Reading the Human Swarm 9: What about the brain?

There is at least one place where Moffett mentions the brain, in the beginning of Chapter 12, “Sensing Others”, where he mentions the work of Uri Hasson, a neuroscientist who investigates neural activity of people intereacting with one another through conversation; in this case, they were watching a film and chatting together. When that happens their brain activity becomes synchronized.

I’d like to introduce some comments on the brain on a different theme: The brain is built from the inside? By thinking that through we can appreciate the (conjectural) neural underpinnings of some findings Moffett has introduced: societies are more likely to form through fission rather than merger; the development of factions; and the distinction between group and society.

Brains are built from the inside

First, what does that mean: the brain is built from the “inside”? Automobiles, for example, aren’t built from the inside. They are designed by engineers and then constructed, to design, by teams of workers, from the “outside”. The same is true of computers. We design them and then build them. Software is like that as well. In these cases, and many more, what is being designed and constructed is one thing, over there, if you will, while the team doing the designing and constructing is another thing, over here.

Brains aren’t like that. Brains and nervous systems are embedded in animals and the process through which an animal comes into being is a biological process of development and growth that starts with a single fertilized cell. There is no separation between a design-build team and the thing being constructed. They are one and the same. It is in that sense that I am asserting the brains are built from the inside. There is no external agent doing the constructing.

While it is common to use computing as a source of metaphors for mind and brain (brain as wetware, mind as software), much of that usage doesn’t hold beyond casual conversation. It is easy to give a computer new capacities by loading a new software package, but nothing like that is possible for humans. We can learn new skills, but that takes time, hours, months, years, depending on the skill. In contrast, a software upload takes whatever time is required for the installation, seconds, minutes, maybe hours; but once the software is installed, the new capacity if fully there and ready to use. Conversely, software can be quickly uninstalled, or simply erased, without damage to the computer itself; but no such thing is possible for knowledge and skills a person has learned. Once the knowledge or skill has been acquired it is more or less permanent, though it may degrade over time if not used.

Implications

Let’s begin with the observation that new societies rarely arise from the merger of existing ones (pp. 283-285). Rather, they arise from the fissioning of existing societies. Thus the members of the societies that result after the split already know one another. They’d grown up together and lived with one another for years. When any one of them was maturing, and thus their brain was developing, the other members of the society where automatically incorporated into their neural representation of the world.

Similarly, as societies become larger, the scope of individual contacts relative to membership in the society as a whole becomes smaller, making internal cohesion more difficult. We can conjecture that this is a function of the capacity of single brains to maintain highly detailed individualized (“face-to-face”) representations of others. Factions develop, Moffett argues (243 ff.). At first they’re amicable, in time, though, that frays. The society must then split in order to maintain peace, peace in two new societies.

Then we have the distinction Moffett makes between a group and a society. Members of groups recognize one another as individuals and interact with one another in individualized ways. Societies do not. Societies divide between the world into US (members of a society) and THEM (non-members). Ants do not recognized one another as individuals, but they do recognize other members of their society (coloney); they do so by scent. Humans typically live in societies consisting of multiple (face-to-face) grounds and use markers of various kinds – hair styles, body markings, clothing, language – to recognize and interact with society members who are not in their local group. They interact with non-group society members through stereotyped social roles. The neural requirements (again, my conjecture) of interaction governed by markers and roles are lower than those governed by detailed individual knowledge. The existence of markers and roles thus allows people to form societies that are larger than face-to-face groups without making burdensome neural requirements.

A concluding note on identity is a different sense

Identity is an important theme in the book where it is about an individual’s link to their group and society. There’s another aspect of identity which Moffett doesn’t deal with and which I’d like to link to the brain, but that would require more of an argument than I can undertake here.

The argument that needs to be made is that our nervous system affords us open-ended awareness of the world. I suspect that’s a joint product of the active nature of the nervous system and the emergence of language. On that active nature, the nervous system doesn’t passively take the world in, but rather actively probes the world through continuously projecting expectations – think, for example, of the model William Powers developed almost a half century ago in Behavior: The Control of Perception (1973). Thus perception is a process of verifying those projections (or, to use a more current language, updating Baysian priors).

The emergence of language leads to an endless curiosity about everything: What’s that? How does it work? Where’d it come from? Living becomes thus becomes a dialog with the world. And the question, Where did WE come from? will arise in that process. The answer initially takes the form of myth, of stories about origins. And those stories, in effect, establish the link between a society and world. That too is a matter of identity.