This Explains Everything

by Mr. John Brockman

  Instead of a tiny handful of elites holding most of the political power by keeping their citizens illiterate, uneducated, and unenlightened, people could see for themselves, through science, literacy, and education, the power and corruption that held them down, and they began to throw off their chains of bondage and demand rights.

  Instead of the divine right of kings, people demanded the natural right of democracy. Democratic elections, in this sense, are scientific experiments: Every couple of years, you carefully alter the variables with an election and observe the results. Many of our founding fathers were scientists who deliberately adapted the method of data-gathering, hypothesis-testing, and theory formation to their nation-building. Their understanding of the provisional nature of findings led them to form a social system wherein empiricism was the centerpiece of a functional polity. The new government was like a scientific laboratory, conducting a series of experiments year by year, state by state. The point was not to promote this or that political system but to set up a system whereby people could experiment to see what works. That is the principle of empiricism applied to the social world.

  As Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Tyler in 1804: “No experiment can be more interesting than that we are now trying, and which we trust will end in establishing the fact, that man may be governed by reason and truth.”

  WE ARE STARDUST

  KEVIN KELLY

  Editor-at-large, Wired; author, What Technology Wants

  Where did we come from? I find the explanation that we were made in stars to be deep, elegant, and beautiful. This explanation says that most atoms in each of our bodies were built up out of smaller particles produced in the furnaces of long-gone stars. Only our primordial hydrogen bits were born before stars. In a cosmic accounting, we are 90 percent star remnants. At our core, humans are essentially the by-products of nuclear fusion. The intense pressures and temperatures of these giant stoves thickened collapsing clouds of tiny elemental bits into heavier bits, which, once fused, were blown out into space as the furnace died. The heaviest atoms in our bones may have required more than one cycle in the star furnaces to fatten up. Uncountable numbers of built-up atoms congealed into a planet, and a strange disequilibrium called life swept up a subset of those atoms into our mortal selves. We are all collected stardust. And by a most elegant and remarkable transformation, our starstuff is capable of looking into the night sky to perceive other stars shining. They seem remote and distant, but we are really very close to them, no matter how many light-years away they are. All we see of one another was born in stars. How beautiful is that?

  Continue reading for an excerpt from John Brockman’s new book

  THINKING

  Available October 29 in trade paperback and e-book

  In Thinking, today’s most influential scientists and psychologists explain everything you need to know about the unique processes of human thought, rationality, happiness, and decision-making.

  1

  The Normal Well-Tempered Mind

  Daniel C. Dennett

  Philosopher; Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy and Codirector of the Center for Cognitive Studies, Tufts University; author, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, Breaking the Spell, and Intuition Pumps.

  I’m trying to undo a mistake I made some years ago, and rethink the idea that the way to understand the mind is to take it apart into simpler minds and then take those apart into still simpler minds until you get down to minds that can be replaced by a machine. This is called homuncular functionalism, because you break the whole person down into two or three or four or seven sub persons who are basically agents. They’re homunculi, and this looks like a regress, but it’s only a finite regress, because you take each of those in turn and you break it down into a group of stupider, more specialized homunculi, and keep going until you arrive at parts that you can replace with a machine, and that’s a great way of thinking about cognitive science. It’s what good old-fashioned AI tried to do and is still trying to do.

  The idea is basically right, but when I first conceived of it, I made a big mistake. I was at that point enamored of the McCulloch-Pitts logical neuron. McCulloch and Pitts had put together the idea of a very simple artificial neuron, a computational neuron, which had multiple inputs and a single branching output and a threshold for firing, and the inputs were either inhibitory or excitatory. They proved that in principle a neural net made of these logical neu­rons could compute anything you wanted to compute. So this was very exciting. It meant that basically you could treat the brain as a computer and treat the neuron as a sort of basic switching ele­ment in the computer, and that was certainly an inspiring over-simplification. Everybody knew it was an oversimplification, but people didn’t realize how much, and more recently it’s become clear to me that it’s a dramatic oversimplification, because each neuron, far from being a simple logical switch, is a little agent with an agenda, and they are much more autonomous and much more interesting than any switch.

  The question is, what happens to your ideas about computa­tional architecture when you think of individual neurons not as dutiful slaves or as simple machines but as agents that have to be kept in line and properly rewarded and that can form coalitions and cabals and organizations and alliances? This vision of the brain as a sort of social arena of politically warring forces seems like sort of an amusing fantasy at first, but is now becoming some­thing that I take more and more seriously, and it’s fed by a lot of different currents.

  Evolutionary biologist David Haig has some lovely papers on intrapersonal conflicts where he’s talking about how even at the level of the genetics—even at the level of the conflict between the genes you get from your mother and the genes you get from your father, the so-called madumnal and padumnal genes—those are in opponent relations, and if they get out of whack, serious imbalances can happen that show up as particular psychological anomalies.

