Of Mechanical Mind,

Of Mechanical Eye

By Marcus T. Anthony (PhD)

Email: mindfutures at gmail dot com

This article also appears at www.22cplus.blogspot.com

We are within a decade or so of building the first electronic brain, exhorts writer Drew
Turney in yesterday’s Sydney Morning Herald. (A brain, but not as we know it
http://www.smh.com.au/world/science/a-brain-but-not-as-we-know-it-20100609-
xwyd.html). Yet how much fact, and how much speculation, assumption or pure
mythology lie behind the claim?

Today I am going to put forward my view. It is not an impersonal view. No such thing
exists, as all discourse is driven by the mind of the knower. My view is that of a person
who has explored consciousness at a first person level for a couple of decades. Yet I have
also studied quite a bit of literature surrounding the topic, and my doctoral thesis
featured a deconstruction of representations of mind and intelligence (see Integrated
Intelligence, Sense Publishers 2008). So I am not without academic understanding of
the subject area.

To do this I am going to use futurist Sohail Inayatullah’s Causal Layered Analysis (CLA),
although in an informal way. CLA examines issues in four layers. (If you read my recent
post, Digging Deeper For Oil, you can skip this, and go onto the next section)

1. The Litany. This is the surface of the problem. It includes bringing forward the
hard data, and also identifying the taken-for-granted arguments and assumptions.
Arguments, media releases, policies, and perspectives which stick to this level are
superficial. Governments and corporations often present problems at the litany level, as
data can be preened and cultivated in an attempt to control the discourse or discussion
(and obfuscate). They do this because deeper analysis can bring to the surface angles
which implicate them, or show the problem in ways which are very difficult to control.

2. The Social/Systems Level. This is where things start to get interesting. Here
we look at the social and political aspects of the problem, and it can include the cultures
and machinations of the groups and organisations involved.

Here we note numerous related facets. At the most obvious level, BP is a profit-making

3. The Worldview/Paradigm Level. A worldview is the way an individual

constructs the world, while a paradigm is a prevailing model of reality, and can include
groups, organisations, nations, etc. We can also talk about national and civilisational
perspectives here.

4. Myth/Metaphor Level. At this level we can name the narratives, myths and
stories which surround the problem. There are also metaphors which are used when
discussing all problems, and sometimes these are implicit - or barely visible. They can
tell us a lot about the mindset which is driving the problem.

5. The Consciousness Level. For me this is the most important level, for it is the
mindset, and the level of spiritual development of the people that are involved, which is
key. As Einstein said, problems cannot be solved at the level of consciousness at which
they are created.
Now, let’s take a look at several claims and statements made in Turney’s article.

The 17th-century philosopher Rene Descartes claimed there was a disembodied driver
in the brain, a kernel of intelligence that viewed sensory input and wielded
consciousness to act upon it.

Though we're no closer to discovering the soul today, we know about dendrites, axons
(cell components) and synapses (empty, electro-conductive space).

Right here at the beginning of the article, the most important linguistic feature is
presents itself. Who is the “we”, whom Turney is referring to? The answer is that it is the
assumed perspective of the dominant discourse, mainstream science, and its
mechanistic paradigm. Turney unquestioningly (and probably unconsciously) attempts
to force the legitimatation of this mainstream perspective by aligning with the status
quo. The use of “we” also implicitly excludes all those people who have found differently,
or who might argue otherwise (such as me, for example). Note that we “others” would
not be given a moment of airtime in much of mainstream science. Thus an implicit
hegemony is established right from the start of Turney’s article.

It is true that science is no closer to understanding the soul. All definitions of ‘soul”
aside, it is my experience that the essence of consciousness is found through silent
meditation, not by observing the material substrates of brains through a microscope or
the printouts of computers hooked up to electroencephalographs. The very process
being employed to understand the problem in mainstream science is therefore self-
limiting. It is much like taking a calculator into the National Gallery and attempting to
calculate the meaning of the artworks on display. The wrong way of knowing is being
employed. It is not in the “space” that the soul is found, but in the emptiness between
spaces, where thoughts have not yet emerged.

But what is still a mystery is how even though the brain comprises little more than
these simple structures, it has somehow given rise to everything from language to
love, from Beethoven to Big Brother.
Here, with the term “given rise”, Turney assumes that consciousness is a bottom-up
process, that mind is reducible to its micro-components. This is a metaphysical
assumption – a guess.

