HOW A PERSON -- BUT NOT A COMPUTER -- UNFOLDS

Easter Island -- always watching

If a person had been following the latest research in what it is to be human (which in our age has replaced— or should — all the worrying about what it is to be God (let Him take care of Himself)  they would have learned things that most people have not absorbed yet.  I shouldn’t say “things,” because the paradigm shift is away from things to patterns, interactions, and change.  Get your dictionary.  

Most people assume that thinking is done only in the brain, that it is accessible on reflection, controllable by “will-power” and at its highest point a matter of words and math.  These things are not true. The whole body counts and thinks, most of it cannot be summoned up by reflection, and many feel its highest use is in the arts.

The essence of a human being is the meiotic synergy of two plans for a body as an aggregation of individual eukaryote cells specialized to operate in a unity.  The plans are encoded in a double helix of only four molecules which are arranged in a specific number of chromosomes that are in pairs.  One pair is either XX or XY — the Y allows the male gametes to leave everything behind (pack ONE bag) except their code and travel to the ovum.  The united halves then begin to follow a specific plan.  This will take nine months or three trimesters in the womb.  At that point the new human emerges and continues the gestation outside for what is considered by some to be a fourth trimester.

A baby ready for the world?

At this point the infant can breathe, eat, digest, pump blood, feel with all senses.  Some say that when newly discovered specialized cells are included (spindle cells and others) there are as many as 200 senses.  No computer or built machine can do this, at least not all at once.  A computer has no access to sense code unless it is provided by a human or an auxiliary machine.  Humans do not perceive directly or consciously many sensory elements, but they always perceive code for waves and molecular interactions that are sorted and patterned in the brain until they reach our awareness as colors, sounds, tastes, and so on.

The brain begins to weave a scaffold for identity: all of this is code and the code is emotion- and memory-based.  This is the fabric for the rest of that individual’s life.  Anything not relevant to this first structure is discarded, literally, by the deaths of those cells. 

We’ve only recently understood the epigenome, which is another set of molecular codes that I think of as a sleeve over the helixes.  However you think about it, it is from the environment and is capable of turning individual genes on or off, sometimes in an individual, sometimes with a wave of effects lasting into three generations later or becoming permanent code.  We are beginning to learn how to turn individual genes on and off though they turn out to be complex interactions with sometimes unforeseen consequences.  We come in a cloud of imperceptible tiny independent creatures: parasites, symbionts.

Hitchhikers and helpers.

The next five years are devoted to learning basic muscle management — standing, walking, gripping, — coordinating eyesight, organizing the perception of senses, forming habits of all sorts.  Next comes reading, writing and arithmetic along with the protocols of interaction among people.   The basic stories, games, management of emotion.  

We now know that the brain is forming the connections among neurons and clusters of neurons that we call the “connectome.”  It is not just through neurons, but also from the production of molecules by organs that form operational loops that control the on-and-off swings of whatever is needed in the moment.  These interact with the autonomic nervous system that controls unconscious operation of the body, often resulting in perceptible emotion.

From about  age 8 to the onset of puberty, the individual is forming an identity, self-talk, reaction style, shape and dimensions of emotion, and belonging to the family, a cohort, and larger sets of loyalty.  

Then comes the challenge of managing sexuality and finding a life work that will sustain a family.  All this greatly involves the pre-frontal cortex, the most recent part of the brain to develop, believed to contain morality, art, and high concept formation which isn’t complete until the mid-twenties and sometimes not even then.

Another capacity is that for empathy which clearly involves the eyes, absorbing another person’s emotion and understanding by looking at them.  To know how another person feels through one’s skill at empathy is mysterious and not anything a machine can do, though a lie detector can record what the autonomic nervous system is controlling.  Muscle movements can be formulated and interpreted, but that’s not the same as activating mirror cells.

A lot of people were seduced by the right brain/left brain idea and the studies that assigned image to one side (females and artists) and words to the other side (men and scientists), but they oversimplified and distorted what happens.  It may be more fruitful to review the evolution of the brain from the first hominin, though much of it is guesswork.  

The aggregated organ we call "brain" was tightly formed by interaction with the environment, which changes for many reasons, or — if the homonins went exploring, the new place changed them.  The two — human capacities and environmental demands — are as tightly choreographed in retrospect as that first dance between the infant and the world.  Homeostasis is the guide.

