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

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       THREE The Plastic Brain

      Every civilised human being, whatever his conscious development, is still an archaic man at the deepest levels of his psyche. Just as the human body connects us with the mammals and displays numerous relics of earlier evolutionary stages going back even to the reptilian age, so the human psyche is likewise a product of evolution which, when followed up to its origins, shows countless archaic traits.

      C.G. Jung

      ‘Organism’…means a self-regulating system of processes tending to maintain themselves, i.e. to maintain the life of the individual or species. But the processes of the organism do not of themselves maintain life; without the continuous influence of the environment the internal organic processes cannot sustain life for more than a moment, their tendency being to break down organic material towards more stable states.

       Lancelot Law Whyte ¹²

      Bodies as Systems

      One of the most remarkable and pervasive characteristics of the genetically designed body, throughout the animal kingdom, is the extent to which it retains its form despite the continual interactions with a changing world. This property has recently been highlighted by Chilean scientists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, who refer to it as ‘autopoiesis’, or ‘self-organisation’, though it was remarked upon as long ago as 1937 by Sir Charles Sherrington in his Gifford Lectures Man on His Nature.13

      Life is an example of the way an energy-system, in its give-and-take with the energy-system around it, can continue to maintain itself for a period as a self-centred, so to say, self-balancing unity. Perhaps the most striking feature of it is that it acts as though it ‘desired’ to maintain itself. But we do not say of the spinning of a heavy top which resists being upset that it ‘desires’ to go on spinning. The very constitution of the living-system may compel it to…¹⁴

      And it follows that:

      Life as an energy-system is so woven into the fabric of the Earth’s surface that to suppose a life isolated from the rest of that terrestrial world even briefly gives an image too distorted to resemble life. All is dove-tailed together.¹⁵

      Animals do not exist by ‘being’; they exist by happening. An animal is not like a coffee mug, which was once made and now can be full or empty, warm or cold, sitting on the table or hanging from its hook, but basically the same ‘thing’, constituted of the same stuff, and continuing to be so until it breaks. An animal is like a whirlpool; it derives its relative stability, and even its form, from its motion, and it is only kept moving through its interactions with the wider system of which it is part. Try to take the vortex home in a bucket and you will be disappointed. Disconnect an animal from its ‘life support systems’ and it too begins to lose its form and fall apart into constituents that are simpler, more independent of one another, more dead.

      There is nothing very mysterious about this view. It only needs stressing in the context of a lopsided scientific tradition which has taught us that the only way to know something properly is to take it to pieces, and study those exhaustively. This analytic, reductionistic approach works well in some areas of enquiry, most notably in the inorganic worlds of physics, chemistry and geology. But if you pull an animal to bits, whether literally or conceptually, it dies. It loses the integrity, the interwovenness that is its central defining characteristic. And it loses the form that only emerges as a result of this interwovenness.

      The Inner Web

      To understand the body, and all the complicated psychological harmonies that have been overlaid on this basic physical melody by evolution, we have to remember its essential embeddedness in the wider system of the world. But we also have to pay attention to the fine details of its internal make-up. An animal is composed of inner systems that are interlaced so finely that they too cannot exist, or be comprehended, simply as a collection of parts. No subsystem of an animal stands alone; the heart, the lungs, the stomach and the kidneys only make sense in terms of each other. You can look at their tissues separately under a microscope, and describe their structure. But if you want to get very far in explaining what they are, you will find that the boundaries between them rapidly dissolve.¹⁶

      The same applies to the way animals behave. We have to see them as much in terms of inner co-ordination as of differentiation. Even a very small and simple creature has to keep track of three crucial aspects of its world: what, at the moment, it needs, or needs most; what opportunities the world is currently affording (as revealed by its stock of sensibilities); and what it is capable of doing, its repertoire of possible responses to differing combinations of desires and opportunities.

      If your powers of perception are extremely limited – say to the concentrations of one or two nutrients in the stream you live in – and your needs are mercifully few – for example, that the levels of concentration of these nutrients are neither too weak nor too strong, and your actions are limited to orienting yourself in one direction rather than another (so that you can keep facing upstream), and opening and closing your pores…if you are as simple as that, then it makes sense for the connections between need, opportunity and capability to be clearly and unambiguously specified, so you do not have to worry about what to do next. You are a simple little soft machine, with reflexes that work to keep you alive, as long as your food keeps coming and your pores do not clog up. You are well adapted to a world that varies only within the limits that you are capable of responding to, and when it gets too hot or too cold, too dry or too salty, or when a family moves in next door that has things like you on its menu, then you have not got a clue what to do, and you and your kind are in trouble.

      But our animal forebears rapidly grew to be more complicated than this, in almost every possible way. First, their physical structure is larger, and certainly more differentiated. They have specialized organs, each of which confers a range of new perceptual and behavioural abilities, and they found ways of moving about: using fills or wings or tails or legs. Their world comprises more needs (as each internal organ requires particular conditions to be able to work), and certainly more sensibilities and more capabilities. If you can see and smell and run around, life gets more interesting.

      Now the perennial problem of prioritization, the question ‘What do I do next?’, is no longer a trivial one, and simple reflexes will not do. There are too many shifting contingencies for that to work. You need some sort of information system that will provide a way of letting the eye and the legs know what the stomach needs, and of letting the stomach know what is on the menu, so that it can lay the table with the right kinds of cutlery and condiments. You will be handicapped, in other words, if you are not able to co-ordinate the different aspects of your insides with each other, and to co-ordinate your system as a whole with the shifting kaleidoscope of threats and opportunities that are round about you. The price that any society pays for specialization is the need for internal communication – and the more complex the community, the more sophisticated its СКАЧАТЬ