Brains-in-vats, giant brains and world brains: the brain as metaphor in digital culture

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Stud. Hist. Phil. Biol. & Biomed. Sci. 35 (2004) 351–366

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Brains-in-vats, giant brains and world brains:the brain as metaphor in digital culture

Charlie Gere

School of History of Art, Film and Visual Media, Birkbeck College, University of London,

43 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PD, UK

Abstract

This paper argues that the ‘brain’ has become a frequently invoked and symptomaticsource of metaphorical imagery in our current technologically mediated and dominated cul-ture, through which the distinction between the human and the technological has been andcontinues to be negotiated, particularly in the context of the increasing ubiquity of electronicand digital technologies. This negotiation has thrown up three distinct, though interrelated,figures. One is the ‘Brain in a Vat’, in which the brain can connect to and even operatesolely through electronic technologies. Another is the ‘Electronic’ or, more archaically,‘Giant Brain’, in which the brain’s functions can be reproduced and exceeded by electroniccomputing technology. A third is the ‘World’ or ‘Global Brain’, in which the connectivityenabled by information–communications technologies produces and fosters forms of dis-tributed intelligence. This paper will trace the development of these figures and show howthey have developed in lockstep throughout the two or three centuries of exponentiallyaccelerating technological advance.# 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Brains; Scepticism; Artificial intelligence; Networks; Metaphors

One of version of the brain in a vat idea is proposed by Daniel Dennett in hisessay ‘Where am I?’ (Dennett, 1979). This jocular piece starts off as an account ofDennett’s purported involvement in a failed Pentagon/NASA project for developinga Supersonic Tunnelling Underground Device or STUD, which is intended todeliver an atomic warhead to the Russians through the earth’s core. Dennett claimsto have been asked to recover the missile, which was lodged a mile deep, under

C. Gere / Stud. Hist. Phil. Biol. & Biomed. Sci. 35 (2004) 351–366352

Tulsa, Oklahama. The only problem was that it was exuding a particular kind ofradioactivity harmful to the brain, but not to other organs. Therefore the Pentagonofficials proposed to remove Dennett’s brain from his body and place it in a life-support system housed in the Manned Spacecraft Centre in Houston. The input andoutput pathways between the body and brain would be maintained by the use of‘microminiaturised radio transceivers’ (Dennett, 1979, p. 311).

For Dennett this elaborate conceit is merely a means through which he can posecertain questions about the nature of identity. Like all philosophical invocations ofthe brain in a vat, however, the thought experiment requires that the brain’s disem-bodiment be at least conceptually plausible. The apparatus that Dennett describesdepends for its plausibility upon the idea that the brain is compatible with man-made electronic technology. This idea, which, it must be pointed out, some peopletake completely seriously, brings into question the distinction between such tech-nology and the brain, and, by extension, breaks down the distinction between themechanical and the human. It is this particular implication of Dennett’s thoughtexperiment that this paper intends to pursue, rather than its more explicit philo-sophical claims. It proposes that the brain has operated as a locus of ambiguity inwhich the distinction between the human and the technological has been and con-tinues to be negotiated, particularly in the context of the increasing ubiquity ofelectronic and digital technologies. In playing such an important role in this negoti-ation I suggest that the ‘brain’ has become a frequently invoked and symptomatictrope in our current technologically mediated and dominated culture.

This negotiation has thrown up three distinct, though interrelated, figures. One isthe ‘Brain in a Vat’, in which the brain can connect to and even operate solelythrough electronic technologies. Another is the ‘Electronic’ or, more archaically,‘Giant Brain’, in which the brain’s functions can be reproduced and exceeded byelectronic computing technology. A third is the ‘World’ or ‘Global Brain’, in whichthe connectivity enabled by information-communications technologies producesand fosters forms of distributed intelligence. This paper will trace the developmentof these figures and show how they have developed in lockstep throughout the twoor three centuries of exponentially accelerating technological advance.

The beginnings of these ideas can be traced back to the mid-eighteenth centuryin the work of Julien Offray de la Mettrie. In a number of texts, starting with theHistoire naturelle de l’ame (1745), la Mettrie extended Descartes’ materialism whilerepudiating his dualism, and argued that consciousness was a purely materialphenomenon. His most famous work, L’homme machine of 1748, notoriously sug-gested that man could be considered no more than a machine whose mental pro-cesses are simply the product of neurological activity in the brain, while hispenultimate book, L’homme plante, firmly placed man in nature as part of an evol-utionary process. La Mettrie’s work made it possible to think of man as bothmachine and animal and that, necessarily perhaps, its conception of the machinewent far beyond the static mechanics of Descartes and other earlier philosophers,towards a far more dynamic, purposive, and autonomous model. La Mettrie’swork was, unsurprisingly perhaps, both unpopular and controversial and he wasobliged to flee France and then Holland as successive works were condemned by

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the ecclesiastical authorities in each country. That he managed to inflame the com-paratively liberal Dutch clergy was a tribute to both his capacity to provoke and tothe great danger his ideas were perceived as posing.

