The neural substrate; astrocytes and information theory

How the brain was in 1911 - Encyclopaedia Britannica

  I left concept and demon as a Mobius strip.  That way is disaster.

  Salvation may lie, I suspect, sethren, in information theory and astrocytes.  About which I know, to be honest with you, fuck all.  Cells in the brain, glial cells.  It was thought that astrocytes merely provided scaffolding and maintenance.  I have no idea how numerous they are, but in the human brain there are about one hundred billion neurons, and astrocytes outnumber them considerably.  Two hundred billion? Ten thousand billion?  A lot.  Also, and this is the significant bit, they don’t just do structure, maintenance, repair, garbage removal and vermin zapping.  They do information traffic control the magnitude of which makes me dizzy.

  The sky tilts.  I  steady myself with a hand on the cold metal of the bus stop.  No, fine, thank you, fine.  I’m all right. But there's more.  While Professor Alcino Silva, from the Brain Research Institute at UCLA, says, "There is a carefully choreographed synaptic signalling dance between astrocytes and neurons...", according to  Maiken Nedergaard, "The volume of human astrocytes is almost 20 fold larger than their rodent counterparts, enabling human astrocytes to integrate input from a comparably staggering number of synapses, 2 million compared with 100,000 in the rodent brain."  Again, I touch the cold metal, not for support, but for the steadiness of the world.

  So in this dance of the astrocytes and the neurons, we are talking about numbers of possibilities so astoundingly out of, for sure, my intellectual grasp that we need not worry about the brain lacking the computational capacity to handle any hypothesis that my puny workspace may foist on it.  That’s my point, sethren.  And as a corollary, because the functioning of this astrocyte/neuron choreography is as yet imperfectly described, it would be vainglorious to try and ascribe locations and functions just yet.  For anybody.

  What I am saying, sethren, is that for the purposes of our endeavour here, it is quite respectable to treat the brain the other side of the language barrier as a black box; the location of an ideoverse; continuous with the metaverse and the universe; to build a hypothesis about this black box being (given its continuity with the universe and the metaverse) the place where culture evolves, including things like needles and the demon astrocyte; remind ourselves that, though our venture here is derisory compared with his, Darwin did in 1857 exactly what I am suggesting now, propound the theory before he understood its physical basis; and plunge onwards.  All we can lose is our dignity, the respect of the academy, and hours which otherwise might be spent wandering the streets hustling for any spare change.

  As for information theory, I know even less about it than about the working of the brain, and cannot consult my phone which has been found by the good workers of the Alhambra Theatre, Bradford, under a seat in row F, but which I cannot retrieve owing to lack of the wealth now demanded for a bus ticket.  “Fucking thumb a lift, yer daft git,” yes, sether Albert, a canny suggestion, as The Pitman Painters would say.

  The only thing I do know about information theory is that it is about economy.  Information is what causes a change of state in a system.  Anything else is noise.  I don’t want to knock language, human speech.  As I say, I use it all the time.  But a lot of human speech is noise, redundancy, ambiguity, sheer nonsense.  And, I make this assertion about the black box, the brain the other side of the language barrier; the neural substrate has little use for language.  Language is merely a cumbersome, somewhat shapeless and blurry form that demons in their numberless alliances assume when they journey out of one ideoverse and through the world to other ideoverses.  It is not a reliable system.  Because it is so overdetermined, it is one of the main places where mutation occurs.  Seldom does a demon arrive in exactly the form that it left.  As it transits through ear or eye and emerges on the ideoverse side of Wernicke’s area, it is likely to be co-opted by a similar demon jealous of its accommodation, and thus immediately mutated, the one becoming the other.  Such co-option across alliances of demons we call confirmation bias.  A signal that this mutation has been complete is when someone says, “Yes, I know exactly what you mean.”

  Information theory is the basis for economy, for the exclusion of noise and redundancy.  It informs, for instance, the cell phone system.  I guess the processes of the human neural substrate would not be found wanting by the prescriptions of information theory.  Thus it’s potential becomes orders of magnitude more vertiginous even than it was to start with.

