Axis, Praxis

I haven’t been writing much, and that is partly because I have been organizing weekly meetings devoted to computational neuroscience. Between January and July, my friends and I did a series on dynamical systems theory in neuroscience. I created a YouTube channel for the videos.

Here’s the playlist for the dynamical systems series:

This month we started talking about Stephen Grossberg’s new book, ‘Conscious Mind, Resonant Brain’. Grossberg set up the department where I did my PhD, and his ideas suffuse how I think about mind and brain. I’m uploading the videos as they happen. Here’ the playlist:

I’ve decided to consolidate my various blogs in one place: yohanjohn.com

I’ll probably still cross-post philosophical musings here, but that will be my main online presence.

I’m also going to try out substack. For those who haven’t heard about it yet, it’s sort of like blogs+rss but you sign up by email and get posts delivered to your inbox.

Expect a magpie’s hoard of shiny bits from neuroscience, philosophy, history, music, and whatever else catches the light.

First post coming soon!

yohanjohn.substack.com

Implants + Internet = ImplanTelepathy!

There will be quite a few threats and opportunities facing humanity in the next few decades. They are often relatively easy to speculate about, and even draw historical analogies with. For example, shortages of food and water will cause major strife around the world. Climate change will cause chaos and destruction. Inequality will exacerbate political instability. Technology will replace more and more jobs.

But I’d like to propose a future development that is conceivable, yet in my opinion unprecedented in its potential for transformation: the emergence of biotechnology-based telepathy. The spread of a “neuro-technology” that enables telepathy would be a consciousness-altering world event, in every sense of the word “consciousness”. A telepathic society might be totally unlike anything we’ve seen before: it might become a hive mind, or perhaps a collection of hive minds interacting in ways that we can barely imagine. ‘ImplanTelepathy’ could alter how we see our selves, and how we organize society and culture.

This sounds like yet another wild sci-fi concept, but I actually think it may be more feasible than “mind uploading”. In fact there are already tentative steps towards “direct” brain-to-brain communication. Brains are incredibly complicated, and the forms of communication that they enable may be the most mysterious biological process of all. But interestingly, we may not even need to understand how the brain works in order to achieve ‘ImplanTelepathy’. We may only need to develop neural implants that are both data-rich and internet-enabled. Once they’re in place, the brain’s own ability to learn through plasticity might take care of the rest. Essentially, implants attached to the nervous system can become new senses. And amazingly, adding new senses is not science fiction. We can already do it, to some extent!

Technology already exists to allow blind people to “see” with their tongues. It works like this: a special camera is connected to a mouthpiece that converts video signals into stimulation patterns on the tongue. The tongue sends these signals to the brain, and with a little bit of training, the signals eventually become experienced as vision! The technology works because of the brain’s ability to adapt to any sort of signal it receives. We don’t quite know how it works, however — whether the signals somehow get re-routed to the visual cortex, or whether the somatosensory cortex (which receives neural signals from the tongue and other parts of the body) can somehow serve as the basis for the subjective experience of seeing.

Adding any kind of new sense is itself an exciting prospect. There are already several different kinds of body modification that can give you a new sense. One tool gives the brain access to the earth’s magnetic field, allowing the wearer to always know his or her orientation with respect to magnetic north. All you really need to do is give the brain information. With training, the brain can learn how this information correlates with processes in the body and in the world. Amazingly, the information can be “fed” into the nervous system from seemingly anywhere. One team of researchers is developing ways to turns audio signals into vibrations that are felt on the back — allowing deaf people to “feel” speech through their backs! (This kind of technology could also lead to controlled forms of synesthesia — we could smell sounds, taste textures, or touch sights.)

Now imagine if instead of sending video, audio, or magnetic signals, we give the brain access to signals from someone else’s brain? Or from multiple people’s brains, simultaneously? If our implants could send and receive a rich “survey” of brain activity, we might be able to sense each others’ minds and bodies. We might figure out how to communicate telepathically using language; we might even develop entirely new, non-linguistic forms of communication.

