The Octopus: From Seeing with their Skin to Phenomenal Mimicry.

Approximately 600 million years ago, octopuses, cuttlefish, and squids - all of which are cephalopods - branched off from the lineage that would eventually lead to humans. The octopus’ lineage consists solely of invertebrates, including cephalopods and insects. While some insects, such as honeybees and ants, exhibit complex behaviors, their nervous systems are relatively small, with a maximum of one million neurons. However, cephalopods, particularly octopuses, are an exception to this rule, boasting approximately 500 million neurons, comparable to a dog’s brain, whereas human brains possess 16 billion neurons. Octopuses are unique creatures equipped with eight arms, each containing a mini-brain. They have a ring-shaped central brain, circulate blue blood, and are powered by three hearts. The smallest species, Octopuss arborescens, is about 2 inches long. The common octopus (Octopus vulgaris), found along the east coast of the U.S., grows up to about three feet long and the largest species, the reddish pink giant Pacific octopus (Enteroctopus dofleini), may grow to 18 feet in length.

The Earth, which is 4.5 billion years old, saw the emergence of life in the form of bacteria about 4 billion years ago. Animals appeared much later, almost a billion years ago. Octopuses and other cephalopods share a common ancestor from the Jurassic age, around 201.4 to 145 million years ago. This is when the two main cephalopod lineages diverged, one with eight arms including octopuses and another with ten arms including cuttlefish and squids. Prior to this divergence in the Jurassic age, the common ancestor had camera-like eyes with lenses, like our own, as do modern day octopuses. This suggests that two vastly different lineages developed large brains and similar vision capabilities. Despite being on completely different evolutionary paths, nature found two distinct ways to develop minds.

The skin of an octopus is akin to a 10-megapixel screen. Its outer layer, the dermis, contains chromatophores that hold color, iridophores that reflect certain light wavelengths, and leucophores that also reflect light. Despite most cephalopods reportedly being colorblind, an octopus’s skin can sense light and respond by changing its color. This discovery implies that an octopus can “see” with its skin. If the skin’s light sensing is connected to the brain, the animal’s visual skin sensitivity is also dependent on its eyes. If not, each arm might have its own independent vision. Even if the entire body can see, it appears to be in monochrome. However, a chromatophore might act as a filter over a light-sensitive cell, allowing a monochrome sensor to detect color if the organism has different colored light filters and knows which ones are in use at any given moment. Ultimately, the central nervous system is monochromatic, but to blend in with the background so amazingly, an octopus must be seeing in color with its skin to be able to match colors so well.

An interesting story of light is seen in the light producing symbiosis that has been extensively studied in the Hawaiian bobtail squid, and its relationship with the bacterium Vibrio fischeri. The bobtail has two light organs inside their mantle which houses the symbiotic luminescent bacteria. An example of quorum sensing, an act I discuss at length in my blogpost on Liquid Brains, where when enough of a common life form is present to make a quorum; with liquid brains it was with honeybees and a quorum was with getting enough, a quorum, of bees at a prospective new nest site before that site was chosen and the entire hive would then migrate to the new site. Within the bobtail squid, bacteria produce light by chemical reaction, but only if enough bacteria are around to join in. The bacteria achieve this by detecting the local concentration of an inducer molecule, which is made by the bacteria and gives each individual a sense of how many potential light producers are around. When the bacteria sense a quorum of themselves is around they start producing light, and when enough light is being produced, the squid housing the bacteria gains the benefit of camouflage. This is because the bobtail squid hunts at night when moonlight would normally cast its shadow down to predators below. Their internal glowing bacteria cancel out their shadow.

Camouflage is intrinsically linked to the process of visual perception. While it typically centers on the visual capabilities of various predators, in the case of octopuses, it also pertains to their own visual skills and the decision-making process involved in selecting a camouflage strategy. As such, the ability to modify camouflage requires the development of a method to swiftly analyze a visual scene, identify its key features, and apply an effective camouflage pattern. This represents an exceptional cognitive process that involves high-level decision-making. As just discussed above some, if not most, of the decision making is taking place at the skin level under control of mini-brains. For instance, the Cyanea octopus, found in the Pacific coral reefs, alters its appearance more than 150 times per hour while foraging for food daily. Each change is necessary as octopuses are mobile and continuously move into different visual environments. They can create patterns on their skin in as little as 200 milliseconds, which is equivalent to the speed of a human eye blink. Octopuses can sometimes mimic stones, algae, the ocean floor, and corals, for example. They can remarkably change their overall body shape, coloration and skin texture to match three-dimensional objects in the distant background.

In 2015, the first complete genomic sequence of an octopus was unveiled, and it’s astonishingly almost as large as that of humans. It also includes hundreds of genes specific to cephalopods. A significant number of these octopus-specific genes are expressed in their nervous systems, such as in their arm’s suckers, mini-brains, and central brain. This explains the diverse and unique cognitive abilities of these remarkable creatures. Additionally, octopuses engage in the highest level of RNA editing among all animal species, surpassing even humans. RNA editing is a process where, after a gene is expressed by copying its DNA template into RNA, a process known as transcription, the resulting RNA version of the gene is then cut and reconnected in various ways and locations. This process allows the animal to create a wide array of novel proteins using these edited RNAs as a guide. This is done through a process called translation, where RNA-encoded information is converted into specific types of proteins using the genetic code. This gives the octopus a significantly larger effective genome. These protein variations in the octopus’s nervous system can change the behavior of a given neuron by directly or indirectly altering its firing pattern. This provides the octopus with a multitude of ways to manipulate and control various abilities, such as its ability to see with its skin, adjust its camouflage accordingly, learn, and even think spatially.

