Minds are built from the inside [evolution, development]

Thinking about this post from last year in conjunction with my short note about Substrate Independence. What's the connection? Systems that are substrate independent are not built from the inside. Their structure is observable externally and are constructed externally. It's this externally observable structure that can be transferred from one substrate to another. 

More later.

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What’s it mean, minds are built from the inside?

As far as I can tell, I’ve been arguing that minds and brains are built from the inside since (at least) January 2002, when I first imagined a thought experiment about coupling two brains together through a huge number of point-to-point connections. I put an argument (about inside) online in 2014 and elaborated on it in my current post at 3 Quarks Daily about the impossibility of direct point-to-point brain-to-brain communication. I’ve decided that the argument is important enough that I’ve excerpted it from the larger article and have placed it below.

The argument I make about brains is, I believe, true for all evolutionary and/or developmental systems, whether biological or cultural. They start at some point in time, maintain a boundary between themselves and their surrounding, and develop from the inside. They are self-organizing.

Note that I first developed the diagrams for a presentation I made before the Linguistics Association of Canada and the United States and were intended to convey an idea I learned from David Hays, who, in turn, learned it from Sydney Lamb: that the meaning of an idea in a network is a function of its location in the entire network. As such, it is difficult to observe such meanings from outside the system.

Minds are built from the inside

Let us start with this simple diagram:

It makes a very simple point: that the central nervous system (CNS), with the brain as the largest component, functions in two worlds. There is the external world: the physical world, the world of plants, animals, and other people. And there is the internal milieu: the body’s interior (in which the brain itself is situated). The brain senses the external world through the vision, hearing, smell, taste, touch, and a other senses; it directs action in the world by control of the skeletal muscles. Similarly, it senses the internal milieu through the bloodstream and acts on it through the endocrine system – there is more to it than that, but we don’t need it all; it is the principle that I’m interested in.

This is basically the same diagram, but with just a bit more detail in the central box, the CNS.

Now we have distinct regions for receiving input from the external world (A), from the internal milieu (B), for acting on the internal milieu (C) and for acting in the external world (D). Finally, there is a central area containing neurons connected to neurons in the other areas. While no real nervous system is that simple, they are all elaborations of that basic organization.

Closed organization

And that organization is CLOSED. What do I mean by that?

The brain isn’t something that is assembled from a bunch of parts scattered throughout a bunch of bins from which they are fetched by some Transcendental Maker. The process is quite different from what I did years ago when I assembled my stereo amplifier from a kit. When I did that I laid all the part out and assembled the basic sub-circuits. I then connected those together on the chassis and, when it was all connected, plugged it in and turned in on, a magic moment when all the dead elements suddenly came to life.

No, the brain develops through an organic process that starts with a single fertilized egg which then begins dividing and differentiating. At some point about three weeks into the process specifically neural cells appear in the embryo and then differentiate into the brain and the peripheral nervous system.

The brain is far from fully developed at birth, but its operating environment changes drastically at that time. Until that point its external world had been the womb. After birth it is exposed to the larger external world. In humans the brain continues developing into the early twenties, at which time the sutures in the skull finally close completely.

At every point in the process the cells are living cells. The neurons are receiving inputs and generating inputs. They are, in effect, becoming used to one another, “learning” one another’s ways. They are mutually adjusted.

THAT’s what I mean when I say that the system is closed. There is no external meddling going on. How could there be?

External meddling

External meddling, that is what happens when two brains are hooked together by a high tech coupling linking tens or even hundreds of millions of neurons across two brains. Both brains are now subject to considerable external meddling. Each brain is receiving inputs from a source it has no experience with, and generating outputs to that source as well. As I have indicated before, it has no way of even recognizing the presence of all this foreign input as foreign. It is just there. It is noise, electrochemical energy with no traceable linkage to the organism itself.

I suppose one could imagine that in time, weeks, months, years, the two brains would somehow sort things out. Maybe. But that’s very different from the instantaneous perception and recognition that Koch is talking about. But maybe not. Maybe the initial shock of all that noise is too much to overcome. We simply don’t know.

No two brains are alike

Bu..bu..but aren’t the two brains alike?

Only approximately, only approximately.

It is easy to identify gross body parts for one individual with the same parts for another. Here’s my left leg, there’s your left leg, here’s my left thumb, there’s your left thumb. But you can’t do that with hairs on the head. For one thing, people don’t even have the exact same number of hairs on their heads.

It is the same with neurons. It is not as though we could link neuron #7,983,004,512 from one brain to neuron #7,983,004,512 in the other brain, and so on for tens or even hundreds of millions of neurons. We have no way of making such identifications between neurons in different brains. Brains are sufficiently different from one another that it is difficult to identify corresponding areas with a high level of precision. Gross correspondence at the scale of centimeters or millimeters is all we can do. That’s not very high precision.

What we have at best, then, is some miraculous technology linking millions or even billions of neurons in one brain with of millions or billions of neurons in another brain in some quasi-ordered pattern based on approximate brain geometry. This technology allows the two brains to send signals to one another, signals which neither brain is prepared to deal with and which therefore interrupt the normal processes of both brains. I do not see how anything resembling coherent thought can emerge from the resulting electrochemical chaos. Even the best of magicians is incapable of pulling a rabbit out of a poorly constructed hat.