Putting the Brain at the Heart of General Education in the Twenty-First Century: A Proposal

Abstract

A general education course is presented that would consider Western intellectual history from the brain's point of view. Although the sciences of the brain have developed rapidly only in recent decades, the figure of the brain as humanity's uniquely distinguishing organ has loomed large for centuries. The course, which is designed for a ten-week term and includes both books and films, is organized around signature contexts in which the brain has taken centre stage, such as ‘the mind of God’, ‘world brain’, ‘brainwashing’ and ‘brain in a vat’. The course description is accompanied by a justification that draws attention to the perennial and pervasive human desire to fixate on the brain, often as a means to transcend our default biological settings.

Keywords

brain general education intelligence liberal arts neuroscience

Introduction: Why the brain?

At first blush, the brain is not a promising focus for a course in general education or liberal arts — say, of the sort that an American student might take before specializing in one subject. While it might be possible to get the two cultures in agreement on such a course, it would probably be to oppose its implementation. To the humanist, such a concentration on the brain would appear to capitulate to biological reductionism, minimizing if not trivializing the life of the mind. To the scientist, the focus would seem to be premature if not overrated, given that most of cultural history has transpired without much substantive understanding of how the brain works — and even now our knowledge is limited and highly contestable.

However, both responses miss the brain's historic distinctiveness as a human organ, namely, its role as an interface, a point of translation and mediation between, in the first instance, one's own mind and body, but more generally, the divine and the human. In this respect, the brain has always had a vehicular character, which in recent years has inspired the psychologist Susan Blackmore (1999) to dub the brain a ‘meme machine’ in homage to Richard Dawkins’ view of organisms as ‘gene machines’. The brain's vehicularity has inspired thoughts that in aid of more efficient meme transmission, the organ may be substantially enhanced and perhaps even replaced by something else — such as a mechanical android — that escapes the brain's biological moorings entirely.

Not surprisingly, then, the ultimate value of centring a general education course on the brain may lie in its long standing as a concrete site for entertaining human self-transcendence. Though of clear theological provenance, this idea has taken on renewed significance in these posthuman times that are marked by, on the one hand, an increased understanding of the continuities between human and animal brains; and on the other, the unprecedented prosthetic extension of human brains (Fuller 2011). While pointing in somewhat different directions, these two developments take the locus of concern outside the traditional liberal arts understanding of the integrated human body as the natural locus of humanity; hence, the centrifugally oriented title of the proposed module: ‘The Brain in the West: From Divine Instrument to Transhuman Icon’.

The rest of this article is divided into two parts, the first outlining the module, the second providing some motivating historical and philosophical considerations for giving the brain such overall prominence.

The proposed module: ‘the brain in the west: From divine instrument to transhuman icon’

This 10-week module aims to survey the history of Western thought from the standpoint of the brain, a locus of increasing interdisciplinary interest in the early twenty-first century. The evolution our understanding of this organ has charted humanity's changing relationship to the divine, the natural and the social. The topics, readings and assignments are designed to be of interest to those specializing in the humanities, social and natural sciences, as well as the medical and information technology professions.

The key objectives of this module are as follows:

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An appreciation of the centrality of the brain as a site of not only contemporary scientific and policy interest but also of cross-disciplinary understanding — a clear case of blind men trying to make sense of an elephant.

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A grasp of the sociological contexts in which conceptions of the brain have been implicated, especially in terms of defining the evolutionary limits of humanity.

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A reciprocal grasp of how various planned and unplanned developments in human history have potentially altered the character of the brain, including the relationship to its possessor.

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An awareness of the relatively seamless way in which classic questions from theology and philosophy have been translated into the modern scientific discourses of medicine, psychology and neuroscience.

Two books, McGilchrist (2009) and Taylor (2004), are readily available and may serve as general purpose reference books for the module. Both provide cross-disciplinary overviews of the history of Western enquiries into the nature of the brain. Though their authors are trained in contemporary neuroscience, their outlooks differ, with McGilchrist more humanistic and positive in outlook, and Taylor more social scientific and critical.

