Rose
Let me begin, first of all, by some thanks and some apologies. The thanks are to the organizers of this magnificent tribute to Francisco Varela, and for giving me the opportunity to take part in it. The apologies are, firstly, I’m going to be doing something which I hate doing at meetings, and that is for reasons slightly outside my control. I’m acting as a parachute. I have to leave later on today, so I shall miss a great deal of the subsequent proceedings, for which—apologies. The more serious apology, however, is for what I would describe as the fairly basic nature of what I want to say. So I would like you to regard it as a sort of clearing of the ground for the presentations which are going to come later, certainly from Susan Oyama, and certainly from some of the other neuroscientists who will be speaking. I’m, as you know—some of you will know—a neuroscientist, a slightly sticky-fingered biologist, in the sense that I work with real brains rather than computer models, and therefore I suppose what I have to say will be as simple-minded as that, rather than the complexities of the models that other people will be talking about.
What I want to do by way of clearing of the ground is, first of all, to put in front of you some of the conventional assumptions of people working in the neuroscience of cognition, of consciousness, of mind, explain where I think they present problems, and then to turn in the second half of what I want to say to the approach which I think I have learnt from and I’m interpreting from the writings of Varela (whom I never met, though we have corresponded), from Susan Oyama, and from others as well. So it’s a sort of tour d’horizon for what I hope will follow.
So let me start, then, with what I would regard as the extreme claims of some of the neuroscientists in my terrain. The mind, they would argue, is in the brain; the brain is the mind. Mental processes, human agency, and human responsibility are what Patricia Churchland calls merely folk psychology. The task of neuroscience, therefore, is to eliminate such mental language—“mentalese”—in favor of the language of neural networks, neurotransmitters, genes, and the language of computers. And the model that they take is very much given by a poem which is much quoted by neuroscientists. This has come out slightly strangely in the—I don’t know what those little S’s are. They weren’t on my memory stick to start with.
Anyhow, the poem that they regard as this as their, if you like, their cri de cœur is by Emily Dickinson, in which she says:
The Brain—is wider than the Sky—
For—put them side by side—
The one the other will contain
With ease—and you—beside—
The Brain is deeper than the sea—
For—hold them—Blue to Blue—
The one the other will absorb—
As sponges—Buckets—do—
The Brain is just the weight of God—
For—Heft them—Pound for Pound—
And they will differ—if they do—
As Syllable from Sound—
And some of you will know that The Brain is Wider Than the Sky is the title of a recent book on consciousness by Gerald Edelman, by which I want to contrast the questions on the nature of mind and memory raised many centuries ago by St. Augustine. And these questions, I think, confront us still today. “How,” he asks, “does the brain and mind encompass vast regions of space and time, abstract thoughts, numbers, the idea of God, logical propositions, false arguments? And the mind”—if I may over-interpret him, he concludes—“is indeed wider than the brain.” And that is going to be the take-home message of what I have to say.
But let me turn, as I say, to the claims of the neuroscientists for the moment, and describe them, as it were, or summarize them, in sound bites. Francis Crick wrote a book a few years ago, The Astonishing Hypothesis, in which he concluded: you’re nothing but a bunch of neurons. Edelman, as I’ve said—Gerry Edelman, immunologist turned neuroscientist—entitles his book on consciousness Wider than the Sky. Patricia Churchland talks about computational brains and folk psychology. Susan Greenfield talks about consciousness as a dimmer switch—and I’ll have something to say about that in a while. And I’m sorry that my friend Jean-Pierre Changeux isn’t here, because some of you will know that, when talking about consciousness, his tendency to move towards the acetylcholine receptor is something which we’ve all known and loved in the field for many years.
So what is the reductive trick which is operating here? Firstly, they argue—and this is essentially the line taken by Crick—the obverse of consciousness is unconsciousness. Unconsciousness is being asleep. Therefore, consciousness is being awake. Awakeness is awareness. To be aware is to be attentive and perceiving. And we can study the neural correlates of these processes of awareness, of attention, and so on, and thus we can locate consciousness amongst the neurons and, as Crick put it, free will to the superior cingulate gyrus. That’s one form of a happy hunting ground.
