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  JOURNEY

  OF THE MIND

  HOW THINKING EMERGED

  FROM CHAOS

  Ogi Ogas and

  Sai Gaddam

  For Agastya, Meera, and Priyanka

  And for Tofool

  Chaos isn’t a pit. Chaos is a ladder. . . . The climb is all there is.

  —Littlefinger, Game of Thrones

  Contents

  Initial Value Problem

  STAGE I

  MOLECULE MINDS

  Chapter OneFIRST MIND / PURPOSE

  Chapter TwoARCHAEA MIND / TARGETING

  Chapter ThreeBACTERIA MIND I / DECISION-MAKING

  Chapter FourBACTERIA MIND II / MEMORY

  Chapter FiveAMOEBA MIND / COMMUNICATION

  STAGE II

  NEURON MINDS

  The Metropolis Principle

  Chapter SixHYDRA MIND / MULTITASKING

  Chapter SevenROUNDWORM MIND / CENTRALIZATION

  Chapter EightFLATWORM MIND / PERCEPTION

  Chapter NineFLY MIND / REPRESENTATION

  STAGE III

  MODULE MINDS

  The Unified Mathematics of the Self

  Chapter TenFISH MIND / THE PRECONSCIOUS PROLETARIAT

  Chapter ElevenFROG MIND / HOW

  Chapter TwelveTORTOISE MIND / WHAT

  Chapter ThirteenRAT MIND / WHERE

  Chapter FourteenBIRD MIND / WHEN

  Chapter FifteenMONKEY MIND / WHY

  Chapter SixteenCHIMPANZEE MIND / THE CONSCIOUSNESS CARTEL

  STAGE IV

  SUPERMINDS

  The Darkness

  Chapter SeventeenHUMAN MIND / LANGUAGE

  Chapter EighteenSAPIENS SUPERMIND I / CIVILIZATION

  Chapter NineteenSAPIENS SUPERMIND II / SELF

  The Light

  The Tandava

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  JOURNEY

  OF THE MIND

  Initial Value Problem

  Do not imagine that the Way is short;

  Vast seas and deserts lie before His court.

  Consider carefully before you start;

  The journey asks of you a lion’s heart.

  —The Conference of the Birds, Farid ud-Din Attar

  In the beginning, fourteen billion years ago, existence arose from nonexistence and the universe commenced.

  Four billion years ago, give or take, life arose from nonlife and the evolution of species commenced.

  A billion years after that, purpose arose from purposelessness and the journey of the mind commenced. Eventually, the journey would forge a god out of godlessness, a new breed of mind endowed with the power and disposition to reshape the cosmos as it saw fit.

  This book retraces the journey of the mind from the aimless cycling of mud on a dark and barren Earth until the morning a mind woke up and declared to an indifferent universe, “I am aware of me!”

  The chapters ahead visit seventeen different living minds, ranging from the simplest to the most sophisticated. First up is the tiniest organism on Earth, the humble archaeon, featuring a mind so minuscule that you would be forgiven for questioning whether it’s a mind at all. From there, our itinerary will take us forward through a series of increasingly brawny intellects. We will sojourn with amoeba minds, insect minds, tortoise minds, and monkey minds, until we arrive at the mightiest mind to ever grace our solar system . . . one that may be something of a surprise.

  Each chapter highlights a new mental challenge thrown down in a mind’s path by chaos, the purposeless churn of physical matter, before revealing the mental innovation that surmounted it. This gauntlet of challenges begins with one of the most perplexing of all: How did a mind emerge from mindlessness?

  You will learn how each new innovation led to an even more daunting challenge that spurred minds to become smarter still. You will see how bacteria make situation-specific decisions without the benefit of a single neuron, let alone a brain. You will discover why the housefly’s surprisingly intelligent mind marks nature’s boundary between minds that are unquestionably nonconscious and those indisputably conscious. You will come to appreciate how monkeys rely upon hope, rage, and awe to chart a course through life. Each new form of thinking is explained in plain language without any mathematical equations, though curious readers can find additional details and references in the endnotes.

  This book is motivated by three goals. First, to help you appreciate the hidden connectedness of all minds. Amoeba minds and human minds are linked through an unbroken continuum that parallels the one linking the ancient Roman town of Londinium with the twenty-first-century London megalopolis.

  The second aim of retracing the mind’s three-billion-year pilgrimage is to obtain new answers to very old questions. Why do we exist? Where are we all headed? Is there a hidden relationship between chaos and purpose? Is there a cosmic role for love in the universe? For decency?

  The third goal is to explain the physical basis of the “Big Three” forms of thinking: consciousness, language, and the Self. How do minds—unlike pebbles and dust and sunspots—boast the ability to experience things? You may have heard that mortal consciousness is the greatest locked-room mystery in science, an unsolved puzzle that may never be unriddled. The journey ahead suggests otherwise. By progressing through the sequence of innovations that led to sentience, step-by-step, this narrative offers an incremental account of why and how consciousness appeared in the universe. You will learn how consciousness works and come to see new strains of consciousness in places you never expected. You will learn, too, how language was constructed atop the architecture of consciousness and why a hairy, hooting biped with a fondness for rocks became the first beast to compose poetry, rather than a soft-feathered flyer with a melodious song. And, finally, you will acquire a deeper understanding of the greatest innovation in biological minds: the human Self.

