Tuesday, July 17, 2012

We wot not of - what?

Um. This is a thing I wrote many moons ago. I deleted it from my blog - I forget why - but having re-read it tonight, I've decided to reintroduce it it to the webiverse. I've realised from stats that nobody reads this anyway, so it's sort of like casting it out into infinite darkness. Which, if nothing else, is sort of Pink-Floydy.

This week, I have been mostly reading 'What Is Your Dangerous Idea?' (edited by John Brockman). 'Leading Thinkers' - scientists, with some associated beardy folk - wrote essays in response to the question. As Steven Pinker explains in the introduction, the ideas sought were those 'which are felt to challenge the collective decency of an age': things which are controversial.

It is the year 2009 (for today anyway, and tomorrow). We have genetic modification and cloning, we have string theory, we have patenting of ideas with the accompanying problems, we have opensource programming which is obviously a Communist plot, we have an entire economic model which has proven itself unsuitable, or possibly that was also a Communist plot. We have lots of material for edgy debate.

But one topic which recurs throughout the book is the soul. Not immortality, but the question of whether our personalities are entirely material, a function of the brain, or whether they have some floaty invisible bit. The relevant essays in the book proposed the former.
I was surprised to see this considered controversial among scientists. What I find interesting is the way most of us recoil from this idea. At first, anyway. Why is that? What is frightening about our minds' being wholly accounted for by our brains?

I think that the idea of the soul reassures us of our autonomy. It used to be believed that the soul inhabited empty spaces called ventricles within the brain. If we are inscrutable, inexplicable, ethereal minds, we do what we like; we are not governed by cause and effect. But if we are visible, examinable brains, with traceable mechanisms and genetically determined structures, we might find our feeling of free will threatened. And if our emotions can be explained as chemicals, we might feel that cheapens them or makes them less 'real'.

It's an interesting paradox that we wish to be less real (less tangible) in order to feel more 'real' (in the Pinocchio sense). This extends to our descriptions and explanations of our consciousness: we will tolerate them only if they are not real.

Astrology reduces your personality to the position of the planets at your birth. Whatever intricacies may be added when you get a full chart read, quite a lot of people are happy thinking there are twelve signs, and their own firmly dictates their personality, who they are capable of loving, and even what events will befall them that week. In contrast, the idea that the personality is created by the endlessly complex and intricate brain, itself a product of millions of years' evolutionary tinkering, is insufficient, unsatisfying and alarming.

Joel L Swerdlow, a senior writer for National Geographic, was expressing a common reaction when he retorted that 'When I fell in love with my wife, I gave her my heart, not my neuropeptides' (Quiet Miracles of the Brain, June 2005). Of course, he didn't give her his actual heart. That would be ... well, beyond Sid & Nancy. He gave her his imaginary heart, which to him meant more than his real neuropeptides.

The real mechanisms for love and thought aren't millenia-old cultural symbols. Swerdlow was happy to use the term 'heart' because in ancient times the heart, not the brain, was believed to be the seat of the soul and since then it has been used as a metaphor for feeling. We are culturally comfortable with it. The brain is slightly less tasty to look at than the heart, it's true, but the heart's no hottie either. I expect we can agree the choice of organ is not aesthetic - it's down to tradition.

Swerdlow's heart does mean something - but it doesn't mean something exact. It can mean what he wants it to mean, and the meaning can shift. Likewise, star-signers have the luxury of believing in something which is not real, and the great thing about unreal stuff is you don't have to believe it if it doesn't suit you. You can always conjure up a rising sun sign or an unaspected ... asteroid, possibly ... to dispel anything disturbing. A wisp of wot-not-of to augment your stubbornly physical brain is indispensible when you are rearranging reality to suit yourself. It is leeway.

I don't want to be patronising here, and as a teenager I believed in star signs too. That's one reason I find this whole area so interesting. I know I felt a little pang when I admitted to myself I was an atheist, and from the perspective of someone who is extremely happy being an atheist, I like to go back and poke that pang, and dissect it. If you're a miserable atheist (Bob Geldof springs to mind) you're just sitting on the pang.

Of course accepting that we are our physical brains has some unsettling repurcussions. For one, if our personalities are based purely on a physical brain, and that brain is shaped by genetics and environment, where does that leave evil? Good old evil, the comforting bin in which we throw those who disgust us. Can anything be anyone's 'fault'? Bertrand Russell suggested that people were not evil but broken. This is in itself an idea that annoys a lot of people, but I can imagine society would be better off with this attitude. The thing is though, if we're not only physical, we still come up against the same problem. Either God in his inscrutable way made people evil, in which case it is most definitely not their fault, or the planets did, which is bad luck and again, about the same situation genes landed us.

I believe my mind is my brain. I don't believe I have a spirity bit. It doesn't depress me. I experience firsthand what it is like to be me, and if my brain is all there is to it, then my brain can do some pretty spectacular stuff. I mean that in a general way (not in a James-Wood-get-me-and-my-IQ-way): I think all brains do spectacular stuff. The multiverse of physicists might and might not exist, but the multiverse of people (and other organisms but leave that aside for now) does exist. Each person carries around their own parallel universe. In your universe, you are god. You create your universe with experiences and learning - because if you don't know about, for example, the eukaryotic cell*, in your universe it doesn't exist. Likewise all the other excellent stuff you can put in there, and all the stuff you can make up yourself. You know this about yourself. So the fear that an explanation of how your brain works can in some way rob you of that or make it less real, is ridiculous. Whatever is empirically proven about the structure or action of the brain, it is, self-evidently, sufficiently brilliant to generate your consciousness.


(*The eukaryotic cell is about the most brilliant thing in my particular universe and I recommend, if you don't have it already, that you procure it. Okay, in case you don't - you are a eukaryote, which means you are made of eukaryotic cells. Eukaryotic cells came about when various free-living single-celled organisms moved in together to create a symbiotic commune. So you are made up of the descendants of individuals who once lived separately. This is the kind of thing I used to imagine as a kid to wreck my own head - maybe I'm made up of lots of tiny people? Maybe I'm part of a gigantic person? It's fantastic, and it makes me smile every time I think of it.)