I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious. – Einstein
On a daily basis I am confronted by all manner of paradox, especially those that underlie the form and function of the universe. The best that most of us can do is make a priori assumptions that work well with our current conceptions of being and build up from there. The problem with this methodology is as old as humanity: once one runs up against another human with an equally presumptuous, yet equally valid conception, tension arises.
In an effort to circumvent this intractable issue, I began studying brain function to see what mysteries the neurosciences could unravel. My reason for doing this was easy to follow: a human can posit a great number of things based on subjective experience, if I could find a pursuit that could inject some semblance of objectivity into this experience then I would bypass the personal construction of said experience.
When one peruses the florid machinations of history’s most advanced and influential philosophers, one cannot help but notice the internal consistency between even the most wildly divergent constructions. All schools of thought follow very basic, very human laws of reasoning. Moreover, philosophies always have a taint of the eras where they came into being. If these brilliant minds were illustrating the universe in toto and coming up with accurate conceptions of it, then why were they tinted by the cultures and current events of the times?
What I kept seeing were humans — very brilliant humans — being human. Each conception was an exercise in the ingenuity of a biological machine, not the precision of an unbiased mechanical one. Human beings were not cameras idly capturing the essence of concrete reality, but a node, an information processor, processing the elements of a stream of data that would emerge as one’s reality.
The differences are deceptively subtle and rather trivial in everyday conceptions of “reality”. There are a great many crafty minds that can and will disagree with this presentation of things “as they are” but therein lies the beauty of the human at work.
I wanted to understand the human at work then see how that commented on what could be considered reality. Instead of casting my lot on processes that theoretically exist outside of humanity, I have placed my bets on studying the functional units that must process all information, since any bit of data that can be known must be integrated and translated into something a human can know.
A quick illustration is this: lets say Computer A has inputs that can process all Information A units in a system comprised of Information A, Information B, and Information C units. To Computer A, Information A and Information B units do not exist; it has no means of detecting their existence!
Even if that information could infer that other types of Information are out there, say through some mathematical formulation, it must develop the inputs before it can deal with that information.
The reason I am bringing all of this up is to make a point about positing about “reality”. It is quite accepted that the universe possesses a great deal of information that we have no inputs for and thus all we are ever doing is describing those elements we do have access to. It is for this reason, that I prefer to say that we all deal in representations of reality, rather than saying that we are privy to reality proper.
A problem we face as a society is that many of us incorrectly figure that we are arbiters of a true reality and thus the conceptions that are the form and function of our mental lives possess an air of righteousness. We mistake our emotions, percepts, and cognitions as exemplars of truth and fashion ideology based on the “correctness” of it all.
However, there is nothing intrinsically correct (or incorrect) about anything. We don’t have access to enough information and the information we do have access to is allowed to pivot along many degrees of freedom. If there were rigid ways of looking at things, there would be no room for interpretation.
What I am saying is that instead of seeing philosophical constructions as right or true, I see them as exemplars of human ingenuity. So, how then can I study human conceptions of reality? By studying the structures which permit this seemingly infinite capacity.
Brain function.
Research suggests that brain function is mediated by genetics and experience. Brain function mediates thought content and the results of those thoughts become behavior. Thus, the state of the brain, the interaction between its great number of networks and modules, gives rise to the thoughts that we all cherish so dearly. There is nothing intrinsically true about something so personal to each organism. We have no special access to realms sacrosanct. We are the products of miraculous biological processes.
Now, I am not relegating humans to soulless automata, I am saying that while you may revel in the content of your thoughts, your thoughts are only partially controlled by you. You may feel a strong pull towards libertarianism or Buddhism, but the feelings that arise in those schools of thought have more to do with your biological and social construction than with any direct access to rightness. If you had a troubled childhood, those frameworks which stress inclusion (or exclusion depending on the additional content of your mental life) will appeal to you strongly.
The sum total of your genetic proclivities and your experiential knowledge commixed in extraordinarily complex ways will give rise to your conception of reality. While there are those that lend credence (or believe vehemently in) other means of informational attainment (extrasensory experience, OBE, past lives, communication with God), they too, can be said to call on certain brain functions which permit belief. Belief, after all, is all some require in order to actually experience something. Magicians, confidence artists, and sociopaths know and exploit these biases with considerable adroitness.
So, from the position of neuropsychology (and other neurosciences), studying brain function rather than studying thought content is more efficacious in understanding humans. While we may generate complex frameworks about the universe at large, we cannot know things we cannot know. Hopefully I am not inadvertently creating a conceptual Charybdis, but the internal structure of this argument remains ostensibly true.
The purview that brain function permits is not one of “how things are” or even “how things should be” because these two concepts are only casually linked to the status of being human. We don’t know “how things are” except for the universe’s radical indifference and we don’t know “how things should be” because each of our ideas about such are subjectively constructed by our brains. Thus, what brain function allows for is understanding how each of us constructs our views of life so that we can teach and be more tolerant of one another.
Consciousness and unconsciousness are another minefield when talking in public. I have commingled these liberally in this post on purpose. To see the unconscious as the “machine behind the scenes” is not really a viable illustration. To talk about willful or consciously willed behaviors differing from unconscious drives, is also deeply flawed. We are organisms comprised of a great many structures; these are two of them.
The goal is survival, not righteousness. Consciousness conferred on us a heightened ability to recognize novel stimuli (if one chooses to follow the wealth of scientific research on the topic).
I do not share Einstein’s cognitive abilities, but I share his deep fascination with everything. I, too, am passionately curious.
In conclusion, I cannot make great sweeping remarks about the nature of ontology, what is, but I can make cursory statements about what can be known and how we can trade that knowledge. By taking us as information processors with unique variations on our processing styles, we can hopefully generate more robust dialogue. This enriched dialogue sets a different milieu for our children and children’s children.
Our brain functions are our information processing, our mental life is the “screen”, and our behavior is the resultant of what the screen suggests.
Within the field of neuropsychology, I get to study these idiosyncrasies in great detail and I am very grateful. The confluence of subjective experiences points to an overarching organization within which interpretation can abound. The paradoxes generated are due to our inability to reason outside of what we can know first and what we know second.
Thus, neuropsychology has deepened my proclivity for nihilism, haha. Meaning only means what one perceives something to mean. It is in and of itself an illusion mediated by — you guessed it — brain function.
bryce's labyrinth 