Hayek, Hebb, and Heisenberg: Toward an Approach to Brain Functioning

hayek

Here’s the second of the extracts from a bona fide neuroscientist (and friend of Fuster). Gerald Edelman of course is also someone who recognized Hayek’s genius in this area.

. . . the mind must remain forever in a realm of its own which we can now only directly experience it, but which we shall never be able fully to explain or to ‘reduce’ to something else (Hayek, 1952, 8. 98).

F. A. Hayek’s The Sensory Order must rate as one of the most creative books written on general philosophy of neuroscience. Though Hayek was a Noble-prize winner in economics, and was not educated as a neuroscientist his book opens up a new window on neuroscience, and this window certainly offers great possibilities to neuroscientists working on unifying aspects of neuroscience. Guided by the fundamental view of Fuster (1995) I have tried to suggestively interpret Hayek’s concepts firstly as a work on memory and brain dynamics (Başar, 2004), and more recently, as a more general work on the brain-body-mind relationship (Başar, 2010). Though a detailed description and interpretation of Hayek’s philosophical psychology is not possible because of space constraints, I will try to explain three concepts that are embedded in the work of Hayek: 1) D. O. Hebb’s learning theory (1949) 2) The S- Matrix concept of quantum dynamics developed by W. Heisenberg (1943), and 3) The Feynman Diagrams as a consequence of the S-Matrix theory.

In the first half of the twentieth century two important books introduced outstanding holistic and dynamic approaches to brain functioning. The first, Donald Hebb’s book (1949) related to the organization of behavior, inspired several neuroscientists in search of the “Hebb neuron.” According to Hebb, the functioning of the brain after learning is a “different” brain compared with the same brain before the learning process. Though Hayek developed his theory almost twenty years prior to the publication of Hebb’s book, The Sensory Order was published three years after Hebb’s book. The chain of ideas developed in this theory is highly pertinent to the dynamic nature of the living brain. Hayek states: We shall see that the mental and the physical word are in the sense two different orders in which the same element can be arranged; though ultimately we shall recognize the mental order as part of the physical order (Hayek, 1952, section). Hayek argues that it is the whole history of the organism that will determine its action with new factors contributing to this determination on later occasions that were not present on the first.

In The Sensory Order asked the question “what is mind?” and discussed the relationship between mind and body or between mental and physical events (Hayek, 1952, 1.49). Hayek classifies “emotion” as a special type of disposition for a type of actions which, in the first instance, are not necessitated by a primary change in the state of the organism, but which are complexes of responses appropriate to a variety of environmental conditions. “Fear,” “anger,” “sorrow” and “joy” are attitudes toward the environment, and particularly towards fellow members of the same species. This means that a great variety of external events, and also some condition of the organism itself, may evoke one of several patterns of attitudes or dispositions, which will affect the perception of, and the responses to, any external event. “Emotions” may thus be described as affective qualities similar to the sensory qualities and forming part of the same comprehensive order of mental qualities. Hayek further proposes that we must distinguish between two different kinds of physiological “memory” or traces left behind by the action of any stimulus. One is the semi-permanent change in the structure of connections or paths and which determines the courses through which any change of impulses can run (similar to Hebb’s principle). The other is the pattern of active impulses proceeding at any moment as results of a stimuli received in the present and past and perceived also as merely part of continuous flow of impulses of central origin, which never altogether ceases, even when no external stimuli are received.

The theory of brain functioning or the “new psychology” as described by Hayek in The Sensory Order still merits important attention as a general framework in stimulating brain-storming approaches to brain-body-mind integration. This essay has described some possibilities to bridge Hebb’s Theory and the quantum brain approach with the insights of Hayek.

Why Jazz Happened

jazz

Review from Reason

As I later became interested in political theory, the relationship between the cultural individualism of jazz and the political individualism of libertarianism seemed so natural to me that, with all the innocence of youth, I frequently expressed surprise upon discovering that few of my libertarian friends shared my interest in this form of music.

The improvisations that characterize jazz have produced the most individualistic form of art in American history. Solo jazz musicians are at once composers, arrangers, and performers; and the variety found in their solos reflects the individuality of the musicians themselves.

Oakeshott on Education

oakeshott

Here are some extracts from my co-editor Paul’s essay.

