First off what do I mean by "human brain"? I mean more than just nerves and ion differentials. I mean also brains in context, that are functioning in societies with other brains, whose operations are more than just chemistry.
A radio program today was describing all the chemicals that are associated with the feelings of love. These chemicals are highly addictive. The scientist made the mistake of describing love in terms of addiction, rather than addiction in terms of love. We evolved the mechanism of love to ensure that we formed long lasting partnerships, presumably with reproduction as the benefit. That we can hijack this mechanism with other chemicals (that we call drugs) is purely a side effect of the love mechanism. It seems hard to explain the corpus of arts that revolve around the subject of love, if love was just chemicals. Instead of Romantic poetry why are there not ballads written about vitamins or elements? You can't reduce human experience entirely to anything other than human experience, any more than you can reduce an apple to a pear. You can see parallels between human experience and brain chemistry and drugs, but they are not the same. If they were the same then what can science learn by studying drugs? Just study love or vice versa! Which scientist replaces their love life with drug injections?
So in this sense a brain is more than just the neurons and chemistry it must include the functioning brain in context. The arising of endorphins is not just a chemical phenomenon, it works within an environment that the brain is evolved to respond and fit into.
This is the flaw at the heart of Psychiatry. Treating the chemical imbalances doesn't treat the cause or meaning of those imbalances. Taking anti-depressants doesn't treat depression, it just switches off the part of the brain that responds to depression. Being a stone can be useful, but if you are not a stone it's not a long term approach.
Now I heard on TV someone saying that surgeons are encouraged to play computer games to keep their hand-eye coordination sharp. They then went further to see parallels between a game console and the human brain and the intricate wiring of both. So far so good. But then they said that a fault in the wiring of the brain can cause complex errors. Problem!
To explain the problem lets invent some "realms." There is the realm of physical cells and chemistry. And then we can create the realm of art and meaning.
We can see these realms in this diagram. The brain is the mass of tissues. The meaning are the boxes and colours containing descriptions of parts of the brain.
We can see that the realm of meaning is broken into sections, and parts. The mass of human brain does not come in discrete regions. It takes close observation to separate it into parts. Watching a zombie movie the camera never stops to examine the components of a brain, its enough just to have some brain tissue for the zombies to eat. There is little meaning attributed to a brain in a horror film, just a disgusting and abnormal mass of flesh usually extracted from an unfortunate victim in unwelcome fashion. Meanwhile in the operating theatre of a brain injury department the exact same flesh is given huge meaning, not just in terms of the close attention to the parts and functioning but also the person and the life in which they belong and take part in.
Now what is especially interesting here, and directly influenced by SRH, is that the human brain is understood by many to be the source of human meaning. Yet as we see in the picture above the human brain that is broken into functioning sections IS already in the realm of meaning. No meaning has been explained yet. You can't make meaning out of meaning! That would be like buying a chair from a carpenter and then seeing a delivery of chairs at the back door. What is the carpenter doing, and why not buy directly from who ever is delivering them missing out the redundant carpenter?
This was captured brilliantly in the Mouse Mill episode 8 of the UK kids program Bagpuss (with added music not in the original!):
Its like seeing the image of a cup fall on the retina and thinking that this image is what we see. If you can make sense of the image on your retina then why do you even need an eye, the cup is surely already made?*
*Let the function m(x) take some x and produce meaning from it. So we see a cup m(x) = "cup." Now we see the cup form an image on someone's retina m(y) = "cup." And then we do extensive study of the brain and come up with new entity z such that m(z) = "cup." So far we know nothing about m. What a scientists is really looking for is some entity 'a' such that m(a) = m. Or if we take meaning as an object itself what m(m) will produce. We're in Descartes or Kant territory. If we don't already know what m(x) is then how can we know what m(m) is? What we can do is make a machine so that n(x) = "cup." But the problem here is that the machine will either agree with m() or it will make no sense. It can't actually give us any insight into meaning. We already know that brains and machines can make meaning, but we are looking to understand how that happens and give it meaning. There is a problem here. But its not game over yet.
