Your Amazing Monkey Brain

In the first post in my series exploring the hard materialists' worldview, I showed that consciousness is a side-effect, and free will an illusion, because the mind is simply what the brain does. That point is more helpful in dispelling the preconceived, wrong notions people have about the human condition, but doesn't do much to show what the true nature of humans is; it merely raises the next question, namely, "If the answer to the question 'what are we?' is merely 'our brains' then just what are our brains?"

Suppose you see two guys, Chuck and Billy-Bob, arguing out in the back of a Jack-in-the-Box parking lot. You see Chuck shout, "Fuck you, asshole!" at Billy-Bob, and Billy-Bob promptly punches Chuck in the face, spraying a jet of blood and ranch sauce onto the pavement. Being the scientific rationalist you are, you note the downward parabolic arc the hemo-condiment mixture follows through the air as it exits Chuck's mouth, which has suddenly been thrust backward as the force of Billy-Bob's fist is kinetically transferred to Chuck's face. If somebody were to then come by and ask why there was a pinkish puddle of fluids on the ground, you might say that that Billy-Bob punched Chuck, causing him to spit out blood and ranch on the ground: simple Newtonian mechanics. But tracing the events back further, would you say that Chuck called Billy-Bob an asshole, causing Billy-Bob to punch him?

Normally, we wouldn't use such mechanical language. We'd say something like "Chuck called Billy-Bob an asshole, which made him mad, so he decided to punch Chuck." Or if we were feeling a little more sympathetic, we might say that Billy-Bob "lost control and punched Chuck" or "He let his anger get the best of him and he punched Chuck." (Funny the more sympathetic phrasing implies less free will on Billy-Bob's part) But we know that the anger Billy-Bob's feeling is just a side effect of the inner workings of his brain, and before he even "decides" to punch Chuck, action potentials have already traveled down his arm to prepare the attack. Somehow the auditory stimulus provided by Chuck's vocal chords has set in motion a series of physical processes whose end result is a tightly-clinched fist moving at high-velocity in the direction of Chuck's face. How does this happen? It seems a bizarre and very idiosyncratic reaction. Usually shouting "Fuck you, asshole!" at rocks or walls doesn't end in black eyes. In fact you won't even get a similar reaction if you do it at another human who doesn't understand English. What's going on here?

Now, the scientific worldview holds that, in principle, you could deconstruct this entire event and explain it in simple cause-and-effect terms of chemical reactions, or even atomic and subatomic processes. We don't do this for a couple reasons. One: there's simply far too much data; no human, and currently no computer could possibly take in all the information regarding the current position and velocity of all the particles in the Chuck/Billy Bob/Jack-in-the-Box system, much less calculate their future path through space and time with any precision. But more importantly, we don't do this because it's not very useful. Just like the brain, you can reduce the heart down to its constituent cells, chemicals, and molecules too if you want to. But doing this can make you lose sight of what the heart does: it pumps blood. When a physician considers a diagnosis of coronary heart disease, he is thinking usually thinking more in terms of "heart as pump" than "heart as aggregation of several billion cardiac cells."

What does the heart do? Pump blood. What does the brain do? Identify and respond to patterns.

Even single-celled organisms often have intracellular nervous systems of a sort that can recognize, say, light, and respond by directing the organism to move in that direction. As organisms evolved over the course of billions of years, constantly competing for the scarce resources of the earth, more complex organisms became more capable of recognizing more subtle details about the natural environment that were correlated with the existence of exploitable resources or avoidable dangers, enabling them to more efficiently sustain themselves and procreate. Thus, all animals have one or more sensory systems that respond positively to the sight, sound, or smell of food, for example.

Adding a little more sophistication to the system though and you start getting the basics of communication and abstract reasoning. Insects, for example, will leave the colony, searching more or less randomly until they stumble upon food, but when they return to the colony they will perform a little dance that varies depending upon the direction they came from and amount of food they recovered. The rest of the colony will witness this dance and respond by sending an appropriately sized team off in the appropriate direction. Insects have no intelligence in the human sense of the word and have nothing like the subjective experience of contemplation and emotion that we know, but their brains are sophisticated enough to have evolved a "program" that not only directs them to the smell of food, but directs them to perform a certain sequence of actions upon discovering food, and directs them to respond to seeing others perform that same sequence of actions in a way that leads them to more food.

