The twilight of the brain

St. Denis of Paris, noted cephalophore

In a recent post (qv), Bruce Charlton discusses Rudolf Steiner's statement that "hearts must begin to think."

My understanding is that Steiner meant that the divine destiny of modern Man is to become a thinker with 'the heart' primarily: that is, an intuitive thinker; and with the feeling that our thoughts are located in the chest.

And the 'must' comes in, because Steiner also predicted that 'Head thinking', intellect, the thinking that we feel is located behind the eyes - would decline.

Therefore, if Men failed to to be heart-thinkers, failed to embrace our destiny; then we would after a while hardly be able to think at all.

I suspect that what follows bears very little relation to what Bruce had in mind when he wrote that, but it nevertheless seems proper to cite him as the source of this train of thought.

"Head thinking" is, obviously enough, that thinking which is performed by, or through the instrumentality of, the brain. Since thinking is not among the functions of the circulatory system, "heart thinking" can only be a metaphor; but it apparently refers to a sort of thinking that bypasses the brain, and which can go on even when the brain is switched-off or dead -- the sort of thinking manifested by the dreaming mind, or by the demented shades in Hades.

The prospect of men abandoning the brain and becoming a race of "heart-thinkers" is a chilling one, because as things stand, the "heart" can hardly think at all, at least not at a level that is recognizably human. (Steiner himself implies as much when he says "hearts must begin to think.") The only heart-thinkers of which we have any direct experience are the dreaming, the demented, and the dead -- which is what makes the idea so immediately repulsive. To embrace that as "the divine destiny of modern Man" would be the ultimate obscenity.

But we are not to embrace heart-thinking as it now stands. We are to develop it into something worthy of the name. Imagine some ancient sarcopterygian fish being informed that its race's destiny is to abandon swimming and rely instead on the vastly inferior means of locomotion known as walking. How could it see such a prospect as anything other than horrible? How could it imagine how its clumsy scrabbling from tidal pool to tidal pool would evolve into walking as we know it today, to say nothing of running or flying?

For astrologers, the present is a time of transition from Pisces to Aquarius -- that is, from fish swimming about in water to that water being unceremoniously dumped out. The fish can learn to walk, and to breathe air, or they can die. Men, likewise, can learn to think with the heart -- developing what rudimentary ability we already have -- or we can cease to think at all.

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But why assume that the water is going to be dumped out? Why assume that the twilight of the brain is upon us?

Well, IQs have been in free fall for several generations now, to the point where roughly 85% of us would have been below-average by Victorian standards -- and this is very likely an inevitable development, something that will happen to every species with a highly developed brain. High levels of biologically-based (brain-based) intelligence are inherently unstable. Basically, highly intelligent animals use their intelligence to create a more hospitable environment for themselves -- that is, one in which basic selection pressures are relaxed, deleterious mutations can accumulate, and intelligence (and every other form of fitness) will decline. The smart make it too easy for the stupid to survive, and once that happens the days of smartness are numbered.

In theory, brainy beings could escape this fate by taking an active role in designing and maintaining their own brains, bypassing biological evolution -- using such technologies as genetic engineering, the augmentation of brain power by means of neurological prosthetics, etc. In practice, the adequate development of such technologies requires a sustained period of high intelligence and high technology -- sustained for a longer period than evolution appears to allow. A mere six or seven generations after the Industrial Revolution, here we are.

One of the most memorable images from Whitley Strieber's book Transformation is that of "a university a million years old." Is such a thing possible? Can intelligence ever persist at that level for that long? Only, it would seem, by making the leap to something not dependent on the biological brain -- which, despite the corporeality of the metaphor, is what I take "heart-thinking" to mean.

Backing up this theoretical argument, there are reports (the accuracy of which is probably unknowable) of contact with intelligences much older than Man -- the gods, the fairies, the greys -- and a few common threads emerge: (1) they are "psychic"; (2) their relationship to their bodies is different from, and looser than, our own; and (3) their way of thinking is, from the human point of view, extremely strange. To me, all of this is consistent with the hypothesis that these beings have a developed a mode of intelligence that is not biologically based.

