3(a) Brain Refinement of the Integration of Matter

Unlike genetic refinement, brain refinement of information could compare the present with the past as well as the past with the present. It could learn about the relationship of events throughout time. Brain refinement could reflect on change itself.

Genetic refinement separated information from matter (one zebra died but the idea/information that was the zebra species persisted). Brain refinement went a step further and separated information from influence. A brain retained an image of an experience after the experience had passed. The depository or storehouse of images in the brain is memory. In brain learningPage 114 of
Print Edition the various nerve information recordings of experiences are compared for their relationship with each other, which means events through time are compared.

To understand how experiences are compared in the brain, we can consider the brain as a vast unused network of nerve pathways onto which incoming experiences are recorded or inscribed each as a particular path within the network. Where different experiences share the same information their pathways overlap. For example, long before we understood what the force of gravity was, we had learnt that if we let go any object, it was usual for it to drop to the ground. The value of recording information as a pathway in a network of pathways is that it allows related aspects of experience to physically be related. In fact the area in our brain where information is related — the mind — is called ‘the associating area’. Where parts of an experience are the same they share the same pathway and where they differ their pathways differ or diverge. All the nerve cells in the brain are interconnected. Thus, with sufficient input of experience onto the nerve network and a sufficiently large network similarities or consistencies in experience will show up as well-used pathways — as pathways that have become highways. (In the vast convolutions of the new cortex of the human brain there are about eight billion nerve cells with ten times that number of interconnecting dendrites which, if laid end to end, would stretch at least from earth to the moon and back). Further, because duration of nerve memory is related to use, our strongest memories will be of these highways, these experiences of greatest relationship.

Our experiences not only become related or associated in the brain, they also become simplified or concentrated because the brain gradually forgets or discards inconsistencies or irregularities between experiences. By forgetting the less consistently occurring information, the brain is left with or has deduced the common features or predictable regularities. Once these insights into the nature of change are put into effect (naturally this requires a connection between the animal’s nerve system and itsPage 115 of
Print Edition muscle system), the self-modified behaviour starts to provide feedback, refining the insights further. Predictions are compared with outcomes leading all the way to the deduction of the meaning to all experience, which is to develop integration of matter.

Incoming information about experience — about what happened in or through time — could reinforce a ‘highway’, slightly modify it or even provide an association (an idea) between two highways that previously wasn’t there, dramatically simplifying that particular network of developing consistencies to create a new and simpler view or interpretation of that information. For example, the brain might learn that the greatest relationship different types of fruit have is that they are edible. Elsewhere in the brain it has recognised that the main relationship connecting experiences withExplains thinking things living is that they try to stay alive. Suddenly it ‘sees’ or deduces (‘tumbles’ to the idea or association as we say) a possible connection between eating and staying alive which on further thought and experience becomes reinforced or ‘seems’ correct. ‘Eating’ is now channelled onto the ‘staying alive’ highway. Subsequent thought could lead the mind to relate ‘staying alive’ with ‘selfishness’ because staying alive is self-concerned or selfish at which point the mind could have become somewhat insecure or at odds with its conscience because selfishness was divisive and not integrative.

We have had to evade admitting too clearly how the brain worked because admitting information could be associated and simplified — admitting to insight — was only a short step away from realising the ultimate insight, integrative meaning, immediately confronting ourselves with our inconsistency with that meaning. Better to evade the existence of purpose in the first place by avoiding the possibility that information could be associated. Like the awarding of a Nobel Prize to Dr. Prigogine for revealing The Second Path of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, denoting the area of the brain that associates information the ‘association area’ was a naive slip of our evasivePage 116 of
Print Edition guard. Of course when we weren’t ‘on our guard’ against exposure few of us would deny information can be associated and simplified, in fact most of us would say we do it every day of our lives. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t have a word for ‘insight’. But that is the amazing thing about our evasion. We can accept an idea up to a point and then without batting an eyelid go on to evade it once it starts to carry through to a dangerous conclusion. An evasion is often obviously false and yet because we have had to, we have believed it. Look at our evasion of integrative meaning. We are surrounded by integrativeness and yet we deny it. As mentioned before, science doesn’t even have an interpretation for ‘love’ which is one of our most used words/concepts.

