Roots

I have lately become impressed with the what's going on in the brain. Learning more about the small details, I wind up asking myself about the "big picture" that these details reveal. I'm a visual kind of guy, so I'm thinking about a picture something like this:

Neural network in the brain

That picture is showing main connections only - myelinated "high speed" connections. The actual picture would be a packed tangle of axons and dendrites - for example, the massive wad of connections that make up the "white matter" in the brain, connecting (on average) each neuron in the neocortex with 1,000 other neurons.

White Matter in the Brain is a Wad of Connections

Where else do we see something like that?

Roots in the Forest Floor

There is a tangle of roots under our feet in the forest floor. We usually see the big ones that manage to break the surface and threaten to trip us up, but the network is much more extensive, especially in a thriving "old growth" forest. We have recently found that trees are not just sucking up water and nutrients. They are communicating with each other through their root system.

I'm a sucker for analogy. It's natural for me to ask: what is the brain "sucking up" through its "root" system. Obviously, the nervous system is in the business of conveying information from the world (and inside the organism) to other parts of the organism - especially the central nervous system. Information is also being conveyed in the opposite direction - not only to allow us to wiggle our fingers but also to modify how our eyes "see" the world (roughly helping the eyes see things that "matter").

We, as conscious beings, owe our consciousness to our roots in the real world. Our root system is designed on a very fine level to suck every bit of precious information from that world. To take the example of the ganglia* in the eye, we have 20 different ganglia types, extracting 20 different types of information from the raw information provided by the retina. It's easy to think of a few types of information that might be extracted, such as a 2-dimensional map of 3 different colors plus black and white (that's the 4 different types of photoreceptors--rods and cones--in the eye). We imagine that like the image going from our camera retina to the camera memory. What else? At this point, we can only guess. Maybe something like this:

• Day and night - time to sleep, time to wake
• Faces
• Weather
• Sun location - where am I? What time is it?
• Movement - comparison with one image with another a fraction of a second later
• Repeating shapes 
• Shapes of known objects
• Basic "camera" adjustments such as the need to increase or decrease exposure, image sharpness, saturation ...
• Compensation for the fact that the eyes are always moving 

We are all familiar with the experience that something we are looking for, perhaps our car keys, mysteriously seem to "pop out" from the jumble of other things in our field of view. Just two hops from raw data from the photoreceptors - a few centimeters -- our brains extend neurons that are hungrily extracting "meaning". "Upstream" from the visual system, we find brain systems looking for enemies, mating opportunities and chances to maintain status in the group.

Like a tree, we are sucking up what we need to survive. We have left it to the plants and the animals that eat plants to take care of our nutritional needs. We live or die on our ability to extract information from the world. Being "rooted" in the world is perhaps the best metaphor to help us think of our relationship to the world - the "mind-body problem".

Our "roots" analogy can be applied at another level: DNA and evolution.

We may regard the entire history of evolution as the story of life groping in "reality" to find a niche, a body plan and a pattern of reacting the environment that "works". 

Similarly, we can use the same concept with human languages.

We may think of languages as groping through the world of human experience (E) to find an effective way to share the matrix of experience within a culture. Shared experience is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for what we might call a scientific apprehension of "reality". In any case, this capability seems to be important enough for nature to devote significant parts of our central nervous system to communicate using language.

Of course, the idea applies to the worlds of imagination such as religion, where an entire culture gropes in vain for some kind of sensible, self-consistent way of speaking about a realm that is entirely fictitious.

The Chaotic Imaginary World of Christianity

* You can learn about ganglia in the visual system from Episode 39 of Rob Reid's "After On" Podcast "Restoring Sight to the Blind"

What is "Truth"?

Daniel Dennett likes to give Jaynes the benefit of the doubt: “There were a lot of really good ideas lurking among the completely wild junk.”

As Dennett hints (with typical subtly), there is a lot of "junk philosophy" around the subjects dear to Jaynes' heart. In this post, I'd like to extract one of Jayne's ideas and wipe a bit of "junk" off it to see where it gets me.

At the center of Jayne's theory is the "bicameral mind", which is firmly based on the idea that we have a "right brain" and a "left brain" with notably different capabilities, each capable of acting somewhat on their own. The "right brain" is good at seeing the "big picture" and sends its judgments to the left brain, where they are perceived as speech - sometimes the speech of the Gods. As things get historically more complicated, we evolve our present day "inner chatter", no longer attributed to the Gods (if we are sane), but now called "reason". Jaynes regards this as the emergence of consciousness itself, which is not what I want to take up in this post. What I like about Jaynes is that he sees language in a dynamic light, evolving and building up over time toward some critical point where the modern mind (along with "civilization") emerges.