(Against this, what is to be made of the grotesquely enlarged crania of the greys, if their cognition is not brain-based? I suppose that non-brain intelligence, the development of which is necessitated by the decline of the brain, can then be used to reverse that decline, bring the brain back, and develop it even further -- but that brain-thinking would ever after be secondary to non-brain-thinking.)

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Even setting to one side these speculations about the future of Man as an intelligent species, it remains true that each one of us will eventually have to learn to think without a functioning brain. Many of us will develop dementia as we get older, and every one of us, without exception, will die and become -- at least in the interval between death and resurrection -- a demented shade.

(Bruce Charlton has an interesting theory that this is why Christianity emphasizes the need for a childlike and decidedly non-intellectual "faith" in Jesus: because it is as demented shades, without access to the brain, that we must make the crucial choice to follow him to resurrection.)

Is it possible to survive death with a fully human degree of intelligence? It certainly seems to be rare. One of the most universal features of ghost stories around the world is that ghosts behave as if they were severely retarded. Possible exceptions include such shades as those of Samuel and Tiresias -- men who were "psychic" in life and may have developed an unusual degree of non-biological cognitive ability.

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The idea that the the brain must teach the soul to think is touched upon by J. W. Dunne in An Experiment With Time (pp. 212-213).

So we are driven to the interesting conception of an ultimate thinker who is learning to interpret what is presented to his notice, the educative process involved being his following, during the waking hours, with unremitting, three-dimensional attention, the facile, automatic action of that marvellous piece of associative machinery, the brain.

This, admittedly, is a complete reversal of the old-time animist's conception of the 'higher' observer as an individual of superlative intelligence producing the best effect he can with the aid of a clumsy material equipment. But it seems to me there is not getting away from the plain evidence afforded by the character of our dream thinking. Whatever capacities for eventually superior intelligence may be latent in the observer at infinity, they are capacities which await development. At the outset brain is the teacher and mind the pupil. Mind begins its struggle towards structure and individuality by moulding itself upon the brain. [. . .] the brain serves as a machine for teaching the embryonic soul to think.

Dunne expands on this in Intrusions? (pp. 64-65).

Your [immortal soul] has plenty of intuitive knowledge: his ability to perceive what lies ahead in time-1 is an instance of that. Moreover, a study of dreams shows that he is thinking in a rudimentary fashion. [. . .] But the logic, usually, is little better than that of a very young child [. . .] He is not in the least surprised by any incongruity which he encounters: he accepts it without hesitation. [. . .] But there are times in dreaming when the more rational part of the mind rouses from its uncritical inspection of the fantasies presented to it by its half-witted partner, and you find definite though still rather feeble thinking going on. It has all the characteristics of brain thinking, incredulity, criticism, judgement, planning: and this is the thinking it has learned from brain during the earlier travels of the three-dimensional 'now'.

Later in the same book (p. 76), Dunne lists the capacities of the mind (as separate from the brain) as follows.

These are: (a) control of attention; (b) an ability to learn from experience; (c) foreknowledge of sense data lying ahead in time-1; (d) as a consequence of (c) and (b), purpose, expemplified in intervention to avoid, or ensure reaching, those foreseen sense data; and (e) a very limited amount of thinking (tutored by that mechanical thinker, the brain).

Dunne's perspective on this is of course inseparable from his unique theory regarding the nature of time. (The references to "time-1" in the passages I have quoted refer to the first of the infinite number of temporal dimensions postulated by Dunne's theory.) While I believe Dunne's theory of time to be essentially correct, I also believe -- as he does not -- that the spirit pre-existed the body, and persists after bodily death, in time-1. For Dunne, the immortality of the soul is strictly a time-2 phenomenon. Nevertheless, his thoughts provide a fruitful starting point for speculation.

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As should be fairly obvious, this post has been an exercise in thinking-aloud and throwing out possibilities, and it does not represent my final, considered opinion. One obvious problem with all that I have written is that it does not deal adequately with the fact that brainless minds must have predated brain-mediated ones and must have been able to develop a high degree of intelligence without the aid of a biological brain. This is something I need to think a lot more about and, while I do not expect this post to resonate with very many people, I do welcome comments from anyone sufficiently sympathetic to be able to engage with it.