Friends and Enemies: Our Need to Love and Hate

Over the last twenty years I have been writing about this because our failure to understand the nature of our existence is the basis of all the suffering and sorrow we inflict on ourselves and on other people. However, over those twenty years what I can say about our curious physiology has changed because scientific knowledge and interests have changed.

Twenty years ago physics, neurophysiology and psychology were entirely separate disciplines with nothing to say to one another. Now physicists have made it very clear why it would not be in the interests of animals like ourselves to be able to directly perceive reality, that is, everything that is actually going on, instead of, as we do, relying on the guesses we make about reality. The physical world is very different from what we perceive it to be, and every advance in fundamental physics distances it even further from what we understand about the world we live in. Psychologists now know a great deal more about how we create meaning and how, when we change the meanings we have created, our behaviour changes. Meanwhile, the study of consciousness has become fashionable. In the past hard-headed psychologists and physiologists eschewed the study of consciousness because it was subjective, and subjective, as they saw it, was bad. Now philosophers, psychologists, physicists, neural systems engineers, neurophysiologists and media commentators have taken consciousness up, and there is a great deal of jolly chat about it.

Much of this chat is no more than that, but some of the conversations across disciplines have proved to be extremely fruitful, although many of the scientists are now so entranced by the notion of consciousness that they overlook the fact that consciousness is just a special case of what we are doing all the time: making meaning. The brain used to be thought of as a kind of computer but it is now clear that brains are very different from computers. However, the marriage of the computer concept of neural learning to the physiological concept of neuronal networks, along with the results of research using non-invasive scanning of the active human brain, appears to be providing some part of the missing link between the functioning of the brain and the functioning of the mind. It seems possible that when we create a meaning we simultaneously create what the neurophysiologist and psychologist Susan Greenfield calls a ‘neuronal gestalt’.

Physicists have always been interested in finding the ultimate ‘stuff’ of reality of which everything is composed. At present they seem to agree that this ultimate stuff is quanta – tiny packets of energy. However, these quanta behave in peculiar ways very different from the kind of matter we humans can experience, and so there are currently two kinds of physics – quantum physics and classical physics, which is the kind of physics which explains why apples fall downwards and planes fly.

The big question for physicists is how to link quantum physics and classical physics. Subatomic particles behave very differently from the way in which we expect objects to behave. An electron will in one situation behave like a particle and in another situation behave like a wave. If you try to measure subatomic particles the actions of taking the measurements affect what you are trying to measure. Then there is the problem of the behaviour of a photon in one place apparently being able to affect instantly the behaviour of another far distant photon. Three solutions have been suggested for this problem of the link between quantum and classical physics, but each solution seems to suggest a reality which we humans could never see. Indeed, it is difficult even to imagine what this ultimate reality might look like.

Einstein argued that quantum particles have definite position and momentum but these are obscured by wave function. It is possible to imagine little quanta darting about at great speed, but then does this mass of tiny dots turn into a seething mass of something else which is itself an illusion? Niels Bohr said that the classical realm and the quantum realm never meet except in measurement, which suggests that we all operate simultaneously in two different realms. Hugh Everett said that there is set of actual states in which a quantum particle is simultaneously a wave and a particle, the implication of which is that there are many parallel universes. Being able to see an infinite number of universes would definitely be an information overload for us. More recently a number of physicists have talked about how time functions in the behaviour of particles, but the time physicists talk about is very different from the time you and I experience.

In short, physicists are showing that we cannot see reality, or, even if we could, we wouldn’t be able to deal with it.

If that is the case, what is it that we do see?

In 1994 Terence Picton and Donald Stuss summarized much of what had recently been discovered about the localization of brain functions usually associated with ‘being conscious’. They said, ‘The human brain forms and maintains a model of the world and itself within that world. This model can be used to explain the past events and predict the future.’

(#litres_trial_promo)

That is, what our brains do is make a guess about what is actually going on and present that guess as a model or picture of ourselves in our world. Curiously, our brains not only construct these pictures, they also persuade us that, instead of the picture being inside our head, we are in the middle of the picture and it is all around us. As I am writing this I have a picture in my head of the gum trees at the bottom of my garden, but what I am experiencing is that I am sitting in my conservatory and looking at the gum trees at the bottom of my garden. Even as I look at the garden my picture is out of date. It takes my brain between a tenth and half a second to form my picture, so what I see my trees doing they have already done. Moreover, because my eyes, like everyone else’s, jump about, I have taken a string of snapshots of the garden, but my brain has turned these snapshots into a smooth, flowing film of trees waving in the wind.