Now our increasing knowledge about the brain's building blocks is bringing us
closer to the ultimate neurology experiment: building one. The Blue Brain Project is
one effort to create an in situ brain, using software instead of proteins in a
supercomputer called Blue Gene to model the brain of a two-week-old rat. It does so by
creating a 3D computer model of neurons in the neocortex (the 'intelligent'
sector of the brain) where scientists can simulate the sizes, shapes, densities and
electro-receptiveness of different neurons in the biological version and watch their
behaviour under certain conditions.

Once again the assumption is that neural microcomponents can produce mind. The
term “building blocks” suggests the materialist presupposition.

That the neocortex is declared “the intelligent sector of the brain”, implies that the rest
of the brain is not intelligent. This is a culturally biased assumption. The neocortex
mediates verbal/linguistic processes, and these are assumed to be the highest
expressions of human intelligence, because these are the cognitive processes that the
people making the claim typically employ. It is a self-fulfilling given. We define
intelligence as being predominantly related to logic and language, identify those parts of
the brain which are mediate these processes, then declare them to be the centre of
intelligence.
As I have argued in my theory of Integrated Intelligence, there are “intuitive” forms of
intelligence which transcend reason. This can only be genuinely understood through
doing committed inner work, and directly applying these “other” ways of knowing in
living one’s life. This cognitive set does not form part of intelligence testing, and so does
not appear on current maps of intelligence in mainstream cognitive science – again, a
self-stultifying problematique.

The Blue Brain Project's goal is to model the brain's response behaviour down to
the nano-level.

The language reveals the same agenda as that of outmoded early twentieth century
behaviourism, and brings with it the same baggage. Behaviourism attempts to
understand the person through observing the surface movements and features of the
organism. It treats people as biological automata. The Blue Brain Project appears to be
making the same mistakes.

Though recreating the brain is the stated aim, the Blue Brain project isn't the first
neurological architecture model. As long ago as 2005 the futurist and writer
Kevin Kelly claimed the internet was essentially a brain. Every computer and
device can be thought of as neurons, every bit of information like the bio-
electrical sparks across synapses that constantly shift, connect and disconnect to form
memories, thoughts, emotions and sensory data.
Jeff Stibel, author of last year's Wired for Thought, thinks the similarities go deeper.
''The internet already has the parallel processing capability of the human mind,'' he
says, ''neuroscientists call it distributed computing, where the brain's
functions are distributed all over the place to happen simultaneously. The
internet is a massive storage and retrieval system, and the brain's
fundamental structure is roughly the same.''

The architecture metaphor indicates the materialist presuppositions which underpin the
argument. Buildings are empty shells – it is my first person experience that brains are
not.

The idea that the internet is a brain is a deeply flawed and limited analogy. Firstly and
most obviously, the internet is not conscious. It is not conscious because information
and consciousness are not the same thing. The brain-as-information-processing-unit is
another presupposition of dominant neuroscience, as well as being the implicit
metaphor of the discourse.

Secondly, consciousness is not merely the processing of information at a

rational/linguistic level. There are levels of mind which transcend the “rational” (and
reason itself is culturally defined). The more one begins to transcend reason, the more it
becomes readily apparent that some forms of perception are non-linear, immediate, and
transcend the limits of conventionally understood notions of space and time. The
internet is limited, at least in its current expression, to four-dimensional space time.
Furhter, the information it contains is processed by web surfers at the level of
consciousness that they have developed – in most cases, the typically expressed
“rational”/linear processing that most modern people exhibit.

This interconnectedness is also the secret to that elusive quality we call intelligence.
Older scientific understanding might have convinced us to try and replicate the brain
by creating a super-driver, but the true smarts might be in the network integration of
a huge number of simple, low-powered processors. ''A brain is really a
massive composition of mini-brains or hives,'' Stibel says. ''There's no such thing
as a central decision-maker in the brain; intelligence emerges from
complex parallel processing of information.''

