Barbelith Underground > Laboratory > Let's take a crack at the Brain/Mind problem

Over in the temple, a few of us were discussing parts of one's being that can survive death or a traumatic brain injury, and the discussion took a turn towards consciousness and the relationship between the brain and the mind. A (not-so) brief primer to current theories on the brain/mind relationship, according to Amit Goswami. I was sort of high when I copied it, but the information is there.

So, in the previous thread, I promised to read through the next chapter. Goswami begins by asking "if the experience of selfness, of the 'I', is just an illusion then what is causing it?" Before he gets too into that, though, he starts by presenting a view of the brain-mind system that accounts for our individual, seperate self-experience.

From the chapter: In the past few years it has become increasingly clear to me that the only view of the brain-mind that is complete and consistent in its explanatory power is this: The brain-mind is an interactive system with both classical and quantum components. These components interact within a basic idealist framework in which consciousness is primary.

He then promises that he shall show that this view, unlike other solutions to the mind-body problem, accounts for consciousness, cause-effect relations in matters of the brain mind (that is, the nature of free will), and the experience of personal self-identity.

I hear you asking “Tuna, that sounds great, but when comes to theories involving the word ‘quantum’ you’re as impressionable as wet clay. You’ll go with just about anything. What evidence is there that the ideas of quantum mechanics apply to the brain-mind?”

Well, as it turns out, there is at least circumstantial evidence. According to Goswami both David Bohm and August Comte noted that there seems to be an uncertainty principle operating for thought. If you concentrate on the content of a thought, you lose sight of the direction in which the thought is heading. If you concentrate on the direction of a thought, you lose some of the sharpness in the content. Goswami dares the reader to observe their own thoughts and see for themselves.

From the book: We can generalize Bohm’s observation and posit that thought has an archetypal component. Its appearance in the field of awareness is associated with two conjugate variables: feature (instantaneous content, akin to the position of physical objects) and association (the movement of thought in awareness, akin to the momentum of physical objects). Note that awareness itself is akin to the space in which thought objects appear.

So, mental phenomena such as thought seem to exhibit complementarity. We can posit that, although it is always manifested in form (described by attributes such as feature and association), between manifestations thought exists as transcendent archetypes—as does the quantum object with its transcendent coherent superposition (wave) and manifest one-faceted (particle) aspects.

Alright, it’s a bit of a stretch, but I’ll go with it. He brings up evidence of discontinuity—quantum jumps—in other mental phenomena like creativity, and I’ll buy that too, but what, really, do I know of quantum jumps? When he quotes Tchaikowsky ”Generally speaking, the germ of a future composition comes suddenly and unexpectedly…it takes root with extraordinary force and rapidity, shoots up through the earth, puts forth branches and leaves, and finally blossoms. I cannot define the creative process in any way but [by] this simile.” and then says This simile is exactly the kind that a quantum physicist might use to describe a quantum leap I’m going to have to take his word for it.

Granted he is in fact a quantum physicist, but he spares us any further quotes from other physicists and only says …but such great mathematicians, such as Jules-Henri Poincare and Carl Friedrich Gauss, have spoken of their own creative experiences in similar terms, as being sudden and discontinuous like a quantum leap. I have to admit that I know a little about creative leaps but nothing about quantum leaps. So, as I said, I’ll take his word for it.

His next bit is about some experiments Tony Marcel (I missed the part of the book where Marcel’s credentials are reported, but Google says he is or at least was a Cambridge psychologist) conducted and the data he reported. I won’t go into the gritty details of the experiment, but I’ll give an overview: it involved measuring the recognition time for the last word in three-word strings like Hand-Palm-Wrist or Tree-Palm-Wrist, in which the middle ambiguous word is sometimes pattern masked so that it can be perceived only unconsciously.

When the word is not masked, word one affects the perceived meaning of the polysemous word, word two. Only the biased meaning of word two (biased by word one) is passed on. If this meaning is congruent (or incongruent) with the target word, we get facilitation (inhibition) of recognition—short (long) recognition time. Looking at the brain-mind as a classical computer, as in functionalism, then it seems like the brain works in a linear, top-down unidirectional fashion.

