Spiritual Brains
Original Content for STEEM: A Philosophical Meditation on Understanding our Essence as Both Material Brains and Immaterial Spirits.
Spiritual Brains
The science of psychology is going ever deeper into the essence of who we are. The brain is singled out as the material seat of the soul and gets dissected, analysed and tested to reveal the truth of how it functions and how it gives rise to perception, thought and action. The complexity of the brain is impressive, and it seems like a miracle that the billions of interconnected neurons gives rise to the richness of our conscious and unconscious life.
Despite the complexity and organic structure of the brain, we can understand and explain how it works in a general, abstract way. What this explanation reveals is as amazing as astronomy and as interesting as evolution, and yet it holds its own weight in wonder apart from these sciences.
Intelligent Brains
The brain consists essentially only of two elements: Intelligence and Consciousness. Intelligence is the mechanism that allows us to perceive, think and speak by recognizing and acting on patterns of information. Consciousness is the awareness that binds this information across various modes together so that we can understand them in a unified way.
The outer layer of the brain, a sheet called the neocortex, gives rise to our unique intelligence and is folded around older brain structures. The neocortex is the source of our distinctly human perceptive, feeling, thinking, speaking and acting intelligence. Despite this variety of abilities, the neocortex is everywhere processing information in the same general, intelligent way.
The neocortical sheet is a few centimeters thick and consists of six layers hierarchically structured. The structure is ideal to process sensory data by taking it in at the low end of the hierarchy, and then chunking it into more and more compact concepts as information moves up the hierarchy, enabling perception. This structure is also ideal to act out (unfold) sequences of patterns from compact concepts at the top into fine-motor actions at the bottom of the hierarchy.
Despite the seeming simplicity of the neocortical structure and function, it can account for almost all of our higher intelligence. The main difference between humans and other mammals, and even primates, is the relative size of our neocortex, which far exceeds any other animal.
Conscious Spirit
Another feature of our humanity, besides our pure intelligence, is our heightened, reflective consciousness. While it is safe to assume that the neocortex helps give rise to consciousness it has not been at all clear how this happens. We know that if any part of the neocortex is damaged, such as the part dealing with color, form, music, or facial recognition, then the corresponding consciousness of those parts will be damaged. But given that the neocortex helps gives rise to our consciousness, we should ask, how does it do it?
First, let us first see again what the neocortex is doing. If we take the function of the neocortex at face value, it is hierarchically compressing various kinds of information. When we hear a piece of a song we know, we can recall the gist of it, and when we hear the name of a song we know we can play out its details. When we know a thing visually, we can see it from a limited angle and reconstruct it in 3 dimensions. The neocortex is responsible for these things.
Second, let us look at what parts of the neocortex is associated with consciousness. Let us imagine we see a cup in front of us. We know that the neocortex is both processing tiny details concerning edges and angles, and that it is processing the overall gist of the cup regardless of perspective. And yet when we look at the cup, we see neither the low-level processing of edges and angles, nor the high-level gist of a perspectiveless cup. We see the cup from a particular angle with a particular form which indicates activation in the intermediate stage of processing.
From these observations it is reasonable to conclude that as the neocortex is compressing information, it is particularly the intermediate stage of this information processing that is associated with consciousness. Given this conclusion, let us now look at consciousness, to see if we may bridge the view from inside with the view on the neocortex from the outside.
Information Unified
To bridge these two things, we need to ask what the neocortex and consciousness can have in common. What they have in common must be extremely general, as it is difficult to find something an experience and a piece of matter, however structured, can have in common. Given what we have said however, the notion of information seems to be a good candidate.
In the neocortex information is processed, but it also seems possible to say that our consciousness gives us information. Information really means putting something into a particular form, and thereby excluding other possible formations. When consciousness takes on a particular form, a particular experience, it excludes certain other experiences. As a limit example, the reader will have an experience of existing right now, which then inherently excludes not existing.
But consciousness being informative seems not to be sufficient. Information is everywhere, in all kinds of forms, and consciousness must be a very distinct kind of information if that’s its essential nature. A distinguishing feature of consciousness is that it is unified - it is always a single field or experience, that draws together many elements into a coherent whole. Let us further suppose then, that the information is unified, or integrated, call it integrated information.
Coming back to the neocortex we can now find a link between its activity and the emergence of consciousness. If the neocortex is compressing information, the hierarchical process of compression will help create a kind of integrated information, and it is this distinct type of integrated information that accounts for the emergence of consciousness from the neocortex.
Luckily there is already a theory by Gulio Tononi that seeks to make this notion of integrated information mathematically precise, and empirically falsifiable. With a real theory of integrated information, we can then begin to measure how various parts of the neocortex helps generate consciousness.
With these discoveries, the uniformity of the neocortex as the seat to all higher cognitive functions, the computational work of figuring out the general principles of intelligence at work, and a theory of consciousness that emerges naturally from joint reflection on first-person experience and cognitive science, we finally have a way to understanding what it means to be a human being.