Later in the same century Luigi Galvani’s experiments that electricity was themedium through which the nervous system transmitted its messages. Galvani’s dis-coveries, along with those of Alessandro Volta, showed that it might be possible toexploit the properties of electricity for various ends. Their work, and that of oth-ers, had led to the development of the battery, which made possible major advan-ces in the development of theories of electric current and electrochemistry. In 1820Hans Christian Ørsted was able to show that electricity and magnetism are linked.Among the many ramifications of this discovery was the development of its appli-cation for long-distance telecommunications. The British scientists Sir CharlesWheatstone and Sir William Fothergill Cooke, and the American painter SamuelMorse, developed the electric telegraph more or less simultaneously. The close con-nections between the discovery of the electrical nature of message transmission inthe nervous system and the development of electrical means of message communi-cation implied and made possible the connections and negotiations this paper dis-cusses.

In 1745 la Mettrie proposed that organisms could be thought of as nothing butmachines. Over a century later the novelist and social critic Samuel Butler sug-gested that machines could be considered organisms, capable of evolving towardsconsciousness. He articulated these ideas in an essay, originally published as a let-ter in the The Press newspaper in Christchurch, New Zealand. Entitled ‘Darwinamong the machines’, it was intended, at least in part, as a parody of Darwinianideas. Butler later incorporated an expanded version of this material in his 1872novel Erewhon (the version I quote from below). Butler points out that consciousbeings all evolved from lifeless cinders and, furthermore, that machines are evolv-ing at a far greater rate than natural organisms. He proposed that:

. . . [T]here is no security . . . against the ultimate development of mechanicalconsciousness, in the fact of machines possessing little consciousness now. Amollusc has not much consciousness. Reflect upon the extraordinary advancewhich machines have made during the last few hundred years, and note howslowly the animal and vegetable kingdoms are advancing. The more highly orga-nised machines are creatures not so much of yesterday, as of the last five min-utes, so to speak, in comparison with past time. Assume for the sake ofargument that conscious beings have existed for some twenty million years: seewhat strides machines have made in the last thousand! May not the world lasttwenty million years longer? If so, what will they not in the end become? Is itnot safer to nip the mischief in the bud and to forbid them further progress?

But who can say that the vapour engine has not a kind of consciousness?Where does consciousness begin, and where end? Who can draw the line? Whocan draw any line? Is not everything interwoven with everything? Is not machin-ery linked with animal life in an infinite variety of ways? (Butler, 1985, p. 199)


Another thinker to engage critically with the ramifications of Darwin’s ideas wasKarl Marx. It is not surprising that Marx was excited by Darwin’s relentlesslymaterialist vision of natural selection, even though he criticised its Malthusianbasis and Darwin’s unconscious transportation of English society into his vision ofnature. In a letter to Engels, Marx remarked that ‘[A]lthough it is developed in thecrude English style, [The origin of species] is a book which contains the basis ofnatural history for our views’ (Marx , 1979, p. 139). Later he sent Darwin a copyof Das Kapital, which was politely received but remained mostly unread. In theGrundrisse, the series of notebooks written at the end of the 1850s, Marx writesabout what he calls the ‘general productive forces of the social brain’ (Marx, 1973,p. 694). He suggests that, because of increasing use of automation and of develop-ing networks of communication and transportation:

. . . [T]he production process has ceased to be a labour process in the sense of aprocess dominated by labour as its governing unity. Labour appears rather as aconscious organ, scattered among the individual living workers at various pointsof the mechanical system; subsumed under the total process of the machineryitself, as itself only a link of the system, whose unity exists not in the livingworkers, but rather in the living (active) machinery, which confronts his individ-ual, insignificant doings as a mighty organism. (Marx, 1973, p. 693)

A few pages later he remarks that:

. . . [N]ature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs,self-acting mules etc. These are products of human industry; natural materialtransformed into organs of the human will over nature, or of human partici-pation in nature. They are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand;the power of knowledge, objectified. The development of fixed capital indicatesto what degree social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and towhat degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have comeunder the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordancewith it. (Marx, 1973, p. 706, italics original)

Marx, ‘one of the first thinkers of technics’ (Derrida, 1993, p. 170), was writingat the very beginning of the era of modern communications technology systems.Telegraphy was only twenty years old and its widespread adoption far more recent.Photography similarly had only been widely available for a couple of decades.Charles Babbage had by then built one of the first effective computing machines,but his attempts to build a more sophisticated model failed. Though Marx did notfocus on such technologies what he did achieve was to anticipate one of the centralmetaphors by which such developments, and those that came later, would beunderstood. His concept of the ‘social brain’ is the first time that collective humanand technological activity is understood in such terms.