Octopuses and other cephalopods' nervous systems are organized very differently from ours. Cephalopod literally translates to the brain on the foot. Their arms have not only the capacity to sense touch, but also detect chemicals as in smell or taste. Each sucker on an octopus' arm may have 10,000 neurons to handle taste and touch. Hunting and foraging makes good sense for the exploratory curiosity side of the octopus psyche especially their engagement with novel objects.   There seems to be a kind of mental surplus in the octopus. The capacity for several types of learning is also seen in both our own and the vastly different octopus lineage. Learning by attending to reward and punishment, by tracking what works and what does not work, seem to be invented independently several times over the course of evolution. There are also more subtle psychological similarities. Octopuses, like us, seem to have a distinction between short-term and long-term memory. Octopuses can use tools: Octopuses can manipulate objects in their environment to achieve their goals. For instance, they can use rocks or shells to cover the entrances of their dens, protecting them from predators. They can also use coconut shells as portable shelters, carrying them around and hiding inside them when needed. Some octopuses have even been observed using sponges to wipe off dirt from their bodies.

Additionally, Octopuses can learn and remember the layout of complex environments, such as mazes or novel aquariums. They can use visual cues or landmarks to find their way around and locate food or shelter. In one experiment, octopuses were able to guide one of their arms through a maze, where the octopus’ arm and its hundreds of suckers could not feel or smell its way to the food, but had to be guided to the food by the observation of the limb and food via its camera eyes and the central brain, demonstrating that they can control their limbs independently and conduct them centrally while at the same time allow the limbs the freedom to explore on their own. I am tempted to call the octopus as having a Glassy Brain, that is, it is mostly solid, a large central nervous system, but at the same time having a liquid aspect, much like glass, which is technically a liquid, with the freedom displayed by their highly innervated and exploratory arms and suckers.

Octopuses can apply their knowledge and skills to novel situations and challenges. They can figure out how to open jars, boxes, or puzzles that contain food or other rewards. They can also learn from observation or experience how to escape from traps, nets, or tanks. Some octopuses have even been reported to display mischievous or playful behavior, such as squirting water at humans, playing with items, such as a plastic pill bottle that they repeatedly push into the stream of water circulating in their tank to watch it get shot out across the surface of the water in their tank and then retrieving it to start the process over again for ten times in a row in some cases for no other reason than they find it amusing. Octopuses can distinguish between different individuals, both of their own species and others. They can also recognize human caretakers based on their faces or clothing. Some octopuses have shown preferences or aversions toward certain humans, depending on how they were treated by them. They can also display different personalities and moods.

Perhaps the most impressive display of intelligence in octopuses is their ability to mimic other animals. Not only can they alter their appearance to blend with their surroundings, but they can also impersonate other creatures. The mimic octopus (Thaumoctopus mimicus) is a virtuoso in this regard, capable of imitating over 15 different species, such as highly poisonous sea snakes, lionfish, flatfish, and jellyfish. This mimicry serves to deter predators, lure prey, and confound competitors. Residing in the Indo-Pacific region, the mimic octopus faces numerous predators and competitors. Interestingly, the mimic octopus isn’t born with the ability to specifically mimic; it acquires this skill through observation and experimentation. It can also tailor its mimicry based on the situation and the observer. For instance, it might impersonate a sea snake when faced with a damselfish, known to be afraid of sea snakes, or a highly venomous lionfish when confronted with a large predator, or even a poisonous flatfish when traversing open sand, where it’s exposed to predators.

The mimic octopus naturally exhibits a light brown or beige color and shows a preference for river mouths and estuaries over reefs, which are typically favored by other octopus species for shelter and protection from predators. This habitat preference of the mimic octopus is attributed to its unique ability to mimic toxic animals, thereby reducing its risk of predation in open areas. The mimic octopus not only uses its mimicry defensively against predators, but also employs mimicry to approach cautious prey. For instance, it can imitate a crab’s potential mate, only to then consume the unsuspecting prey. The mimic octopus is not just intelligent, but also inventive and adaptable. It can even merge different mimics to create unique forms, like a half-sea snake and half-flatfish. This remarkable cognitive and behavioral complexity challenges our comprehension of animal intelligence. Scientists theorize that such behavior necessitates advanced cognitive abilities; it must comprehend how other animals perceive it and how it can manipulate their expectations by changing its appearance. Moreover, it must be capable of modifying its imitation strategy based on context; all demonstrations of advanced cognitive abilities. It has often been postulated that octopuses live a difficult life in environments dominated by vertebrate predators and that these evolutionary selective pressures crafted the highly intelligent, incredibly resourceful, and quite successful octopus species seen alive today. “Given all the remarkable capabilities that octopuses indeed have, I find it impossible that these extraordinary creatures are not conscious.”