  We’re beginning to come to grips with the idea that your brain is not this well-organized hierarchical control system where ev­erything is in order, a very dramatic vision of bureaucracy. In fact, it’s much more like anarchy with some elements of democracy. Sometimes you can achieve stability and mutual aid and a sort of calm united front, and then everything is hunky-dory, but then it’s always possible for things to get out of whack and for one alli­ance or another to gain control, and then you get obsessions and delusions and so forth.

  You begin to think about the normal well-tempered mind, in effect, the well-organized mind, as an achievement, not as the base state, something that is only achieved when all is going well. But still, in the general realm of humanity, most of us are pretty well put together most of the time. This gives a very different vision of what the architecture is like, and I’m just trying to get my head around how to think about that.

  What we’re seeing right now in cognitive science is something that I’ve been anticipating for years, and now it’s happening, and it’s happening so fast I can’t keep up with it. We’re now drowning in data, and we’re also happily drowning in bright young people who have grown up with this stuff and for whom it’s just second nature to think in these quite abstract computational terms, and it simply wasn’t possible even for experts to get their heads around all these different topics 30 years ago. Now a suitably motivated kid can arrive at college already primed to go on these issues. It’s very exciting, and they’re just going to run away from us, and it’s going to be fun to watch.

  The vision of the brain as a computer, which I still champion, is changing so fast. The brain’s a computer, but it’s so different from any computer that you’re used to. It’s not like your desktop or your laptop at all, and it’s not like your iPhone, except in some ways. It’s a much more interesting phenomenon. What Turing gave us for the first time (and without Turing you just couldn’t do any of this) is a way of thinking in a disciplined way about phenomena that have, as I like to say, trillions of moving parts. Until the late 20th century, nobody knew how to take seriously a ma
chine with a tril­lion moving parts. It’s just mind-boggling.

  You couldn’t do it, but computer science gives us the ideas, the concepts of levels—virtual machines implemented in virtual ma­chines implemented in virtual machines and so forth. We have these nice ideas of recursive reorganization of which your iPhone is just one example, and a very structured and very rigid one, at that.

  We’re getting away from the rigidity of that model, which was worth trying for all it was worth. You go for the low-hanging fruit first. First, you try to make minds as simple as possible. You make them as much like digital computers, as much like von Neumann machines, as possible. It doesn’t work. Now, we know why it doesn’t work pretty well. So you’re going to have a parallel architecture because, after all, the brain is obviously massively parallel.

  It’s going to be a connectionist network. Although we know many of the talents of connectionist networks, how do you knit them together into one big fabric that can do all the things minds do? Who’s in charge? What kind of control system? Control is the real key, and you begin to realize that control in brains is very different from control in computers. Control in your commercial computer is very much a carefully designed top-down thing.

  You really don’t have to worry about one part of your laptop going rogue and trying out something on its own that the rest of the system doesn’t want to do. No, they’re all slaves. If they’re agents, they’re slaves. They are prisoners. They have very clear job descriptions. They get fed every day. They don’t have to worry about where the energy’s coming from, and they’re not ambi­tious. They just do what they’re asked to do, and they do it bril­liantly, with only the slightest tint of comprehension. You get all the power of computers out of these mindless little robotic slave prisoners, but that’s not the way your brain is organized.

  Each neuron is imprisoned in your brain. I now think of these as cells within cells, as cells within prison cells. Realize that every neuron in your brain, every human cell in your body (leaving aside all the symbionts), is a direct descendant of eukaryotic cells that lived and fended for themselves for about a billion years as free-swimming, free-living little agents. They fended for themselves, and they survived.

  They had to develop an awful lot of know-how, a lot of talent, a lot of self-protective talent to do that. When they joined forces into multicellular creatures, they gave up a lot of that. They became, in effect, domesticated. They became part of larger, more monolithic organizations. My hunch is that that’s true in general. We don’t have to worry about our muscle cells rebelling against us, or anything like that. When they do, we call it cancer, but in the brain I think that (and this is my wild idea) maybe only in one species, us, and maybe only in the obviously more volatile parts of the brain, the cortical areas, some little switch has been thrown in the genetics that, in effect, makes our neurons a little bit feral, a little bit like what happens when you let sheep or pigs go feral, and they recover their wild talents very fast.

  Maybe a lot of the neurons in our brains are not just capable but, if you like, motivated to be more adventurous, more explor­atory or risky in the way they comport themselves, in the way they live their lives. They’re struggling among themselves with each other for influence, just for staying alive, and there’s competition going on between individual neurons. As soon as that happens, you have room for cooperation to create alliances, and I suspect that a more free-wheeling, anarchic organization is the secret of our greater capacities of creativity, imagination, thinking outside the box and all that, and the price we pay for it is our susceptibility to obsessions, mental illnesses, delusions, and smaller problems.

  We got risky brains that are much riskier than the brains of other mammals, even more risky than the brains of chimpanzees, and this could be partly a matter of a few simple mutations in con­trol genes that release some of the innate competitive talent that is still there in the genomes of the individual neurons. But I don’t think that genetics is the level to explain this. You need culture to explain it.

