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

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       FIVE Mosaic Mind

      I am large; there is a multitude within.

       Walt Whitman

      Brain Clumsiness:

       The Proliferation of Needs, Part 11

      As we look back along the evolutionary trajectory that was, eventually, to lead to homo sapiens, we can see the intricacy of our animal forbears becoming ever greater; and as it did so, the complexity of the operations required of their brains grew enormously. As the range of needs, the repertoire of deeds, and the sophistication of the information they can pick up got bigger and bigger, so the problem of keeping track of all the different operations became more formidable.

      The brain began, in evolutionary terms, to adopt the solution that is typical of almost any system of increasing complexity. Just as the body had differentiated itself into subsystems (one of these subsystems being the nervous system itself), so the brain sought a way of managing its increasingly unwieldy complexity by the same strategy. Indeed the noted American cognitive scientist Herb Simon argued in an important essay published in 1962, called ‘the Architecture of Complexity’,³⁰ that it is part of the internal ‘logic’ of complexity that an evolving system has, at some point, to adopt a hierarchical structure, with the whole breaking into intermediate parts (what the writer Arthur Koestler called ‘holons’³¹), which themselves may also comprise further sub-assemblies.³²

      Effectiveness is Not Necessarily Tidy

      The form of internal organization that the brain-mind develops does not need to look very logical from the outside. One of the mistakes that brain researchers have sometimes made is to assume that the brain is designed on the basis of elegance and economy. But evolution, as we have seen several times already, does not, indeed cannot, work like that. Natural selection has to build on what is already there, it has to work with the kinds of mutations that just happen to occur, and it can only take account of the particular local conditions that happen to obtain. It can never say: ‘Hold on a minute; this brain is getting untidy. Let’s go back to the drawing board and start again.’ Paul Churchland talks in his book Matter and Consciousness of a car he used to have when he was a student. One of his friends insisted that it was not so much a car as ‘a squadron of nuts and bolts flying in loose formation’. So it is with the brain. We can ask how it has solved the problem of making sure you can quickly find the right ‘book’ in a rapidly expanding ‘library’. But we should not expect to find anything as neat as the Dewey Decimal System. We would be well advised to expect to find something that behaves like a patchwork of linked components, rather than something with a clean overall design.

      There are of course many ways of sub-dividing the work of the brain, just as there are many ways of effectively organizing one’s own kitchen. A kitchenologist could no doubt come along to each of our homes and convince us that it is irrational, or uneconomical, to keep the paper napkins in the same drawer as the bagels, and she may well be right. But the much more important consideration is: does the way I have it organized work for me? If I’m having a phase of Italian cooking, why should I not keep the tagliatelle, the tinned tomatoes, the cookbook and the oregano all together? And if I’ve gone off Italian, and am now wild about Thai, why should I not continue to keep the Italian ingredients together, if I have got used to the arrangement, and make space for the coconut cream and the freeze-dried coriander alongside them? The organization of the brain is likely to be a record of our evolving preferences and strategies for feeding, housing, protecting and perpetuating ourselves, in just the same way.

      So instead of one big ‘theory’ about how the world works, and how to shove it around to my own advantage, the brain begins to divide – functionally, not structurally – into a library of ‘minitheories’³³ Each of these sub-minds is designed to tie together a package of knowledge, skill and experience that can be brought to bear on a particular domain of life. This package specifies what it is for – the purposes to which it can be appropriately put; in what conditions it can be used – what environment it is likely to work in; and what it can do – what abilities, mental and physical, it makes available.

      Two points about these minitheories. First, nothing is needed, in the brain, to play the role of the ‘librarian’, of course. The currently active priorities make themselves known by priming their relevant minitheories to different extents (depending on the urgency of the need or desire); and the sensory receptors feed activation into those minitheories that seem to match what is going on outside. The network quite effortlessly performs its job of selecting a course of action, by waiting to see which ‘gang’ awakens first, and thereby activates its associated bundle of dispositions and expectations. And secondly, the concept of a ‘minitheory’ (or a ‘module’) is one that bridges the domains of ‘brain-language’ and ‘mind-language’. As you zoom in on a minitheory, so you can start to see its fine structure, and describe it in the language of octopus gangs and ultimately in terms of individual neurons and their properties. As you pan back from any particular minitheory (as we are in the process of doing), so you are able to see more clearly the whole mosaic mind-scape of which it is just one part.

      Keeping the Brain on Track

      One of the major СКАЧАТЬ