Leaving Psychiatry. J. R. Ó’Braonáin. M.D.
we might say it is not in the spatial complexity so much as the complexity of elements that mind emerges, of there being a potpourri of different neurotransmitters and different types of neurons and glia, along with a bewildering complexity of intracellular machinery. Yet once again so what? In an age when we have many who literally believe that oxytocin is love, that dopamine is hedonism and reward, that serotonin or GABA is calm, that anandamide is bliss, in even dismissing these scientistic horrors, how does the immaterial property “emerge” from the complex co-existence and operations of all these neurotransmitters in the same brain. Does consciousness emerge in there being a half dozen herbs in the chemical soup, or is it less, or is it more? How does the complexity in neurotransmitters interact with that of glia and neuronal shape and size to create mind? And where might the threshold be found between zombie and person? And once again we are appealing to an alchemical argument in the emergence of one from the other. Now they might say it is not in the complexity of the spatial properties, or the number of arrangements, but in the temporal complexity. Once again so what? And once again we can return to the train analogy. How might we conceive it to be possible for the train God to emerge from the fact of some trains always running in perpetuity down the tracks, others released at a given frequency from their stations, some traveling under contingent modal schedules of supply and demand of special occasion etcetera. Music also depends greatly upon temporality of physical events and yet the instruments and sound waves can neither compose the music nor listen to themselves. Or we might imagine it possible for us to build a computer in the imago of the brain, building up the elements of the circuits within circuits one by one, testing dynamic frequencies of substructural components until somehow what emerges is the conscious computer that we have taken as an article of faith to have passed the test to convince us has a mind like our own (and contra Turing, this will always necessarily involve an article of faith). After all, what is so special about proteins, fats and fluids when these might simply be material realizations of on/off functions and spatial arrangements which might be achieved by other non-biological material means, or even the abstractions of a model that, like mind in mind, be the idea of a model. One day they might say “aha, a circuitry of a billion neuronal switches arranged like a spiral within a spiral here running at 70Hz, and a 5 billion unit helix shaped circuit there running at 10 Hz, with each node in the helix connected to fixed points in the spiral, this is the basic model from which consciousness emerges and a mind comes to say ‘cogito ergo sum’ when we attach up to some communicative output”. If the spiral is to appear similar to that of the galaxy or if the helices to resemble DNA there would be those to ponder the spatial correspondences. The esoterica in the shared symbology would be the stuff of many new age books. Is the universe then conscious they would ask? Is DNA? As above, so below. But regardless of what spatio-temporal correlate to consciousness is the threshold of its apparent emergence, what would they have really found if they think they found it? What have they explained, except to open the door to mystery all over again.
The fact that the above is a gross simplification of the brain is acknowledged. Yet I would submit to the reader that when one takes a partial Cartesian turn and comes to dwell within their own mind for a reflective moment and seeing it as the you who you are, and then takes an honest look at brain as the material thing it is, that they can only be left with the conclusion that words such as property and substance dualism and emergence are stand ins for others better fitting the occasion, those being supra-material alchemy or, better yet, a miracle. Now an alchemy implies an alchemist I’ll grant you, just as a miracle implies a miracle worker. And so what? Let us not yet launch into that question or recoil from the implications of the same, foreclosing on what ought to be the moment of being caught suspended in confrontation with the miraculous. My contention is that mind and brain are metaphysical categories so radically different as to be radically irreconcilable. Just to restate, I am not proposing this to be a devilish problem for which we have yet to arrive at a solution, like an understanding of what caused the plague in the days before microbiology in its current form. I am proposing that the metaphysical gulf between brain and mind is so great as to not allow for the possibility of a solution. The horizon of an answer in the distance that the neuroscientist sees is simply a projection of their own wish, a faith in their own scientistic eschatology. And I am willing to wager in particular that what Chalmers calls the hard problem, i.e. the explanation for consciousness as the ground upon which all mental operations must stand, can and will never be solved to the satisfaction of an honest neuroscientist. Any awaiting of a new science or paradigm shift is as much an article of faith as the belief in a miracle.
Part of the problem lay in the language. Neuroscientists speak of the “reward circuitry” of the brain without there being a silicon chip or electrical wire in sight, and in full knowledge that so many loops of connection are found in the brain as to make the analogy of “circuit” trivial. And computer scientists program what they call “neural networks” without a single neuron to be found anywhere outside of their heads and on the desktop in front of them. Psychologists increasingly talk of the nature/nurture problem as being a hardware/software problem (in so doing an insidious move from nature and family towards computer science), and cognitive scientists talk of the mind of a person as a processing unit of packages of information, and of the on/off state of neurons in terms of the binary “language” of the computer. Military engineers develop “smart” bombs and we talk of computers “solving a problem”, the smart phone app “suggesting” we buy something or the satnav in the car “telling” us the way. We live in an age when the computer is described in terms of mind and mind (and brain) in terms of computer, just as every age has chosen the apex technology of the day as an analogue for both mind and brain. And so with the lubricant applied to this psycholinguistic crime, we might be incredulous to hearing the fact that no computer, even an “artificial intelligence” (which dare I add has no consciousness), has ever calculated anything at all, any more than it would be true to say an umbrella protects us from the rain. We protect ourselves from the rain using the umbrella as a prosthetic. We build clocks that have a mechanism, the output of which is what we call the time. Yet a clock does not “work out” the time. It does not “tell us” the time. And an artificial intelligence might propagate and elaborate an output that might be fruitful, even unto novel fruit and better than we can imagine with our feeble minds. Yet so does a tree yield its own fruit. An artificial intelligence does not invent, innovate, compete or win at anything as there is no winner there within it, no internal witness to innovation. Likewise, there is no binary language, no ones and zeroes within the computer, and in its complexity we do not have calculation qua mental activity. We do not have intentionality between self and objects both internal and external with preferences driven by emotion, desire and telos. We simply have statics and dynamics of matter and energy, complex machines that we anthropomorphise into being like us. Similarly, no book communicates things to us. We read meaning into it or extract meaning from it that the authors mind is communicating to us through words on the page. But without two minds this is just ink and paper. As a test of the degree to which we have allowed these semantic conflations between man and machine cloud our judgment, try and explain the operations of any complex technology or machine used by a human without use of any terms that might be more properly descriptive of a person with a mind, of feeling and thought, of intentionality and teleology. And try and explain the operations of the mind without recourse to the language of technology. It is harder than you think, and more difficult than I wager would have been the case were we not indoctrinated in a philosophically malignant overreach of analogy and metaphor.
Returning to emergence
One way out of these troubles is to imagine that the “emergence” is not some kind of immaterial ghost from the brain (a substance dualism). Rather there is no immaterial mind at all and emergence is some kind of stand in term for a focus on a heretofore unacknowledged physical property no more special than any other (property or semantic dualism). And so the second dimension of a drawing emerges from the first and the third emerges from the second. If the 3 dimensional object is materialistic then heat emerges from it, mass and gravity emerges in interaction with other masses and mind emerges in a way consubstantial with its own materiality. Or it could be said that a brain qua supercomputer is doing its super mechanical thing and the mechanism has certain functions that require a partitioned “language”, functions of “modelling” itself in relation to other computers or modelling future outcomes so as to optimize future outputs in accord with a programmed equilibrium