It’s a civilizational achievement to be able to extrinsically see the universe “from the outside.” It is also a civilizational achievement to be able to intrinsically see the universe “from the inside.” The two perspectives are the sources of our greatest triumphs, like our ability to observe galaxies light-years away, and also the elegance and beauty of the stories we tell. Although not technological marvels we can take a picture of, the intrinsic and extrinsic perspectives are conceptual marvels, and took as much intellectual work to create as our greatest institutions and constructions. They are, if judged by their fecundity, the cognitive Wonders of the World.
What a crazy trip is The World Behind the World: Dr. Erik Hoel, a Forbes 30 Under 30 scientist, starts this history of scientific navel-gazing in Ancient Egypt (handily disproving the misconception that they had no understanding of stream of consciousness and believed that all interior monologue came from their gods) and ends with modern efforts with Artificial Intelligence (making the case that machines will never gain true consciousness). Quoting from poets, philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists throughout the ages, Hoel presents equal parts narrative and theory to explain why Neuroscience is in need of a paradigmatic shift (along the lines of Relativity’s impact on Physics or the double-helix structure of DNA on Genetics), because as it stands, the field is “floundering”, and “secretly, a scandal.” Hoel writes, for the most part, at the layperson’s level (I have no background in Neuroscience and could follow along), but I got the feeling that he was maybe not writing for me: this has the feel of a disruption, a wake up call for the small group of researchers and their post-docs who control research into the nature of consciousness, and more than anything, the narrative-lover in me would like to know how this disruption plays out. Fascinating, beginning to end. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Who am I to write this book with such a span it involves not just history, but literature and neuroscience and philosophy and mathematics? It is impossible in scope. But if not me, then who? For I have lived for years ensconced in both perspectives, and feel, at a personal level, the tension in their paradoxical relationship. I grew up in my mother’s bookstore and, later in life, became a novelist. Yet I am also a trained scientist. And in graduate school for neuroscience I worked on a small team advancing the leading scientific theory of consciousness. So for decades I have lived in the epistemological hybrid zone where the intrinsic and extrinsic perspectives meet. What I saw nearly blinded me with its beauty and paradox. This book is an expression of what I’ve learned living in the hybrid zone.
Basically, the question is: Can we understand how the brain works only using tools developed by that same brain? Poets and novelists have long attempted to describe the interior (“intrinsic”) experience of humanity, but starting with Galileo — who argued that science should concern itself only with those properties (size, shape, location, and motion) that can be described mathematically — a “serious” study of any phenomena (from human consciousness to the speed of light) was to be considered solely from this “extrinsic” perspective. As far as Psychology is concerned, Hoel names B. F. Skinner as the “villain” of the story: Failed novelist, rejecter of the intrinsic perspective. Due to the popularity of his (black box) approach consciousness became a pseudoscientific word and psychology was stripped of the idea of a “stream of consciousness,” stripped of everything intrinsic, for almost a century. In order to survive as a science, psychology only kept the reduced elements of consciousness — attention, memory, perception, and action — while throwing out the domain in which they exist, the very thing that gives them form, sets them in relation, and separates one from the other.
In the middle of the twentieth century, modern research into consciousness divided into two camps which continues to this day: the empiricists (following in the footsteps of Francis Crick), “who focus on brain imaging and finding the neural correlates of consciousness”, and the theorists (following the work of Gerald Edelman), “who make quantitative and formal proposals to measure the content and level of consciousness”. With regard to the empiricists, Hoel doesn’t have much respect for their reliance on fMRIs to map brain functions (In a notorious study in 2009, a dead salmon was put in an fMRI scanner and shown the kind of standard fMRI task of “looking” at photographs that depicted humans in social situations. The dead salmon, quite obligingly, showed a statistically significant response to a common analysis pipeline. Also: I was stunned to read that my mental picture of neurology is all wrong – neurons are actually “squishy quark clouds”?) And as for the camp of theorists: Hoel did his postgraduate work with a leading neuroscientist who had studied under Edelman — Giulio Tononi — and although Hoel had been captivated by Tononi’s integrated information theory (IIT), Hoel would eventually co-author a paper that demonstrated the theory’s shortcomings.
Hoel goes on to explain that perhaps the nature of consciousness is unknowable. Referencing the 2017 paper, “Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor?”, I found it fascinating that, using the same methods they would to map out a human brain, neuroscientists were unable to locate any specific function in a 1980s era Nintendo-running MOS 6502 microchip (despite knowing its complete wiring diagram). Further:
No one knows how the large-parameter models that show early signs of general intelligence, like GPT-3 or Google’s PaLM, actually work. We just know that they do. And this is because there is often no compressible algorithm that an ANN is implementing. Applying this same reasoning to neuroscience leads to some uncomfortable conclusions. Neuroscientists often assiduously avoid such discussions, since asking “How does the brain perform this transformation between input and output?” is a far more complex version than that same question put to ANNs, and with ANNs we know that often in principle we can say very little about this (and that’s with the complete and perfect access to the connectome, or wiring diagram, of the ANN, unlike the brain, which comes to us piecemeal via invasive surgeries or coarse-grained neuroimaging). So it’s not a lack of data about the brain that’s the problem. It’s the approach.
