A SPECULATIVE ESSAY ON THE QUEST for CONSCIOUSNESS

(final vesion, Feb 7)

“Nullius in verba” *

F. Eugene Yates, M.D** Ralph and Marjorie Crump Professor of Medical Engineering (Emeritus)/ UCLAScientific Advisor, The John Douglas French Alzheimer’s Foundation

* Motto of the Royal Society since 1660: “Take nobody’s word for it”

CONTENTSI. IntroductionII. Targets for a consciousness detector III. Some bottom-up views IV. Emergence V. Some top –down viewsVI. Social NetworksVII. What’s missing? VIII. Appendices A. Becoming human: brain developments in the hominid to hominin

(Genus Homo) evolutionary transition B. A relevant theme from quantum mechanics?

** In my capacity as a Medical Engineer, I seek a scientific connection between normal brains and minds. In my capacity as Scientific Advisor to the John Douglas French Alzheimer’s Foundation, I seek ways to support or restore lost minds.

This essay is background for my talk on February 26, 2010 in the University of California Multi-Campus Series on Complexity.

I am indebted to my son Gregory Barnett Yates for providing ideas, criticisms and sources for this essay.

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I. INTRODUCTION

The synoptic and engaging book by Christof Koch (with Francis Crick) lays an unsurpassed foundation for studies of consciousness (1). It has 429 pages, sixty of which are references. In addition, Gerald Edelman has produced a wonderful series on consciousness of great value (26) that has strongly influenced my thinking. In this short essay I try to find my own independent “voice” on the topic, knowing that I’ll merely add some bits and pieces of newer data, and some idiosyncratic personal perspectives.

The mystery of consciousness has been vigorously studied from the “lower”, reductionistic views and methods of modern molecular and cell biology, biophysics, and neurophysiology, as well as from the more holistic, “higher” levels of philosophy, psychology, social sciences, anthropology and evolution. Between the domains of these two approaches lies an explanatory gap. This essay addresses that gap from many perspectives. The details of top-down and bottom-up scientific data and concepts are necessary but not sufficient to characterize consciousness. That characterization may require a bridge between the two approaches to close the huge explanatory gap between them.. It is commonly held that mental states, including consciousness, emerge from physical states in brains (or ganglia).

Living systems are famously complex. In contrast to machines, complex systems have no overarching model from which all subsystem models can be derived, and successful reductionistic analysis does not imply a path for successful synthesis. Analysis and synthesis are not inverses in complex systems. As a result, descriptions of complex systems require multiple models and levels of observations and the models cannot always be formally reduced to each other. Jacques Monod (2) pointed out that living systems have three essential characteristics: 1. nearly invariant reproduction, 2. hereditary transmission of characteristics, and 3. teleonomic (goal-directed) behaviors - that look to us like signs of intentionality. However, Intentionality does not imply consciousness, though it is a regular feature of consciousness when it is present.

The concept of emergence (3) could provide the required bridge mentioned above, but the search for a “bridging principle”, that was fashionable several decades ago, has failed to illuminate the quest and has recently been largely abandoned. Instead, candidate processes like 40 Hz oscillations in the cerebral cortex or quantum coherence in microtubules or loops of kinase enzymes and synaptic chemistries have all been proposed to account for the highly subjective qualia of consciousness, and to firmly anchor the thoughts of an immaterial and conscious mind in material, biophysical processes. These proposals have also failed. The Quest for consciousness would be helped if we had a device, sensor or program that could detect consciousness, without false positives, in any entity. I shall comment on possible targets for the detector later.

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The “mind” is usually pursued using the norms of Western science that, following Aristotle, emphasize “agency” , but an Eastern path might emphasize “harmony” as the key (4). The following story is an example:

A troubled man came to a monk and said: “Please, Master, give me peace of mind”. The monk replied: “Show me your mind and I shall give it peace.” The troubled man went away and looked everywhere for his mind -by one account in the ten directions: North, East, South, West; in the intermediate points and up and down. He also looked in the seven places, and eventually he returned and reported: “ I searched everywhere but cannot find my mind .” “There”, responded the monk: “I have given it peace.”

(The relevance of this story to my topic becomes apparent when the word consciousness is substituted for mind. That there is no such fixed thing as a mind is a common understanding in zen. A source is: The Gateless Barrier. Robert Aiken trans. The Wu-men Kuan (Mumonkan) 1990 North Point Press, NY NY p 248. )

My essay accepts the Scottish Enlightenment (1730-1800) and the Logical Positivism of the 1920s and 1930s as a standard base for starting out on a quest for a reductionistic, objective, scientific account of consciousness. (I studied symbolic logic under Hans Reichenbach, a member of the Vienna Circle of Positivists.) Historically, in the intensely reductionistic, “hard” physical sciences, many of the most productive questions have been those having binary (yes/no) answers to sharply defined queries, that support strong inferences. Some classical examples from physics:

Is spin parity conserved? Does a light ray bend near massive objects? Is the velocity of light in a vacuum a limiting velocity in all reference

frames? Can the position and momentum of an electron be simultaneously

Observed?

In contrast we find that in the so-called “soft” sciences: e.g., biology, psychology, evolution, economics, sociology….more nebulous questions abound, and among them are: a. What was the earliest terrestrial life-form - self-replicating molecules (e.g., RNAs serving as information )?, or metabolism – a quasi-stable arrangement of catalyzed reactions, locally bounded, that yield abundant thermodynamic free-energy for creating new reactions and forms? b. What are the lineages of extant life-forms? c. What are the “mechanisms” of evolution? d. Is Homo sapiens predominantly a cooperative or an aggressively competitive species? e. Does “free will” exist? f. How should we define and identify consciousness?

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Consciousness (some definitions)

I proceed mindful that J.B. Watson (5) in declared in 1913 “The time has come when psychology must discard all reference to consciousness…Its sole task is the prediction and control of behavior (i.e., observable activities) and introspection can form no part of its method.” Skinner’s operant conditioning later drove that position to the limit.

Consciousness is a special mental state. The simplest definition of waking consciousness is that it is synonymous with awareness. A fuller definition would add that it is awareness with focused attention and a mix of memories . Because consciousness is so personal I have little hope of finding a standard definition. However, here is a labored one from the neurophysiologist E.R. John (around 1980):

“Consciousness is a process in which information about multiple individual modalities of sensation and perception are combined into a unified, multidimensional representation of the state of the system and its environment, and integrated with information about memories and the needs of the organism, generating emotional reactions and programs of behavior to adjust the organism to its environment.”

Mental states are an immaterial, emergent property of physical states of a material brain. Not all mental states are conscious: some are unconscious (and in humans, these can be powerfully influential on behaviors and beliefs). In fact, consciousness may often be an “afterthought” of the unconscious mind (6). Other non-conscious mental states are instincts – relatively direct, stimulus-response, semi-automatic behaviors and processes.

Varieties of consciousness include: waking consciousness; REM sleep; hypnotic states, reveries, musings and daydreaming, and the suspended attention state such as we experience when driving a car on a familiar commute, arriving at the destination with no detailed memory of the details of the trip. A few of these types will be discussed.

Having invoked “brains” and “minds” above, I offer a few comments about them.

Brains

The human brain looked at materially is an unpromising object. In adults, it typically weighs about 1350 grams, comprising 1 to 2% of body weight. It has a volume of about 1300 cc which means it has a density of about 1.0. Compositionally, it is full fat and water. Energetically it is commonly said to be “expensive” because it consumes about 18% of resting oxygen consumption – the highest fraction of any organ. But, that opinion is somewhat misleading because the absolute metabolic rate for a human being quietly sitting is under 100 watts and the brain is then expending only 25 watts. It is a dim bulb. And yet, if a supercomputer had to

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compute what the brain does well (and much of what it does well is trans-computable), it would melt down its switches unless it were cooled very severely. The brain, in contrast, is cooled rather cheaply by a low flow of a sticky fluid offering only the heat capacity of water at 37°C to carry off its modest heat. Its trick, as we all recognize, is having a large number of varied types of neurons, and almost ten times that number of varied classes of glial cells that interact with them and their dynamic, dendritic-synaptic connections that are of stupendous number and varieties, forming modules and networks.

All members of Class Mammalia have brains of a common global design, but, of course, the detailed anatomy varies widely within the Class. Some “lower” animals have clusters of neurons with a very different layout (e.g., ganglia) much less complicated than brains. All brains of members of Class Mammalia (excepting a few with severe developmental anomalies) are presumed to be endowed with the capacity for consciousness, on the grounds of many similarities in their neural organizations, and the many common behaviors, e.g., grooming, playing, REM and SWS types of sleep - discussed later. A big question concerns the phylogenetic distribution of that capacity beyond Class Mammalia.

