mind> brain p1> p2> p3
Lift your eyes and look around. It’s so easy. The
world just floods in, an instant panorama. Nothing missed, nothing
invented, nothing incoherent. OK, now forget the evidence of your eyes
because seeing the world is not like that at all.
We have talked about the way genes make a general nervous system and
then childhood experience shapes specific cortex circuits. Now
let’s look at how those pathways process a single moment.
Let’s imagine what happens in your brain as you round a
street corner to find a rhinoceros blocking your way.
how to see a rhinoceros
First your brain has to take in the raw sensations. The
rhinoceros and
every other object in the field of view reflects light of various
intensities and wavelengths. This light hits the back of your eyeballs
where it is picked up by a layer of pigmented nerve cells. The scene is
then relayed via the thalamus to the occipital lobe at the back of your
head. A map of what you are seeing is “projected”
(upside down) onto the primary visual cortex – a palm-sized,
two millimetre thick sheet of about half a billion
densely-interconnected neurons.
Are you aware of anything yet? No, even though both the retina and the
thalamus have contributed some initial sharpening and tidying up of the
picture. The primary visual cortex, or V1, is just a first staging
post. The serious analysis is to follow.
As mentioned, the human cortex has about 30 modules devoted to
extracting the detail of visual experiences. Physically, the cortex is
a single continuous sheet. But logically it is broken into a mosaic of
processing areas, which each patch of processing connected to the next
to form a rising stack of activity.
So
you round the corner. A pattern of information is splashed across
the primary visual cortex. A hierarchy of visual modules then starts to
make sense of this pattern. The very next level, V2, is important for
highlighting the boundaries and contours of what you are seeing. Like a
heavy black marker, it draws around edges so that the shape of the
rhinoceros stands out from the shapes of the background. Next there is
V3 which takes the analysis of shape and perspective a step further
while V4 takes the wavelength information and turns it into a
decisive experience of colour. And so the analysis continues, each
level feeding the activity of the next to extract increasingly crisp
details.
Rather early on, a dichotomous fork appears in the visual hierarchy.
One branch heads up the back of the skull towards the parietal lobes,
focusing on “where is it?” questions to do with
motion and location. The neurons are tuned to pick up shifts of
position and also to subtract our own motion from the emerging picture
so we know that it us moving towards something and not it moving
towards us. At the peak of this brain path emerges a general feel for
the space about us, how near or distant are the many elements of the
visual field.
The other branch of analysis runs down the brain towards the temporal
lobes, and this focuses on “what is it?” questions.
Driven by a gathering tide of sensory details – a distinctive
silhouette, a horny brown hide, an impression of great bulk –
these areas can put an identity to the visual object. They have the
memories etched into their synaptic connections to splutter the answer
“rhinoceros!”.
attending~disregarding
Right then. The information has rippled through 30 processing stages.
It has been dichotomised into what~where. Now you know what you are
seeing? Not quite. At this stage the visual pathway is still busy
mapping and recognising everything in the field of view. As you turn a
corner, you must take in the whole scene before you can zero in on any
of its parts. There will be other neurons energetically signalling
people, houses, cars, trees. The “rhinoceros”
neurons need to make themselves heard over this hubbub.
The next phase of brain activity must draw in the frontal cortex. So
far we have been talking about the back half of the brain, the sensory
cortex. Each of the senses – touch, taste, hearing, balance
and sight – has its own corner of this sheet. And each
follows the same hierarchical logic. With hearing, for example, a
pattern of raw frequencies is mapped onto the primary auditory cortex
(A1). Then further stages of processing identify and locate the sounds.
For the sake of completeness, we ought to mention that as the
sensory
hierarchies reach a peak, they also begin to converge. In special
“multi-modal” areas like the entorhinal cortex and
especially the hippocampus, neurons start to fire in response to
combinations of noises, visions, smells and other sensations. The many
strands of sensory activity are tied together. This does not mean the
hippocampus suddenly light ups with miniature sensory images. But its
pattern of activity does point back to a stack of other neural
patterns. The hippocampus reflects the fact that certain details exist
spread across the rest of the sensory cortex circuitry.
