Stuart W. Mirsky 2010-01-12
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Science is like a fishing expedition, Dr. V. S. Ramachandran a neurological researcher and physician tells us near the beginning of this book, written with the aid of professional science writer Sandra Blakeslee. And so he proceeds to demonstrate in the pages that follow. Eschewing any effort at formulating or defending an overarching theory of how brains produce consciousness (the state of being a subject with the features we associate with having a mental life), Ramachandran recounts a series of observations he has made over the course of a lifetime of treating individuals with brain dysfunctions, offering some explanations of the possible or most likely causes of the behaviors he has witnessed, documented and studied. Along the way he provides a good description for the lay person of the parts of the brain and how these interact with other parts and how they relate to the behaviors presented by his many patients and case studies he has reviewed.
Ramachandran's main purpose is to provide a basis, and some ongoing observations and theoretical possibilities, for what, he suggests, will ultimately be a fuller understanding of brains and minds. His observations lead to a conclusion that the features we associate with mind (being a subject, having experience) are the outcome of perfectly physical processes in brains. This isn't an earthshaking insight in today's world but his hands-on experience in studying brains and behavior lends credibility and dimension to this fundamentally modern insight. Noting that much of what the brain does is below the level of actual consciousness, he points out that the selves we recognize when we introspect consist in large part of multiple processes that underlie but are not included in consciousness per se. We have, as he puts it, multiple "zombies" in our brains, doing things we are not aware of but which are part and parcel of those aspects of our mental lives we ARE aware of. His paradigm for this is found in the process of seeing which he breaks down into conscious and unconscious processes (the what, or semantic aspects, and the how, or practical aspects, of seeing, as he puts it) by showing how we can trace different components of the visual process via distinct neurological functions and routes to different parts of our brains.
While he never gives a full account of what consciousness is and how it comes to be, he does offer an interesting insight related to this problem in his final chapter. Starting at page 228 he writes ". . . many people find it disturbing that all the richness of our mental life -- all our thoughts, feelings, emotions, even what we regard as our intimate selves -- arises entirely from the activity of little wisps of protoplasm in the brain. How is this possible? How could something as deeply mysterious as consciousness emerge from a chunk of meat inside the skull? The problem of mind and matter, substance and spirit, illusion and reality, has been a major preoccupation of both Eastern and Western philosophy for millennia . . ."
Continuing: "Except for a few eccentrics (called panpsychists) who believe everything in the universe is conscious, including things like anthills, thermostats, and Formica tabletops, most people now agree that consciousness arises in brains and not in spleens, livers, pancreases or any other organ. This is already a good start. But I will narrow the scope of inquiry even further and suggest that consciousness arises not from the whole brain but rather from certain specialized brain circuits that carry out a particular style of computation. . ."
His first insight seems to be that consciousness is only one of the things brains do and, moreover, that it involves only some highly specialized parts (even if they are dependent on the other, non-conscious brain processes to operate or operate fully). He goes on:
"Why are there always two parallel descriptions of the universe -- the first-person account ('I see red') and the third-person account ('He says that he sees red when certain pathways in his brain encounter a wavelength of six hundred nanometers')? How can these two accounts be so utterly different yet complementary? Why isn't there only a third-person account, for according to the objective worldview of the physicist and the neuroscientist, that's the only one that really exists? (Scientists who hold this view are called behaviorists.) Indeed, in their scheme of 'objective science,' the need for a first-person account doesn't even arise -- implying that consciousness doesn't exist. But we all know perfectly well that can't be right. I'm reminded of the old quip about the behaviorist who, just having made passionate love, looks at his lover and says, 'Obviously that was good for you, but was it good for me?'. . ."
In an effort to address this second, more philosophical question he asks: "How does this idea apply to the brain and the study of consciousness? I submit that we are dealing here with two mutually unintelligible languages. One is the language of nerve impulses -- spatial and temporal patterns of neuronal activity that allow us to see red, for example. The second language, the one that allows us to communicate what we are seeing to others, is a natural spoken tongue like English or German or Japanese -- rarified, compressed waves of air traveling between you and the listener. Both are languages in the strict technical sense, that is they are information-rich messages that are intended to convey meaning, across synapses between different brain parts in one case and across the air between two people in the other."
If we can apply the neurological "language" of neuronal communication by developing "cable" links between compatible brains of two organisms, he notes, then there is nothing that in principle prevents us from sharing experiences, sharing what philosophers call "qualia" (the qualitative aspects of individual experiences). If so, he notes, "This scenario demolishes the philosophers' argument that there is an insurmountable logical barrier to understanding qualia. . ."
He concludes: "The key here is that the qualia problem is not unique to the mind-body problem. It is no different in kind from problems that arise in any translation, and thus there is no need to invoke a great division in nature between the world of qualia and the material world. There is only one world with lots of translation barriers. If you can overcome them, the problems vanish."
If one grants his fairly broad definition of language (and, indeed, why should we assume that language is only about two or more conscious entities talking to one another rather than any system of signaling which communicates information between terminals?), then this does look like it begins to answer the question of why we so often tend to think there is an unbridgeable divide between the subjective and the objective.
While this book suffers from the lack of an overarching narrative or theory to answer the big question of just how the brain actually does produce experience, Ramachandran told us at the outset that that wasn't his goal. Still, he acknowledges, science often does ultimately lead to such overarching theorizing (however tentative the results) and that he believes the kind of fishing he's done in the neurological waters of brain pathology over the years is a useful path for getting us there. At the least this book is highly informative and suggestive regarding the challenging question of how brains do what they do.
SWM