If I were writing a sci-fi plot, I’d imagine this process unfolding in a serendipitous way, as the unexpected consequence of incremental and seemingly unrelated technological developments. Let’s say the Quantified Self movement really kicks off in the near future, and people start to use apps and implants to record their own biosensor data. Perhaps some mischievous hackers develop a way to breach privacy and access this data. Then just when people start to panic, things get really crazy: someone figures out that the existing biosensors can not only record and transmit data, but also receive data from elsewhere — and pipe it into the brain.

It’s like the reverse of what happens in the movie Batman Forever. The Riddler’s brainwave device — “the Box” — started out as a way to insert brainwaves into someone in order to facilitate virtual reality. The Riddler becomes the Riddler when he discovers by accident that he can actually receive brainwaves from the users of the Box. This gives him access to the minds of Gotham city’s residents (and also makes him super-intelligent somehow). ImplanTelepathy might emerge in the reverse order: “quantified selfers” might start out with the intention to store and analyze their own signals, and might then discover that the technology is a two-way street.

Imagine being able to share in other people’s joys and sorrows! It might be a euphoric experience. It might also be traumatic. Imagine having access to the mind of a psychopath. Or even just a garden-variety weirdo. Imagine having your own private thoughts and feelings broadcast to the world like a continuous stream of over-sharing tweets.

Some people might be horrified and unplug very quickly. Others might decide that they don’t really care about privacy, and that they have the stomach to experience alien minds. The early adopters of ImplanTelepathy might find that they end up sacrificing far more than their personal information though. They might even sacrifice their sense of self.

Scientists and philosophers don’t really understand the sense of self, or consciousness. No one can even agree on what the word consciousness means, let alone how it works. But I think that one crucial foundation of consciousness is integration — between perception and action, between mind and body, and also between organism and environment. Integration forms part of a popular new theory of consciousness called integrated information theory. In a nutshell, it proposes that consciousness depends on how well integrated different parts of the brain (or any system) are. A system in which parts communicate well with each other is “conscious”, according to this theory. One feature of the theory (or bug, depending on your perspective) is that it seems to imply that almost anything might be conscious — even rather abstract “things”, like the internet. One philosopher used this kind of idea to write a fascinating and funny argument for why “the United States Is Probably Conscious”.

Even now, without telepathy, it can often seem as if there is such a thing as “group consciousness”. For example, when a sports team plays in a beautifully coordinated way, it can seem as if each team member is guided by the same mind — we might call it ‘the soul of the team’. People who use ImplanTelepathy may become even more closely integrated with each other than “unlinked” lovers, friends, family members, teammates, or people united by common goals, experiences and interests. Some of them may find it easier to act for the “the greater common good” of a larger group. Perhaps the technology will make any individual’s feelings of joy or sorrow seem less important than the overall emotional state of the hive. One way this could happen is through a gradual increase in (1) the “bandwidth” of inter-implant communication, and (2) the level of detail being recorded by the sensors. Perhaps people will find that the signals from other people are “louder” than their own internal signals. Perhaps mass telepathy will end up being a kind of Total Perspective Vortex.

At some point, the sense of being a distinct individual may start to come apart. I can’t imagine what this would be like, but perhaps people who have had dissociative experiences might be able to speculate about it. For some people it might be an ecstatic feeling. For others it might feel like death.

ImplanTelepathy, if it ever emerges and becomes popular, would have profound effects on society. A hippie utopia in which everyone empathizes with everyone else is only one possibility. Imagine if different companies have competing, non-compatible versions of the technology. (A three-way battle between Apple-minds and Google-minds and Facebook-minds, perhaps!) There might be more rather than less social fragmentation. Political movements might become more easy to organize, and perhaps more hard to control or predict. Some people might lose control over their actions, or cede control to others. There might be neuro-slaves and neuro-masters. Or neuro-sheep and neuro-shepherds. And imagine if hackers find out how to manipulate other people’s actions. Crime, terrorism, and war might change in radical ways.