Among other things, this allows the hippocampus to be a memory organ. A
snapshot of neural activity at the level of the hippocampus can be used
later to cause firing to follow a reverse path back down the sensory
hierarchy, recreating the feel of the original experience. Memory is a
general property of brains as every synaptic connection is shaped by
experience. But the hippocampus is positioned to capture specific
memories, to trap a neural template of a particular sensory state, and
then to use that template hours or even years later to reconstruct that
moment.
Anyway, getting back to our rhinoceros example, first the sensory half
of the brain maps everything – all the details. Then the
frontal lobes need to kick in. The sensory picture has to be focused by
a frontal act of attention that then leaves the brain in a state of
intention – knowing both what is happening and what it wants
to do about it.
So just as the brain is dichotomised into what~where, it is also
physically structured by the dichotomy of input~output, or
sensory~motor processing. There is even a further dichotomy in the
left~right hemispheric dichotomy of focus~fringe, or figure~ground,
event~context, processing.
The very highest levels of the brain are the dozen or so processing
areas that make up the prefrontal lobes. These areas are not interested
in what is routine about any moment, just what is significant and
worthy of closer examination. And it is when news of a
rhinoceros-shaped patch of visual activity hits this part of the brain
that a sharp conscious experience can start to dawn.
Acting in concert with the arousal and emotion centres of the lower
brain, with which they have intimate connections, the prefrontal lobes
organise a state of attention. The paying of attention has two effects.
First it defines the sensory experience itself. As said, the sensory
cortex begins by responding to the full panorama – the
rhinoceros but also everything else. Attention goes back over this to
create dichotomous contrast. It turns up the volume of the neurons
representing the rhinoceros, pushing irrelevant details such as the
presence of people, houses, cars and trees, into the dim fringes of
that moment’s awareness.
This is one of the advantages of the brain being an organic network of
connections rather than a strict input-output device. The
“output” areas can reach back down to alter their
own inputs. Any input actually starts as more of a suggestion
– “Hey, I might be important”. Many
inputs are analysed and eventually there is feedback to say yes, you
were the bit that mattered. The brain’s pathways do not just
emit a response, they evolve a response. The global context acts
downwards to shape up the localised impressions.
We will have more to say about this looping logic in a minute as the
full story is even more devious. But a second obvious effect of paying
attention to a particular aspect of a moment is that it unleashes a
flood of thoughts, emotions and associations. The whole of the brain is
prompted to respond to the focal event with whatever resources are
available.
So noting the sight of a rhinoceros will bring any stored mental
associations to the surface. Even as we are recognising the animal, we
will be bubbling up with relevant thoughts. Is there a zoo nearby? Has
it seen us? Should we freeze or run? Could this be a practical joke,
maybe even a dream? Of course, we will also be feeling emotions. Our
arousal centres will be making decisions about whether to relax or
whether to pump up the body for action. Our motor areas, behind the
prefrontal regions on the frontal cortex sheet, will be gearing up to
execute any intentions beginning to form. And even our language areas
may start to organise a suitable (or suitably strangled) vocal
response.
The brain thus takes in the whole of each moment and extracts its core
aspect. Then the whole of the brain responds to this core and more or
less ignores everything else. A lamppost or parked car may have been
clearly visible alongside the rhino. But it is unlikely we would have
any particular thoughts or feelings about them. The brain’s
mission is only to find what matters most and then to react to that in
as full and coherent a way as possible.
So now lift your eyes again. Yes, it still all floods in. But what
aspect is being attended? What is provoking a response? And
isn’t it amazing that so much scattered mapping and analysing
must be taking place for you to have any kind of sensory panorama? It
is incredible that it happens almost instantaneously. Well in fact it
doesn’t. And that is another problem that brains have to
overcome.
consciousness takes time
Ever played tennis? Good players must have incredible
reflexes. In the
professional game, the serve is banged down at 200, even 225 kilometres
per hour. It is across the net and at you in about a third of a second.
