The Revelations by Erik Hoel (e ink ebook reader txt) 📕

need to recognize that localization of all but the grossest modular function is wrong. Then start paying attention to mesoscale dynamical trajectories through continuously remade and shifting neural attractor ruins, which makes predicting or decoding brain activity as difficult as long-term prediction of the weather, but these positive Lyapunov exponents are blowing up the prediction at the order of milliseconds, not weeks. You can’t take the thing apart like a combustion engine. It’s been mathematically proven that no one can understand in any precise way the workings of even small artificial neural networks and yet everyone still thinks they can understand the brain? The only real question in all of neuroscience is: why are some neural states correlated with conscious experience? Why is any physical event accompanied by any subjective experience at all? That’s how you carve the brain at its joints. And once you have a fundamental theory of consciousness, you should be content. Let it rest. The best kind of neuroscience is the kind of neuroscience that lets you stop doing neuroscience. Why stay in the field when it’s all over, when the theoretical underpinnings are established? Why be a glorified cartographer when the borders are always changing, plastic, fractal, individuated?”

“Take a chill pill, Kierk,” Mike says as he lines up his shot.

“Take a nootropic, Mike,” Kierk bites back.

Mike makes a face like: what the fuck does that mean?

Carmen quickly calls out—“Kierk, listen for a second. Biology didn’t stop when Darwin and Wallace invented the theory of evolution by natural selection.”

“Yeah, the whole thing isn’t going to be over when we figure out how consciousness works,” Alex says.

Mike sinks the ten, but he ends up with no line of sight and is forced to split a pair of stripes and solids sitting against the far wall.

“Why not? The main task of the brain is to be conscious,” Kierk says as he looks around for a shot. “The categories cognitive neuroscience places on mental activity are just the latest in a series of fads that has been the history of psychology. Now it’s medieval humorism all over again, but this time it’s levels of dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin. An imbalance of the humors made me do it!”

He positions himself into a tight bow, his cue at a steep angle, and bounces the cue ball over the eleven to gently nudge the five into a pocket.

“Oh, what the fuck,” Mike says, his face flushing.

“You can’t get at what’s going on in the brain without talking about consciousness.” Kierk circles the table. “Neuroscientists talk about things like concepts, cognition, memory, attention. But they don’t exist in and of themselves, they only exist because a conscious process expresses them. I’m just pointing out that these terms don’t define a playable game by themselves. They’re just the shadows consciousness casts.”

Mike is shaking his head, incredulous. “There are plenty of really fucking smart people in this field, and you’re just dismissing everything they do and the arrogance is astounding. That’s all I’ll say.”

“But that doesn’t mean he’s wrong,” Carmen interrupts. “I mean, you can’t believe that there are no serious fundamental problems in this field, unless you’re wearing, you know, your research blinders.”

Kierk bounces the one off a wall at an acute angle such that it traces a slow lazy yellow line into a middle pocket. Before it even sinks, Kierk is crouching down and surveying the table at eye level, talking. “Let me put it another way. If we didn’t experience it for ourselves, and instead just had to rely on the current literature that makes up the field of neuroscience, would we have any idea, any idea at all, that mental events are bound into a single internal world of experience and that this world is egocentrically oriented around a self? Would you be able to deduce, at all, the structure of human consciousness from what we know about the brain?”

Carmen shakes her head so hard she nearly unbalances herself and falls off her stool. Alex is the only one who sees this and both Carmen and Alex are now laughing at each other, drinks clinking.

“What about my research, Kierk?” Carmen says, recovering. “Want to analyze mine? Say it’s all bullshit?”

“Nah, I read your Nature paper. You’re arguing on my side. Trying to show that consciousness isn’t localized to any part of the brain.”

“And,” Carmen adds, fluffing herself up, pretending to deliver a grand lecture, “that the vast majority of the brain participates in any one given conscious moment. Irreducibly.”

Kierk’s next target is the four, which is sitting snug against the far edge. The cue ball barely touches it but somehow, as if tugged by an invisible string, the four drifts perfectly sideways for almost half a meter along the wall, losing momentum and stopping just in front of the pocket, blocking it.

“Holy shit,” Jessica says. Mike stalks around the table angrily looking for a shot. Kierk clears his throat theatrically, as if taking stage.

“I’m sure you’ve all heard of Momus’s indictment of Hephaestus; if not, you will hear it now. Momus was asked to judge a contest between Athena, Poseidon, and Hephaestus, on who could construct the best artifact to present to Zeus. Poseidon bred a bull. Athena erected a house. But Hephaestus built an entire mechanical man who could walk and talk. As the other gods clapped and congratulated him, Momus, the god of writers and tricksters, said—‘Why Hephaestus, it is clear that you are a master craftsman. But what is also clear is that this is the worst present in the competition. You have failed in representing the fundamental nature of the thing. Would not this mechanical man be vastly superior if upon his skull there was a window through which one could see his thoughts?’ ”

Alex does a little golf clap. Carmen from her stool gives an exaggerated look of unbelief, somewhere between astonishment and mock astonishment.

Kierk continues. “Installing a pane of glass that lets you look at the gears, that’s the neural correlates of consciousness. It won’t tell