Consciousness and Matter: Mind, Brain, and Cosmos in the Dialogue between Science and Theology

By Alexei V. Nesteruk

This volume represents a collective effort to advance research on the perennial problem of matter and consciousness, body and mind. It contains contributions from the fields of philosophy, psychology, physiology, cosmology, and physics. However, its distinctive emphasis is on the key role of theology. The modern natural sciences historically arose as an attempt to read the second book of God--that is, the book of Nature. The contributors to this volume maintain that this orientation of early modern science was correct and that our contemporary understanding of matter and its link with the psychic world can only be plausibly advanced through an appeal to theology. Attempts to resolve the problem of consciousness without theological insights yield problematic reductions of mind to matter or vice versa. The authors maintain that a Christian theological understanding of creation and of humanity provides a framework for a more fruitful way forward in our interdisciplinary attempts to engage the issue.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Release date: Mar 21, 2024
• ISBN: 9781666777017

Book preview

1

Once Again about the Brain and Semiosis

Can Neural Networks Make Their Point?

¹

Tatyana Chernigovskaya

Leaving point A, the train is on the flatland.

Headed to point B, not yet in sight.

—

Joseph Brodsky

Introduction

The science of our times is faced with existential challenges that demand engagement with philosophical discourse, but that in neuroscience occupy only a strangely peripheral area. When discussing the so-called "hard" problems, in particular the long-standing mind-body problem, it has been repeatedly set forth that such issues are differently understood within different fields of knowledge. Furthermore, there are different interpretations that range between the mind-body and psychophysiological aspects of the problem and the question as to whether the scientific method itself can address such questions (Lektorskii 2011; Dubrovsky 2011; Alexandrov and Sams 2005; Aleksandrov 2009; Kaplan 2019; Chernigovskaya 2012; 2017; 2020; 2021).

Experimental neuroscience has maintained by default that the matter of understanding consciousness and the spirit is a matter of understanding the properties of neurons and their interactions (Crick and Koch 2007). Of course, not everyone believes this is the case, but it is the view of most of the representatives of the natural sciences. At the other end of the spectrum, for example, John Searle argues that consciousness is irreducible, and this illusion is a reality that natural science cannot accept (Searle 1992). In a survey article Konstantin Anokhin takes pains to specify the main problem of the mind-brain and the hard problem of consciousness-brain and then describes what particular tasks must be performed to succeed in arriving at an answer to these problems (Anokhin 2021). This does not negate the paradoxes that the brain is in the world, and the world is in the brain (Lektorskii 2011), and that the external world is constructed from within (Zinchenko 2010). It is impossible not to agree that, within the framework of existing ideas about the work of the brain and with the help of accepted approaches, the main problems cannot be solved. In this article, as in a previous one (Chernigovskaya 2021), I propose to approach this incredibly complex task not only by developing a theory of the cognitome and all related multidisciplinary problems, but also using the archaeology of mental principles manifested in semiotic human behavior, in particular, in art.

Eternal questions still require answers from the natural sciences—from physiology and genetics—but also from anthropology and now the sphere of artificial intelligence in its various guises.

I would divide the most urgent topics into four questions:

•Are the natural sciences themselves sufficient to discover the principles and mechanisms by which the brain operates in its higher functions, and not just simple skills comparable to the capabilities of other living beings or artificial intellectual agents?

•Language, consciousness, thinking, qualia—are these unique characteristics of the person? If this can be demonstrated, how could we do so?

•How does this work in the brain and in which brains? Modules, networks and their properties, hypernetworks, connectomes, and cognitomes.

•Can this be reproduced? not only our intellect, but our inner world as well?

A Brave New World . . .

Obviously, this is followed by another question—why? Is it to understand how the brain works (and, as a final answer: for theory)? Is it to understand what is possible in the mental world at all, including the one that we don’t know of or that doesn’t yet exist? Is it to understand how we can be biologically or technically improved, to create new people who will be faster, smarter, with a huge memory, those who do everything better than we do now? Is it to make some Frankenstein or, even more ambitious, to digitize our mental and emotional world and thereby achieve immortality?

As Boris Groys writes, For a long time, man was ontologically assigned the middle position between God and animal. At the same time, it seemed more prestigious to stand closer to God and further away from the animal. But the Modern puts the human between an animal and a machine. And in this new context, it seems better to be an animal than a machine (Groys 2013, 113). Intelligent self-learning programs such as AlphaZero have transcended almost all boundaries: chess, go, shogi, even poker. There were many enthusiastic reviews of the AlphaZero chess matches with the former champion, the StockFish program. AlphaZero’s success came from its deep intuition, going through only eighty thousand positions per second (as opposed to StockFish’s seventy million), and nevertheless it won. It is believed that AlphaZero played more holistically, subordinating all moves to a single goal, making seemingly ridiculous, and even incorrect moves, if you do not look very far ahead, while forcing the opponent into what is called Zugzwang. The program used artificial intuition as opposed to rigid iterative logic (Perez 2017). Such a manner of playing is described as alien. It is not how people do it, and it is not how programs created by people play. The semantic gap between intuition and logic has been overcome, and it looks like a cognitive attack, or even a challenge to civilization, to our ideas of human intellectual capability (see Ushakov 2011). The analysis of the matches that devastated the world’s best go players amazed the experts. The victory over Lee Sedol in 2016 and over Ke Jie in 2017 showed much the same thing: people do not make such moves and such strategies never occurred to them (at some points the program may incur losses only to recoup them in following moves). When the disadvantageous moves are being made, the result is evident neither to the human player nor to the observer, so the program’s decisions sometimes seem strange; the program may sacrifice one or several stones to gain a tactical advantage—something human players usually do not do (Knight 2017).