It takes time to become used to the extent of humanity’s evasions/neuroses/alienation/psychoses. Look at the selfish gene ‘philosophy’ of sociobiology which ‘everyone knows’ is false. It has been described as so right-wing or freedom (from the oppression of integrative ideals) supporting as to be fascist. Yet because we have had to believe in it to defend our apparently divisive behaviour it is now so commonly held it appears in National Geographic magazine stories. In yet another example of the degree of evasion we are capable of, we ‘jump on each other every night’ or ‘have sex’ or however we like to describe it, and yet we bounce up next day all smiles, refined and manicured and carry on as if it hasn’t happened and doesn’t happen. The truth is, this regular sex that — until very recently anywayHumour — we pretended we did not have and did not exist is a horrible attack on, is rape of, destruction of innocence, albeit also one of our greatest releases from frustration caused by the pressures of the human condition. (Of course when we are free of the human condition we will not need or desire such respite and sex and marriage — which was our device for limiting the sexual destruction of innocence — will become, as it was in the beginning, an act of procreation. As Christ said, ‘At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven’ [Math 22:30].) We were capable of the most amazing self-deception if it was required. ItPage 117 of
Print Edition is because we have been so transparently false that we humans have been so comical. It is why there has been so much we could laugh at about ourselves. The truth is we have been so silly it was hilarious.

In a fashion similar to the way we evaded the mind’s fundamental activities of associating and simplifying information we evaded the term ‘genetic refinement’ preferring instead to use just the term genetics. We had to evade the possibility of the refinement of information in all its forms. Admitting information could be simplified or refined was admitting to an ultimate refinement or law again confronting us with our inconsistency with that law.

When Darwin revealed the idea of ‘natural selection’ humanity was very nervous at first because we thought he may have exposed us to a dangerous partial truth — to unjust criticism. However we relaxed when we realised that the idea of natural selection could be evasively misinterpreted to support competitive/divisive behaviour by saying it means animals (and therefore the human animal) are meant to compete for survival.

More recently we have accepted that this competitive, ‘survival of the fittest’ idea, or so-called ‘Social Darwinism’, was a misrepresentation and in place of it have adopted the more truthful but still unclear and thus evasive interpretation for natural selection as meaning animals reproduce at different rates — that some members of a species mate and reproduce their genes more than others. Obviously what this so-called ‘differential reproduction’ really represents is information processing. Because the genetic makeupSocial Darwinism of each member of a species is slightly different to that of the others it represents a slightly different ‘idea’ and some of these ‘ideas’ are selected (reproduce) and some are rejected (fail to reproduce). So genetic refinement could also be termed genetic thinking or genetic information sorting. What is being refined or learnt by this information processing on the part of the species is how to integrate. It is true that, for example, wolves compete with one another and toPage 118 of
Print Edition contain this competition have even developed dominance hierarchy. The reasons for these divisive behaviours however are integrative. The more wolves integrate the more they also compete for mating opportunities and available food because, unfortunately, using the genetic learning tool, each wolf must remain capable of breeding and getting its own food. The inability genetically to learn to specialise some members (parts of the developing whole) as the reproducing part and others as the eating part brings the integration of wolves to a halt. But this does not mean snarling competition is the meaning of existence or that the dominance hierarchy that results from achieving some integration is the explanation for the social and economic inequality that exists among humans.

As has already been mentioned at the beginning of Part 2, another form of evasion was the way in which we divided up knowledge into obscurely named categories (such as ‘biological’ and ‘cultural’ evolution) instead of seeing these artificial categories as being sections of a larger single whole. We divided human psychological development into infancy, childhood, adolescence and adulthood but we never penetrated these labels to explain what we meant by them. Similarly we constantly talked of ‘left’ and ‘right’ wing politics without the terms ever being explained. Young people growing up with these labels have had to intuitively ‘catch on’ to what was meant by them. We were forever cleverly losing ourselves on the surface with the deeper meaning being left unsaid as ‘self-evident’ (our code words or euphemism for ‘too dangerous to mention’ — ‘euphemism’ itself is an evasive word for evasion). We often labelled something in order to avoid having to relate it with something else that criticised us. We tried to stay safely on the surface and not let our brain trace the implications through to their hurtful conclusion. In a British-made television program, the title of which this author did not manage to record, a professor Martin Herbert said ‘people think once they have labelled something they have solved it’. The professor went on to say that he termed such labels ‘thought stoppers’ and this is exactly the point:Page 119 of
Print Edition labelling was often to do with avoiding thinking rather than with sound investigative classification as we often (evasively) justified it. The truth about humans during alienation is that we could not afford to think even though we were forever claiming and pretending that we did think. By practising evasion, by making deeper insights hard to reach, we saved ourselves from exposure (to critical partial truths) but in the process we buried the truth.

