Introducing the divinity of the Universe
to pave the way for scientifically credible theology
Chapter 10: Networks, brains and consciousness
Synopsis
Biological evolution is a very slow process involving millions of years and millions of generations to create new species. Social, political artistic and scientific evolution are similar processes, depending on memory, variation and selection, but they are very much faster. Given the internet, the rate of generation and popularization of hypotheses has grown immensely while selection by fact checking and testing against reality are falling behind. Voter driven politicians will implement policies that conflict with reality if they are supported by significant numbers of people who may be are unaware of the consequences of their choices. We can be confident that reality will eventually rule because disastrous decisions frequently make us pay dearly for our mistakes.
Table of contents
10.1: Consciousness10.2: Imagination: dangerous delusions
10.3: Intelligence, communication and meaning
10.4: Variation and selection: from gossip to art, law and science
10.5: Human ontogenesis
10.6: The evolving structure of a growing brain
10.7: The power of thought
10.1: Consciousness
It was the age of aggiornamento and the Second Vatican Council was on, initiated by Pope John XXIII. I was standing by my scientific education. I felt that all these mythological stories about talking serpents, immaculate conception, virgin birth, miracles, eternal life, heaven and hell were no basis for a respectable scientific theology.
One thing I could hold onto, however, was incarnation. If the world is divine, I also am divine, a source of creation. It took me twenty years to get a firm grip on this idea. In 1987 I went public with the first draft of a new theology. Now, nearly forty years later, I am presenting my theology in this book. The core of my vision comes from Genesis: So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him. My intelligence is a direct derivative of the intelligence of the Universe that created me. Jeffrey Nicholls (1987): A theory of Peace
10.2: Imagination: dangerous delusions
The writers of the New Testament devised a happy ending to the Old Testament at a time when they were suffering under Roman occupation. They created a very plausible story of spiritual liberation built around the murder of Jesus. Their story was later appropriated by the Roman Empire to consolidate its power. This fiction is still the foundation of the Roman Catholic Church. Jesus commissioned his followers to spread his theological revolution throughout the world. Three hundred years after his death, a meeting of bishops organized by the emperor Constantine distilled the Christian message into the Nicene Creed and Christianity became the official religion of the Roman empire. Nicene Creed - Wikipedia
My five years in the Dominicans taught me much of the history of the Church, particularly the huge role Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas played in its medieval doctrinal development. From a modern perspective, this Church has two principal defects: first, it values its allegedly infallible doctrines above our modern understanding of humanity: it holds, for instance, that women are incapable of priesthood; and second it is an absolute autocracy. Ir denies the modern political belief that rulers are to be ruled by those they purport to rule, rather than vice versa.
Falsehoods in myriad forms colour the political world. They do enormous damage to our planet and to our human spirit by denying reality and creating painful cognitive dissonances. Many pride themselves on the belief that we are in some way God's chosen. The Church has constructed a body of fictitious evidence to support this idea.
Reality, through science, is making us aware of the enormous damage we are doing to our planetary habitat by redirecting resources essential to global health to ourselves. Further, we pollute the environment with our wastes which contain many chemicals that poison the planetary life support system. The science that brought us all our technology tells us we are heading for a dead end. If the Universe is truly divine, science, not collections of ancient texts, is the true evidence based word of god.
10.3: Intelligence, communication and meaning
Every country has some sort of intelligence community whose job is to collect military, political and commercial information about other countries. We all rely on observation and gossip to keep up with what is happening in the human world around us. The currency of intelligence is information. In it simplest form, information just reflects facts: it is raining outside; they are in love; she is pregnant; the end is nigh.
At deeper levels, we want to know the meaning of facts: why are they massing troops on the border? We need to learn what they are saying to each other; tap their phones, break their codes, read their mail. In a nutshell, we determine meaning by studying networks. A dictionary provides us with snippets of meaning which can be networked together to create an infinite variety of messages.
The Catholic idea that we are an immortal soul who will be rewarded or punished after death derives from ancient tradition. Archaeologists see this in the care often taken to provide provisions for the afterlife in the burial of the dead.
The whole business plan of the Catholic Church is based on this notion that we have an immortal spiritual soul which was damaged by original sin. It claims to be the only path to our eternal reward in heaven. This is one of the most effective falsehoods ever sold to humanity. As Nietzsche wrote in Beyond Good and Evil: Insanity in individuals is something rare—but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule. Friedrich Nietzsche (2003): Beyond Good and Evil
I laid the foundation for this work in an essay proposing to identify God and the Universe. If the Universe is divine, we can study it scientifically and learn the real mind of the real god. One way to approach the divine mind, made possible by the fact that we are created in the image of god, is to think about our own minds. Jeffrey Nicholls (1967): How universal is the universe?