Minds

For comprehensive reports on studies of animal minds see (6 – 9). Some invertebrates with brain structures very different from ours (e.g., octopuses) show high intelligence by tests we accept as suitable for the purpose, and in many invertebrates there is more there than simple stimulus-response, instinctive behaviors. It is now incontrovertible that honey bees have a truly abstract language (no quotation marks needed for the word language). More than that, using eyes of very different construction from ours, and working with only one million neurons, bees recognize human faces, and do so in the same way we do (10). However, most insects express only purposeful, instinctive behaviors arising from elementary stimulus-response systems that are not likely to be mindful, even when the behavior seems elaborate. Though they are obviously goal-directed, the limited repertoires of instinctive behaviors require no fancy interpretations involving mental states. They are automatic. The superb, now classical studies of insect societies by E.O. Wilson, including ants, (11) can be appreciated by his delightful fictional (but not really fiction) story Trailhead, that is featured in the Jan. 25, 2010 issue of The New Yorker. After reading it, you will know what it is like to be an ant!

A test for the presence of a mind is adaptability to a wide range of unforeseen circumstances. A surprising adaptation by an animal only doubtfully mindful, is the hermit crab. It has three pairs of side legs plus a pair of antennae up front. When it tries to occupy an empty shell, the crab grasps the margins of the entrance with its rear pair of legs, braces in the sand, on which the empty shell is located, using its front legs and then scoops itself backwards into the shell using its middle pair. That is its standard behavior. Remarkably, if the middle pair of legs is cut off, the crab still gets into the waiting shall, but by a novel technique. It again grasps the shell with the

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rear legs, but braces itself with now- lowered antennae and scoops backwards with its front legs. I have seen a convincing video of this instantaneously adaptive performance, the existence of which I would be otherwise be inclined to doubt. The crab’s unlearned behavior, appearing immediately as needed, has suggested to some that there must be a mindless repertoire of automatic “motor tapes” available. The origin of that proposed and controversial repertoire is unexplained.

Successful modifications of behaviors by Pavolvian conditioned responses, or by Skinnerian operant conditioning, though they require active attention, do not imply or require the presence of consciousness, and may be demonstrated even in primitive animals. An organism exposed to a repetitive stimulus to which it gives a non-random, regular response may or may not be conscious. Circus-trained bears and dancing elephants, though surely conscious – being mammals - manifest the effects of operant conditioning and their tricks are not spontaneous nor signs of their consciousness. In contrast, the famous You-Tube video of a parrot dancing to music revealed a unique, spontaneous behavior not put in by a trainer. (That bird may well be conscious.)

II. SOME PLAUSIBLE TARGETS FOR DESIGN OF AN OBJECTIVE “CONSCIOUSNESS-DETECTOR”

. The need for such a detector is imperative in some uncommon clinical cases such as the “vegetative states” and the “locked-in” syndromes. (For the latter see the renowned and dramatic book by Jean-Dominique Bauby entitled The Diving Bell and the Butterfly first published in French in 1997 as Le scaphandre et le papillon.) For the mammalian brain to be awake and aware, the neocortex requires inputs from lower levels of organization including hindbrain (brainstem) and midbrain structures, rather than from direct sensory inputs. Some structures supporting awareness states in the neocortex are the reticular formation, ventral pons, mesencephalic tegmentum, subthalamus, hypothalamus and internal capsule. H.W. Magoun in 1952 (12)defined “An ascending reticular activating system in the brain stem”, since abbreviated as RAS. The RAS can be damaged in many ways (e.g., trauma in auto accidents) but a stroke involving the basilar artery of the brain supplying the pons is a common cause. Such patients are conscious and may have no loss of cognitive powers (we now know) but can barely communicate (sometimes only with eye blinks). They can’t move or speak and superficially they seem to be unconscious. In contrast, persistent vegetative states usually result from damage to higher levels of the brain and consciousness is definitely lost, though the EEG is not flat.

The recent (Feb. 3) online issue of The New England J. of Medicine (www.NEJM.org) has a detailed article by Martin. M. Monti et al. entitled Willful modulation of brain activity in disorders of consciousness with an accompanying Editorial by A.H. Ropper entitled “Cogito ergo sum by MRI”. These have strong bearing on the use of fMRI as a consciousness detector. Fifty-four patients with

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disorders of consciousness were studied. One of them was a patient with traumatic brain injuries that put him into a chronic, clinical “vegetative state” as determined by bedside testing. No responses of any kind. He was put into an MRI machine and (with appropriate control data from normal subjects available for comparison) instructed to imagine himself in either of two scenes – playing tennis (motor test) or navigating the streets of a familiar city or walking from room to room in his home (spatial imagery test). Data from normal subjects showed that the motor test would activate the supplementary motor area whereas the spatial test would activate the parahippocampal gyrus. This clinically unresponsive patient was told to think of one scene to indicate a “yes” answer to a Y/N question, and the other scene to indicate “no”. The correct answers to questions asked were not known to the interrogators. Evidently the patient could hear, because with a high degree of accuracy he actually carried out the instructions and gave correct answers. Sample question: Do you have any brothers? In spite of these results indicating that he was in a “minimally conscious state” rather than a true vegetative state, no communication at the bedside could be established. The content of that minimal conscious state could have been at a very low, reflexive level, without self-awareness. There is no way for an observer to judge. As might be expected, these data raise ethical issues about when to “pull the plug” on patients who cannot communicate at all at the bedside. What has been found here is an fMRI-dependent signal for very minimal communication that has no practical value. The Editorial by Ropper shows proper caution in evaluating the significance of these findings.

A “consciousness – detector” should report only on objective phenomena of a kind that any appropriately educated scientist could observe and record. Three kinds of such data have been frequently sought in consciousness studies: 1) certain behaviors, 2) brain images – especially, these days, as mentioned above, from fMRI scans that measure increases in local oxygenation via blood flows as indicator of neural activity and 3) communication (human speech – or signing – having no rival for effectiveness in this regard). The difficulty is that minds and consciousness are subjective and private whereas brain events are objective and public. Mental events violate the requirements of the scientific enterprise that is fundamentally committed to the position that private experiences don't count as evidence. Only publicly accessible and repeatable experiences have that status. By running scans on conscious subjects who can tell what they are thinking and experiencing under test conditions (limited by what can be attempted while inside a scanner), all three kinds of data can sometimes be simultaneously obtained. While the subject’s comments describe mental states, their behaviors and scan data give a view of the associated physical brain states.

Some objective markers of consciousness

1) Self-Recognition Protocol: secretly put a mark on the forehead of a sleeping or distracted subject and after its awakening place a mirror

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before it. Is there any behavioral evidence indicating that the mark has been noticed in the reflection and referred to self by attempts to touch it or scrape it off? So far, only humans (after about one year of age), elephants, chimpanzees, dolphins, and magpies have passed this self-recognition test.

2) Pointing test. A human who is well known to the test subject (animal, baby or adult human) suddenly points to some object or location in the room without saying anything, except, maybe, Look! Only humans, starting at about age two years, and domestic dogs can follow the point. Even other canines such as wolves fail to get it. The assumption is that as dogs became domesticated from wolves, starting about 135,000 years ago, there was a strong selection by their keepers for those who showed certain aptitudes – such as following hand signals to guide a retriever to a downed bird. I have frequently marveled at the extraordinary recoveries by black Labrador retrievers on duck hunts when the dog hadn’t marked the shot bird down. Hearing the command: “Get the bird”, the dog looks to its owner for a hand signal (point) to choose a course for retrieval (often into rushes that obscure the downed bird). As it nears the target area, if the bird is not immediately located, the dog looks back toward its master in the duck blind for another fix by hand signal. This performance goes way beyond the famous “Clever Hans” trick in which a horse (Hans) was supposedly able to count or answer yes/no questions put to it by its handler, who was unobtrusively and unconsciously giving it specific signals when it chose the right answer out of a selection. Even the excited responses of the audience as the horse tapped on choices and came near the right answer, when the handler was shielded so Hans couldn’t see him, were sufficient to clue the horse in good light. In dim light it lost its “amazing ability”.

