ULTIMATE COMPUTING - Quantum Consciousness Studies

From Brain to Cytoskeleton 77
4.3.7 Parallelism, Collective Cooperativity, and the Grain
of the Engram
Neuron to neuron synapses operate on the order of milliseconds whereas
modern high speed computers operate with semiconductor switches which
function on the order of nanoseconds. Yet the brain is able, in a few hundred
milliseconds, to perform processing feats that are impossible to emulate in
hundreds of minutes of computer time. The assumption is that the brain
accomplishes this feat through the simultaneous operation of many, many parallel
components.
Parallel, distributed models of collective mind organization have been
proposed by two noteworthy authors coming from different orientations. Michael
Gazzaniga (1985) is one of the first researchers to work with “split brain” patients
in whom a severed corpus collosum has separated right and left hemispheres. He
contends that minds consist of large collections of smaller semiautonomous parts
with limited communication among them. Gazzaniga has developed convincing
evidence that our minds are “modular”; they are organized into relatively
independent functioning units that work in parallel. The mind does not operate in
a single way to solve problems but has many identifiably different units that
contribute to our conscious structure in ways that can sometimes be isolated by
clever experiments. Specific modules might be devoted to face and visual image
recognition, language interpretation, and what Gazzaniga calls an “inference
engine.” Located in the brain’s dominant hemisphere close to the language
interpreter module, the inference engine is thought to “coordinate” consciousness.
These modules may be compared to those described by Pribram or the “cartels”
described by Freeman and represent a level of brain organizational hierarchy just
below that of the entire brain. Gazzaniga relates free will to a basic feature of
brain organization, and suggests that the particular belief in free will itself follows
from the modular theory of mind. He observes that we are continually interpreting
behaviors produced by independent brain modules as behaviors that are produced
by the “self.” We conclude that we are acting freely whereas at the root of it we
don’t really know why we do almost anything. This notion may be compared to
the parallel connectionist concept (i.e. “Darwin” and “Wallace”) which requires a
vote or caucus to determine a summary output. Gazzaniga also states that basic
cognitive phenomena such as acquiring and holding social beliefs are just as
much a product of human brain organization as our behaviorist desires to eat,
sleep, and have sex. He argues that we are “hardwired to have beliefs.”
A comparable conclusion has been reached by Marvin Minsky (1986). In The
Society of Mind, the patriarch of AI discusses the mind as a vast number of
“agents.” Information is represented by “frames” which are multiple connected
knowledge nodes. Minsky throws a much more complex grid of agents over the
mind than Gazzaniga’s modules, but both describe levels of organization between
the neuronal synaptic level and the whole brain which are more or less
representative of neural network theory. Gazzaniga argues that the brain is more a
social entity than a psychological one. Rather than being an indivisible whole as
was once believed, it is a vast confederacy of relatively independent modules,
each of which processes information and activates its own thoughts and actions.
But what are the modules Where is the grain of consciousness Isn’t the mind
more than an array of squabbling modules
John O’Keefe and Andrew Speakman (1986) at the University College of
London have completed a series of experiments on the activity of rat hippocampal
neurons while the animals were performing spatial working memory tasks. These
and other results suggest a hippocampal cognitive map in which the
representation of place in an environment is distributed across the surface of the