Brainless

image by AI; my own somewhat hyperbolic prompt

Reconnaissance

The ravens come to feast upon the deer.
Their talons are too dull to tear like claws.
They smartly team with wolves, as hunting peers
And point the way to road kill with their caws.

These creatures love to play, nurse others’ chicks,
Do barrel-rolls and bathe collectively,
Use rocks for self-defence and play with sticks
And flying upside down proclaim they’re free.

But still, to man, an animal can’t feel —
We daren’t believe they love or hurt or think.
We cage them all in labs and farms concealed:
The human ‘masters’ cannot face the stink.

Our bankrupt, separate culture’s madness reigns.
We think. Ergo we end the world, with brains.

— my attempt at a sonnet; one of my first blog posts, in 2003, (before Facebook existed, let alone AI!)

Imagining the existence of a mind-body (or brain-body) ’split’ is a pretty ubiquitous practice when we write and talk about the ‘components’ of ‘us’ — as if the brain and the body are somehow two separate ‘creatures’. When in fact, the brain is just a label for that inseparable ‘part’ of the body that performs certain functions in service to the rest of the body.

In their groundbreaking work Figments of Reality, Stewart and Cohen defined the ‘mind’ (the brain and the related neural apparatus that performs these functions, and including these functions themselves), thusly:

“Our minds co-evolve with everything that influences them. Minds are figments [fabrications, representations] of reality, processes going on inside structures made from ordinary matter whose behaviour evolved in order to mimic, model and manipulate natural processes. This explains why they are ‘unreasonably effective’ at perceiving and reorganizing the environment. The human condition is a complicit interaction between collective culture and individual minds, each shaping the other.”

“Culture depends upon communication, which we achieve with language. Language, the first step towards extelligence [collective intelligence] co-evolved with brains and made minds, complicit with hands and technology, and the discovery of patterns and laws. Mind can only think about mind once language equips it with a recursive, self-referential, feature-detection system. Once it has this, self-awareness [‘consciousness’] is an immediate, essentially trivial property, because ‘self’ is a feature too. The existence of features [properties, attributes and characteristics] makes it possible to employ a mental map instead of the real territory.”

Brains, in all creatures that have them, evolved specifically as a “feature detection system” to alert the body’s other cells, organs and networks to ‘features’ that might be advantageous for it to ‘know’ about, to react appropriately. What Stewart and Cohen are saying is that the ‘stuff’ of the mind is a map or model or ‘figment’ of reality that evolved in brains large enough and structured in such a way as to have the capacity to create such a model. In humans, the ‘self’ is placed at the centre of this model, since it is its most important feature, what all its detections are symbolically oriented towards.

In simple brains, it is enough for the mind/brain to simply process sense perceptions. Fast moving yellow thing running through the forest is perceived, brain alerts the rest of the body to these perceived features, and conditioning prompts fight/flight/freeze response. There is no need for ‘sense-making’ in the human sense of the word.

In more complex, entangled brains, there is a capacity to ‘make sense’ of things by constructing a much more complex model, develop hypotheses about the ‘meaning’ of sense perceptions, and create an entire belief system or ‘worldview’ around these hypotheses. This model requires labeling of phenomena in order to keep them sorted and useful for ‘meaning-making’, which requires the invention of abstract, symbolic language. The model also requires the development of concepts like time and space in order to sort and categorize these phenomena. Otherwise, as neuroscientists and philosophers have wryly said, we couldn’t make sense of them because they’d all be happening at once in the same place.

All of these are purely constructs of the mind/brain. They are not ‘reality’, but merely arbitrary representations (‘figments’) of reality, much as a map is not the territory, just a vastly oversimplified representation of parts of it. Our brains, Stewart and Cohen say:

“… project the inner world of figments back onto our conception of the outer world of reality so our inner, virtual world appears to be out there“.

So the real ‘version’ of the world (e.g. the light-waves of frequencies we perceive as ‘red’), and the virtual figment of it (e.g. our perception of ‘red’) are superimposed on each other, a little perhaps like Google Maps’ combined aerial photos and maps, if those photos were live images.

What we call ‘reality’ is hence a mashed together version of our sense perceptions (our senses’ extremely limited and incoherent ‘view’ of what is apparently happening ‘outside’ the body) and the complex model that our minds/brains construct to ‘make sense’ of these perceptions.

What is reality then? We can’t know. It is just this. I know; you’re tired of me saying that. Not going to go into that again now.

In a recent article, Steven Newbury argues that the evolution of human brains was driven by the need and/or capacity to ‘predict’ the future, because of the increasing complexity of human ‘civilized’ societies and the commensurate needs for more sophisticated survival and adaptation tools.

I wanted to believe him, since his views on civilization’s inevitable collapse mirror my own. But the ‘future’ is actually, I would argue, just an idea, a uniquely human construct, a categorization within the synthetic model of the mind/brain. The fact that something apparently happens as a ‘consequence’ of something else that has apparently happened (eg we run out of affordable oil ︎ the global economy collapses) is just the brain’s sense-making. The ‘meaning-making’ of correlation and consequence is just part of the model. But since the whole idea of time is likewise just a construct of the brain, and not ‘real’ at all (a fact that theoretical physicists are increasingly acknowledging), the whole idea of correlation and causation is therefore just a fiction, a story.

Does this fiction at least have ‘predictive value’? Maybe. It does until it doesn’t. If there is consistent correlation, it doesn’t much matter practically speaking whether there’s causation or not. Until the correlation ceases, or the model is changed due to some additional circumstances being considered.

