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| Douglas R. Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach |
- Gödel, Escher, Bach
- Insight Through Isomorphism and Paradox
- A Picture of God?
- God as Genotype
- More on God as Genotype
- Hints As To the Nature of Reality
- Two Dilemmas of Consciousness
- The Incompleteness of Provability
In the last, I summed up Part I of Hofstadter's book as a discourse on "incompleteness": the inability of formal logical systems — systems by means of which "theorems" can be derived, based on axioms and rules — to encompass all knowable truths about themselves. All formal systems turn out to be cognates of number theory, when the latter is formalized rigorously. Hence, incompleteness results in there being truths concerning number theory that number theory ought conceivably be able to derive, but cannot.
So the mind is capable of knowing things — about number theory, about reality — that the brain from which the mind arises simply cannot demonstrate the truth of by operations that happen at a mechanistic level of neuron interactions. The mind, rather, attaches meanings to the symbols that it manipulates — meanings that are not, strictly speaking, justified by the lower-level, mechanistic rules of symbol manipulation.
What could this notion of the transcendence of mind over (brain) matter mean? How could it be so? Such questions are brought into focus in the second part of Hofstadter's book. Early on in Part II, the author conveys the essence of what he thinks is going on, human-brain-wise, in a pair of dialogues between the whimsical personages of Achilles, the Tortoise, the Anteater, and the Crab.
Actually, it is a single dialogue called "Prelude ... Ant Fugue," split into two unequal parts: first a short "Prelude," and then a long "... Ant Fugue." The misspelling of "ant" is intentional; read on for more on that. Between the two parts of this dialogue is interposed a chapter on how computers, those paragons of mechanistic symbol manipulation, work.
I'll discuss what Hofstadter has to say about the nature of mind, vis-à-vis brain, presently. First, though, why is this question of mind-over-brain significant from the point of view of religious inquiry?
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| Sharon Begley's Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain |
Neuroscientists were long under the impression that the human brain is pretty much set in its capacities and abilities by the time a person reaches late childhood, not to mention full adulthood. Wholesale rededication of large areas of the brain — say, to compensate for the catastrophe of going blind as a teenager or adult — were thought impossible. Now, research is indicating otherwise.
Instead of lacking any ability to "rezone" itself to establish new functionality, the brain is actually capable of amazing feats of neuronal regeneration and signal-path rededication. This remains so well into adulthood, and even at an advanced age.
One of the capacities that this new cutting-edge science is finding we have a chance to enhance, if we take advantage of our inbuilt but until now unsuspected neuroplasticity, is our intrinsic potential for compassion and empathy. This may be the principal reason that one of the individuals looming largest in Begley's book is none other than the Dalai Lama.
Begley's book is structured around a series of annual conferences, hosted by His Holiness at his home in Dharamsala, India, that have brought together some of the world's leading scientists to exchange views with experienced practitioners of the ancient wisdom of Buddhism, so that they might discuss what their worldviews have in common. And nowhere is that commonality more evident than when it comes to the cultivation of compassion.
"In Buddhism," Begley writes (pp. 184-5), the greatest wish is 'May the suffering of all sentient beings be relieved' — the very definition of compassion." Along these lines, the research of social psychologist Phillip Shaver has shown that there are many people whose childhood experience has left them with brain circuitry that disposes toward being (in Begley's description, p. 184) "insecure, closed-minded, deluded, biased, defensive, and selfish." Even such people can successfully be primed make the switch to compassion, empathy, and altruism, Shaver has learned.
Shaver's methodology for turning a human being on to compassion involves enhancing what he calls the person's "attachment security," an aspect of the individual's mental apparatus which has typically been impaired since childhood — due possibly to, among other factors, a lack of nurturing from the person's mother.
The Buddhists have a different methodology to achieve the same end, Begley says: "compassion meditation," which she calls "one of the primary forms of mental training for monks, yogis, and other practitioners" (p. 185). Whatever the methodology, it seems to me (and in this I believe I am echoing the Dalai Lama himself) that compassion for other humans, and indeed for all sentient creatures, is the final destination of human religious awareness and practice, no matter what the person's religion happens to be.