Dogs have even more capable brains still. They will start salivating if you throw a big juicy steak in front of them. That much is simple mechanistic stimulus-response. But as Pavlov showed, they are also capable of recognizing situations that are often associated with big juicy steaks and will start salivating in anticipation if they encounter such a situation. It can be something as simple as a flashing light or a ringing bell (simple stimulus-response, though more removed and "abstract" from the end-goal) to something as subtle as a particular 4 note musical chord (as opposed to every other possible arrangement of 4 such notes) or a wheel spinning clockwise (as opposed to counter-clockwise). This demonstrates a capacity to recognize relatively nuanced arrangements of matter and motion in spacetime and requires a very high degree of computational power, the kind that is able to compute self-containing models of reality that give rise to subjective awareness. Dogs are not quite as conscious as us humans, but they almost certainly feel something going on inside. Though we might say the note sequence "A, G, C, F" causes Fido to salivate and the sequence "B, C, F, G" does not, if Fido could talk he'd probably say something like he gets excited when he hears the former, and frustrated when he hears the latter.

Popular depictions of the evolution of man sometimes convey a sense that we are the climax of a long and gradual process leading to ever greater and greater intelligence. This is not quite right. Before primates, animal intelligence was basically limited to responding to the natural environment: finding food and fleeing from predators. No matter how long you let that process run, it was never going to result in culture and technology. With the evolution of primates a few tens of millions of years ago, though, came a group of animals with an interesting set of anatomical features to work with: social creatures with relatively large brains to facilitate rudimentary communication (common among mammals), a long development cycle and life-span, upright posture and strong arms good for adapting to any terrain, and opposable thumbs capable of grabbing objects. These features allowed for - after the requisite millions of years of evolution - a paradigm shift in the applicability of intelligence. No longer was brain power limited to responding to nature, it could be used to manipulate nature through the creation and use of tools. Gradually the apes' brains expanded to greater model not just the world as it is, but as it could be, and what was necessary to get there. This came through the evolution of the prefrontal cortex of the brain and was an unprecedented leap in the generalization of computing power.

The capacity to imagine and plan things greatly enabled primate species to find new resources, avoid environmental hazards, expand into new territory and adapt to it, carving out a comfortable niche spanning a large portion of the globe. But the apes' strength is also its weakness: it so happens that high-powered brains don't come fully formulated out of the womb; they require time to learn. This makes primate babies especially vulnerable and means such species require a tremendous amount of cooperation in order to survive. In fact, the smarter the species is, the more help in needs. Humans might be the smartest animal to ever walk the earth, but leave one alone and naked in the middle of the wild and its just somebody else's meal.

As the brains of what would become the great apes (including eventually humans) evolved, they outsmarted their way to the top of the food chain. But as collaboration and communication became more and more sophisticated, a pandora's box opened that provided the final push to humankind's unparalleled ascent to general intelligence. As anybody who's ever worked on a group project knows, cooperation is great and can get things done a lot better than individually, but even better still if you can shirk your duties and reap all the benefits of the group without adding anything yourself... unless of course everybody takes up that attitude.

This is the sort of paradox the human brain was built for. We're all collectively better off if we join forces in providing for the tribe, but we're each individually better off if we get everybody else to do it for us. How do we resolve this conflict? This goes beyond the scope of processing sensory input, beyond manipulating simple objects to obtain immediate reward, this requires the computation of multi-dimensional game theoretic formula involving matrix algebra and Bayesian statistics. And THAT is what the human brain does, that is what you are doing whenever you feel angry, remorseful, spiteful, jealous, depressed, anxious, mournful, indignant, or in love.

So by what computational logic did Billy-Bob's brain program punch-throwing as the response to the particular input provided by Chuck? In the next post in this series I will elaborate upon how our emotions and other cognitive states are the epiphenomenal result of our brains' computing the genetically efficient behavioral response to the sort of situations we regularly faced in the particular ecological niche homo sapiens evolved in.