Introduction - R.A. Wilson's Brain Circuitry (long)

We will, throughout this book, consider the human brain a kind of bio-computer -- an electro-colloidal computer, as distinct from the electronic or solid-state computers which exist outside our heads.

Please note carefully and long remember that we have not said that the human brain is a computer. The Aristotelian idea that to understand something you must know what it is has been abandoned in one science after another, for the pragmatic reason that the simple word "is" introduces so many metaphysical assumptions that we can argue forever about them. In the most advanced sciences, such as mathematical physics, nobody talks about what anything is anymore. They talk about what model (or map) can best be used to understand whatever we are investigating.

In general, this scientific habit of avoiding "is" can be profitably extended to all areas of thought. Thus, when you read anywhere that A is B, it will clarify matters if you translate this as "A can be considered as, or modeled by, B."

When we say A is B, we are saying that A is only what it appears within our field of study or our area of specialization. This is saying too much. When we say A can be considered as B, or modeled by B, we are saying exactly as much as we have a right to say, and no more.

We therefore say that the brain can be considered as a computer; but we do not say it is a computer.

Every computer consists of two aspects, known as hardware and software. (Software here includes information).

The hardware in a solid-state computer is concrete and localized, consisting of central processing unit, display, keyboard, external disk drive, CD-ROM, floppies, etc. -- all the parts you can drag into Radio Shack for repair if the computer is malfunctioning.

The software exists of programs that can exist in many forms, including the totally abstract. A program can be "in" the computer in the sense that it is recorded in the CPU or on a disk which is hitched up to the computer. A program can also exist on a piece of paper, if I invented it myself, or in a manual, if it is a standard program; in these cases, it is not "in" the computer, but can be put "in" at any time. But a program can be even more tenuous than that; it can exist only in my head, if I have never written it down, or if I have used it once and erased it.

The hardware is more "real" than the software in that you can always locate it in space-time -- if it's not in the bedroom, somebody must have moved it to the study, etc. On the other hand, the software is more "real" in the sense that you can smash the hardware back to dust ("kill" the computer) and the software still exists, and can "materialize" or "manifest" again in a different computer.

In speaking of the human brain as an electro-colloidal biocomputer, we all know where the hardware is: it is inside the human skull. The software, however, seems to be anywhere and everywhere. For instance, the software "in" my brain also exists outside my brain in such forms as, say, a book I read twenty years ago, which was an English translation of various signals transmitted by Plato 2,400 years ago. Other parts of my software are made up of the software of Confucius, James Joyce, my second-grade teacher, the Three Stooges, Beethoven, my mother and father, Richard Nixon, my various dogs and cats, Dr. Carl Sagan, and anybody and (to some extent) any-thing that has ever impacted upon my brain. This may sound strange, but that's the way software (or information) functions.

Of course, if consciousness consisted of nothing but this undifferentiated tapioca of timeless, spaceless software, we would have no individuality, no center, no Self.

We want to know, then, how out of this universal software ocean a specific person emerges.

Beause the human brain, like other animal brains, acts as an electro-colloidal computer, not a solid-state computer, it follows the same laws as other animal brains. That is, the programs get into the brain, as electro-colloidal bonds, in discrete quantum stages.

Each set of programs consists of four basic parts:

1. Genetic Imperatives. Totally hard-wired programs or "instincts."

2. Imprints. These are more-or-less hard-wired programs which the brain is genetically designed to accept only at certain points in development. These points are known, in ethology, as times of imprint vulnerability.

3. Conditioning. These are programs built onto the imprints. They are looser and fairly easy to change with counter-conditioning.

4. Learning. This is even looser and "softer" than conditioning.

In general, the primordial imprint can alwasy over-rule any subsequent conditioning or learning. An imprint is a species of software that has become built-in hardware, being impressed on the tender neurons when they are peculiarly open and vulnerable.

Imprints (software frozen into hardware) are the non-negotiable aspects of our individuality. Out of the infinity of possible programs existing as potential software, the imprint establishes the limits, parameters, perimeters within which all subsequent conditioning and learning occurs.

Your hardware is localized: brain calles right here, right now.

Your software is non-local: points-events everywhere, everywhen.

Before the first imprint, the consciousness of the infant is "formless and void" -- like the universe at the beginning of Genesis, or the descriptions of unconditioned ("enlightened" i.e., exploded) consciousness in the mystic traditions. As soon as the first imprint is made, structure emerges out of the creative void. The growing mind, alas, becomes trapped within this structure. It identifies with the structure; in a sense, it becomes the structure.

Each successive imprint complicates the software which programs our experience and which we experience as "reality."

Conditioning and learning build further networks onto this bedrock of imprinted software. The total structure of this brain-circuitry makes up our map of the world. It is what our Thinker thinks, and our Prover mechanically fits all incoming signals to the limitations of this map.

Following Dr. Timothy Leary (with a few modifications) we shall divide this brain hardware into eight circuits for convenience. ("For convenience" means that this map is the best map I know at present. I assume it will be replaced with a better map within 10 or 15 years; and in any case, the map is not the territory.)

Four of the circuits are "antique" and conservative, they exist in everybody (except feral children).

1. The Oral Bio-Survival Circuit. This is imprinted by teh mother or the first mothering object adn conditioned by subsequent nourishment or threat. It is primarily concerned with sucking, feeding, cuddling, and body security. It retreats mechanically from the noxious or predatory -- or from anything associated (by imprinting or conditioning) with the noxious or predatory.

2. The Anal Emotional-Territorial Circuit. This is imprinted in the "toddling" stage when the infant rises up, walks about and begins to struggle for power within teh familiy structure. This mostly mammalian circuit processes territorial rules, emotional games, or cons, pecking order and rituals of domination or submission.

3. The Time-Bending Semantic Circuit. This is imprinted and conditioned by human artifacts and symbol systems. It "handles" and "packages" the environment, classifying everything according to the local reality-tunnel. Invention, calculation, prediction and transmitting signals across generations are its functions.

4. The "Moral" Socio-Sexual Circuit. This is imprinted by the first orgasm-mating experiences at puberty and is conditioned by tribal taboos. It processes sexual pleasure, local definitions of "right" and "wrong," reproduction, adult-parental personality (sex role) and nurture of the young.

The development of these circuits as the brain evolved through evolution, and as each domesticated primate (human) brain recapitulates evolution in growing from infancy to adulthood, makes possible gene-pool survival, mammalian sociobiology (pecking order, or politics) and transmission of culture.

(my note: I may go into the final four circuits at a later date, but I'm only posting about the first four at this time, as the final four are theorized by the author to be in only a small percentage of people at the moment)

Part One: The Bio-Survival Circuit
Part Two: The Emotional-Territorial Circuit
Part Three: The Semantic Circuit
Part Four: The Socio-Sexual Circuit
Part Five: The Circuits and communication

C.

I only got halfway through Prometheus Rising & Cosmic Trigger before realizing my brain was fucking melting. maybe one day i'll finish 'em. Nice post, though.

Thanks.

My husband hates that I've read these books. He says I used to be a lot more predictable before I started to read Wilson, now he has no idea what's going to come out of my mouth, lol.

C.