Mind and Matter — Tomás Ryan
What is mind?
The book What Is Life? — based on Schrödinger’s 1943 Trinity College Dublin lectures of the same name — is, today, often copublished with another of his books entitled Mind and Matter (1944). This book was based on his Tarner Lectures on the physical basis of consciousness delivered at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1956. In Mind and Matter, Schrödinger develops and expands on his speculations on the nature of consciousness and free will that permeated and concluded What is Life? Like countless scientists before and after him, Schrödinger wrestled with the nature of mind and its place in the material world. This struggle is illustrated by Schrödinger’s question ‘Why should an organ like our brain, with the sensorial system attached to it, of necessity consist of an enormous number of atoms, in order that its physically changing state should be in close and intimate correspondence with a highly developed thought.’ (What is Life?, 1944).
Though full of insight and wisdom, Mind and Matter did not significantly influence the scientific study of brain and mind. This is in stark contrast to What is Life?, which seeded a revolution in our understanding of genetics and biology. Schrödinger inspired the experimental studies that lead to our understanding of the structure of DNA as a double helix, which allows for the stable replication and coding of our genes. But he has not, or at least has not yet, had the same effect on our understanding of mind.
In 2018, we understand as a society much of the physical basis of life. We understand how organic life originated from inorganic chemicals. We understand how single cell organisms gradually evolved into multicellular plants and animals. We understand the universal genetic code that governs the programming of all life on Earth through DNA — and it is now trivial to sequence the whole genome of any species on the planet. We understand how to engineer our genomes to the point where many medical disorders, from cancer to infectious diseases, will eventually become things of the past.
However, these ongoing triumphs of genetics and molecular biology have yet to be paralleled by brain and cognitive sciences. We do not understand how conscious animals evolved from nonconscious organisms. We do not understand how our brains store information. We do not understand how brain activity leads to a conscious human mind with language, thoughts, and feelings. We do not understand how to adequately treat, or even explain, brain disorders ranging from Alzheimer’s disease to schizophrenia. We do not understand how to effectively manage the behaviour of our own species in order to maximise our chances of survival and achieve positive mental health in the human population.
This is why neuroscience is exciting. All science begins with ignorance, and journeys meanderingly towards the truth through the formation of new ideas and theories that are experimentally validated, or falsified, in the lab. Schrödinger was able to have a rapid effect on molecular biology because the required experimental tools, such as X-ray crystallography, had been developed by physicists and could be employed by the biologists and chemists of the day. Unfortunately the experimental tools of neuroscience have been relatively crude, until the past decade. Our ability to probe and manipulate the brain is now advancing at an exponential rate. We can now image the activity of thousands of individual brain cells in awake behaving organisms, extracting mountains of data that can be correlated with behavioural states. We can reversibly manipulate specific brain cells by turning them on and off at the speed of light using fibre optics. We activate and deactivate specific memories and emotions at will. We can genetically alter targeted areas of the brain, and for the first time in history, we are in a position to fully map the structure of the entire brain of an animal.
Owing to these technological advances, today is an extremely optimistic time for brain science. There is no doubt that the neuroscientists from 1918 would wish they were living today, and if we do our jobs well, the neuroscientists of 2118 will wish they were living today. The challenge now is to return to the spirit of Schrödinger’s original question, to develop new ideas for how the brain leads to consciousness and to find ways of sharply testing them.
For this reason, half of the Speakers at Schrödinger at 75 — The Future of Biology are neuroscientists. All of them are leaders in their respective areas of research, but collectively they represent diverse modes of thinking and doing from different generations of brain science. Each will offer their own unique perspective on the future of brain science.
From John O’Keefe’s lecture we can expect over half a century of sage perspective on the development of neuroscience and what the future may hold for the brain. Originally from New York and born to Irish emigrant parents, O’Keefe has spent the past 50 years of his research career at University College London. In 1971, he discovered place cells — brain cells that are active when an animal is in a specific spatial place. For this discovery, and the extensive research that followed from both his own lab and the field he created, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2014 (jointly with May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser). Continuing to the present day, O’Keefe’s past and current research is foundational for how we think about information coding in the brain.
What is emotion and how does the brain generate it? Representing a new generation of neuroscientists, Kay Tye combines numerous cutting edge methodologies to interrogate the circuitry underlying positive and negative emotion in both innate and learned behaviour. Currently an Associate Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Tye has made rapid progress investigating the fundamental neurobiology of emotion, for which she has received numerous accolades including the National Institute of Health Director’s New Innovator Award (2013), MIT Technology Review’s Top 35 Innovators under 35 Award (2014), and the Society for Neuroscience Young Investigator Award (2016). Tye’s dynamic work on the circuitry of emotion is exemplary for how modern techniques can allow research to progress at an unprecedented pace. From her lecture we will hear how these efforts are coming to fruition in understanding the basis of motivation and emotion.