The second is the tradition which comes out of the work of sociobiology, and more recently evolutionary psychology—the arguments of people like Cosmides and Tooby—that the mind is a Swiss army knife composed of innate modules. There are little fixed properties that the mind has got, and you are born with a small Swiss army knife in your mind, in your brain, and as you grow older the Swiss army knife simply gets bigger. But there is no development, no change, simply growth. Stephen Pinker speaks about the evolved architecture of the mind. And this concept of architecture—with its fixed concept, with its idea of a Bauplan, of a blueprint, and then, as it were, simply the construction thereof—seems to me, in my understanding, the antithesis of what I interpret Varela/Maturana and the autopoietic concept as meaning in terms of mind and brain.
To summarize the arguments of evolutionary psychology, human nature was fixed in the Pleistocene—what they call the environment of evolutionary adaptation—and it has not changed subsequently. Fixed characters include xenophobia, male rape and infanticide, the female propensity to mate with men wearing Rolex watches, males to mate with women with desirable hip–waist ratios, and so on and so on. The reference there is to a book which Hilary Rose and I edited a couple of years ago which discusses some of these issues. So what this gives you is a view of what I call the determined brain and mind. The mind is an epiphenomenal product of the brain; the product of an unrolling developmental program, to be sure, but it has been specified by natural selection, which enables it to respond to environmental contexts, a property that we all call “plasticity” in general, and “learning” in particular.
Now, by contrast with that, I would want to argue that, in my understanding, the autopoietic paradigm asserts—and I’ll explain why as we go along—firstly, that the mind is wider than the brain, and development is more than genes plus environment plus a small interaction term between genes and environment, which some of you who are biologists will recognize as the equation on which heritability estimates are based in attempting to partition out variances between genes and environment in differences between individuals. It’s this partitioning, this belief that you can dichotomize, that you can split, which seems to me to be a fundamental problem with this reductive view of understanding either the brain or the mind or development.
So how I see the autopoietic view—and this is something, I think, that I’m sure that Susan will elaborate on in her talk immediately after this—is the key, I would say, is neither genes nor environment as polar opposites, nor that other metaphor which immunologists use of instruction versus selection, but the metaphor or the understanding of development. Development is a process that engages both genes and environment in ontogeny, and that is precisely the autopoietic self-creative process by which organisms construct themselves out of the raw material which is provided by genes and by environment. And essential to this is, I think, the claim that development is an active, not a passive process. Organisms construct themselves within the constraints. Organisms exist within the constraints, the enabling and the constraining framework provided by evolution, provided by natural selection, provided above all always by context, by environment, by the framework within which they are both choosing, developing, and expressing themselves.
This leads me to a second (and I think extremely important) point, and that is—and it’s a point which I think is profoundly difficult to grasp for those of us who are reared in the tradition of a reductive Western science. And it’s one I think that those of you in this room who are more familiar with Eastern views, and particularly, I think, with the Buddhist perspective—which, I believe, as it were, expresses something rather similar to this, though I stand to be corrective—that the living world consists of processes, not of things. And living systems are, of necessity, constantly both being and becoming. And I want to unpick that concept of being and becoming very briefly, because it seems to me to be fundamental to the paradox with which developmental problems actually confront us all the time.
If you consider a newborn baby, the baby is born with a suckling reflex—that is, put it to the breast and it will suckle. Within months, it has teeth and it develops from a suckler into a chewing infant. Now, chewing is not simply a grown-up form of suckling. It involves different nerves, different muscles, different processes. It’s possible to map those quite precisely. But that’s not the point I want to make. The point I want to make is that the issue for a baby is to both be a competent suckler and to become at the same time a competent chewer. And you cannot—Richard Dawkins used once the metaphor of trying to reconstruct an aeroplane in mid-flight. You can’t do it. The extraordinary feature of living organisms is that they can actually both be and become. They’re constantly reconstructing themselves.