This seems barely time for an ordinary person even to begin a turn
towards the forehand or backhand side. Yet top players can see the ball
well enough to swoop and swing their rackets through the correct spot
with split second accuracy. At these speeds, just a few milliseconds
(thousandths of a second) early or late and the result is an air shot
– a missed ball.
So the brain and nervous system must work lightning fast. Except they
don’t. Even conducting signals at several hundred kilometres
per hour, nerves need considerable time to turn input into output.
It takes at least 20 milliseconds for messages to travel the length of
the body. Because the eye takes a little time to register changes in
light, visual signals take more like 50 to 100 milliseconds to reach
the brain. Then once inside the brain, many further connections are
needed to transform the raw signals into some kind of mental response.
Add up all these delays and it ought to be physically impossible to
watch a ball right onto the strings.
Indeed, laboratory experiments show just how long it takes to integrate
new information. When people are asked to tap a button as soon as a
light flashes, it takes them 200 milliseconds – fully a fifth
of a second. About 120 milliseconds are needed to register the fact the
light has flashed and another 80 milliseconds to get their finger to
move.
And this reaction time is for a simple unthinking task. For any task
that demands careful attention, the conscious juggling of several
responses, the response lag is nearer half a second. Even more
astonishingly, the greatest athletes are just as slow on these reaction
time tests. Their brains work no faster. They cannot see what is
happening in the world any quicker than the rest of us.
Brain processing does take time, much too much time it seems for anyone
ever to manage a game of tennis – or drive a car or flip
pancakes for that matter. Any theories about the brain have to account
for this basic mystery.
Brains do ease the problem by always taking as little time as possible.
To go all the way up and down the brain’s processing
hierarchy to form a fully conscious, attention-level, mental response
takes about half a second. Bringing hundreds of cortex areas into a
state of co-ordinated response demands a lot of work. But the brain can
learn to short-circuit this full-scale response and instead react out
of habit, cutting the processing time from 500 milliseconds to
“just” 200 milliseconds or so.
There are lower brain structures specialised for making this happen. A
cluster of nerve centres, the basal ganglia, nestles inside the
cerebral hemispheres, quietly observing the patterns of attention and
decision-making taking shape on the cortex sheet above. By watching,
the basal ganglia begin to see which sensory patterns latter produced a
particular response. They can then literally short-circuit the
production of that output state. As soon as the right kind of
sensations start to come in, the basal ganglia can trigger the same
response in an immediate, unthinking, way. The job can be done as if
the higher brain had patiently considered its response.
This is a clever time-saving trick that works once a brain has
experienced the same situation enough times for it to become wired in
as a habit – as a fixed action pattern or automatism. But
such a shortcut only reduces the response lag from half a second to a
fifth of a second. There still remains a yawning gap to be explained
given that even walking down a flight of steps or pouring a kettle of
boiling water are tasks that demand millisecond-level precision.
Luckily the answer is rather simple. Brains anticipate. They get good
at guessing.
reading the game of life
At one level, making predictions is no big deal because the brain can
more or less assume that each new moment is going to be pretty much
like the last one. It is not as if life jerks us about, one second
hoisting us a mile above the Indian Ocean, the next leaving us pressed
face down on a busy restaurant floor. And even when there is some
wrenching surprise, like a car crash or turning a corner to find a
rhinoceros, we will still find ourselves inhabiting the same body. The
same laws of physics still apply.
So the brain’s simplest prediction is that whatever it knew
to be true about the world a few moments ago will continue to be true.
Then against this general expectation, the brain can generate more
specific states of expectancy. This is where full-scale attentive-level
processing starts to count. It arrives too late to see the world as it
happens, but it focuses our view of what has happened so that we are
armed with definite expectations about what might happen next.
If we actually came across a rhino in the street, the surprise would be
such that we would notice a lag in our own reactions. We would feel a
half second of confusion as we struggled to make sense of the scene.
