The new neuroscience -- functional, systems neuroscience which has mathematical explanations for how our minds really work -- explains how cells fit into a larger system. This shows that the analogy between us individual humans are LIKE cells in a brain, in more ways than we ever knew before, in more precision and detail.
This post attempts to explain that analogy, without oversimplifying too much, and without neglecting the important connections between ideas which really do need to be connected.
1. Metaphors in general
(Hey, the new neuroscience actually helps us understand how metaphors work in the brain!)
Metaphors really can have a strong scientific foundation, which can even reflect mathematical transforms.
Some metaphors are extremely important to our balance and our sanity, requiring attention but also care of course to remember the limits of the partial equivalences.
One metaphor I use a lot in technology and practical life is "First we must crawl before we can walk, then run, then fly."
Again and again I see people utterly frustrated or confused because they try to fly before they have even mastered the art of walking. Last Sunday, I discussed this with the father of two small boys... and we remembered the exceptions we know where a boy refused to crawl and insisted on walking from the start. Those exceptions did fine in the end. Another key aspect of mammal biology is diversity. The gene pool itself is a dynamical system which has evolved to exploit a high degree of diversity, diversity which sometimes makes the systems as a whole stronger, though there is also conflict of course in animal life.
2. New Systems Neuroscience of Intelligence and Neural Networks
But this morning, I am reminded of another more fundamental metaphor, of huge importance. The metaphor that WE each are like a cell in a larger organism.
In fact, it is more than JUST a metaphor.
The metaphor is more useful when we understand more about functional systems neuroscience, as in the paper by Werbos and Davis, easy to find on the web.
(We paid the open access charge, and scholar.google.com has "advanced search" when you click on the three lines.)
Brain cells are each individual creatures in a way, in their own right, with a rich family history going back almost a billion years. They are less independent (and less in conflict)
than their ancestors hundreds of millions of years ago, but they are still capable of very strong "personal" motives which science works especially hard to understand, while ALSO having occasional genetic deviations like cancer or infection, which our immune system is evolved to cope with, with a type of intelligence of its own, not the same as that of the brain but reflective of the same mathematics. A healthy organism does not CHOOSE between having a powerful, effective, agile brain VERSUS an effective immune system; it balances the two, and supports both.
In our role as cells in a brain...
3. Brain and Soul
We individual humans have both brain and soul, in my view, which I have described in great detail, posted in part at werbos.com but refined much more through the years.
BOTH parts of us are learning systems, embedded in larger systems. The body/brain part has a lot more natural conflict with other brain/body people. The soul part is
much more like a cell embedded in neocortex.
[In follow-on discussions, I see how many people are attached so strongly to some older view of what "soul" is about that they assume I mean something different from what i DO mean. Those papers describe how I came to believe that we each are a SYMBIOSIS of what you see ["QED stuff"] and what you usually don't [yes, dark matter is real. BOTH parts are intelligent systems, with different properties.]
Cells in neocortex COMBINE both a kind of stratification, and diversity of very basic drives and principles, BUT ALSO the kind of diversity which occurs between cells of the same type even across time as they LEARN. Learning, and the uniqueness of what each cell learns, is absolutely fundamental to how the system works and how life feels to any cell.
They are each unique; a neuron which simply inputs and outputs the exact same signal as other neurons has no value added in its information, and is useless to the system. (As with walking and crawling, there are caveats; for example, some signals are difficult enough for an individual cell to get right, in a way which leads to "cell assemblies", groups of cells with very similar behavior, adding some fault tolerance.) The brain has "garbage collection" systems, brothers to the immune systems, which simply dissolve cells which have low value added, in a way which reminds me of the Book of Esdras in the apocrypha of the Bible, and of the earliest AI designs. Many souls do end up that way. What keeps cells and souls alive is the FEEDBACK from the larger system they are part of... FEEDBACK... awareness and response to a certain type of signal which comes from cell to cell within the larger system.
