A fact of business nature: how we define a problem determines the bounds within which we solve it.
If we call it the "fossil fuel peak oil problem," we set the stage for calculating a finite mined supply of a singular resource and how we can best ration it over a short term timescale. If we call it the "fungible liquid store of energy supply concern" we immediately reframe the issue into one of finding any reliable, stored, and easily transportable energy source. The solution becomes not one of rationing but of seeking alternative supplies over a longer timescale.
If we call it the "employee liabilities minimization problem" due to their not insignificant cost centers, we frame the short term set of solutions within those that reduce employees or salaries. If we call it the "employee asset investment maximization," we seek the long term set of solutions to enhance profit centers and outputs. As any accounting textbook 101 indicates, assets and liabilities are two sides of the same coin (equation). One is literally as equally correct a term as the other.
In the beginning, we could call it the "eternal judgment soul of consciousness and behavior." A person's actions and behaviors were reflections of their permanent underlying sin or sainthood.
Then came along a railroad construction foreman named Phineas Gage. According to contemporary written accounts, he was
hard-working, responsible, and 'a great favorite' with the men in his charge, his employers having regarded him as 'the most efficient and capable foreman in their employ.' - John Harlow, Gage's personal physician
In 1848, while working with a railroad tamping rod to pack in explosive charges, he was distracted and let his head stray over the rod just as the explosive charges beneath it prematurely detonated. The rod pierced his head and exited out the top of his skull, taking with it portions of his left prefrontal cortex.
Miraculously, he survived. His post-accident behavior however, according to the same contemporary account describes him thusly
A child in his intellectual capacity and manifestations, he has the animal passions of a strong man. Previous to his injury, although untrained in the schools, he possessed a well-balanced mind, and was looked upon by those who knew him as a shrewd, smart business man, very energetic and persistent in executing all his plans of operation. In this regard his mind was radically changed, so decidedly that his friends and acquaintances said he was "no longer Gage."
This provided evidence for the "physical brain substrate for consciousness and behavior." Could the physical brain be instrumental in guiding our signature behaviors?
Now for the confounds. The only written accounts originate from the same personal physician who treated Gage and who subsequently became very famous - consciously or unconsciously, the physician could have had motives to hype up the behavioral changes. Also, these accounts refer to behaviors in the short term before and afterwards. Gage is on record for having apparently recovered over the longer term to continue gainful employment and travel. And the trauma of having a tamping rod blast through the head is surely sufficient in itself to cause life changing psychological trauma that can account for personality changes and loss of friends without the need for alterations in physical substrate. One must not read too much into a single landmark case.
Fortunately for science - but very unfortunately for soldiers- World War I and the advent of massive amounts of low velocity shrapnel led to many survivors with penetrating, non-lethal head wounds (Smithsonian here, and PubMed here). Many soldiers apparently volunteered to demonstrate their abilities post-trauma, which provided the rudiments of brain mapping. Modern brain scanning equipment, such as CT scans, fMRI, EEGs, and a personal favorite, TES (Transcranial Electromagnetic Scanners) makes possible safer observations and modeling of brain theory.
Dr. Michio Kaku provides a brief non-specialist perspective on changing brain theories based on his interviews with neuroscientists. It is often times useful to have an outside perspective to provide a cogent summary overview.
The earliest theories of behavior revolve around a mysterious but fixed homunculus - a miniature being or soul - that rides inside and controls the body's shell.
By the 1400s, with gears and clockworks becoming widely available, theories started to attempt to explain the behavioral mechanism using vast gears to explain the workings of the soul.
By the 1800s, steam engines became dominant and widespread. Working on steam engines gave people experience in thinking about pressure, flows, valves, and balancing forces. This perhaps explains the Freudian behavioral theories as imbalances of some unknown essences. While Freud himself proposed id (secret emotional desire), ego (rational self), and superego (moral conscience), these should be taken as temporary placeholders for balancing forces rather than as literal agents in a matured theory.
