can this be the case? There are no convincing analogies of emergence the likes of which we are asked to believe happens in the relationship between brain and mind. One could say that the wetness of water is an emergent property from the combination of billions of water molecules. Yet this is a nonsense. Wetness is the subjective sense of a person with a mind who “feels” water. Wetness needs mind. The fluidity of water on the other hand results from the properties of the water molecules themselves and their arrangement at a given temperature and pressure. Fluidity can be understood with a language already contained within a semantics of physical chemistry. Are we to propose that from placing the straws on the camels back, that somehow emerges this alien state of crushing the camel, like a giant phantom hand has appeared in the midst of the straw or come down from on high. And yet the potentiality of the crushing was contained within the mass of each straw, this pitted against the physical carrying capacity of the camel. Something happened for sure yet nothing alien emerged. Or it is like a revolutionary society, which in its emergence is more than the conversation. And yet what is so alien here? Is not the revolution of the same properties of the conversation in the café or the first call to arms? But where in the brain can we find mind, even in its proto or partial emergence?
That having been said, let’s entertain the nonsense anyway, and pit it against our intuitions. Let’s scale up the complexity. Where there were three neurons and two synapses, we now have billions. And so what? From heaping lead upon lead upon lead do we see emerge an ounce of gold? Billions of more of the same is greater mass without effecting an alchemical transmutation of what that mass is composed of. Now it’s in the arrangement they might say, the spatial complexity is the wellspring of emergence. Fair enough. Let us put one train upon a track, then multiply the tracks into an elaborate system of a national railway, with thousands of miles of tracks and hundreds of trains coming and going in extension and recursive loops. And yet we still have nothing more than trains and tracks. Nowhere in all this does the great train God emerge to know itself as something beyond its material and efficient self. Or at least the train God has not acquired a communicative apparatus to communicate its existence to us, and so we have exercised the option to hypothesize its non-existence. Those of a pan-psychic persuasion think every material thing is conscious. Even a grain of rice has a tiny packet of proto consciousness. How a consciousness not conscious of itself can be a meaningful consciousness is for them to say before the proof in the rice is found. Digressions aside, we might say it is not in the spatial complexity so much as the complexity of elements that mind emerges, of there being a potpourri of different neurotransmitters and different types of neurons and glia, along with a bewildering complexity of intracellular machinery. Yet once again so what? In an age when we have many who literally believe that oxytocin is love, that dopamine is hedonism and reward, that serotonin or GABA is calm, that anandamide is bliss, in even dismissing these scientistic horrors, how does the immaterial property “emerge” from the complex co-existence and operations of all these neurotransmitters in the same brain. Does consciousness emerge in there being a half dozen herbs in the chemical soup, or is it less, or is it more? How does the complexity in neurotransmitters interact with that of glia and neuronal shape and size to create mind? And where might the threshold be found between zombie and person? And once again we are appealing to an alchemical argument in the emergence of one from the other. Now they might say it is not in the complexity of the spatial properties, or the number of arrangements, but in the temporal complexity. Once again so what? And once again we can return to the train analogy. How might we conceive it to be possible for the train God to emerge from the fact of some trains always running in perpetuity down the tracks, others released at a given frequency from their stations, some traveling under contingent modal schedules of supply and demand of special occasion etcetera. Music also depends greatly upon temporality of physical events and yet the instruments and sound waves can neither compose the music nor listen to themselves. Or we might imagine it possible for us to build a computer in the imago of the brain, building up the elements of the circuits within circuits one by one, testing dynamic frequencies of substructural components until somehow what emerges is the conscious computer that we have taken as an article of faith to have passed the test to convince us has a mind like our own (and contra Turing, this will always necessarily involve an article of faith). After all, what is so special about proteins, fats and fluids when these might simply be material realizations of on/off functions and spatial arrangements which might be achieved by other non-biological material means, or even the abstractions of a model that, like mind in mind, be the idea of a model. One day they might say “aha, a circuitry of a billion neuronal switches arranged like a spiral within a spiral here running at 70Hz, and a 5 billion unit helix shaped circuit there running at 10 Hz, with each node in the helix connected to fixed points in the spiral, this is the basic model from which consciousness emerges and a mind comes to say ‘cogito ergo sum’ when we attach up to some communicative output”. If the spiral is to appear similar to that of the galaxy or if the helices to resemble DNA there would be those to ponder the spatial correspondences. The esoterica in the shared symbology would be the stuff of many new age books. Is the universe then conscious they would ask? Is DNA? As above, so below. But regardless of what spatio-temporal correlate to consciousness is the threshold of its apparent emergence, what would they have really found if they think they found it? What have they explained, except to open the door to mystery all over again.
The fact that the above is a gross simplification of the brain is acknowledged. Yet I would submit to the reader that when one takes a partial Cartesian turn and comes to dwell within their own mind for a reflective moment and seeing it as the you who you are, and then takes an honest look at brain as the material thing it is, that they can only be left with the conclusion that words such as property and substance dualism and emergence are stand ins for others better fitting the occasion, those being supra-material alchemy or, better yet, a miracle. Now an alchemy implies an alchemist I’ll grant you, just as a miracle implies a miracle worker. And so what? Let us not yet launch into that question or recoil from the implications of the same, foreclosing on what ought to be the moment of being caught suspended in confrontation with the miraculous. My contention is that mind and brain are metaphysical categories so radically different as to be radically irreconcilable. Just to restate, I am not proposing this to be a devilish problem for which we have yet to arrive at a solution, like an understanding of what caused the plague in the days before microbiology in its current form. I am proposing that the metaphysical gulf between brain and mind is so great as to not allow for the possibility of a solution. The horizon of an answer in the distance that the neuroscientist sees is simply a projection of their own wish, a faith in their own scientistic eschatology. And I am willing to wager in particular that what Chalmers calls the hard problem, i.e. the explanation for consciousness as the ground upon which all mental operations must stand, can and will never be solved to the satisfaction of an honest neuroscientist. Any awaiting of a new science or paradigm shift is as much an article of faith as the belief in a miracle.
Part of the problem lay in the language. Neuroscientists speak of the “reward circuitry” of the brain without there being a silicon chip or electrical wire in sight, and in full knowledge that so many loops of connection are found in the brain as to make the analogy of “circuit” trivial. And computer scientists program what they call “neural networks” without a single neuron to be found anywhere outside of their heads and on the desktop in front of them. Psychologists increasingly talk of the nature/nurture problem as being a hardware/software problem (in so doing an insidious move from nature and family towards computer science), and cognitive scientists talk of the mind of a person as a processing unit of packages of information, and of the on/off state of neurons in terms of the binary “language” of the computer. Military engineers develop “smart” bombs and we talk of computers “solving a problem”, the smart phone app “suggesting” we buy something or the satnav in the car “telling” us the way. We live in an age when the computer is described in terms of mind and mind (and brain) in terms of computer, just as every age has chosen the apex technology of the day as an analogue for both mind and brain. And so with the lubricant applied to this psycholinguistic crime, we might be incredulous to hearing the fact that no computer, even an “artificial intelligence” (which dare I add has no consciousness), has ever calculated anything at all, any more than it would be true to say an umbrella protects us from the rain. We protect ourselves from the rain using the umbrella as a prosthetic.