The human body/mind is a composite that is always in flux, but also always evolving new ideas and skills.  This is so complex that we nearly have to reassemble ourselves on waking every day.  Trauma or disease can interfere to the point of insanity, crippling and death.  

Thus we need communities to sustain us through the ordeals and to learn and remember our work after we are gone.  Communities are individuals gathered and in tension between what is good for one and what is good for all.  In a way this mimics the tension between the parasitic developing zygote and the mother’s resources as a providing body.  It’s a balancing act.

The tension between the one and the many can be governed by religious principles or — after writing was invented — governmental laws.  Greek drama was meant to act out the struggle between the individual and the state.  I first learned about it as a sophomore in high school when we performed “Antigone” in a classroom, theatre in the round.  

One young woman has two brothers who war over power.  Both die in battle.  Creon, the king, has to pick one brother as justified in order to reunite the country and he does it by denying the other brother traditional burial, using his power as a human law-giver to oppose what was seen as God’s law.  Antigone insists on burying her brother, which ends up with her death and the death of her lover, the king’s son.  The play has repeatedly been recreated as opera, which was intended to use the best and most powerful of the elements of staging to get to the passionate core.  A computer can do parts of this, but no computer can compose and perform an opera.

There is another set of stages related to the empathy stirred by spectacular story, progress beginning with focused attention, then growing interest, entwined memories, accordance, intimacy, bonding, faithful dedicated love (not sex or not JUST sex), virtual concepts of what is true.  One can go through these stages with a person, a work of art, an animal, a landscape, and more.  It is what unites the person and the group, the world, the cosmos.  It is the source of the sacred, a felt dimension of human being that cannot be detected by instruments, no matter how sensitive they are.

DEEP HISTORY AND HUMAN THOUGHT

The Flesh Made Word

Two books, which are related, have flung open the doors to a paradigm shift that I welcome.  (Also they are the entering edge of a new field of thought.)  They come out of an interaction of several forces:  the new exploration of pre-writing history that reaches unbelievably far back to include “hominins” via traces  -- just like CSI! -- dependent on intense technology analyzing clues never available before, and something like the same examination of the morphology, evolution, mutation and response to environment of the human body.  We now see that it is best to understand the neurology of the whole body as “thinking,” not just the brain.  It’s so new and strange that many well-educated people just can’t get their heads around all this, let alone their "gut."

The two books are “Origins and Revolutions: Human Identity in Earliest Prehistory” by Clive Gamble  (Cambridge University Press, 2007) and “On Deep History and the Brain” by Daniel Lord Smail (University of California Press, 2008).  To some thinkers the ideas here are seen as destructive, tearing down convictions the academic community has felt were absolutely “true”.  Learning those ideas is what justified their Ph.D.  But this is mistaken or at least not eternal.  The new ideas ought to be seen as extensions, exploring underlying assumptions to challenge social contradictions we badly need to resolve.  It does ask the prevailing authorities to consider a broader understanding of hominins, history, and the canon.

Neubauer Collegium

It’s rather ironic that this material, which is EXACTLY the direction I’ve wanted to go for many decades, came to my attention because of Smail’s interval at the Neubauer Collegium where he gave a talk on “Containers,” in the broadest and most metaphorical sense.  The Collegium is housed in what was once “my” seminary, Meadville/Lombard Theological School, which is now leasing in the Chicago Loop.  

In my day (’78-’82) Eliade occupied an office on the top floor and lived next door.  There was a kind of “force field” around him.  People who see religious subjects in terms of “belief,” “dogma,” “prescribed ritual”, and so on -- not just as phenomena to study but as required faiths -- will have trouble with Eliade, myself, and maybe others too tactful to say so.  We operate on “feelings” but “feelings” have been classically defined as ephemeral, possibly neurotic, and unreal.  Every time I raised the issue, it was defined away as Phenomenology, trivial.  Then came post-structural analysis.  Now every phenomenon is a potential metaphor, possibly with great social power.  Like the metaphor of “God.”

UU “principles” are vague enough to evade quarreling, but there is still dogma despite protestations.  It takes a while to pick up the near-subconscious prioritization of academia, publishing, British Empire class systems, prestige and so on.  Inordinate valuing of eminent persons and national or ideological victories have caused neglect of all the post-structuralist revelations.  UU’s are just realizing it themselves, but now what?  Multi-national reconciliation?  The adjunct faculty these days is not the usual old white guys.  But the new people are too assorted to gel into a coherent entity.  And minorities often make progress by accepting the standards of the majority, a strategy of assimilation.