Students are required to watch at least one of the following five classic films of the past 50 years — all cheaply available on DVD — in which the brain figures prominently in the technologies of social control. The assignment may take one of two forms: (a) an academic critique of one or more aspects of the film in light of issues raised in the module; (b) a dramatic script based on one or more aspects of the film in light of issues raised in the module. The five films and their general relevance to the brain are as follows:

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The Manchurian Candidate (1962) — programming assassins

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A Clockwork Orange (1971) — rehabilitating delinquents

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Minority Report (2002) — anticipating crime

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The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) — erasing memories

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Inception (2010) — implanting thoughts

Weekly module content

Introducing the cult of the brain: Students are introduced to how and why the brain became the defining organ of the human condition from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. This is the path charted from Descartes's fixation on the pineal gland at the brain's base, through Swedenborg's focus on the cerebral cortex, to finally the Freudian view of the self as an extension of the entire nervous system (Gross 1998). Originally treated as the meeting point between our animal and divine natures, the brain came to be regarded by an increasingly atheistic science as a secular fetish, a view which if anything contemporary neuroscience has helped to revive (Hecht 2003).

The brain's access to God: Even before the advent of modern neuroscience, the brain was seen as the organ necessary to tap into our divine natures (even if the heart or liver were regarded as more crucial for normal life functions). Two models of such tapping — both prominent in Platonic Christianity — were the arts of memory and the ‘course of study’, the former drawing on our divinely inspired creativity (Yates 1966), the latter on the prospect of our re-absorption into God's mind (Bonaventure1993). Together they formed the basis for the scientific method in the seventeenth century. For Giordano Bruno, whose demise Galileo studiously avoided, it meant a form of self-discipline that would enable us to acquire a state of knowledge sub specie aeternitatis, which is to say, as if we stood above the empirical world in both spatial and temporal terms, i.e. the standpoint from which physics still operates.

The brain merges with God: The analytic philosopher Thomas Nagel (1986) popularized the expression ‘view from nowhere’ to capture the divine standpoint that Newton arguably rendered humanly accessible, which brought into focus the nature of our capacity for second-order thought, i.e. to see the world as if standing outside of it. The modern history of this prospect begins in the seventeenth century with the theologically suspect field that Leibniz christened in 1710 as ‘theodicy’, which invited systematic speculation on God's motives, given the suboptimal (or ‘evil’) nature of the world as it normally appears to our finite minds (Neiman 2002; Nadler 2008). It later developed into the logical and computational puzzles associated with cybernetic models of the brain (Wiener 1950, 1964) and has been subsequently embraced by those who would project intelligent design on a complex nature (Fuller 2010, 2011).

The brain's external relations to mind: The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries witnessed the modern formulation of the two main problems of the philosophy of mind, both of which highlight the role of the brain as a translation device: How is mind related to body, and how do minds relate to each other? The former problem was defined in terms of, so to speak ‘foreign exchange’ (commercium mentis et corporis), i.e. how much of the right sort of matter is needed for the expression of intelligence (Funkenstein 1986). The latter was addressed by finding a basis for calibrating human similarity. Was it our common descent from God, as Descartes thought, or our common life situations, as Adam Smith held? Latter day versions are, respectively, Chomsky (1966) and Hayek (1952).

The brain's internal relations as mind: The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the rise of associationism as an account of thought based on neural conductivity, which seeded many ideas about the role of contiguity and similarity in establishing mental patterns, not least that higher (aka divinely oriented) forms of thought are produced by the synthesis or integration of nervous energy. Thus, for the dissenting Christian scientist-ministers who started this movement, most notably David Hartley and Joseph Priestley, the defining human attribute of free will became the capacity to determine the brain's focus of attention. However, after Darwin, associationism came to be increasingly identified with behavioural conditioning in a sense that was neutral on matters of the brain but presumed the existence of innate associative tendencies, or operants, that could be externally manipulated (Passmore 1970).

Composing the brain: The two main modern views of the brain's organization emerged in the nineteenth century as offshoots of medical enquiries: on the one hand, a modular view that envisaged the organ as subject to micro-version of the social division of labour (Desmond 1992); on the other, a holistic view that depicted the brain as an especially sensitive self-organizing form of matter (Star 1989). The former tended to favour more direct, the latter less direct medical interventions, which in turn served to bifurcate the history of psychiatry in the twenty-first century (McGilchrist 2009).

Combining brains: Alongside paradigms for making sense of the individual brain were paradigms for characterizing the common or collective features of brains, especially as they adapt to changing historical circumstances. Before any clear empirical accounts of genetic transmission, theories of common sense and collective memory existed as alternative accounts of the acquisition and transmission of our humanity that over the nineteenth century came to be known as culture (Valsiner and van der Veer 2000). The recent growth of evolutionary psychology and neurohistory provides a new context for exploring how mass exposure to psychotropic elements in the environment (e.g. diet) have re-wired human brains, resulting in new forms of sociality and self-expression (Smail 2007).