Clever though my brain may be, there is much it cannot do. The models that our brains create are limited first by the basic physiological equipment we are born with and second by what our environment has to offer.

The physiological equipment which humans are born with is different from the equipment other animals have – in some cases very different. Take the humble octopus. It does not just sit there waving a tentacle or two. The New Scientist pointed out,

To plumb an octopus’s thought will require a huge leap of the imagination. As earthbound humans we are not even very good at imagining the world of other animals that move around in three dimensions. Scuba divers know how easy it is to be lost at the right place but the wrong depth … Cephalopods [which include octopuses, squid and cuttlefish] have boneless bodies and keen senses. Their complex eyes, as large as car headlamps in some deep water species, can distinguish detail as well as mammalian equivalents. Although cephalopods are thought to be colour blind, they can see polarized light, which we cannot. They also have highly developed senses of touch, taste and smell, and can detect gravity, a sense which is used in the co-ordination of muscles during movement. And in the past few years, researchers have even discovered what can be best described as hearing: fine hairs along the head and arms that, in cuttlefish at least, can detect disturbances made by a metre-long fish up to 30 metres away.

(#litres_trial_promo)

Thus an octopus’s picture of the world must be quite different from our own. Even the domestic cat occupies a world very different from its owner’s. To claim to know what an animal is thinking is, in fact, to claim the impossible.

It is sad to think that cephalopods are colour-blind when to most of us humans the sea is full of colourful delights. Actually it is not, nor is the world a colourful place. What we see as colour is the response of the cones in the retinas of our eyes to different wavelengths of light. Our eyes respond to light, and so we see a world which is complex and detailed. Yet within that world there is much we cannot see. What we see as light is only a part of the electromagnetic spectrum, which extends from extremely low-frequency radiation with wavelengths of more than 1,000 kilometres to gamma rays with wavelengths measured in billionths of a millimetre. Only a narrow band somewhere near the middle of this spectrum provides us with wavelengths to which our eyes respond.

In contrast, plants ‘see’ much more of the electromagnetic spectrum than we do. They do not have eyes but they do have proteins latched on to light-sensitive compounds which can then harvest the packets of light energy called photons. They not only ‘see’ more wavelengths than we can see but they can also identify the intensity, quality, direction and periodicity of light. Most plants can also taste, touch and perhaps even hear. Plants create their own kind of meaning, but their construction of themselves in their world must be very different from our construction of ourselves in our world.

(#litres_trial_promo)

When we see we do not simply record things in the way that a video camera does. When we see, wrote Richard Gregory, we ‘receive signals from the physical realm, and then create everything we see. Shape, size – all the properties we assign to the world around us – are largely a result of our visual intelligence.’

(#litres_trial_promo)

Different parts of our brain deal with different aspects of vision. They select and combine, and we see a picture which seems to be reality. It is only when one or two of these specialized cortical areas are damaged that the selecting and synthesizing functions of the brain are revealed. After such damage a person might be aware of colour without form or form without motion. Thus a person might be able to see a red mass but not recognize it as a bunch of roses, or be able to recognize a car but not see it as moving from one place to another. When we are seeing, different parts of our brain are used to put the picture together. What the picture means to us depends on our past experience. The retina of your eye might register a small upright rectangle with a triangle on top of it but what you see on the horizon is the huge bulk of the Canary Wharf Tower.

However, not everything we ‘see’ is experienced consciously as a picture. It seems that we have two visual modes, ‘one that allows us to consciously perceive the world and a second, subconscious mode that helps us move around in it by, say, informing a foot where to place itself.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Letting the conscious visual mode override the unconscious visual mode can make us stumble or drop things, while letting both modes work in harmony can mean typing fast or making a brilliant return in a game of tennis.