Telepathy could have very interesting effects on religion, art, and entertainment. Imagine if there are qualitatively new emotions that can only emerge through telepathic interplay. Here’s one fanciful example: telepathically linked people might head to different parts of the world and perform quirky “neuro-rituals” — dancing, contorting their bodies, eating specific things — in order to trigger experiences that would be impossible to simulate or create in isolation. And more radically, telepathy might lead to the creation of abstract sensations that are experienced at the level of the group-mind and not at the level of the individual. (“Inter-qualia” perhaps!)

All major technological changes are consciousness-altering. Every new tool at our disposal alters how we interact with the material world, and with each other. But I think that mass telepathy would represent a psycho-social revolution, because it might be the only technological breakthrough that can lead to the breakdown of individual human consciousnesses and to the creation of a networked, distributed consciousness.

(I know this is wildly speculative, but it’s great fun to think about!)

____

I wrote this in February 2016, before I knew of Neuralink’s existence. It was in response to the following Quora question:

What are the biggest ways in which the world 20 years from now will probably be different from today? What are the biggest “X factors” (changes that are not probable, but are possible and could be huge)?

Cross-posted from my neuroscience blog.

This is the first in a planned series of posts on Terrence Deacon’s book Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged From Matter. I’m calling it the Deactionary, since Deacon is fond of coining new terms and redefining old ones.

Deacon outlines an ambitious goal: understanding the emergence of consciousness from insensate matter. Of course, not everyone thinks that mind emerged from matter in the first place. Dualists think mind is a separate substance from matter. Idealists think matter is a subset of mind, rather than the other way round. And panpsychists think that mind is an intrinsic property of all forms of matter, so it didn’t really emerge at all.

But dualism, idealism and panpsychism are probably minority positions among the science-oriented. It is widely assumed that before life evolved, the universe was mindless, and that the arrival of subjective experience — the word “subjective” may or may not be redundant when discussing experience — represents a qualitative change that demands explanation.

There is an apparent gap between physical and biological modes of description. Physics is articulated in terms of mind-free concepts such as mass, position, velocity, charge, force, and so on. But subjective experience is described in intentional terms like ‘mental content’, ‘representation’, ‘symbol’, ‘concept’, ‘meaning’, and ‘idea’. And non-mental biological processes are described in teleological terms such as ‘function’ and ‘purpose’. Deacon wants us to see intentionality and teleology as variations on a single theme: the inclination or tending of a thing or process towards something else.

Intentionality and teleology are alien to the sciences of the inanimate: atoms don’t have purposes, and chemical reactions aren’t representing anything. Moreover, concepts like representation, goal, and function sit uneasily with modern notions of causality.

It’s good to pause here to investigate what exactly we mean by causality. Aristotle laid much of the groundwork for subsequent western thinking on causes. He thought of causes as answers to “why” questions. Aristotle proposed that when we want to know why a thing appears the way it does, we seek one or more of the following:

• The material cause: the substance(s) of which the thing is made. For example, the material ’cause’ of a table is wood.
• The formal cause: the form or arrangement of the thing. For the table, its shape is the formal cause.
• The efficient cause: the conditions apart from the thing itself that enable the thing to arise. The carpenter with his tools is the efficient cause of the table.
• The final cause: the end or purpose of the thing. In the case of the table, it may be to serve as a writing desk or as a dining table.

The first three Aristotelian causes fit well with modern physical science. But final causes seem out of place. The end for which something is meant occurs after the thing is created (if at all), whereas causes are typically understood as preceding their effects. The causal story of how a ball rolls down a hill involves the state of the ball in the present — not the still-unrealized purpose for which the ball was dispatched (there may not even be one, in the case of an accident). Moreover, once we have explained the physical causes of some process, the purposes (if any) seem superfluous. Reductive physicalism might be understood as the attempt to subsume all why questions into how questions.

Reductive physicalists reason that since (1) physics is the science of the most fundamental entities, and (2) physics has no use for purposes and goals, then purposes and goals must not ‘exist’ — the universe is quite literally pointless. At best, goals, functions and purposes are shorthand compressions of complicated physical processes that will one day be decompressed into a teleology-free format. The term ‘teleonomy’ is often used to denote apparently teleological processes whose telos is no more than a tool for the scientist, with no real existence. A side-effect of the illusory nature of teleological processes is that they cannot then be causal.