The global brain: As the cult of the brain peaked in the twentieth century, the evolutionary prospect of a world brain loomed on the horizon, understood either as a single unitary entity or a parallel distributed process. The unitary world brain was described in sacred (Teilhard 1959) and secular (Wells 1938) terms, both stressing tendencies towards amplification and standardization in global communications. The distributed world brain began as an update of the classic geopolitical balance of power (Deutsch 1963), though Wikimedia nowadays offers a postmodern take based on the endless differentiation and democratization of knowledge production (Keen2007).

The mass mediated brain: From the printing press to the Internet, the mass media have functioned — both intentionally and unintentionally — to reform the brain's powers, leaving the organ better equipped to adapt to the ever-expanding mental ecology in which it has been embedded. This matter may be seen in positive or negative terms, as well as approached from the brain or the media side, resulting in four prospects: brain-positive (Dehaene 2009), brain-negative (Greenfield 2003), media-positive (McLuhan1964), and media-negative (Lanier 2010).

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Conclusion — Brains shaped, washed and sold: The final week reflects on the extent and import of humanity's attempts to control its brains. The history of this ambition recapitulates the Reformation (evangelism) and Counter-Reformation (propaganda) roots of modern brainwashing, which may be seen as, respectively, a cathartic purge of unsavoury associations or a reinforcement of latent virtues. The introduction of brain scanning in the field of neuromarketing represents a more invasive and personalized development along this trajectory (Taylor 2004).

Motivating the module: Western intellectual history as told from the brain's point of view

What follows is best seen as providing the deep structure for the introductory lecture to the outlined module. It is written as a continuous essay that moves back and forth across the centuries to reflect the changes in emphasis that a brain-centred curriculum would bring to common understandings of Western intellectual history. My aim here is to provide a narrative account of resources that would place prospective teachers in the right frame of mind for running the module. Its overall trajectory moves from a theoretical to a practical understanding of what is at stake, concluding with a reminder that our brains’ ability to process written texts both in their specificity (i.e. their meaning in specific contexts) and their generality (i.e. the larger discursive units into which they feed) is quite remarkable and requires continual support.

While no one disputes the brain's singular role in defining the human condition, it is remarkable just what little difference that fact has made so far to the human sciences. Most accounts of history that call themselves materialist do not explicitly deal with the brain as a topic, let alone an agent, of history. Even the field called neurophilosophy, now a quarter-century old, has mostly served as a platform for applying broad-gauged arguments from evolutionary psychology to address the nature of the mind (Churchland 1986). Here the brain's neural circuitry is simply the pretext for playing out a rather detailed Darwinian version of naturalized epistemology. In this respect, Daniel Smail's On deep history and the brain (Smail2007) has been a breath of fresh air for taking the specificity of the brain — both its hard-wiring and its plasticity — as an opportunity for re-integrating the natural and human sciences by promising a richer sense of what it means to re-enact the thoughts of the past. Smail's neurohistory takes into account not only the brain's inherited capacities but also, and perhaps more importantly, what people have done to and with their brains — that is, the construction of internal and external psychotropic environments.

The reader may already feel disorientated by the juxtaposition of neuroscience and that classic method of humanist historiography, cognitive re-enactment. However, it is worth recalling that when in the late nineteenth century Wilhelm Dilthey proposed empathy as a vehicle for inhabiting past minds, he based its feasibility on humanity's common ancestry, even though he was in no position to specify empirically the relevant features of our shared nature that might underwrite empathy's efficacy (Harrington2001). Clearly Dilthey had been drawing on the theory of hermeneutical understanding previously proposed by the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, whilst trying to shift the sense of common ancestry from the spiritual (i.e. our having been created in imago dei) to something more bio-psychological that might be underwritten by evolution. Indeed, at the same time that Dilthey was secularizing our powers of what Schleiermacher originally called ‘divinatory understanding’ (aka the capacity to look into another's soul, what nowadays is often called mindreading), he was also defending what turned out to be the losing side of the battle to locate the newly emerging science of biology in the hierarchy of sciences. Whereas he wished to see a vitalist version of biology figure as the foundational science of the Geisteswissenschaften, the mechanistic vision that came to prominence — popularized by Emil DuBois-Reymond — portrayed biology as a specific complex extension of the Naturwissenschaften (Veit–Brause2001).