We learn to use both these visual modes when we are tiny babies learning to see. When we are born we do not just open our eyes and see. We open our eyes and set about learning to see the world. In the womb in the developing brain neurons divide and then migrate to their correct locations in the brain. Susan Greenfield explained,

As soon as the neurons have proliferated, migrated to the appropriate brain region, they effectively set down roots, initiate communications with neighbouring neurons by establishing a synaptic circuitry. Much of the increase in brain size after birth is actually due to the development of these connections, rather than simply to the addition of more neurons … As our development continues after birth, the jostling, restless neurons in our brain are very sensitive as they form circuits, to whatever changes, or simply signals, are imposed from the outside world. Inside the brain, right up to sixteen years of age, a bloody battle is being raged between our neurons. It is a battle for establishing connections. If a new neuron does not make contact with a target neuron, then it dies …

Another related and very important factor in determining cell survival, once contact is established between neurons, is activity, the sending and receiving of signals. This point is tragically made by the recent example of a six-year-old Italian boy. This boy was blind in one eye. Yet the cause of his blindness was a medical mystery. As far as the ophthalmologists could tell, his eye was totally normal. Eventually the enigma was solved. It finally emerged that when he was a baby, the boy’s eye had been bandaged for two weeks as part of the treatment for a minor infection. Such treatment would have made no difference to our older brains with their more established connections. But two weeks after birth the connections of the eye were at a critical period for the establishment of eye to brain circuits.

Since neurons serving the bandaged eye were not working, their normal target became taken over by nerves from the normal, working eye. In this case the neurons that were not signalling were treated as though they were not there at all: the target for these inactive, functionally non-existent neurons was readily invaded by the active brain cells. Normally this rule would be beneficial as it would mean that neuronal circuits were being established according to the working cells which reflected in turn the environmental requirements in which the person had to live. Sadly, the bandaging of the eye was misinterpreted by the brain as a dear indication that the boy would not be using that eye for the rest of his life.

(#litres_trial_promo)

In those weeks following our birth we learn to structure space and distance as we look around us and, if we are not swaddled as many babies still are, we reach out and discover what is near and what is far and how something feels when we put our hand around it or hold it in our mouth. Once we have learned this we can look at something and know how that shape would feel even though it is too far away or too large for us to put it in our mouth or hold it in our hand.

While, through our experiences, we are learning a basic structure for our perception of space we are also having the first of a multitude of experiences which determine how our brain selects and combines to form a picture of the world. No two people ever have the same experiences, so no two people ever have the same picture of the world. If you listen to a group of people discussing an event in which they have all participated you’ll see how individual experience shapes individual perceptions.

I went with a group of friends to the Proms, where the Chinese composer Tan Dun was presenting the European première of his symphony ‘Heaven Earth Mankind’. An important part of this symphony was the Imperial Bell Ensemble of China, who perform on a set of sixty-five ancient Chinese bells made 2,400 years ago and excavated from the tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng in 1978. The bells are amazingly wonderful and we were all entranced by them. We were also amazed and intrigued by the soloist Yo-Yo Ma, who used his cello in ways we had never seen before, and by the string section of the Scottish Symphony Orchestra, who treated their instruments as things to be slapped and banged as well as played. Moreover, behind the orchestra was the New London Children’s Choir singing as we had never heard a children’s choir sing before.

Afterwards we talked about what we had heard and seen. We all agreed that it had been a special occasion for us, but when we talked about certain details in the performance it was clear that we had each seen a different event. Although we had all watched and listened intently we could still inform one another about what we had seen and the other missed. The parents of children in the choir gave precise accounts of their child’s behaviour. The musicians in our group commented upon the structure of the symphony and the qualities displayed by the performers. I realized that I had missed the significance of the different shapes and textures of the bells and was glad to have this explained to me, but, inveterate people-watcher that I am, I had seen, and others had not, many of the interactions between the participants which were not part of the actual performance.

Every meaning we create is a selection from a vast array of possible meanings. The meanings we choose to create arise from all the meanings we have created in the past. The old saying, ‘If I hadn’t seen it I wouldn’t have believed it,’ might be correct in particular circumstances – for example, when we see an extraordinary sporting achievement or when we see an old friend act out of character, but in general the saying should be, ‘If I hadn’t believed it I wouldn’t have seen it.’ Those people who believe in astrology see in a person’s life the effect of the movement of the planets, which is something that I cannot see.

When I ask myself, ‘Why did that person do that?’ I come up with answers that have to do with the person’s feelings, desires and fears. I do not create theories that have to do with the influence of the planets or evil spirits or God’s mysterious ways, even though I am familiar with the ideas in astrology and in the various religions. However, as I make sense of any situation there are certain meanings which are not in the vast array of possible meanings presented to me because they are meanings which I could not possibly apprehend.