By the 1900s, telephony was ascendant with multiple wired connections coordinated by central switchboards. The theories on behavior likewise started to reflect neural regions that operate in multiple streams around a central coordinator. However, there were no rigorous concepts on exactly how the streams work together.
By the 1950s, computer artificial intelligence theory gave rise to the concept of programs and subroutines that carry out mathematical operations. Behaviors would be built in subroutines that trigger under specific boolean True or False test conditions:
Left unanswered were program origin and most importantly, what would be the biological analog to the computer's central processing unit which is essential to computer artificial intelligence.
By the 1980s, publications revisiting neural network and regression summary paradigms led to deep learning-like connectionist theories. Multiple layers of interdependent network elements loosely representing abstract neurons send and re-send external observations together into an emergent behavior. Translation:
As Michio Kaku notes, this still "...brushes all the complexity of the brain under the rug of chaos theory." In other words, the output is the same as with the 1950's like subroutines with the difference being instead of hiring expert logic programmers to build them we crowd sourced it instead. Quite literally, it is akin to 10,000 monkeys pseudo-randomly typing up Shakespeare.
Michio Kaku's best guess understanding, based on his interviews and discussions with the likes of Marvin Minsky, Steven Pinker, and others is that behaviors arise through the command interactions of a corporate board. Sensory information from eyes or ears or touch combine with emotional instincts from the lower regions and rise to the prefrontal cortex where a "Chief Executive Officer (CEO)" command center decides on a response.
Which, upon reflection, happens to combine the concept of the ancient homunculus (CEO) with 1950s computer subroutine-like corporate divisions. Fascinating that the apparently older, may we say "obsolescent" theories still have merit and that multiple terms can all be helpful in getting us to think about the problem. They provide different biases on defining potential use cases and solutions. Like seeing the forest for the trees - or vice versa
First of all, when Michio Kaku mentions the prefrontal cortex as being like a CEO, it carries with it some conceptual baggage with ambiguous denotations and connotations. For some, the CEO is the higher caste royalty who decisively waves the royal flag and leads the battle - or maybe just parties and gets drunk while abusing the underlings. For some, the CEO (prefrontal cortex) contains the essence and identity which controls the implied replaceable lower caste parts like vision, hearing, or limb controls. Sales team (speech region) not performing? Fire them and hire new! Transport team (motor cortex) is under performing? Get on their case or cut the budget! This is why damage to vision or hearing leads to non-identity threatening blindness or deafness but damage to prefrontal cortical areas like Phineas Gage's injury encourages us to view it as permanent damage to the soul.
Having had some experience in advising chief executives and other C-suite folks, we might have another take on what is a CEO - and by extension the role of prefrontal cortex. What is the primary purpose of CEO? Names notwithstanding a Chief Executive Officer is actually the chief sales person. (Three Reasons Why Sales People Make The Best CEOs, forbes.com) And what a sales person does is act as a reporter or an information conduit. The primary duty of a CEO is to attract sales and investment. They represent the product and get customers for the product. The CEO role is the primary connection conduit that summarizes the average consumer and informs the producers of what, when, and where to produce as if there were a single average consumer, statistical standard deviation, skewness, and kurtosis notwithstanding. The CEO (prefrontal cortex) does not know the answer, but focuses on allowing the consumer base through say an earnings call or via aggregate stock prices to communicate their representative answer.
Besides changing the connotation from that of higher caste royalty to one of lateral division, this definition also changes the denotation bias from internal executive within an entity to an external telephone switchboard operator connector without to other entities. In short, the CEO/prefrontal cortex does not necessarily control or decide any more than the news reporter or public relations president controls a country, even though their broadcast observations correlate with and play a role in the onset of its response. In short, the difference in perspective determines whether we should or should not shoot the messenger.
Second, Dr. Kaku summarizes his understanding through the lens of a physics space-time theory of consciousness. Briefly stated, it is that consciousness and behaviors arise from the number and complexity of physical "feedback units." Further, one can rank levels of consciousness in an hierarchy.
- Level 0.A. Single units. A thermostat that singly senses temperature and activates.
- Level 0.B. Multiple units. A flower or bacterium with ten sensors, including temperature, moisture, sunlight, gravity, and others.