When the word is masked, then the way your brain processes two separate meanings simultaneously with feedback included is more akin to the bottom-up, connectionist approach used with artificial intelligence machines, in which the connections among the various components play a dominant role.

So. Either theory can be adjusted to fit either piece of the data—conscious perception (top down processing) or unconscious perception (bottom up processing)—BUT both sets cannot be explained in a coherent fashion. What gives?

Psychologist Michael Posner invokes attention as the crucial ingredient for distinction between conscious and unconscious perception. Attention comes with selectivity, Thus, according to Posner, we select one of two meanings when we are attentive, as in conscious perception of the ambiguous word in the Marcel experiment. When we are not attentive, there no selection. Thus both meanings of an ambiguous word are perceived, as in the unconscious perception of the pattern masked word in Marcel’s experiments.

Goswami then asks “But who turns attention on or off?” According to Posner, a central processing unit switches attention on or off. Goswami claims that no one has ever found such a thing in the brain, and that anyway it brings up the “specter” of the Little Man Inside Your Head who is really running things. We may as well face it: there is no local homunculus, or CPU, sitting in the brain that switches attention, that interprets and ascribes meaning to all the actions of the mental conglomerates, tuning the channels from a control room.

Alright, so what now? Goswami claims to favor a quantum mechanical interpretation. I could go into details, but this post is already crazy long, so in short I will say that he favors a “both-and” explanation of simultaneously processing “palm” as both a tree and a part of the hand, which one has to admit is advantageous over the classical linear explanation of “either-or”. He finishes the section with this:

I realize that the data suggesting the parallels between the mind and the quantum—uncertainty, complementarity, quantum jumps, nonlocality, and finally, coherent superposition (I didn’t go into depth regarding some of these, but he makes a reasonable case for most of them) --may not be considered conclusive. They could well be indicative, however, of something radical: What we call the mind consists of objects that are akin to the objects of submicroscopic matter that obey rules similar to those of quantum mechanics.

Let me put this revolutionary idea differently. Just as ordinary matter consists ultimately of submicroscopic quantum objects that can be called the archetypes of matter, let us assume that the mind consists ultimately of the archetypes of mental objects (very much like what Plato called ideas). I further suggest that they are made of the same basic substance that material archetypes are made of and that they also obey quantum mechanics. Thus quantum-measurement considerations apply to them as well.

Right! Cool. So. As noted earlier, I'm alright with this explanation, especially as I've read the rest of the chapter, but it should come as no surprise that with my scant knowledge I would come around to his view after reading his own goddam book.

I ask you: does it add up? Do you have or know of another explanation re: the brain-mind system? Maybe one that doesn't involve quantum mechanics? Or does; I don't really care...

Right, it's been a while, but I haven't had much time to take a look at this stuff recently. Which is unfortunate, because Hofstadter's tangled hierarchies are involved. Who didn't enjoy Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid? Nevermind that I didn't really know what it was about the first time I read it...

Anyway. If you're familiar with Hofstadter, then you'll know about his theory that consciousness arises from the tangled hierarchy formed by the programs of the brain's computer, the ones that we call the mind (if you're not familiar with Hofstatder, there's a thread about him and GEB here).

A character in Goswami's book questions whether tangled hierarchies are really a phenomenon that nature allows. "After all, language paradoxes have an arbitrary, artificial tone to them," he says. Well, yeah, Goswami answers, but ask Bertrand Russel and Alfred Whitehead, the inventors of logical typing, about Godel and his discovery that any attempt to produce a paradox-free mathematical system is bound to fail if that system is reasonably complex (Hofstadter mentions this idea fairly often in his book as well). Godel's discovery came when he used a tangled hierarchy and proved that no sufficiently complex system can be both complete and consistent at the same time.

Well great, I hear you saying, but what does this have to do with the subject at hand. Goswami has this to say about Hofstadter and his tangled hierarchies:

THe idea of the tangled hierarchy is fascinating. But did anybody explain how Hofstadter is going to generate discontinuity in the programs of a classical silicon machine that are by their very nature continuous? It's not so much that the programs feed back on each other and get so tangled that for all practical purposes you cannot follow their casual chain. It's not like that at all. There really has to be a discontinuity, a real jump out of the system, an inviolate level. In other words, the question is how can our brain, looked at as a classical system, have an inviolate level? In the philosophy of material realism on which classical systems are based, there is only one level of reality, the material level. So where is the scope for an inviolate level?