10.4: Variation and selection: from gossip to art, law and science
Most gossip is very local and very specific, but common themes emerge and become icons of our humanity. Once of the principle concerns of parents is to equip children as quickly as possible for a well connected and profitable independent existence. Since time and resources are always limited, this often means identifying and promoting well known classics, often the art, literature and history of bygone golden ages. Tales of the capricious, violent, deceptive, cunning and sometimes sexy gods of ancient Greece and Rome have played a major role in Western culture, their stories rewritten and represented in many forms. The Bible has added another alternative view of divinity.
Variation and selection work in the human social world just as they do in the biological world. On the largest and possibly the best researched scale we see that these forces determine the fate of nations. Like species, nations and their constitutions come and go. Very few have existed in their present form for more than a century. At any given time many are involved in war and social unrest and may be classified as failed or failing nations. Daron Acemoglu & James Robinson (2012): Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty
A common prescription for success at the political level is a combination of the rule of law, democracy and justice. At the practical level the probability of success is increased by relying on careful scientific research to select the best means to implement decisions reached through fair political systems.
The most general principle available would seem to be that stability is is achieved by maximizing entropy. This has the effect of reducing communication errors in the human network. We return to this issue in Chapter 19: Quantization: the mathematical theory of communication. As the theory demonstrates the entropy and stability of human societies is maximized by establishing a just and fair system that treats us all equally.
10.5 Human ontogenesis
We might understand our growth by comparing a fertile human egg to the information processing system that grows out of it. I am much more complex that the egg I grew from. The information in my egg is encoded in my genome, a DNA string of some three billion molecular symbols (A, T, G, C) each representing 2 bits of information for a total of about six billion bits.
This information is decoded to construct proteins, the basic structural and functional machinery of the cell. As the egg grows it divides repeatedly and the daughter cells gradually differentiate into different tissues in my body by talking to one another and decoding different genes at different rates.
Life is a electrochemical process based on insulating membranes and ionic motors which create and utilize electrical potentials across the membranes. Multicellular plants rely on electro-chemical signalling to coordinate the operations of individual cells. All but the simplest of animals use neural networks, both for internal housekeeping and for interaction with the world around them.
Neural networks are information processors constructed from neurons, cells adapted to receive, process and transmit electrical signals. The connectivity in the network is high. Neurons fall into three classes: sensory neurons collect input from the senses, motor neurons convey output to muscles and other agents, and interneurons process sensory input into motor output.
Neurons receive information from the fibres connecting through synapses bound to their membranes. When a synapse receives input from a connected fibre it releases chemicals which interact with the neuron either exciting or inhibiting it. The neuron adds up these inputs over time. This arrangement is very similar to the key operation in quantum theory, superposition (Chapter 13: The emergence of quantum mechanics). When a neuron reaches a certain threshold it “fires” sending an action potential along its output fibre to be distributed to other neurons, each of which reacts to the superposition of signals received by its synapses. Neuron - Wikipedia, Synapse - Wikipedia
Processing and memory in a neural network are modulated by synaptic weights which are a measure of the level of influence, positive or negative, a particular synapse may have on the neuron to which it is attached.
10.6: The evolving structure of a growing brain
The ontological development of a human brain poses an interesting problem in network creation. The source of formal guidance in the development of any living creature is its genome. The translation of the data in the genome into functional proteins depends on physical and chemical processes embodied in ribosomes in the cell.
Formally, programmed deterministic development is subject to the cybernetic principle of requisite variety. This principle requires that to be successful an agent must have entropy equal to or greater than the entropy of the system it is to control. At its simplest, entropy is simply a count of the degrees of freedom available to the agent and the patient.
In the specification of a standard engineered network, every physical connection is specified by source and destination. Measured in bits of information this is at a minimum twice the logarithm to base 2 of the number of connections. Such precise specification in the case of the n connections of the human nervous system is n log2 n, where n = 100 billion (neurons) x 1000 (connections per neuron), ie 1014. n log2 n is therefore about 1016 bits, approximately a million times greater the information content of the genome.
It is necessary, therefore, that some other mechanism must account for the connective structure of the brain, which is to say that to a large degree this system must define itself. The human brain must have a self-structuring property.
The explanation appears to be a form of evolution by natural selection. The neurons in an infant brain seek out synaptic connections with one another, a process which is to a large degree random, creating an excessive number of connections. There follows a process of pruning which continues through the teenage years to the twenties, eliminating little used connections.
As well as determining the wiring of the brain over a period of years, experience determines the synaptic weights connecting neurons. Changes in weight may occur in milliseconds during the real time processing of speech, or over a lifetime during the acquisition of knowledge and experience. The physical development of a brain is thus closely related to the reception of information from the environment via the senses and feedback from the results of actions (like learning to walk). It serves as a microcosm of the development of the Universe.
