it. Even if it's all a construction of the mind (at least in the terms set up by Constructivism, which complicate things more than Dickinson does), I still want to know how it works.

If we are living, moving, growing beings, so are our brains. Our conceptions of ourselves and our worlds are vastly different when we're infants from what they are today, just as our behavior changes. How do the ingrained growth processes that we all grow through, AS WELL AS the more flexible ways in which we're changed, built, or affected as individuals, play into this discussion?

If the brain=behavior but both brain and behavior are constantly changing, what does the equal sign even mean? What kind of correlation do these two ideas have to one another?