There is no particular reason to locate these two faculties at some location in the brain and this is perhaps Jaynes main mistake - built in to his terminology. But we can understand his arguments very well without referring back to his neurological ideas. In fact, he rarely does so himself. You could go through his book and translate "Left Brain" as "Kidney" and "Right Brain" as "big toe" without impacting the meaning of what he's saying.

What we regard as "truth", at least in the Western traditions, is a linguistic concept. The "most" true statements are those of mathematics, which can be "proven". As Wittgenstein famously pointed out, such proofs are basically moves in a language game, where everyone agrees to the rules and agrees about what is "proven" in dialogue. As Hofstadter points out in Surfaces and Essences, the concept of language can be broadened to include the "models" of Physics - the underlying idea is metaphor and analogy.

Jaynes, Hofstadter and others point out that language is a huge labyrinth of metaphor. We "bootstrap" our store of metaphors as children (Jaynes is particularly good at describing how this bootstrap process works) and we proceed to produce the vast store in our heads - tens of thousands of words. It is in this language that our "inner voice" speaks. If our inner voice proclaims something to be true, it does so according to the impenetrable rules of the language that has been programmed into our brains. In the vast majority of cases, the beleivability of that inner voice comes from uncounted assumptions and analogies buried in the language it speaks. For example, if my inner voice calls someone a "nigger" in my head, that one word carries centuries if history and thousands of voices. It will make no sense to me to say to the inner voice: No, that person is not a "nigger". In fact, given the language that is being spoken, such a question makes no sense.

If you think that "1" is a solution to "x squared minus one equals zero", you speak the language of mathematics. If it seems sensible to say "I think, therefore I am", you have learned to talk like Descartes. Like him, you will regard that statement as self-evidently true. Those who fail to see the statement as self-evident are used to speaking a different language in a whole different culture which, for example, may regard the "self" as an illusion. Such a statement would make no sense to Descartes. It's not a matter of "truth" outside of the rules of the "language game". Descartes spoke the language of the religion of his time, which regarded the soul as the "self" -- the "self evident" starting point for any discussion of what is "real".

Is there any other way we can reach the "truth"? Jaynes says there is: that "right brain" which sees the truth but speaks it to the "left brain". It's better to characterize this source of perception as some kind of holistic or aesthetic sense that goes beyond language and perhaps precedes language historically. It is an open question whether this "right brain" (or big toe) processing works according to analogy. I think it's better to say it works by hard wired recognition of symmetry, but that is another topic.

For example, this "right brain" truth pops up when we say a certain combination of notes "sounds right" or a scene is breathtakingly beautiful. It certainly shouts loudly at us when we judge another human being to be beautiful, honest or friendly.

This simple observation leads me to some wide-ranging conclusions.

• By definition, we cannot expect language to reach into non-linguistic "truth". Western philosophy, including that of Dennett, even when purged of "wild junk", has nothing to say about "truth" revealed by our innate mental capacity to judge certain experiences as special and valuable.
• Zen, emphasizes direct aesthetic perception and takes pains to isolate and ignore the "inner voice". There is no reason to prefer one path over the other. In fact, I'm perfectly happy to leave the whole idea of "truth" to the language experts and seek for other words that reflect the judgement of my "right brain". This consideration is a much needed justification for being open to Zen.
• Our "right brains" have a shared language, a culture and a history of their own, referred to as "art". I would also contend that they have a built-in "language" of their own - perhaps reaching back far into the past, perhaps part of the very definition of life itself. Even when the "art" in question is expressed in language (the novel for example), quality judgement are made by standards that are difficult to express in the language of logic, although critics struggle endlessly to do so.
• We need to distinguish between what is "real" and what is "true". Truth is the umpire's call in the language game. Reality is what remains after all alternatives are ruled out.

There is another road to "truth", described in our language as "Science". Advances in Scientific knowledge are made chiefly through language - vigorously expanding our vocabulary. There are maybe 180,000 words in the English language (give or take). Scientific journals add a few more with every published article. Moreover, Science is constantly adding new models of reality. The first of these was "Euclidean Space". More recently, Feynman Diagrams have added to our ability to "picture" and discuss quantum reactions. Many things are easily "said" with pictures but almost impossible to "say" with words. However, these pictures ("maps") obey the same principles as language as discussed by Hofstadter and Jaynes. All lovers of maps and models will agree that there is a strong element of aesthetic beauty in a good map. 

