How Matter Becomes Imagination

As preface to future posts on embodied imagination, sentience, sapience and human phantasy I want to share a little bit of Gerald Edelman's groundbreaking work on human consciousness and neural dynamics. Edelman has been a major influence on my thinking ever since my undergrad courses in cognitive science and animal behaviour.

Edelman's work convincingly demonstrates how human perception is not identical with conceptual categorization ('thought') - renouncing both property dualism and reductionism. Edelman argues that 'conscious experience' is biological but not causal. He was also an early advocate of the theory of epigenesis and what Dawkins has called "the extended phenotype".

In addition, Edelman's theory of neuronal group selection, also known as 'Neural Darwinism', goes a long way towards explaining brain plasticity and cumulative complexity over a person's life-span. Edelman was one of the first researchers to argue that "neurons that wire together fire together", and the first researcher to point out the pervasiveness of "degeneracy" in biological systems and the fundamental role it plays in facilitating evolution.

From Wikipedia:

Gerald Edelman is an American biologist who shared the 1972 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for work with Rodney Porter on the immune system. Edelman's Nobel Prize-winning research concerned discovery of the structure of antibody molecules In interviews, he has said that the way the components of the immune system evolve over the life of the individual is analogous to the way the components of the brain evolve in a lifetime. There is a continuity in this way between his work on the immune system, for which he won the Nobel Prize, and his later work in neuroscience and in philosophy of mind.... 

Edelman is noted for his theory of consciousness, which he has documented in a trilogy of technical books, and in several subsequent books written for a general audience including Bright Air, Brilliant Fire (1992), A Universe of Consciousness (2001, with Giulio Tononi), Wider than the Sky (2004) and Second Nature: Brain Science and Human Knowledge (2007).

In Second Nature Edelman defines human consciousness as being:

"... what you lose on entering a dreamless deep sleep ... deep anesthesia or coma ... what you regain after emerging from these states. [The] experience of a unitary scene composed variably of sensory responses ... memories ... situatedness ... "

He rejects dualism and also dismisses newer hypotheses such as the so-called 'computational' model of consciousness, which liken the brain's functions to the operations of a computer. Edelman argues that the mind and consciousness are wholly material and purely biological phenomena, arising from highly complex cellular processes within the brain, and that the development of consciousness and intelligence can be satisfactorily explained by Darwinian theory. 

In Edelman's view, human consciousness depends on and arises from the uniquely complex physiology of the human brain: 

• the vast number of neurons and associated cells in the brain 
• the almost infinitely complex physiological variations in neurons (even of the same general type) and in their connections with other cells 
• the massive multiple parallel reentrant connections between individual cells, and between larger neuronal groups, and so on, up to entire functional regions and beyond. 

Edelman's theory is strongly anti-reductionist and seeks to explain consciousness by reference to the extraordinarily rich and complex morphology of the brain.

Below Edelman delivers the Jacob Marschak Memorial Lecture at UCLA:

From Brain Dynamics to Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination
by Gerald Edelman