This paper uses V.S. Ramachandran's neurological research on phantom limbs as a springboard for examining fundamental philosophical questions about self, knowledge, and the existence of God. Drawing on Sartre's model of knowledge as active world-acquisition, Descartes' methodic doubt and ontological argument, and the empiricist traditions of Berkeley and Hume, the paper argues that Ramachandran's experiments — including the Mirror Box Procedure and the Elongated Nose Procedure — demonstrate that the brain routinely constructs realities that do not correspond to the external world. This neurological capacity, the paper contends, undermines Cartesian rationalism and suggests that belief in God may be a product of neural activity rather than evidence of a divine external presence.
The paper demonstrates philosophical counterpoint: it presents a scientific claim (Ramachandran's neurological model) and systematically places it in dialogue with classical philosophical positions. Rather than simply summarizing each philosopher, the author evaluates each position against the neurological evidence, using Arnauld's Cartesian Circle critique as a pivot to show how even internally, Descartes' argument fails before Ramachandran's empirical challenge is even applied.
The paper opens with a philosophical framing of knowledge as active world-acquisition (Sartre), then grounds the discussion in clinical definitions of phantom limbs. It introduces Ramachandran's experiments before moving to Descartes' rationalism, which serves as the primary philosophical target. Berkeley and Hume are then brought in as complementary empiricist challenges. The final sections synthesize the neurological and philosophical arguments to suggest that God, like a phantom limb, may be a construction of the brain rather than an external reality.
When we ask ourselves what knowledge is — as we do when we engage in the practice of philosophy — we are effectively asking what our relationship with the world is. V.S. Ramachandran, as is the norm for philosophers, asks this question about our relationship to the world by using what might at first seem a relatively trivial issue, or at least one that very few of us shall ever actually have to worry about: the question of phantom limbs, the subject of both Ramachandran's interest and our own.
The desire to know and the desire to discover are essentially active, even aggressive actions taken on the part of consciousness to acquire pieces or aspects of the world. When we seek knowledge, we seek to take into our minds — and so to take into our bodies physically — something that exists in the world. We seek through knowledge to dismantle the world and thereby to come to possess it.
This is of course an ongoing concern of philosophical discourse. Jean-Paul Sartre, for example, argues for this model of knowledge, contending that it is a sort of black hole, something that uses the primordial forces of cognition and reason to draw the world into the self. We construct ourselves out of bits of the real world; thus we cannot in any sense argue that knowledge and self are different entities, since we actively create who we are through our active acquisition of knowledge. Knowledge is the process of choosing which pieces of the world to incorporate, and thus the process of making ourselves responsible for the world around us. In other words — or at least this is the Sartrean position, with which Ramachandran would not necessarily disagree — knowledge is not merely a collection of facts. It is the active way in which we interact with the world around us. It is linked to our state of being.
Related to this question of the nature of knowledge is, of course, the question of the nature of the self. The question of self is one often expressed in philosophy as the question of "being" — as opposed to, or in addition to, "knowing" — and has been of primary concern for many, if not most, philosophers. They have argued that whatever certainties may be possible in our world must come from an understanding of our authentic self, the core of our individuality.
But questions of the self are not so simple as they first seem — and they are hardly seemingly simple even at first glance. It is to suggest the complexity of one of the most apparently simple ontological questions — who are we, in the sense of where do our bodies begin and end — that Ramachandran takes up the issue of phantom limbs.
We should first define the concepts of phantom limb and phantom pain. Imagine having your arm cut off and still being able to feel where your arm used to be. That is what it is like to have a phantom limb. People with this condition feel that the limb — an arm or leg — that was removed is still present, and they often feel pain, and sometimes pleasure. Usually the pain is mild and is only a small distraction. However, some people describe the pain and other symptoms of phantom limb as totally unbearable. When a person experiences pain from a phantom limb, this is often referred to as phantom pain.
More commonly, people with phantom limb feel other abnormal sensations in the missing limb besides pain. These sensations typically take the form of stabbing, cramping, burning, or crushing feelings. Warmth, itchiness, and squeezing sensations are other commonly reported symptoms. These sensations can occur continuously or only intermittently. Stress usually makes the symptoms worse.
People with phantom limb usually perceive the arm or leg to be in a certain position, and sometimes the limb is perceived to move. They may also feel that when a different body part is touched — such as the face — the missing limb is being touched instead. Some people with phantom limb experience a symptom known as telescoping, in which the imagined limb slowly shrinks.
There are clearly purely medical, or therapeutic, issues to be dealt with in terms of phantom pain. But the idea of phantom limbs is a more broadly illuminating one, and it allows Ramachandran to examine how our interior sense of self matches some objective measure of that self. We think that if we know nothing else, we know where our bodies begin and end. But this is, in fact, not the case.
Recently, Ramachandran and Rogers-Ramachandran used a Mirror Box Procedure (MBP) to treat phantom limb pain. In this procedure, upper-limb amputees placed their intact arm into a box with a mirror down the midline, so that when viewed from slightly off-center, the reflection of their arm gave the impression of having two intact arms. Individual differences were observed in the extent to which participants were susceptible to the MBP illusion. Moreover, although this technique had quite dramatic therapeutic value for some people, it was only moderately effective, or completely ineffective, for others. More troublingly, some investigators have recently found that using the MBP to induce illusory body experiences can actually worsen phantom limb pain in people who have had an amputation (MacLachlan, Desmond, & Horgan, 2000).
This experiment is linked to another that Ramachandran has performed and which is — from a philosophical point of view — even more challenging. It might be relatively easy to dismiss the epistemological significance of phantom limb pain because it is in some sense unnatural; but Ramachandran and Blakeslee have demonstrated that each one of us is subject to such illusions. We can all be convinced — quite easily, albeit temporarily — that we are Pinocchio.
The Elongated Nose Procedure (ENP) described by Ramachandran and Blakeslee aimed to produce the illusion that the participant's nose had stretched approximately three feet in front of his or her face. The blindfolded participant was seated directly behind a volunteer, both facing in the same direction. The participant allowed the experimenter to passively manipulate his or her left hand so that the index finger was used to touch the volunteer's nose in a rhythmic tapping sequence. The experimenter simultaneously and synchronously tapped the participant's own nose in the same manner. After one and a half minutes, the participant was asked to give an open-ended description of his or her experience. The experimenters subsequently rated responses on a three-point ordinal scale, where a score of zero indicated no experience of the illusion, one indicated an intermediate-strength illusion that the participants were touching their own nose, and two indicated a stronger sense that the participants experienced their own nose as stretched in front of their face (MacLachlan, Desmond, & Horgan, 2000).
Ramachandran provides us with a neurological model that explains why people around the world and across the centuries believe in the existence of God. This does not prove that God exists, nor does it prove that God does not exist. What it does demonstrate is that if God does not exist, our neurons are quite capable of having invented him — in precisely the same way that people feel limbs long gone, or believe their own noses to have grown.
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