Smail is nimble enough to go around all that to the physiological basis of psychotropic mechanisms that influence our behavior and identity though rarely revealing the dynamics in the blood and organs where we base our thinking.  If the “dashboard” of thought were visible as dials and gauges exhibited on our chests, we could see thinking as clearly as with a brain fMRI, though in a different dimension, revealing the molecules in liquid that are messengers.  (We assume that nerves are like wires carrying info and the brain is a hard-drive.  There’s no good simile for blood molecules.  I use "soup" teasingly.)   

Smail is among new thinkers responding to research.  Many naive people consider “consciousness” to be the verbal description of one’s awareness and reasoning, but the “real” thought is underneath, not conscious.  If words are the pinnacle of human-ness, one must admit it’s a small footing that depends upon deep, broad and unseen forces which as plate tectonics, which are what throw up mountains in the first place.

I do not underestimate the anguish of being forced to give up sources of identity because new research and social forces have dispersed what previously was key.  Once I attended a “peace” conference in which the main address took as theme, “Abba,” Father, and explored the idea that a loving father was protective as a religious truth.  It was very nice, so long as you were actually remembering a loving father, and I suppose the supposition that a father would take a child on his lap for other purposes than protection would not be “nice” and therefore should not be considered.

Being mischievous, in the following discussion I asked the speaker what advice he would give a child who had been raped by the father.  How could that child see God as other than a rapist, or -- slightly better -- a vengeful punisher for wrong-doing.  What of the child who loves the rapist in the bonded way that children do, which is normally a protection?  The speaker said I didn’t “play fair” and avoided me for the rest of the conference.  But I was serious.  All metaphors carry significance that believers may not recognize -- may not want to.  Maybe some abused children do not want to be lambs.  Maybe a better God image for them is a protective wolf pack. 

This quote is from page 113 in Smail’s book:

“ . . .The large human brain evolved over the past 1.7 million years to allow individuals to negotiate the escalating complexities posed by human social living.  This is still what we use the brain for today -- most of the time, at least.  And then there are all the noncognitive features of the brain.  Many of the things we do are shaped by behavioral pre-dispositions, moods, emotions, and feelings that have a deep evolutionary history.  These body states are not ghostly things flitting mysteriously through consciousness.  Recent work in neuropsychology and neurophysiology has shown that they are physiological entities, characteristically located in specific parts of the brain and put there by natural selection.  some of them, including emotions, are relatively automated, no different  from the other areas of life governance -- basic metabolism, reflexes, pain, pleasure, drives, motivations -- that are routinely handled by the brain in all hominoids.  

Most, perhaps all, are also associated with an array of hormones and neurotransmitters such as testosterone and other androgens, estrogen, serotonin, dopamine, endorphins, oxytocin, prolactin, vasopressin, epinephrine, and so on.  Produced in glands and synapses throughout the body, these chemicals facilitate or block the signals passing along neural pathways.  They induce the somatic states revealed on and in our bodies and help determine how feelings actually feel.  We share virtually all of these chemicals with other animals, though the nervous system of an iguana, say, will not necessarily use testosterone in the same way ours does.  In a sense, each of these chemicals has its own natural history.”

Some people are distressed that I have no faith stance that I can describe as doctrine, except the provisional map my path has suggested so far.  But though I insist on staying put in a place I’ve known a long time, it’s because it’s not my body that travels -- just my mind and heart.  But then it turns out that they ARE my body! 

WHY A COMPUTER IS NOT LIKE A BRAIN

The brain is not a computer because a computer has no body.  The brain is the result of having a body.  It is the sum outcome of sensory access to the world: a computer has no sensory access to the world beyond a camera and a microphone.  When I google for "brain", I get only one organ from inside the skull, but that's only the dashboard.  Thinking is done with the whole body, interacting with its community of brains (in other people) within a specific ecology.

The brain is the result of thousands of years of sense development and the knowledge of what will support survival through those senses and a zillion little shifts in how that sensory information is sorted, prioritized and translated into actions.  Millennia of people dying are the experimentally derived information of what doesn’t work, all that dying witnessed by descendants adding their deductions and efforts to make survival happen, because people love each other and try to preserve those they love, even saving their dead bodies if they can.  They wrote it down, a brainy thing to do.