Toward the end of his essay on “The Universities,” Oakeshott returns once more to the issue of specialization, this time in a less polemical, more thoughtful manner. Though he believes that Moberly has exaggerated the problem, he nevertheless acknowledges that the disintegration of the world of knowledge into a set of miscellaneous specialisms “is something we suffer from at the present time and that it is destructive of the university we are considering.” Still, we must not look for quick or simple remedies. The problem of integrating the world of modern knowledge is “one of the most difficult of the current problems of philosophy: a century of pretty intense thought has already been given to it without much result.” For this reason, “to expect a university to provide an integration of its curriculum is asking for dishonesty” (VLL, 131–32).

It is in connection with the university’s “gift of an interval” that Oakeshott finally touches on the practical, indeed transformative, effect of liberal education on the student. “Nobody,” he writes, “could go down from such a university unmarked.” Not only will the student have acquired a discipline of mind that “puts him beyond the reach of the intellectual hooligan”; he will also “have learned something to help him lead a more significant life. . . . He will have had the opportunity to extend the range of his moral sensibility, and he will have had the leisure to replace the clamorous and conflicting absolutes of adolescence with something less corruptible” (VLL, 102–3). Here Oakeshott echoes another one of the great themes of Cardinal Newman, who claimed that the reason why it is more proper to speak of the university as a place of “education” rather than of “instruction” is because education “implies an action upon our mental nature, and the formation of our character.” Oakeshott does not dwell at length on this practical and transformative effect of liberal education in the two essays we have been considering—no doubt partly because it muddies his polemic against Moberly’s emphasis on the university’s role in providing students with existential meaning and purpose—but it plays an increasingly larger part in his later writings on education.

The new emphasis on self-cultivation and self-realization is evident from the outset of “The Study of ‘Politics’ in a University,” where Oakeshott defines education as the “process of learning, in circumstances of direction and restraint, how to make something of ourselves.” Learning how to make something of ourselves, however, is not something we can do simply on our own or independent of a particular context. Self-realization or self-cultivation necessarily involves initiation into a particular, historical civilization, in the process of which we “discover our own talents and aptitudes in relation to that civilization and begin to cultivate and to use them” (RP, 187).

It is remarkable to think that Oakeshott wrote this passage in 1974, before the advent of personal computers, the Internet, e-mail, cell phones, Facebook, and Twitter. But for all its insight into the world in which children now grow up, the passage unwittingly raises a question about the sharp division Oakeshott draws between the university and that world. Nothing would seem to be clearer than that the university Oakeshott prizes cannot survive in a world degraded in this way. The university must exert some sort of cultural influence on this world if only to secure the conditions of its own existence. Oakeshott himself asks how the university should respond to the current hostility to intellect and spirit that prevails in today’s world; he answers, by “a quiet refusal to compromise” (VLL, 42). But such a response seems to fall short of what is really needed. To remain a lonely island (or interval) in an otherwise hostile sea is ultimately to accede to the inevitable and engulfing flood.

Christmas with the Armstrongs

Louis Armstrong

Here is a lovely article (with recordings) featuring the very excellent Ricky Riccardi, author of the superb biography of Pops.

Mardi Gras Indian Culture

new orleans

Here’s an excellent article in The Economist by Jon Fasman. (H/T to Brett Martin for this). One can get a good sense of how just much work is involved in making these suits via the character played by Clarke Peters in Treme. Here he is talking about the role.

Hayek in Today’s Cognitive Neuroscience

Fuster

My chum, the extraordinarily distinguished and generous neuroscientist Joaquín Fuster, has this excerpt from his essay:

In bold characters I mark the concepts advanced by Hayek in his The Sensory Order. In parentheses, under each conclusion, the text passages are noted in which he makes reference to those concepts:

1. The cognitive code is a relational code; memories are self-organized networks of associative connections formed in the cortex by the temporal coincident activation of dispersed neuronal assemblies.

(The Sensory Order 2.1-2.5, 3.51-3.78)

2. The networks or cognits of perceptual memory self-organize hierarchically in posterior cortex; those of executive memory do it in frontal cortex.

(The Sensory Order 4.1-4.26, 5.17-5.32)                                                                              

3. The prefrontal cortex, at the top of the perception/action (PA) cycle, integrates behavior, language and/or reasoning by, among other operations, working memory.