  Such grandiose finales often have modest origins. The journey of the mind begins eons before the first human mew, in a bleak and unthinking void without a trace of purpose in sight. The old fable of Genesis got one thing right, for in this boundless reign of chaos the first mind strove to cleave the light from the darkness . . .

  Stage I

  Molecule Minds

  CHAPTER ONE / FIRST MIND

  Purpose

  We’re building something here, Detective. We’re building it from scratch. All the pieces matter.

  —Lester Freamon, The Wire

  1.

  A long, long time ago, somewhere in the dark and the deep, volcanic vents blasted through the crust beneath the ocean and spewed out sulfur and minerals in a furious maelstrom of pressure and heat. Out of this infernal brew, the first living organisms began to multiply.

  Or maybe they oozed out of asteroid-infused mud. Or seeped from the cracks of sunbaked clay. Or bubbled out of wet pockets of rock galvanized by lightning. Or wriggled out of freshwater pools on volcanic islands. Or—another serious contender—perhaps they hitched a ride across the heavens on a meteor.

  The origins of life on Earth remain one of science’s most enduring mysteries. Nobody has a particularly persuasive theory regarding the identity or circumstances of the primal chemistry that jump-started metabolism and reproduction, the two fundamental hallmarks of life. Making the task of recombobulating life’s firstborn even more knotty is the fact that conditions on primeval Earth were radically different than now.

  If you were somehow transported back to the day that the first audacious speck of life xeroxed itself, you would find that the day was a brisk ten hours long, the Earth completing an entire rotation during the length of a modern commuter’s workday. A dim chilly red sun barely penetrated a hazy sky the color of brickdust. During the brief night, the moon loomed low and enormous in the sky like some pale fairybook beast. An oxygen-less atmosphere drenched with poison churned over a cold and sludgy ocean.

  In this exotic and speculative realm, some combination of molecules interacted with some other combination of molecules and sparked the journey of life—an event whose staggering import scientists dryly mask with the term “abiogenesis.” Regarding the identity of this sacred web of chemical permutations, all is contested conjecture. Well, almost all. One hypothesis has risen above the rampant guesswork and attained something close to consensus among scientists. The hypothesis is this:

  The chemical system of newborn life—whatever it might have been—was swaddled in a tiny ball of fat.

  We should all sing hymns of thanksgiving to this wobbly little globe. It proved to be the cornerstone character in two cosmic narratives: the journey of life and the journey of Mind. (Biologists have a ready term to refer to all species that ever were: “life.” Neuroscientists lack a corresponding term for all minds that ever were, so this book shall employ “Mind” for the task.)

  Certain large molecules containing fatty acids—lipids, in the language of chemistry—possess a special property. They automatically self-assemble into a membrane. Their physical nature is to link together into an elastic wall that bends back on itself to create a sphere. You’ve witnessed this process anytime you’ve noticed a bubble emerge from soapy water. Soap bubbles contain molecules similar to those found in the membranes of living organisms—and similar, perhaps, to those in the primeval membranes that originally cordoned off life from not-life, thereby constructing a private room where the story of biology could unfold in fragile safety.

  The establishment of a distinct physical boundary around metabolizing and sel
f-replicating chemical processes inaugurated something marvelous. A body. A physical configuration whose constituents were diligently laboring to preserve their configuration’s existence.

  By separating the stuff performing all the indispensable tasks of self-preservation from all the other stuff in the world—by dividing me from not-me—an ancient shroud of lipids fulfilled an essential precondition for the emergence of Mind. Every mind needs a border partitioning the physical processes of its body from its environment, where chaos maintains its indomitable reign.

  The inception of a living body introduces the first of four deep principles of Mind that will help us make sense of Mind’s ascendance from mindlessness to sentience: the embodied thinking principle. According to the embodied thinking principle, it is not possible to separate a mind from its body, any more than we can separate a city from its buildings. In order to understand any particular form of thinking, we must always take into account the configuration of the physical stuff that the thinking is incarnated within, even when much of that stuff may not appear to be directly involved with manufacturing thoughts.

  THE BIRTH OF BODY

  Every mind has a body. Yet, no matter how complex its breathing, feeding, and excreting, a body alone is not a mind. Innumerable generations of membrane-enveloped organisms nursed a vibrant biochemical metabolism and were perfectly alive yet remained totally mindless. That’s because these pioneering species lacked something else indispensable for the genesis of thought.

  They needed something to think with.

  2.

  A mind is a physical system that converts sensations into action. A mind takes in a set of inputs from its environment and transforms them into a set of environment-impacting outputs that, crucially, influence the welfare of its body. This process of changing inputs into outputs—of changing sensation into useful behavior—is thinking, the defining activity of a mind.