Thinking is not all that happens in a body.  The body IS the brain, the body thinks everywhere in itself.  Intestines are derived from embryo brain precursors.  Blood is the fuel of the brain and affects how and what it thinks.  Muscles are sensory, meaning loaded with sensors, sending information to the brain, as well as being activated by the brain.  The brain DOES things (at least orders them done) and then evaluates the results in terms of its own survival, not whether it produced so many widgets or calculations or print-outs.

The computer has no equivalent to the autonomic nervous system, which is much of what guides every mammal with molecules that signal love, rage, persistence, and comfort.  Even if a computer were programmed to have emotions, it doesn’t have the carefully body-regulating as well as emergency-responding systems.

Then let’s go to the second level of “thinking” which is a relationship between two persons. Eventually more persons than that, but at first a bonding, a commitment supported by empathy and inclusion in the sensory/behavioral system of the bonded individuals.  A computer can be moral, have personality, and commit to another computer, but it cannot “bond” in the organic sense that prompts us to say that two people in love constitute one person.  This is a high level of functioning.  

People who can’t bond with others -- and they do exist -- are called “sociopaths.” 

The implication is that they are at least broken and possibly dangerous because they have no awareness of what the other person is feeling and then the derived sharing of their agonies, which is part of human identity and something that a computer cannot do.  In our typical over-rational way, we describe the “Theory of Mind”, meaning that we can figure out what someone else is thinking.  Your dog can do it, up to a point, but is not a calculation -- rather it comes from “mirror cells” and feeling in your own body what the other body feels.  It is a kind of participation.  If it’s strong enough, we call it intimacy and there is a kind of intimacy achievable between a torturer and a victim.  Intimacy is not always pleasant because intensity at extreme high levels becomes a kind of fusion, and may destroy part of a person that tries to preserve individuality.  

But destruction of individuality can be a gradual erosion.  Intimacy that comes of love shared with another person is not the same as simple information, but a kind of “contact high.”  Computers do not have intimacy or contact highs, but they can link humans into a kind of mock person full of what seems like emotion so that real humans with brains can “feel” emotion without any actual contact at all.  They may have print, image, story, information that is shared, but it is thin and ought to feel unreal.  They should realize it's a story that should be checked out.

It turns out that a human being is capable of creating a false reality and acting as though it real.  In fact, this is the major problem from the beginning for the human brain:  how does it know whether the information it’s getting is distorted or whether its unconscious interpretation into categories and systems is mistaken?  It doesn’t.  It doesn’t even know whether the culture in which it participates is leading to survival.  

The trouble with psychoanalysis is that it is a relationship between two persons that mostly happens subconsciously, though the intent of one is rather more deliberately conscious, presumably trained to perceive the second person as that person is actually organizing the self and interacting with the world, and then to supply ideas and information that the second person’s brain has not taken into account.  Regardless of how conscious and rational the interactions are meant to be, what actually happens is UNconscious and, until now, could only be seen in terms of observation of behavior, whether the small reactions expressed in faces and movement or a major shift in interacting with the world.

On a culture-wide scale, the provision of a lot of new information can cause major shifts in many people.  This might be called politics, religion, or ethics, which is a kind of blending of both.  The sudden onslaught of information like that revealed by hackers is shocking.  People demand, "We went to war over THAT?"  The steady strengthening of new scientific thought about how bodies work, what the cosmos “really” is, and the more nearly empathic knowledge of planetary human suffering due to displacement, drought, and corruption is tipping us out of rigid opinions.  Computers don’t have opinions, nor do they empathically value humans or the earth itself or they would be jumping up and down on our desks, screaming in our pockets.

Computers don’t have “denial” of evidence that is factual, but humans do.  Part of having a brain is considering something terribly threatening to be an illusion, or engaging in threatening behavior on behalf of the body they occupy.  I’ve always cherished a tale told by Doug Peacock.  A big grizzly male had locked onto him and was stalking him in the high country of Glacier National Park.  Doug made it a point to know where that bear was at all times and to make sure he had an escape or avoidance route in his head.  On this occasion, near-night, his brain map didn’t match the territory and the bear confronted him on a high and windy ridge where there was no easy retreat.  The bear stopped, sizing up how much of an advantage he had.