(The Sensory Order 4.45-4.55, 5.33-5.49)

4. Working memory is maintained by recurrent activity within the PA cycle between perceptual and executive cognits.

(The Sensory Order 5.63-5.91)

Thus far I have summarized the contributions of modern neuroscience that support Hayek’s thinking in The Sensory Order. There, in accord with the latest data at the time he theorized, that perceived knowledge was distributed in the cerebral cortex in the form of associative networks (“maps”) that bound together the sensory elements of every perceptual experience. He also theorized that the cortical perceptual system thus constituted a classificatory apparatus that was embedded in memory and would serve to classify future percepts by association or similarity. He proposed that that perceptual-knowledge apparatus of the brain was a hierarchically self-organized system that, in its ensemble, constituted what we now call a complex adaptive system. Clearly he was using a methodology very similar to the one he had been using with respect to socio-economic systems. This is most apparent on reading his earlier 1937 paper, Economics and Knowledge, of which he always spoke very fondly.

What Hayek did not say in The Sensory Order, because it was not yet known when he wrote it, is that his hypothetical “maps,” which we now call cognitive networks or cognits, interconnect profusely with one another through nodes of common linkage. In other words, that all the items of memory and knowledge in our brain constitute a massive system of relational encoding and communication. Most importantly, that knowledge is dispersed and distributed in the cerebral cortex much as it is in the marketplace among individuals. Further, that it makes sense, metaphorically, to speak of a cerebral marketplace of knowledge. This would be the cognitive counterpart of the sub-cortical marketplace of values and rewards that Ainslie et al. (2004) hypothesize.

In both “marketplaces” the unit of exchange would be synaptic strength. Thus, with more empirical knowledge, Hayek could have extended to the brain concepts very similar to those he used to explain the relationships between marketplace participants and between price and cost. He could have applied those concepts more explicitly than he did in his book to the cybernetic relation between perception and action, as encapsulated in the PA cycle. My presumptions are the more plausible if we view his stance on the role of subjective factors in the behavior of complex economic systems.

Thus current cognitive neuroscience not only confirms Hayek’s hypotheses on the brain/mind relation, but also incorporates gradually into the cerebral cortex some of the same principles of operation that he and other liberal economists tell us govern the behavior of individuals in an economic system as complex as the human brain. Indeed, there is in the cortex an endless competition between cognits for action. Cognits are, after all, self-organized units of information that is incomplete by definition — insofar as it is subjective. Out of that competition emerge, spontaneously, not only the sensory but also the action order. And the PA cycle engages the self with the environment in a dynamic cybernetic interplay much as the one that governs market transactions. In neither of the two is a “central executive” necessary.

Thus the brain dynamics between perception and action is more than a metaphor of market dynamics, not only because the former underlies the latter, but also because both serve the continuous regulation toward adaptive equilibrium that characterizes the dynamics of all open adaptive systems in biology as well as human society. Feedback and self-correction are essential components of adaptive systems. Central design and planning are generally blind to both, and therein is the cause for failure of many self-sustained bureaucracies and multi-annual plans.

For proper operation, a cybernetic cycle needs built-in feed-forward as well as feedback. Here is where Hayek’s “foresight” in an economic system appears essential to deal with what he called “imperfect competition,” in the brain as in the market. Much as in the latter, the cortical cognitive system, where cognits compete with estimates of risk and success in the PA cycle, contains within it a substrate of executive cognits or “enablers.” They reside in the prefrontal cortex on top of the cycle, which collects the information available to it in preparation of action and expectation of outcome. For this reason we can rightfully envision the prefrontal cortex as the organ of pre-adaptation of the cognitive system, which through its PA cycle ever strives for maximal future success with minimal risk.

Finally, our cortex serves our individual goals with more knowledge than we are aware of. Unconsciously, we can intuit probabilities of risk and benefit a great deal better than any conscious “central planner” inside our brain could ever do. Much of our decision-making is laden with the imponderable yet beneficial force of intuition. Inasmuch as we may derive individual benefit from intuitive knowledge, and inasmuch as our intuitive knowledge may serve our fellow humans, it is entirely possible that there is in our brain an “invisible hand” sustaining that larger one that Adam Smith (1976) proposed for society at large.