William Phillips - The Cooperative Neuron: Cellular Foundations of Mental Life

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2022949982

ISBN 9780198876984

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DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198876984.001.0001

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To my wife, Rena

our children, Fred, Lowana, and Ned

our grandchildren, Charlie, Thomas, Andrey, and Daniel

and to all grandchildren, everywhere.

The history of science is replete with unexpected turning points that needed someone to put their finger on the right way to construe the emerging data. More often than not, it involves some insight, change in perspective or even a paradigm shift, that allows the known facts to be reorganized in a way that makes them appear to fall suddenly into place. It is usually difficult to identify turning points as they happen even though they frequently appear obvious with the benefit of hindsight. This is often because of the sheer amount, and often sheer disorganization, of the data. The Copernican Revolution required the marriage of hard-fought observations with a change in perspective. Similarly, Darwins theory of Natural Selection made sense of a mountain disparate evidence with a fundamentally different starting assumption. In both these cases, and in numerous others throughout history, the critical insight itself is at first treated as improbable but eventually as obvious. I believe that The Cooperative Neuron has all the hallmarks of a perspective shift that will transform and endure in the best traditions of transformative science.

With this book, Bill Phillips attempts nothing less than to explain the relationship between the mind and brain, starting from bottom-up principles. Make no mistake, Here be dragons!. There are many who would claim this is a foolhardy mission, both today and for the foreseeable future. Indeed, it is common to come across the opinion, including amongst neuroscientists, that, if the brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldnt. So why should you expect this book to solve one of the last great mysteries of our time? And especially why should you invest the time and energy to embark on the trip Bill Phillips lays out from first neuroscience principles to psychophysics and information theory? Well, one reason is that its fun all the way! Having spent time with Bill myself, I can attest to the fact that his enthusiasm is expressed in every bone and sinew. In this book, it pours out of the text. But the main reason is the multifaceted intellect he throws at this problem. This is truly a book that only Bill Phillips could have written.

Also in the best traditions, the key insight of this book requires the reader to take on a perspective shift that runs against the current dominant dogma. It requires the reader to stop assuming that neurons of the brain are simple counting devices, but instead to take their complexities seriously. For a reader with no neuroscience experience, this might seem trivial. Why shouldnt neurons be complex? To be honest, I often find myself feeling a little bit like the little boy in the Emperors New Clothes story. I mean, they do look complex, after all. And having recorded from thousands of real neurons, I can attest that their properties turn out to be more complex than their appearance already suggests. Nevertheless, the dominant description of a neuron in most models of the brain and artificial neural networks is not much more than a blob that counts how many signals arrive, and if and when enough do arrive, sends the signal on to the next unsuspecting blobs. In case youre tempted to say, thats absurd!, just remember that using only this description (embedded in a deep neural network) your phone can recognize your face, the best chess players of all time can be totally embarrassed, and everyday texts can be translated and even generated de novo in the style of different famous authors such as Shakespeare and Edgar Allen Poe. So, put that in your pipe and smoke it!, says the current and apparently unstoppable juggernaut of neuroscience and artificial intelligence research.

But have no fear! Professor Bill Phillips of Stirling University has done the heavy lifting for you in the form of this book. This book is really the distillation of the important complexities of the important neurons of the brain cast in the important abstraction of what their important function is. As you might guess from the title of the book, this involves the notion of the cooperative neuron. Having myself spent years interacting with Bill mulling over the morass of details one could focus on in describing real neurons and their function, I can say that this analogy works like all good insights in that it irresistibly instils in you that Aha! feeling. However, as the author himself warns early on, you should not let yourself be satisfied with the first Aha!. Rather, I would advise you to enjoy the various ways in which the cooperative neuron perspective solves one neuroscience problem after another as you progress through the book. Unless youre Bill Phillips or some other rare polymath, this is going to involve going to places you havent yet thought about.

This book, therefore, introduces a kind of fiction in the best possible sensethe notion of the Cooperative Neuron. As Yuval Noah Harari points out in 21 Lessons for the twenty-first century, For better or worse, fiction is among the most effective tools in humanitys tool kit. By bringing people together, religious creeds make large-scale human cooperation possible. They inspire people to build hospitals, schools, and bridges in addition to armies and prisons. Adam and Eve never existed, but Chartres Cathedral is still beautiful. He might have added that fiction is a great tool in the scientists tool kit too. A simultaneously dangerous but powerful tool, so use the