Further Reading:

Baker, Beth (2010). "Unusual Adaptations: Evolution of the Mimic Octopus". BioScience. 60 (11): 962–962.

Peter Godfrey-Smith (2016). Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Roger Hanlon, Michael Vecchione, Louise Allcock: (2018) Octopus, Squid & Cuttlefish: A Visual, Scientific Guide to the Oceans’ Most Advanced Invertebrates. The University of Chicago Press.

Harmon, Katherine (2013). "Mimic Octopus Makes Home on Great Barrier Reef". Scientific American.

"Mimic Octopuses". Marinebio.org. 2017.

John Roach (2001). "Newfound Octopus Impersonates Fish, Snakes". National Geographic.

 

 

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Beyond the Mind: Source, the Foundation of Reality

Mind: I would strongly suggest that before reading further you read my blog post “The Mind: Who you are at any given moment.” To recap briefly: The world has a memory source outside of our minds. I use the word memory as in memory where a table becomes a table again even when it has been unobserved for a time, but that is not the whole story. When I gaze upon the computer monitor in front of me it is in my mind, and when I blink my eyes, the monitor remains where it was – memory. All of my sensory perceptions such as blue, rough, and sweet have to have a source and a way of processing that information. A brain processes the sensory input from a source into the experiences or qualia of what we can call mind. Everywhere I look, hear, smell, touch, taste I am confronted with my mind, which has been constructed by my brain from the emissions of sources, e.g. photons, electrons etc. from tables, computer monitors, and everything else that is being observed. So, source can be defined as a memory source that delivers the necessary information (photons e.g.) that a conscious observer requires to instantiate a table or anything else for that matter in their mind. It is also everything that a conscious observer is not currently observing.

What best describes reality in the universe we live in? Two major schools of thought are Idealism and Materialism. Idealism: From Wikipedia: "Idealism proposes that the essential nature of reality lies in consciousness or reason. It suggests that only the perceptible is real, or that only mental states or entities are knowable. It asserts that reality is equivalent to mind, spirit, or consciousness; that reality is entirely a mental construct, or that ideas are the highest form of reality or have the greatest claim to being considered ‘real’." Thus, according to idealism everything is in your mind. Materialism: From Wikipedia: "Materialism emphasizes the primacy of physical matter in the interpretation of reality. Here are some key aspects of materialism: It is a theory that physical matter is the only or fundamental reality and that all beings, processes, and phenomena can be explained as manifestations or results of matter. It holds that matter is the fundamental substance in nature, and that all things, including mental states and consciousness, are results of material interactions. It directly contrasts with idealism, which asserts that consciousness is the fundamental substance of nature." Thus, with materialism there exists solid things in the universe other than what is in your mind. It should be noted that recent quantum mechanical experiments point to Idealism as the fundamental description of reality. However, the final decision remains to be determined, and as I will describe below, I propose a different view: source is the fundamental unit of reality.