Another relevant point about being and becoming, and that is it’s not simply confined to the situation of development from the newborn baby to the adult. It happens all the time in all of us. The issue—which again seems to me to be profoundly paradoxical, but nonetheless central to biology—let me again demonstrate by an example. Where’s Evelyn? Oh, she’s over there. I don’t know when we last met Evelyn. It was probably a couple of years ago at that meeting in Sweden. I’m not sure, but I suspect that. Nonetheless, when you came into the room earlier on, I recognized you, you recognized me immediately. And yet, you and I know—and every biologist knows—every molecule in our body has turned over many hundreds of millions of times in the period since we last met. So the issue that we have to confront is: what provides the unity of me, of Evelyn, and of everyone else in this room? It is not a unity given by the existence of static molecules. It is unity given by process. And that process—by which the molecules are constantly turning over, but the structure, the person, remains and is themselves being transformed—so that seems to me to be a key issue of development, of which the issues of mind and brain, in a sense, become (as you’ll see in a moment) a subset, though an important one. So the relevant dichotomy in development is between specificity and plasticity.
As a—come back to my baby again—as a baby develops, so the eye is wired up through a set of staging posts to the visual cortex at the back of the brain. It’s wired up so that the baby can see binocularly fairly early on, and that binocular capacity remains throughout the whole of development. And yet, during that period of development, the retina at the back of the eye is growing at one rate, the visual cortex is growing at another rate, so are the intervening steps. So somehow, the continuity by which synapse to brain connectivity has to remain, even though individual synapses are constantly being broken and remade. So that provides specificity: the need to be invariant in a varying environment. There’s also the need to be variant in a variant environment, and that provides the fine tuning, which actually sort of enables the visual system to wire itself up to recognize what are the salient features of the environment. So, to summarize: unity and coherence are provided by process. They’re not a rarefied thing.
So, from the general concept of development to the issues about brains and mind. Firstly, as with every other aspect of the organism, brains and minds, I want to argue, construct themselves during development. They’re open systems, embedded in bodies (that’s important), and in the external world (and perhaps that’s even more important). And they deal above all in meaning, not in information. And again, I want to emphasize this because the computer language of information, I think, does not help us understand very well the richness of association of context which actually sort of ensures that we are not—with great respect to the engineers and the computer people here—we are not simply computers made out of carbon chemistry rather than silicon chemistry. The meaning is embedded in our experience, and is embedded in some way in the ways in which we transform information in particular contexts. And it’s created, therefore, by living people in interaction with their own history and culture. And that, essentially, is why minds cannot be simply in brains. They must be embedded within the context of the brain and the mind.
So, to come on from that point: mind (I would therefore want to argue following Gilbert Ryle) is a verb. It’s not a noun, it’s an action statement. It’s not a thing. Minding is what brains and bodies do. And minding is a hybrid. It’s not a thing, it’s a relationship between an individual and the physical, social, cultural, and historical world in which they are embedded. Minding depends on, therefore, that it’s not exactly either in or the same as the brain. This seems to me to be crucial. And what follows from that is that consciousness, far from being you’re nothing but a bunch of neurons or a dimmer switch, is essentially relational itself. It’s the dynamic product of present and past brain and body activity, life history, and social context—which is, parenthetically, why I regard the attempts of many of my fellow neuroscientists to provide a neuroscience of consciousness to be really missing, I think, what are the crucial features of what it is to be a conscious living organism.
Okay, so let me move from there to try to, as it were, spell out some of the implications of this in terms of minds and brains, and how we should understand them. Firstly, some numbers. 25,000 genes, 100,000 proteins, a hundred billion neurons, and 1014 synapses. The speed of development is phenomenal. From conception to birth, you’re talking about something like 30,000 synapses being built per second under every square centimeter of cortex—a phenomenal rate of development. And we are dealing here, of course, as is apparent, with a combinatorial explosion which prevents the reductive step of going from the synapses back to the genes in any simple sort of way.
And then some systems. The brain consists of a multitude of mini organs, massively interconnected. There are about thirty different modules in the visual cortex, each responsible for analyzing one feature of the environment: the color, the shape, the motion, et cetera. So the problem which neuroscience faces at the moment, and which many of my neuroscience colleagues are concerned with—and I suspect Wolf Singer will talk about when he’s here in a day or so’s time—is: how do we bind all of these together? The binding problem is central to a lot of the debates in current neuroscience.