  And that doesn’t matter a fuck to demons, sethren, to culture.  That’s where they thrive.  Culture does not evolve by making things clear and plain for its obligate symbiont, the human organism.  In fact culture is not at all keen on us knowing it’s there.  I sometimes wonder if it has its own phagocytes, its own glial cells, in their infinite trillions, to attack, consume and excrete, as noise at the limits of entropy, the kind of thing I am trying to say here.  But this is paranoia.  And as your hunger grows, sethren, and the wherewithal to pay Madam MeMe for her slurry is harder and harder to come by, all sucked away by the tapeworms of government and the financial industry, you will, by way of distraction, begin to cry out, “Stop your blather, man.  Have done with prevarication.  You were in a deep hole.  It suddenly came to you that every demon is a concept, and every concept a demon.  Get th’sel out of that fatal loop if th'can.”

  But first I had to set the stage, sethren; though to be honest for what enaction I know not yet.  Tomorrow I shall make the attempt, so we may spend the weekend at peace.

Throttle people, make bread and love

 

Skellig Michael - Wikimedia commons

    Supposing all you say is so, so what?  We are still beset by unwholesome weather, and eat muck.  And now we have been told by our noble leader that social security leads to infanticide.  Sethren, our noble leader may have the mouth parts of a six foot tapeworm, but he also has a first class degree from Oxford.  PPE, admittedly.  I have no more idea than you what cutting-edge intellectual content resides in a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Oxford.  Nugatory, one would imagine.  But enough to rule.  And the tyro tapeworm clearly had enough brain to master it splendidly.  A first class degree.

  Sethren, the mouthings of the great leader may evince stupidity, but they are designer mouthings, crafted by years, centuries of evolution to embody a gargantuan gormlessness.  Not his. Ours.  Our  stupidity, sethren.  The stupidity inheres not in the crafting of these obvious, children’s picture book, fatuous lies.  The gargantuan stupidity is in us, who are the butt of this ludicrous mendacity.  And yet we believe in it utterly, and remouth it and remouth it continually, as if we ourselves were not as withered grey-green carcasses on the Huddersfield ringroad, but plump pink tapeworms whose every comfort is eternally assured.

  Surely, sethren, our so thoroughgoing stupidity needs some explanation.  The last person to try to explain it was Karl Marx; false consciousness, opium of the masses; spot on, old Karl.  But a century and a half ago.  The Communist Manifesto was published nine years before The Origin of Species.  Nobody has attempted to explain our moronic collective credulity since then.

  I will.

  But first the building blocks.

  An act.  A kinetic four dimensional amplification of a sequence of alliances of demons.

  In the human world, maybe in the Hominin world (and I read on my phone yesterday, sethren, that Sahelpithecus is likely to represent the divergence between Homo and Chimp, seven million years ago or thereabouts), in the human world, an act is seldom isolated from a thing.  “Manus amimam pinxit, my pen is in my hand” as the old fascist put it.  There is not much that we do with our bare hands.  Throttle people, make bread and love.  But by and large a human act is an obligate symbiont with at least one thing.  It is the nexus of doing and done to — obligate symbiont, Sether Albert? Have I not mentioned it before?  Oh.  No I fucking haven’t, then.  Two different kinds of organism living in a cooperative relationship upon which both are completely dependent; trees and root fungi, mammals and their gut bacteria; human beings and politicians.

  Think of sewing, sethren.  Sewing without needle, thread and two bits of material to be joined, is not sewing.  But a needle and thread and so on cannot be sewing without kinesis, fingers, musculature, neural substrate.  Most human acts can only exist in the context of things.  And most things can only evolve in the context of acts.  The old joke goes, when a simple lad had finally been taught to add two apples to two apples and get four apples, he asked, “does it work with pears too?”  Does the concept of obligate symbiosis work with acts other than sewing?  Pears, sethren, pears.

