Consciousness and reason defy science

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Are cyborgs in the string universe our tomorrow?

Brain and Mind Sciencetoday is similar to the sea coast of the era of the great geographical discoveries. Psychologists, biologists, mathematicians, linguists - all stand on the shore in a state of "just about." Everyone peers into the horizon, and everyone already understands that there is something there, beyond the horizon. The ships are equipped, some have even sailed away, expectations are high, but no one has yet returned with the booty, has not redrawn the map of man's ideas about himself, and even before the cry "Earth!" still far.

In June 2012, in Kaliningrad, on the basis of the Baltic Federal University, one of the most representative scientific conferences in the country in the field of research of the functions of the brain, language and consciousness was held - Fifth cognitive … It brought together more than 500 scientists from 30 countries of the world, representing a wide variety of fields of knowledge from medicine to computer science.

One of the objectives of the conference was to stimulate an interdisciplinary scientific dialogue: to actually overcome the "confusion of languages", to enable the knowledge about the work of the brain, accumulated in different areas, to circulate freely.

About what could be the key to solving this problem, columnist for the journal "Science and Life" Elena Veshnyakovskayatalks with the doctor of philological and biological sciences, deputy chairman of the organizing committee of the Kaliningrad conference, professor Tatiana Vladimirovna Chernigovskaya.

The problem must be posed by philosophers

- In my opinion, the science of the brain has once again come to a critical point. There are so many articles that you don't have time to read them. Facts are accumulating at such a speed that it makes no difference whether they exist or not. If the data cannot be processed, then maybe we should stop receiving it? In the science of consciousness, some kind of paradigm breakthrough, there is a completely different look …

- Suppose I have devices (this is still a fantasy, but not too fantastic) that can show me each neuron during its operation. We will reliably see a quadrillion connections between neurons. And what do you want to do with this quadrillion? It is desirable that by then some kind of geniuswas born or grew up, who would say: "This is how we no longer look at it, but we look differently."

- Yes. We need a breakthrough, and, excuse the pun, it’s cognitive. In the natural science tradition, it is customary to scold philosophers, but now we clearly need a person with a philosophical mind, able to look in the abstract. And this is not the same person who walks with a test tube. At the academic institute where I worked there was a man who thirty-four years old rabbit blood pH … Not three-hyphen-four, but 34 years … Agree, with all due respect to the facts, there is something delusional in this. The problem for researchers should be set by philosophers. They have to say what to look for and somehow interpret what we get. We need to set big tasks, especially when it comes to such things as the problem of consciousness and the brain.

- … Yes, and they are still round, overturning, like in the Mobius strip. I am reviewing works that have been done in different fields. When I see thirty-eight thousand of these boxes in a manuscript, I immediately understand that the work will go to the trash heap.

- Not. Still no. Philosophy owes something else to evidence-based science. In the 1920s and 1930s, the physical paradigm, conditionally Newtonian, was replaced by quantum mechanics. And this made me form a fundamentally different view of everything. It turned out that causality is of a different nature, and Schrödinger's cat is either alive or dead, and the observer is not an observer, but a participant in the events. It was a shock. They coped with it, reassuring themselves that it is all in the microcosm, in the quantum world, and nothing like this happens in the big world.

But also the great Russian physiologist Ukhtomsky, who was one hundred years ahead of his entourage, said: "Our nature is done, and we are participants in being." Taken out of context, these words sound pretentious, but in fact his thought was that we are participants in the events; we cannot pretend to be spectators who sit in the audience and watch what is on stage. This is not true. And here Schrödinger comes onto the stage with a cat very well: if we observe, then the observed is already different.

Man becomes modular

- There is such an unpleasant thing about which Gödel wrote: no system can study another system more complex than itself. In this case, not only is the brain immeasurably more complex than those in which it, shall we say, “settled”, but we also observe ourselves.

- That is, we do not understand at all. And who is watching whom, we also do not understand. And who is where, we also do not understand.

