Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

Instead, it is two forms of reductionism that, in the present climate, attract most support. For people like Daniel Dennett, a biologically inclined philosopher from Tufts University near Boston in Massachusetts, human consciousness and identity arise from the narrative of our lives, and this can be related to specific brain states. For example, there is growing evidence that the ability to ‘apply intentional predicates to other people is a human universal’ and is associated with a specific area of the brain (the orbitofrontal cortex), an ability which in certain states of autism is defective. There is also evidence that the blood supply to the orbitofrontal cortex increases when people ‘process’ intentional verbs as opposed to non-intentional ones and that damage to this area of the brain can lead to a failure to introspect. Other experiments have shown that activity in the area of the brain known as the amygdala is associated with the experience of fear, that the decisions of individual monkeys in certain games could be predicted by the firing patterns of individual neurons in the orbitofrontal-striatal circuits of the brain, that neurotransmitters known as propranolol and serotonin affect decision-making, and that the ventral putamen within the striatum is activated when people experience pleasure.²⁴ Suggestive as this is, it is also the case that the micro-anatomy of the brain varies quite considerably from individual to individual, and that a particular phenomenal experience is represented at several different points in the brain, which clearly require integration. Any ‘deep’ patterns relating experience to brain activity have yet to be discovered, and seem to be a long way off, though this is still the most likely way forward.

A related approach – and this is perhaps to be expected, given other developments in recent years – is to look at the brain and consciousness in a Darwinian light. In what sense is consciousness adaptive? This approach has produced two views – one, that the brain was in effect ‘jerry built’ in evolution to accomplish very many and very different tasks. On this account, the brain is at base three organs, a reptilian core (the seat of our basic drives), a palaeomammalian layer, which produces such things as affection for offspring, and a neomammalian brain, the seat of reasoning, language and other ‘higher functions’.²⁵ The second approach is to argue that throughout evolution (and throughout our bodies) there have been emergent properties: for example, there is always a biochemical explanation underlying a physiological or medical phenomenon – sodium/ potassium flux across a membrane can also be described as ‘nerve action potential’.²⁶ In this sense, then, consciousness is nothing new in principle even if, for now, we don’t fully understand it.

Studies of nerve action throughout the animal kingdom have also shown that nerves work by either ‘firing’ or not firing; intensity is represented by the rate of firing – the more intense the stimulation the faster the turning on and off of any particular nerve. This is of course very similar to the way computers work, in ‘bits’ of information, where everything is represented by a configuration of either 0s or 1s. The arrival of the concept of parallel processing in computing led Daniel Dennett to consider whether an analogous procedure might happen in the brain between different evolutionary levels, giving rise to consciousness. Again, though tantalising, such reasoning has not gone much further than preliminary exploration. At the moment, no one seems able to think of the next step.

So, despite all the research into consciousness in recent years, and despite the probability that the ‘hard’ sciences still offer the most likely way forward, the self remains as elusive as ever. Science has proved an enormous success in regard to the world ‘out there’ but has so far failed in the one area that arguably interests us the most – ourselves. Despite the general view that the self arises in some way from brain activity – from the action of electrons and the elements, if you will – it is hard to escape the conclusion that, after all these years, we still don’t know even how to talk about consciousness, about the self.