- Level 1. Mobile organisms with more complex central nervous systems and sensor loops in the 100s. A reptile with sight, smell, balance, and others coordinates these senses within their reptillian brain stem.
- Level 2. Space and time sensor loops placing organisms within social groups. A wolf that interacts with a pack of other wolves in the environment needs an accordingly larger set of feedback loops in a more complex limbic system of the brain.
- Level 3. More distal space and time loops allowing complex longer term planning. A human that continually simulates "what-if" scenarios needs a prefrontal cortex, specifically Brodmann Area 10 dorso-lateral prefrontal cortex, to make decisions.
Theories on human function are notoriously tricky. Dr. Jared Diamond had an eye-openingly honest take on how scientists' theories on human evolution originate. Namely that nearly all theories proposed by male scientists tend to play up the role of cavemen whereas female scientists tend to focus attention on the positive role of cavewomen. Might we not be doing the same in terms of playing up the hierarchical superiority of human brain function?
If a Level 3 human brain is hierarchically more superior and complex than lower orders of brains, might not a superior Level 3+ brain be hierarchically more complex than ordinary Level 3? This is essentially the question a Thomas Harvey, the physician performing the autopsy on Albert Einstein posed to himself. Or more specifically, to Einstein's brain, which he secretly preserved against the knowledge and wishes of Einstein's kin.
Perhaps he preserved Einstein’s brain with the vague notion that one day it might unlock the secret of genius. Perhaps he thought, like many others, that there was a peculiar part of Einstein’s brain that was the seat of his vast intelligence. Brian Burrell, in his book Postcards from the Brain Museum, speculates that perhaps Dr. Harvey “got caught up in the moment and was transfixed in the presence of greatness. What he quickly discovered was that he had bitten off more than he could chew.” What happened to Einstein’s brain after that sounds more like a comedy than a science story. Over the years, Dr. Harvey promised to publish his results of analyzing Einstein’s brain. But he was no brain specialist, and kept making excuses. For decades, the brain sat in two large mason jars filled with formaldehyde and placed in a cider box, under a beer cooler. He had a technician slice the brain into 240 pieces, and on rare occasions he would mail a few to scientists who wanted to study them. Once, pieces were mailed to a scientist at Berkeley in a mayonnaise container. Forty years later, Dr. Harvey drove across the country in a Buick Skylark carrying Einstein’s brain in a Tupperware container, hoping to return it to Einstein’s granddaughter Evelyn. She refused to accept it. After Dr. Harvey’s death in 2007, it was left to his heirs to properly donate his collection of slides and portions of Einstein’s brain to science. The history of Einstein’s brain is so unusual that a TV documentary was filmed about it. - Michio Kaku
After all this, the only finding about Einstein's brain was that it appeared completely ordinary. Whatever it was about Einstein that made Einstein into Einstein, it was not his brain. Far more fascinating, maybe, would be Einstein's life. He lived in a time when scientists were fascinated with gravity, radiation, physics, and chemistry. He lived in place where he had easy access to the core of scientific literature and in an environment where he had time and inclination to devote towards relativity theories. And all this where his work connected and applied directly - in both subject matter and nationality - to subjects of grave importance which resulted in lots of publicity. Again, the CEO as public salesperson messenger correlates with circumstances and responses without necessarily causing them. Einstein was genius because we the audience and customers subjectively agree he was. Had he made similarly complex breakthroughs in "A General Theory of Relativity in Visual Art Pigments" in say, Taihiti, today we would be wondering "Albert Einstein who? Say, wasn't he Paul Gaugin's assistant?" So examining Einstein's prefrontal cortex would be no more fruitful than examining Einstein's fingernails. For where else would his relativity pigments contact?
Michio Kaku reminds us that a theory needs to be falsifiable. It is the only way to objectively evaluate whether we should invest more resources to extend it or to justify its continued existence. Regarding the negative result in differences between Einstein's brain and others, there can only be two alternatives:
- Either the difference between human genius and non-genius is non-existent and the space-time complexity theory is false
- Or the difference between human genius and non-genius is too small for our current observation technology to distinguish, whereupon this portion of the theory is currently non-falsifiable.
