(by Misha Naimark)

Summary

I want to start with the “ideology”; if you will like it, then I can proceed with more concrete and accurate things. Of all sciences, this “ideology” is closest to that of Freud's psychoanalysis. By the way, what do you think of it? It is commonly understood just as pansexualism, but this vulgarization has nothing to do with my hypothesis, and now it will be appropriate to outline my idea of psychoanalysis:

1) Contrary to the wide spread opinion, vast majority of human mind actions are unconscious. By “actions” I also mean thoughts, motivations, ideas, memories, dreams, etc. Brain usually functions like some kind of automaton, and in this respect it does not differ from any other material object, for instance, from an artificial automaton. Phenomena of “self awareness” and “consciousness” are rather exceptions than rules even in the brain. An unconscious action can under certain circumstances enter the consciousness and become conscious; the reverse process can also occur, and conscious action may become unconscious again, but this late process is very often abnormal and neurotic.

2) Thoughts can contradict one another, and motivations can conflict. Such conflict situations are main sources of mental disorders and neuroses; one can judge whether the neurosis is present by appearance of so called “neurotic symptoms” (they are actions, too) But sometimes conflict does develop into symptoms, and sometimes it is being resolved in more healthy way.

3) The important discovery, made by Freud, is that conflict can develop into neurotic symptoms only when at least one of the conflicting motivations is unconscious; when both of them are conscious, the symptoms never appear. Therefore a good way to treat a neurosis is to make the unconscious conflicting side conscious, i.e. to help it enter the consciousness.

4) There is no definition inside psychoanalysis as to what is “consciousness”. For “motivations”, “thoughts”, “ideas” there are no definitions either. You can conceive some idea of what these things are only with the aid of several analogies (rather vivid):

First: Things like these (and like “ego”, which is related to the “consciousness”,

and also things like “internal censorship”) are called “agencies” (in Russian - by similar word “instanziya”, which is applicable to social organization as well as English word “agency”), and are imagined as interacting structures and organizations in society.

Second: These things are imagined as communicating persons or beings of some sort (for example, a strong antisocial passion as a wild beast). The “consciousness” has a room of it's own, and the entrance to this room is guarded by guard - “internal censorship”. Those of the beings who manage to pass the guard and enter the room, represent conscious actions.

Third: They are compared to several nations, such as Germans, Czechs and Hungarians, living on the same territory among each other, but conducting different ways of life and speaking different languages.

5)There is one “ideologically” important question: what is psychoanalytical fact? Any theory must be based on solid facts, but psychoanalysts often draw their conclusions from dreams, free associations, and the like, and these things seem so unreliable, uncertain, and sometimes quite absurd. Freud resolved this problem in following way: the contents of a dream or an association indeed can be unreliable and absurd, but these contents are not the psychoanalytical fact. The fact is that the association or the dream with such and such contents appeared in the mind of such and such patient under such and such conditions, which could be detected through some changes in the patient's behavior. The two things - contents of the dream and the fact of the dream's appearance are not to be confused, as former belongs to subjective world, while the later to the real and objective one. In addition, Freud claims that the facts of this sort are reproducible, a dream or an association can come many times (especially when it is really informative of the patient's condition), furthermore, it can even become obsessive.

When I read Freud, the resemblance between his model of human mind and social structures (either whole state with it's government, censorship, suppression apparatus and plentiful organizations, or an imagined small society of few “persons” - “consciousness”, “internal censorship”, and several “passions” and “motivations”) stroke me very deeply. I made a supposition, which is crucial for the present hypothesis: that brain is indeed organized like human society. This means that brain (or at least it's hemisphere's cortex) supposedly consists of numerous interacting elements (I am going to call them “subjects” in future), and the relationships between them are in a sense similar to those between individuals in society. Naturally, I tend to think that the subjects are nothing but really existing neurons, though my approach does not necessarily require this; subjects can be some structures (or even virtual structures) inside real cells, or, on the contrary, may contain several cells each. All mentioned above phenomena - “ego”, “thought”, “internal censorship”, “motivation”, etc. are organizations of subjects; for example, “ego” resembles government of a state, “internal censorship”, naturally, state censorship, other thoughts, ideas and motives are like numerous organizations (formal and informal) existing on that state's territory. By “resemblance” I now mean following thing: if we would draw two graphs - one representing government, whose nodes represent individuals employed there, and arrows - relationships between them, and the other - representing “ego” with subjects in it's nodes, then these graphs will look very much alike. A “thought”, or an “idea”, can be charged with “energy” of some mysterious nature ( Freud's notion; he called this energy “libido”) and then it acquires the quality of “motivation” or even “passion”. So, an organization of subjects usually functions as “thought” and “motivation” at the same time. The late two can not exist without each other; when you feel that you want something, and can not understand what, that only indicates that the thought is having problems with entering your “consciousness”; that does not mean the absence of the thought. In society one and the same organization can be either rich or poor, and, therefore, can have or have no influence and power to accomplish it's goals; it seems likely that money in society play the same role as libido in brain. I have a paranoid idea of reducing all various relationships between subjects to the relationship of just one kind, namely, to the relationship similar to ownership in society. Since monetary transactions in society reflect these relations of ownership, I expect that the signals by which the subjects communicate to be in a sense similar to monetary transactions. Well, sounds too paranoid for the moment; we can discuss money later. All I wanted to say is that I am going to build a model of a brain with just one kind of relationship between it's subjects, and all the arrows on the graph will be of the same sort.

