Neuroscientists admit the brain still full of mystery

                                                                              Photo by Markus Spiske from Pexels

Two neuroscientists have new books out. In doing the publicity rounds they have shone light on where gaps exist in their understanding of the human intellect and will. The human brain means mystery. 

David Eagleman is a neuroscientist at Stanford University. He is the presenter of a TV series, The Brain, shown on PBS, the BBC and elsewhere. In his latest book, Livewired, "he tells the story of brain plasticity: how your forest of billions of neurons reconfigures every moment over your life," as his website puts it.

So how do we maintain a personal identity while this material transformation is going on? What preserves our subjective consciousness over the course of our life?

In an interview, Eagleman lays out the basics to do with the brain:

What we’re looking at is three pounds [1.36 kg] of material in our skulls that is essentially a very alien kind of material to us. It doesn’t write down memories, the way we think of a computer doing it. And it is capable of figuring out its own culture and identity and making leaps into the unknown. I’m here in Silicon Valley. Everything we talk about is hardware and software.

But what’s happening in the brain is what I call livewire, where you have 86 billion neurons, each with 10,000 connections, and they are constantly reconfiguring every second of your life. Even by the time you get to the end of this paragraph, you’ll be a slightly different person than you were at the beginning.

[...] If you blindfold somebody for an hour, you can start to see changes where touch and hearing will start taking over the visual parts of the brain. 

As if expressing wonderment at the intricacy of that physical process, the interviewer, Andrew Anthony, states:  "Another mystery is consciousness." From one mystery, to another. The interviewer goes on: "Do you think we are close to understanding what consciousness is and how it’s created?" Eagleman replies with admirable humility:

There’s a great deal of debate about how to define consciousness, but we are essentially talking about the thing that flickers to life when you wake up in the morning. But as far as understanding why it happens, I don’t know that we’re much closer than we’ve ever been. It’s different from other scientific conundrums in that what we’re asking is, how do you take physical pieces and parts and translate that into private, subjective experience, like the redness of red, or the pain of pain or the smell of cinnamon? And so not only do we not have a theory, but we don’t really know what such a theory would look like that would explain our experience in physical or mathematical terms.

This points to consciousness being a spiritual capacity that humans alone in creation are endowed with. Eagleman brings out that element when exploring whether, in the future, it will be possible to "glean the details of a person’s life from their brains." His answer indicates his belief is that there is physical content that is ripe for the picking: "our computational capacities are becoming so extraordinary now, it’s just a countdown until we get there." 

However, and this is the most interesting part of his answer if we are thinking of the brain-mind dichotomy, he adds:  

Do we get to keep our inner thoughts private? Almost certainly we will. You can’t stick somebody in a scanner and try to ask them particular kinds of questions. 

That there is clearly something about our intellect and will that is beyond the physical is brought out in an interview with Anil Seth, professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the University of Sussex in England.  His book, Being You, has just been published. This is how interviewer Tim Adams introduces his discussion with Seth:

For centuries, philosophers have theorised about the mind-body question, debating the relationship between the physical matter of the brain and the conscious mental activity it somehow creates. Even with advances in neuroscience and brain imaging techniques, large parts of that fundamental relationship remain stubbornly mysterious.

It was with good reason that, in 1995, the cognitive scientist David Chalmers coined the term “the hard problem” to describe the question of exactly how our brains conjure subjective conscious experience. Some philosophers continue to insist that mind is inherently distinct from matter.

So the interview is presented as a look at whether "advances in understanding how the brain functions undermine those ideas of dualism."

Seth's first statement does seem to support a form of "dualism" with his reference to what he calls "emergence":

The reason I’m interested in consciousness is intrinsically personal. I want to understand myself and, by extension, others. But I’m also super-interested for example in developing statistical models and mathematical methods for characterising things such as emergence [behaviour of the mind as a whole that exceeds the capability of its individual parts] and there is no personal component in that.

An example that Seth has given elsewhere is of someone having a pang of jealousy as a result of something seen or heard. Is that jealousy a spiritual or a purely physical experience? How to regard lust or greed, or kindness or compassion? 

Let's explore the interview some more as Seth sets up a study team at Sussex "as a multidisciplinary group, with pure mathematicians, psychologists and computer scientists as well as cognitive neuroscientists."

The starting point is: "The question of how to develop a satisfying scientific explanation of conscious experience."

Tim Adams: Presumably, the mind-body problem is never going to be entirely resolved?

Anil Seth: No, but I’d like to make progress. It’s the boring answer of continuing to do rigorous science [...] My approach is that we risk not understanding the central mystery of life by lurching to one or other form of magical thinking. While science might be a little bit slower, there is much to be done in a straightforward materialist understanding of how the brain relates to conscious experience.