3) Speech, signing, reading. Whether or not Chomsky is right that human

language skills arise from fixed innate structures in the brain (an opposing view emphasizes the mounting evidence for plasticity in the brain), the use of symbolic language is, of course, a very strong indication of consciousness. In spite of decades of efforts to teach apes some form of language, be it by gestures or visual symbols, there has been no noteworthy success (but much hype). One of the prerequisites of language is the ability to imitate sounds created by someone else. Chimps and bonobos can’t do it to any extent, but whales (by singing!), many parrots and songbirds are striking vocal mimics. Nevertheless, using speech or vocal mimicry as a convincing test of consciousness is too narrow a criterion,

4) Tool fabrications and uses of symbols. Besides us, some primates and birds can make the triangulated abstraction associating me, it and function between. More advanced abstractions appear, to a limited extent, in some

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chimpanzees, gorillas, dolphins and birds who can count, add, subtract, string short lists of symbols together in a “meaningful” way, plan ahead, or play games to deceive others. The African gray parrot Alex was the subject of 30 years of scientific study during which he learned more than 100 words and could distinguish colors and numbers.

Some members of the corvids (crows, rooks) have substantial intelligence, as seen when they spontaneously, without prior training or clues, drop stones into a tube with some water near the bottom on which a worm is floating. They keep adding stones until the water level is high enough for them to get the food. New Caledonian crows (captive) can figure out how to manipulate three wooden sticks of different lengths, in sequence, to pry out food. They select a short stick, from a tube, that is suitable to retrieve a longer stick out of another tube, which is suitable to retrieve a still longer stick, out of another tube, that reaches the food. Orangutans solve the floating food (a peanut) problem by taking a mouthful of water and spitting it into the tube to raise the water level to a point that they get the peanut.

In the hominin evolutionary line (Genus Homo), crude stone tools first appeared around 2.5 million years ago (H. habilis, H. erectus). (For details about the hominid to hominin evolution see Appendix A.)

5) Brain size and organization

Darwin believed that consciousness was a graduated phenomenon among primates and perhaps other animals, present in most or all, but reaching its greatest elaboration in us. Others claim that to be accorded consciousness an animal must manifest highly developed cognitive systems behaviorally and anatomically along the lines I have been discussing above. Members of Class Mammalia alive today range in body mass from the smallest (e.g., the shrew) to the largest – the blue whale (the largest animal that has ever lived). The shrew weighs about 3 grams, and the blue whale has a mass of 100,000 kg. This mass range for the Class is an extraordinary eight orders of magnitude! If, as seems very likely, all mammals have the brain circuitry for consciousness, then absolute brain size alone cannot be a reliable marker for consciousness.

The classical allometric scaling for brain size as a function of body size is given by:

Y = YoMb where Yo is a normalization constant, M is the independent variable body mass, and b is the scaling exponent.

A linear graph is given by:log Y = logYo + b log M with b as slope of the line

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For eutherian mammals, there are good data indicating a value for Yo of 11.24 and b=0.76 when M is body mass in kg and Y is brain mass in grams. For most of the animals the data lie on or close to a line with a slope of (rounded) 3/4 which is identical to the slope for their metabolic rate. Some primates (chimpanzees) and marine mammals (dolphins) are an exception- their brains are bigger than their size or metabolic rate would predict from the allometric relation for other mammals. Humans are farther above the line than any other animals. This fact suggests that an important indicator for what might be called cognitive power, including consciousness, is brain size as a relatively large fraction of body size. Octopuses share this important trait with some mammals and some birds: a high brain to body mass ratio – an example of “convergent evolution”. But large brain/body size ratio is also too narrow a criterion for consciousness, as is vocal mimicry mentioned above. Though providing strong evidence for the presence of consciousness, both criteria exclude too many animals that pass other tests. It is sobering to realize that Neanderthals had bigger brains we do, for similar body size. In the other direction, the skull of miniature Homo floresiensis (“fossil hobbits”) held a chimp size brain, but with enlarged frontal lobes. Some interpret this finding to mean that this hominid species (if it is that) had neural reorganization that allowed its members to think much as people do, in spite of its small size.

6) Brain imaging

EEG, fMRI, PET, CAT are prominent methods, used separately and in some combinations, to peek at brain structure and function in living brains. All are in clinical use. Of course each has its own special value and limitation (that I won’t detail here). Recently, reading the brain’s spontaneous magnetic fields is also being explored. The new science of optogenetics (2002) has matured to the point that light-driven experiments are now probing the brains of mice, fruit flies, zebra fish, and nematodes, as well as human neurons growing in dishes, “to get the neural code for complex things such as reward” (Karl Deisseroth, Stanford University).

When imaging views can be obtained from conscious subjects, it is possible to get some idea of which brain regions are most active under highly specified test circumstances. (A particularly interesting question is where the most intense activity is when a bilingual person is reading, first a text in his/her native language, and then in a language acquired later.)

Imaging approaches can provide some crude empirical patterns associated with claimed mental states, but they can’t discover the content of those mental states, nor provide a clue as to how they emerged from brain states. The images do reveal that consciousness in humans has a physical substrate in the thalamo-cortical complex that begins to be detectable between the 24th and 28th week of the ~ 40 week human gestation. By the third trimester

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the fetus is continually in either one of two sleep states, called active and quiet, corresponding to rapid-eye-movement (REM) and slow-wave sleep (SWS) common to all mature mammals. Imaging has also revealed that the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex in humans is not fully formed and active until about age 20 years, and that surprising fact has suggested that mature judgments are not supported until that age. (Companies insuring teen-age drivers have taken note of these data.) Homo sapiens has a long childhood and adolescence – the longest of all in the homin line (Appendix A).

Christof Koch, who has outstanding credentials regarding the quest for consciousness (1), advises that we should “measure more, argue less” (13).He based his demand on the study of a patient like that discussed above. He also cites studies that show that in certain tricky protocols, relying on “people’s instinct (?) to make money”, there was evidence that something in the brain could guide the subjects to make “good” choices using unconscious processing that did not force subjects to focus their consciousness on what they are conscious of. This effort tested the philosophical theory of consciousness, called higher-order thought, that specifies when you are conscious of something you can confidently judge what you saw. The results confounded these expectations.

7) Sleep states

The literature on sleep has become vast since the discovery of its stages through EEGs. It is clear that consciousness during sleep is lost in SWS yet still present, in modified form, during dreaming (mostly in REM). Uniquely among mammals, the Cetacea (whales, dolphins) enter sleep with only one side of their brains at a time. Sleepwalking is a recognized clinical condition of great interest because during episodes the subjects are unconscious, as proved by their total lack of recall of events after they are awakened. During this unconscious mode people may do very complicated and distinctively human things -- talk, make phone calls, get into a car and drive off, or even play musical instruments. Mat Cartmill comments: “This makes it much harder for us to find out anything about animal awareness. How do we know that animals are not simply sleepwalking all the time, even when they appear to be awake? Do wolves hunt and horses gallop in their sleep, in the same way that a human somnambulist gets into the car and drives off on the freeway at 65 miles an hour?”

Regarding the normal functions of sleep and dreaming, there are too many theories to detail here. But there is one for dreaming (REM) that I like: dreams keep the attention circuits tuned up. SWS seems to support the setting of long-term memories and modifications of dendritic trees and it cleans up the metabolic ashes of wakefulness (possibly by removing an accumulation of adenosine).

I turn now to views of different levels of neural organizations that may support consciousness.

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III. SOME BOTTOM-UP VIEWS

Are single neurons, or very small clusters, “smart” ?

Firing of a single neuron can modify global brain states. Cheng-yu T. Li Mu-ming Poo and Yang Dan (14) asked whether or not the activity of a single neuron could switch between two global brain states, resembling SWS and REM, in anesthetized rats. Whole - cell patch clamps were placed on superficial layers of visual or somatosensory cortex. Recordings were first made to show that there were indeed two global brain states, resembling the two sleep states, detectable in the firing patterns of the single cell. Then different frequency stimulations were delivered to the single neurons and a global pattern could be switched, as confirmed by examining local field potentials remote from the stimulated cell. Previous studies by others had shown that that stimulation of a single motor cortical neuron could evoke whisker movement and that spiking of a single somatosensory cortical neuron could induce behaviorally reportable effects. This study showed that burst spiking of a single neuron can trigger a switch among global brain states. They conclude that these results underscore the functional importance of individual neuronal activity. However, these important results do not necessarily impute “smarts” to the individual neuron providing the switch. Complex fields in nonlinear systems often have singularities at which a small input – even noise- can reorganize the field into a new quasi-stable dynamic state. I believe this study may show an instance of such an effect.

E.Z. Macosko et al. (15) studying the nematode C. elegans, reported that regulated feeding behavior of this simple animal with only 302 neurons depends upon a pair of cells (RMG) whose activity is essential for all aspects of their social behavior. Differences in the foraging styles of this organism can be explained by variations in the gene NPR-1 whose protein is found associated with the RMG neurons and these are potent in their global behavioral effects. That potency arises through gap junction connections to seven other neurons in a hub- and - spoke arrangement with RMG at the center.

