What Does Neuralink Say About Consciousness?
By now you may have seen the simple drawings that a quadriplegic – one of the three people in the world equipped with Neuralink – was able to create simply by thinking. Neuralink is an implant about the size of a coin with wires that connect to about a thousand electrodes in the brain. I am the son of a man who spent the last 17 years of his life paralyzed from the neck down, so I can imagine how wheelchair-bound people around the world must be turning their heads towards these developments with a tender hope.
Still, there is something about the notion that wires can connect with the brain to insert or extract information that is slightly discomfiting. It exposes a truth that we don’t always wish to consider – that the workings of our brain, this whole miraculous interface with the world that we call our consciousness – is driven by nothing more than electro-chemical signals flashing across a tangle of neurons.
A drawing by Noland Arbaugh, created through Neuralink.
Of course, this is not a new discovery. As far back as 1954, the Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield was applying electrodes to the brains of fully conscious patients under local anesthesia. Specializing in treating epilepsy by removing cerebral tissue, he used this method to determine what could be safely excised. Sometimes the electrodes would trigger physical movements; other times they released exceptionally vivid sensations or memories. One patient heard a Beethoven symphony. Another was brought into a reverie: “I hear voices. It is late at night, around the carnival somewhere — some sort of traveling circus.”
All the beauty of music, the poetry of memory – if it can be manifested by organic electrical circuitry poked at by real electrical circuitry – doesn’t that demote us to the status of mere machines? The idea that we have a soul, a center of our being that resides in our mind – it isn’t just a religious concept. It’s really the intuitive interpretation of our experience of life. But that view seems to be incompatible with the physicalist position that science keeps fortifying year after year.
If we cannot imagine an untouchable orb of mystical us-ness within us – a font of agency and character and moral choice – do we lose something sacred?
We are only at the very early days of computer-brain interfaces. They may expand our memory, grant us instant access to all world’s knowledge, even offer a wise coach’s voice in our ear. Or they might bring insistent advertising, addictive experiences, and the heightening of social anxieties. Whatever is ahead, we will be better able to manage the new if we can find a sacredness in the circuitry – if we can let science guide us to a greater wisdom.
Neuroscientist Patrick McNamara describes what religion does to the brain as “decentering.” By lowering the volume at which our self is set, it has been shown that religious practice can improve our mood, life satisfaction, resilience… even health outcomes.
Acquainting oneself with the science is certainly decentering. There is considerable evidence that our consciousness is comprised of misperceptions, none greater than the notion that our self is unitary, independent, and unchanging.
Perhaps Neuralink is a metaphor for what has always been. I do not have a wire to reach your brain, but I still have an easeful capacity – using this much older technology of the written word – to share symbols with you, and I have the expectation that they may trigger a comparable pattern of neuron firings in your mind as in mine. A medium of shared language, knowledge, and an intricate system of informational transmission makes this possible.
In Buddhist mythology, the goddess Indra had a palace with an infinite net inside it that extended in all ten directions. At the intersection of each thread there was a knot with a jewel inside it. Each jewel reflected and refracted the light of every other jewel in this vast web.
Even before Neuralink, we were already part of the big brain. We are the neurons in something larger.