Later in the discussion, Seth comments: 

The philosopher William James said: “Thoughts themselves are the thinkers.” I think that there’s a truth to that. It’s perhaps always a mistake to think of thoughts being produced or observed by a prior internal self. Thought is foundational to psychology, but it’s one of the things that’s hardest to study. You can’t control thought in the same way you can systematically manipulate perception in the lab. So I’ve tended to avoid investigating how the mind wanders and so on.  [My emphasis - BS]

Further on this topic:

But where do thoughts come from? I’m left a little cold by psychoanalytic explanations, which suggest there’s a subconscious trying to get in there and give you some thought that would otherwise be repressed. I think, to me, they’re the maximally abstract version of perception.

Is Seth saying that thoughts usually arise from our sensible experience, but turn into something of a spiritual nature? That fully corresponds with the Christian understanding of the body-spirit unity, the embodied soul or ensouled body, where there is unity of the two elements, but integrity of each individually, with the soul taking precedence because it is of a higher order as to capacity. 

Adams: One pivotal one in your argument about the how and why of consciousness is the idea that “I predict myself, therefore I am”. What is the “I” in that sentence?

Seth: It’s a collection of perceptual predictions. It’s a playful sentence. The “I” is deliberately ambiguous there – it says there is an experience arising of me being a single unified individual, with all these different attributes: memories, emotional bonds, experiences of body. For this piece of flesh and blood here, they seem to be unified – at least if I don’t reflect on it too much. 

Christians would say that the unifying factor is the simple nature the unified body-soul. Seth says that as yet he is agnostic toward the physical-spiritual unity, "the central mystery of life":

I’m agnostic about whether at the end of this programme of trying to account in physical terms for properties of experience, there will still be some residue of mystery left, something more to explain. 

How Seth's views are conflicted are revealed in the next exchange:

Have your thoughts [...] ever taken any spiritual swerve – in terms of the why of there being something rather than nothing?

It’s more that I think there’s hubris in assuming that everything will submit to a mechanistic programme of explanation. I think it’s intellectual honesty to acknowledge that the existence of conscious experience as a phenomenon in a universe for which we generally have physicalist accounts seems weird. I want to figure out the ways in which we can undermine this seeming weird. 

To parse that statement:

First, for sure it is arrogant to assume in the blinkered manner of much of science that the hard reductive principles of physical processes are the only ones to apply. 

Second, Seth acknowledges that the "existence of conscious experience" is totally unexpected in the context of the totality of the evolutionary process. Haven't we known that for millennia!

Third, how can Seth say that with regards this universe, "we generally have physicalist accounts"? Has he not looked to the religious traditions, especially Christianity with its solid history of scholarship, absorbing as it did the penetrating insights of Aristotle and Plato, for a wider reading of the nature of the human person?

Fourth, in this team effort to "undermine this seeming weird" is he fully open to the "spiritual swerve" arising from the answers he gains, or is he going to remain a lazy or feeble agnostic instead of showing a willingness to explore where colleagues, captured by scientism and/or political correctness, fear to tread? 

Fifth, Seth states that perception is a “hallucination” and “a big lie created by our deceptive brains”. Why the negativity, the deprecation of processes that do, in fact, help us to know reality? As another commentator put it:

It does seem perverse to claim that the very physicality of being alive downgrades perception to spontaneous fakery.

Sixth, I find this from Seth somewhat disconcerting as to a person "being you" - "A lot of what we know about human consciousness is based on animal experiments." The professor should leave the octopi alone and focus on the human.

Perhaps his book, which I have not read, does offer a wealth of  research findings on, for example, reflective reason. To quote (with minor editing) Ronald Knox, a Catholic priest and public intellectual, writing 100 [!] years ago in a more relevant way than lately published neuroscientists on concerns how we know we live in the real world: [*]

Run "instinct" for all its worth; show how [humankind's] delicate sensibility in a thousand directions is but the hypertrophy of such instinct; collect whatever instances you will of inherited tendencies, of herd-psychology, and the rest of it - you will still come up against a specific difference bewtween [humans] and the brute which eludes all materialist explanation: I mean the reflective reason.

When your attention, instead of being directed towards some object outside yourself, is directed towards  yourself as thinking or towards your own thinking process, that is the work of the intellect, that is [humankind's] special prerogative.

The phenomenon of the intellect, considered in itself, is not subject to any material laws or susceptible to any material explanation.

The person is the object of their own thought, and in the direction of that act they borrow nothing whatsoever from their material surroundings. 

Therefore, there is an absolute difference between "the living thing that can feel and the living thing that can reflect on its feelings". This is where neuroscience should apply its talents, towards all the manifestations of the intellect and its associated spiritual capacity, the will.

[*] The Beginning and End of Man, Catholic Truth Society, London, 1961 edition (first edition 1921)

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