Darwin’s ideas found speculative application in the work of H. G. Wells, whowas taught biology by Thomas Huxley, ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’. Wells is now widelyregarded as one of the founders of modern science fiction. Both his fiction and his


non-fiction are deeply engaged with scientific questions, not least those concerningevolution. It is to Wells that we owe one of the essential components of the Brainin a Vat idea, the notion that brains can and might evolve to exist outside of thebody, and need to be supported by machines. In his War of the worlds of 1898 thenarrator describes the Martians as resembling:

a sort of metallic spider with five jointed, agile legs, and with an extraordinarynumber of jointed levers, bars, and reaching and clutching tentacles about itsbody. Most of its arms were retracted, but with three long tentacles it was fish-ing out a number of rods, plates, and bars which lined the covering and appar-ently strengthened the walls of the cylinder. These, as it extracted them, werelifted out and deposited upon a level surface of earth behind it. (Wells, 1898, pp.203–204)

He continues that ‘Its motion was so swift, complex, and perfect that at first I didnot see it as a machine, in spite of its metallic glitter. . . the controlling Martianwhose delicate tentacles actuated its movements seeming to be simply the equiva-lent of the crab’s cerebral portion’ (Wells, 1898, p. 204). But on closer inspectionhe realises that what he presumed to be the brain was the Martians themselves,described as having:

. . . huge round bodies—or, rather, heads—about four feet in diameter, eachbody having in front of it a face. This face had no nostrils—indeed, the Mar-tians do not seem to have had any sense of smell, but it had a pair of very largedark-coloured eyes, and just beneath this a kind of fleshy beak. In the back ofthis head or body—I scarcely know how to speak of it—was the single tighttympanic surface, since known to be anatomically an ear, though it must havebeen almost useless in our dense air. In a group round the mouth were sixteenslender, almost whiplike tentacles, arranged in two bunches of eight each. Thesebunches have since been named rather aptly, by that distinguished anatomist,Professor Howes, the hands. (Wells, 1898, pp. 205–206)

After a number of observations on Martian eating habits (injection), and mannerof sexual reproduction (budding) the narrator makes an observation about therelation between the advanced, if rather repulsive, nature of the Martians and theless developed humans. He has the narrator of War of the Worlds remark that:

. . . that the perfection of mechanical appliances must ultimately supersede limbs;the perfection of chemical devices, digestion; that such organs as hair, externalnose, teeth, ears, and chin were no longer essential parts of the human being,and that the tendency of natural selection would lie in the direction oftheir steady diminution through the coming ages. The brain alone remained acardinal necessity. Only one other part of the body had a strong case for sur-vival, and that was the hand, ‘‘teacher and agent of the brain.’’ While the rest ofthe body dwindled, the hands would grow larger. . .. To me it is quite crediblethat theMartians may be descended from beings not unlike ourselves, by a gradualdevelopment of brain and hands (the latter giving rise to the two bunches of


delicate tentacles at last) at the expense of the rest of the body. Without the

body the brain would, of course, become a mere selfish intelligence, without any

of the emotional substratum of the human being. (Wells, 1898, pp. 210–211)

Wells’s Martian invaders have brains so evolved that they can almost function

autonomously, an obvious precursor to J. D. Bernal’s brain in a vat (discussed

below).Several decades later Wells was proposing a far more optimistic idea of the evol-

ution of the brain with his vision of a ‘world brain’. He had anticipated such ideas

in his general introduction to his collected works, published in 1924, in which he

described his work as drawn from the idea of a synthetic Collective Mind, and that

his theme was ‘the reaction of the passionate ego-centred individual to the growing

consciousness and the gathering imperatives of such a collective mind’ (Wells,

1924). Starting in 1936 he wrote a number of essays and speeches in which he

explored the possibility of what he called a ‘new world encyclopedia’. He gave a

speech on that theme in November of that year at the Royal Society, which was

received with enthusiasm. The following year he expanded these ideas in various

contexts, including meetings held at Birkbeck College and then at Nottingham

University. He also toured America and twice gave a talk entitled ‘The brain

organization of the modern world’. He also wrote an entry for the Encyclopedie

francaise on ‘The idea of a permanent world encyclopaedia’. The following year he

published some of this material in a slim volume, entitled The world brain. In the

essay for the Encyclopedie Wells’s proposal for the Permanent World Encyclopae-

dia involved the ‘collection, indexing, summarising and release of knowledge’ by a

‘centralised world organ’ working on a ‘planetary scale’ to pull the mind of the

world together’ (Wells, 1994, p. 120). Wells saw the technical means to realise this

idea in the newly developing field of micro-photography. For him the capacity for

endless reproduction and wide circulation afforded by photography was a ‘way to

world peace that can be followed without any very grave risk of collision with the

warring political forces and the vested interests of today’ (Wells, 1994, pp. 121–

122). Thus for Wells the technologies of reproduction offered the possibility of

going beyond the antagonisms of contemporary politics, and towards a global

community united under a ‘common ideology’. At the end of the American spee-

ches he proclaimed that he had been talking about:

. . . something which may even be recognizably in operation within a lifetime—

or a lifetime or so, from now—this consciously and deliberately organized brain

for all mankind.