  At the level of demons, there is no distinction to be made between an act and a thing.  An act is a thing.  Sewing, like a needle, is a demon.  Sure, as with a needle, other demons consort with the demon sewing, many more than the minimal ones we associated with a needle.  We could anatomise the demon sewing into quite a lot, or if you prefer, a whole bunch of demons.  But if you are running your eye over the contents of a design technology course to see if it is suitable for one, oh ye paupers, of your profligate quantity of offspring (whom, because you may rely on social security, you are quite likely to go home and slaughter) and in the midst of a list of course components, joinery, web design, you note for the fraction of a second your eye overflies it embroidery before the epicentre of vision moves on to automobile aesthetics; then embroidery occurred as a demon; not totally unexamined, because there will be a locus in the neural substrate which awakes and leaps to life screaming me, me, and would be only too delighted to call up other demons into the workspace, needles, coloured thread, the Bayeux tapestry, whatever the fuck you like as long as you are going to take notice; but not a chance.  The automobile aesthetics demon is already having its microsecond flicker.

  So, at the demon level, things and acts are not differentiated.  But, you will say, we humans can distinguish between a thing and an act.

  Sethren, we can distinguish between a trillion things and another trillion things, had we but world enough  and time.  We have no difficulty telling the difference between angels and fairies, between cricket and baseball, between a virus and a bacterium or a gigue and a saraband.  But we do it at another level.  We shall come to concepts in time, sethren, but you will not be amazed to know that concepts, like everything in the metaverse, are also alliances of demons.

  For it is only at the demon level that evolution can take place.

But, you may say, the ancestral organism became the hippo and the whale.  Surely it is at the level of species that things change?

That is what we see, because we cannot see genes.  Darwin didn’t even know they existed.  But it was genes, sethren (and epigenetics, of course).  Evolution takes place at the level of the cell, and it is only the sum of cells that is the organism that represents the, to us, apprehensible species.

  And you will say, but culture doesn’t have to be like biological life.  Just because evolution takes place at the level of genes, not the level of the hippo and the whale, there is no reason why culture should follow suit.

  Agreed absolutely, sethren.  Give me another explanation that will lead to an account of why we believe the simple lies of our Great Leader, an explanation that does not rest on metaphor and religious platitude, and I will go along with you.  Until then, the evolution of culture takes place at the level of demons.

  The question still lies open, can there be a non-kinetic act?  Clearly.  Acts can take place in an ideoverse unexpressed by any kinesis.  You cannot look into the face of the beloved and know of whom they dream.  The raven surveyed the meat, the string, its perch for several minutes before it acted.  The high jumper clears the bar before she starts her run-up.  This, sethren, is why I call it an act, not an action.  All that we do happens in the theatre of the skull.

  Sethren, tomorrow, sabbatical.  I go to the monastery of Skellig Michael to watch and pray for a week.  You must wander the streets of Huddersfield alone.  Watch the behaviour of your fellows, and ponder my words.  Dwell on our stupidity in especial.  When I return, and if, in like case to the Earl of Groan, I am not consumed by puffins, then concepts.

A field guide

I’ve spent a couple of days searching for people who are interested in actual cultural evolution; like discussing human culture in the (hypothetical but strongly arguable) light of being an evolving process, analogous to biological life.  I am looking for a cooperative forum where such necessities as taxonomy, scale, calibration can be discussed, as a  pre-conditon for developing a natural history of culture.  Think of an ornithological field guide, with pictures and diagrams to enable bird recognition.  What equivalent do we have for cultural evolution?  Nothing yet.  The meme thing is not just dysfunctional, it’s counterfunctional.  Nobody has the slightest idea what a meme is (well, “mirror neurones”, but in the context of the cerebral cortex and all that goes on there that we traditionally characterise as thought and memory, identifying mirror neurones explains nothing).  An end to memes!

We need some hard work.  Cultural evolutionists spend their time in all sorts of ventures, arguing with creationists (redundant), formulating theories like the place of warfare in the evolution of ultrasociability (interesting, but totally unscientific until we have some sort of finer calibrated system for looking at culture).  Where’s anybody doing any work on the basic stuff (apart from at the Royal Society, Stringer, Whiten &c)?

We need a bird book.  But before you have a bird book you have to know what a bird looks like.  Fill it up with cows, bacteria, dinosaurs, angels, and it’s kind of rather lost the point.