Bear brains are not unlike human brains.  The intent of both is survival and one rule is to avoid the big and the unreadable.  Doug reached into his backpack and pulled out two big plastic garbage sacks.  Putting one on each arm, he held his arms high so that the wind inflated them, making him into a giant flapping monster, impressive enough for even a squinty bear to disbelieve his own nose that told him this was the man he’d been stalking.  The bear had a perfectly good brain.  But no experience with trash bags used that way.  He left.

If you can’t make up your own version of the usefulness of this little parable in terms of religion and politics, or even in terms of something like addiction, then you’re denying your own brain or operating on an assumption that is mistaken.  Learn the difference between a bear and a trash bag.  Only Doug’s physical empathy for bear emotion let him know how to intimidate a fellow thinking, feeling mammal.

THE KALEIDOSCOPE OF MEMORY

We think of memory as a beam of light that reveals something real and actual, but now research reveals it is more like a kaleidoscope, so that when we put it to our eye, we see bits and pieces in patterns that change, mostly with the same pieces in different arrangements but possibly with some bits dropped out and possibly new bits added (perhaps bits of mirror) have fallen in.  

This is emotional for two reasons.  One is that the actual mechanism of memory which is at the interface between what it out of the skin and what is in-skin, is “filed” for retrieval according to the sensorium pattern of the moment being noted and its attached emotion.  We call this association, evocation, and sometimes flashback, re-living, maybe in an uncomfortable way, moments of intense fear, rage or possibly more positive feelings.  Since this function developed before we had evolved the ability to talk, which is associated with the pre-frontal forebrain, it is developed and held in the older, more “limbic”, parts of the brain.  Animals can do this.  It amounts to a whole “feeling” system that is pre-verbal concepts but particularly accessible in art and always going on under our conscious verbal lives.

Who me?

As time pushed on with its evolutions and mutations, memory became entangled with the idea of “truth,” which then -- like just about everything -- became a lever of authorities against lessers, which invented the categories of lies and fantasies.  These might be conscious, to escape punishment -- which is a kind of deviousness that chimpanzees can learn -- or it can be a sincere mis-remembering, at variance with the evidence or recordings of various kinds.  (I am drawing on Joseph LeDoux’s book, “Synaptic Self” and though I have it at hand with a lot of markers in it, I might not get all this quite right.)

By the time a human being is barely beginning to remember (which might or might not coincide with learning to talk) the culture is insisting on certain standards.  These things are formed in the pre-frontal cortex with the actual mechanics handled in places like the hippocampus over the ears, the nearby cortex cells, the thalamus, and the amygdala -- all maturing at slightly different times so under slightly different environmental circumstances like safety or nutrition or exercise. 

We used to consider this normal and effective discipline.

Then, of course, every culture and every mom has slightly different ideas about how to handle memory, particularly “truth.”  Controlling moms need to know what you’ve been up to so they can intervene if necessary.  “Where did you go?  Who were you with?” and even the intimate matters of excretion, so that “mom wants to know” gets entwined with toilet training.  “Did you do your duty?” 

All this information is great for sibs who are tattletales or blackmailers.  In my childhood there wasn’t much money so after we three became fascinated by toilet paper and enjoyed creating great bouquets of it, the rule was made that you couldn’t use a piece longer than your arm.  Since I was female and my arms were short, my two brothers were happy to inform my mother that I was a paper-waster.  Thus the truth gets to be an element of crime and testimony, but also a source of guilt, so I’ve remembered and resented this all these years, though now it’s pretty funny, a petty crime indeed.  Still, it linked the earliest back-of-the-brain feelings of infancy with all today's little Miss Manners niceties of polite society.

LeDoux points out that though we’ve insisted for centuries that the brain is once-and-for-all the same, now we know that it is constantly growing and withdrawing.  It is a process, a dance, and the result of time-arts, so that the brain we use to record what happens and to thereby guide the modification of our neuron protocols is not the same as the brain we use after decades to re-assemble and reflect upon our memories.  Our problem is not quite the same as that of the music lover who begins with 78’s and must update through 33-1/2 to reel-to-reel to cassette to MP3 -- but that sequence is suggestive.  Some songs can't be played anymore.

Remember the little cylinder you had to put over the turntable spindle?