  This, I speculate, is a response to our invention of culture; cul­ture creates a whole new biosphere, in effect, a whole new cultural sphere of activity where there’s opportunities that don’t exist for any other brain tissues in any other creatures, and that this explo­ration of this space of cultural possibility is what we need to do to explain how the mind works.

  Everything I just said is very speculative. I’d be thrilled if 20 percent of it was right. It’s an idea, a way of thinking about brains and minds and culture that is, to me, full of promise, but it may not pan out. I don’t worry about that, actually. I’m content to ex­plore this, and if it turns out that I’m just wrong, I’ll say, “Oh, okay. I was wrong. It was fun thinking about it.“ But I think I might be right.

  I’m not myself equipped to work on a lot of the science; other people could work on it, and they already are, in a way. The idea of selfish neurons has already been articulated by Sebastian Seung of MIT in a brilliant keynote lecture he gave at the Society for Neuroscience in San Diego a few years ago. I thought, Oh, yeah, self­ish neurons, selfish synapses. Cool. Let’s push that and see where it leads. But there are many ways of exploring this. One of the still unexplained, so far as I can tell, and amazing features of the brain is its tremendous plasticity.

  Mike Merzenich sutured a monkey’s fingers together so that it didn’t need as much cortex to represent two separate individual digits, and pretty soon the cortical regions that were representing those two digits shrank, making that part of the cortex available to use for other things. When the sutures were removed, the cortical regions soon resumed pretty much their earlier dimensions. If you blindfold yourself for eight weeks, as Alvaro Pascual-Leone does in his experiments, you find that your visual cortex starts getting adapted for Braille, for haptic perception, for touch.

  The way the brain spontaneously reorganizes itself in response to trauma of this sort, or just novel experience, is itself one of the most amazing features of the brain, and if you don’t have an architecture that can explain how that could happen and why that is, your model has a major defect. I think you really have to think in terms of indi­vidual neurons as micro-agents, and ask what’s in it for them.

  Why should these neurons be so eager to pitch in and do this other work just because they don’t have a job? Well, they’re out of work. They’re unemployed, and if you’re unemployed, you’re not getting your neuromodulators. If you’re not getting your neuromodulators, your neuromodulator receptors are going to start dis­appearing, and pretty soon you’re going to be really out of work, and then you’re going to die.

  In this regard, I think of John Holland’s work on the emergence of order. His example is New York City. You can always find a place where you can get gefilte fish, or sushi, or saddles, or just about anything under the sun you want, and you don’t have to worry about a state bureaucracy that is making sure that supplies get through. No. The market takes care of it. The individual web of entrepreneurship and selfish agency provides a host of goods and services, and is an extremely sensitive instrument that re­sponds to needs very quickly.

  Until the lights go out. Well, we’re all at the mercy of the power man. I am quite concerned that we’re becoming hyper-fragile as a civilization, and we’re becoming so dependent on technologies that are not as reliable as they should be, that have so many condi­tions that have to be met for them to work, that we may specialize ourselves into some very serious jams. But in the meantime, think­ing about the self-organizational powers of the brain as being very much like the self-organizational powers of a city is not a bad idea. It just reeks of over enthusiastic metaphor, though, and it’s worth reminding ourselves that this idea has been around since Plato.

  Plato analogizes the mind of a human being to the state. You’ve got the rulers and the guardians and the workers. This idea that a person is made of lots of little people is comically simpleminded in some ways, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t, in a sense,
true. We shouldn’t shrink from it just because it reminds us of simple-minded versions that have been long discredited. Maybe some not-so-simple minded version is the truth.

  There are a lot of cultural fleas

  My next major project will be trying to take another hard look at cultural evolution and look at the different views of it and see if I can achieve a sort of bird’s-eye view and establish what role, if any, there is for memes or something like memes, and what the other forces are that are operating. We are going to have to have a proper scientific perspective on cultural change. The old-fashioned, historical narratives are wonderful, and they’re full of gripping detail, and they’re even sometimes right, but they only cover a small proportion of the phenomena. They only cover the tip of the iceberg.

  Basically, the model that we have and have used for several thousand years is the model that culture consists of treasures, cultural treasures. Just like money, or like tools and houses, you bequeath them to your children, and you amass them, and you protect them, and because they’re valuable, you maintain them and prepare them, and then you hand them on to the next gen­eration, and some societies are rich, and some societies are poor, but it’s all goods. I think that vision is true of only the tip of the iceberg.

  Most of the regularities in culture are not treasures. It’s not all opera and science and fortifications and buildings and ships. It includes all kinds of bad habits and ugly patterns and stupid things that don’t really matter but that somehow have got a grip on a so­ciety and that are part of the ecology of the human species, in the same way that mud, dirt and grime, and fleas are part of the world that we live in. They’re not our treasures. We may give our fleas to our children, but we’re not trying to. It’s not a blessing. It’s a curse, and I think there are a lot of cultural fleas. There are lots of things that we pass on without even noticing that we’re doing it, and, of course, language is a prime case of this—very little deliberate, in­tentional language instruction goes on or has to go on.