A global perspective on brain networks can be expected from Danielle Bassett’s lecture. Like Schrödinger, Bassett is a physicist who has turned her attention to biology and brain science. She is an Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and her research employs mathematical concepts to quantify cortical connectivity and understand brain organisation. Bassett has identified functional topologies within the human brain, and studies their functional role in normal and schizophrenic individuals. In 2014 she was awarded a MacArthur (‘Genius Grant’) Fellowship as well as a Sloan Fellowship. Bassett’s work offers the most complete global picture to date of stability and change in human brain networks, and she is ideally placed to meaningfully communicate the complexity of brain function.
Of all the experimental tools that have been developed for brain research in the past few decades, none has had the impact of optogenetics. The ability to reversibly switch on and off brain cells at will with lasers at millisecond resolution using light-activatable microbial opsins was first developed by Karl Deisseroth’s team at Stanford University. As a method, optogenetics has fundamentally revolutionised how researchers go about designing and executing experiments in neuroscience on a day to day basis, and Deisseroth has been leading this field for 15 years since its inception. Amongst extensive recognition, Deisseroth has been honoured with the Brain Prize (2013), the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences (2015), and the Gairdner Foundation International Award (2018). In his lecture, we can expect to hear exciting glimpses into the near future of optogenetics, including potential applications for next generation targeted brain manipulation in human clinical patients.
Biology is the scientific study of life, but the content of this conference does not concern itself solely with the future of biology but the future of life itself. Where are we going in our evolution? A fundamental maxim in engineering is that you don’t understand something until you can build it. If we think we understand mind or intelligence at a basic level, then we should be able to replicate it artificially. Murray Shanahan and his colleagues at Google DeepMind are continuously pushing boundaries in the field of artificial intelligence. Shanahan is also Professor of Cognitive Robotics at Imperial College London, and serves on the external advisory
board for the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk. He authored The Technological Singularity, which elaborates on various scenarios following the invention of an artificial intelligence that makes better versions of itself and rapidly outcompetes humans. From Shanahan’s lecture we can expect predictions of how artificial intelligence will develop in the near future, how it is likely to behave, and how it can be used for society.
Understanding the kind of intelligence that emerged in animals over one billion years of evolution can only be achieved through studying the engineering of the brain itself. However we cannot yet adequately explain how even the simplest of animal brains leads to basic coordinated motor behaviour. A biological perspective on how to engineer computational processes will be provided by Saul Kato, who is an Assistant Professor of Neuroscience at the University of California, San Francisco. Kato brings an unconventional background to his research: having first studied physics as an undergraduate at Stanford, and then spending over a decade as an engineer and tech entrepreneur before completing his PhD at Columbia University, and Postdoctoral research in Vienna (as an EMBO Long-Term Fellow) — both in computational neuroscience. By utilising computational, engineering, and experimental approaches, Kato’s research aims to causally explain the behaviour of simple organisms, such as worms and tardigrades, in terms of the comprehensive activity of their nervous systems. This line of research aims to understand the basic foundations of cognition, for extrapolation to more complex animals in order to explain how the problem-solving computational functions of animals, still not surpassed by artificial intelligence, emerged through evolution. From Kato’s lecture, we can expect to hear a sophisticated perspective on how we can begin to reverse engineer the biological machines that control our behaviour.
The programme for Schrödinger at 75 hinges around the What is Life? keynote lecture that will be delivered by renowned philosopher and author, Daniel Dennett, who will present his vision for the Future of Life. Dennett is the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy and Co-Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. His works have drawn on virtually all fields of biology in order to produce a coherent and scientifically grounded account of consciousness. The celebrated cognitive scientist and artificial intelligence researcher, the late Marvin Minsky, referred to Dennett as: ‘Our best current philosopher. He is the next Bertrand Russell.…a student in neuroscience, linguistics, artificial intelligence, computer science, and psychology. He’s redefining and reforming the role of the philosopher’.
Dennett has published over fifteen highly influential books including Consciousness Explained, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, and Breaking the spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. His most recent book, From Bacteria to Bach and Back, deals explicitly with evolutionary origins of conscious processes in general, through a synthesis of not only evolutionary biology and neuroscience, but also cultural evolution, information theory, and linguistics. Much like Schrödinger, Dennett is adept at blending ideas from disparate fields and subfields of science, philosophy, and engineering. In doing so he cathartically takes the mystery out of consciousness by explaining, how as a phenomenon, it could plausibly evolve within the constraints of what we already know about the facts of biology. Furthermore, he provides a framework for how to consider evolutionary processes more broadly, including our own future evolution. Dennett achieves this by drawing a continuum between biological information, cultural
evolution, and artificial intelligence. As part of this work Dennett is developing a novel theory of biological information that departs from conventional wisdom, but perhaps, not Schrödinger’s. We can expect a lecture from a thinker whose boundless curiosity takes him into any intellectual terrain that a question requires, and whose rare ability for synthesis allows him to bring disparate strands of knowledge together in way that opens new doors and creatively introduces people to new scientific perspectives.
