THE THEOLOGY OF THE BRAIN: A DEAD END

 From BigThink: Will we download our minds into new bodies? 

According to author and entrepreneur Steven Kotler, at some point this century, we will confront the prospect of immortality. NOT. Das ist nicht Wissenschaft, das ist nicht Naturwissenschaft: das ist theologie.
The brain is not an independent bio-informational machine. It is at the coarse grained level intricately informationally networked with the body, the bodies organs, the bodies social interactions in cultural and ecological niches, and triadically entangled: the triad is the basic social unit, an emotionally connected unit bonded by a micro-collective effervescence. You "hard problem of consciousness" folks; that's where you should be looking. Following are excerpts from my The Social Brain in progress: 

THE SOCIAL BRAIN MODEL

I have taken this model through several revisions in order to keep current with the most recent developments in the relevant sciences.  The model was initially based on an argument for the social brain proposed by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz (introduced in Chapter 10).   He argued that the following features of life emerged together, in synch with each other: 

• expanded forebrain among the primates;

• complex social organizations

• at least among the post-Australopithecines tool savvy humans, institutional cultural patterns.  

This perspective implies that we should not treat biological, social, and cultural factors as serially related; that is, we should not think in terms of biological factors causing social factors which in turn cause cultural factors.  Instead, the implication is that these factors matter but they are complexly interrelated in terms of causation.  They should be viewed as reciprocally intertwined and conjointly causal.  The claim in a nutshell is that human behavior emerges from the complex interactions of genes, neurons, neural nets, organs, biomes, the brain and central nervous system, other elements of the body’s systems and subsystems down to the molecular level (see Pert, 1999) and our social interactions in their ecological contexts. 

The unit model is activated in a triad of unit models and it is that triad that is the basic model of brain/mind/culture/world. This reflects the idea that the triad, not the dyad, is the basic unit of social life.  

CONNECTOMES

          The latter part of the twentieth century can be described as the age of the network, an era in which thinking began to dominated by the idea of connections.  In 2005, Olaf Sporns  and. Patric Hagmann, exemplifying the principle of multiples, independently introduced the term "connectome" to refer to a map of the neural connections within the brain. They were inspired by the effort to construct a genome, to sequence the human genetic code.  More generally a connectome maps the elements and interconnections in a network.  Connectomes may range in scale from maps of parts of the nervous system to the neural connections in the brain. They have been used specifically in connection with mapping the neural connections in the brain. Partial connectomes have been constructed of the retina and primary visual cortex of the mouse. In line with these developments, my model represents a connectome of connectomes.  The next stage in this project is to construct the triad unit of my model, three interconnected individual models and then to embed this triadic connectome in the nested networks of the social and cultural connectomes locally, regionally, and globally.  I visualize a global connectome driven by the circulation of information across a global network of nested networks. This sounds complicated but we’re talking about a complex network model of the peoples, flora, fauna, and ecological systems and subsytems of our planet.  On the rationale for a global connectome (my interpretation), see Khanna (2016). Some progress has been made recently on using connectomics to predict behaviors.  

The first wiring diagram of a pinhead sized  (one cubic mm) piece of human brain tissue was recently completed.  It produced 1.4 petabytes worth of images (Shapson-Coe, A., M. Januszweski, et al., 2021).   The first full-brain wiring diagram was completed more than thirty years ago for the roundworm (White, J.G., E. Southgate, J.N. Thomson, and S. Brenner, 1986).  The roundworm has only 302 neurons in its brain.  The process took fifteen years to complete.  It is now possible to diagram a roundworm brain in about a month. In a recent study, the connectomes of eight genetically identical roundworms from larval to adult were constructed.  As much as 40% of their connectomes differed.  

Connectomics is becoming a critical resource in neuroscience.  In principle, connectomes are a key, in terms of the reigning neuro- paradigms, to understanding how the organism thinks, feels, moves, remembers, perceives, and so on.  So far, however, it hasn’t been much help in explaining how the brain functions.  That would involve at least parsing the overwhelming 

interconnectivities in the complex brains of humans and non-human primates. Connectomes also tell us nothing about the quality of the connections they map.  They indicate a connection between neurons but not whether the connection is strong or weak.  For this and other reasons involving, for example, the activity of neuromodulators, we should not expect connectomes alone to explain brain functions.  I take note of a recent study in human brain connectomics based on graph based mathematics that found striking interhemispheric asymmetry and intraparcel heterogeneities  (Hanalioglu, Bahadir, et al. (2021).  The authors are careful to note that their findings might be the result of artifact or technical errors.  They are more persuaded that their use of data science and optimization application are key methodological contributions to future studies in network neuroscience. If these findings turn out to be robust they will offer some evidence of localization but of the type defended by Goldstein and Lashley (as discussed earlier) on split-brain functions.  In any case, we shouldn’t expect to find universal patterns of localized or hemispheric functions.  Rather, we should expect any evidence of localization to reflect specific network patterns of the systemic movements of bodies through time, space, culture, and the environment.

