# What are brains?

I see a self-reference problem with reductionism. I wonder if this has already been solved. So I'm asking.

Best as I can tell, there aren't actually *things* in reality. That's a human interpretation. It collapses upon almost any inspection, like [the Ship of Theseus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus) or [the paradox of the heap](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox). We also see the theory of thing-ness collapsing with *physical* inspection, which is why QM is "weird".

Best as I can tell, all thing-ness arises from reification. Like how we talk about "government" like it's a thing, but really we've just thingified a process. "The weather" is another clear-to-me example.

It seems to me that physical objects are exactly the same in this respect: a child interacts with swirling sense perceptions and reifies (i.e. thingifies) those experiences into "a ball" or whatever.

So how does reification happen?

*   Well, it's not like there's a *thing* that reification *is*; it's just a process that a human mind does.
*   Okay, so what's a human mind? Well, it's a process that the human brain engages in.
*   So what's a brain? A configuration of chemicals.
*   The chemicals are atoms, which are patterns of wiggling magical reality fluid from QM, which is maybe just made of mathematical structures.

So… when do we get to the place where we aren't using objects to explain how the impression of objects arises?

* * *

This puzzle shows up in the Many Worlds view of QM. It's roughly equivalent to "How do worlds arise?"

Two things (!) get entangled via an interaction. When one of those things is a human brain, we see the various possibilities, but as various brains which aren't interacting directly anymore from the perspective of those brains. So instead of seeing all quantum superposed configurations at once, each version of us observes just one configuration.

Okay, great.

So where are these brains that are getting entangled with other things? Aren't these brains made of the same quantum soup as everything else?

This Many Worlds thing makes a lot of sense if you're seeing the situation from the *outside*, where you can safely reify everything without self-reference. You can be a brain looking at a situation you're not in.

But we're *in* the reality where this happens. We're [embedded agents](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/Rm6oQRJJmhGCcLvxh/p/p7x32SEt43ZMC9r7r). The brains doing this reification are somehow arising from the very process they're attempting to explain, which they meta-explain by… reifying themselves?

Which is to say, brains exist as reifications of brains.

So WTF is a brain??

What is reality *actually doing* here?

What is going on before whatever it is reflects on and reifies itself as "a brain" or "a human" or whatever?

What is that which comes before thing-ness?

* * *

I find it hard to talk clearly about this puzzle.

Best as I can tell, language assumes the objectivity of things as its foundation. I have not found a way to write a clear grammatical sentence without at least implicitly using nouns or gerunds.

E.g., "What is that which comes before thing-ness?" assumes the answer will be a *thing*, which explicitly it cannot be.

Poetry sometimes sidesteps this limitation but at the cost of precision.

Please be forgiving of my attempt to be clear using a medium that I find doesn't allow me to speak coherently about this.

If you care to articulate the puzzle better than I have, I'm all ears. I'd love to see how to use language more skillfully here.

I also would very much like to know if there's already a known answer that doesn't defeat itself by ignoring the question.

("Oh, brains are just processes that arise from the laws of physics." Okay. So, like, what are these "laws of physics" and these "processes" prior to there being a brain to interpret them as *those things* as opposed to there just being more swirling magical reality fluid?)