The Thing-Law

The human brain and its functioning is extraordinarily complex; it is the most com­plex object that we know of. Yet, the history of science tells us that the principles underlying even the most complex systems are simple, when understood.

One of the properties of a conscious organism is its ability to associate a law interpretation to its own active neural pathway. This can well be the definition of thinking, and of intelligent behaviour. Only a conscious [self-aware] organism can accomplish this.

By bringing self-awareness on the scene, we get rid of the self-referential problem of brains having to understand brains. Brains do not have to understand brains; that job is left to self-awareness. Self-awareness is probably a property and a consequence of the collection of neural pathways all over the body, but the whole is more than the sum of its parts. It is also a unique situation where the whole influences the parts of which it is made. In an inanimate system, the whole does not influence its own parts; it is only influenced by them.

There is evidence from the world of neuroscience, to support the thing-law inter­pretation and its connection with the watcher. It is quite convincingly evident from ongoing studies of brain evolution that the human brain had very primitive beginnings in the earliest of organisms which did not even have a brain (For a very lucid elemen­tary account see [2]). And that the purpose of the early brain is to coordinate body functions in such a way that in response to the environment, chances of survival of an organism improve. Even single-celled organisms such as bacteria, which of course have no neurons, possess ion channels (large proteins) which control the flow of ions in and out of the bacterial cell. Ion channels affect bacterial functionality, and similar channels in the human brain are key for communication in neurons, and the very same genes which express for ion channels in the human brain are also found in bac­teria! The bacterial ion channels were inherited by successive generations for a few billion years, until a few hundred million years ago, when multicellular organisms [with no organs or neurons] evolved, and used proteins to communicate between cells. These same cell proteins are importantly involved in forming synapses which allow neurons in the human nervous system to communicate with each other! It is likely that neurons and synapses in nerves and brains of higher organisms resulted from an application of these pre-existing parts (ion channels and synaptic proteins), a process known as exaptation (“recommissioning an inherited trait for a new pur­pose” [2]). Some fifty million years after the first multicellulars appeared, marine life forms having neurons and nerve nets emerged.

In a non-mammalian brain such as that of a reptile, the neo-cortex is absent, and while there are sophisticated senses and complex behaviour, intelligent behavior [i.e. the thing-law association determined by the self-aware watcher] is absent. The neo­cortex is a key add-on to the reptilian brain, and thought to be responsible for memory and prediction, essential for intelligent behaviour [3].

In the eighties, scientists succeeded in mapping all the seven thousand connec­tions between the three hundred neurons of the worm C. Elegans, thus determining its ‘connectome’—the entire set of neural connections in an organism’s brain. The human connectome is far more complex, because the human brain has a hundred billion neurons, and a million billion connections. Does the connectome define an individual, and could it be that when the connectome in the brain of an animal crosses a critical threshold, consciousness emerges? Connectomes change over time, with neurons gaining and losing branches, and synapses getting created and destroyed. These changes can be genetic, or caused by neural activity, which in turn is the result of the brain’s response to the environment, or to its own internal thinking process. The connectome in turn determines the pathways along which neural activity takes place [4].

Given that the rudimentary brain elements such as ion-channels and synaptic proteins were already present in primitive life forms which did not have a nervous system, it is evident that the brain evolved to help life-forms adapt and survive better. With the emergence of the neo-cortex in mammals, brains appear to cross a critical threshold and give rise to self-aware living forms, who are also able to associate a law interpretation to the thing (thing being the active neural pathway). The crossing of the threshold is accompanied by enhanced size and complexity, and a vast increase in the number of connections in the connectome. Since the connectome determines the pathways of neural activity, which in turn shape the connectome, we may speculate that consciousness is an emergent property of a connectome, which allows the association of a law with an active neural pathway. The mammalian brain, possessed with the neo-cortex, does not necessarily need an external input for activation of a neural pathway. It is self-aware, and self-processing as well. Current computers are like pre-mammalian brains. Their thinking capacity could be illustrated by this amusing example of an e-mail I got in my Inbox a few days ago: 44

Dear Kinjalk Lochan,

Greetings and good day.

I represent EnPress Publisher Editorial Office from USA. We have come across your recent article “Statistical Thermodynamics for a Non-commutative Special Relativ­ity: Emergence of a Generalized Quantum Dynamics” published in Foundations of Physics. We feel that the topic of the article is very interesting. Therefore, we are delighted to invite you to publish your work in our journal, entitled Trends in Genet­ics and Evolution. We also hope that you can join our Editorial Board. Please reply to this email if you are interested to join the Editorial Board.

I look forward to hearing your positive response. Thank you for your kind consider­ation.

Best regards,

Aaliyah Lopez

Editorial Office

Trends in Genetics and Evolution

When the connectivity of an artificial neural network crosses a critical threshold in complexity and in number of networks, it perhaps become self-aware, and also an intelligent thinker. Thinking is the act of a connectome to bring changes unto itself, of its own volition, without any external input. That ‘own volition’ is self-awareness.

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