This study confirms that small clusters of neurons can have amplified effects on whole-animal behaviors. However, a recent report challenges the conventional view that dense local connectivity in visual cortex of primates forces nearby cortical neurons to share common inputs, and that sharing must lead to strong correlations among them. Ecker et al (27), studying the visual cortex of monkeys, discovered that even nearby neurons, with similar orientation tuning, show little if any correlated variability. They conclude that either adjacent neurons share only a few percent of their inputs, or that “their activity is actively decorrelated”. In addition, Renart et al simulated recurrent neural networks and showed that they can generate an asynchronous state characterized by low mean spiking correlations despite substantial amounts of shared inputs (28 ). It is surprising (to me) to have evidence that within a network neurons are

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cooperating, but that correlated electrical activity is not a signature of that cooperation.

Below are two kinds of valuable data that I think have created some mis-interpretations (not by their authors) that I call “myths”. Experts in neuroscience have never endorsed these mistaken views, but in lay publications I have often encountered them so I expose them here.

1) The myth of “Grandmother neurons”

This term was invented by Jerry Lettvin of MIT , a brilliant neuroscientist with a proclivity to dramatize aspects of the sciences.

Recently, Moran Cerf et al. at the California Institute of Technology have shown in epileptic patients with implanted electrodes, that single brain cells can fire selectively to specific thoughts. The electrodes were able to record activity from single brain cells in the medial temporal lobe, in a region important for memory, attention and perception. In each patient the researchers found about five neurons that fired when the subject viewed an image of a certain person or object. (e.g., grandmother). Once these neurons were identified, the researchers wanted to know if the patients could control each cell by merely thinking about that certain person or object. Indeed, they could. With practice the patients became increasingly adept at controlling individual neurons with specific thoughts. To me, this remarkable result does not necessarily mean that the individual neuron by itself was able to carry out the whole recognition, but only that when the thought was present the particular cell was a regular participant in the response. Furthermore, properties of temporal lobe neurons are extraordinarily plastic - they respond to many different input stimuli. The expert Charles G. Gross calls attention to these realities in a recent book review (Science 327:524-525, 2010.)

2) The myth of “mirror neurons”

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, neuroscientists found a population of cells that fired whenever a monkey prepared to act - but also when it merely watched another animal act. They called these cells “mirror neurons." However, we cannot generalize directly from other animals to people. The evidence for individual mirror neurons comes mostly from studies of macaque monkeys. Because the studies require placing an electrode in single neurons they are not likely to be repeated in human beings. Furthermore, it does not follow that mirror neurons were structurally and specifically determined in advance during the development of the brain. Neurons are shaped by experience. In spite of these striking and interesting data, I remain doubtful that a single type of cell can be responsible for a single type of experience. Even something as simple as seeing an edge, results from a very complex pattern of interactions among many

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different types of neurons. There are no neurons that by themselves are uniquely and only “edge detectors”.

Small clusters of neurons supporting a thought that can move matter

Recently, Jose M. Carmena et al. showed that monkeys can learn to move a computer cursor with their thoughts, using just one set of instructions and a small set of 75-100 neurons. With training the number of neurons required decreased, and, remarkably, the same set was used on subsequent days. Furthermore a smaller set (10-15 neurons) could learn a different task, and later switch from one task to the other without interference. Thus, the brain can acquire multiple skills using the same small set of neurons to carry out movements. Again, neuronal networks are plastic.

Genes - Why can’t chimps speak?

Katherine S. Pollard recently summarized DNA sequences that are distinctive in humans as compared to chimpanzees (Scientific American, May 2009. pp 44-49). Her list includes FOXP2, HAR1, AMY1, ASPM, LCT, HAR2 and each of these supports a different process that puts humans at an advantage.

Although our genetic relation to chimps superficially seems close, it does not take many changes to produce a new species. In the case of speech, the amino acid composition of the protein that is the gene product of FOXP2 changed rapidly around the time that language emerged in modern humans. All animals have the gene, but the human version’s product differs in only 2 of its 740 units from that of chimpanzees. From study of a large family, half of whose members have severe problems in articulating and understanding speech, it seemed that this gene was essential for normal speech production and comprehension, and they had a mutant version. That importance of FOXP2 has since been confirmed. Daniel Geschwind, at UCLA, put the chimp version of the gene into cultures of human neurons, and found that at the cellular level the gene did not do just one thing – but controlled the activity of at least 116 other genes (see Nature Nov 12, 2009). But there must be more to the origin of the capacity for speech because the FOXP2 network is present and equally active on both sides of the human brain, whereas the language facility is asymmetric. And, at the very bottom, quantum mechanics (QM) and consciousness

Some serious attempts have been made to anchor consciousness in quantum-level phenomena. There are two books with a quantum perspective that I have found informative. The curious reader may enjoy looking at these as an introduction to the issues (16,17). Nevertheless, I had never warmed to the idea that quantum physics could serve as a useful platform for understanding consciousness. Its appeal seemed to me to arise from the following absurd syllogism:

Quantum physics is very mysterious and no one really understands it. Consciousness is also very mysterious and no one understands it.

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Therefore there must be a quantum-physical foundation for consciousness.

I had felt that scale differences between macroscopic brain structure and function and the microscopic dynamics of quantum physics constituted a mismatch, but on further study I noticed what physicists have always recognized, viz., that some phenomena and entities are to be best understood simultaneously as both a classical (macroscopic) system and a quantum system. (Crystals are a common, simple example. In them micro = macro.) Quantum theory is not restricted to the explanation of microscopic phenomena only (18). I have come to respect (some) efforts to present a quantum-physical theory of consciousness, and in Section VII, I use a concept fundamental to QM, in my attempt to reconcile the profound differences between brain states and mind states. (See also Appendix B ).

The common assumption in studies of immaterial consciousness and mental states is that physical, material, brain states are associated with them, and their source. That is, they emerge from the material brain. I mentioned earlier that the notion of emergence has come in and out of favor in neuroscience (and in physics too). Nevertheless, on page 10 of his splendid book (1), Koch accepts the usefulness of the term and concept. So do I. Below I examine it. For an argument that emergence can’t be a proper description of how brain states create mental states, see Galen Strawson et al.(19) and its rebuttal by Jerry Fodor (20).

IV. EMERGENCE Brain states are material and therefore susceptible to analysis through normal principles and procedures of physics, chemistry, and neurophysiology. All emergent properties, material or immaterial themselves, have an associated physical, material state or states associated with them at a lower structural and functional level, consisting of atoms and molecules, cells, reactions and flows.

There are two kinds of emergent phenomena of relevance to consciousness. They differ in the degree of our ignorance, rather like the differences between the deeply probabilistic (and profoundly mysterious) quantum mechanics, and the less mysterious, more trivially probabilistic, statistical mechanics. The first is the emergence of a new material structure with functions from a material physiological state similarly constituted. That is the normal condition in the developing human brain that ultimately has more synaptic connections than can be specified by its genetic details. The scales are too different. About 50% of the total human genome, of at most 25,000 genes, is active, or potentially so, in the brain, whereas the number of synaptic connections is uncountably large. It has been estimated to be in the trillions, and ever-changing. The brain is not “hard-wired” in advance; its structure emerges. We rely on the current and familiar activities of interested scientists from cell and molecular biology, biochemistry,

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biophysics, neurophysiology, information and computation, brain scans as well as methods of tissue-section analyses, to advance further our understanding of material structure → emergent material structures.

This first kind of emergence appears even in statistical mechanics. The founders of statistical mechanics showed that macroscopic observables were averages over microscopic states and thus the two intensive thermodynamic variables, pressure and temperature, were emergent properties of mean field theories. In contrast to the first kind of emergence is a second kind - that of immaterial mind from the material brain. This emergence cannot arise directly from the material to immaterial by any known, normal-science pathways. The classical reductionist approach leaves us continually to seek solutions at lower and lower hierarchical levels. To move conceptually in the other direction, we must apply pruning algorithms at the lower level and look for emergent properties including new entities that become new agents for behaving according to new rules at a higher hierarchical level of organization.

Emergence is thus the opposite of reduction

Below I introduce some top-down perspectives, and later will consider whether or not the concept of emergence bridges the gap between them and the bottom-up perspectives.

V.TOP-DOWN VIEWS of Brains, Minds and Consciousness .

