Above is a drawing by Ramon y Cajal of a neuron (brain cell). You see the neuron from your point of view. What does the neuron see from its point of view? Or do physical things not have points of view?
Since 2003 my research has been distinguished by my effort to treat physical things as observers. There is not much I can do to know how it feels to be a neuron. But it is possible to know, more or less, what a neuron knows. I want to take the neuron’s point of view by knowing what it knows. Ideally this means quantifying what it knows about its external environment and future.
“Knowledge” is an extremely important and useful word. Unfortunately it has the connotation of a rarified and profound truth understood only by a human or god. I use “knowledge” as a synonym of “information” and “evidence.” Physicists say that a particle has information about its location. By my definition of terms, this is no different from saying that a particle knows its location. If a particle knows its location, a neuron surely knows something considerably more interesting.
A General Theory of the Brain Based on the Neuron’s Point of View
In 2008 I published a general theory of the brain (Fiorillo, 2008), which I have expanded since then in both published (Fiorillo et al., 2014) and unpublished work. Today I can see many shortcomings in my understanding from that time and the language I used to convey it. But apart from a specific proposal about exactly how to relate the internal state of a thing to the probability of an external state, I still believe that the theory is correct.
There has long been a great deal of supporting evidence in the literature, and since 2008 my students and I have provided additional experimental evidence for certain aspects of this wide ranging theory. I can say with confidence that there is no other theory of the brain that is nearly as general, biophysically detailed, and accurate in its predictions (for example, see Kim and Fiorillo, 2017).
Anthropomorphic Nonsense
The theory has been neither well received nor criticized. But certainly it has achieved a world-class level of neglect. I could spend the rest of my career amassing more experimental evidence. The problem is that no amount of biophysical evidence will convince people of the truth of a hypothesis that appears confusing if not entirely nonsensical.
What could it possibly mean to say that a single cell in the brain has knowledge about something outside the brain? After all, a neuron is not mysterious. It is nothing more than a tiny machine, and we have understood its biophysical mechanics quite well for decades. How could it possibly achieve a sophisticated cognitive function like prediction?
Perhaps my most outrageous claim is that we should treat the neuron like a person and take its perspective. After listening to me as a postdoctoral student make my case for the neuron’s point of view, an agitated professor of genetics once made his entire counterargument by forcefully exclaiming “you can’t do that!” Apparently he was convinced that while an animal like a cat might have a point of view, it was perfectly obvious that a neuron is purely physical and does not. To think otherwise is surely anthropomorphic nonsense.
The Dualistic Methodology of Science
Indeed, the neuron’s point of view surely is nonsense to a devout dualist. If mental and physical are two distinct categories of substance, it follows that we should begin the scientific enterprise by categorizing the world into the mental and the physical (people and things, mind and body, software and hardware), and then analyze them by entirely different methodologies. The fact is that although it is extremely difficult to find a scientist who preaches dualism, it is perhaps even more difficult to find a scientist who does not practice dualism.
Those things that science categorizes as strictly physical, like neurons, are analyzed solely from the perspective of scientists. We are the observer, and we try to identify the relationship (algorithm) between their observed inputs and outputs. This can be seen as a definition of what we mean by “physical science.”
If instead we believe that a thing has mental attributes, as we do for a person or animal, we often treat them as an observer and try to take their perspective. This means that we try to understand what they know about the world, while recognizing that their knowledge will differ from our own. We employ a belief in observers, which is known in psychology as a “theory of mind.”
Thus we have a third-person method of analysis for entities that we classify as mindless and thing-like (bodies), and a very different first-person method for entities we consider person-like (minds). I discussed this at length in Fiorillo (2012). In psychology these two methods of analysis, and corresponding philosophies, are known as behaviorist and cognitivist.
The physical sciences employ only the behaviorist methodology of input-output relations as seen from the scientist’s perspective (indeed, behaviorism was invented as an effort to reformulate psychology and the study of behavior as a physical science). Some scientists, such as the aforementioned geneticist, presumably see this as an essential and defining feature of physical science. I have been stepping outside the bounds of physical science just by talking about the neuron’s point of view (though I was not the first; see The Unreasonable Ineffectiveness of Information Theory).
Mental Observers and Physical Objects
The predictable result of our dualistic methodology is that we have excellent physical models of neurons and other things, and we have good cognitive models of human minds, but our understanding of the relation between the mental and the physical is superficial at best.