So, we are faced with a new cognitive space. Of course, we could say that, if a human brain played go for another couple of thousand years, it might have come up with such strategies. And if it didn’t? Does it not follow that neuroscience is essentially continuing to look in the brain only for that which it already knows (an understandable, but short-sighted, aim). I give here these examples of the possibilities of artificial intelligence as I see their parallelism with the appeal to the archeology of thinking/consciousness/intuition through art.

We set out to repeat repetitions—to create those who will create worlds along with us, or even instead of us. On the surface, it looks like a student’s task: write like Mozart, Dürer, Pushkin; play with a flawless technique at unimaginable speeds (we see this vector in human art as well, until recently it was impossible to imagine such extraordinary heights of speed and technique in instrumental or choreographic arts). Of course, with some progress, programs will do these things better than people. If, of course, we reduce art to technology, and remove personality, soul, mind, interpretations, proximate conditions; i.e., the human, all too human.

Co-evolution of Language, Thinking, and the Brain

The main work of the brain is semiosis, and its study has a long biological history (Eco 2000; Hoffmeyer and Kull 2003; Kull 2014; Natochin and Chernigovskaya 2020). Discussions about the relationship between the social and the biological in man have been going on for a long time; and, I must say, with little progress, because there is actually no balanced position (see Kozintsev 2013a, 2013b; Panov 2017). Umberto Eco in his book Kant and the Platypus discusses the origins of semiosis and asks the most pressing questions: Why do we use signs? How reliable and stable are the connections between them and what they mean? What makes us express ourselves at all (What makes u stalk?) in either a philological onto-genetic sense? (Eco 2000). It is impossible not to recall profound Pierce’s discovery that such a correlation is based on attention to the object, and not to all its features, but only to those relevant to a particular situation or convention (Pierce 1980). In an interesting way, this is similar to the cognitive role of photography (Nurkova 2020). This, of course, leads to an even more general problem of the origin of language and even the need for definitions—understanding what we mean when we say language—with the whole panoply of options from the structural to the functional (Deacon 2013). In this sense the views of the biologist and the poet strikingly converge: T. Deacon remarks on the co-evolution of language and the brain and insists that language occupied the brain (Deacon 2013, 289). Joseph Brodsky in his Nobel Lecture formulates this no less starkly: The poet, I wish to repeat, is language’s means for existence—or, as my beloved Auden said, he is the one by whom it lives. . . . One who writes a poem writes it because the language prompts, or simply dictates, the next line. One who writes a poem writes it because the language prompts, or simply dictates, the next line. Beginning a poem, the poet as a rule doesn’t know the way it’s going to come out. . . . The one who writes a poem writes it above all because verse writing is an extraordinary accelerator of consciousness, of thinking, of comprehending the universe (Brodsky 2002, 764–65). And elsewhere: with language you anatomize your experience (Brodsky 2002, 724).

The idea of recreating worlds is not new. A person is his brain, and he does not only process information that enters him through the senses: he also creates worlds that have never been there before, the brain—and, with some limitations of scale, not only the human brain—is a semiotic device that generates sign systems, and this is a serious obstacle to transferring information about the brain and animal behavior on humans (Uexküll 1922; Uexküll 1970; Knyazeva 2015; Zolyan et al. 2020). Meanings are more important than algorithms, and because of the complexity of their production and decoding, they require huge energy costs. When mastering a language, a small child learns large quantities of information each day (mostly lexical semantics). For language development it is clear that meanings are more important than the syntax that allows language to become structured and, of course, is specific to humans (Mollica and Piantadosi 2019). Research in the field of language origins and evolution is directly related to researchers’ fundamental approaches. These are reduced to the opposition of structure and functions and the search for special zones in the human brain that are distinguished from those of closely related species (Deacon 2004; Pylkkänen 2019; Neubauer et al. 2020). These are, especially, human genetic mechanisms and their prerequisites (Clark and Grundstein 2000; Heide et al. 2020). We know that in our brain there are connections linking the anterior and lateral temporal divisions with the frontal lobes, forming the so-called uncinate fasciculus, a hook-shaped mass characteristic only of the human brain, although it has evolutionary prerequisites (Balezeau et al. 2020). This structure has to do with ventral language flow, which provides the processing of the semantic aspects of the language. Results form neuroscience have illustrated which characteristics of the connectome ensure the functioning of the most complex structure of the mental lexicon, allowing you to retain different layers of memory, to distinguish reality from hallucinations, and the like (Hugdahl 2002; Davtian and Chernigovskaya 2003; Kireev et al.