You are not your brain: misses the point

In an otherwise interesting and helpful article Alva Noe says The brain, the body, and the world | Culture Making: "Trying to understand consciousness in neural terms alone is like trying to understand a car driving down the road only in terms of its engine. It’s bad philosophy masquerading as science....
Just as an engine is necessary in a car. But an engine doesn’t “give rise” to driving; driving isn’t something that happens inside the engine. The engine contributes to the car’s ability to drive. Consciousness is more like driving than our philosophical tradition leads us to expect."
Now, I agree with the starting point about reductionism (for that is what it is). What I'm unhappy about is the analogy which seems to divorce mind and brain. Our brain is more to us than a car is to a driver. The analogy loses the vital and important connection with the concept of emergence. We need an analogy that captures that otherwise we are in danger of reinforcing unhelpful and scientifically unsustainable dualisms.

It seems that the understanding of emergence is not really present, and so we should recall that emergence basically means that from complex interactions of events on one level (for example, chemical) may emerge a state of being that, while dependent on the 'lower' level interactions, is not wholly determined by the 'lower' level complex but rather may exercise 'top-down causality' and exhibit properties of the whole that are not predictable from the properties of the constituents of the 'lower' level. Thus it is possible to conceive of the mind as emergent from the brain-body complex such that it is partially independent in being able to exercise top-down causality (that is our minds can control our bodies and brains to varying degrees) and in operating in ways that are not merely reducible to the constituent bio-electro-chemical operations of a human being.

In this way, we do, in principle, account for the fact that brain damage affects our minds, but also that our minds control and are not wholly determined by our biology. So it is sad that the analogy used to by Ms Noe not only fails to capture that, but actually misleads in an area where we need precisely to understand that emergence offers a third way between reductionist materialism and transcendent dualism. I'm just surprised that there seems to be so much ignorance of this perspective around.

From a Christian point of view this perspective is of a piece with the valuing of material creation implied in the 'it is good' of Genesis 1 and the Resurrection of Christ not to mention the related Hebrew bodiliness which questions gnostic/platonic ways of thinking.