Moreover, Dilthey was hardly alone amongst late nineteenth and early twentieth century social and cultural theorists who thought of the brain as the material basis for cognition. An idea especially popular in France which influenced early thinking in American sociology was that patterns of excitation and inhibition in the brain might provide clues to spontaneously formed patterns of affiliation that not only transcend historical distance but also undercut the class and status markers that were increasingly proving a source of social conflict. (Freud's concept of the unconscious partly arose from this context.) This fuelled the idea that properly wired, or even re-wired, brains — say, through the power of suggestion — might provide an all-purpose solution to society's problems (Turner2007). The recent alleged discovery of mirror neurons (i.e. neurons in the frontal lobe of the cerebral cortex that fire in the same way when watching or performing an action) has revived this line of thought, though most of the original conceptual problems involved in drawing inferences from brain patterns to socially relevant behavioural patterns remain (Gerrans 2009). But notwithstanding the specific existence of mirror neurons, there is no denying the brain's capacity for projective identification, perhaps most strikingly to twentieth century psychologists, in the case of film, where it has been long recognized that people can identify with onscreen characters, even when they are presented in a highly stylized fashion, as in the case of abstract cartoons — a finding easily updated for avatars in cyberspace (Heider and Simmel 1944; cf. Turkle 1984).

In the line of thought and research outlined in the previous paragraph, the brain is envisaged as an organ with the capacity to generate realms of meaning that extend beyond, if not leave behind, its bodily basis. While the brain's self-transcending powers are easily understood in the context of religious experience, they may apply even more strongly to science, especially if physics is the paradigm, which also involves the sort of out-of-body experience that has been philosophically objectified as the ‘view from nowhere’ (Nagel 1986) but finds its natural home in the brain's dream states (Koestler1959). However, the ultimate bio-evolutionary value of such feats of self-transcendence is far from clear, especially upon considering that the pursuit of science has arguably made our survival as a species increasingly precarious (Fuller 2010).

The rest of this section proceeds first by showing that the brain, while key to our humanity, stands ambiguously with respect to life itself — especially when compared with another organ, the heart. I then proceed to show that this ambiguity may be related to the interface role that the brain has played, at least since the late Middle Ages, between our divine and animal natures. The transplantation and immortalization of brains, the conversion of nature to brain food and then technology, as well as our preoccupations with the aether and extraterrestrial intelligence, all point to the privileged status of the brain. The section concludes with some speculations about how literacy may have enhanced the brain's God-like creative powers.

The brain is humanity's most distinctive biological organ. It is the seat of our mentality. That much is clear. But is the brain the seat of life itself? That is much less obvious. Consider the continuing controversy over whether death should be legally defined in terms of the cessation of function in the brain or the heart (Brante and Hallberg 1991). In such a liminal state, the brain typically ceases to function before the heart does, but only the latter is normally defined as clinical death. This would suggest the prospect of life without a brain, which is certainly the standpoint of anyone who attributes life to creatures lacking vertebrae. But there is more here than meets the eye. Brain-death proponents tend to be quite literalist about the body's various organs as instruments, which explains their fixation on thresholds beyond which an organ — especially the brain — is no longer of use to its host body. Thus, they want to invest more on research and equipment designed to establish such thresholds with greater precision and accuracy, typically for purposes of transplanting still usable organs. In contrast, heart-death proponents uphold a more discretionary notion of the distinction between life and death, one that comports well with a traditional reading of the Hippocratic oath as enjoining physicians not to cause harm to patients. In this context, life is often seen as a divine gift even if someone harnessed to a life-support system is in no position to acknowledge the gift. A balanced judgement thus needs to be made between the interests of the patient and those of others who would suffer a permanent loss from the patient's death.

The difference in the locus of affect surrounding brain-death and heart-death is striking. The loved ones of a patient in a so-called vegetative state (i.e. with only autonomic brain activity) may call for indefinite life support, based on a religious belief in the sanctity of life, while enthusiasts for cryonics, fearing an information-theoretic death, may call for the brain to be extracted relatively early in the dying process to be preserved for future resuscitation before its higher functions have a chance to deteriorate (Merkle 1992). This difference serves as a reminder that possession of a mind and a life, while subject to significant overlap in terms of the entities involved, are not identical states of being. Secular philosophers like to encapsulate the situation by saying that life is necessary but not sufficient for mind. To be sure, this conforms to the Darwinian narrative currently en vogue, whereby mind is an emergent property of biological processes that could not have been predicted. But this does not explain the increasing significance that has been attached to the brain specifically in the modern period.