There is also a strong aesthetic motive in Science as a whole, most eloquently described in "The Beautiful Question" by Frank Wilczek. Wilczek makes a strong case that the universe really is governed by symmetric principles, which also appeal strongly to our sense of what "looks right" (this is a right-brain kind of "looking right"). In other words, our taste for symmetry is a reliable guide to what is real.

So, in Science all three roads to the truth come together. 

Julian Jaynes - The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

Daniel Dennett likes to give Jaynes the benefit of the doubt: “There were a lot of really good ideas lurking among the completely wild junk.”

(one might say the same of Dennett, but that is another essay ...)

"Origin" is an important book. It inspires more notes than will fit in a single post. A sympathetic portrait of the rather quirky Julian James can be found here. Jaynes was somewhat obsessed loner -- a "one book wonder" -- who spent his life chasing a rather off-beat idea of what it is to be conscious.

As his title indicates, Jaynes tackles the issue of consciousness. The "Hard" problem of Consciousness is, Why does it feel the way it does? How can a lump of "stuff", no matter how complex its structure and function feel anything?

I agree with the general consensus that Jaynes doesn't solve or even address the hard problem but, like the others, comes closer by helping to understand what consciousness is in the first place. His book is full of remarkable insight into the way his mind works, along with the results of a massive research project conducted mostly on his own, involving sources one suspects are "cherry picked" to support his thesis.

Jaynes' theories are complex, deep, well-documented and surprising. A summary can be found here.

For the moment, I'd like to focus on one of his central ideas, that consciousness (for most of us) consists of a constant chatter "in our heads". Who is the speaker? Who is the listener? Jaynes was a clinical psychologist and suspects that there is a relationship between the hallucinatory voices heard in schizophrenia and these voices that chatter endlessly in the heads of ordinary people. He refers extensively to left brain/right brain ideas that were current at the time, but there is no strong reason for preferring his neurological "explanation" of the voices - the voices are undoubtedly there and undoubtedly have some neurological underpinning - the exact nature of this underpinning can await modern FMRI studies which typically don't shed a great deal of light on the "big picture". I should parenthetically mention Hofstadter's "I Am  A Strange Loop", which has something to say about the ability of the mind to host or "boot up" virtual people. Hofstadter's insights are valuable but make no reference to brain structure.

Jaynes has a deep appreciation for metaphor and how language is "boot strapped" from analogy. This insight is worked out in detail in Hofstadter's "Surfaces and Essences". Strangely, Hofstadter makes no references to Jaynes in his otherwise massive index and notes, but if there is credit to be allocated for this fundamental insight, it would seem to go to Jaynes. Jaynes makes a serious effort to dig into the evolution of language based on metaphor, showing how our common language has roots that go back thousands of years to language that was, in many ways, simpler and more literal. We see the modern perception of "self" as, for example, as being in a space behind the eyes, as something that emerged over time. As with Jaynes' excursions into neurophysiology, the details are not as important as the insight itself. These metaphors didn't come from nowhere. They evolved over time. The language that we now take for granted has vast and deep roots in the past. The fascinating corollary is that there must have been a time when language lacked such vast and deep roots. Jaynes asks, What would it be like to be a primitive human when these "voices" started to talk in your head? It is a classic example of an "impertinent question" that leads to some surprising perspective. As the title hints, it provides a way to reconstruct the history of consciousness, or at least the history of a very important component of consciousness - that inner voice. Along the way, Jaynes develops a radically original theory of the history of religion. He believes that the "inner voices" were originally perceived as very intimate personal or tribal "gods" - the voice of the dead "king". This is what he calls the "bicameral" mind - one consisting of the "voice" (perceived as external and independent) and the "listener". This mode of perception broke down as societies became larger and more complex (the "breakdown"), leading to the gods becoming more remote - their "voices" being heard only by special individuals (the priesthood). For students of religion, this is a valuable addition to the way we think of how religions come to be. Anyone who studies religion sees historical evolution as an important aspect of the subject.

It is possible to challenge Jaynes' insight or at least to ask if our modern dialogue with this "inner voice" is "consciousness". Mindfulness meditation is specifically aimed to distance the "mind" (whatever that is) from that inner chatter. It does so not by silencing the chatter, but by creating a state of mind that observes the chatter dispassionately, in effect recovering the ability to "be" the listener and simply be aware of the chatter coming from the internal "speaker". This results in a state of consciousness that is aware of all the other "contents" of the mind - sensations and observations that are stripped of the judgement inherent in the chatter of the inner voice. All this means that Mindfulness has something to say about Jaynes' theories and vice versa.