Then he asks "Have you heard of Schrodinger's cat?"

[audience groans]

Yes, yes, we're all sick to death of Schrodinger's cat. What can we possibly learn from it now? Doesn't it sort of show the sillyness of adapting quantum mechanics to macro systems, or to single objects? Or are we supposed to actually believe that the cat really is both half-alive and half dead, and not simply either dead or alive, with a 50% chance for each outcome?

Tough question. But keep in mind that the same screwy mathematics that tells us the cat is both dead and alive gives us the marvels of transistors and lasers. But, of course, no one has ever actually seen a quantum cat, or a coherent superposition, not even quantum physicists. If you look into the cage, the cat is either dead or alive but never both.

Goswami suscribs to the idealist school, going with Copenhagen interpretation which says that the coherent superposition is an abstraction; and as an abstraction, the cat is able to exist as both alive and dead until our observation collapses the cat's dichotomous state into a single one. Goswami believes that it is our consciousness that collapses the cat's wave function. He's not alone: apparently John von Neumann (hungarian mathematician and polymath), Fritz London (physicist) , Edmond Bauer (don't know who this is) and Eugene Paul Wigner (hungarian physicist) endorse this idea.

So, if you give that idea any credit, how about this: an inanimate machine is observing the state of the cat. Would this collapse the wave function? No. From this argument it follows that an observer with a consciousness must have a different role in quantum mechanics than the inanimate measuring device. The machine would just pick up the "contagious dichotomy" of the cat until a consciousness collapsed it (either by observing the cat or observing the machine's readout of the condition of the cat, whichever is more trustworthy).

If one were to set up a machine to observe the state of Schrodinger's cat, and a machine to observe that machine, and still yet another machine to observe the second, and so on into infinity, you could create a Von Neumann chain. The thing about a Von Neumann chain is that it is not a closed system, it goes on and on and on, it is infinitely regressive and does not collapse upon itself. As Goswami says, "We vainly chase the collapse in a Von Neumann chain just as we chase the truth value in the liar's paradox. In both cases we end up in infinities. We have the makings of a tangled hierarchy."

So how does this explain how tangled hierarchy and self-reference arise in the brain-mind?

Here goes: Let's make a crude model of the brain-mind's response to a stimulus. The stimulus is processed by the sensory apparatus and presented to the dual system (the dual system of the mind that contains both a classical mind and a quantum mind, as outlined above). The state of the quantum system of the mind expands as a coherent superposition, and the classical measuring apparatus that couple with it also expand in the manner of the machines that pick up the "contagious dichotomy" of Schrodinger's cat. There is no mental program, though, that chooses among the different facets of the coherent superposition; as stated earlier, there is no program in the brain-mind that we can identify as a Central Processing Unit. Here's what Goswami says happens:

...there is a discontinuity, a breakdown of casual connection within space-time in the process of selection from the possible choices in the probability pool that the quantum system gives. The choice is a discontinuous act in the transcendent domain, an act of our non-local consciousness. No liner, cause-effect description of it in space-time is possible. This is the white spot (as in Escher's drawing Print Gallery) in our picture of a tangled hierarchy in the brain-mind. The result is self-reference. Consciousness collapses the total quantum state of the dual system, resulting in the primary seperation of subject and object. Because of the tangled hierarchy, however, consciousness identifies itself with the "I" of the self-reference and experiences the primary awareness,I am.

That's, um, that's kind of "out there". Comparing this to the "white spot" in Escher's Pring Gallery makes my ears ring and my head hurt. Goswami finishes the chapter with this:

Realize that the self of our self-reference is due to a tangled hierarchy, but our consciousness is the consciousness of the Being that is beyond the subject-object split. There is no other source of consciousness in the universe. The self of self-reference and the consciousness of the original consciousness, together, make what we call self-consciousness.

I'll realize what I want to realize, thank you very much. But so far I can go with this, it seems as least as plausible as the other theories I've heard in my research of the brain-mind deal. Next in the book he starts delving into mysticism and the like, which should be fun.