Source: Mind is everything one encounters in life, which is in agreement with Idealism, but that is not the only thing in the universe. Far from it, there is source, which is not exactly Materialism either, the caveat being that source is special, it is pre-matter, a memory system. Source is simply the supplier, from the world, of all of our sensory perceptions. The computer screen that I am now looking at is source, as it is sending photons of light to me and my sensory visual system of my brain, which then converts this into a picture in my mind. Hence, what we see, hear, touch, smell and taste are all from different kinds of source. For example, I just lifted my voice recorder from the table that it sits on and I see that the table is contiguous cherrywood, but when I put the voice recorder back down, what is underneath it loses its cherrywood color because the color is constructed in my brain and produced in my mind, as is the voice recorder itself. Now what if I turn the voice recorder on and don’t pay attention to it and keep talking it will record, so that when I play it back at a later date I will hear what I recorded. There is nothing spooky about it, the voice recorder functions whether I’m paying attention to it or not. This is an argument against Idealism, as is the table in the room that remains a table even if no one is conscious of its existence. The argument is that if there is no conscious observer present yet the world wags on so to speak in a predictable manner based on a memory system. What I do know, is that my computer monitor is in front of the wall in some way, so that the photons that my brain constructs the room with come from the screen and not the wall behind it. So even if space doesn’t exist outside of the mind, a prediction of an extreme version of Idealism, the source has precedent, that is, things are in front of or on top of other things. I used to joke with my wife about what I called the Kidney Conundrum: if I’m not paying attention to it, if I can’t see it, and if I can’t experience it, thus if everything is in my mind how does it work? According to an Idealist, the kidney only comes into function retroactively from me urinating, hence the conundrum. With my view of the source the kidney is kept in a decohered state, defined by everything around it. I like this view much better than having to think that the past has to be created anew every moment. In quantum mechanics, there is a mathematical formula that defines a wave function that describes amplitudes or likelihoods of things occurring, such as the possible location of an electron. When an electron is detected in a particular place that means the previously coherent wave function has collapsed into a particular state, i.e. the electron itself, and all the other possible places the electron might be, are eliminated. As far as the source goes, I believe an unobserved table, for example, is in a decohered state. Thus, the coherent wave function of the pre-table source has been collapsed (decohered) by the constant bombardment of particles from the environment, not by a conscious observer as Idealism demands. The quantum mechanical coherent state of all the atoms in the table are nearly instantaneously decohered by the immediate barrage of particles from their environment, i.e. the table itself. What this decohered table actually looks like is impossible to say as we are only privy to our brain-constructed, mind-made image of the table. My mind is externalized; everything I perceive is my mind. The rest is source. By observing the table, it becomes instantiated in my mind from the source (pre-table) and my brain (the instantiating instrument). Hence, the source is a memory system, and it remembers how to present the table to me when I observe it again. Prior to observing the table, it is not completely undefined, but instead it is decohered source. Weirdness of Source: This brings me to a thought experiment: I was looking at a can of soda and thinking, what if someone else was looking at the same can? We would both be receiving photons, importantly different photons, would be reaching our eyes so in fact we would each be seeing a different can. Does this mean we're each in different universes? This multiverse view of things is quite different from Everett’s multiverse. In his version the universes do not interact in any way. This implies strongly that your source and my source are different even though we may be looking at the exact same thing. In the same way our conscious experience is different, our internal ‘I’s, our feeling of self-hood must be derived from our own unique internal source. The source is a memory system; what is the brain except for a memory system and a processor? Source in Review: We use source to create the world around us, when I am in non-REM sleep the entire world is source. When I start dreaming or when I wake up, source is converted into my mind, which is everything I peruse. From a source's point of view, I am taking the information it is supplying me with and creating a world with it. The brain is a world maker and that world we call the mind. The brain makes the world out of source. So, there isn’t a mind-body problem, there is just mind and source. So, to summarize source, it is everything that you’re not consciously aware of, hence it is not mind. Source is decohered pre-matter that carries out most everything that happens, from keeping car engines running, to having your brain process visual information such that it will soon become a picture in your mind. Though I do believe everything we encounter is our mind, I believe that space is created from source, and that it has precedence such as in front of, on top of etc. Source is in everything, it is a memory system, it has precedence, it is inanimate and animate, and it is everything that is not mind. So finally, what is reality? It is a construct that is dependent upon our brains converting sensory information from sources into our minds. Thus, source is the foundation of reality, and the defining entity of all of our perceptions.

The Simulation Hypothesis and Source: What I liked about the simulation hypothesis, the idea that we are living in a simulated universe ala The Matrix, is that it states, like a game, you only have to instantiate what you are looking at currently. This is an odd enactment of a conservation of energy principle. This weirds me out a little, as the limits of my visual field are all that are instantiated in my simulation just like a game program. The room next door is kept in memory as an object of source. In a simulation, the source fits in very nicely with this. The source would be everything that isn’t instantiated on the processor. Decohered source would simply be an object in memory waiting to be put on the stack of the processor. When I first thought of the source, I got the name from what I called a memory source and thought of it as part of a computer program. The processing speed of the simulation is at a maximum at the speed of light. Time slows down near energy sources/mass due to heavy processing requirements in a simulated universe. The startup of this universe from nothing is like a computer game booting up explaining the Big Bang. There is more than what we can see with our minds; there is the rest of the program. Decohered matter would simply be an object already constructed ready to be brought online. Source is what’s running in the background, like the subconscious of the brain most of what happens in a computer you do not see. Even with the nice fit with source, and other physical consistencies, I personally am not a huge fan of the simulation hypothesis unless someone can figure out a way to make it falsifiable (it is currently unprovable by scientific experimentation.) Further Reading: Sean Carroll (2019): “Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime.” Dutton.

Robert Lanza, Matej Pavsic, Bob Berman (2020). “The Grand Biocentric Design: How Life Creates Reality.” BenBella Books.

Anil Seth (2021): “Being You: A New Science of Consciousness.” Dutton.

Rizwan Virk (2019): “The Simulation Hypothesis: An MIT Computer Scientist Shows Why AI, Quantum Physics and Eastern Mystics All Agree We Are In A Video Game.” Bayview Books

The Evolution of Language: From Howls to Hamlet

 As our most powerful tool, language not only allows for communication and reading and writing but also for thinking. Languages are hierarchical in that they have phrases, clauses, sentences, etc. Additionally, languages have syntax (grammar), which gives sentences structure. Ants, Bees, and Birds all have primitive languages; pointing and screeching are parts of a language and even emotions are a language. In the 100,000 years of Homo sapiens existence there was no higher thought until the emergence of a complex language occurred, which may have arisen 50,000 years ago, as this time marks the emergence of symbolic representations such as dolls and cave paintings.

Written language, however, only emerged just over 5,000 years ago when Egyptians wrote pictorial hieroglyphics focusing on images of animals, outward anatomy, tools, etc. The meaning of hieroglyphics remained a mystery until one of the greatest finds in all of archaeological history: the famed Rosetta stone was discovered in 1799 by a Napoleonic soldier in the Nile River Delta, and has three sections; Egyptian hieroglyphics, Egyptian Demotic script, and ancient Greek. The ancient Greek allowed the deciphering of the Egyptian hieroglyphics. 