But the very act of focusing on the existence of the rhinoceros to the
virtual exclusion of everything else would in turn generate a state of
anticipation paving our way into whatever followed. We would be primed
for the rhino to turn and fix us with its beady eye. Or perhaps to mope
off down the street so long as we stayed frozen.
In some real sense, we will be living in the future, already
consciously aware of what is about to happen. And if our predictions
are good enough, we can even begin to act upon them without waiting for
further sensory input. The brain can jump to habitual responses on the
basis of expected sensory patterns.
This is exactly what happens when we play sport, drive cars, descend
stairs, or perform any other demanding, yet reasonably predictable,
physical task.
In another experiment, psychologists showed two groups of tennis
players – beginners and professionals – film of a
person serving. The film was stopped at various points during the
service action. The subjects then had to guess whether the serve was
going to their forehand or backhand.
The professionals could predict the direction even before the ball had
been struck! Through years of practice they had learnt to read the
wind-up of a server. Then only the first part of the ball’s
flight was needed to judge exactly where the ball would land, and with
what sort of spin. The beginners, of course, could not tell anything
from the wind-up and had to see most of the flight - by which time it
was usually too late to do much about it.
So experts read the game. They look for early clues and then respond
with unthinking habit. Experiments have proven that if ever a ball does
something unpredicted less than 200 milliseconds away from a player in
any sport, such as take a bad bounce, then there is no adjustment. The
player swings on the basis of a wrong prediction and misses.
But generally professionals get it right and can forecast where to have
their racquet or bat to within the few thousandths of a second
necessary to swat a ball. And the rest of us learn to master the
millisecond-level tolerances involved in other more mundane skills such
as changing gears on a car or lifting a coffee cup to our lips without
bashing our teeth.
So time is a real problem for the brain. There was always great
evolutionary pressure on brains to speed up their awareness of the
world. If you are an antelope being chased by a leopard, or a
chimpanzee leaping precariously through the branches of a tree, then
you want to be instantly updated as to the state of the world.
But brains actually went one better. Physiological limits meant the
speed of neural transmission could not be changed. But brains could
invest in intelligence for better forecasting. They could learn to work
ahead of the game.
inside a moment of consciousness
The brain’s job is to optimise behaviour. It must understand
the needs of the body and then recognise when the world offers
opportunities to meet these needs. It does this by adapting its
structure – the patterns of linkage that transform sensory
input into motor output – across an ever-tightening series of
timescales.
First there is the genetic timescale. With each generation, the genes
make a prediction about what kind of nervous system will do the job.
Then Darwinian selection acts on this prediction, providing the
feedback that leaves the genome better focused for its next round of
circuit-building. This is a knowing of the world at a species level.
Second there is the developmental timescale. Once brains swelled to a
certain size, genes could only code for a rather general state of
circuitry. Individual organisms had to build their own brain pathways,
learning exactly how to sense and respond. With humans, some very
complex skills come to be built into the brain – not just the
ability to see black bars and grip rattles, but to read a tennis serve
or negotiate rush hour traffic.
Finally, like the eye of a storm, we get down to the moment-to-moment
flurry of adaptation that produces sharp awareness – the
tightly specific pattern of linkage we experience as a focused state of
knowing and intending.
This level of adaptation is the result of a cycle of processing that
begins with a set of expectations. Everything – from the
thoughts and experiences of the last few seconds to the dim memories of
childhood – help to get us orientated.
Then the moment starts to happen. For about a tenth of second, we have
no choice except to continue blindly to ride our wave of anticipations.
But soon updated sensory impressions begin to form. After a fifth of a
second, the patterns are clear enough for the brain to react out of
habit. Where possible, further processing is short-circuited and
routines are used to emit the right responses. By doing this, the brain
manages to keep much of life confined to the fringes of awareness, thus
clearing the decks for anything that does actually matter.