Hoel spends a lot of time on mathematicians Gödel and Boole (and their realisation that “formal systems built on axioms are necessarily incomplete”), and eventually references Stephen Hawking as acknowledging that science — using as it does the language of mathematics — is, by extension, also necessarily incomplete. So maybe uncertainty is simply a feature of reality and neuroscientists are asking all the wrong questions (and it's this conclusion that feels disruptive for the gatekeepers of academia). From here, Hoel goes on to briefly explore the possibility of consciousness surviving death and presents an examination of the case against free will. All fascinating stuff and well worth the read.
We may be hairless apes, but we are conscious, and that is indeed something special and unique, as the paradoxes around it attest to. Studying consciousness scientifically requires exploring the hybrid zone where the qualitative meets the quantitative, a unique metaphysical ecosystem. And it is possible that this zone will never be resolved to our satisfaction in the way other fields of science are, that it, and therefore we, will always remain paradoxical, mysterious as a deep-sea trench.
I want to record here just a couple more interesting tidbits that didn't fit into the review. The field of Psychology (beyond Neuroscience) seems due for a shakeup as a whole. Not only does fMRI seem bogus, but Hoel writes:
For how many years have neuroscientists and psychiatrists told the public that depression is caused by a chemical imbalance in serotonin levels? And yet there is no proven link, after decades of exhaustive research, between depression and these levels. It was merely medieval humors, resurrected for the modern chemical age…The Stanford Prison Experiment, and so on, arguably either can’t be replicated or have only small effects once the data is analyzed appropriately. Even the supposed Dunning-Kruger Effect, in which people with low knowledge or experience in a given area supposedly overestimate wildly their expertise, may be a statistical artifact.
And I liked this aside:
Both Einstein and Picasso had been influenced by Science and Hypothesis, a 1902 book by mathematician Henri Poincaré ( Einstein had read it with interest; Picasso seems to have had the book explained to him by a friend.) Notably, Science and Hypothesis contained within it meditations on how best to not only understand, but draw the fourth dimension: for Einstein, the fourth dimension was time itself, represented mathematically, and for Picasso, the fourth dimension became the out-of-time layered points of view of cubism.
And I enjoyed Hoel's comparison of the intrinsic-focussed experience of novelistic storytelling vs the extrinsic focus of films:
I grew up in my mother’s independent bookstore, and came of age among its shelves, and worked there as a teenager hawking fiction to customers, and so feel that the novel is something special, and has been relegated to being an undeservedly less popular artform. I even think it’s arguable that this shift has changed our understanding of our own psychology. For instance, Freud was the best thing to ever happen to film and television. Of all the many ideas that Freud advanced, the most popular, even to this day, is the notion of psychological trauma being a central explainer of people’s behavior. This idea permeates our culture, despite research showing that even extremely traumatic events, like living through horrific earthquakes and disasters, leads only to a minority of victims experiencing predictable negative psychological effects like PTSD, and also, that people’s prior personality (to the event) has a strong effect on whether negative outcomes develop. This doesn’t mean trauma isn’t real, but I think it’s possible that trauma’s popularity as an explanation of behavior came about because traumas are extrinsic events — they are things that can be filmed, they can be seen, which in turn means they can literally be shown on-screen as flashbacks. I find it no coincidence that the rise of trauma as an explanation of human behavior just so happens to correspond with the rise of our dominant narrative artform, the extrinsic medium of film, and its replacement of the intrinsic medium of the novel.
And reading that Erik Hoel considered himself a novelist, I went looking for what he's written and found the Goodreads reviews for The Revelations (Once a rising star in neuroscience, Kierk Suren is now homeless, broken by his all-consuming quest to find a scientific theory of consciousness.) This wasn't hugely well-received, but I found it very interesting to counterpoint a couple of the reviews. To quote "Vicki":
It is really hard to connect to a character whose entire personality is believing they're the sole proprietor to the solution for the most elusive human mystery, and acting as such. I think the main character is supposed to come across as complex and burdened by the weight of his genius, but he's just arrogant. The problem with writing a character closer to understanding the mystery of consciousness than any other person is that unless the author himself knows something that the scientific community doesn't, there is no way to make that character convincing while also sharing his theories. Almost every idea felt like a retelling of existing theories of consciousness, spun to sound inventive and groundbreaking.
(There is something of that same attitude in this nonfiction treatment of what seems many of the same ideas, but perhaps Hoel really does know something that the rest of the scientific community doesn't). And to quote "Jeff":
When the primary character struggles with how to know anything, when he obsesses over the fact that everything he knows begins from the position of an observer... that has a double meaning. It's a book! The reader is the real observer. The characters can never know anything more than they've been allowed to know.
It's a perfect metaphor for how we can't understand consciousness from within consciousness.
We may not be able to solve the problem of consciousness in the real world, but in the book world... Maybe? Perhaps the main character is on the brink of solving it. But for him, solving the problem of consciousness means something different than it does for us, because he is actually a character in a book. That's a terrifying fourth-wall breaking discovery to make and perhaps what has happened at the end.
And these reviews seem to prove that Hoel really does live "in the epistemological hybrid zone where the intrinsic and extrinsic perspectives meet", and he might just be uniquely poised to use his hybrid tools to crack the whole mystery of consciousness wide open.