- Life is hard, to be honest. Actually, I'm almost agnostic. Of course, such research has many very useful applications, from artificial intelligence to rehabilitation of patients, education of children … But, seriously, I confess that I do not believe that we will ever be able to understand what consciousness is and how the brain works.

- Partly. You see, where is the border? If materialism is roughly understood, then consciousness should be thrown away altogether, where is it? I want to understand how my completely non-material desire to move my own finger turned into a completely material movement. My colleague Svyatoslav Vsevolodovich Medvedev, director of the Institute of the Brain in St. Petersburg, says that the brain is an interfacebetween the ideal and the material.

- And I, in fact, did not promise anything to anyone. Superstring theory is somehow also … not very close to materialism in its ordinary sense. When there is either mass, or not, or a particle is somewhere, or everywhere, as, say, in the quantum world, where a particle, as you know, can be at point A and at point B simultaneously. What about causal relationships in such a world? Now physicists are talking more and more about whether the effect is necessarily preceded by a cause.

- Here! And here's my question - and let it sound like a stupid joke: can we trust mathematics? All sciences are based on mathematics, mathematical apparatus, but why should we believe it? It is something objectively existing - or is it a derivative of the properties of the human brain: does it work like that? What if we have such a brain and all that we perceive is only it? We live in the world that our senses supply us with. Hearing - such and such a range, vision - such and such a range, we do not see less, more - we also do not see. Dosed information comes to us through windows and doors that lead to the brain.

But when we communicate with the world, we have no other tools than the brain. Absolutely everything that we know about the world, we know with its help. We listen with our ears, but we hear - with the brain; we look with our eyes, but we see - with the brainand everything else works the same. So, if we want to even hope to learn something more or less objective about the world, we must know how the brain processes input signals. Therefore, it seems to me that cognitive research is the future for the next century.

- New and quite expensive. Large projects, on the scale of the same genomic project, could not have been done earlier also because the decoding of the genome is still very expensive, and in the beginning it cost millions. But now Academician Scriabin almost predicts that by the end of this year the cost of decoding a personal genome will drop to a thousand dollars, which is comparable to an expensive blood test. I was recently at Stanford, and the biologists told me there that the university gave every professor of biology a gift: they had their genome decoded.

- The decoded genome is such a black box, closed to death, in the sense that only the owner of the genome has the keys to it. It follows from the genome what medical risks you have. In particular, if a person, who has looked at his genome with the help of a specialist, finds out that he has a greater danger of Alzheimer's disease than other people, then he must catch it in time. Now they say that early diagnosis is very important and that medications must be taken in advance.

- The question is when we will be turned off and in what sequence. If Alzheimer's comes at 85 years old, this is also unpleasant, but still not as offensive as if at 50. Or, if a woman knows that she is genetically threatened by a breast tumor, then she simply has to do an ultrasound scan every six months. And if there are any hereditary diseases, people should think about whether it makes sense to have children.

- Undoubtedly. Bombs and socially dangerous things. That's why I say that we are in a crisis: scientific, anthropological, and civilizational. Because the screwdriver with which we climb into a person does not just show what potential joys and concerns there are. With the same screwdriver, you can still twist something. This means that a lot of serious ethical and even legal issues arise, for which humanity is completely unprepared.

- For example, let's take brain mapping, brain-imaging. Let's say the mapping has shown that the person's brain is very much like the brain of a serial killer. I am now exaggerating the possibilities of mapping, but I assure you that this is not the most distant reality. And what are we going to do with this information? In all decent societies, the presumption of innocence has not yet been canceled. So, sit and wait for him to stab someone? Or inform him and hang the brunt of this knowledge on him? But he did not kill anyone and, perhaps, will not kill, but will leave for Switzerland, drink milk, grow edelweiss and become a poet. Vanguard. Or not avant-garde.