One of the most exciting uses of the technique of optogenetics has been the identification of specific memories in the rodent brain by Susumu Tonegawa and his team at MIT. The idea of the memory engram was first put forward in 1904 by the German zoologist, Richard Semon, who predicted that the engram was ‘An enduring though primarily latent modification in the irritable substance (of the brain) produced by a stimulus (experience)’. Though this idea was out of step with conservative memory research at the time, Schrödinger himself wondered — in 1964 (My View of the World) — why a biological model of Semon’s engram theory had not yet been developed, ‘important though it would be for the advancement of our knowledge’. Beginning in 2012, Tonegawa published a series of groundbreaking studies that combined optogenetics with genetic engineering in order to tag and then manipulate specific memory engrams in the mouse brain. Using this method Tonegawa and colleagues showed that memories apparently lost in various cases of amnesia could be retrieved by direct optogenetic activation of memory engrams. These studies open up many new possibilities for memory research and are allowing us to close in on the biological mechanism of information storage in the brain. Originally a molecular biologist, Tonegawa was sole recipient of the 1987 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in recognition of his groundbreaking research on the genetic origin of antibody diversity in the immune system. His relentless and uncompromising approach to research has led to numerous progressive discoveries with transformative effects on immunology, genetics, and neuroscience. From Tonegawa’s lecture at Schrödinger at 75 we can expect a broad and piercingly unbiased perspective on recent and future progress in memory research.
A unique combination of deep insights and broad perspective on mind and consciousness (and their relationship to biological information) will be provided by Mike Gazzaniga. He is Professor of Psychology and Director of the SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Gazzaniga is internationally regarded as the ‘father’ of cognitive neuroscience, and is responsible for initiating and developing human split-brain research (in collaboration with the late Roger Sperry). His research resulted in advances in our understanding of brain lateralisation and created paradigms for how the cerebral hemispheres communicate with one another. Besides his extensive research and academic writing, Gazzaniga has contributed twelve books of wide interest to the public. His writing has had a significant impact on how we understand free will, and on how neuroscience can inform law and justice systems. In his most recent book, The Consciousness Instinct: Unravelling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes the Mind (2018), Gazzaniga draws on a vast knowledge of cognitive neuroscience and neuropathology to develop a theory that consciousness is essentially a broad instinctual process, and emerges through the competition and coalition of numerous genetically encoded instincts and behavioural drives. Gazzaniga describes useful ways of explaining how consciousness could emerge through meaningful interactions across levels, from physics to psychology, and warns against attributing causation to any one specific level. Much of his thesis resonates subtly with some of Schrödinger’s ideas on information coding, in order to transcend the explanatory gaps that trouble much thinking about consciousness. In his lecture we can expect an illuminating and interdisciplinary discussion of these ideas.
To conclude Schrödinger at 75, an authoritative perspective on consciousness will be provided by Christof Koch, who is President and Chief Scientific Officer of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle. Koch is one of the world’s foremost consciousness researchers. He collaborated closely with the late Francis Crick (co-discoverer of the DNA double helix) for nearly 15 years on the neurobiological basis of consciousness. Koch’s research programme endeavours to directly locate and identify neural correlates of consciousness in the brain in order to explain the nature of the subjective mind. The author of a number of books including The Quest for Consciousness: a Neurobiological Approach (2004), and Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (2012), Koch argues that consciousness is a fundamental property that is intrinsic to networked entities such as the brain. Koch and his collaborators have developed the idea that one mind can be composed of an aggregate of ‘smaller’ minds, known as the combination problem. Since 2011, Koch has been leading a ten year big data project at the Allen Institute aimed at understanding the computations that lead from photons of lights to perception to behaviour, by observing and modelling the physical transformations of signals in the visual brain of behaving mice. This ambitious project is funded largely by Microsoft founder and philanthropist Paul Allen. Koch will deliver the Schrödinger Lecture on the Future of Consciousness, which is jointly hosted by the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies, at which Schrödinger was Director of the School of Theoretical Physics from 1940–1956. From Koch’s lecture we can expect to hear a captivating exposition of where the frontier of experimental consciousness research sits today — and where it is going — from possibly the field’s most exciting investigator.
What would Schrödinger think of biology if he was alive in 2018? I am struck by one remark he made in Mind and Matter (1956): ‘Next to want, boredom has become the worst scourge in our lives’. No one can tell us what Schrödinger would really have thought of the revolution in biology that he started. No one can actually say how Schrödinger’s views on the philosophy and science of mind might have changed in light of current data. But one thing seems fairly certain — he would not be bored.
(With 50 % certainty)
Tomás Ryan (Trinity College Dublin) is an organiser of Schrödinger at 75 — The Future of Biology. The conference takes place on Sept 5th and 6th in the National Concert Hall, Dublin, and you can watch it live here.
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