The “machinery” or “software” of the brain is far more complex than we thought, so that’s the reason there are so many margin notes, high-lights and stickies in this book.  It’s a used book, so I also have the previous reader’s marks.  I’m working on a little glossary because some of these tiny instant phenomena have never been detected before and have names invented by scientists with their Latinesque prefixes-and-suffixes way of thinking.  But then they discover that they were wrong about whatever, so it gets a new name, and then they call it by initials or use lab nicknames.  It’s like reading a Russian novel.  

The actual structures, the channeling of the electrochemical impulses that come from the basic sensorium touching the out-skin world, the necessary molecules on hand (hopefully you’re not starving or missing a basic element), the limbic emotional attachments, the moral censoring from the pre-frontal cortex or perhaps the adding of fantasy shadows from a movie, the genetic instructions that argue among themselves (they can intensify or mute), the accumulation of endogenomes that (we are shocked to discover) can cross generations, the interfering chemicals from mind-altering substances like alcohol -- all this stuff makes a difference in what gets recorded.  And then what can play back.

Tentatively, my understanding is that the pristine bit of impulse from hearing a sound goes through a series of steps beginning with a little dashboard close to the perceiving cells.  Then it is filtered and annotated by half a dozen structures who pass it on as short-term memory, which again sorts and passes it on to another structure where it is prepared for long-term storage by dissecting it and classifying it, tagging it with the emotions of the moment.  There is a “master dashboard” or “working consciousness” that can only handle seven or eight concepts at once, so it chooses some and drops out some.  We don’t know a whole lot more than that.

Since memory is a major component of consciousness and since we think of consciousness as defining identity and since “felt-concepts” are not very conscious but those pinned down in words are certainly more conscious -- though choice of vocabulary (skinny or slim, naughty or nice) will not be value-free -- and those enshrined on paper whether as direct journal notes or as highly analyzed and distilled into written words acquire a kind of aura of valuable truth.  

Until now.  Words in code are now “set free” -- easily altered, transmitted out of context, contradicted by witnesses who would formerly have been suppressed.  You can't rubber stamp "for eyes only" on computer code.  You can't even really delete it.  The truth and memory are now hydra-headed chimeras that politics and advertising (is there a difference?) try to collar -- to no avail.  The point of God used to be that at least he/she (like mom) knew what was real and what was enduring.  But now that God (Deus Absconditus is a formal theological term) and possibly Mom have left (it’s no longer just Dad who elopes with the secretary) we wonder whether the category is even useful.  Do we need new words?  Probably.

Halfway between writing and drawing.

And what does this do to a system of justice that depends upon testimony?  Will it reveal new realities about people unlike ourselves?  Will it uncover a final solipsism in the world that paralyzes us between trust and fear?  Yes.  We embark on the trial of the Boston Bomber with deep misgivings.  Can we handle the truth?  Are there elephants hiding in the trees?

Writing on water -- FROM the water.

THE MUSIC OF THE UNIVERSE

YOU ARE NOT YOUR BRAIN, DUMMY!  The brain is only the managing system, the dashboard!  Your consciousness is the dials of feedback system (speedometer, oil level, etc.), but what the brain is managing is your body!  Your WHOLE body -- guts and all.  Skin, five classic senses plus many others, some subconscious like beating your heart and digesting your food and healing your cut.  The brain is constantly gathering, sorting, and prioritizing information from the body and deciding what to do about it.  The main goal is survival.

http://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_wolpert_the_real_reason_for_brains.html  There are 86 TED talks in the category called “brain.”  This particular one is the closest to what I’m trying to say.  (But I’ve watched only a few of the other 85, so . . .)  I’m right there with Wolpert when he says that the difference between inanimate and animate (living) things is that the latter move.  The fact that they can move for their own purposes, either to approach food and sex or to avoid trauma and poisoning, means that they are alive and have intentions or at least reactions.  In the early moments of evolution, like bacteria, there is only a one-celled animal, but it has both kinds of movement: approach and avoid.  No brain, no skeleton, no muscles, but it can move.

Wolpert says that movement can account for everything a body does except sweat.  I think he should broaden his category to “secrete.”  In the bacterium, that would mean managing the permeability of the cell boundary to let certain molecules in and push other molecules out.  The brain cells must do something like that, because every cell does that, but that’s not interacting with the world.  Still, bodies excrete as well as secrete.  Muscles are involved in excretion.  We even speak of a bowel movement.