Reaching the human mind by introspection

Because introspection is by definition private, it lacks scientific status. However, it has possibilities. My son Gregory provides this thought experiment based on his actual experience in a neuroscience laboratory. He presents it as a story:

Late one night a skeptical scientist probed the activity of nerve cells cultured in a glass dish. Micro-electrodes and flashing fluorescent dyes revealed the complex activity of the neural web on the bench before him. The scientist studied and recorded the scintillating patterns closely, gaining ever-deeper understanding of the network’s functioning. The scientist then had an odd thought:

“Watching these flickering patterns must be causing activity in my own brain. If I had. myriad micro-electrodes to study the activity of my own brain ( a healthy whole-brain), what cascades and patterns of activity I might then see! But wait. What are my own neurons but elaborately ramified micro-electrodes monitoring the activity of my own brain? If I am in large measure a brain, then what is introspection but literally “seeing within” – observing the activity of my own brain using neural microelectrodes? Others may not be able to verify my introspective observations, but if I am careful to shun my own biases might I not use introspection as a powerful tool

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to formulate hypotheses about brain function – hypotheses that could then be tested in mutually observable ways?”

Boredom. What does your mind do when you are “doing nothing”?

According to some scientists, boredom may be useful as an important source of creativity. (Watson remarked in The Double Helix that for creative work it helps to be slightly under-employed.) Data from people lying quietly in an fMRI or other scanner, waiting to be given a mental task as part of a psychology experiment, reveal that their brains are then very active in regions presumed to be involved in autobiographical memories, imagining the thoughts and feelings of others, and making up hypothetical events. This is a default mind-mode that uses almost as much energy as does active attention to tasks. It is currently believed to be based on a network having two major hubs: the posterior cingulate gyrus (with the precuneus) and the medial prefrontal cortex. It screens a show on our inward eye with scenes and scripts - imaginative, creative, or foolish.

Jacques Barzun claimed that the mark of an educated person was the ability to sit quietly alone in a bare room for an hour – and not be bored! A “daydreaming” or musing person can be far from “spaced-out”, and even creative. The rich rewards available from this default mode of the brain come most easily to a person feeling well rested and not sleep deprived. But, there are some who take a different view. In his unfinished novel The Pale King, David Foster Wallace deliberately introduces boredom as part of the plot. In a note left with his manuscript he wrote: “Bliss – a second-by -second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious – lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom.“ He likened release from boredom to “stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.”

The mesmerized mind

Research shows that when people act on a hypnotic suggestion, they actually see, hear and feel differently. When told to see colors, the color-processing parts of their brains “light up” in scans – despite the absence of any real color in view. In this mysterious state of mind the subject may seem quiet, but the scans show that the brain is actually focused and super-attentive. Other studies indicate that hypnosis can measurably change how the brain works. During color-text conflict tests (e.g., the word “red” is displayed colored blue), highly hypnotizable subjects show diminished activity in the anterior cingulate cortex that is active when people are trying to sort out conflicting information from different sources. (The fMRI scans were done at Weill Medical College of Cornell University and published in Proc Nat Acad Sci in 2005).

Peter W. Halligan of Cardiff University, in collaboration with Quinton Deeley of King’s College London, has evidence that hypnosis boosts activity in the prefrontal cortex, and Yann Cojann (Geneva) found that when a hypnotized subject was told

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that one hand was paralyzed, and later directed to use that hand, the motor cortex failed to send signals to motor execution regions in the normal way, but instead sent them to the precuneus. (As mentioned above, it is believed that the precuneus is a center for self-consciousness and mental imagery.) Evidently, hypnosis definitely can alter mind-body relationships in both an objective and a subjective fashion.

Sleep and sleepwalking

These mental states have already been discussed.

Multiple minds – three views

1. The unconscious normal mind (consciousness as an “afterthought)

Freud’s vision of a tripartite mind, consisting of super-ego, ego and (hidden) id, no longer commands respect (it tends to turn everyone into a clinical case needing therapy), but no one doubts that some vigorous mental processing is ongoing of which the conscious mind, by definition, seems unaware. That busy unconscious (or subconscious) mind unobtrusively biases the conscious mind, creating and maintaining various fixed notions such as racial prejudices, sexual preferences, political positions, and even altruism – all of which reach conscious awareness as compelling “afterthoughts” (for which the conscious mind takes credit). Steven Harnad (21) has even suggested that, in general, consciousness is itself a continual afterthought.

2. The triune brain

Another well-known partitioning of the brain, that has implications for different classes of brain functioning and mental states, comes from an evolutionary view of the origins of modern mammalian brain structure. McLean has called it a triune brain – reptilian, paleomammalian (limbic system), neomammalian. Anatomically they are the hindbrain, midbrain and neocortex (22).The neocortex is uniquely mammalian - a sheet-like, six-layered structure, found in all mammals and only in mammals and is required for their consciousness.

3.Split brains/split minds

The careful studies of epileptic patients who have undergone section of the corpus collosum have dramatized the correctness of the view that the brain has a profoundly modular construction. There is a broken symmetry between the two hemispheres, each with a “personality” and capacity uniquely its own. The details are so well known that I won’t recap them here, except to say that it is too easy to over-interpret the data and over- invest in the view that we have two minds, not one. Connected, the two normal hemispheres coordinate to establish one coherent mental state of awareness. Were that not so, we would all suffer from a “paralysis cogitans”! There are rare instances of people born with a congenital failure to

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develop a corpus collosum, and they are less inconvenienced than might be expected from the split-brain clinical syndrome induced in normally-developed brains. (Presumably the congenitally defective brain arrives at compensatory pathways during its development that are not available to normally-developed brains.)

4. Altered minds (other than by trauma)

Schizophrenia, bipolar disease, autism, addictions and numerous other distortions of “normal” mental states abound. The mind-altering effects of many common chemicals such as nitrous oxide, ether, alcohol, caffeine, cocaine, marijuana, modern centrally-acting general anesthetics, LSD, as well as uncommon therapeutic drugs of many classes …..demonstrate dramatically the existence of a physical/chemical foundation from which non-physical mind emerges. (Those who like to believe that the mind lives in “another world”, separate from the body, might profitably take notice that it stands in that other world with feet of clay!)

At this point, having presented some samples from both bottom- up and top-down views, and also the possibly bridging concept of emergence, I now mention an old issue in the field of consciousness studies.

The interaction problem between brains and minds

In this essay, up to now, I have focused on the conventional problem of deriving (emergent, higher-level) mental states from (lower-level) brain states. But the inverse problem – the ability of mental states to affect brain and body states is equally formidable. Many studies have shown that how we process information depends not just on our brains, but on our entire body. The famous James-Lange theory of emotions proposed that brain/body states cause the mental states of emotions. But, it was opposed by the Cannon – Bard theory, from two very distinguished physiologists, who theorized instead that bodily changes associated with emotions were caused by the emotions. The issue of interactions between brains and minds remains a central problem in neuroscience today. In Section VII I shall return to this issue.

At this point I have arrived at the conclusion, based on known structures and some functions, that we can justifiably claim: All mammals possess consciousness – an ability to be aware of themselves as an individual, and of others in a kinship group, and to play. Playing may in some cases be a rehearsal for hunting or other food-gathering behavior, but it is more than that in its seemingly gratuitous excess capacity for fooling around, teasing, competing in mock fights. But only a few mammals have been proven to be able to read the minds and intentions of others, as living in organized social groups requires.

.SOCIAL NETWORKS

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As the audience for this Lecture Series knows well, modeling of small networks has become basic to “computational social science”, as can be seen in the titles of recently scheduled presentations. They include: Social Networks and Human Social Complexity (D. White), How Cooperation Emerges from Conflict: an Agent-Based Model of Security Network Formation (Zeev Maoz), Power and Exploitation in Exchange Networks (P. Bonacich), Large Scale Structure in Complex Networks (Joerg Reichardt). My attention was initially drawn to small world networks by the work of Steven Strogatz and Duncan Watts. Networks with properties between completely ordered and completely random appear widely, from neural networks of nematodes to the power grid of the United States. In the case of human social networks, the advent of mobile phones tied to the internet generate data about networks of contacts rich enough and fast enough to permit robust theory building and testing.

In his now –classic Sociobiology : The New Synthesis, E.O. Wilson set the scene for subsequent discussions of social mechanisms, symbioses, evolution and much more. He examined “societies” ranging through slime molds and colonial bacteria, insects, cold-blooded vertebrates, birds, mammals, non-human primates and humans. There is no need for me to try to add to that masterpiece with a synoptic view of my own. Instead, I’ll offer some comments on the importance of networks as underlying structure of advanced social groups, that makes them much more than mere aggregates, or kinships. By “advanced” I mean that the members of the social group must have awareness of, and sensitivity to, the states of minds and intentions of others. That restriction eliminates from consideration here of most of the “societies” of other animal life, including hives ,herds, flocks, schools, prides….etc. In fact, on the available evidence, I claim that it leaves only members of the hominin line (genus Homo) and requires language. Behaviors and feelings must be able to travel and disperse through an advanced network to constitute a culture.

