Translated by Keti Mskhiladze
According to the well-founded suggestion of Colombian neuroscientist Rodolfo Llinás, the brain in living organisms emerged and evolved to govern their autonomous movement. But what is movement? Movement is a change in position of a body in a space. A suspiciously simple and intuitive answer, is it not? It isn’t difficult to imagine (and the reader may even have had an experience such as this) that after waking up from a state of inebriation or deep sleep, it can take a person several seconds to discover that, besides a somewhat woolly mind, she or he also has a body. A slight, even involuntary, movement is usually needed to make this discovery.
According to this impromptu experiment, a movement is a division of space into two parts. More precisely, movement involves splitting a space so that part of it becomes a body in a certain place, while another part becomes the surrounding space within which the body can change its place. Obviously and logically, only after such a division has been made can we speak about a body changing its place in a space. Bearing this in mind, the brain’s basic evolutionary function must be the separation of space between the body and the space around it. In other words, the initial—or, more precisely, the innate—function of the brain is to separate, and to connect, the two spaces, i.e. two worlds—the personal and the alien, internal and external—so as to allow controllable autonomous movements, i.e. a change of position of a body in space in order to meet the requirements of survival.
I think that the skin that envelops the body and represents a borderline between the two spaces is an elementary, nascent form of consciousness and, if I may say so, the bodily predecessor of consciousness. Consequently, the brain function that preserves the skin as a borderline between two spaces, two worlds, whole and intact could be the basis of a particular and still unidentified mechanism in the brain whose existence is decisive for the emergence and evolution of consciousness. More precisely, just as thinking is an internalized movement (R. Llinás), consciousness is an internalized skin. In other words, consciousness is an internal skin. Just to give you a hint, let me recall that the human eye—this amazingly complex organ of vision—began its gradual evolution from a photosensitive area of skin, with tissues having a primitive capacity to distinguish between light and darkness. In the fifth chapter of his book I of the Vortex: From neurons to Self, Llinás describes the evolution of the eye and brain in a fairly clear manner.
The American psychologist and neuroscientist Michael Graziano reached a series of noteworthy conclusions based upon experimental research concerning the mechanisms of perceiving and protecting spaces near the body. No less interesting is his “attention schema theory” to explain the consciousness. According to this theory, which Graziano discusses in his book Consciousness and the Social Brain and some other works, consciousness is a simplified scheme, a caricature, which the brain constructs of its own attention, which makes it easy for the brain to control the attention function and predict the actions of a subject of its attention.
While noteworthy, I believe that this theory may provide a possible explanation of only one aspect of consciousness and point to only one important mechanism of consciousness. Personally, I consider as indisputable Graziano’s opinion, which suggests that the entire familiar and attainable external world (and, with it, the rich and diverse internal world, including our “I”s) is nothing else but the entirety of the representations, models and schemes which the brain has constructed and which have withstood and continue to withstand practical testing. This general position, which is known as Representationalism, has many adepts—including the German philosopher Thomas Matzinger and the Finnish neuroscientist and philosopher of the mind Antti Revonsuo, to name but a few. However, apart from a conceptual framework, the only thing that the theories of the Representationalists have in common is the failure to solve the riddle of the emergence of consciousness from the brain’s biology—a riddle which many suppose to be the greatest in modern science.
I also see the issue of consciousness in my own way. To put it in a concise and schematic manner, I believe that consciousness must have originated in the “information war” that involved the very first, simplest brains. The latter had no other option but to constantly receive a myriad of information from both the external and internal worlds, to process it to the best of their capabilities and to shape from this material a primitive but sufficiently “realistic,” i.e. practically useful, model of the external world and of their own bodies within it. It was precisely this model that would largely determine which of them would cope with the objectives necessary to life and reproduction, and which of them would fail to do so. Moreover, every primordial brain had to filter out less important or already outdated information in order to keep pace with our unpredictable, ruthless world, and, at the same time, in order not to “burn out” and drown in a deadly chaos of excess information. It is therefore likely that only those brains that were capable of equipping themselves with an effective mechanism for deleting information were able to survive and perpetuate themselves through their descendants.
The brain thus found itself caught between Scylla and Charybdis from the very beginning. On one side, a flood of information rushed in from the external world, and on the other stood a mechanism for deleting information. In dealing with this information, the brain had to always stay alert in order to separate important information from secondary considerations, and, at the same time, to keep pace with the ruthless pace of life. Simultaneously, the same brain had to set aside relatively useless and outdated information for deletion. The brain, therefore, had to construct two models: the first of these was to be the supplier of information, corresponding to the external world and useful in practice. The second model, which the brain had to construct—or, more precisely, to invent—had to be able to handle the blind, information-deleting mechanism that did not exist in the external world but instead lay in ambush inside the brain, hungry for its prey.
I think that this less restricted, creative modeling of a deleting mechanism enabled the brain to create and develop the Subject that is somewhat “remote” from, independent of, and opposed to the external world—or, rather, a model of the Subject that constantly and tirelessly takes away information.
As is well known, while processing sensory input, the brain uses top-down “predictions” to filter incoming information and to only process that information which is different from the predicted one, i.e. is new and unexpected. One can learn more about this from The Predictive Mind, a book by the Australian philosopher Jakob Hohwy, and from the works cited in the book’s bibliography. The discovery of this mechanism of prediction in the arsenal of the brain springs from Helmholtz’s hypothesis, and seems to explain important aspects of brain functioning quite convincingly. I think that the same economic methods of modeling and prediction must have been used by the brain not only in the case of the information-supplying external world but also towards the information-deleting mechanism in order to thoroughly select excess information for deletion. I think it must have also been here that memory developed as a mechanism for making and keeping faint copies of relatively and supposedly useful fragments of information that was set aside for deletion.
The main revolutionary benefit, however, which the brain must have gained from creating models of giver and taker, caterer and cleaner, supplier and eraser of information, of “light” and “shadow”—i.e. models corresponding to objective and subjective poles—would be that by connecting them with each other as two inseparable poles, the brain would be given an opportunity to… step aside and from there control an elusively direct interaction of these two models. This interaction is life, however. To safely find its ways between objective and subjective poles, between Scylla and Charybdis in both directions, the brain, guided by the firm hand of evolution, must have developed and improved, through generations, a common economic principle of control: prediction.
I would laugh if something new and interesting concerning the greatest problem of contemporary science will unexpectedly be written in Georgian.