Here theologians, at least of the Abrahamic faiths, offer a clue. For them biology implies an acceptance of the finitude of material beings, such that if one wishes to express a continuous train of thought, or spirit, indefinitely, then it will need to be reproduced through successive biological containers — that is, generations of organisms — each of which strives to make the thought more manifest over time. This is true whether one means the divine logos or a human institution. What began in Neo-Platonic theology as ‘the great chain of being’ (Lovejoy 1936) led to a natural and political economy of needs by the end of the eighteenth century, and by the first decade of the nineteenth century eventuated in an evolutionary vision roughly equivalent to the one that Jean-Baptiste Lamarck championed under the very name of biology (Bowler2005).

However, organism provides only one of the two great images of the modern secular world-view. The other is the machine, already popular in the Middle Ages, which suggests that God could create a universe that is programmed to operate regularly, indefinitely and autonomously — which is to say, without the need for a replacement or improvement of parts (Rosen 1999, chap. 17). In their rather different ways, the mechanical clock and the steam engine governor captured this ideal in the eighteenth century (Mayr 1986). It is easy to forget that the machine's allure rests on what it says about its human makers: That we are the only animal capable of producing machines is indicative of our having been created in imago dei and hence provides clues to the divine modus operandi (Noble 1997). The ideal's allure resulted in the search for the perpetual motion machine, which came to grief on the concept of thermodynamic entropy in the late nineteenth century (Rabinbach 1990). Nevertheless, the search was resumed in the second half of the twentieth century — this time with information replacing energy — as cyberneticians inferred that whatever practices distinguish humans most from other animals are probably what brings us closer to God. In that case, apotheosis would come from designing a mechanical brain (Wiener 1964).

The interesting general feature of this trajectory from the standpoint of humanity's self-conception is that the heart tends to stand metonymically for our organic nature, while the brain so stands for our mechanical nature. For those inclined towards structuralist poetics (Culler1975), we might project heart-based relationships syntagmatically, which is to say, in terms of thinking of ourselves in lateral, symbiotic associations with other similarly embodied creatures, be they human or animal. On the other hand, brain-based relationships have tended to be paradigmatic, based on formal similarities between ourselves and other creatures who may be quite differently embodied and even normally operate on a different plane of reality (e.g. God, angels, machines). In the syntagmatic case, everything about us is potentially relevant to the formation of relations with other equally valued beings; in the paradigmatic case, we become self-discriminating, valuing only those aspects of our being that match the properties of higher order beings. At the late medieval dawn of the university, this divide was captured by the difference in scholastic ideology between the syntagmatic Dominicans (e.g. Thomas Aquinas) who presided over Paris and the paradigmatic Franciscans (e.g. John Duns Scotus) who dominated Oxford (Fuller 2011, chap. 2).

To put the contrast in sharp focus, consider what attraction means in the two cases. In the heart-based world, attraction is founded on feeling, whereby emotion is conceived as virtual touch, as in bonds of sympathy highlighted in Adam Smith's Theory of moral sentiments (Smith 1759). In contrast, in the brain-based world, attraction is elevated to a state of higher receptiveness; hence, this view's historic fixation on light, which brings to mind the upward look of plants in phototropism, as well as the older astrological use of sympathy to mean the relationship between stellar dispositions and human fates (Crombie1953). The impact of this metaphysical conceit continues to be felt in the belief that something profound about the human condition will be revealed by advances in physical cosmology, despite its main focus on times and places alien to the human condition. Starting with Smith's contemporary, the Swedish mining engineer turned spirit seeker Emanuel Swedenborg, the cerebral cortex of the brain has been centrally implicated in this process of universal self-transcendence (Gross 1998, chap. 3). The Swedenborgian impulse is served today in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), which abandons biologically based bonds altogether for a notional cosmopolis whose members are joined in the ability to transmit and receive binary code through radio waves. The only biological organ of ours that can engage with that sense of universal citizenship is the brain (Basalla 2006, chap. 9).