- I think so too. So what to do with it? Advance it to the cage? Or twist the chromosomes a little? Or will we cut out a piece of the brain? This is "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" turns out. There are also legal implications. For example, everyone wants to improve their memory. And so we learned how to insert some kind of chip into the head that improves memory. Question: Masha N. before the chip and Masha N. after the chip - is this the same Masha or is it different? How to test it, for example, if it needs to go somewhere?

- The further, the more. Up to the point that you have to remember the word "cyborg". Artificial hands, artificial legs, an artificial liver, an artificial heart, half a brain clogged with chips that make everything better, faster and more economical.

- No, tomorrow. Not even the day after tomorrow. Close reality. Of course, this reality has huge advantages: for example, a person does not have a leg or an arm, but he was given a prosthesis that is controlled by the brain, and thus the opportunity to live a full life. This is, of course, amazing. But you understand that the question of where “I” ends and “everything else” begins will arise. There will be a civilization failure.

NBIK: a breakthrough outside the system

- Disappearance of boundaries between sciences. You have to be crazy not to admit it. Nobody negates the importance of certain sciences, but judge for yourself. What should be called the specialty of a person who, say, studies how a child learns to speak? How does a small child manage to master the most difficult thing on earth in a short time - the human language?

To this one is supposed to answer: he listens and remembers. But this is absolutely the wrong answer. Because if he listened and memorized, it would take a hundred years to listen. So the question remains: how did he manage to do it, given that no one ever teaches him. Moreover, "he" in this case is not a child, but a child's brain, because the brain does everything by itself.

The researcher answering this question must be simultaneously a neurobiologist, linguist, child psychologist, experimental psychologist, behaviorist, physician, intelligence specialist, brain mapping specialist, mathematician - to build models, a neural network specialist - one who will teach artificial neural networks, pretending to be a “child”, a geneticist, and so on.

- True, but the need for such connections poses many serious tasks related to education. It is clear that in reality it will not be possible to train such a specialist in one person. But in each area listed there should be specialists who know at least something from the other areas listed. They should at least be able to talk to each other. It is clear that I will not become a geneticist. But I read with great interest, to the best of my ability, the articles of geneticists related to the development of speech, because I need to know this. This means that I must be able to read these articles at least on a superficial level, must be prepared enough to ask a meaningful question to a geneticist.

- We have already started to prepare them. There are NBIK faculties. NBIK - this is "nano, bio, info, cogno".

- The NBIK “brand” did not appear now and not here. There are NBIK faculties in Italy and in the USA. Our NBIK faculties exist on the basis of the Kurchatov National Research Center.

- It is being created there now, with great difficulty. We meet with many people, talk, look at them from all sides, and mainly from which side: is this person capable of standing on a different ground altogether. Do not drag with you what he is doing elsewhere. And to come and do something that is generally impossible in another place. For example, the most powerful equipment, which the Kurchatov Institute has, will not be in other places, because these are all expensive things, of which, in principle, there cannot be many.

There are specialists in nuclear medicine. There is an opportunity to work simultaneously for geneticists who are engaged in, say, the development of speech, those who study the similarity of ethnic groups, and linguists who are concerned with the relationship of languages. Because the correlation between the spread of genetic diversity and the branching of languages is far from an exhausted topic, and interest in it is constant.

- I think it will be so. I believe that a number of serious issues that a specific area of knowledge is unable to solve within itself, it will solve with an exit to the outside. The NBIK-faculty, no matter how foolish it may sound, trains physicists - biologists. I will read linguistics there, to physicists. And something like "The role of socio-humanitarian knowledge in natural sciences" at the physics department at our university in St. Petersburg. Yes, the application was sent by the department, which will be headed by the director of the Kurchatov Center, Mikhail Kovalchuk, that is, it is clear where the legs grow from. But I assure you that this is not an imposed thing. They in the faculty really really want to get “knowledge from other places”, “other knowledge”.