For meaning to be explained we must show how we get meaning arising from before there was meaning. If we explain meaning within the already existing realm of meaning then we have failed to add anything new. We are the carpenter taking deliveries of chairs, or the mice putting a biscuit into the mouse mill.
So how does the brain work? Where does meaning come from?
Well we can say for sure that meaning does not arise from meaningful parts of the brain. It must arise from what is as yet not meaningful. That is obviously a deep thing to discuss, but for a shortcut its called Sunyata in Buddhism which is translated as "emptiness." The world before we apply meaning is meaningless.
Wittgenstein devoted the second part of his life to this question and he found a realm that is prior to meaning. He called it the "game." Before we know the rules of a game the pieces are meaningless (in that context). We may see people pushing wooden statues around a checker board and wonder what is going on: it is meaningless until we learn chess. Likewise we hear foreigners speak and the language is meaningless. we may travel to another country and see customs that seem peculiar and meaningless to us. In archaeology whenever "meaningless" things are found they are almost universally attributed to "religion." This seems a rather "off the shelf" approach. If we don't understand yet, then what is wrong with things being meaningless to us (for now). Wittgenstein observes children's games and notes the process by which a ball gains meaning. The kids learn the rules of the game, and then they can play, and then the ball has meaning. Analogously he talks of "language games" to describe how words that are quite arbitrary in themselves gaining meaning through their use in a game of language. Pictorial scripts may indeed draw pictures of the things they are talking about, but this is no use in spoken language! Well apart from onomatopoeia like a dog going "woof". So we can see meaning arising from the practices of the world that we learn by physical processes like copying and being corrected. Wittgenstein identifies for example finger pointing as something that precedes language. I think all higher animals know when they are being looked at. Looking into the eye of an animal precedes meaning, it is universally understood. David Attenborough refers to the wealth of meaning in the gaze of a gorilla, and that is all pre-language. Often when you look at an animal, even as lowly as a lizard, it scurries away. This is a world before meaning. But how far can we go into the world prior to meaning.
Slightly more specifically that TV program's suggestion that errors in the neuron wiring causes problem like they would a computer is false. There is much evidence of neuron plasticity. The brain rewires to get around problems. Brain wiring is not what gives the brain its function. You do not just wire up neurones to get a working brain.
This means there is not an direct correlation from circuit board and function. It is true that brain damage and brain scans do show correlations between regions of the brain and external phenomena. But these are probably artefacts of embryogenesis. Brains grow and as a result they grow in particular ways and using similar instructions they grow in similar ways. So indeed there is correlation between brains on which parts are important in vision for example. But we should not then conclude that this correlation translates into an understanding of vision. All it does it correlate with the fact that we have separate vision and hearing senses for example. It doesn't explain how we are able to know this and how we give meaning to our vision and hearing senses even just by experiencing hearing and seeing with no knowledge of brains at all.
Synaesthetes may draw attention to their "miswiring" that leads to cross overs in their senses. So that a sound may also create a sense of colour. But we are still just dividing regions either in our consciousness or in our brain scans. We have not gone even 1 step closer to understanding this process of how we divide things up into meaningful parts itself.
The realm of meaning should meet a "fixed point" or "singularity" when it comes to examining the brain (if the brain is indeed the thing doing the examination). Such research should create some kind of fractal as you would expect when a function is applied to a closed field repetitively.
I believe I have covered this regarding how "ego" is perhaps the fixed point of the meaning realm. When we come to think about ourselves in depth we are forever trapped by a chicken and egg loop. What is the nature of my existence? But if I don't already exist then what am I thinking about? If I already exist then what is the nature of that existence? And the loop goes on. Out of this recursion should come a fractal. Pure science fiction but perhaps that infinite loop is the cause of all creation.
So we need be careful about making pronouncements about the brain, like its wiring is critical to function. The reason is that we are at some level using a brain to make this prnouncement, and if we are to explain ourselves we need go below the basic level of the brain's functions like meaning and pronouncements themselves. We need explore into the realm prior to meaning upon what all this rests. This sounds like nonsense, but it can be done. Enough for this blog, that would begin a discussion of meditation and jhanas.
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