The early assumption was: somehow there’s a homunculus. There’s some little integrating center sitting at the top of the brain, and all of these different organs report back to it, and then, as it were, the homunculus issues its instructions and comes down again. Now, that produces you, of course, an infinite receding paradox of: where is the brain in homunculus, et cetera, et cetera—beautifully, as it were, demolished most recently by Daniel Dennett, for whom I don’t have much time in other aspects, but I think this is a very clear demolition in his book Consciousness Explained. The issue is, for me, that there’s no homunculus. The brain is a self-organizing system. Its different modules are linked dynamically by coherent oscillations—that’s the point that Wolf Singer would make.
But is that enough? I don’t think it is enough, because the brain is in the body and in the world. Coherence, for example, also engages field effects—a point made by Walter Freeman. So we’re not just dealing with the binding of individual synapses. And there’s more to the brain than simple point-to-point connection between neurotransmitters. The sort of things that modelers are always very happy with; they make, as it were, artificial neural networks as if the brain works simply by a synaptic network. It does not. There are neuro-modulators, growth factors, many other features.
And the brain, as I’ve said, is in the body—a point made by Tony Demasio, who can’t be here—and that involves therefore interactions with hormones, with immune systems, with all of those other processes which ensure that what goes on in providing meaning to our experience of the world is not simply embodied within the 1010 neurons in the cortex. But, most importantly, the body is in the world. And it’s that relationship between the body and the world which I think is very important. There’s a book by Merlin Donald called So Rare a Mind, which I think expresses this very nicely. But Hilary Rose has been telling me for many years that, as it were, this is a point that most sociologists would have been making and taking for granted anyhow. It’s taken neuroscientists a little time to come to terms with it.
So let me offer you a thought experiment of: how do we get between molecules, cells, and systems, not to mention the dynamics? Let’s imagine a cerebroscope: an instrument which can measure the properties of all of the synapses and all the neurotransmitters in my brain at any given moment. Okay. So I’m thinking in terms of: how do I escape a moving bus? Okay, the bus is coming towards me. There are all sorts of processes going on in my brain at the same time: there’s a visual cortex active; the auditory cortex is the sound; infra-temporal cortex dealing with memory; Broca’s area—I’ve got to see that it’s a bus—the hippocampus, which is giving me some sort of spatial location; the amygdala, because I’ve have an emotional fear in relationship to the bus; adrenaline and blood flow, because I have to escape from it; the cerebellum and the motor cortex, because I’ve therefore got to sort of move my arms and legs in order to get out of the way. This provides the coordinate movement to escape.
Okay. Now, supposing in my cerebroscope it would detect the activity of every neuron in the brain millisecond by millisecond. We can practically do that with some of the imaging techniques that we have at the moment, at least at a systems level. So if I did that, it would interpret my brain activity when that bus comes as me jumping out of the way of the moving bus. Yeah? Or would it? And that’s the question that I really want to ask: is it enough to actually sort of know the state (in the Laplacian sense) of all the neurons, all the synapses in my brain? So I say: no, it wouldn’t, because the current state of those synapses is un-interpretable unless we understood history. That is, we have to understand the history of those synapses from the moment of conception of their formation to the present moment.
So let’s have a more dynamic cerebroscope, which doesn’t only read the present state of my mind and the synapses, but it’s plotted the millisecond by millisecond from their formation. So can I now read off my mind from my brain? Most neuroscientists would probably say yes. We were debating this in a meeting in Strasbourg a month or so ago, but I still think the answer is no. That is, the experience may impose a unique pattern on my synapses, but can that pattern, in turn, be read as unique to the experience? And this is, I think, a non-reciprocal relationship.
That is: given the eye of God to read my cerebroscope, I don’t think the eye of God would be able to interpret what they read there. And that non-translational relationship seems to me to be a crucial difference between the nature of understanding the processes and the nature of reading meaning off the processes that we actually measure. And it is there, I think, that we need a better theory, a better understanding, and it is there, I think, that we can begin to see, I hope, in the glimmer of the theoretical framework which autopoiesis developmental systems theory gives us, how we might better actually sort of understand and approach these problems.