10.7: The power of thought
Mental evolution provides an enormous advantage, since thought is usually much cheaper than action. In the natural world of evolution by natural selection many newborns fail to reproduce for one reason or another. In some species this failure rate may be very high, thousands being born for every one that survives and reproduces. In more complex species like ourselves most children are carefully nurtured by their parents, leading to a high rate of survival.
Cognitive cosmology sees the Universe as a mind, a creative mind, and we are the ideas in that mind, created over many billions of years by a long and complex process of evolution. Human cultural evolution seems slow. But compared to the biological evolution of the world, we see cultural, scientific and technological changes occurring in centuries where evolutionary changes require thousands or millions of years.
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Notes and references
Further reading
Books
Acemoglu (2012), Daron, and James Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty, Crown Business 2012 "Some time ago a little-known Scottish philosopher wrote a book on what makes nations succeed and what makes them fail. The Wealth of Nations is still being read today. With the same perspicacity and with the same broad historical perspective, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson have retackled this same question for our own times. Two centuries from now our great-great- . . . -great grandchildren will be, similarly, reading Why Nations Fail." —George Akerlof, Nobel laureate in economics, 2001
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Nietzsche (1961, 1969), Friedrich, and R. J. Hollingdale (translation and introduction, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Penguin 1961, 1969 ' Nietzsche was one of the most revolutionary and subversive thinkers in Western philosophy, and Thus Spoke Zarathustra remains his most famous and influential work. It describes how the ancient Persian prophet Zarathustra descends from his solitude in the mountains to tell the world that God is dead and that the Superman, the human embodiment of divinity, is his successor. With blazing intensity and poetic brilliance, Nietzsche argues that the meaning of existence is not to be found in religious pieties or meek submission, but in an all-powerful life force: passionate, chaotic and free.
R. J Hollingdale's vibrant translation captures the dramatic force of Nietzsche's writing. His introduction offers a comprehensive chapter-by-chapter survey of the work, and there are also explanatory notes.'
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Nietzsche (2003), Friedrich, Beyond Good and Evil, Penguin Classics 2003 ' Beyond Good and Evil confirmed Nietzsche's position as the towering European philosopher of his age. The work dramatically rejects the traditional of Western thought with its notions of truth and God, good and evil. Nietzsche seeks to demonstrate that the Christian world is steeped in a false piety and infected with a 'slave morality'. With wit and energy, he turns from this critique to a philosophy that celebrates the present and demands that the individual impose their own 'will to power' upon the world.'
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Links
Jeffrey Nicholls (1987), A theory of Peace, ' The argument: I began to think about peace in a very practical way during the Viet Nam war. I was the right age to be called up. I was exempted because I was a clergyman, but despite the terrors that war held for me, I think I might have gone. It was my first whiff of the force of patriotism. To my amazement, it was strong enough to make even me face death. |
Neuron - Wikipedia, Neuron - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'A neuron or nerve cell is an electrically excitable cell that communicates with other cells via specialized connections called synapses. It is the main component of nervous tissue in all animals except sponges and placozoa. Plants and fungi do not have nerve cells. . . . A typical neuron consists of a cell body (soma), dendrites, and a single axon. The soma is usually compact. The axon and dendrites are filaments that extrude from it. Dendrites typically branch profusely and extend a few hundred micrometers from the soma. The axon leaves the soma at a swelling called the axon hillock, and travels for as far as 1 meter in humans or more in other species.' back |
Nicene Creed - Wikipedia, Nicene Creed - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' The Nicene Creed (Greek: Σύμβολον τῆς Νίκαιας, Latin: Symbolum Nicaenum) is the profession of faith or creed that is most widely used in Christian liturgy. It forms the mainstream definition of Christianity for most Christians. It is called Nicene because, in its original form, it was adopted in the city of Nicaea (present day Iznik in Turkey) by the first ecumenical council, which met there in the year 325. The Nicene Creed has been normative for the Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Church of the East, the Oriental Orthodox churches, the Anglican Communion, and the great majority of Protestant denominations.' back |
Synapse - Wikipedia, Synapse - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'In the nervous system, a synapse is a structure that permits a neuron (or nerve cell) to pass an electrical or chemical signal to another cell (neural or otherwise). Santiago Ramón y Cajal proposed that neurons are not continuous throughout the body, yet still communicate with each other, an idea known as the neuron doctrine The word "synapse" (from Greek synapsis "conjunction," from synaptein "to clasp," from syn- "together" and haptein "to fasten") was introduced in 1897 by English physiologist Michael Foster at the suggestion of English classical scholar Arthur Woollgar Verrall.' back |