Moreover, it is not clear that a brain requires a life in the normal biological sense, even granting that the organ's development has so far been the product of biological evolution. Here the history of technology proves an interesting witness. Its overall narrative thrust could be described as an extended attempt to reconstitute the world to make it easier for the brain to handle, even at the expense of the rest of our bodies, including the emotional aspects of our being that rely on more than the frontal lobe of the cerebral cortex. Thus, videogame theorists argue that the elective affinity between brains and games provides in the guise of entertainment opportunities for developing the complex social skills needed for solving real world problems (McGonigal 2011). Indeed, intensive recreational gaming may even induce the rigorous dreaming of the sort dramatized in the 2010 film Inception, whereby the unconscious is not a hazy pastiche of half-remembered events but levels of eclectic architecture that quotes in novel combinations various times and places of relevance to the dreamer, very much in the spirit of how postmodernism arose in the arts (Kolb 1990).

Perhaps unsurprisingly, some brain scientists have expressed concerns that the increasing number of hours spent by humans staring at computers for both work and leisure is producing a form of overstimulation that is skewing our grasp of reality (Greenfield 2003). Such fears about the pathological amplification of one aspect of our being (call it ‘synecdochosis’) echo those generated by the rise of mass industrial labour in the nineteenth century. Back then, the disproportionate application of muscular force, rather than neural conductivity, was seen as providing the greater threat to our humanity — namely, in the form of the body's thermodynamic decline, or, as it became known by the end of the century, fatigue (Rabinbach 1990). Of course, in today's brain-centred world, we fear less that the body will wear itself out than that it will atrophy from disuse, as the brain itself falls victim to the contrary malaise of sensory overload. This condition, nowadays medically associated with autism, was coined by the German philosophical anthropologist Arnold Gehlen (1988) as Reizuberflutung. Like many of his fellow Nazi sympathizers, including Oswald Spengler, Othmar Spann, Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger, Gehlen believed that the characteristically modern tendency to lurch from crisis to crisis reflected the brain's technology-led overdevelopment, as society is continually reconstituted in line with the latest innovation, or fad, the overall effect of which is to set our species adrift from its natural moorings.

In stark contrast to these reactionary back-to-nature calls is the branch of engineering known as biomimetics, which develops new technologies in the spirit of treating life forms as paradigms of human utilities (Benyus 1997). It represents how biological science would look to a brain that was equally well disposed to being maintained naturally and artificially, as long as it were allowed to exert its capacity for creative thought (Rosen 1999, chap. 7). In that case, the bombardier beetle, say, is interesting less because it is a co-habitant of our biosphere or even that it occupies a particular offshoot in a common tree of life than that it provides a prototype for improving payload delivery (ScienceDaily 2008). The insect is thus literally valued as food for thought that is cerebrally metabolized, resulting in a technology with humanly relevant import. (The example is selected provocatively, since the research was done by the leading UK scientific proponent of intelligent design theory, Andrew McIntosh, for whom biology simply is biomimetics, given humanity's divine entitlement to complete creation.)

Today's philosophical normalization of the brain's view of the world goes back to Putnam (1982), on the basis of which the idea that we might be ‘brains in a vat’ is taken as less an argument for scepticism about the external world than the simple acknowledgement that we might inhabit a world different from the one we first thought in terms of our causal relationship to it. To be sure, we would be forced to reconsider exactly what our words refer to, but without concluding that those words had become meaningless. In this context, the computer represents a high watermark as a technology designed to simulate the brain's multiple functions (aka software), in spite of radical differences in their physical constitution (aka hardware). After all, even the most primitive computer resembles a brain in terms of having been designed to integrate various digitally coded inputs for purposes of producing a coordinated sensorimotor response. It was just this line of thought that motivated Cold War cyberneticians to try to leverage the computer's initial success in capturing the brain's electrical circuitry (as what is now called a parallel distributed process) into a model of global governance, thereby making good on H.G. Wells’ idea of a world brain (Pickering 2010). Moreover, as Putnam's brains in a vat scenario illustrates, the brain shares the computer's peculiarity in being both the means by which we investigate the world and the model of the world that we are investigating (Berry 2011).