4. Making Sense of Our First Person Perspective
For me... what keeps me alive, most mornings, is conscious AWARENESS (and thus responsiveness) to that kind of feedback signal, a nonverbal signal, BOTH in brain and in soul, coming from multiple directions (as cells receive feedback form multiple other cells), ranging from my wife, to the light I see and bird(s) I hear out the open window, and to "qi" from several levels. Many times I think of this nonverbal feedback signal as "light life love (LLL)" but I also understand it as a kind of modulated backpropagation signal, governed by equations which I was the one to first introduce to humanity. (My book The Roots of Backpropagation from Wiley covers that history, but I have posted many further aspects on the web, for example at vixra.org.)
It is crucial that this is a NONVERBAL signal, applicable to ALL mammals (and many more organisms, with more or less force). ONE view of first-order sanity is that the word-processing ASPECT of our brains can learn to be in harmony with what really matters, the ruling part, the "emotional" system, which USES words as just one of an arsenal of tools, which we are driven to try to learn to use better, but we all have a lot to learn.
One of my friends uses the term "FFF" (friends, family, faith) in a unifying, motivating, driving concept, much as I use LLL. My first response to that was:
These are two sides of the same coin. The LLL is the ACTUAL underlying mechanism. "FFF" is basically a MODEL we learn in our mind to try to EXPLAIN what causes the sensation of LLL to rise or fall. But as I type this, I realize ... because of the DIVERSITY of what we learn and do, what works well as a model for one person's life may work better or worse for another. More concretely -- the "F" faith aspect may be very different in practice for different people, simply because THEIR connections, needs and roles within the same greater system may be different.
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5. What This Means For Human Society Today
In the dark back rooms of my unsleeping awareness... I remember some tricky aspects I remember but rarely voice, because of how easily people get confused to the point of scary violence.
DOES the brain have something like the caste system, and would the noosphere itself have such a strong partitioning, supported even by its immune system?
First crucial caveat: a human caste system which does NOT precisely mirror the simpler but stronger division of cell types we need in a brain can easily decay into radical instability, failing to deliver functionality but also delivering terrible conflict and waste of potential. DESIGN of the subsystem rules is absolutely essential to replicating mammal level intelligence or more, and avoiding very gross instabilities which may become fatal. THIS IS A CURRENT SERIOUS CHALLENGE to the "IT" part of modern human life, where human progress in designing the internet of the future is now on a path to instabilities which will be fatal to humanity if we don;t do better, getting the math right.
(I will always remember how I learned about the "guard rail" requirements for intelligent systems, as I learned to upgrade my initial design for Dual Heuristic Programming DHP
as described in chapter 13 of the Handbook of Intelligent Control, edited by White and Sofge, chapter posted at werbos.com/Mind.html).
The most important partitioning is the partition between the NEOCORTEX "half" of the mammal brain, and the DECISION-MAKING (including strong emotions and values and decision commitments) "half". The neocortex (plus a few pieces of thalamus and hippocampus which are part of that same system) is the "university of the brain", responding to TWO types of "LLL" feedback -- the ancient striving for truth, judged in the thalamus and in giant pyramid cells in neocortex, AND a slightly more modern creativity rewarding system, a bit like professors being rewarded for policy IDEAS or DESIGNs which proved interesting to the decision-making part.
Werbos and Davis gives actual data ON cells in the neocortex part (giant pyramid cells, interneurons AND hippocampus cells), the "half" which performs "cognitive prediction".
Dan Levine's new book, Healing the Reason-Emotion Split, directly address the issue of learning to harmonize the "cognitive prediction" and "cognitive optimization" "halves"
of our personality. The very design of the learning mechanisms of the mammal brain pushes us to TRY to heal and balance ourselves, but IT STILL REQUIRES LEARNING.
When I discussed this with my wife early this morning, I used a metaphor I learned long ago in childhood -- the metaphor of riding a bike, learning to maintain balance and poise WHILE in motion. We are DESIGNED (by genes) to DO that learning, but still we must actually DO the work of learning in order to expand our sanity, and learn to survive ever more challenging (and important) tasks, not only in body but in soul. We are "called" (by "who we are, inside us") to GROW. (To survive, to grow and to expand our situational awareness, as in my chapter in the new book edited by Carpemier and Anmol, published earlier this year.)