Consider now a conceptual formula for the probability of an “innovative thought.”  This will look more technical than it really is.  My objective in constructing this formula is to try to isolate the factors that go into predicting creativity, or more realistically the probability of a creative thought.  The formula for the probability of an innovative thought, iTp, is: iTp = qc2 (K+G), where qc2 is the amount of cultural capital the person commands and K is a constant that represents the cultural context and network structure the person is embedded in; qc2 because doubling the amount of cultural capital, for example, quadruples its impact factor. K=C+Nt where C = Cultural Context, an index that takes into account a variety of demographic and institutional diversity indicators; N = the density and diversity of the network structure of the society at time t. G=the genius cluster quotient at time t. When considering the etiology of behaviors that are traditionally considered genetically grounded, it is now important to recognize that the brain, like humans, arrives on the evolutionary stage always, already, and everywhere social. Therefore, what we have considered to be linearly transmitted genetic phenomena must now be viewed in the context of a brain that is at no stage of development separated from the social and cultural imperatives that form us. The very notions of “genes” and “genetic” must now be revised in the context of the social brain paradigm.

          Some recent studies that do not rely on social brain or connectome models demonstrate that there is a rationale for pursuing the advanced network directions of the work I’ve been drawing your attention to.  They demonstrate two things: one is that there are indeed information flows that link the brain to the organs of the body; the other is that the links between the brain and the liver, heart, and gut are notably stronger the other links.  One researcher argues that the heart, for example, thinks for itself; rather than waiting for instructions from the brain, it sends signals to the rest of the body on its own.  In fact, the heart sends more signals to the brain than the brain sends to the heart.  

The gut-brain axis has long been recognized as a key linkage.  Gut bacteria make ninety percent of the brain’s neurotransmitter serotonin and a variety of neuroactive compounds.  The brain sends signals to the gut that stimulate or suppress digestion.  The brain’s connection with the liver is notably complicated (O’Hare and Zsombok, 2016; Gao, Molinas, et al., 2017; Bruce, Zsombok, and Eckel, 2017). The lesson of such studies is that the most complicated object known to humanity, the brain, does not do its work alone.  And the connections, as I’ve indicated, reach outside the body into the world around us including our social relationships.  

CODA

I am obliged to pay attention to recent development in brain-machine interaction and brain-computer interaction (BMI and BCI).  This work, exemplified by Miguel Nicolelis’ (2011) research and development program, involves experiments with the wireless transmission of thoughts.  This work promises life changing cognitive prosthetics.  At the same time I see a troubling resurrection of an ancient Platonic dream (or nightmare) of "free floating minds," minds freed of the flesh. Nicolelis imagines minds without bodies, or with bodies that do not have to move, communicating "wirelessly" across a room, a city, a country, a continent, the galaxy.  The ancient fear of the flesh we see here is at bottom a fear of the female flesh.  This is a sign that science is still being fueled by patriarchy and the masculine fear of the feminine.  

If all of the research and theory I have been rehearsing in this book points to a social self, a social mind, and a social brain where is “the social” in BMI and BCI?  Decades of work in science and technology studies have demonstrated that the social and more broadly the cultural are embodied in the hardware and algorithms that make the machines in this work function.  But wireless transmission seems to violate the basic principles of social construction.  There is a technology at work here – wi-fi technology – and not ESP.  Sociologist and STS scholar Jennifer Croissant of the University of Arizona suggests the following hypothesis (personal communication): These wireless results will only work if and to the extent that the participants have a set of shared kinaesthetic and cultural references (e.g., relative homogeneity in brain mapping and information processing, starting with the linguistic level).  Just as we can no longer assume transparency in everyday communications as diversity in all its varieties increases these systems will either be extremely narrow in their potential participants and applications, OR have to engage a model of the social brain and an enormous amount of cultural complexity in algorithmic form so that there is interoperability amongst diverse brains.  As diversity increases, the amount of effort spent indexing communications increases.  More and more metadata and contextual data will be needed to understand if two interlocutors are talking and thinking about the same ‘thing.’ Cultural diversity will pose huge challenges to complex BMI and BCI but even the relatively narrower diversity characteristic of individual brains will overload bandwidth and algorithms.  

          The research frontiers in the neurosciences are moving very rapidly and brain researchers are regularly announcing new and surprising discoveries.  As a neuroscience watcher, I’m alert to the fact that developments even within the brains in a vat neuroist framework could radically alter our understanding of the social brain. It’s hard to say in what ways or directions but there are still so many things we don’t know about the brain per se that it is not unreasonable to expect changes that will impact my model coming from newly discovered features of the brain. I am confident that however radical these changes are they will not overturn the basic message of my model and social brain thinking: our interactions and environment impact the brain. Stay tuned.    The model can be viewed in my latest book, Inventions in Sociology: Studies in Science and Society (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022).