I Am a Strange Loop - Douglas R. Hofstadter [25]
At the time, I was reading books by many different writers on the brain, and in one of them I came across a chapter by the neurologist Roger Sperry, which not only was written with a special zest but also expressed a point of view that resonated strongly with my own intuitions. I would like to quote here a short passage from Sperry’s essay “Mind, Brain, and Humanist Values”, which I find particularly provocative.
In my own hypothetical brain model, conscious awareness does get representation as a very real causal agent and rates an important place in the causal sequence and chain of control in brain events, in which it appears as an active, operational force….
To put it very simply, it comes down to the issue of who pushes whom around in the population of causal forces that occupy the cranium. It is a matter, in other words, of straightening out the peck-order hierarchy among intracranial control agents. There exists within the cranium a whole world of diverse causal forces; what is more, there are forces within forces within forces, as in no other cubic half-foot of universe that we know….
To make a long story short, if one keeps climbing upward in the chain of command within the brain, one finds at the very top those over-all organizational forces and dynamic properties of the large patterns of cerebral excitation that are correlated with mental states or psychic activity…. Near the apex of this command system in the brain…. we find ideas.
Man over the chimpanzee has ideas and ideals. In the brain model proposed here, the causal potency of an idea, or an ideal, becomes just as real as that of a molecule, a cell, or a nerve impulse. Ideas cause ideas and help evolve new ideas. They interact with each other and with other mental forces in the same brain, in neighboring brains, and, thanks to global communication, in far distant, foreign brains. And they also interact with the external surroundings to produce in toto a burstwise advance in evolution that is far beyond anything to hit the evolutionary scene yet, including the emergence of the living cell.
Who Shoves Whom Around Inside the Cranium?
Yes, reader, I ask you: Who shoves whom around in the tangled megaganglion that is your brain, and who shoves whom around in “this teetering bulb of dread and dream” that is mine? (The marvelously evocative phrase in quotes, serving also as this chapter’s title, is taken from “The Floor” by American poet Russell Edson.)
Sperry’s pecking-order query puts its finger on what we need to know about ourselves — or, more pointedly, about our selves. What was really going on in that fine brain on that fine day when, allegedly, something calling itself “I” did something called “deciding”, after which a jointed appendage moved in a fluid fashion and a book found itself back where it had been just a few seconds before? Was there truly something referable-to as “I” that was “shoving around” various physical brain structures, resulting in the sending of certain carefully coordinated messages through nerve fibers and the consequent moving of shoulder, elbow, wrist, and fingers in a certain complex pattern that left the book upright in its original spot — or, contrariwise, were there merely myriads of microscopic physical processes (quantum-mechanical collisions involving electrons, photons, gluons, quarks, and so forth) taking place in that localized region of the spatiotemporal continuum that poet Edson dubbed a “teetering bulb”?
Do dreads and dreams, hopes and griefs, ideas and beliefs, interests and doubts, infatuations and envies, memories and ambitions, bouts of nostalgia and floods of empathy, flashes of guilt and sparks of genius, play any role in