The Machiavellian Mind
As I protrude along the freshly cut grass with the soles of my feet.
Billions of sensations flash; from the cacophonic chirping of songbirds,
The tessellation of azure that paints the Heavens,
The scented aroma of divine nectar,
The splashing stream of water that gives life to all that is beautiful.
Yet only O so few are honed by the conscious mind.
I say alas, one last time … Too bad all of this isn’t real.
The common perception is that the brain delivers the brain a true form of reality derived from our senses (Naïve realism). However, this is in truth is not the case; the reality that we are conscious of, are the brain’s best conjectures of reality. Every single moment of waking, conscious experience like the one mentioned above; the brain is actively creating the world around you². Anil K. Seth: a neuroscientist puts forth an important notion of the brain as a prediction engine; he argues that the brain is locked inside the skull and it is trying to figure out what ‘s out there. All that the brain is relying upon to figure out reality is through the nervous system essentially through the stream of nerve impulses that enter the brain.
Now, why is this a problem? Well, let’s look back at the evolutionary history and journey of Homo Sapiens. Hominidae (great apes) the common ancestor between apes and humans that split off from Gibbons arose around 15 million years ago. This taxonomic family then split off into several tangents, one of them eventually led to the Orang-utan, another led to the Gorilla, and lastly the Hominini taxonomic tribe which includes Chimpanzees, Bonobos, and Humans³. Humans and our closest relatives Chimpanzees and Bonobos then also split off, ultimately Homo Sapiens arose from this divide. A theory behind the split between apes and humans is that the apes dominated the jungle because of their more suited adaptions to the environment e.g longer limbs; humans were then forced to dwell in the Savannah where it significantly holds more dangerous predators, this forced humans to adapt to this new environment eventually leading to humans becoming the most superior species on Earth. In order to survive this new and harsh environment evolution needed to provide significant adaptions, and evolution doesn’t care for the well-being of humans it is primarily in the interest of evolutionary fitness in that it centres on the reproduction and survival of a given species. This indifference is the reason why we do not see reality as it is; we see reality in a manner that enables predictive decisions and actions helping us survive and propagate our genes to the next generation, hence, the notion of the brain as a prediction engine.
Since we now know that reality is not real and does not coincide with the objective world; how does the brain deceive us and what is the process? A model that I use to dissect this question is the DIKW pyramid. However, I remove the Wisdom segment of the pyramid. This is because I want to analyse the brain’s process in a more analytical and scientific manner focusing on specifically the reconstruction of reality.
The DICK model explains the process of the brain when sensing the world and how it then reconstructs reality as knowledge. Data is raw/pre-processed data, this is received as sensory input from the senses; as this is raw data it has no meaning. Once data is extracted from the senses it is immediately computed as information once it is transmitted through nerve impulses by the neurones. Through the work of Information Theory⁵ by Claude Shannon, we are able to understand that since this information is computed, the data that feeds it must also be filtered and lost as a result; this is because when transmitting a message, the receiver of this message needs to decode it and as a result wants to reduce as much noise as possible that is either trivial or fuzzy in order to gain the best possible interpretation of the message⁶. So how does the work in the brain? Data is fed by the senses and the sensory receptors in these, it is then extracted by the sensory neurones of which it then travels through its axon and synapses; transmitting to other inter-neurones. These inter-neurones form a neural pathway consisting millions to billions of neurones and billions to trillions of synaptic connections eventually reaching its final end-point the brain. Now, this is where information is then computed into knowledge; once again, this computation leads to further loss of information as the brain which is the receiver needs to decode the message and symbolically represent in a manner of which reduces noise and provides the understanding of the message. This end-point is also where information arriving from many sources and neural pathways fuses and synthesises into one body unified information where again information is reduced. This body of information eventually becomes knowledge. This knowledge provides utility, understanding, and conscious experience enabling predictive actions upon the world. This knowledge is what becomes the reality that we are conscious of. The mind in general and the brain specifically when speaking in terms of biological organisms are inherently Machiavellian because it deceives us into experiencing reality, not as it is but in a manner that is beneficial and predictive.
“Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful.”
Excerpt From: Aldous Huxley: “Doors of Perception: Heaven and Hell”
[1]: Somfy. (n.d) Interior Inspiration: Claude Monet’s Water Lillies. https://www.somfysystems.com/common/static/monet/medias/monet-waterlillies.jpg
[2]: Anil Seth. (18 July 2017) Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality. https://www.ted.com/talks/anil_seth_how_your_brain_hallucinates_your_conscious_reality?language=en
[3]: Smithsonian: National Museum of Natural History. (16 January 2019) http://humanorigins.si.edu/education/introduction-human-evolution
[4]:Wikipedia. (n.d) DIKW Pyramid. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/06/DIKW_Pyramid.svg/1200px-DIKW_Pyramid.svg.png
[5] Wikipedia. (n.d) Information Theory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory
[6]:Salley Davies. The bit bomb. https://aeon.co/essays/how-a-polymath-transformed-our-understanding-of-information