  THINKING ELEMENTS

  Accordingly, every mind requires a minimum of two thinking elements:

  •A sensor that responds to its environment

  •A doer that acts upon its environment

  Some familiar examples of sensors that are part of your own mind include the photon-sensing rods and cones in your retina, the vibration-sensing hair cells in your ears, and the sourness-sensing taste buds on your tongue. A sensor interacts with a doer, which does something. A doer performs some action that impinges upon the world and thereby influences the body’s health and well-being. Common examples of doers include the twitchy muscle cells in your finger, the sweat-producing apocrine cells in your sweat glands, and the liquid-leaking serous cells in your tear ducts.

  A mind, then, is defined by what it does, rather than what it is. “Mind” is an action noun, like “tango,” “communication,” or “game.” A mind responds. A mind transforms. A mind acts. A mind adapts to the ceaseless assault of aimless chaos.

  The identities of the sensors and doers of Earth’s first mind are lost in deep time and may never be recoverable. These primal thinking elements may have been simple, perhaps single molecules that changed their shape when they contacted a photon of light. However, it’s more likely that the original sensors and doers were ungainly contraptions composed of clumsy chains of free-floating molecules that did not reliably respond to stimuli or consistently exhibit a desired behavior.

  Together, this trinity of sensor, doer, and body launched the journey of Mind by solving its first mental challenge: creating a mind out of mindlessness. Cast apart, sensors and doers are inanimate matter, flecks of vagrant chemical junk. But when you assemble a sensor, doer, and body so that they interact in a particular way, something interesting happens. To illustrate this physical revolution, it’s time for the protagonist of our story to step on stage.

  The simplest hypothetical mind is the proud proprietor of a single sensor and a single doer swathed in a membrane. How could a single sensor and doer usefully benefit an organism? If the sensor detects some resource in the environment (light, perhaps) and the sensor activates the doer when it detects the resource and if the doer affords some kind of locomotion (propulsion, perhaps), then this super-simple mind could advance toward the resource.

  SIMPLEST POSSIBLE MIND

  Behold purpose, an unprecedented development in the universe!

  Purpose is a special class of physical activity, different from all other physical activity that existed before the first mind thought its first thought. A moon orbits a planet because the laws of gravity command it. But a moon with purpose might very well throw off the shackles of its planetary master and soar off into the freedom of open space. Whereas physics obeys rigid laws without aim, a mind pursues an aim without following rigid laws. Physics ensues. A mind adapts.

  Purposeful phenomena are best explained using different mathematics than purposeless phenomena. Imagine predicting the path of an ant as it walks through a forest. It dodges rocks, clambers over twigs, crawls along the side of stumps. Its path is complex and nonlinear, and if physicists attempted to derive an equation that accounted for the ant’s trajectory using the same mathematical tools they employ to account for the trajectory of an asteroid, tornado, or electron, they would labor in vain. If they instead recognized that the ant’s behavior was purposeful—the ant was trying to get home to its anthill—then they could predict the ant’s trajectory by assuming that at any given moment, the ant will choose the path offering the easiest route home. Predicting the ant’s motion requires a different kind of mathematical model than any found in the physical sciences: a model describing the thinking processes responsible for the ant’s decision-making. One of the aims of this book is to guide your intuitions about the odd principles of purpose so you can better understand consciousness, language, and the Self.

  The first thinking on Earth, whatever it may have been, surely served a specific purpose. And whatever that purpose was, it was surely an advantage in the pitiless contest for survival. Even if the first mind’s sensor was feeble and its doer clumsy, such a configuration would move itself closer to food (or away from danger) with a probability better than chance and thereby engage the engine of natural selection. A photosynthesizing organism that could move toward light or away from darkness would outcompete an identical organism that floated about aimlessly like a feather on a pond.

  Earth’s first mind remains entirely speculative, to be sure, and is the only mind on our journey that we cannot examine directly. Sadly, no organism with one sensor and one doer roams the microscopic wilds of twenty-first-century Earth. So let’s visit the next best thing. Let’s examine the simplest living mind in nature and see how it compares to the simplest hypothetical mind.

  CHAPTER TWO / ARCHAEA MIND

  Targeting

  We sit in the mud, my friend, and reach for the stars.

  —Fathers and Sons, Ivan Turgenev

  1.

  Please take a moment to move yourself one centimeter in the direction of the brightest available source of light.

  Done?

  Accomplishing this task required the use of your eyes. Your muscles, too. But most important, it required the use of your mind.

  You needed to survey the light in your surroundings (an act of perception), determine where it was brightest (an act of judgment), and then will your legs, arms, or hind parts to move there (an act of volition). In a word, you needed to think.

  Accomplishing this task solves the first challenge that every mind must address. Let’s call it the targeting problem: How do you locate a desired objective in your environment and move yourself toward it? On the face of it, the thinking you just engaged in would appear to require a fair bit of mental wiring. Some kind of visual processing circuitry to apprehend the light, you might guess, as well as judgment circuitry that evaluates where the light is brightest, and motor-control circuitry that formulates and executes the plan to move your body toward the light in question. This sounds fairly complicated. And yet, this complex feat of targeting is accomplished by the most rudimentary mind in nature.