Emergentists, of which Deacon is a prime example, complain that pronouncements about cosmic purposelessness are based on half-baked science. Instead of forcing living systems to fit into physics-derived categories, non-reductive physicalists seek an intermediate stage in which specific arrangements of inanimate matter cause purposes to spontaneously arise.

Deacon’s first step towards this goal is to highlight what is similar about intentionality and teleology. Both concepts are fundamentally relational: they involve one thing being for or about something else. But to Deacon, intention and telos bear the stain of the mental; when attempting to explain the emergence of mind, using such terms is tantamount to circular reasoning. So he creates the term “ententional” as a broader tent that encompass both concepts.

[…] we need to introduce a more generic term for all such phenomena, irrespective of whether they are associated with minds or merely features of life.
To address this need, I propose that we use the term ententional as a generic adjective to describe all phenomena that are intrinsically incomplete in the sense of being in relationship to, constituted by, or organized to achieve something non-intrinsic. By combining the prefix en– (for “in” or “within”) with the adjectival form meaning something like “inclined toward,” I hope to signal this deep and typically ignored commonality that exists in all the various phenomena that include within them a fundamental relationship to something absent.

It is not obvious to me, even after reading the book, that inventing a term like this enables Deacon to successfully avoid the issue of mind-ladenness (I have alluded to the general difficulty here), but the attempt to reformulate aboutness in terms of incompleteness is thought-provoking nonetheless. The idea has a poetic quality. Deacon coins yet another term, absential, to elaborate on the concept:

So, at the risk of initiating this discussion with a clumsy neologism, I will refer to this as an absential feature, to denote phenomena whose existence is determined with respect to an essential absence. This could be a state of things not yet realized, a specific separate object of a representation, a general type of property that may or may not exist, an abstract quality, an experience, and so forth—just not that which is actually present. This paradoxical intrinsic quality of existing with respect to something missing, separate, and possibly nonexistent is irrelevant when it comes to inanimate things, but it is a defining property of life and mind.

In the case of goals, the incompleteness is relatively clear: having an active goal in the present means the goal hasn’t been reached. We might say a goal is a vacuum that nature abhors — and attempts to fill by means of the organism’s behavior. Each goal-vacuum is ‘about’ the currently-absent state that brings about its cessation1.

Absence initially seems promising when we apply it to intentionality: if I am consciously experiencing a duck, the experience per se does not ‘contain’ an actual duck — and so the duck’s absence is in some sense characteristic of the experience. But how does this work for something like color? I suppose the experience of magenta is of or about magenta, but magenta itself is not an external physical object — it arises when blue- and red- wavelength beams of light arrive at the eye. It would be strange to say that the experience of magenta is an experience of blue and red light, since the experience itself clearly occurred long before anyone understood color vision. In any case, red and blue light do not blend into magenta “out there in the world” — the experience occurs because of the specifics of our very-much-not-absent nervous systems. If we instead try to say that magenta experiences are about memories or prior experiences of magenta, we seem at risk of some kind of regress. So what exactly is intrinsically absent in the experience of magenta? 2

Perhaps that is a digression to pursue another time. For now it suffices to point out that in order to work his way up to intentionality in its full-blown mental splendor, Deacon first characterizes mindless ententional processes, which are described as natural consequences of the right sort of physical process. Perhaps ironically, Deacon proposes a bottom-up, reductionist-sounding conception of emergence. But unlike the reductionists, Deacon is interested in assigning causal efficacy to the emergent ententional processes:

By analogy, to really understand how the additional dimension of ententional properties can emerge from a substrate that is dimensionally simpler and devoid of these properties, it is necessary to understand how the material and energetic threads of the physical universe became entangled with one another in just the right way so as to produce the additional dimension that is the fabric of both life and mind. This is the problem of emergence: understanding how a new, higher dimension of causal influence can be woven from the interrelationships among component processes and properties of a lower dimension.

We’ll see how Deacon attempts this in future posts.

Notes

1 The reader acquainted with dynamical systems might wonder why Deacon doesn’t subsume absential processes into the established concept of attractors — I don’t really have a good answer yet. It may be that the attractor framework does the opposite of what physicalists want, since it opens up the possibility of an acasual, teleological interpretation of physics. This issue has been debated by physicists for two centuries — without any resolution, as far as I can tell.