Last comes the mop-up operation. If unthinking habits have
automatically dealt with as much as possible, then by definition
anything that has not been handled by this stage must be novel,
surprising, unpredicted, difficult or in some other way significant,
and therefore worthy of global, attentive-level, thoughtful processing.
We may have bumped into a rhinoceros, missed a tennis ball, crunched a
gear change, stumbled on a step, slopped a cup of hot coffee. Now the
brain has to adapt its neural state on the fly, evolving a pattern of
linkage that best copes with this novel set of circumstances.
Feedback from the highest levels of the brains, the prefrontal lobes,
sharpens any sensory impressions, making them stand out from the
background of mental activity. This act of attention also drives a
brain-wide search for a meaningful response. Any memory association,
emotion, or action pattern that might help is evoked.
After about half a second of frantic activity, we find ourselves
successfully reorientated. We are left feeling we know what has just
happened and what we might want to do about it. The cycle of processing
is complete. And it has produced a fresh set of expectations and
intentions to lead us into our next moment of experience. The meaning
we extract from one instant is our best launchpad into the one that
follows.
This is certainly a satisfying neurological tale. But how does it
square with our inner feeling of what actually happens? Subjectively,
consciousness appears smooth, continuous, unified and instantaneous.
The processing cycle theory makes it sound a clunky, disjointed,
production.
Consciousness feels smooth for several reasons. First, there is never
an actual break in the stream of awareness. The brain is always in a
state of knowing. All that we are saying is that this general knowing,
represented by the general connective balance of the brain, becomes
fleetingly dichotomised into more specific focus~fringe,
attended~disregarded, balances of neural activity. Like whorls in a
river, particular mental points of focus froth up out of a current that
is already flowing.
And then there is the fact that during most moments, not much actually
needs to change in the state of the brain anyway. Anticipations
imperceptibly smooth our path into each moment, making most of the
necessary changes ahead of time. Embedded habits then handle most of
what remains to be handled without having to trouble the brain greatly.
Our waking day consists of about 100,000 “moments”
– potential half second chunks of mental activity. However
the vast majority of these moments will prove to be filled with nothing
of particular consequence. Things will be routine. Therefore any
attentional-level response will be muted at best and a passage of such
moments will blur together in our memories.
It is only when something jarring happens that we need to make big
adjustments – and also may notice that it actually takes a
slight instant to catch up with changes in the world. So every waking
moment contains the potential for a radical shift, a seismic
realignment of the brain’s circuitry, but there does not have
to be such a shift. The brain is happy to roll along quietly, relying
on anticipations and habits, given the chance.
So that is the story of the brain. Except the human brain does have a
few extras that appear to make it different from ordinary animals
brains. And the exact nature of this difference may surprise you.
what is it about the human mind?
Humans and chimpanzees are almost identical in their genes. Yet
mentally, the gulf is clearly immense. It is not even just that our
brains are four times bigger than a chimp’s. After all, our
own brains are in turn dwarfed by those of elephants and whales. Herein
lies a puzzle.
So far we have been telling a tale of evolutionary continuity. Taking
the holistic route, we have been looking at how brains are the
expression of a purpose. Brains exist to make decisions – to
dichotomise each passing moment into actions and inactions, the
attended and the disregarded. And they do this by following an adaptive
trajectory. Over generations, over lifetimes, and finally over
split-seconds, they zero in to form neural patterns that
“know” the world.
Thinking about brains in this light, we can see that the brain-less
activity of a tumbling bacterium is not that different in principle
from the swift mental accommodations achieved by the large,
complexly-organised brain of vertebrates such as ourselves. Both are
examples of mindful responses.
We might even admit that a lowly creature like a slug has a kind of
species-level sentience.
An individual slug acts reflexively rather than consciously. It does
not have enough brain to have a succession of crisply specific states
of neural adaptation. But if we could observe a species of slug
developing its genetically-coded patterns of response over millions of
years, then we would see changes in behaviour as if the species were
seeing and understanding its world. There would be a glacially slow
form of consciousness as a whole species of slug learnt some new mating
dance or developed a taste for some new food source.