Some of these meanings are beyond my apprehension because I have never had the required experience to form them. I am largely ignorant of mathematics. I speak only one language. I was born at a particular time in the history of the universe and I have lived in particular places and not others. Similar restrictions apply to each of us, but, along with these, there is the restriction which our physiology imposes on us.

Each of our senses responds to some aspect of our environment in a particular way – that is, our senses respond only to change or contrast. The uniform green of a thick bush hides from our eyes a green tennis ball or a green lizard. The tennis ball is visible only when its texture is seen in contrast to the texture of the leaves; the lizard is visible only when it moves.

This necessity for contrast carries over into the meanings we create. Every meaning contains its opposite because, if the opposite did not exist, no meaning could be created.

If, from the moment of your birth, you had been surrounded by loving people who protected you from every pain and disappointment and met your every need, you would have no concept of happiness because you would never have been sad. If you had been born into a world where everyone without exception was kind, caring and tolerant of everyone else you would have no concept of friendship because you would never have encountered enmity.

Sometimes the contrasts we see actually do exist. Sadness is part of the human condition and enmities abound. Sometimes the contrast exists only in our imagination because the actual contrast is for us literally inconceivable.

For instance, we cannot conceive of the actual opposite of meaning. We would say that the opposite is ‘meaninglessness’, but that itself is a meaning. Usually when we call something meaningless we mean, ‘I don’t know at the moment what meaning to give this’ or ‘I don’t approve of this’, as in the phrase popular with politicians and media commentators, ‘meaningless violence’.

When we are reaching into our imaginations to create a contrast we often come up with images from our past experience which seem sensible but are actually quite misleading. When physicists talk about the edge of the universe or before the Big Bang we can picture a cliff-like edge to the universe or a time before the universe existed. Our image presupposes an observer. However, the physicists are talking about a timeless nothingness which is the actual contrast to our timeful somethingness, but a timeless nothingness which, like the opposite of meaningful, lies for ever beyond our comprehension.

When I talk about meaning I can only use words, and this can give the impression that meanings exist only in words. Many of them do, but many, perhaps most, exist in wordless forms. Many exist as visual or auditory or tactile or kinaesthetic images, or mixtures of all four – the kinds of images we create before we acquire language. Many exist in that wordless but vital knowledge we call skills. Ask a champion golfer, a master potter or an experienced cook how to produce a winning drive, a superb pot or the perfect soufflé and their description will fall far short of what they actually do. Each is likely to say, ‘I’ll show you.’

Even when we construct our meanings in words we do not, and cannot, report the world as it is. Just as our past experience limits what meanings we can create so does the language we speak limit what we can say.

As they left the forest for the savannah our far distant ancestors weren’t chattering away as we do now. They would have communicated with one another, but language as we know it evolved over many thousands of years. As Richard Gregory has pointed out,

(#litres_trial_promo) they would have evolved perceptual classifications of objects and actions, knowing, say, which leaves to eat and which to avoid, and it was from these classifications that language developed. There had to be changes in the brain, changes in the larynx and pharynx to make possible a wide range of vocalizations, and these changes had to be underwritten by changes in the genetic structure. Linguists and anthropologists argue about the rate of these changes. Could the Neanderthal people talk? Did our species, Homo sapiens, have, right from its first appearance, language as we know it, or was there some major explosion of language ability coinciding with an explosion, between 60,000 and 30,000 years ago, of artistic creation, implying the ability to think in symbolic forms? The only thing these scientists seem to agree on is that we evolved language in order to talk to one another, to inform, warn, trade, or, as Robin Dunbar said, to gossip.

(#litres_trial_promo)

Different languages developed as different groups of people spread across the continents. The best time to learn more than one language is in early childhood when neuronal connections are being set up. In adulthood learning another language is for most of us quite difficult, and different languages can seem to be extremely diverse, yet what linguists following Noam Chomsky have shown is that every language has within it the same Universal Grammar, and that small children learning to speak exhibit an innate ability to use this grammar.

Language might be universal to our species but different languages developed in different groups of people in different places, dealing with different kinds of environment and having different interests and needs. Steven Pinker in his book The Language Instinct

(#litres_trial_promo) scornfully demolishes the belief disseminated by the linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf that the Eskimos had some 400 words for snow. The Eskimos, said Pinker, had about as many words for snow as English speakers have.