The information processing metaphor dominates again. Further, the misunderstanding

about there not being any central processing unit probably emerges from a confusion
between automatic functioning in the brain (which comprises probably 99% of what
goes on there) with the self, which does effectively form a (potentially) self-directing
centre of consciousness. With greater awareness, some of that autonomic processing is
reclaimed – that part which has been formed by habit, and the self-regulating
predisposition of the human ego. As just one example, Indian yogis, under scientific
testing, have been shown to be able to slow down heart rate and respiratory function at
will.

The internet=mind argument also fails to understand that the mind, as is commonly
experienced by most people (including scientists), is not the only “mind’ which
potentially exists within individuals. The ego or personality construct is essentially a
product of natural selection, and its prime function is to ensure the physical survival of
the body. In a sense it it the “voice in the head”. Yet there is a higher self (for want of a
better phrase) which emerges naturally once the “talking head” is allowed to go quiet.
The problem is that science and education are dominated by talking heads, and there is
an inability to perceive the higher levels of mind. Again, it’s a self-regulating
problematique. The very ways of knowing and the investigative tools and methods being
employed reinforce the misunderstanding, as they cannot perceive that which lies
beyond their own perceptual limitations (by definition).

Bill Lytton, a Blue Brain Project technical adviser, is a professor of physiology,

pharmacology, biomedical engineering and neurology at New York State University.
He thinks if we can perfect the mechanism to generate those hundreds of millions
of base-level computations in a simulated brain, the mental commands we know
as decisions, emotions or thoughts might arise as spontaneously and magically in it as
they do in us.

Here the metaphor “mechanisms” betrays the paradigm, as does the verb
“computations”.

''The simultaneous processing going on will achieve its objectives without ever
bothering to reach higher levels of integration,'' he says, ''and it's not just the brain
that does this - consider chickens or mice running around with their heads cut off.''

As far as I am aware, chickens and mice with their heads cut off do not meet the
requirements of being conscious, and even if they do, it is short “lived”. Ironically, the
seemingly perpetual and fruitless quest to generate consciousness from machines
appears to duplicate the behavior of the aforementioned headless bioforms.

The world view of the brain as a machine packed with incredible densities of
deceptively simple parts isn't new. In his 1995 book Are We Alone? cosmologist Paul
Davies suggests there is no life force. The only difference between us and rocks, air or
plastic might be the complexity of the structure; make something complex enough -
like the proteins that form DNA - and it can be termed alive, he suggests.

Davies’ argument is at best circular, or at worst nonensical. We might then ask “What
does it mean to be ‘alive’?” The argument makes no attempt to ascertain what the
qualitative difference is between “alive” and “not alive”. A fresh corpse retains
neurological complexity, but in terms of consciousness, has more in common with a
rock than, say, Barack Obama.

So how do even start creating something so intricate it generates normal function

spontaneously from the basic engineering, like expecting a 747 to take off and fly
by itself just because we've built it? While a single neuron is comparatively simple it's
the sheer number of types and behaviours involved that makes the computational task
so big.
This is an apt metaphor.

Another way to gain a closer understanding of the brain is to examine how it interacts
with itself, as Srini Pillay does. The chief of the coaching and organisational
psychology company NeuroBusiness Group and a brain imaging researcher,
Pillay uses brain scanning technology to watch for changes in blood flow
relative to emotion. When he prompts an emotional response in a patient or
subject, the positioning and quantity of blood flow offers the possibility of
regulating it to generate the mental model or mind state we want to study.

The key way of knowing, and its limitations, are clearly seen here. “Watching” and
“scanning” the “subject” involve surface level perception, and can never reveal the
knowledge that first-person introspection can (there are also limitations with
introspection, but introspection permits the contextualisation of the observations via a
holistic, immediate perception, while external observation does not). Most significantly,
any observation which attempts to ascertain the links between brain physiology (such as
blood flow), and the emotionality (first person experience) of a person can only ever
observe a correlation, not cause. It tells us nothing about the source of consciousness
itself.

Note also that the people being quoted and references in this paper are all mainstream
science and culture people – the aforementioned “we”. For a deeper understanding of
the problem of consciousness, there is a need to begin to broaden the paradigmatic
parameters of the discourse and invite “others” to participate.

The applications of brain modelling could transform neuroscience. We can already

model chemicals - most of us did so in year 7 science - if we have a virtual mock-up of
how they interact at the synaptic level it would let us design better treatment for a
huge range of conditions from depression to stroke.

