The one fact about the brain upon which Harth builds his theory of the Creative Loop is the fact that there are major connections from higher cortical brain regions back to lower cortical regions and sub-cortical regions. Here, higher and lower just mean the relative position in a neural network; closer to a sensory input organ is lower, further removed from the sensory input cells by synaptic connections between cells in interconnected regions of the brain is higher. The role of these backwards connections in the nervous system has become a central feature of many modern theories of brain function. Harth politely refers to the importance of these reciprocal or reentrant connections in Gerald Edelman's theory of brain function. Francis Crick has also made the return of signals along these downward channels central to his theory of visual awareness.
Harth is on solid ground here, and does a good job of using powerful analogies and flowery language to make the importance of these connections come alive. To my knowledge, nobody has done a better job of giving an accessible popularization of the idea that our brains can produce thoughts that are our high-level internal representations of the external world and that these thoughts can function as a code-generating system that sends signals downward to lower brain regions in order to activate cells in these lower brain regions that hold more details about sensory inputs than do the more general cells of the higher brain regions. Harth's idea of an optimization process that makes use of this loop from higher to lower brain regions and back up to the higher brain regions to allow us to think about the world is entirely analogous to what has been studied under the name of Winner Take All (or just WTA) algorithms for explaining how a brain can focus one's attention on the most important feature in ones visual environment.
Harth has done a real service to neuroscience in championing his idea of this Creative Loop, and I would recommend the first 9 chapters of The Creative Loop to the general public as an introduction to the issue of how a brain makes a mind. The main positive aspect of Harth's presentation is that he has attempted to avoid jargon and make the ideas accessible to a general reader. The remaining 6 chapters (fewer chapters, but they are more than half the pages in the book) are another story. Polite biologists like Gerald Edelman and Francis Crick have previously politely dismissed the silly consciousness-related ideas of physicists like Penrose. The 1990s have brought a flood of such flaky science to the discussion of how brains make minds. Personally, I have reached the point where I cant let this torrent of nonsense continue to freely pollute on-going discussion of the topic that I am most interested in. Just as the world (and particularly the WWW) is over-run by crap flowing from the creationist spigot, we are up to our knees in Phowl Physics Pharces. In this case, it is even worse than most of the creationism drek, because the Phowl Physics is presented in a pseudo-scientific fashion by scientists.
Harth's story of the Creative Loop does not explain how a brain makes a mind. What else is important? I would suggest at least one additional issue: memory. Memory research is a field of study where neuroscience continues to struggle to elucidate the details of how memories are stored in brain tissue and then recalled at later times. Such memory processes are fundamental to the function of Harth's Creative Loop. Unfortunately, Harth not only ignores the modern study of the cellular and molecular basis of memory, but he openly states his prejudice that the details of brain function are so inaccessible and complex and smothered in chaotic noise effects that the standard neuroscience hypothesis that behavior can be explained in terms of brain structure and function can never be subjected to empirical test and has no predictive value
Harth's closest approach to the world of neuroscience could have come in his Chapter 10 which has the promising title, Dynamics of Brain and Mind. Instead, Harth dismisses the detailed study of the brain as a waste of time. Harth is a master at building up ideas that he does not like into the form of spooky straw men that can then be toppled at Harth's leisure. The boogie man that Harth constructs in Chapter 10 is Harth's view of psychoneural identity theory (also known as mind-brain identity and central state materialism; removed from the jargon, this means the idea that mind can be explained as the function of brain). Harth condemns this idea using the most strident language (a strange condemnation to find in a book sub-titled how the brain makes a mind). Harth explains that in order to specify a human brain state, we would need to describe in detail the position and momentum of every molecule in the brain. Even if we could, it would be impossible to use that information to predict a future brain state, so the idea that brain states account for behavioral states is unprovable and totally useless. QED.
Harth's argument in Chapter 10 is silly, and we should wonder about the nature of his fury that so blinds him to the importance and power of experimental and theoretical neuroscience. We can use Harth's argument against psychoneural identity theory on any scientific endeavor, for example: Physicists claim to be able to explain the properties of material objects in terms of quantum mechanics. However, in order to predict the future of a material system you need to solve the wave equation(s) for the system. Since we can never really do this for any real object (say, an ant that I see walking across the floor), the idea that quantum mechanics is a useful theory is refuted. A physicist's claim that quantum mechanics is the correct theory to account for the properties of material objects (like an ant) can never be subjected to empirical test and has no predictive value.