Even if we say Einstein had the same level of physical feedback loop complexity, but mentally used or set up more software loops, this only exposes it to the confound that reptiles could potentially generate more software loops than some of us humans. And again, invalidates the hierarchical space time complexity theory since consciousness has no relation to physical space time complexity loops.
An alternative theory is that Einstein was a genius only inasmuch as we the audience agree. The alternative theory - call it the "tripartite attention, working memory, and social learning theory of intelligent behavior (Wong, 2011)" treats consciousness not as a judgmental one-dimension linear hierarchy where human consciousness level exists as an hierarchical layer. Rather it treats it as a multi-dimension map where human consciousness is a directional bearing pattern. Where for example a reptile has qualia A, B, C, and F while humans have qualia F, L, M, and N. The number or amount has no judgmental bearing. Only the points of overlap do, much the same as with DNA. A tiger or a pig has a chromosome count of 38. A human has 46. A potato has 48. We have yet to see an argument that more or fewer chromosomes determines anything about the species.
The tripartite theory of intelligent behavior states that the pattern overlap of connectivity links determines the level of connection between entities. In this theory, neurons in the brain and elsewhere all serve the same function - as connective tissue, not computational. A reptile is not conscious to a human not because it is too simple but because its differential biases prevent its connecting to the same patterns as humans do. And importantly, it works both ways. A human is not conscious to the reptile for the same reason. The theory falsification test is simple: cutting the connectivity at any point should materially significantly and dramatically alter the consciousness. e.g. Put a person in a maximum security prison or in isolation within the same and see what comes out.
Or in extremis, we can "Tarzanify" a person by forcing them to become feral. In such cases, their reported induced or exacerbated personality changes appeared far greater than that of Phineas Gage.
The US services industry accounts for 77% of GDP and values at nearly USD 18 Trillion per year. It refers to labor most directly relying upon prefrontal cortical regions - negotiating, reporting, sales, analysis, and management. While mining or manufacturing is straightforward to automate - more physical explosions or physical arms to loosen and move more heavy ores or more physical assembly line arms to assemble more components - there has been persistent difficulties in applying the same techniques and concepts to services. The primary use cases for services technology have been focused on attempting to apply large scale automation, which mainly applies to database mining and indexing. From single document search using single words (card catalogs and early search engines) to centroid-weighted mixture of documents generation using massively indexed predefined potential phrases (current and likely future generations of chat/search engines) the solutions are biased towards applying mining techniques to services.
How we define a problem determines the bounds within which we solve it. In this services case, we are typically defining the problem of productivity in terms of how we can apply prior solutions. It is the classic "solution looking for a problem."
But if we define the problem of scaling and productivity within the terms of the tripartite connectivity theory of intelligent consciousness, we do not focus on the prior solutions of more processing, more data, and more predefined or pre-trained potentially random generators. Rather we focus on patterns of connectivity. Instead of feedback loops on the data - which always has the potential for endless infinity loops by the way - we focus on feedback loops between entities and shared connections. We also select or pioneer feedback models in which runaway saturated feedback is structurally and mathematically impossible. And while there is a role of CEO as prefrontal cortex, this role is one of many that simply connects instead of independently computing or deciding.
In this manner, a services industry provider is not one who searches faster or has access to a wider, larger database of pre-set and pre-trained potential search responses waiting for a subset prompt. Rather a services industry provider is simply one who arises from a compatible set of circumstances and biases and adjusts their choices to complement and match the customer's biases. In short, to grow a connection.
To cap it off, would this article even exist were it not for Dr Michio Kaku's exploration into the mind? If it were not for his grappling with a complex, intangible, but oh-so-important neuroscience of connecting our behaviors to the environment, we could not offer any response. How can there be a response without the paired question? The question defines the bounds within which we can solve it. So perhaps instead of asking where in the brain does intelligent consciousness operate, we should be asking how does our learning, memory, and attention determine our behavior?