. What can we learn about social networks from comparing signs of consciousness in apes and in us?

Although the phenomenon of conscious awareness clearly extends to more animals than just humans and chimps, it has been customary to look closely at the differences between humans and chimps, both of whose genomes have been largely decoded, for clues to the character of consciousness, given that ours is uniquely expanded in potential compared to that of chimps. The comparisons usually take a top-down view of three contrasts: 1. Distinctive mental processes, 2. Evolutionary histories including tool use, 3. Aggressive versus cooperative behaviors. (Speech is another contrast that I already discussed under “genes” in Bottom-Up Section III.)

1. Distinctive human mental processes

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Marc Hauser recently suggested that there are four key and unique ingredients of the human mind: 1. generative computation, 2. promiscuous combination of ideas, 3. mental symbols to encode sensory experience, 4. abstractions permitting contemplation of things beyond what we can see, hear touch, taste or smell. (Scientific American Sept. 2009, pp 44 – 51). I would add music explicitly to Hauser’s list. It has “a language of its own” (24).

Although we do not know exactly when the modern human mind took shape, it is clear from the archeological record that a major transformation occurred during the relatively brief period of evolutionary history, starting approximately 800,000 years ago and accelerating 45,000 to 50,000 years ago (when evidence of hearths and community gatherings around a fire, and cooking appear). The selection pressures that may have been forcing the advances are currently thought to be climate variability.

2. Evolutionary histories: Becoming human- some timelines. ( See Appendix A.)

Working with three nearly complete human genomes, Chad D. Huff and Lynn B. Jorde reported that from Alu insertions and the amount of variation seen in the DNA immediately surrounding the insertions, they could calculate the size of the human population (Homo sapiens) about 1.2 million years ago, from which everyone in the world is descended. Their estimate is from 600 to 18,500 people. The beginning of the hominin line, of which modern humans (Homo sapiens ) is the latest version, has recently been pushed back (controversially) to 4.4 million years ago (mya) by the publication of analyses of the fossil skeleton named “Ardi” ( from Ardipithecus ramidus). (See Appendix A.) Previously “Lucy” (Australopithecus afarensis) held the record at about 3.5 mya.

As mentioned above (Tools) members of the human evolutionary family are known to have made and used stone tools of increasing complexity since about 2.5 mya. (Homo habilis – the first member of Genus Homo.) Recently, a new field, “primate archeology”, merges contributions from archeology, anthropology, primatology and psychology, to explore past material cultures among apes and, perhaps, other nonhuman animals. Modern chimps crack nuts in a series of steps that imply an awareness with focused attention to details: First, lug large rocks to a spot near a nut-bearing tree; next, gather nuts and place them on the rocks; then, obtain a smaller, graspable rock; and finally, smash the nuts open. Early hominids had chimp-sized brains, making comparisons appropriate. A new analysis of previously unearthed sites of hominid fossils (Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania) reveals evidence of stone-on-stone pounding. In the hominid line techniques seem to have been passed from one generation to another. Modern chimps show some tendency to do the same, but it isn’t known how long ago they acquired that inclination. The emerging speculation is that at the time when hominins had chimp-sized brains, they may also have had a chimp-like “culture”.

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For amusing speculations, consider that our advanced cultures may evolve further, possibly reaching the famous “Omega Point” of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

3. Aggressive versus cooperative behaviors

The literature on this subject, full of anthropocentric projections, can’t decide whether chimps are basically peaceful and empathetic, or dangerously harmful. Gorillas are known to be “gentle giants”. The Bonobo apes have sometimes been presented as a delightful yet irrelevant side branch of our family tree, whereas we are more like the blustering chimps. They can be killers. They have fearsome fangs. (Ardi did not, so maybe the chimps are outliers?) Cooperative behavior and signs of caring for others does appear occasionally among chimps, and the new field of “behavioral economics” notes that not only humans, but monkeys, elephants and dolphins do not always seek maximum benefits for themselves in social settings. But apes and monkeys make dangerous pets. The have a propensity for jealousy and misunderstanding of human body language that has led to vicious, destructive and even lethal attacks with little warning. Furthermore, apes and monkeys manifest a range of behaviors that we might interpret as covering the whole range of our “seven deadly sins”: pride, greed, lust, sloth, envy, gluttony and avarice. They are surely conscious.

The history of weapons documents stone tools, as mentioned above, to 2.5 mya. Stone, as well as fire-hardened wood, tips of spears appear 250,000 – 100,000 BCE. So did bows and arrows and more effective knives with sharper edges. These were hunting tools. It is not certain exactly when these tools began to be used against humans. Signs of warfare are evident from bodies killed with stone-bladed weapons at Jebel Sahaba (now Egypt) 12,000 – 5,000 BCE. At that time humans were making transitions from hunter-gatherer to agriculture, and living in settled communities. Jericho (now Israel) and Catal- Hüyük (now Turkey) had fortress walls 7,000-6,000 BCE, that imply wars (though some think that they have been merely mud-guards!). By that time the city-states had become empires fielding armies of professionals with weapons made especially for killing humans. Are we like the chimps, or not?

Advanced social networks generate a “culture” of shared knowledge. That fact offers an explanation of the seemingly peculiar consequence that the new Homo sapiens is the last species of the hominin line still alive today. Consider that H. erectus lasted from almost 2 million years ago to the near present ~50,000 years ago. Homo erectus spawned both H. sapiens and H. neanderthalensis (via H. heidelbergensis – see Appendix A) about 300,000 – 400,000 years ago, and the Neanderthals lasted until about 25,000 years ago. Why are they all extinct while we are survivors? Survivors of what? Climate variability. The evidence is compelling that in the past 200,000 years the climate of the earth has had abrupt and huge swings between hot and cold, wet and dry, in many regions. During that time getting sufficient calories for maintenance became increasingly difficult. Species with

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specialized diets (e.g., carnivores, as the Neanderthals were) had trouble adapting. H. sapiens did not, and found new ways to hunt (throwing spears, bows and arrows) and as coastal regions of Africa offered a mellower climate than inland regions, H. sapiens learned to get food from the sea. . Doing that successfully required noticing some connection between phases of the moon and tidal processes. H. erectus and H. neanderthalensis made no significant change in their tools, locations, diets or strategies for over 2 milllion years. In contrast, 50,000 years ago H. sapiens already had hearths, speech, and gatherings around pit fires where they cooked food (easier to digest) and no doubt, shared experiences. Modern human consciousness was forming in full strength out of that cultural network – a likely time and place for the birth of philia, - friendship, comradeship or brotherly love. Climate variability forced cultural adaptations that only H. sapiens could make.

And yet, minds and thoughts still seem uncomfortably distant from all that we learn about the material brain. Below are two ideas that have occurred to me as pointing toward a reconciliation across the phenomenological gap.

VII. Summing Up – Two missing themes may help “explain” consciousness

First Theme: Complementary conjugates

The Principle of Complementarity from quantum mechanics (QM) (see Appendix B) asserts that some features of physical reality come in conjugate pairs. With a “prepared system” of measurement (observation) you the observer can address only one at a time. What you discover with each separate view cannot invalidate whatever you discover with the other view, using a different prepared system to access it. Separately considered, the two views may seem contradictory in the (limited) mind of the observer. The famous example, of course, is the wave/particle duality of an electron. There is no bridge between the two views and no interactions. They just have to accepted for what they are – complementary conjugates, equally valid versions of some otherwise inaccessible deeper reality.

All attempts to build a rational, reductionistic, formal bridge, using normal science ( in Kuhn’s sense), between brain states and mental states including consciousness, having demonstrably failed, I suspect that they will continue to fail because they frame the problem in the wrong way.

Here is a novel proposal that may succeed. It offers a new frame, analogizing from QM principles. It asserts three propositions:

1. All mental states, conscious or not, are manifestations of complementary, conjugate brain states.2. Consciousness is a special instance of such a mental state manifestation of a conjugate brain state.

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3. Because the underlying reality is always, and only, brain states, no “interaction” rule is required to connect mind states and brain states, and the need for the concept of emergence is diminished.

The reason that immaterial mental states can affect the body is that they do so through their associated brain-state conjugates which, like all other body states, are material.