This has not just been a philosophical failure to relate mind to body and psychology to physics. The general problem is that we have two entirely distinct conceptual frameworks for understanding the world. Each has its own vocabulary. We have the physical realm of space, time, matter, energy, mechanism, etc., and we have the mental realm of perception, intention, information, prediction, value, decision, intelligence, etc. We explain some observations and phenomena using the mental framework and others using the physical. Any attempts we make to explain one using the other are superficial (like saying that mental property A is in brain region X and causes motor behavior M). Another millennium of research using the dualistic approach will not diminish the schism.
If one thinks about this problem for a few seconds, it seems obvious that people and animals are not like other things, so we should analyze them differently. But if one thinks about this problem for more than a minute, it ought to become apparent that we have no principled justification whatsoever for assuming a dichotomy and treating only higher animals as observers. Of course the perspective of a fly or a rock must be very different from that of a human, and it is not obvious how one could take the perspective of a fly or a rock. But there is not a shred of scientific evidence that only higher animals, or only things that are alive, have a perspective. A perspective requires only local evidence about the environment and the future. Even a rock has that (conscious or not).
Cognophysical Models
We need models in which mental and physical are not only both present, but are non-dissociable, with a specific and determinate mapping between physical and mental states. I will call such models of observers “cognophysical models.”
Evidence/knowledge is the only cognitive/mental property that is critical to my ideas. I consider it a ‘mental’ concept because it has no accepted physical definition, and it is part of our mental framework for understanding the world. I am convinced that evidence is the key concept that we need to bridge the gap between the mental and physical. The major focus of my current research is to develop cognophysical models of the evidence about external and future reality inherent within the physical structure of a thing.
A cognophysical model might help us to better understand consciousness, and what it is like to be a particular physical thing, such as a cat, or a neuron. But that is not its primary purpose. In fact the utility of cognophysical models, and the validity of Rational Observer Theory, would not be altered in the least if we agree that neither you nor I nor anything else is conscious of anything.
A cognophysical model concerns what a physical thing knows, regardless of how that knowledge relates to conscious perception. Whereas hypotheses about mental properties are not directly testable, cognophysical models make testable predictions about what we as scientists will observe, such as the temporal pattern of a neuron’s spikes (Fiorillo et al., 2014) and the decay time of its synaptic inhibition (Kim and Fiorillo, 2017).
I emphasize concrete physical predictions of the theory in part because I presume that there are still physical scientists who view concepts related to psychology with suspicion, even more than a century after physics underwent a revolution that was initiated by Einstein’s imagination of what it feels like to be in free fall. Our physics is very much bound by what we feel and sense (too much so; see Science’s Problem with Reality).
Physics already features simple versions of cognophysical models, at least implicitly. For example, typical models propose that a particle has information about its state (such as its location) and the states of other particles, as in the case of quantum entanglement. This means, by my definition of terms, that it is a local observer and it knows its state and infers the state of other particles. However, physics needs explicit physical models of local observers. I further discuss this in Science’s Observation Problem.
How can we take the neuron’s point of view?
I cannot literally take any perspective other than my own. When I take the perspective of another person, I have a model/hypothesis in my mind, corresponding to my knowledge, of the knowledge and associated mental state of that person. The same applies when I take the perspective of a thing.
However, my understanding of what another person knows does not come from any knowledge I may have about the particular physical properties of that person’s brain. I do not employ a physical model of a person’s brain. In contrast, when I try to take a neuron’s point of view, I rely primarily on my knowledge about its physical state. I use my knowledge to create a cognophysical model of its physical state and how that state relates to its knowledge of its environment and future. To the extent that I have the correct model and understanding, I can take its point of view, at least in a mathematical sense.
When I write “the neuron’s point of view,” I am not considering the entire neuron, which is exceedingly complex. Rather the neural observer of primary interest to me is a single quantity, the electrical potential energy (voltage) across the neuron’s membrane at a moment in time. This voltage is the most distinctive and sophisticated property that connects a neuron to the external world. It is evidence that favors certain external and future states. Ideally we can quantify this evidence with probabilities. In other words, we find the probability distribution over external and future states conditional on the present internal state. This is the complete description of all that this observer knows.
Achieving this complete description is more novel, and more challenging, than it might appear, even for very simple physical models. It requires overcoming multiple conceptual obstacles related to philosophy and mathematics, as discussed in The Measure of Evidence. But the greatest obstacle is the difficulty we have in simply conceiving of physical things as mental observers with their own points of view. Once that leap of imagination is made, the remaining obstacles will fall in time.