I once asked my mother, a poet, English professor, feminist, and lesbian, ‘Who was the best writer?’ She didn’t hesitate, ‘Shakespeare.’ Have we reached the pinnacle in writing? Some think so, but I am reminded that until 1905, for three hundred years scientists thought Newtonian mechanics was the last word, but then came around a 26-year-old upstart named Einstein. Elaboration of Quantum Mechanics would follow and yet there still remains a mystery over the merging of general relativity with quantum theory. So, keep on writing and keep on thinking. Now back to the language of Shakespeare, Yeats, and Woolf.

There are two language areas in the human brain that have received the most attention; the first is Broca’s area, discovered by the French physician Pierre Paul Broca who first recognized the condition known as Broca’s aphasia in 1861. This area when damaged, by a stroke for example, leaves the patient’s speech and grammatical systems severely impaired as well as their use of verbs.  Broca aphasiacs still generally retain good comprehension, with the damaged areas located in the left frontal cortex. The second major language area, located in the left temporal lobe, was identified by the German neurologist Carl Wernicke who published his first work on aphasia in 1874. This type of aphasia is characterized by impaired comprehension of spoken words and sentences, while the production of speech may not be very affected. Patients have normal fluency and prosody, but sadly they speak fluent gibberish. The left hemisphere is the dominant hemisphere for language and logic, while the right hemisphere is known as the emotive and creative side.

The question at hand is how did a complex language, complete with a 100,000-word lexicon (vocabulary), and meaning system, as well as our grammar (syntactic) system, evolve from grunts, shrieks and cries? Clearly, we did not evolve in a single step from a grunt to Hamlet, although some leading linguists believe our language abilities did emerge from just such a leap; in a single bound as it were. According to American Noam Chomsky, language is not a product of culture or learning, but a biological feature of the human mind. Chomsky's universal grammar theory implies that language is not a result of natural selection, but a sudden and mysterious emergence in human evolution. He suggests that language may have originated from a single genetic mutation, giving rise to the capacity for complex and creative thought. According to Chomsky, universal grammar is a biological component of the language faculty that allows children to acquire any natural language with minimal input from their environment. Chomsky professes a ‘Merge’ function in which words or groups of words are merged to form grammar, e.g. [the, man] are Merged into {the man} and this Merge could not have occurred partially. That is, there is no state of half merged, hence he argues that grammar emerged in a single step. This would have occurred in Broca’s area, the grammatical area of the brain. He later goes on to write that semantic/meaning aspects of language are mysterious, which leaves a gaping hole in his one step language acquisition model.

Meaning, and associated qualia-based (experiential conscious) comprehension are the ingredients missing from AI. Once an artificially intelligent agent can actually comprehend the qualia that is being said to them, they will have achieved the singularity. It is clear that almost all animals possess some form of comprehension, so that lexical/semantic (i.e. meaning) aspects of language are ancient and evolved over time. That is, emotive warning cries, by nonhuman primates for example, carry meaning and are comprehended as such. In fact, pre-human hominids already had at least one meaning region of their brains, which they used to build complex tools and weapons. One such region of the brain, Wernicke’s, could then be hijacked for a language system, as Broca’s area was later selected for grammar. How qualia-based comprehension occurs is unknown and is one of the most important questions remaining unanswered by science. 

Evolution via Punctuated Equilibrium, which American Stephen Jay Gould professed, supposedly occurs after long periods of stasis, say four million years, followed by sudden emergence of new species. In such a scenario the acquisition of language might occur quite rapidly. In favor of Punctuated Equilibrium, over Natural Selection, there are few intermediate forms in the fossil record, whereas Darwin’s gradualism predicted there would be such intermediates. However, not surprisingly, soft tissue does not usually survive eons to make fossils, and most evolution takes place within soft tissue. The human brain most likely underwent Darwinian Natural Selection during those one hundred thousand years without an increase in skull size. Gould proposed that language evolved not for communication but for thought. Gould, somewhat surprisingly, criticized the idea that language had a single origin or a universal grammar, and suggested that linguistic diversity was a result of historical and cultural factors. 

Indian neurobiologist V.S. Ramachandran raised an important point about the region in the frontal cortex that houses Broca’s area; it’s rich in mirror neurons. Mirror neurons let us mimic others’ actions as the name states. He argued that the motor areas for the use of tools, for example, could be mimicked by the Broca’s region into step wise grammar evolution. The use of a tool is a grammar in itself; ‘tool user’ (subject) ‘cut’ (verb) ‘twig’ (object). This leaves it to the relatively recent acquisition of Broca’s syntactical (grammar) area for pairing with Wernicke’s area (comprehension), which must have been in place prior to humans. Inner speech has been implicated to Broca's area, and thinking can be seen as a motor activity.

Colombian born neurobiologist Alfredo Ardila argued “that the modern syntacticized language and the development of metacognitive executive functions are simply two sides of the same coin.” That is, the acquisition of grammar was the crucial step in what makes humans human. He may have been right.

A fascinating aspect of noun storage is that different categories of nouns have their own storage locales in the human brain. For example, tools are stored together in the motor cortex. Vegetables/fruits and animals also have their own separate storage locales. It is clear that by categorizing nouns by type, the unconscious brain comprehends the meaning of these words.