In a few score years there will be thousands of workers at this business of

ordering and digesting knowledge where now you have one. There will be a

teacher for every dozen children and schools unlike the schools of today as

a liner is unlike the Mayflower. There will hardly be an uninformed or

misinformed person. And the brain of the whole mental network will be the

Permanent World Encyclopaedia. (Wells, 1994, p. 118)


Wells’s ideas were taken up for discussion by a new section of the British Associ-ation for the Advancement of Science (the BA), Section L, dedicated to questionsof education and educational research. Out of the meetings of this section a ‘BrainsTrust’ was formed, whose members included the physicist and chrystallographerJ. D. Bernal and Julian (later Sir Julian) Huxley, grandson of Thomas, with whomWells had once collaborated on a popular book about biology. Unfortunately theWar prevented any further development of Wells’s idea.

Bernal is well known as one of the most important physicists of the last century.He was also the first advocate of the idea of the brain in a vat. In this he wasgreatly influenced by Wells’s early futurological works such as Anticipations of1902. Bernal’s first published work, The world, the flesh and the devil (1929), was anextraordinary vision of space colonisation, artificial biospheres and bioengineering.Some of his predictions were less prescient. Among its more extreme ideas wasBernal’s solution for resisting the second of his ‘three enemies of the rational soul’,the flesh. Anticipating future conceptualisations of the cyborg or cybernetic organ-ism, Bernal pointed out that whenever we use some kind of technology we havealready superseded the processes of evolution by use of our own intelligence.Bernal went on to propose that the brain should be removed from the body andshould be attached to various mechanical prostheses.

Bernal’s idea of how this might be achieved, involving the brain being supportedin a cylindrical framework of ‘some very rigid material, probably not metal butone of the new fibrous substances’ with its nerve connections, immersed in a liquidof the nature of cerebro-spinal fluid, kept circulating over it at a uniform tempera-ture. The success of this apparatus relied on ‘the essential electrical nature of nerveimpulses’ (Bernal, 1929, p. 43), which would require:

. . . delicate surgery to attach nerves permanently to apparatus which will eithersend messages to the nerves or receive them . . . The eyes will look into a kind ofoptical box which will enable them alternatively to look into periscopes project-ing from the case, telescopes, microscopes and a whole range of televisualapparatus. The ear would have the corresponding microphone attachments andwould still be the chief organ for wireless reception. Smell and taste organs, onthe other hand, would be prolonged into connections outside the case andwould be changed into chemical tasting organs, achieving a more conscious andless purely emotional role than they have at present . . . Closely associated withthe brain-case would also be sound, colour and wireless producing organs. Inaddition to these there would be certain organs of a type we do not possess atpresent—the self-repairing organs—which under the control of the brain wouldbe able to manipulate the other organs, particularly the visceral blood supplyorgans, and to keep them in effective working order . . . On the whole, however,the locomotor organs would not be much used because the extension of thesense organs would tend to take their place. Most of these would be meremechanisms quite apart from the body; there would be the sending parts of thetelevision apparatus, tele-acoustic and tele-chemical organs, and tele-sensoryorgans of the nature of touch for determining all forms of textures. Besides


these there would be various tele-motor organs for manipulating materials atgreat distances from the controlling mind. These extended organs would onlybelong in a loose sense to any particular person, or rather, they would belongonly temporarily to the person who was using them and could equivalently beoperated by other people. (Bernal, 1929, pp. 43–44)

As can be seen Bernal’s ideas relied heavily on emerging techno-scientific tech-nologies of representation and communication. To some extent Bernal’s vision isprescient, not in literal terms but more as a metaphor for our relationship to aworld mediated by tele-technologies. In the same section he seems to suggest thepossibility of a global brain:

If a method has been found of connecting a nerve ending in a brain directlywith an electrical reactor, then the way is open for connecting it with abrain-cell of another person. Such a connection being, of course, essentiallyelectrical, could be effected just as well through the ether as along wires. At firstthis would limit itself to the more perfect and economic transference of thoughtwhich would be necessary in the co-operative thinking of the future. But itcannot stop here. Connections between two or more minds would tend tobecome a more and more permanent condition until they functioned as a dualor multiple organism. The minds would always preserve a certain individuality,the network of cells inside a single brain being more dense than that existingbetween brains, each brain being chiefly occupied with its individual mentaldevelopment and only communicating with the others for some commonpurpose. (Bernal, 1929, pp. 52–53)

The idea of the brain as a kind of communications network proposed by Wellsand Bernal had been anticipated by the French philosopher Henri Bergson. In hisbook Matter and memory, published at the beginning of the twentieth century,Bergson described the brain as a:

. . . central telephonic exchange: its office is to allow communication, or to delayit. It adds nothing to what it receives; but, as all the organs of perception send itto their ultimate prolongations, and as all the motor mechanisms of the spinalcord and of the medulla oblongata have in it their accredited representatives, itreally constitutes a centre, where the peripheral excitation gets into relation withthis or that motor mechanism, chosen and no longer prescribed. (Bergson, 1991,p. 30)

Bergson’s metaphor opens up the possibilities of brain function as part of anextended and distributed network of cerebral activity existing and operatingbeyond the confines of the brain, which Marx anticipated, but did not develop,which Bernal hinted at and which was first proposed as a serious idea by Wells inthe 1930s.

