Noises from the Darkroom: The Science and Mystery of the Mind. Guy Claxton

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      Since man is above all future-making, he is, above all, a swarm of hopes and fears.

       J. Ortega y Gasset

      Brain-Mind language

      If we talk about the workings of minds in the language of commonsense, we can consider the kinds of important, human things that we want to consider—hopes, fears, aspirations, experience. But in doing so we have to take the concepts of everyday language on trust. If there is something wrong with the assumptions about the mind that are built in to, these categories and idioms, no amount of vernacular talk will reveal it. Our familiar ‘mind-language’ is too suspect; if we rely on it we may be inadvertently begging the most crucial questions.

      On the other hand ‘brain-language’, the neuroscientists’ vocabulary of neurons and synapses, enzymes and axons, is not up to the job either. It may be ‘sounder’ in some ways, but it is simply too low level, too fine-grain, to enable us to discuss the issues we need to discuss. Human beings are systems, and one of the things this means is that they have properties at ‘higher’ levels of organization that are not predictable or explicable in terms of the properties of ‘lower’ levels. At each level of discourse one needs a new language for talking about ‘wholes’, a language which builds on the language of ‘parts’, but which can say things that the language of parts cannot.

      (This incidentally is the reason why currently fashionable attempts to talk about, or worse to ‘explain’, consciousness in terms of the language and phenomena of quantum physics – or any other kind of physics, come to that – are nothing short of ridiculous. While claiming to be based in ‘new paradigm’ thinking, they are in fact reductionism ad absurdum. The parallel between the (presumed) ‘free will’ of human beings and the ‘indeterminacy’ of fundamental particles is of no more interest or significance than a pun like Thomas Grey’s ‘They went and told the sexton, and the sexton toll’d the bell’. It is the basis of a cheap joke, not of a serious intellectual conversation. The sciences of nuclear physics, chemistry, biochemistry, genetics, neurophysiology, cognitive psychology, sociology, anthropology and cosmology are distinct, and hierarchically arranged, for very good reasons. Each attempts to find the best language for talking about a particular level of organization within the cosmic system as a whole, and to do so it must pay attention to what the people working in the next layer up and the next layer down are also saying. But to jumble up the language of quarks and the language of consciousness is just conceptual vandalism.)

      To talk of the brain is to talk in a dialect that is vital to builders – brick-laying and plumbing, foundations and joists – but which is quite unequal to the needs and interests of an interior designer, who uses a vocabulary of spaces, functions, aesthetics and style; a language of human purpose and desire. ‘Brain’ is builder language for one specialized part of the body. ‘Mind’ is designer language for the functions that the brain carries out.

      An architect needs to be bi-lingual: she has to be able to talk to both electricians and designers in the language that is appropriate to the concerns and problems of each. One of the main assumptions on which this book rests is that we need to be architects in order to stand a chance of getting an adequate overview – let alone a comprehensive understanding – of how human beings work. We need at times to be able to talk the language of human beings’ fears and aspirations; at others to see what understandings are offered by the construction of the brain; and at times to be able to explore the traditional concerns of one in the language of the other. Just as new materials make possible creative solutions to old design problems, so cognitive science is making available ideas that give a new purchase on the perennial issues of ‘la condition humaine’. We have reached the point in our discussion where we begin to need to introduce ‘brain-mind language’.

      There are about 100 billion neurons in the average brain, so densely interconnected that there is a potential pathway that can be found between any two. Our intermediate-level brain-mind language has to respect what we know about the brain, but reduce this massive complexity into an image or a model that we can use to talk about the actions, needs and experiences of sophisticated animals. Over the last fifteen years or so brain researchers have revived a level of modelling first developed by Canadian neuropsychologist Donald Hebb back in 1949, in his classic book The Organisation of Behaviour.²⁴ Hebb’s achievement was to devise a way of thinking about the brain that was faithful to what was then known about its real biological nature, but which was easier to visualize. The revival of this approach, known as ‘neo-connectionism’, has drawn heavily on work in Artificial Intelligence, the science (or perhaps the art) of writing computer programs that simulate aspects of what people do, and the ways they do them.

      Let me give you a rather fanciful metaphor that captures the main ideas behind this kind of thinking. As you will see, even this simple image rapidly becomes quite intricate: the next few pages are the most ‘technical’ (despite the picturesque language) of the whole book. But bear with me. I shall not give you more detail than is necessary to follow the rest of the story as it unfolds. Without this overview of the brain-mind, and the way it does what it does, it will be difficult to understand how it is that the developing science of the mind offers us a radically new way of interpreting religion and religious experience.

      The Octopus Discotheque

      Imagine a small tropical island, perhaps a few hundred metres across, that has been colonized by a large troop of unusual octopuses who have turned it into a 24-hour-a-day discotheque. At an octopus disco you do not move around much. You all pile up in a big heap, and you extend your tentacles in all directions until you make contact with another octopus’s head. In fact we should really call these particular creatures ‘centipuses’, because they have not eight legs, but hundreds. These legs vary in length considerably, so that some of those whose heads you are touching are beside you, while others can be right across the other side of the dance-floor.

      Octopuses, who need their rest as much as anyone, cannot stay awake the whole time. In fact, at any moment, only a small proportion of the total clientele is actively awake. You can tell when an octopus is awake because its skin turns from a dull grey colour to a bright lobsterish pink – as if it has been boiled. When it is awake and ‘dancing’, all it does is make small movements of the tips of its tentacles, thereby making their presence felt by all those other octopuses it is touching. Each octopus can affect its contacts in one of two quite different ways. If it tickles, the octopus on the receiving end is irritated and stimulated, and becomes more likely to wake up itself. But if the first octopus caresses, the other is relaxed and calmed, and is inclined to fall asleep (or more deeply asleep, if it is already asleep). Strangely, these caresses mean that if octopus A has been giving octopus B a gentle, tranquillizing massage, B will become more responsive to other sources of stimulation as soon as A falls asleep.

      Each octopus wakes up when the total amount of tickling it is receiving from all the others who have their tentacles on its head, exceeds a certain amount. Like human beings, some octopuses are generally very sensitive, and will wake up and start squirming with only a couple of tickles. Others are heavy sleepers, and it takes the concerted tickling of dozens of tentacles before they come to and join the dance. And others are choosy: they will respond to tickles from certain other octopuses of whom they are fond, but will be more resistant to the approaches of those they care for less.

      There are actually three kinds of octopus: those that live on the windward side of the island; those that live on the leewards; and those that live in the middle. Those on the windward have some of their tentacles resting in the sea, and they can be woken up, as well as by tickles on their heads, by particular patterns of waves. These are called the Lookout Squad. СКАЧАТЬ