Comprehension is a hierarchy from single words, to clauses, onto sentences and beyond. Single word comprehension is averred to be done by the brain calling up word meaning from a lexicon, a mental dictionary. For some time, many cognitive scientists have been under the illusion that sentence comprehension occurred by the simple integration of the individual word’s lexicons. This sounds reasonable, but if you think about what goes into language, that it is laden with emotional clauses, innuendos, inferences to be gleaned that are barely visible on its surface it seems highly unlikely that a complex language is just an amalgamation of dictionary entries. In the human brain, besides the left temporal lobe-Wernicke’s area, there are two top-down frontal cortical regions that are also implicated to be critical for sentence comprehension. The combined network gives the appearance of an assembly line for increasingly more complex processing leading up to conscious comprehension.

With the advent of modern genomic science, the hand-waving associated with linguistic squabbles might be nearing an end. For example, an English family usually referred to as the KE family had members that presented important abnormalities in language development. This disorder was associated with a mutation in the FOXP2 gene. FOXP2 plays important roles in brain development, including the growth of nerve cells (neurons) and the transmission of signals between them. It is also involved in synaptic plasticity, which is the ability of connections between neurons (synapses) to change and adapt to experience over time. Synaptic plasticity is necessary for learning and memory. Mutations in other genes such as ERC1 and BCL11A, have been identified in language pathologies. Research has identified FOXP1 and TBR1, their target genes, such as CNTNAP2, while additional candidate genes such as ROBO1, ROBO2, and KIAA0319 have all been associated with human language deficits. It is clear that the one mutation, sudden emergence of complex language of Chomsky seems unlikely.

Over twenty years ago, I had the insight that the human brain operated under evolutionary control. That is, mechanisms such as duplications, mutations, juxtapositions, inversions, etc. along with feedback selection were at the heart of neuropathways, and higher cognitive function. These evolutionary moves operated via the rapid changing of synaptic strengths and even the turnover of synapses in the brain. Some 18 years later, Belgian Luc Steels and Hungarian Eörs Szathmáry published a paper on “The Evolutionary Dynamics of Language" where they propose that language evolves to “relate meaning with form through the intermediary of syntactic and semantic categories” thereby comparing language function to the evolution of species and the adaptive immune system. I am certain they are correct. 

Further reading:

Alfredo Ardila (2015). “A Proposed Neurological Interpretation of Language Evolution.” Behav. Neurol. Jun 1.  

Robert C. Berwick and Noam Chomsky (2016). “Why Only Us; Language and Evolution.” Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

T.G. Bever, N. Chomsky, S. Fong, M. Piattelli-Palmarini (2023). “Even Deeper Problems with Neural Network Models of Language.” Behav. Brain Sci. Dec 6; 46.

S.E. Fisher (2017). “Evolution of language: Lessons from the genome.” Psychon. Bull. Rev. Feb; 24(1):34-40.

Stephen Jay Gould (2002). “The Structure of Evolutionary Theory.”  Harvard University Press.

V.S. Ramachandran (2012). “The Tell-Tale Brain.”  Random House. 

Luc Steels and Eörs Szathmáry (2018). “The Evolutionary Dynamics of Language.” Biosystems Volume 164, February, 128-137.

The Mind: Who you are at any given moment.

What is the mind? It is elusive, and it is the product of conscious awareness, which is a product of the brain. The mind is the sum total of all the information you are aware of at any point in time, whether it be a song, a thought, a full moon, whatever you happen to be cognizant of at any given moment. Everyone’s mind is different because the way we see the world depends on our past experiences, and our physical makeup. All senses combine to make up the mind, so if you press your foot against the floor your foot becomes part of your mind. Your mind is who you are at any given moment. A neural network forms a memory system that keeps your mind familiar when it becomes instantiated into conscious awareness. Call the core processes a personality. Your brain goes to great lengths to keep your mind together mainly by discarding the vast majority of the information our sensory systems take in; for example, the visual sensory system processes about 10,000,000 bits per second, while our thought rate is only 40 bits per second.

In 1909 a man ahead of his time, named Jakob von Uexküll, coined the term umwelt to represent the perceptive mass of any species. In the same environment each species has its own unique viewpoint i.e. umwelt. Worlds within worlds. What do blue birds see, or feel? Are they conscious? What is their umwelt? Certainly, all primates are conscious, they feel pain, they solve problems, and they have minds. Part of our umwelt is what we think of course. If you take that away most humans umwelten (the plural of umwelt) are probably very similar. In our umwelt we share emotions, and we are thinking machines. Let’s delve into the mind.

Nobel Laureate Eric Kandel pointed out two startling ramifications about vision. 

1. We do not have direct access to the real world.

2. Vision is not a window on the world but a creation of the brain.

In a very brief overview, a 2D image on the retina is converted into a 3D image in the brain. Once visual information in the eye has been transduced and reaches the optic nerve it soon arrives at the visual cortex where contrast, color and motion are analyzed in different regions of the cortex. Information is sent forward where, for example, contours are analyzed, and the foreground is separated from the background. Object recognition uses memory in the temporal lobe as part of the ventral ‘what’ pathway that identifies the object. Simultaneously information is sent to the dorsal ‘where’ pathway in the parietal lobe to determine the object’s location in space. As Kandel pointed out, the key to visual processing is that the image that we see has been constructed for us by our brains. This general concept applies equally to all sensory systems. Our brain constructs what we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch.