Compassion for creatures who, like us, feel is a desideratum that is not just a religious concern. It is also the goal of what the Dalai Lama calls "secular ethics." His Holiness, whose English is apparently less than perfect, says
... the key thing is the peaceful mind. Naturally and obviously, anger, hatred, jealousy, fear, these are not helpful to develop peace of mind. Love, compassion, affection — these are the foundations of peaceful mind. But then the question, how to promote that? My approach, not through Buddhist tradition, I call secular ethics. Not talking about heaven, not of nirvana or Buddhahood, but a happy life for the world. Irrespective of whether there is next life of not. Doesn't matter. That's individual business. (p. 180)
Recognizing this to be so only reinforces the importance of sentience. To be an agent of compassion toward other sentient beings, it would seem that one must oneself be sentient. One must have a mind that is itself conscious and self-aware. Then and only then does the desideratum of compassion have real meaning.
Which brings me back to my main topic, which is the way Douglas Hofstadter characterizes the conscious mind in Gödel, Escher, Bach.
The "Fugue" portion of the cleft-in-two dialogue involving Achilles, the Tortoise, the Anteater, and the Crab is the nut of Hofstadter's argument about what sentience or consciousness is all about.
The mind is to the brain-as-a-collection-of-neurons as an ant colony is to the population of ants that make it up, Hofstadter suggests. (This is why the dialogue is called "Prelude ... Ant Fugue.") In the dialogue, the Anteater claims to be able to exchange information with his favorite ant colony, fetchingly named Aunt Hillary.
It seems that he, Dr. Anteater, knows how to interpret Aunt Hillary's thoughts by reading the ant trails set up by the to'ing and fro'ing of her constituent ants. Inasmuch as his own arrival upon the scene, which communicates itself to Aunt Hillary via his scent wafting on the air, results in a decided change of trail-making behavior among the ants within the colony, any fool can see that a sort of two-way conversation is in progress there.
In an ant colony, there are multiple castes of ants whose distributions around the colony are neither uniform nor random. The various local distributions of individual castes are, the Anteater says, analogous to pieces of knowledge stored in a brain. The overall caste distribution, then, is like a "brain state."
Moment-by-moment caste distributions within an ant colony respond to things going on in the vicinity of the colony. By virtue of teams of ants banding together and moving as one through the colony, information such as the discovery and location of new food can be disseminated.
In fact, the information superhighway of an ant colony is composed not just of teams of ants, but also of teams of teams, and teams of teams of teams. on up to quite a high level of team-within-team "nesting." Hofstadter's Anteater considers the highest-level teams to represent "symbols" and the intermediate-level teams to constitute "signals." These are concepts that apply equally well to the brain.
A symbol is analogous to, in a human language, a word that is distinguished by its ability to carry a meaning. A signal, on the other hand, is like a letter that bears no intrinsic meaning. But symbols and signals are active, while words and letters, since they are external to the brain, are passive. In order for a passive word to trigger in the brain a conceptual meaning, it has to activate an active symbol housed in the brain.
Likewise, each passive letter in a word conceivably triggers an active signal path in the brain. Thus do we recognize the difference between, say, "red" and "read," or "red" and "rod." But when the brain is confronted with words and letters in an unknown language — for example, in my case, Hebrew — the appropriate signals and symbols do not, shall we say, "light up" in the brain.
Symbols and their associated meanings are the stuff of consciousness. In a conscious brain there are active symbols that "reflect the overall state of the brain itself" (p. 328). When a mind has access to such self-referential symbols, it is conscious or self-aware. "For consciousness requires a large degree of self-consciousness," observes the Anteater.
Symbol manipulation is accordingly what a mind basically does. In particular, the human mind has access to (and only to) the active symbols that compose the highest levels of thought in the brain. Aunt Hillary is no exception here: though not human, she too is a symbol manipulator. As such, she is the "agent" by virtue of whom her internal symbols can be said to be active rather than passive.
Put another way (see p. 327) Aunt Hillary is a "full system [that] is responsible for how its [own] symbols trigger each other [such that] the state of the system gets slowly transformed, or updated [over time]." If Aunt Hillary were human, it would be her mental activity — her mind — that would provide the continuity to constrain the changes taking place in what would otherwise be her potentially chaotic, ever tumultuous "brain state."
In fact, as a self-aware agent of change, Aunt Hillary is unique in her ant-colony identity. Though she happened to be composed of the same exact population of ants as one Johant Sebastiant Fermant, her predecessor ant colony who met an untimely demise after a freak thundershower, the unique organization of the constituent ants that made J.S.F. who he was was irretrievably gone. Aunt Hillary inherited the ants but not the organization. The notion is akin to how a human body might conceivably be made of the same atoms as one which lived before and is now dead ... but the soul would be unique.
In fact, it is the implications of all this concerning the soul which I will take up in the next post in this series.
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