I Am a Strange Loop

It’s also worth noting that Searle’s image of the “single beer can as thirst-experiencer” is but a distorted replay of a long-discredited idea in neurology — that of the “grandmother cell”. This is the idea that your visual recognition of your grandmother would take place if and only if one special cell in your brain were activated, that cell constituting your brain’s physical representation of your grandmother. What significant difference is there between a grandmother cell and a thirst can? None at all. And yet, because John Searle has a gift for catchy imagery, his specious ideas have, over the years, had a great deal of impact on many professional colleagues, graduate students, and lay people.

It’s not my aim here to attack Searle in detail (that would take a whole dreary chapter), but to point out how widespread is the tacit assumption that the level of the most primordial physical components of a brain must also be the level at which the brain’s most complex and elusive mental properties reside. Just as many aspects of a mineral (its density, its color, its magnetism or lack thereof, its optical reflectivity, its thermal and electrical conductivity, its elasticity, its heat capacity, how fast sound spreads through it, and on and on) are properties that come from how its billions of atomic constituents interact and form high-level patterns, so mental properties of the brain reside not on the level of a single tiny constituent but on the level of vast abstract patterns involving those constituents.

Dealing with brains as multi-level systems is essential if we are to make even the slightest progress in analyzing elusive mental phenomena such as perception, concepts, thinking, consciousness, “I”, free will, and so forth. Trying to localize a concept or a sensation or a memory (etc.) down to a single neuron makes no sense at all. Even localization to a higher level of structure, such as a column in the cerebral cortex (these are small structures containing on the order of forty neurons, and they exhibit a more complex collective behavior than single neurons do), makes no sense when it comes to aspects of thinking like analogy-making or the spontaneous bubbling-up of episodes from long ago.

Levels and Forces in the Brain

I once saw a book whose title was “Molecular Gods: How Molecules Determine Our Behavior”. Although I didn’t buy it, its title stimulated many thoughts in my brain. (What is a thought in a brain? Is a thought really inside a brain? Is a thought made of molecules?) Indeed, the very fact that I soon placed the book back up on the shelf is a perfect example of the kinds of thoughts that its title triggered in my brain. What exactly determined my behavior that day (e.g., my interest in the book, my pondering about its title, my decision not to buy it)? Was it some molecules inside my brain that made me reshelve it? Or was it some ideas in my brain? What is the proper way to talk about what was going on in my head as I first flipped through that book and then put it back?

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.