When I was a child, my mother brought me to a smoke-filled college auditorium to see the Beatles’ movie Yellow Submarine. About halfway through the animated feature there was a lull in the action, and I turned to my mother and said, “I feel funny.” The entire theatre broke out laughing, quite proud to have gotten a five-year-old stoned. Hey, it was the sixties. I remembered George Harrison’s character saying, ‘It’s all in your mind.’ I did not understand what he meant until many years later while I read Walden by Henry David Thoreau. Knowing that our brains constructed our world brought home the idea that everything I sensed was a creation of my mind as Kandel implied. At the time I became convinced that George Harrison was right. It was all in my mind.

That leaves me at Caltech where I met Steven Hawking after a seminar of his on the birth of the universe. I did say we met. Well, we didn’t exactly meet in the traditional sense, instead Hawking ran over my foot with his electric wheelchair. I wasn’t watching out; I made my profuse apologies and Hawking smiled broadly and then scooted away. That incident didn’t trouble me about Steven Hawking, but when he later wrote about a table in a room that stays in the room even after you leave troubled me greatly. Why was he writing about tables? Then it hit me. I was devastated. If everything was in my mind, why didn’t the world change when I didn’t watch it? Why didn’t my computer turn into a tomato when I was away from my desk? If I look away, my computer monitor remains in front of me when I look back: every single time! There must be a memory source outside of my mind! Tables! What this memory source looks like or feels like is impossible to say because what I experience is in my mind. In fact, it is my mind.

Hold on to your hats. Now I ask you a simple question; where is the image of the words you are now reading? Take a moment…clearly the answer is inside your mind. Look around your room and see that it too is inside your mind. All you will ever see is constructed inside your mind. Memories alter what you see and work very hard keeping your act together. The whole world just got even more subjective. The mind externalizes our senses so that the world is out there, and to help situate yourself in that world. 

David Chalmers first formulated the so-called hard problem of consciousness, that is, how are electrochemical signals in the brain converted into actual experiences such as pleasure and pain? That’s opposed to easy questions such as what neurotransmitters affect a cognitive state. I believe a definition such as a ‘state of focused awareness’ captures the important aspects of consciousness including self-awareness. The other is that consciousness is the act of experiencing qualia. Qualia are just experiences such as seeing blue, tasting chocolate, hearing a piano, etc. Another big question is what material is the mind made of. Surely it has a neuronal electrochemical basis, but how is this transformed into a flaming red Maple tree in autumn or the taste of a Lemon Meringue pie? Both of which are products of the mind. If a Maple falls in the woods and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound? No! Only minds make sounds, falling trees make air waves. Considering von Uexküll’s umwelt, what would an ant think of a towering maple tree? Which is the right umwelt? Whose world is the real world? According to Kandel, we don’t get to see the real world; our reality is a construct full of biases and memory driven inconsistencies.  

At one time in my life between my Walden elation and Hawking deflation I thought everything was in my mind. Now I ascribe to the memory system of the universe. How else could the logic of the world stay so normal? Normal in the sense that a table remains a table when no one is looking. Actually, it doesn’t remain a table, that is a mind made object, what remains is the memory system that collaborates with the brain to instantiate a table only when it is gazed upon or felt. What can we say about this memory source? I like the name source as in the source of our minds, but I do not imply any religious significance. The main point is that everywhere I look, hear, smell, touch, and taste I am confronted with my mind which has been constructed by my brain from the emissions of sources, such as light or I should say pre-light (photons), as light is a product of the mind. For example, you are walking along in your bare feet thinking about what to have for dinner when suddenly you stub your toe. Ouch! Prior to stubbing your toe, your toe was not part of your mind, but immediately afterwards your toe’s ‘pain’ neurons send a signal to your brain, which are then instantiated into the sensation of pain creating your toe in your mind. Prior to instantiation in your mind your toe was source. We can describe our worlds and infer what source must be doing based on observations and throw science at it continually bringing the unknown to the known, and darkness into the light of our minds. More on source in a future blog post, and its implications on the universe as a potential computer or even a simulation.

Further reading: 

David Chalmers (1995). "Facing up to the problem of consciousness." Journal of Consciousness Studies. 2 (3): 200–219. 

Eric Kandel (2012). “The Age of Insight.” Random House.

Eric Kandel, John D. Koester, Sarah H. Mack, Steven Siegelbaum (2021). “Principles of Neural Science, 6th Edition.” McGraw Hill.

Donald Hoffman (2019). “The Case Against Reality.” Penguin.

Tor Norretranders (1999). “The User Illusion.” Penguin.