And so, like cells in the brain, we are always driven to BALANCE and reconcile several streams of feedback, expanding our own personal value added of information but ALSO working hard to connect better with other cells different from us, providing information and responding to feedback, feedback from "on high" and "from below".
To sustain MY consciousness, and avoid war with myself, I always am aware of the need to harmonize at least the three basic LEVELS of my consciousness, like the three levels stressed by KuKai -- the "physical level" (from helping fix thing in my house and managing my physical body, from cells to qi), the "speech level" (normal interactions of humans,
from conversation to global politics and even a bit of SETI technology), and "the level of the gods" (our life as souls as part of the largest system). The gravure by Melissa Cody "hangs in in the "narthex of my mind". (And I pray that Erdogan does not now restrict access to the first real physical narthex I saw, in Hagia Sophia, itself a kind of giant pyramid cell in the soul of humanity.)
Best of luck...
Paul
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My response to one of the comments received back:
On Thu, May 23, 2024 at 3:15 AM Edwards, Jonathan <jo.edwards@ucl.ac.uk> wrote:
I am sorry it was so dense. That was inevitable, trying to describe such a thick network of connections while I still remembered the whole picture.
In truth, that blog post REALLY called for a whole book, with all the important explanations, background, and such. But so do many of these things.
For example -- as we see parallels across multiple LEVELS (levels of approximation, really) of emergent behavior, it is somewhat complicated to keep the different levels straight even as we understand the parallels. I have seen that kind of challenge playing out in MANY fields of science.
Pribram's edited book from Erlbaum on Quantum physics and the brain... includes a great example, which I am glad I could discuss with Karl in person
in relaxed, "holistic" full human communication. At one point, he was very clear about ACTUAL quantum effects in brain, VERSUS metaphoric use of quantum physics ideas and math in constructing differential equation models which were all very classical neural network designs.
When people here talk about Tosen, I think of how HE tried to discuss different levels. I recall talks by program directors in physics, biology and electric power all very
emphatic about different levels in the systems they studied.
In this case...
You could even ask "DO individual human people EXIST at all?" (And then later, "If so, what ARE they?")
Some people could even look at a rat and say "There is no organism there, only just a pile of atoms. Or just an idea in my imagination."
The field of psychiatry has a lot to say about humans asking these questions, but let me not confuse things even further by adding yet another level of abstraction here!
As an individual human myself, I recognize that I am not a perfect, Platonic closed system. But identifying individual humans is a useful starting point, a useful approximation.
And I see most of us as a SYMBIOSIS, as I said, of one intelligent system which we all see, the brain/body system, and of what I call "soul," for want of a better word.
I fully understand how many people inject many, many assumptions into the word "soul" which I disagree with, but it helps to have SOME word for
that real aspect of our intelligence which is grounded more in dark matter than in atoms.
Just as lichen is a symbiosis of parts which have different properties, important for the biologist to understand, so too do the mundane and soul parts of
each of us have different properties (as well as links and parallels, which tend to vary a lot from person to person, just as what we have learned varies a lot).
IT IS FAR LESS ACCURATE to think of the body/brain part as like a cell in a larger body than it is to think of the soul that way.
But even for QED-matter body brains, there is a lot of variation. There are three main "continents" of intelligent animal life on earth:
(1) the line going from octupi to giant squid, truly individual and separate minds; (2) ants and bees etc, which possess a kind of "hive mind," as E.O. Wilson has described;
(3) our line, peaking with humans and cetaceans, which is INTERMEDIATE between 1 and 2 in degree of sociality. Again, e.O. Wilson should not
be underestimated.
IS a human tribe "A mind"? Is each cell in your body "an intelligent system"? reality is often defined by continuous variables, by matters of degree, yea even unto fuzzy logic.
Binary modelos are often gross distortions.
But "soul" is another matter. It seems this is as much as I should write right now, in any case; after all, I got into many details at werbos.com
and in my chapter for Come's new book. (Earlier draft attached.)
Best of luck, Paul
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