Imagine slug evolution in fast-forward. Or we have all seen the
speeded-up movies of plants sprouting and winding their way to follow
the sun. Once it is accepted that conscious experience is not an
instantaneous affair even for humans, then we can see how all forms of
life have something like conscious experience, just spread over vastly
different timescales. And of course, a much more generalised, far less
specific form of mental response.
All life is cognitive and all cognition has some level of experiential
intensity. It is in some degree conscious. But then we have to say that
humans represent some kind of big jump.
Abruptly, consciousness took on a different quality. And a glance at
the evolutionary history of Homo sapiens reveals just how abruptly.
the rise of the hominid
Some five million years ago, a branch of apes – the hominids
– learnt to walk on two legs. Many different species roamed
the African landscape. By about two million years ago, one had evolved
into Homo erectus – a strapping six footer with a brain three
times the size of a chimp. Erectus was a hunter, a stone tool user, and
possibly even a fire user. So here was an apeman with a pretty smart
mind.
And yet Erectus did little following the first burst of technological
ingenuity. Having learnt one axe design, this hominid went on making
almost exactly the same tool for the next million or so years. Erectus
seemed strangely lacking in imagination.
Then a branch of Erectus gave rise to Homo sapiens some 100,000 years
ago. Overnight the picture changes. Suddenly we are on a technological
fast track. There is an explosion in the variety of tools being made.
Homo sapiens discovered fish hooks and barbed harpoons. We could weave
ropes and sew clothes. When we hunted, now it was with traps or bows
and arrows. We had not just camp fires but proper hearths, wind breaks,
flint lighters and fat-burning lamps.
The truly telling difference is that we quickly became a symbolic
species. From about 40,000 years ago, we began daubing ourselves with
paint, carving figurines and beads, even decorating our caves with
murals of hunting scenes. Our dead were buried with ritual. This
archaeological evidence leaves no doubt that we had become fully
modern, conscious of ourselves, our pasts and our futures. We were able
to think innovatively and also had the imagination to be ruled by
superstitions and fears. What could possibly have wrought such a
transformation?
speech made the difference
Rather than beat about the bush, let’s say right away that
this mental revolution must have been the result of language
– the development of grammatical, articulate, referential
speech.
Words are symbolic. A word is no more than a puff of air, or an
imagined noise in the head. In terms of physical effort, one word is as
easy to utter as another. But the sound may refer to anything from the
most mundane object – a banana, a table, a rock –
to extremely abstract concepts such as valour, destiny, chaos, the
Universe. Words make the most complex thoughts tractable.
When the idea of a verbal token is harnessed to the logical engine of a
grammar – a set of rules for combining these tokens into
sentences – then speech comes with its own built-in momentum.
All known grammars have the same basic subject-verb-object structure
(although in different languages these three components may be arranged
in different orders).
So to speak a sentence, grammar forces you to tell a complete
(mechanical!) tale of who did what to whom. You have to take the
complexity of real life (organic!) situations and shoe-horn it into a
simple linear narrative.
Even a simple descriptive sentence like “the cat
slept,” depends on this hidden logical structure. Here, the
cat happens to be both the doer and the done to – we might
instead have said “sleep overtook the cat,”
especially if we wanted to imply some level of resistance on the part
of the animal.
Words and grammar – the dichotomy of semantics~syntax or
words~rules – allow for an almost infinite variety of meaning
and shades of meaning. The point is that the rules of sentence-making
always force you to make a logical assertion – what caused
what, or what is a property of what. You have to choose from an
infinity of possibilities (a vague generality) to state something
specific.
Then of course, having made this precise assertion, either you or your
audience will immediately turn around and respond. The sentence will
provoke thoughts about what might be right or wrong about it. The more
focused the sentiment, the more intense the resulting mental reaction.
So again, grammatical speech comes with its own inbuilt momentum. Like
giving a worm a head and tail end to its body, the sequential or
segmented logic of the speech act creates direction. Thoughts expressed
in words cannot help but be heading somewhere – even if
sometimes it seems to be in circles.