But it remains a metaphor. Bergson did not literally propose that the brain couldoperate as such. But his later work would open out the question of the relationbetween the human and the technical. In his most famous book, Creative evolution


(1911), Bergson attempted to rethink biology, much as he had tried to apply thelatest research in neuroscience to philosophical problems in Matter and memory.Creative evolution was Bergson’s response to the theory of evolution, which heaccepts, but which he criticises for not taking duree, or duration, into account.(Duree, continuous lived time as opposed to clock time and other forms of spatia-lised, discrete time, is of great importance for Bergson’s whole philosophy). He sawevolutionary theory’s mechanistic account as failing to account for the complexityof life and proposed instead that the process is driven by what he called elan vital,which is continually developing and generating new forms. For Bergson, the move-ment of evolution follows three main directions: plant life, instinctive life, andintelligent/rational life, the last of which is largely a human preserve. He articu-lates the difference between instinct and intellect in relation to the use of tools Hepointed out that the appearance of man on Earth coincides precisely, as far as weknow, with the emergence of artificially constructed tools and weapons. Thus, infinding such artefacts, we are confronted by the presence of human intelligence.The attribution of intelligence to humans and animals is directly related to tool useand understanding. Animals are gradated in terms of intelligence in relation totheir capacity to use, or at least to recognise tools. Mechanical invention has beenthe essential feature of human intelligence from the beginning and continues to beso. Indeed, Bergson suggests that such manufacture is the essential marker anddeterminant of human progress, and that it proceeds at a far greater rate than oursocial development. He gives the example of how long it has taken the shock of theinvention of the steam engine to be assimilated, and also how our wars and otherevents are forgotten while technology comes to define different ages (Bergson,1911).

Bergson greatly influenced the Jesuit priest and palaeontologist Pierre Teilhardde Chardin, best known for his theory that man is evolving, mentally and socially,toward a final spiritual unity. Teilhard was introduced to Bergson’s work by hisfriend Edouard le Roy, who was also Bergson’s successor in the chair of philo-sophy at the College de France, as well as one of his first interpreters. Teilhard sawin Bergson’s rethinking of evolution in Creative evolution a means of reconcilingChristian thought with modern science. Teilhard attempted to construct a kind ofChristian metaphysics of evolution, proposing that it was a process convergingtoward a final unity that he called the Omega point. He wanted to show that tra-ditional philosophical thought can be maintained and that such thought and mod-ern science do not contradict one another, if it can be seen that the tendency of thematerial universe is towards more complex forms or aggregates, which Teilhardsaw as the basic trend in matter, starting with gravitation, electromagnetism andother phenomena and progressing towards increasingly complex entities of atoms,molecules, cells, and organisms. This culminated in the human body that hasevolved, to include a nervous system sufficiently sophisticated to permit rationalreflection, self-awareness, and moral responsibility. The human capacity for reflec-tion is the most important part of this process. Man is not just another animal.Man is the animal that knows that he knows (Teilhard de Chardin, 1959).


Teilhard applied his evolutionary thinking beyond the merely biological. Withmankind evolution has gone about as far as it can in physical terms. The next stepis the evolution of social collectivity, which he saw already in progress, throughtechnology, urbanisation, and modern communications. Following the work of theRussian scientist Vladimir Vernadsky, he saw the history of the earth as a series ofprogressive developments, starting with the Geosphere, the sphere of inorganicmatter, followed by the Biosphere, the sphere of life. Teilhard proposed the con-cept of the Noosphere, which was originally coined by the philosopher Edouard leRoy, to refer to the sphere of intellectual activity made possible by human collec-tive activity, particularly in relation to technologies of communication. The Noo-sphere, one of the canonical expressions of the World Brain idea, is the means bywhich the world will be unified by love. For Teilhard, it contained the meaning ofhistory, which he described as the omega or end-point of time. Thus for Teilhardorganic evolution is a divine process, whose ultimate convergence point is that ofGod. When evolution has exhausted all potential for further development, the Par-ousia, or second coming of Christ, would initiate a new convergence betweenhumanity, the material world and the supernatural order. In Teilhard’s escha-tology, evil is merely a necessary and lesser adjunct to the process of evolution bywhich Christ will lead the material world to cosmic redemption (Teilhard de Char-din, 1959).

With the rise of the internet and the world wide web, Teilhard’s ideas have beenenthusiastically embraced by those who would wish to see such developments aspart of a larger scheme of things. During his lifetime he was forbidden to promul-gate his ideas by the Vatican, who banished him to a remote province of China formuch of his career. His most famous work, The phenomenon of man (English publi-cation, 1959), was only published posthumously in 1955, when it was well regardedby progressive theologians and those looking to reconcile science and God, thoughin general it was more critically received by scientists. Sir Peter Medawar, forexample, wrote a famously contemptuous and dismissive review. The exceptionwas Julian Huxley, who wrote the introduction to the English version of Thephenomenon of man, and while unable to fully support the Christian message of thebook, signalled approval of its metaphysical understanding of evolution.