Jaynes claims that humans were not conscious prior to the appearance of primitive language. Before consciousness could emerge (defined by Janyes as identical to our dialogue with the "inner voice"), there was a period where the "inner voice" simply told the person what to do. The listener simply obeyed the inner voice without question. That was the period of "the bicameral mind". However, it would seem that Jaynes has made the error that philosophers often do: identifying
"thinking" with language and thinking with consciousness. Once the philosopher can think of a few hundred pages of detailed things to say about language, he feels he has "solved" the problem of consciousness. We see the same problem in Dennett's efforts (Dennett actually does reference Jaynes). But this begs the  question, Is consciousness more than language? Does it provide the answer to the question, what is it like to be a dog? Jaynes would seem to say that dog and a paleolithic human would have pretty much the same experience of "consciousness", namely none. Philosophers have a blind spot similar to those who imagine that all of us have an "inner eye", in which we can call up a picture of an imagined scene. Most of us do, many of us don't. The same goes with the centrality of language to "thinking" and consciousness itself.

Jaynes provides unique and valuable insight into what is, for humans at least, an important component of consciousness and the mind in general. The language component of consciousness (the inner voice) makes human consciousness a societal, cultural phenomenon. The inner voice is "programmed" with millennia of deep, convoluted metaphors - many totally lost to history.. When  "think" or speak, I do so with a language that has embedded housands of metaphors reflecting the insight of generations that went before me. This is an important reason - perhaps the reason - why the human mind is so remarkable - it's not just one mind but many. We can also see why it was necessary for the "many mind" effect to take root in a large and relatively stable population before it could become as deep and powerful as what we now regard as a "language". There was a critical mass that may have been reached (as Jaynes would claim) about the time humans invented agriculture. Before that, what we see in archaeology is a very slow progress in technology presumably reflecting a slow progress in the effectiveness of the human mind, quite possibly a symptom of a primitive, limited language. Before that, for a long time, humans were learning from each other the way Chimpanzees so - by imitation ("instrumental" learning)./ I imagine that a relatively small tribe could develop rudimentary language only to be wiped out by any number of factors, breaking the continuity of metaphor-building so essential in deep language.

We see the same effect in computer software, where each generation of programmers can access the "subroutines" developed by others to solve new problems without being concerned with how or why the details are being worked out "under the surface". This leads to an exponential growth in the expressiveness and power of computer programming. :"Critical mass" is achieved when the vast number of programmers are working with a common "class library" that embodies the continuous efforts of thousands of forgotten individuals who solved the basic problems that "stay solved".

Bottom line, Although taken seriously in Jaynes' lifetime and still popular in pop psychology, "bicameralism" is no longer taken seriously in professional circles. But I think that Jaynes opened up the dialogue about "mind" in very promising directions. Perhaps he will eventually be seen like Freud and Columbus - wrong about most details but right in setting off in new directions.

Dennett 2013

THE NORMAL WELL-TEMPERED MIND (2013)

Dennett describes the idea that you can break down the mind into "dumber" minds and those into dumber minds and so on. He calls it an "dramatic over simplification". He now likes to think of neurons as a competing society (let's call this "hypothetical reductionism", distinguished by reduction of the need to explain something into the hypothetical ability to solve something simpler) and persues the analogy all the way up to society.

Still refers to "cognitive science". As a philosopher, he is wistful about the younger generations that take computers for granted. Still clinging to Turing. Likes recursive organizations, virtual machines implemented on top of virtual machines. Control in computers is very different from control in brains. Computer is a society of slaves. Creeping love of competition and survival. His "hunch" is that competition applies in the brain - an admittedly wild idea. And back to how we are the only species like this. Culture creates a new sphere for neurons to compete. "Very speculative" for sure. At least he's considering the possibility that he's wrong. Mentions plasticity. What's in it for neurons when they pitch in and do new work? Is it true that unemployed neurons are killed off? Talks about emergence and cities, winding up with an analogy between free enterprise in NYC and the brain. "Reeks of over-enthusiastic metaphor". Ready to reconsider his model of cultural evolution. Doesn't mention genes at all. Not all of cultural assets are treasures. Also a lot of crap, like mud and fleas - they just ride along. Language is a "prime case" - very little design or thought behind language. (30:00) Free will. (34:00) Authority - attack on religion without mention of memes. "Professional double-talk" - lost track of what we call the truth - "Suspension of disbelief"

Other sources