Why is this so important? It is because the minds of animals are
trapped in the present tense. The very nature of the brain locks them
into thoughts about what is happening right here, right now. Language
was a lucky discovery that allowed the human mind to break free of this
crushing tyranny. Speech gave us a new kind of software that could take
the ancient hardware of our brain to places it had never been before.
As we have seen, the brain evolved as a mechanism to make decisions.
The nervous system encodes patterns that link inputs to outputs. As
animals developed more and more elaborate brains, they came to
understand more and more about the opportunities and threats contained
in each passing instant. The full weight of the brain’s
history, all its remembered experiences, remembered intentions and
remembered expectations, could be applied to the processing of a
moment. The result was a sharply intelligent state of awareness for the
world. An animal like a chimpanzee knows both what is going on at a
moment and what it wants to do about it.
However, this relentless pressure to extract meaning from each passing
instant leaves an animal with its nose pressed hard against the
windscreen of life. An animal does not lack for consciousness. A large
brained animal is extremely conscious. But it is a view that looks out
into what is currently happening. It is highly located in space and
time. And greater brain power merely thrust an animal even further into
an intelligent appreciation of the threats and potentials that surround
it. Increasing the constraining weight of context only strengthens the
dichotomisation, forcing the attentive focus to become even more
specific to some moment, some place.
A slug does not know much about a moment. A goldfish or frog has a hazy
awareness for the moment. A dog, dolphin or chimp is quiveringly alert
and emotionally responsive to the smallest details of the moment. And
yet such an animal is still being driven by the demands of that moment.
What brains needed was some mechanism for stepping back, a way of
redirecting their phenomenal responding powers and turning them on
problems or situations that were not immediately present.
Words were this mechanism. They could be used to steer the mind away
from the instant-to-instant press of events. They could lift us out of
our mental rut and transport us to imagined moments, or even imaginary
viewpoints such as ourselves seen through the eyes of others.
Words created the mental distance by which we could become not just
conscious, but self-conscious – able to contemplate the fact
that we are a self with a history and a future, desires and
responsibilities. The machinery of attention and intelligent response
was unchanged. But we could use the scaffolding of words to direct this
attention inwards and catch ourselves in the process of reacting.
the dichotomistic approach
So there we have it. A quick introduction to the structure of
consciousness. The challenge is to be able to break it into parts and
still see how it all fits together. How it is all about organicism,
holism, hierarchies and dichotomies – and also the power of
mechanical causality. Modules, sequences, pathways, nodes, information
bits, symbolic codes and constructive acts.
This is always going to be confusing. But the way out of confusion
(vague understanding!) is to dichotomise. So the deep principles of
mind science are going to emerge but seeking out the dichotomies.
The brain itself is dichotomised in many obvious ways. It has the
architectural divisions such as higher~lower, what~where, left~right,
sensory~motor. And the processing divisions such as attention~habit,
focus~fringe. Each of these neuroscience dichotomies should then of
course be interpretable as versions of the ur-dichotomy of
local~global.
And we can use organic logic to predict further facts about the brain.
In some way it should be always expanding (and shrinking). It should
also be striving towards a “flat middle”
– a middle realm that becomes fractal, or scalefree, or
critical in some sense as it approaches an equilibrium where further
changes ceases to be a change.
The adoption of organic logic should give some completely new answers
to some old questions. Such as which came first in the evolution of
human speech – the word or the rule?
I used to think, mechanically, it had to be one or the other. And the
development of single word protospeech as a first step made the most
sense. Complex grammar would have come later. But now I would have to
say that both words and rules would have separated out as part of the
same evolutionary act. They would have dichotomised from the same vague
mental potential.
That will mean I will have to rewrite quite a bit of my own early work
on this subject – which happened to be the question I first
set out to answer in books like The Ape That Spoke and The Myth of
Irrationality. But what is life without progression?