People who get all hung up on a person being the same as a brain are thinking of consciousness, which is a late evolution.  I would describe emotion as the response of the body that is both voluntary and involuntary, but both are the movements of organs or molecules circulating (movement) in the solutions of the body.  Some of it is conscious and some of it is not.  Training and practice can move the boundary back and forth.  If the brain isn’t functioning properly, it will be demonstrated to others through aberrant movement.  That movement might originate in a failure of sensory systems, like problems with sight and hearing.  

There is a more mysterious and recent development in the positive function of the brain which is “mirror cells,” which means that if some one else moves, as in dancing or playing tennis, the person who is watching will “ghost” the movement in their own brain and muscles.  It’s possible that this is the beginning of us evolving a more intense empathy -- feeling what other people feel -- that someday might amount to mental telepathy. 

History seems to show that the more we understand each other, the more likely we are to be doing things that help everyone survive.  So how do we get that understanding now?  Art.  Expression.  Story.   This is the eventual conclusion of the following TED TALK.

Damasio is in pursuit of consciousness.  http://www.ted.com/playlists/1/how_does_my_brain_work.html   We have seen that the work of the brain is to manage the body, taking in “a flow of sensory images” both inside the flesh and outside the skin -- the environment we cannot access except through our senses even though it is what we draw sustenance from..  In the process of sorting and weighing these sensory information systems, we spontaneously create “a “self”  which is the consciousness.  These are managed by the construction of a map or grid in our brains, that is actually graphed on the cerebellum as memory in the language of the senses.  Electrochemical impulses, coordinated by rhythm (not the heart’s rhythm but one like it), travel along the axons of the neurons in what is called “the connectome.”  

This shuttling has two goals:  first is the maintenance of homeostasis in the molecular fluid system of the body: water, salt, sugar, hormones of all kinds, and the like -- even the “drugs” like adrenaline or cortisol.  The second is the homeostasis of the body in the environment, achieved by movement which is part of what separates animals from vegetables.  Animals can change location, can alter their environment, can change their relationship to the environment.  The concerns here are food, shelter, freedom from trauma and more, particularly in relation to the part of environment that is other people.

The body is an instrument controlled by the brain:  the self is the music, all of it that is conscious.  Because of writing or video or even actual music or other art, the self can persist apart from the person’s body as memory and emotional response in other people.  A body can exist without a brain if it has support -- person as oyster or what is called a “vegetative state.”  A brain without a body cannot do anything and will not support identity.  People who think the brain can be kept in a jar to preserve identity are wrong.  There will be nothing for the brain to manage.  All dashboard dials would show zero. 

Damasio says the molecular fluid system is the most important set of parameters to keep consistent.  If molecules that are misshapen, missing or entirely alien are floating around in the fluids of the body and brain, the self will be lost.  In addition, the top of the spine  (brain stem) is the earliest part evolved and formed in utero.  It controls the most basic functions of the body.  One half allows consciousness and the other one does not.  If the half that allows consciousness is undamaged but the unconscious half is damaged, the “self” will be trapped in a non-responsive body, a parked car.  This is probably what makes people think they can just remove the brain and have the person. The only part that is missing in a nonresponsive body containing an otherwise functioning brain is the movement part.  The molecular fluid system, the sensory signaling throughout the body must persist in order for there to be consciousness, but that can go on without movement if others supply the basic nutrients and air, so on.  

The cerebral cortex, in Damasio’s words, “conducts the great spectacle of the mind,” the score for the self’s music.   Once produced by an individual, one’s instrument is playing in concert with many other instruments who are “conducted” by sociocultural regulation, the homeostasis of culture.  Just like the homeostasis of water or sugar, the culture keeps behavior within the parameters that sustain life.  (We might call it morality, which is not necessarily conventional since the conditions of society are sometimes outside the usual parameters and demand a new morality for survival.)  The culture can be very wrong about that, which will mean many people will not survive.

An over-rigid culture endangers the curiosity and wandering that allow the exploration of new ways and spaces, perhaps at great cost or perhaps with great rewards, and often identified as art.  It is this force, in my opinion, that takes us closest to what Damasio calls:  “True happiness and the possibility of transcendence.”   We call this "religion", but that implies an institutionalized, bureaucratized capture of beliefs and practices.  

In truth, when the brain is skillfully playing a gorgeous symphony of the senses, perhaps with other people, it is capturing holiness.  It is participating in the cosmos, which is music.  If the brain-body instrument is just sitting in church, that may be playing a tin whistle in a tune that is merely noise.