What is wrong with this argument? Many things, but most important is Harth's physics bias. Harth spends endless pages explaining to the dim-whited biologists of the world that real scientific explanations are those that are based on laws (such as conservation of energy) and rules that allow for predictions. Harth might benefit from a reading of Ernst Mayr's book, The Growth of Biological Though. Harth might be interested to learn that not all of science was invented by physicists. Harth then proves that brains are too complex and chaotic to be explained by a materialistic theory. Harth has come down from the Mountain in order to share his enlightened state and proclaim Law of the Universe #6, "The brain is not just a vast and complex network of cells and fibers". What, then, beyond the too-simple-mined approach of reductionistic materialism does Harth offer in order to solve this problem?
After Harth has rejected the conventional neuroscience approach to mind-brain study, his answer to the mind-brain problem is hard to get to; the book descends into an introspective quagmire after Chapter 10. In Chapter 11 we are invited into Harth's dreams.....how can they be so palpable? Perhaps unknown physics can explain such sensations! It is all down hill from here.
In Chapter 12 Harth sounds just like a priest constructing a theological argument to explain why polytheism is not as good as monotheism. In Chapter 12 we are told, the feeling of selfhood of the indivisible one is the centerpiece of the mind-body problem. What must be explained are subjective, introspective sensations and feelings. Harth finally vents the true (and typical of the physicist) source of his anti-materialistic bias: he feels (by introspection) that he has Free Will and so no deterministic, materialistic, reductionistic theory of mind can be true. Luckily (Harth informs the dim-whited biologists), modern physics is not deterministic! Quantum mechanics liberates our minds from determinism....TA DA! Harth explains that the bozo biologists are still using out-of-date thinking from Newtons age when they try to construct their explanations of mind as brain function. Harth pulls out his stone tablets from the Arc and lets us have a look: sure enough, right there as Law of the Universe #7 is, "The human sensation of Free Will is the mechanism that constructs the human self". Golly! Ain't physics cool?
While our minds are still spinning from this revelation, we get (on the same page, no less!) Law of the Universe #8, The self is neither an object nor a process, it is a potentiality. Wow. Spooky stuff. No wonder Harth is sure that materialism can not explain mind; mind is built from non-material Platonic Ideas! Yawn. Where have I heard this before? Thanks for the enlightenment, Erich; maybe for your next project you can invent the wheel. Under the appropriate sub-heading, Beam Me Up, Scottie, Harth delivers his best one-liner: "we must be careful to not let the object (here, Harth is in the middle of a multi-paged lecture on the self, the word object refers to the self {yes, I know, just 5 pages after we are told Law of the Universe #8 Harth sins by calling the self an object, but, hey, when did the rules ever apply to the high priests?}) stray too much from what is commonly felt to be its nature". The scientific study of mind has labored hard to shed the evils of introspection, but Harth makes introspection central to his explanation of mind, right in the same chapter where he chides biologists for not being modern scientists.
In Chapter 13 Harth quotes Freeman Dyson in a way that sums up the whole book: "In dealing with consciousness physicists have had courage but no competence, biologists have had competence but no courage". Physicists like to tell stories about how amateur physics enthusiasts send them long letters explaining how to build perpetual motion machines. These amateur physicists have courage in the same way that physicists like Harth have the courage to deal with consciousness. What cards does Harth deal us in pursuit of the explanation of mind in terms of brain? "I will rely on the readers own introspective familiarity with the subject". Harth drags us (kicking and screaming by this time) through another classic Platonic Ideal: "pain is pain itself". Gee, I guess the NIH can stop funding all that research into how parts of the brain are responsible for the sensation of pain. However, amazingly enough, consciousness is not a Platonic ideal! (Parenthetically, I must say that it is sure nice of Harth to cover all of these issues, it is so hard for the uninitiated to recognize the real Ideal Forms and not be fooled by the unreal Ideal Forms that are really just real objects.) How does Harth know consciousness is real? Because we are not subjectively aware of all sensory input. Got that, now? It will be on the test. Just in case that explanation does not cut it, explanation number two is, "I know consciousness is real because consciousness is a feeling". Well, that certainly deserves a QED, then maybe we can move on to Lemma 1 in which Harth will explain why pain is not a feeling.