2 This color conundrum just struck me, and seems to be a problem for intentionality as a whole, and not just Deacon’s treatment of it.

___

All quotes are from Incomplete Nature.

Terrence W. Deacon’s 2012 book Incomplete Nature is a bold attempt to conceptualize the emergence of life and mind using a consistent ‘physicalist’ framework. I put the term ‘physicalist’ in scare-quotes because one of the appealing quirks of the book — and perhaps one that isn’t given enough attention despite a length of 500+ pages — is that Deacon wants us to add something to the list of physical things, which typically only includes matter and energy. This something is… nothing. The incompleteness in the title seems to refer to this idea: a qualified nothing or absence is central to emergence.

The book is by turns intriguing and exasperating. Deacon’s emphasis on the usefulness of absence and constraint in physicalist discourse is admirable. And his treatments of familiar concepts like resonance, entropy and work should prove stimulating even for people who know the physics inside out. The main source of irritation for me is the prose: the stacking of invented terms on top of each other leads to a wobbly Jenga tower of clunky clauses. Deacon loves his neologisms and his redefinitions of existing terms. I suppose anyone interested in pushing science and philosophy forward will need to invent some jargon. But here the jargon risks alienating many otherwise sympathetic readers. Another barrier is the sheer length of the book, which arises as much from repetition as from a desire to cover the topics thoroughly. One gets the impression that there is a much shorter and more metaphysically radical book lurking within this one, screaming to get out.

My plan is to do a series of posts on Deacon’s key terms, so people who can’t get past the prolixity and the weird writing can access the concepts, which may prove handy for thinking about emergence in biology and beyond.

As a preview, here are brief intros to each of his major neologisms.

The Deactionary

ententional: This is Deacon’s adjective for referential or directed processes such as functions, goals, and representations. It derives from the term ‘intentionality’, which is the philosopher’s term of art for the directedness of mind towards its objects of thought and perception — its “aboutness”. Deacon feels that we need a separate term that captures aboutness but does not connote anything mental.

homeodynamic: A system is homeodynamic if its spontaneous, natural or unforced path leads towards equilibrium. Homeodynamics erases differences (e.g., in temperature or pressure).

morphodynamic: A system is morphodynamic if it tends to spontaneously increase in order. This generally involves external perturbations, but does not involve external design or imposition of form. Morphodynamics subsumes many standard examples of self-organization. Morphodynamics amplifies differences.

teleodynamic: A system is teleodynamic if its organization becomes spontaneously end-directed. Teleodynamic systems employ homeodynamic and morphodynamic processes in the service of a self. Terms like ‘self-maintenance’ and ‘self-repair’ become natural and unavoidable in teleodynamic systems.

orthograde: The orthograde trajectory of any system is the spontaneous trajectory it takes when there is no additional interference. It means following the grade or gradient: going with the flow.

contragrade: A contragrade change must be forced on a system, and is therefore non-spontaneous. Contragrade changes involve one orthograde process acting upon another.

Some of his more dense sentences involve these terms sandwiched with his versions of the following: absence, constraint, supervenience, work and information. Here’s are some examples:

“Morphodynamic processes are the only spontaneous processes that generate and propagate constraints, and autogens demonstrate that reciprocity between morphodynamic processes can preserve and replicate constraints.”

“Teleodynamic systems can interact homeodynamically; homeodynamic relationships between teleodynamic systems can produce morphodynamic relationships; and synergistically reciprocal morphodynamic relationships constituted by interacting teleodynamic systems can produce higher-order teleodynamic relationships.”

“Teleodynamic orthograde processes are more complex because they dynamically supervene on morphodynamic processes.”

“Information is dependent on the propagation of constraints linking a teleodynamic system and its environmental context.”

Whew!

Anyway, I am pretty sure statements of this sort can be decompressed without too much pain, and often contain real insights. Also, perhaps in keeping with the importance of absence, the ideas that Deacon neglects may be as interesting as the ones he draws attention to.