There may be a notable difference between wave/particle duals and my proposed brain- state/mind- state conjugates. The latter pair can be observed simultaneously as individual aspects of reality, whereas the former cannot - except by superposition, in which their separate identities are lost. By superpositioning, we can see light, without noticing its photon conjugate pairs. (I can’t discuss here “collapse of the wave function” during measurement or observation. It is a classical but not simple issue in QM.) I recall Penrose’s proposal that superpositioning plays an essential role in consciousness (25).

NOTE: there are a few physical, “prepared systems” that can access brain states directly (e.g.,electrical recordings, scans) but they do not give unique answers. Recall that, as mentioned in Section II, sets of same neurons can participate in different tasks at different times.

NOTE: Two “prepared systems” can probe mental states directly: 1. introspection on the part of a human subject whose mental state is being assessed and 2. communications from any subject, animal or human, to observers. The communications can be by “languages” (speech, signing, specific gestures, signal flags, waggle dances of honey bees), or by various sounds (screams of pain, Morse code), pheromones (ants) or some motor actions using a special code. Recall the locked-in syndrome of J-B Bauby (Section 1) who could demonstrate that he was conscious and cognitively intact using only coded eye-blinks observed by a confederate who set up the code. Though he appeared on casual observation to be an example of the “living dead”, Bauby proved that he had full cognitive powers by “writing” an amazing book. (See also the brain imaging subsection of Section III.)

Second Theme: The arts and the problem of qualia

(The following discussion was strongly inflenced by a “Features” article in the November/December 2007 issue of SEED Magazine.)

The epic questions that modern science must answer cannot be solved by science alone. Karl Popper wrote: “It is imperative that we give up on the idea of ultimate sources of knowledge, and admit that all knowledge is human; that it is mixed with our errors, our prejudices, our dreams, and our hopes; that all we can do is grope for truth even though it is beyond our reach.” Novelists can simulate the

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latest theory of consciousness in their novels. Noam Chomsky has declared that “It is quite possible- overwhelmingly probable, one might guess – that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology.” No scientific model of the mind will be wholly complete unless it includes what can’t be reduced. Science rightly adheres to a strict methodology, relying on experimental data and testability. But until science sees the brain from a more holistic perspective such as those to be found in the artistic imagination, our scientific theories will be detached from the way we see ourselves.

Our mind evolved in a simplified world, where matter is certain, time flows forward and there are only three dimensions. When we venture beyond these innate intuitions, we are forced to resort to metaphor. Einstein used moving trains; Eddington compared the expansion of the universe to an inflated balloon; Maxwell thought of magnetic fields as little whirlpools in space (vortices); the Big Bang is a cosmic firecracker; and Schrödinger’s cat is neither alive or dead until we look. Bohr said that quantum properties reminded him of cubist paintings - the form they took depended on how you looked at them.

My point is that modern science has made little progress toward any unified understanding of everything. Our unknowns have not dramatically receded, but in many instances the opposite has happened. We don’t know the answers, and we don’t always know how to frame the questions. In neuroscience we have fascinating details and more to come, but they highlight an enigma which is that we don’t experience these cellular details. It is ironic, but true, that the one reality science cannot reduce is the only reality we will ever intimately know . And the arts bring us closer to it than does science.

Considering that consciousness, besides expressing awareness, also draws heavily on memories, it is appropriate to re-visit the opening paragraph of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu (1911), variously translated as “In Search of Lost Time” or “Remembrance of Things Past”. Proust is remembering eating a madeleine (a buttery cookie flavored with lemon zest and shaped like a sea shell), and dipping it in his tea:

No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory; it was me. I had ceased to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I sensed that it was connected with the taste of the tea and the cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could not, indeed, be of the same nature. Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize it and apprehend it?.....It is plain that the truth I am seeking lies not in the cup but in myself.

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I close with a poem by Robert frost:

We dance round in a ring and suppose,But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.

The End

I

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APPENDIX A. The hominid to hominin (Genus Homo) evolution.

An excellent recent account can be found in the PBS three-part series entitled Becoming Human, available as a DVD disc. It provided a background for my synopsis below and credits the scholars who developed the data and interpretations.

Below is a list of the genera and species lineages plus approximate dates and brain sizes (estimated from endocasts of skulls). Dates are estimated beginning of a range for the species.

Hominids

!0 - 6 million years ago (mya) hominid line (Ardipithecus kadabba) separated from ape line. Chimp brain size then and now ~ 400 cc.

4.6 mya. Ardipthecus ramidus (“Ardi”) brain size ~ 420 cc

4.2 mya. Australopthecus anamensis

Start of long period of steady climate.

3.8 mya Au. Afarensis, including “Lucy” 3.2 mya. First creatures remotely like us. Walked upright much of the time. No other mammal does it. Note: bipedalism believed to be the driving force of further brain development, not because of seeing further, but because it is more efficient locomotion and reduces caloric requirement. Climbing trees is energetically expensive.

2.8 mya Au. Africanus

Start of highly variable climates that continued for next 1.5 million years. That variability was the likely driving force for emergence of genus Homo.

Hominins: Genus Homo

2.3 mya H. habilis. Carpal navicular wrist bone like ours, indicative of more supple hands and thumbs. Brain size 800 cc.. Still some ape-like features – short.

1.8 mya H. erectus, “Turkana Boy” (TB) fossil 1.5 mya - brain 900 cc (twice that of chimps); face structure more like ours. 5” 3” tall. Rapid maturation, short childhood over by age 8. H. erectus was hanging on in Asia 50,000 years ago. H. erectus was basically us, except that we have much longer brain developmental time – up to age 20 years. TB’s fossil showed signs of an enlarged Broca’s area, suggesting speech. That is what makes us human. TB was hairless and could sweat (evidence from lice types!) Permanently bipedal. H.

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erectus was built to run long distances without overheating. Hunted by running game until the prey were exhausted from the heat. (Bushmen do that today.) H. erectus had fire, cooking and advanced tools. They left Africa 1.8 mya. Skulls of elderly without teeth indicate that they were being fed by others. H. erectus was a caring species. There are other social animals, but none like us, as H. erectus was.

500,000 years ago H. heidelbergensis. Hand axes found with many Homo bones in a deep pit in Spain, perhaps indicating ceremonial burials; offerings; symbols of beliefs?

By 250,000 years ago very specialized tools have appeared, with stone or fire- hardened tips of throwing spears, bows and arrows and flint knives. The human ancestors that left Africa to explore the rest of the world may have done so sooner than we have thought, and by sea as well as by land. On January 7, at the 2010 meeting of The Archeological Institute of America, Thomas Strasser presented data showing that stone hand axes unearthed on the island of Crete indicate that an ancient Homo species – perhaps Homo erectus- had used rafts to cross from northern Africa to Europe via some of the larger islands in between. Many of these axes resemble those fashioned in Africa about 800,000 years ago by H. erectus. Strasser said that “We’re just going to have to accept that as soon as hominids left Africa, they were long-distance seafarers….” If so, they were skilled tool makers and users.

250,000 years ago H. neanderthalensis Brain size 1400 cc. (larger than ours). Endocasts show frontal lobes and Broca’s areas like ours. Lasted until 25,000 years ago. Their tools did not evolve nor did their carnivorous diet ever change. Last evidence was of a small population on Rock of Gibraltar. Genome now decoded: FOXP2 speech gene same as ours. We and they have a common ancestor – evidently H. heidelbergensis 300,000 – 400,000 years ago. No interbreeding.

200,000 years ago H. sapiens. Brain size 1350 cc. Founding population was only about 600 fertile members, about 1800 in all. Gene bottleneck –little diversity. 140,000 years ago most of Africa became uninhabitable – drought, except at coasts. H. sapiens moved there and learned to fish – diet became diverse. Tools evolved – fire hardened spear tips, cutting tools with thin, sharp blades. Could get more out of the environment. Painted shells with holes suggest ornamentation and symbolic art. Culture.

50,000 years ago – there were at least four different kinds of species Homo living simultaneously, but without interbreeding.

30,000 years ago. Advanced cave paintings. Fully human minds at work. Culture.

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18,000 years ago H. floresiensis (Hobbit”). Brain size only 400cc, but endocasts of skull show brain reorganization compared to chimps with brain of same size. Hints of speech capability.

APPENDIX B. Relevant Theme from Quantum Physics?

Quantum physics has four deep and fundamental principles that might be invoked to help explain consciousness: Superposition, Heisenberg Uncertainty, Bohr Correspondence, Bohr Complementarity,

Superposition

A striking feature of quantum mechanics (QM) is the existence of superposition states in which an object seems to be in different situations at the same time. The existence of such states has been proved for small objects like atoms, ions, electrons, photons and, even, molecules. Schrödinger’s famous live/dead cat gedanken paradigm has become the archetype for provocative discussions of superposition.