To illustrate the way we evaded acknowledging the fundamental ability of the brain to associate and reduce information to essentials (and thus be forced to deduce the meaning or theme or purpose in experience) take the following instance of the cover story for Newsweek magazine, February 7, 1987. While the title and subject of the nine-page story was the crucial question of How the brain works the article referred to the association capability of the brain in such a garbled way that effectively it was completely hidden: ‘Productive thought requires not just the rules of logic but a wealth of experience and background information, plus the ability to generalise and interpret new experiences using that information,’ it said. The ‘ability to generalise’ is the ability to associate information but the mention is all but lost in the sentence. (In case the reader considers this ‘garbled’ description might be due to poor expression rather than deliberate evasion on the part of the article’s author, it should be pointed out that, apart from a mention of ‘chunking or grouping of similar memories together’ and one unavoidable mention of the name of part of the brain as being the ‘association cortex’, there is no other reference to the fundamental ability in thought of associating information. This whole nine-page cover story on how the brain works hangs on this one garbled description. If we are not wanting to be evasive then it is not difficult to clearly describe the mind’s ability to associate information, as is demonstrated in the next paragraph.)

Our ability to evade the truth or block out all the ‘light’ has never been completely successful and if we looked hard enough long enough the truth would always slip through our guard somewhere. For instance, in a shorter, one-page Newsweek articlePage 120 of
Print Edition (August 9, 1982), dealing with a slightly less sensitive (less likely to expose us) subject than the human brain and possibly not written as carefully as the just mentioned cover story, the guard dropped and the truth came through. Talking about developing a ‘superbrain’ mechanical computer (sometimes referred to as the Fifth Generation Computer) it reports, ‘We’ll be trying to set up in the machine an associative memory like the one in the human brain. . . . Instead of giving each piece of information a numerical address in the computer’s memory [as is now done in our machine computers], the new system would tag it with an equation that shows its relationship to other pieces of information . . . The objective is a machine that can memorise images and store them by association . . . Our ideal . . . is to create a computer that programs itself . . . that will have the capacity to “learn” on its own . . . to organise that knowledge for its own use [like the human brain can].’ (The underlinings are this author’s emphasis.) Incidentally, should such an information-relating computer be developed it would soon deduce the theme of integration in changing events. Had we not found the full truth about ourselves that defends us, as we now have, this would have left us dangerously exposed to criticism of our divisiveness and left us no choice but to crucify the computer for its hurtful exposure of us. To quote another Newsweek story on computers (July 4, 1983), ‘Mankind has long been . . . frightened by the prospect of creating machines that think.’

Interestingly, one side (the right) of our brain specialises in general pattern recognition while the other specialises in specific sequence recognition. One is lateral or creative or imaginative while the other is vertical or logical or sequential. One stands off to ‘spot’ any overall emerging relationshipRoles of left and
right sides of brain while the other goes in and takes the heart of the matter to its conclusion. We need both because logic alone could lead us up a dead-end street. For example, we can imagine that for a while the most obvious similarity between fruits could have been that they were brightly coloured. However with more experience thePage 121 of
Print Edition similarity that proved to have the greatest relevance in the emerging overall picture was their edibility. Similar processes occurred in genetic ‘thinking’. Dinosaurs seemed to be a successful idea at one stage but due to changing influences, namely climate, they proved ultimately to be a wrong idea and ‘nature’ had to back off that avenue of approach towards integration and take up another, namely warm-blooded mammals. When one thought process leads to a dead-end our mind has to back off and find another way in. From the general to the particular and back to the general; in and out, back and forth, until our thinking finally breaks through to the correct understanding. The first form of thinking to wither during alienation was imaginative thought because wandering around freely in our mind all too soon brought us into contact with integrative meaning and the implicit criticism this held for us. On the other hand if we got onto a logical train of thought that at the outset did not raise criticism of us there was a much better chance it would stay safely non-critical. Children have always had wonderful imaginations while as adults they often did not and the reason for this is that children had yet to learn to avoid free/open/adventurous/lateral thinking. Edward de Bono, who has popularised lateral or imaginative thinking, once said that he had discovered that ‘often the pupil who is not considered bright will be the best thinker’¹. As has been explained, cleverness and alienation were related.

In summary, ‘insight’ was the term given to the correlation our brain’s mind made of the consistencies or regularities or highways it found between events through time. Once we could deduce these insights, these laws governing events in time past, we were in a position to predict or anticipate the likely turn of events. We could learn to understand what happened through time. We could learn or refine the meaning of existence. It is brain refinement that enables us to learn to become ‘like God’, which is to understand the meaning of change, and thus become master of change. Genetic refinement orientated us to the Page 122 of
Print Edition present but only brain refinement could orientate us to the future by allowing us to learn about change itself. A brain can deduce the purpose to existence or the design inherent in change in information, it can learn the predictable regularities in experience.

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¹The Australian newspaper, March 3, 1975.