The Human Essence: Intelligent Conscious Being
To be human is essentially to be an intelligent conscious being. Our human form and evolutionary history are accidental aspects of our essential nature. Intelligent conscious beings could have emerged other places in the universe with different forms and different evolutionary histories, all converging on the same truth: Universal intelligence and consciousness.
This is also the challenge in all true spirituality: To find the truth of who we are. When we ask, “Who am I?” and look honestly, we can find an aware, intelligent presence within us that goes beyond our evolutionary habit of relying on an ego with fears and desires. Opening us up to this universal intelligence and consciousness is what all true mysticism and spirituality is all about.
Now the objective and skeptical among us too can join in on the quest, using science as our aid to discovering the truth of our essential nature. To do this we need to get rid of dogmas and engage with the latest science honestly, and be fearless in the quest for ultimate understanding.
I really like this thought. It fits with my general construct of consciousness being a continuum of experiences.
There's an interesting, if not widely accepted view, within psychology called ontological hermeneutics that argues the ego is entirely a fabrication of our own making, and that what we call ego is really the output of a system of relations dictated by a role-based inner dialogue. Put another way, everything we are is relational to our environment and our peers within it because we have no way of interpreting our environment outside of our relationships with it and its many objects, and our primary way of interacting with this environment is to engage in dialogue, both with other people and our own inner dialogue that organizes and reorganizes our relationships to other concepts and objects.
On the dialogical self:
I think if I were to take a deep dive into psychology/neuroscience, I'd ultimately want to surface why dialogue is so important, where it stems from, and how it functions within the brain. Learning more about how the brain processes dialogue seems like an incredibly powerful path toward understanding the greater complexities of our cognition since it would appear to be a central process that helps form the integrated information you mention as being the crux of our continuum of experience that we call consciousness.
Thank you for your detailed reply!
Speaking honestly: I believe there is a lot of confusion, both in continental and analytic philosophy, with placing too much emphasis on language. It is clear to see why we are biased towards language; it's the stuff of academic philosophy (text) and it's the stuff of our ego (narrative). The confusion mixes our individual consciousness and intelligence, which are universal features of the universe, with contingent relations between signifiers and signified. Philosophy should teach us what is essential, not what is accidental. By taking our contingent relations to our body, the environment and world situation, to be essential features of our being, we may delude ourselves into thinking that we have accessed "the great outdoors," but as I see it this is nothing but a cheap trick that has become fashionable. Spiritually also becomes lost in this confusion. Spiritually is all about learning to identify with our conscious intelligence which is universal, instead of our ego narrative and contingent circumstance. From the light of spirituality, much of modern psychotherapy simply attempts to replace on kind of insanity (a bad narrative) with another (a good narrative), instead of seeing the total truth of who we are and what situation we are in (beyond good and bad, beyond narrative).
Wow fantastic piece! Really well articulated and fascinating. I haven't thought as deeply about this subject so it gets my mind spinning a bit. In terms of science and philosophy where do you see the most debate? If consciousness comes from the neocortex, wouldn't that mean our existence emanates from an objective material world? But could that be consistent with spiritual ideas whatever they may be? That perhaps there is an existence beyond the material world?
Would Descartes say I am a human with intelligence, therefore 'I am'?
Or would he say I am conscious, therefore 'I am'?
The latter my friend! Indeed "I am conscious, therefore 'I am'"!
On your last point, I hope he would say I am conscious, or better consciousness-is, since it has epistemic priority (i.e. it defeats the skeptic: consciousness-is remains true if I am dreaming). While intelligence is becoming a quantitative science, partly due to computational psychology, partly due to Artificial General Intelligence research, the combination of consciousness and intelligence is not well understood, partly because there is still no agreement on a theory of consciousness.
There is no debate between science and philosophy. Science is a method to study the physical world. The philosophy of science is a discussion of how good this method is to study the physical world, what a method is, what the physical world is. When science expands, it often happens in tandem with philosophical discussions on scientific method. The discussion now in philosophy is whether current scientific methods created to study the physical world are sufficient to include an explanation of consciousness. If we think that consciousness cannot be an object of science, then clearly it cannot. If we do think that consciousness is a potential object of science, the question becomes - does science have to expand its methods to include it?
One reason for supposing that consciousness is a potential object of science is that it seems to have causal power. Otherwise, how could I talk about consciousness here? If my consciousness did not in some way cause what I am writing now, then what am I talking about? So if consciousness exists at all, and we speak about it in the physical world with physical consequences, it seems there must be some connection between consciousness and the rest of physics. So many believe that we need a science of consciousness.
In the science of consciousness, there is, as is typical when a new science is emerging, a lot of philosophical discussion about the scope and limits of this new science, what methods should be employed to study it, are already existing methods enough, in what way are they limited, should they be supplemented? These are philosophical discussions that become informed by conjectures and new theoretical models that people propose and test against the empirical facts; and note that even the idea of empirical fact here might expand to include first-person data, induced from reports like "I am conscious now" "I see red, not blue," i.e. things that are inherently subjective, but hopefully can be studied objectively.
It's definitely an exiting time, both for the philosophers who have been thinking about this for ages, and for the pioneering scientists who hope to establish a new field of science!
Simpatico my friend! A light worker for sure!
Thank you :)