Liquid Brains: A Different View of Intelligence

Liquid brains are the distributed and dynamic ways of information processing in social insect colonies, slime molds, bird flocks, fish schools, and even the immune system. Unlike solid brains, which are fixed in size and shape, liquid brains can change their volume and form depending on the situation. Liquid brains are composed of individuals that act as neurons, transmitting signals through their interactions with each other and the environment. Liquid brains can also store and retrieve memories, coordinate tasks, learn from experience, and adapt to changing conditions without a central leader or a centralized sophisticated brain. 

Solid brains, such as the human brain, exhibit what is termed a small-world architecture. That is most connections are local in nature, while some are not, and these long-range connections carry the group consensus to other portions of the brain. These long-range nerve tracts the so-called rich club are the most active in the brain, and they are particularly good for quick solutions to problems. But if the quick response is met with negative feedback, then a more elegant solution is required and searching among the local small-world component neurons takes place until a new more accurate consensus is reached. The same phenomenon occurs with liquid brains. In bees for example, there is a rich club of individual bees who are termed elites that function at a significantly higher level than the average hive mate and it is this rich club of bees that serve to best find food sources and potential new hive sites, which are then searched by local small-world bees that follow the elite’s instructions that are dictated by a waggle dance (see below).

Decisions are ultimately made by quorum sensing, an emergent phenomenon of greater intelligence than that of the individual bees. Quorum sensing is a democratic process in which individual agents, such as bacteria, fungi, insects, and even neurons in monkey brains communicate with each other and coordinate their actions based on the number and quality of signals they receive from their peers until a quorum level of consensus (say 80% in agreement) is reached. Once the consensus has been reached the group takes the appropriate action. It is an amazing example of how animals can achieve complex and intelligent outcomes without a central authority or leader. By using simple rules and local interactions, they can solve problems that require collective wisdom and consensus. Quorum sensing also shows how nature can inspire new solutions for human challenges, such as distributed computing, network optimization, and social coordination.

You might be asking yourself, “Don’t social insects like bees and ants have Queens?” They do, but they are not part of the executive functions such as decision making, instead they are relegated to mating and egg laying, for which they may lay up to 2 million eggs in their lifetime in some species.

Liquid brains are themselves an example of an emergent phenomenon where the capabilities of the whole are greater than the sum of its parts. Emergent phenomena such as the development of a multicellular embryo proceeds without a leader, an executive, and the embryo as a whole is also greater than the sum of its parts. Thus, emergence can be defined as a Gestalt that leads to a dramatic decrease in description length. To paraphrase Sean Carroll the uncountable number of quantum interactions going on in front of me can be reduced into a single word a table.

One way to understand the intelligence of liquid brains is the ability of a group of individuals to solve problems that are beyond the capabilities of a single individual. These emergent properties are self-organized and robust. They rely on positive and negative feedback mechanisms that regulate its dynamics. For example, if a food source is discovered by a scout bee, it will return to the hive and perform a waggle dance that indicates the direction and distance of the food. The vigor and length of the dance indicates the quality of the food source. The more bees that visit the food source, the more they will recruit others, creating a positive feedback loop that amplifies the signal. However, if the food source becomes depleted or less attractive, the bees will stop visiting it and stop recruiting others, creating a negative feedback loop that dampens the signal. This way, the group as a whole can allocate its resources efficiently and avoid wasting time and energy on unprofitable options.

Finally, one of the most striking examples of how a liquid brain functions is the process of nest-site selection in honeybees. When a colony needs to relocate to a new nest site, such as when it swarms or when its current nest is destroyed, it faces a complex decision problem that involves multiple nest criteria, such as the size, shape, orientation, entrance size, cavity volume, insulation, etc. First, a small fraction of the colony (about 5%, elites), act as scouts that search for potential nest sites in the surrounding area. Each scout evaluates a site based on its own criteria and preferences and returns to the swarm cluster to report its findings. The scout performs a waggle dance that encodes the quality and location of the site. Second, each scout that visits a site compares it with other sites that it has visited before, by the amount and quality of the waggle dancing that is currently going on for the alternative sites. Finally, as more scouts visit more sites and exchange more information, a collective preference emerges among them. Eventually, one site will gain enough support from enough scouts to reach a quorum sensing threshold that triggers a decision. The scouts that have agreed on this site will then stop dancing and start producing a piping sound that signals their readiness to move. The piping sound will spread throughout the swarm cluster and induce the other bees to follow the elites to their new home.

Liquid brains challenge our conventional notions of intelligence and cognition, showing that complex behaviors can emerge from simple interactions among many agents. Liquid brains are truly amazing in their abilities, without a central leader, to perform higher-level cognitive functions, such as decision making, memory storage and retrieval, asset allocation, learning from experience, and adapting to novel stimuli and environments.

Further reading:

Stephen Buchmann (2023) What a Bee Knows. Island Press.

György Buzsáki (2019). The Brain from Inside Out. Oxford University Press. 

Seeley, T.D., Visscher, P.K., Schlegel, T., Hogan, P.M., Franks, N.R., & Marshall, J.A.R. (2007). Stop signals provide cross inhibition in collective decision-making by honeybee swarms. Science, 335(6064).

Solé R, Moses M, Forrest S. (2019). Liquid brains, solid brains. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. Jun 10; 374(1774).

Len Bogarad Art Please click to view my paintings.