Roger Penrose, in his Shadows of the Mind: a search for the missing science of consciousness (25) (1994) Oxford Univ Press, argues for the trans - computable character of mind, while still accepting that it arises from brain states. He calls for some modification of physics to accommodate that claim. (Although he picks the wrong biological platform for the response element to quantum physical thoughts – microtubules - the book is otherwise a good account of the nature of the consciousness problem. ) Penrose says we need to confront the concept of superposition and imagine that it is the state of atoms and subatomic particles, that we can’t see or even measure in functioning brains, that determines the state of the mind. He proposes that it is this coherent superposition of particles plus his newly-proposed, quantum wave function called “self-collapse” (objective reduction), that constitute the QM basis of consciousness.

Heisenberg Uncertainty

The common form of this well-known principle states that it is not possible to simultaneously determine the position and momentum of a particle. In its compact form:

Δ xΔpx ≥ ½ħ (Some forms use Planck’s constant h, instead of the preferred ħ, omitting the factor of 2.) Heisenberg’s original paper in 1927 did not attempt to determine the exact quantity on the right side of the inequality, but used a physical argument to show that the uncertainty between conjugate quantum mechanical variables is approximately h. (This principle has attracted the attention of a lay public that regularly misrepresents it with sloppy generalizations.)

Bohr Correspondence Principle

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This is a fundamental hypothesis proposed by Bohr in the early 1920s, according to which classical mechanics can be understood as a limiting case of quantum mechanics; or conversely, many characteristic features in quantum mechanics can be approximated on the basis of classical mechanics, provided the latter is properly interpreted. Since 1925, because of the success of wave mechanics in QM, the correspondence principle became diminished to a vague article of faith among physicists. Today, however, it has regained significance in cases where the traditional methods of QM are not very useful, and it is recognized that the correspondence principle is still valid.

Bohr (Copenhagen) Complementarity

This principle states that sometimes an object can have several different (apparently) contradictory properties. We can switch back and forth between the different views, but we can never see both members of the pair at the same time, although in reality the object exists in both at the same time. The wave/particle duality is the most famous case.

Comments

These four principles are distinct and should not be confounded. Taken together, Complementarity and Uncertainty dictate that all properties and actions in the physical world must be non-deterministic to some degree. (It has been suggested that “free will” takes advantage of that non-determinism.)

Of the four principles, only Complementarity seems to me to offer a new way of looking at the brain/mind duality, and I develop that idea in the essay Section VII.

REFERENCES – WITH SOME ANNOTATIONS1. Koch 2004. The Quest for Consciousness – a Neurobiological

Approach .Roberts, Englewood, Colo.2. Monod, J. Chance and Necessity (1971). Knopf, N.Y.3. Morowitz, H.J. The Emergence of Everything; How the World became Complex. Oxford.4. Nisbett, R.E. 2003. The Geography of Thought- How Asians and

Westerners Think Differently – and Why. Free Press, N.Y.5. J.B.Watson Psychology Review (1913) pp 158-167. 6. .Gould, J.L. and C.G. Gould: The Animal Mind (1994). ,Scientific American Library, N.Y. 7. Edelman, D.B. and A.K. Seth. Animal consciousness: a synthetic approach. Trends in Neuroscience. Sept. 2009;8. Cartmill, M. The problem of animal consciousness. Natural History, March 19989., Griffin, D. Animal Minds: Beyond Cognition to Consciousness, 2003.10. Giurfa, M. et al. J Exp. Biol. Feb 15, 2010).11. Wilson, E.O. Insect Societies . (Updated): Holldobler, B. and E.O. Wilson.

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The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies. (2009). Norton, N.Y.12. Magoun, H.W. (Am. Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry 67:145-154, 1952 13. Koch, C. Scientific American Mind February/March 2009 pp 16-17.14. Cheng-yu T. Li Mu-ming Poo and Yang Dan (14) (Science 234:643-645, 2009)15.. Macosko, E.Z. et al. (Nature 458: 1171- 1175, 2009)16.Delbrück, M. Mind from Matter? An essay on evolutionary epistemology. (1986). Blackwell, Palo Alto. This is a surprising contribution from a physicist with a Nobel prize who later turned his attention to biology. The book is not an easy read. The first 9 chapters deal with biology, but chapters 10 – 18 require a knowledge of physics, mathematics, and logic that will likely require hard study from most biologists.

17. Vitiello, G. My Double Unveiled: The dissipative quantum model of brain. (2001), John Benjamins Publishing Co. Philadelphia. The author draws attention to an important distinction between Quantum Mechanics (QM) and Quantum Field Theory (QFT). He emphasizes that QFT usefully dissolves the distinction between structure and function, and has the capability for formally connecting certain macroscopic features of the brain (collective properties) to collective modes born out of the microscopic quantum dynamics.

18, Umezawa, H. et al. Advanced field theory -: micro, macro and thermal concepts. (1993). American Institute of Physics. N.Y.

19. Strawson, G. et al. Consciousness and its Place in Nature. Imprint Academic. 2006

20. Fodor, J. . London review of Books, 24 May, 2007 pp 9- 10. 21. Harnad, S. Consciousness – An Afterthought. J. Theoret. Biology

22 McLean, P. 1977. On the evolution of three mentalities. New Dimensions in Psychiatry. Vol II. Wiley, N.Y.) 23. Wilson E O Sociobiology : The New Synthesis (Belknap Press, 1975),

24. Katz, R. , A Language of its Own. Univ. of Chicago Press, 2009.) 25 Penrose, R., Shadows of the Mind: a search for the missing science of consciousness(25) (1994) Oxford Univ Press

26. Edelman, G. a. Neural Darwinism – The theory of neuronal group selection. (1987) . Basic Books, N.Yb.The Remembered Present – a Biological Theory of Consciousness. (1989).Basic Books, N.Y.

c.(with G. Tonini) A Universe of Consciousness – How Matter becomes Imagination. (2000).Basic Books, N.Y d. Wider than the Sky – the phenomenal gift of consciousness. (2004). Yale Univ. New Haven e. Second Nature – brain science and human knowledge. (2006). Yale Univ. New Haven.

27. Acker, A.S. et al. Decorrelated neuronal firing in cortical microcircuits

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. Science: 327:584-587, 2010. 28. Renart, A. et al. The asynchronous state in cortical circuits. Science 327:

587-590. 2010.

A few books about minds and mental states that open the door to the mysteries I have over 50 books that address brains, minds and consciousness in my personal library. Many are now old, but in my view some are still valuable for their outlining the problems, their bibliographies, and their conjectures. Though progress in neuroscience has been made in cell and molecular biology and brain imaging since they were published, we still lack a deep understanding of how mental states arise from brain states. I believe that mystery is just as intractable today as ever – perhaps because we are looking in the wrong places or in the wrong way. (I’ll return to that point in Section VII.)

Here is a small sampler of books, in no particular order, perhaps useful to anyone starting out on a serious quest for a scientific account of minds and consciousness. Most of them received extensive reviewing when they were new, and heavy criticisms in some cases.

Gazzaniga, M. Mind Matters: How the mind and brain interact to create our conscious lives. (1988) Houghton Mifflin Co. Boston. The author is well-known for his studies of “split-brain” patients. Here he address in separate chapters the mental states of pain, memory, intelligence, psychoses, anxiety, depression, obsessions and compulsions, addiction, love, sleeping and dreaming, stress, healing. The appeal of the book stems from the fact that Gazzaniga is a first-rate neuroscientist.

Humphrey, N. A History of the Mind. (1992). Harper Perennial. N.Y.

Schwartz, J.M. (with Sharon Begley). The Mind & The Brain: Neuroplasticity and the power of mental force. (2002) Harper Collins, N.Y.

Harth, E. Windows on the Mind. 1983. Quill, N.Y.

Hofstadter, D. and Dennett, D. (Editors) The Mind’s I – Fantasies and reflections of self & soul. (1981). A collection of wildly varying essays by many authors. Basic Books, N.Y..

Dennett, D. Kinds of Minds: Toward an understanding of consciousness. (1996). Basic Books, N.Y.

Minsky, M. The Society of Mind. (1985). Simon and Schuster, N.Y.

Searle, J.R.The Mystery of Consciousness. (1997) including exchanges with Daniel Dennett and David J. Chalmers. The New York Review of Books, N.Y.

J.Allan Hobson. Consciousness. (1999). Scientific American Library, N.Y.

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