True to his physicist's nature, Harth can't shake the feeling that the sensation of consciousness may require some unknown physics. Harth is not Penrose, but he does flirt with the idea that quantum mechanical uncertainty can be amplified by a brain to control the macroscopic activity of neurons. Harth believes that relatively simple self-referent mechanisms may be able to act as an optimization mechanism that starts with chance noise and quantum uncertainty and creates useful thoughts. I doubt if you could find a neuroscientist who would disagree with Harth's claim that subjective awareness depends on the activity of self-referent channels in the brain. As I mentioned above, this idea is central to every theory of consciousness from Edelman's to Crick's. But Harth thinks that these self-referent channels are in some mystical fashion able to transcend material reality. Gee, why are those silly neuroscientists wasting their time identifying the molecular and cellular basis mind? I would wager that when all is said and done, brains get very little useful mileage out of noise as an input; there is just too much useful sensory and remembered information available in a brain to bother with noise. But since Harth plays ostrich and ignores the fussy issues like the neurobiology of memory, he is free to elevate noise to a lofty position in his theory of mind.
Harth's only motivation for walking out on the deadly plank of noise as an important source of thought and creativity is that he is struggling like a fish on a hook to escape from our deterministic nature. (Yikes! After reading Harth's flowery language I am now making fish walk the plank!) If he had more understanding of the biology of brains he would have more respect for them. A brain is a machine, but that is not bad and loathsome. It is reality, and the truth is that people are as free as any subset of the universe. It don't get any better than this! That may break Harth's heart, but he should grow up and stop trying to project his personal desires into the issue of how a brain makes a mind. This is an exciting time: people are just now able to begin to understand how a brain makes a mind, and we do not need sniveling physicists distracting people from the challenge of determining the details of how brains work. Harth like Penrose and dozens of other physicists want an easy solution to the mind-brain problem. Unfortunately, the mind-brain problem is one of the most complicated scientific puzzles that humans will ever face. Physicists need to face up to that reality and get with the program: pitch in and help out!
Chapter 14 is Harth's version of the tiresome journey through the standard party line that says, Computers cant do what a human mind does. This is the modern equivalent of the old essays that used to be written about how biologists will never be able to explain life because:
"Man will never achieve flight."
"A man will never walk on the moon."
"The Earth cant be billions of years old because the sun would have
exhausted all of its (chemical) fuel long ago."
Under the sub-title Magic Trick, Harth delivers his best straight man's line of the book. After giving a fairly amusing description of how to theoretically convert a person into an artificial intelligence, Harth (who is convinced that he has demonstrated an absurdity) asks sweetly, "Or have I overlooked something?" Only what countless other luddites before him have overlooked: just because they feel personally threatened by a new technology it does not mean that technology should not and will not be developed by other more thoughtful people.
Harth attempts to include all of the standard arguments against artificial intelligence; computers cant guess (only people can), computers cant be creative (only people can), computers cant do anything meaningful (only people can), computers are devices created by people and can only do what people tell them to do (people can do what they want to do, Free Will, etc.), saying that the brain computes is meaningless- people think, computers compute(QED), nobody has yet made a computer that can do everything a person can do so nobody can (ever) make such a machine. Most of Harth's anti-machine intelligence blabber was refuted long ago in books like Godel, Echer, Bach and slides easily enough off of the educated mind. Harth only becomes somewhat original and offensive when he starts putting unsavory words into the mouth of Alan Turing and accusing AI researchers of being latent racists.
Chapter 15 closes out Harth's tirade against AI and materialism. I guess
it is the fate of most old men to come to sound like ranting old men. In
this book that is supposedly about how a brain makes a mind, we are forced
to squirm through Harth's sermon about how Post-Modern art does not appeal
to Harth's taste. Harth agitates himself to the verge of declaring inter-generational
warfare as he asks, What are we to do? It seems like a good time to quote
scripture, so Harth turns our attention to another great authority (no
need to ask, the gospels were all written by physicists) Paul
Davies, Take heart: materialism is dead, man is not a machine. Harth
(breathlessly nearing his climax) rehearses the Rosary of Wave Equation
Collapse; reality is created by the (conscious) observer. Harth gives a
hearty Amen to Davies contention that when a mind creates reality it sends
instantaneous ripples across the universe. Harth calls this type of physics
of mind (I ask for forgiveness from physicists like Hawkings
and Gell-Mann,
who have publicly argued against such fantasies, but if Harth calls it
physics, so I will too) a physicalist interpretation of mind. That
it is, and in an attempt to call a spade a spade, I will call Harth's physicalist
interpretation of mind his physics-biased interpretation of mind. Biologists
are not going to be (favorably) impressed by it and my only concern is
that it will deflect general readers towards a new kind of mysticism that
folks like Harth endeavor to make sound scientific.
Go to John's Book Page.
Go to John's
Home Page.