- It seems. In the face of their clever representatives. Humanitarian knowledge was in demand there before, but it was always perceived as a kind of dessert: a decent person should know the word "Mozart" …

- By the way, yes, it struck me at the Kurchatov Institute. The average good physicist is definitely better educated in the humanities than the average philologist.

Handcrafted specialists

- For the department that we are now discussing: cognitive science, cognitive science. If not to flirt, but seriously, then to the question "Who are you?" I don't know what to answer. I am a linguist by training, that's a fact. So it is written in the diploma. But the diploma says "Germanic philology", and I have never done it.

- Yes, but I studied at the Department of Experimental Phonetics, from all areas of the Faculty of Philology the least humanitarian: spectra, articulation, acoustics …

- At that time, it actually didn’t exist. There was a word, but no one really knew anything. So I jumped from philology to biology.

- I think it’s out of boredom. I studied well, they left me at the faculty, which at that time was a very thuggish business, I taught Russian phonetics to Americans, English to Russians … And I became unbearably bored - so bored! I thought: so that I put my only life on this rubbish? Yes, it failed! Now, of course, I don’t think so, but then youthful maximalism took possession of me: I decided that what I was doing at the philological faculty had nothing to do with science. That it all lies in the realm of chatter and taste: you like Pushkin, and I like Mayakovsky, you Boccaccio, and I like raspberry pie. And science is generally about something else. And I left. My parents decided that I had lost my mind. I did not go to study biology, but to work directly: at the Sechenov Institute of Evolutionary Physiology and Biochemistry.

- And I went to the bioacoustics laboratory. It was actually a much less dangerous jump than it seems, because I already studied acoustics at the philology department. The director of the institute was then academician Krebs, a biochemist, already a very old man, a fantastic personality. He spent seven years in Kolyma, where a pine fell on him while felling and broke his spine, so he walked all over, hunched over, this way, that way, but at the same time he still hunted with dogs … That was how they were, that generation …

So, he did everything not to take me. He said: "I only have the position of a junior laboratory assistant, and you have a higher education, I cannot take you on it." I said, "I don't care." "You will get a penny." Fortunately, I had something to live on, so I said: "I don't care." He said: "You will wash the test tubes." I said: "I will wash the test tubes." In short, he took me to fear, and I starved him out. I entered there and began to study bioacoustics. Then she wrote a dissertation.

- Yes, but I passed the exams, please, what. Biological candidate minimum, moreover, since I did not have a formal biological education, I had to pass general biology, and not only physiology and - for complete horror - also biophysics. Here I just thought that now heaven is punishing me.

- I will answer it like this. Nothing is more important than the environment. Broth. Cooking in the environment - nothing can compare with this. But I really regret that I do not have a basic biological education. I can’t make up for this. I'm pretty sure I have gaps.

- I defended my dissertation, which was about the interaction of hearing and speech, semi-acoustic, and decided to jump again, but not so far - across the floor. There was a laboratory for the functional asymmetry of the human brain. After all, it was already about the brain, which I was striving for. It was there that I realized that I needed linguistics. I needed to analyze what the brain does with language and speech, so I could not use the school type of linguistics - “the instrumental case has such and such an inflection”.

I needed serious linguistics, for which we barely had the first translations: Chafe, Fillmore, Chomsky … I stumbled, as if in a nightmare, into the fact that linguistics is needed, but there is nowhere to take it, they do not teach. I wrote notes to myself on what was later called neurolinguistics … And so it went. But many of the psychologists here at the conference will tell you that I am a psychologist. They also hold me for theirs, I enter their scientific councils, psychological societies.

- What is a normal psychologist? The word "psychology" in European languages and in Russian only sounds the same, but the content is different. What is traditionally called "higher nervous activity" in Russia is called psychology throughout the rest of the world. If you open the encyclopedia and see who Ivan Petrovich Pavlov is, as you know, the Nobel laureate in physiology, then you will read: "… the famous Russian behavioral psychologist."