Huxley’s enthusiasm for Teilhard’s ideas may have been inspired by his role inH. G. Wells’s World Brain scheme, which was curtailed by World War II. In factWells’ vision was far more practical than either Teilhard’s as yet unpublishednotion of the Noosphere or Bernal’s extreme futurology, and is now seen as one ofthe principle precursors of the world wide web. At the time though, such futurerealisations must have seemed unlikely. From the beginning of his writing careerWells had evinced a profoundly pessimistic streak about the future of mankind,and the war, exactly the kind of confrontation the World Brain was supposed toprevent, confirmed his worst fears. But, even during the war, his writing attemptedto balance pessimism with the hope that out of desperate need mankind will pro-gress towards unity and peace. He just lived long enough to hear the news aboutthe bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. With extraordinary prescience Wells hadpredicted the development of atomic weaponry in his 1914 novel The world set free.


Wells died apparently in despair at mankind’s prospects. For others though, thedevelopment of atomic weaponry offered the chance to progress to higher stages ofdevelopment that Wells had hoped for in more optimistic moments, and realise thedream of a world government and even a World Brain.

According to Spencer Weart’s history of images of nuclear fear, one of the earlycharacterisations of the nuclear cloud, before the mushroom became the standardtrope, was that of a ‘convoluted brain’ (Weart, 1988, p. 402). In 1946 Teilhardpublished ‘Reflections on the spiritual resonance of the atomic bomb’ which pro-claimed that the eponymous weaponry would lead mankind to a new stage in his-tory, while a little later the controversial German novelist and philosopher ErnstJunger wrote a bizarre work of speculative futurology entitled An Der Zeitmauer(By the wall of time, Junger, 1959), which deals at length with the themes of tech-nology, history, and time, under the new conditions of a world threatened byatomic destruction, as well as the momentous changes wrought more generally bytechnological progress. In a passage that echoes the work of Teilhard de Chardinand anticipates media theorist Marshall McLuhan, Junger declares that technologyis the ‘form and beginning of a new spiritualization of the earth in the closingstages of historical time’ and that it is changing the face of the earth by copyingthe functions of the central nervous system. As Junger puts it, electronic systemsspeak, hear, and compute, using cables simulating vital nervous systems (Neaman,1999, pp. 202–203).

The Second World War and the development of atomic weaponry did indeedproduce the conditions in which the ‘World Brain’ or Noosphere was made poss-ible, though not because of human progress towards a more peaceful society, butrather through technological developments necessitated by the existence of suchweaponry. These conditions brought together technology, neuroscience and politicsto produce new understandings of the operations of the brain, and of the possibi-lities of emerging technologies, such as computing, as well as more general concep-tions of systems, feedback, and response. As is well known, the Second World Warpresented the conditions for the development of digital computing. The need toproduce calculations of an unprecedented complexity at great speeds, for ballisticstables, cryptography, and the Manhattan Project for producing the first atomicweaponry, led to the production of the first digital, binary, electronic computers,sometimes known as ‘Giant’ or ‘Electronic Brains’. At the same time the war pre-sented a great impetus to the furthering of research into questions of how organ-isms respond to their environments, and into more general questions of systemsand systemic organisation. This became known variously as cybernetics or generalsystems theory, and represented one of the most important intellectual endeavoursof the post-war era. Some of the most important concepts for cybernetics weredeveloped in the so-called Macy conferences, which brought together mathemati-cians, physiologists, and engineers, to discuss advances in the understanding ofsystems of information and feedback by the mathematician Norbert Wienerand others. In 1943, one of the participants, Walter McCulloch, along with themathematician Walter Pitts, published a paper entitled ‘Logical calculus of ideasimmanent in nervous activity’ (McCulloch & Pitts, 1943), which suggested that the


workings of the brain could be modelled in terms of a network of logical opera-tions. This paper was extremely influential both in presenting a model for under-standing the operations of the brain, and in modelling the operations of machinesin terms of mental processes.

Pitt and McCulloch’s paper anticipated many of the ideas that would later bediscussed in terms of neural networks. The idea that the brain consisted of discreteelements, neurons, and that brain function consisted of communication betweenthem, had first been proposed in the late nineteenth century by the great Spanishscientist Santiago Ramon y Cajal. Reacting against the dominant conception of the‘reticular’ theory of brain function, in which the nervous system is understood as anetwork, web or ‘reticulum’, Cajal (he signed his scientific papers thus, by hismother’s maiden name) questioned this dogma, and developed an improved formof slide staining that clearly showed that the nerve endings were discrete. Thoughsupported by subsequent neuroanatomists such as Charles Scott Sherrington andEdgar Adrian neuron theory was far from fully accepted before the war. Much ofthe work in elucidating the mechanisms of synaptic transmission was done byanother Huxley, Andrew, half brother of Aldous and Julian, along with his col-league Alan Hodgkin. Hodgkin and Huxley, who shared the Nobel Prize for Physi-ology with Sir John Eccles in 1963, had managed to predict, isolate, and observethe actions of the neurons in the giant squid. At about the same time the neu-ropsychologist Donald Hebb had proposed a neuronal model of learning in hisclassic work The organization of behavior (Hebb, 1949). Ideas very similar to thoseof Hebb were developed by Friedrich von Hayek , who was at the time working asa psychologist but later became more famous as an advocate of laissez faire eco-nomics. The concept of neuronal learning is sometimes referred to as the Hebb/Hayek Synaptic Model. Thus McCulloch and Pitt’s paper was timely and evenprescient in its understanding of brain function in terms of an abstract network ofconnections. The apogee of this approach was Frank Rosenblatt’s Perceptron net-work, in which he attempted to realise the ideas of McCulloch and Pitts and Hebbthrough an electronic network intended to model vision.