An underexplored trace for tapping into this ‘I am my brain’ sensibility is the history of the aether concept. The Greeks tied it to the fire element, which the Stoics then domesticated into the ‘breath of life’ (pneuma), the prototype for the divine logos in Christianity. All of this traded on the very pervasive and ancient idea that the sun is the source of all motion. However, over the centuries, the sun's purely luminiferous qualities were disaggregated from its more generally energetic ones, resulting in the autonomization and privileging of thinking (as reflection) above all other forms of animation. The first head of Oxford University, the Franciscan Robert Grosseteste, marks a pivotal turn in this direction, providing the context in which the brain eventually superseded the lungs and the heart as our organic interface with the rest of reality (Crombie 1953). The Franciscan quest for divine illumination metamorphosed into the secular idea of Enlightenment, largely through Newton's immediate intellectual sources, the seventeenth century Cambridge Platonists, Henry More and Ralph Cudworth, the latter normally credited with having first called the faculty of reflection ‘consciousness’ (Passmore 1953).

But the most decisive move perhaps came in the second half of the eighteenth century by Christian dissenters, notably the physician David Hartley, who started to mean by ‘aether’ the medium through which all of reality transpired — including both light and thought — whose material character was at once an enabler and a retardant of humanity's capacity to reconnect to the source of all being from our presumptively fallen state. This view gave clear sailing to the idea that scientific inquiry is a process of hypothesis-testing that corrects itself over many trials, in which individual observations are presumed to be errors hovering around a real mathematical principle (understood — at least by Hartley and fellow dissenters such as Joseph Priestley — as an expression of the divine logos), for which later hypotheses then overcompensate, only to be themselves subsequently overturned (Laudan 1981, chap. 8, 14). Such a metaphysically comprehensive approach to aether, which persists as late as the 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, came to define the theory and practice of nineteenth century physics, largely through the work of James Clerk Maxwell, who himself drew on innovative interpretations and uses of statistics in psychology and the social sciences, via such concepts as ‘normal distribution’, ‘just noticeable difference’ and ‘marginal utility’ (Porter1986; Heidelberger 2004). This mentality persisted in the twentieth century in creative attempts to lower the noise-to-signal ratio in communications (e.g. Wiener1950).

Ironically, given our secular times, after having taken seriously for two centuries that the brain might be the seat of the mind/soul, we may be finally getting clear about what it would mean to adopt the divine standpoint. Indeed, one neuroscientist has come up with an ingenious way of exploring the matter, which takes seriously the tricky task of translating secular back into sacred time. Thus, Eagleman (2009) envisages the brain as a multiply biased recorder of human experience that serves the brain-bearer in life but effectively scrambles the ultimate meaning of that experience. However, at the moment of brain-death, God decodes the brain so to reveal to the brain-bearer the meaning of what s/he has just experienced. It is presented as a narrative consisting of familiar events now placed in their proper order, which is to say, weighted by their proper significance. Here intimate knowledge of the brain's workings is necessary to define the nature of the divine task at hand — aka The Final Judgement — and its (deceased) human reception of its outcome.

But what is it that has enabled us to simulate the divine standpoint, even after God has ceased to be of moral and practical relevance to much, if not most, of humanity? The answer may lie in the spread of literacy. According to Dehaene (2009), it is a triumph of the brain's plasticity, what he characterizes as ‘cortical recycling’, whereby sensory inputs normally processed in different parts of the cerebral cortex are merged into a common activity that then causes the relevant neurons to develop together. Thus, reading merges the auditory input of speech and the visual input of writing to produce a simulation — if not hologram — of a fellow rational being. Dehaene here draws inspiration from one of the original stylists of the Spanish language, Francisco de Quevedo, who said that reading allows us to ‘listen to the dead with our eyes’ (Dehaene 2009, 325). Those dead may be understood as not only making a statement but also conveying an intention, the statement of which may or may not convey the intention fully, and so, given the chance, this imagined entity could expand in many ways not expressed in the writing but which the brain-bearer could project as imaginary dialogues with the dead. However, our brains are not simply populated by ghosts. We still retain our native sensory-based brain functions, which enable us to pick up patterns in both spoken and written text. This, in turn, allows us to acquire genre- and style-based knowledge, the value of which was often underestimated by twentieth century academic humanists, who increasingly treated the brute act of reading — the closer the better — as the only appropriate way of dealing with human expression (Gorman2011). Yet, generally speaking, facility with mixing and matching genres and styles — the stuff of improvisation — has been the fount of our expressive originality, perhaps the moment when the brain comes into its own (Fuller 2009, chap. 4).

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