- In natural sciences. And here psychology is how not to swear in the family or how to make sure that inside the company the girls do not put buttons on the chairs for each other. At international congresses on neuropsychology, the audience is completely different. More empirical, physiological, natural science.

- And even I am a member of their governing bodies. Not for show, but because I'm really interested. I go to them from time to time to see what they got.

- Yes, we are one-of-a-kind. And we prepare the piece. In St. Petersburg, I opened two master's degrees, one of them is called Cognitive Studies … My students work with FMRI, with transcranial magnetic stimulation. They are linguists. Former. There is a boy who graduated from the medical faculty. What brought him to the philological faculty? After all, he is already a doctor, moreover, he teaches some kind of cytology at First Medical.

– He is interested … He will now write a serious dissertation. You see, if he is going to deal with the hedgehog heel, then he may not need cognitive science. And if the brain? Or a girl from the biology department came to me, wrote a wonderful dissertation "Working memory in connection with dyslexia." They are in the same group: those with the instrumental case, and those with the hedgehog's heel. I ask her: what kind of biology did you do? It turns out that they are generally insects.

Or another one, from the Faculty of Philosophy - I started to snort mentally: a girl, a philosopher … I ask: what were you doing there? "At the department of logic …" Yeah, I think. Department of logic - then let's think about it. In my master's degree I have subjects: Biological foundations of Language, cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics, ontolinguistics … Such a set of subjects - I would not regret anything in my youth to go to such a place. Then some of the students go straight to graduate school, and some travel around the world to study, go to Clinical Linguistics, which is neurolinguistics.

Children from other worlds

- I will say this. Not lost, but fell apart in two. Either very low or very high. There are almost no averages. Which is very bad. Society cannot exist only out of scum and stars. There must also be just good working people. It is impossible to have only stars in science, the same does not happen.

- Not even discussed. They cannot work otherwise. Modern literature is all in English. But our students are smart, so English is not an issue for them. The question is - is there still French, German, and so on. I signed a letter of recommendation to one young lady, I read about languages. English, German, French fluently - okay. Next comes: Latin and Ancient Greek: five years, five hours a week (a girl from a good gymnasium). Italian. Lithuanian. And finally, Arabic.

- And what is it like to teach them?

- …It is not true. But no illusions are needed. With us - as at OTiPL in Moscow. We are already receiving very strong and definitely not thieves. Because there is no need for thieves to go there. They will not be able to study, it is difficult. There is no talk, Oblomov is a positive character or a negative one - all this nonsense is not there. Even those who come from very strong grammar schools, where they study Greek and Latin for five years, find that they were taught very well, but here they are going to teach something else.

- And how I envy them! Once in our department we sat and said: maybe we’ll let these students go to hell and go to each other’s lectures?

- It's true. Some of my close friends studied in Tartu. God, how we envied them. We were just filled with envy. We went to see them at all kinds of summer schools, talked with Lotman. I thought, why am I sitting here? After all, there is a real university city! And today's children have it all. Some of those who graduated are already teaching others, and I can't read the way they teach the course. They may have less drive, but they are very well prepared.

- This is bad. This is generally a separate story. These children, who already have children of their own, are all gutta-percha. Extremely capable. Very well educated. But they are machines … They were thrown to us from other worlds and given out cribs: what is supposed to be done here on Earth. The girl was told: wear such a skirt. Wears the right skirt, perfect. They said: you need to marry a boy from a good family. Intellectual is desirable. And a set: what should be with him. No, he should not be the son of an oligarch, this is indecent. Other qualities. Against each - we put a tick, if there are enough ticks, we take it. Or, for example, it is now fashionable to know about wine. Marks with a tick: "I know about wine." That is, they are as if, "ostensibly", do you understand? They do everything right, but I haven't seen any of them fall in love or get drunk.

- Honestly, this idea pleases me.