So let me finish by turning to what I call the great free will dilemma: the paradox which is imposed upon a Western reductive science by its insistence of the determinisms provided by the genes. And there are some quotes there which speak for themselves. Francis Collins, the organizer of the Human Genome Program in the US, says: “Humans are composed of genes, environment, plus free will.” I mean, there’s a cop-out, if ever there was one. Richard Dawkins: “Only we have the power to rebel against the tyranny of our selfish replicators.” The whole of Dawkins’ argument is, of course, that we are the passive vehicles of these replicators. So what is it about “we” which is separate from the replicators, which gives us this power to rebel against them? Clearly, the power to rebel under that circumstance must be in the genes as well. And the slightly more demotic viewer, Stephen Pinker: “If my genes don’t like it, they can go jump in the lake.”
I think we’ve got a real paradox here, and let me hand-wave a solution to you, and that is that choice and freedom occur at the interface of many determinants, so far as we humans are concerned. The determinants are evolutionary, they’re developmental, they’re historical, and they’re social—social issues are including class, ethnicity, gender, these great terrains of divide within our societies. And freedom, then, I want to say, lies at the intersection of these determinants. That is, we are free to make our own futures, though in circumstances not of our own choosing.
And that leads me finally to my bullet-point summaries of what the autopoietic ideas developed by Maturana and Varela have left me with in terms of trying to understand what it is to be a biological living organism, not a living organism encapsulated even in two or three dimensions in computers. Firstly, being and becoming: I’ve talked about that already, this paradox of development, this paradox of being one thing and becoming another. Stability comes through dynamics. When I was talking about, as it were, the rate at which molecules were turning over in our body, what provides a living organism with its continuity is precisely that it is a dynamic system, it’s not a static system. One of the—I hate to say this in France and in the shadow of the great Claude Bernard, but he didn’t actually use the word “homeostasis,” although that was what was given to him afterwards. Stasis in living systems is death. What we have to understand to provide stability over time is dynamics, which is why I and others have used the term homeodynamics or homeorhesis to try to describe this principle.
Organism and environment interpenetrate. That is: the boundaries between an individual—even an amoeba, a single cell—and its environment are always fluid and are always open. And organisms, furthermore, are not simply the passive recipients of this environment. Organisms actively choose their environment. And that act of choice in development in an organism—and you can exemplify this not just with humans, but, as it were, sort of, in a sense, with even single-cell organisms, which move from one environment to another, transform that environment in doing so, then, as it were, sort of move away from it again—is a fundamental nature of being alive, a living organism, rather than a dead bit of computer. Organism and environment interpenetrate. The past is the key to the present. We cannot understand ourselves without historically recognizing what constrains us in terms of evolution, development, life history, and so on.
And finally, I think, in this context: one world, many ways of knowing. What worries me about—as a biologist, as a materialist, I’m committed to the view that we live in a unitary material universe: there ain’t anything else operating there. But we live in a world of epistemological diversity. And one of my own concerns about the reductive spirit within which a lot of biology is operating at the moment, is to insist on the elimination of those other ways of knowing. I think that certain—not all, but certain other ways of knowing. at any rate; this isn’t, as it were, sort of a carte blanche for everything—but we have to recognize that there are diverse ways of knowing and understanding the world. We have to understand the relationships between them, but we cannot pack them all down into a set of principles of mathematics, physics, or biology.
So, in the last analysis, what ways we have of understanding the world and interpreting the phenomena that confront us depend on the answers that we want. And, as I said—and this, I think, is a key concept to me, at any rate—that life constructs its own future. Now, I have to confess that I do not know how far I have imposed my own interpretations on the idea of autopoiesis in the account that I’ve just given you, and how far Francisco Varela would himself have been happy or unhappy with this interpretation. But I present it to you as an indication of someone who has been influenced by those thoughts, who welcomes the opportunity to pay a tribute to one of the progenitors of those thoughts, at least in the way that I have developed them. Thank you very much.