“The processes in the brain are like the wind that rustles through the trees”

Today, a new scientific revolution is taking place – penetration deep into the human brain and into the nature of the mind. Philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists face the difficult problem of understanding how brain matter produces subjectivity. Why are the processes that give rise to movement, adaptive behavior, purposeful action, accompanied by a sense of our subjective “I”. Philosopher David Chalmers contrasted it with the more “simple” problem of understanding and deciphering how the brain works. He wrote that even when we learn everything about the work of nerve cells, impulses, processes in billions of brain cells, we will still be faced with this issue.

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• “Blindsight” – the key to the work of consciousness?

One of the attempts to find an answer to it is a project of mapping the brain, identifying its connectome (this is the name of the entire set of brain connections of some organism)¹. Many believe that it is the decoding of the connectome that can allow us to understand what the human “I” is. With the help of MRI methods, the direction of movement of the bundles of processes of nerve cells is determined. So it becomes possible to build a complete diagram of the connections of different areas of the human brain. At the same time, functional brain scans are performed on 1000 volunteers while solving cognitive tests and tasks to establish the connection between different points of activity.

In Calum Chase’s recent novel Pandora’s Brain, scientists manage to preserve a person’s consciousness by digitizing all of the brain’s connections and loading them into a supercomputer. How realistic is such a scenario? The problem is that today scientists can only scan the macroconnections of the brain. They cannot identify all the nerve cells and all the contacts between them. Another problem is that the activity that is recorded in the brain by various means is short-lived. It is impossible to notice it by ordinary methods. All subjective processes in the brain are like the wind that rustles through the trees. The wind subsides and the foliage takes on other forms.

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• “Consciousness makes us believe that we are unique”

Contrary to the ideas of many experts, our brain is not an electrical circuit, it is not the number of wires that an electrician connects. In addition to neurons, there are many other cells that transmit signals without using electrical potentials. Therefore, we will not be able to include them in the scheme of electrical activity of the brain.

Another factor is neurochemistry. Nervous systems arose about 500 million years ago and at that time used the entire chemical broth of communications between individual cells. These are hundreds of different signals that carry their own meaning. Many cells do not have point contacts with others at all – for example, cells of the dopamine system. And it is extremely important for many subjective, emotional, motivational states.

How does the subjective “I” emerge from all this activity? In the book, after transferring the entire wiring diagram to the network, the researchers start the supercomputer with trepidation to see if consciousness will wake up. In reality, the awakening of consciousness requires very complex processes of circulation of activity. A lot of structures should turn on and synchronize with each other. How one can run a structurally scanned connectome, even if all the details of chemical bonds are added to it, to recreate consciousness, is the very difficult problem that Chalmers writes about. And I’m not sure that we can solve it – at least with the means that we have now.

¹ The Human Connectome project was launched in 2009 under the auspices of the US National Institutes of Health.