Rosenblatt’s project can be considered as part of the research into ArtificialIntelligence that had been undertaken in various forms since the early 1950s. Butthe ‘bottom-up’ approach it presented, in which mental processes were understoodthrough a biological, embedded paradigm was in conflict with another model,symbolic AI, which took a top-down approach and emphasised the disembodiedlogical processes of the mind, which resonated with the potential capabilities of thedigital technology then being developed. This had its roots in work done before thewar with Claude Shannon’s master’s thesis, which showed that electronic relayscould be used to represent Boolean logic, and with Alan Turing’s conceptual uni-versal ‘Turing machine’, intended to test Hilbert’s ‘entscheidungsproblem’ (Turing,1936). Turing’s experience in the war with calculating machines designed for cryp-toanalysis led him to compose a report for the British National Physical Labora-tory on ‘Intelligent machinery’ in 1948, and two years later, an article in Mindentitled ‘Computing machinery and intelligence’ (Turing, 1950). In it he suggestedthat in the foreseeable future computers would be recognisably intelligent. He pro-


posed the famous ‘Turing test’ as a measure of machine intelligence. In the late fif-ties researchers such as Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert took up the challengeof realising machine intelligence through symbolic representations of logical struc-tures, by now known as Artificial Intelligence (AI).

The relationship between AI and how the brain is understood is, to say the least,overdetermined. Not only is it thought possible to produce electronic brains, whichwill for all intents and purposes, function like human brains. But, more problem-atically, one of the dominant means of understanding the processes of conscious-ness in the last fifty years or so has been in terms derived from AI research andcomputing, the so-called ‘computational theory of mind’. In fact, Artificial Intelli-gence has been notable mainly for the degree to which it has failed to realisealmost all of the grandiose predictions made in its name. To some extent it is basedon a fallacious characterisation of computers as ‘Giant Brains’ and the consequentunderstanding of the brain or mind as a powerful computer. AI is, in a sense, theembodiment of the Brain in a Vat idea. By proposing that consciousness can bemodelled in terms of symbolic logic, it implies that the apparatus for mental eventscould exist within the brain, as a kind of program, which does not require anynecessary involvement or engagement with the surrounding environment. Despiteits failure AI still has many supporters and advocates. As the essay referred to atthe beginning of this paper demonstrates, Daniel Dennett is one such supporter.

In the early 1980s, soon after the publication of Dennett’s essay, one of the mosttrenchant critiques of the brain in a vat scenario was published. Hilary Putnam’sessay ‘Brains in a vat’ in his collection Reason, truth and history developed a theoryof reference to refute the scenario. Like Dennett Putnam also imagines a complexapparatus to realise his thought experiment:

Imagine that a human being (you can imagine this to be yourself) has been sub-jected to an operation by an evil scientist. The person’s brain (your brain) hasbeen removed from the body and placed in a vat of nutrients which keep thebrain alive. The nerve endings have been connected to a super-scientific com-puter which causes the person whose brain it is to have the illusion that every-thing is perfectly normal. There seem to be people, objects, the sky, etc; butreally, all the person (you) is experiencing is the result of electronic impulsestravelling from the computer to the nerve endings. The computer is so cleverthat if the person tries to raise his hand, the feedback from the computer willcause him to ‘see’ and ‘feel’ the hand being raised. Moreover, by varying theprogram, the evil scientist can cause the victim to ‘experience’ (or hallucinate)any situation or operation, so that the victim will seem to himself to havealways have been in this environment. (Putnam, 1981, pp. 5–6)

Both Dennett and Putnam, despite their different intentions, have no difficulty inimagining these setups. In this they reflect a world in which information communica-tions technology is of increasing importance. At about the same time Peter Russellpublished The awakening earth: The global brain (Russell, 1982). Russell conflatesMarshall McLuhan’s concept of the Global Village with James Lovelock’s theory


of Gaia, to produce a beguiling if somewhat outre vision of human progress.Invoking the embryonic and infant development of the brain Russell, author,incidentally, of The brain book, a kind of user’s guide to that organ (Russell, 1979),suggests that:

. . . Similar trends can be observed in human society. For the last few centuriesthe number of ‘cells’ in the embryonic global brain has been proliferating. Buttoday population growth is slowing, and at the same time we are moving intothe next phase—the linking of the billions of human minds into a single inte-grated network. The more complex our global telecommunication capabilitiesbecome the more human society is beginning to look like a planetary nervoussystem. The global brain is beginning to function. (Russell, 1982, p. 78)

In the 1982 version of the book Russell does not mention the internet (thoughlater editions make up for this deficiency). He does however discuss the ‘worldwidetelecommunications network’ of ‘440 million telephones and nearly one milliontelex machines’ which ‘represents only a minute fraction of the communicationterminals in the brain, the trillions of synapses through which nerve cells interact’(Russell, 1982, p. 78). He suggests that:

. . . global telecommunications network of 1975 was no more complex than aregion of the brain the size of a pea. But overall data-processing capacity isdoubling every two and a half years, and if this rate of increase is sustained theglobal telecommunications network could equal the brain in complexity by theyear 2000. (Russell, 1982, p. 79)

Thus, he proclaims, ‘we will know ourselves to be part of rapidly integrating glo-bal network, the nerve cells of an awakening global brain’. As can be seen Russellwas writing when the internet was still a comparatively small and little-knownphenomenon. Since then this has changed dramatically with the internet’s rapidgrowth and, in particular, the development of the world wide web in the late 1980s.The web in particular has encouraged researchers and others to think in terms ofan emerging World Brain and there has been a deal of work in this area. (TheRAND researcher Paul Baran, whose paper on making communications robustenough to survive nuclear conflict was of great importance in the development ofthe internet, knew and was influenced by McCulloch’s work on neural con-nectivity.) Since Russell’s seminal text there have been a number of books and arti-cles exploring the same theme, by among others, Francis Heylighen, GregoryStock, Robert Wright, Kevin Kelly, George Dyson, Valentin Turchin, Joel deRosnay, Pierre Levy, and Howard Bloom. It is also implicit in other concepts andtheories, such as ideas of complexity and emergence as studied at the Santa FeInstitute and elsewhere, Richard Dawkins’ problematic concept of memes andmemetics, the anthropic cosmological principle in astrophysics, extreme versions ofpost- and transhumanism, such as promulgated by the Extropian group, and, ofcourse, James Lovelock’s notion of Gaia. The World Brain concept even found itsway into Marxist theory, when Italian autonomist theorists such as Antonio Negri


and Maurizio Lazzarotto took up Marx’s notion of the ‘general intellect’ from the

Grundrisse in order to understand and propose forms of action appropriate to a

post-fordist information society. The autonomists were influenced by post-

structuralist thinkers such as Deleuze and Guattari, whose concept of the rhizome

offered new ways of thinking about both social arrangements and mental opera-

tions.Dennett and Putnam’s brain-in-a-vat essays and Peter Russell’s The awakening

earth are clearly very different. Yet they are all products of the particular cultural,

scientific and technological conditions in which they emerged. The Brain in a Vat

scenario, which Dennett proposes and Putnam rejects on the grounds that it is

necessarily self-refuting, and the idea of the global brain, so enthusiastically

embraced by Russell, are representations through which we negotiate the relation-

ship between the self and the technologically mediated world in which we live. Nei-

ther conception could have emerged other than in a world dominated by

information and communications technologies. Furthermore one is not imaginable

without the other, even if, at some level, they seem to contradict each other. If we

can be brains in vats, then we must also be part of a World Brain. Putnam implies

this when he expands his original brain-in-a-vat scenario thus:

Instead of having just one Brain in a Vat, we could imagine that all human

beings (perhaps all sentient beings) are brains in vat (or nervous systems in a vat

in case some beings with just a minimal nervous system already count as ‘sen-

tient’). Of course the evil scientist would have to be outside—or would he? Per-

haps there is no evil scientist, perhaps (though this is absurd) the universe just

happens to consist of automatic machinery tending a vat full of brains and ner-

vous systems.

This time let us suppose that the automatic machinery is programmed to give

us all a collective hallucination, rather than a number of separate unrelated

hallucinations. Thus when I seem to myself to be talking to you, you seem to be

hearing my words. Of course, it is not the case that my words actually reach

your ears—for you don’t have (real) ears, nor do I have a real mouth and

tongue. Rather, when I produce my words, what happens is that the efferent

impulses travel from the brain to the computer, which causes me to ‘hear’ my

own voice uttering those words and ‘feel’ my tongue moving, etc., and causes

you to ‘hear’ my words, ‘see’ me speaking, etc. In this case, we are, in a sense,

actually in communication. (Putnam, 1981, pp. 6–7).

This may be intended as a philosophical thought experiment, but it is also a per-

suasive representation of how our social relations are mediated through technolo-

gies of communication, from telegraphy and telephony through to email and the

world wide web. In turn it is in the context of such mediation that our contempor-

ary understanding of the brain has been developed.


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Documents

Brains-in-vats, giant brains and world brains: the brain as metaphor in digital culture