The 2,000-year-old “red sky at morning” weather prediction for sailors, for example, only applies at certain latitudes, but it’s been usefully predictive for a long time. Conversely, my apartment building does not have floors ending in the number 4 because in many East Asian languages the word for 4 is close to the word for death. The convolutions builders have to go through to accommodate the myth (ie story) that there is correlation or causation between the two, prevails throughout much of the world. As long as we are conditioned by others’ assertions and stories that there is some correlation or causation, the evidence to the contrary really doesn’t matter much.

When we run out of affordable oil (well before the end of this century, according to most currently credible models), the global economy will collapse. Or else it won’t. In the model supporting this warning, there is a lot of compelling statistical ‘evidence’. We are conditioned to believe the evidence, and act accordingly, until it is disproven. Or we are conditioned to not believe the evidence, and to act in denial of it accordingly.

When the deer come to realize that the ‘fast-moving yellow thing’ in the next compound of the zoo cannot access their compound, their ‘learned response’ to that will re-condition them that their instinctive fight/flight/freeze reaction to it is unnecessary, and their behaviour will change. At least until some tiger manages to breach the fence.

Likewise, when we are taught by people we trust that, despite the ‘evidence’ of our eyes, the sun doesn’t actually revolve around the Earth, our brains will tweak the model to reflect the new evidence, though we will probably still behave as if it still revolved around the Earth. Our brains are capable of juggling multiple incompatible stories at once, as long as they are both useful.

Do we actually need any model or story at all to function perfectly well in the world? Wild creatures don’t seem to need them. But our lives, in the bewilderingly complex prosthetic modern human world, are immeasurably different from those of wild creatures.

I have a few friends who say they have no sense that selves, or time, or any of the other constructs of the human mind are real, and these friends seem to function perfectly well without that sense. Their (bodies’) apparent behaviour, like wild creatures’ (and ours as well) is completely biologically and culturally conditioned, given the circumstances of the moment. The story of why humans exhibit these behaviours, and how these behaviours can be ‘made sense of’ in the context of our model of reality, is just an afterthought. My ‘self-less’ friends’ brains, just like ours, continue to do the sense-making and tweak the model. The only difference is that they realize the model and sense-making are just fictions, stories, and completely unnecessary to behave the only way they could have anyway. That, they say, is kind of liberating, but it has zero impact on their actual behaviour.

Steven writes:

“For centuries, human exceptionalism has dictated that the centralised brain is the pinnacle of a biological hierarchy, a ladder of complexity leading inevitably to us. But evolution does not optimise for ‘superiority’. It optimises solely for thermodynamic fitness.”

“From a systems architecture perspective, a brain is a metabolically exorbitant piece of hardware. It requires a massive, continuous flow of energy to maintain. The vast majority of animal life on Earth gets by just fine without one, relying on distributed nerve nets and local reflex arcs.”

“Brains evolved because a reflex is purely reactive. A centralised brain builds an internal model of the world to shift from reacting to the present to anticipating the future.”

Where I disagree with Steven, for the reasons I’ve noted above, is in his belief that this “internal model” actually serves any evolutionary purpose or has any actual survival value.

The obvious question is, if this “exorbitant” piece of hardware doesn’t actually serve any essential purpose, why is this whole model still being perpetuated from generation to generation?

My answer, tentatively (and of course this is just a story too), is that the development of the internal model of self and reality, uniquely in the human brain, was nature’s experiment in her endless endeavour to increase the ‘fitness’ of life on Earth. It would seem logical that a predictive model that closely mapped to the existential features of reality would be a useful evolutionary advance. But I believe it actually isn’t. The existential features of ‘real’ reality are vastly, unfathomably more complex than even the most complex model simulations that the human brain is capable of constructing, could ever comprehensively and usefully mimic.

And because the human model is powerful enough to let us imagine truly horrific, utterly fictitious stories about the reconstructed past and invented future, not only is the model largely useless as a predictive construct, it can render us emotionally ill and incapacitated. Only humans, seeing the world through this invented model and trying to ‘make sense’ of it, can feel dread and anxiety about an imagined future, and shame and jealousy and regret and nostalgia about a completely fictitious reimagined past.

And thanks to the commensurate invention of abstract symbolic language, we can then inflict our fictional imaginings, and the associated negative feelings and concocted stories, on other humans, so that this emotional illness becomes infectious to the point it becomes the ubiquitous human condition.

That’s tragic, I would say, but evolution is a constant experiment, and not every evolutionary ‘attempt’ is an advance. Some of nature’s evolutionary experiments have led to massive extinctions.

And perhaps the experiment with entangled brains capable of creating ‘credible’ sophisticated models of ‘actual’ reality is one of those tragic experiments.

As Ronald Wright said in his wry summation of human destiny in A Short History of Progress:

“It’s entirely up to us. If we fail — if we blow up or degrade the biosphere so it can no longer sustain us — nature will merely shrug and conclude that letting apes run the laboratory was fun for a while but in the end a bad idea.”

Of course, if there’s actually no such thing as free will — if our behaviour is in fact entirely the result of our biological and cultural conditioning given the circumstances of the moment — then it’s not up to us at all. We are just acting out our conditioning.

John Gray’s much dourer prognosis in Straw Dogs acknowledges this lack of free will, and leads him to conclude:

“Homo rapiens is only one of very many species, and not obviously worth preserving. Later or sooner, it will become extinct. When it is gone Earth will recover. Long after the last traces of the human animal have disappeared, many of the species it is bent on destroying will still be around, along with others that have yet to spring up. The Earth will forget mankind. The play of life will go on.”

If he’s correct, then the experiment with brains that can invent models of reality, and then come to believe those models to be ‘real’, will probably not be repeated. Nature will have learned from her mistake, and will turn her hand to trying out other marvels, far more wondrous than our sad, struggling human brains could ever fathom.