This is true. Intervention at the physical level can assist in the treatment of a whole host
of psychological and neural problems. They may not always assist in finding the cause,
however.

But as we have seen, simply arranging the parts won't cause the virtual brain
to just switch on. External stimulus is the key to all theoretical biology.
''We can grow neurons and support cells in culture and make them grow,'' says
Richard Senelick, a neuro-rehabilitation specialist and medical director of
HealthSouth Rehabilitation Institute of San Antonio in Texas, ''but we can't effectively
direct them to make the correct connections consistently to reproduce function.''
The limitations of a disembodied, software-based brain don't stop there. As Bill Lytton
reminds us, a real brain doesn't exist in a vacuum. ''A full brain wouldn't be all that
interesting without being connected,'' he says, ''and I doubt we'd ever have the
resources to build a full simulated nervous system.''

Finally, an admission. Science isn’t really close to producing an artificial brain at all.
The problems are huge. The limitations of the entire model are easily seen in the phrase
“External stimulus is the key to all theoretical biology”. Such stimulus is key to the
knowledge claims of mechanistic biology, but it is not the essence higher levels of
consciousness. These levels permit an essentially spiritual experience, and no amount
of observation of “external stimulus” will deliver this understanding.

Here we can see that, despite the huge advances in science in the last century, it is still
dominated by mechanistic presuppositions. This is because the ways of knowing have
changed little. Both peering down a microscope (as did scientists a hundred years ago),
and peering at the computer readouts generated by electroencephalograms, are
externalized modes of perception which disconnect the observer both from his/her inner
world and intuitive perceptions. They separate the knower and the known.

Until such time as mainstream science encourages, or at least permits, the intimate
perceptions of the human intuitive mind to be incorporated within its discourses, it will
continue to repeat the paradigmatic errors of the past century or more.

But the biggest constraint is that we simply don't know what language the brain uses
to work. ''We're missing the code,'' says Lytton, who worked with the DNA pioneer
Francis Crick at the Salk Institute, where the latter devoted the remainder of his career
to decoding the brain.

''The brain uses different codes simultaneously to deliver information at different

rates for different purposes. It's difficult to record from many neurons at once and
then analyse what you've recorded. Right now we can record up to 100 but we
might need to do up to 10,000.''

Of course, if we can grasp and deploy all the theory and technology we need to
build a simulated brain from the ground up, there's an ever bigger philosophical
question.

Note the verbs of knowing, which mirror the prime ways of knowing developed by
science over the last 150 years: classification, analysis and experimentation.

In her 2008 book ID, the Oxford University pharmacology professor Susan Greenfield
outlines how our personalities, our hopes and dreams and our sense of self are no
more than the sum total of our own neurons.

''The mind'', she writes, ''far from being some airy-fairy philosophical alternative to
the biological squalor of the physical brain, is the physical brain - more specifically the
personalised connectivity of that otherwise generic brain.''

In order to come to this conclusion, not only must a person reject all the experience and
data gathered from thousands of years of mystical insight (which reveals that
transpersonal levels of mind are genuine human potentials, and that mind and brain are
not the same thing); one also has to reject (or explain away) all the scientific evidence
garnered by those investigating psi phenomena. Parapsychology is a highly problematic
field, but its discussions and findings should at least lead a learned professor to use
conditionals in her pronouncements about consciousness.

If that's true and we build a human brain from scratch, what will it mean for the
spiritual dimension of human life if a fully formed, sentient consciousness wakes up,
shakes it computerised head and declares: ''I think, therefore I am''?

I suspect that Descartes never transcended the rational mind, and equated “self” with
ego, or the voice in the head. It is more accurate to simply say “I am”. Like so many of th
deeper understandings of consciousness, the meaning of that cannot be intellectualised.

If you have gotten this far into this article, no doubt the question has arisen, “Who is this
Marcus T. Anthony to be claiming to know better than international renowned scientists
and researchers?”

It’s a good question.

Marcus T. Anthony

* * *

Have you ever felt you had a greater

calling, but been unable to put your
finger on what it is?

Marcus T. Anthony’s Sage of

Synchronicity is now available. Find out
more about the book at
www.sageofsynchronicity.weebly.com .

Marcus T. Anthony’s blog about the future: www.22cplus.blogspot.com