It is widely accepted in modern neuroscience that neurons communicate by means of electrochemical pulses going through synapses, and almost all of the brain cortex synapses are of the same sort, they use acetylcholine as a mediator (to be accurate, there are synapses of another sorts, using for mediators some derivatives of adrenaline and opiates, they play an especial role in maintenance of the general level of brain activity). There would be no great exaggeration to think that a real brain with just one sort of links between neurons can possibly function.

Now let us consider a simple example of subject organization; traditionally, I take for this purpose the concept of “apple”. Let it be an image APPLECONCRETE 1 of an absolutely concrete physical body of an apple, let it be, for certainty, big, round, and red. Moreover, the image have to be taken at a concrete moment of time. ( I can ask you: count, how many times you will see an apple? And then show you, say, 5 times one and the same apple. You will answer: 5 times. As you see, one and the same physical body have created 5 different images in your brain, i.e. 5 different organizations - APPLECONCRETE 1, APPLECONCRETE 2, ... APPLECONCRETE 5 ). Now we are interested about just one of the organizations. Here we have to make next important supposition: that to any of the subjects corresponds some elementary idea, or a concept - for example, there exist a subject, responsible for the concept “red” (I will denote this subject as RED ) , another one - ROUND - for the concept “round”, BIG for the concept “big”, and so forth. As we remember, an organization of subjects is also responsible for some idea or a concept; the difference is that this late idea or concept is not elementary any more. Elementary concept, by definition, has no more properties: for example, “big” is only big and that is; but “appleconcrete” (non-elementary concept) has also properties of being big, red, etc. In a sense, we consider an elementary subject as an elementary organization, exactly like we could consider an individual as an elementary social organization; I even going to call organizations subjects, too (naturally, without adjective “elementary”). Among others, there exist subjects, responsible for the meanings of all words of our language; these word subjects are supposed to have immediate links to speech apparatus of the brain. Organization APPLECONCRETE 1 is to encompass all the elementary subjects responsible for properties of the concept “appleconcrete 1”, i.e. BIG, RED, ROUND, etc. But how are them linked together, and then, what distinguishes two organizations containing identical sets of property subjects? ( APPLECONCRETE 1 and APPLECONCRETE 2, for instance?) I propose the following model: any organization consists of one leading central subject SUBCENTR and the set of property subjects connected to the SUBCENTR by links, directed from center to properties (the direction is conventional). Several words, like “this”, “the”, “it”, “something” are relevant to any SUBCENTR, they just indicate, that the speaker means a concept as a whole, and not it's properties separately; subjects SUBCENTR are too numerous to invent an especial word for each of them. When it will not lead to confusion, I will call a SUBCENTR by the name of the organization it is in charge of. ( by the way, a very common situation with social organizations - they are often called after their leaders and vise versa). Here I want to draw your attention to the following fact: the word “property” in English has two different meanings - first is “object of ownership” and the second - “quality”. Exactly the same situation with Russian word “svoistvo”. The verb “to have” by some reason became modal verb, (also to certain extent it's Russian equivalent “imet'”). In Hebrew we can say: “ha tapuach - baal zeva adom” ( the apple is an owner (or a master) of red color ). Consider two phrases: “ the man has (or possesses) an apple” and “ the apple has (or possesses) red color” ( I believe the second one is understandable in English; at least, Russian equivalent sounds perfectly well). These phrases are grammatically identical, but they are applied to absolutely different situations - the first describes social relationship of ownership, while the second - reflecting capacity of a physical body. How could it be explained? You probably anticipate my explanation: I suppose that the second phrase reflects the structure of the concept “red apple”, i.e. the structure of it's correspondent organization in the brain. The organization is linked together by relationship, which resembles ownership in society; it consists of several property subjects belonging to one central subject. People unconsciously feel this resemblance, and that is why they call different things by the same words.

{ I should say, within the present approach I use such “strange” coincidences in word usage very widely. From psychoanalytical standpoint it is quite justifiable, specifically when equivalent usage occurs in several unrelated languages. For example, in a mathematical book you can encounter phrases like these: “This conclusion is legitimate (or just, or justifiable)” or “this assumption is justifiable under such and such conditions”. ( in Russian “spravedlivost” and “zakonnost” are used in exactly the same way). But words “justice” and “legitimacy” originally mean some social phenomena, they are relevant to relationships between people; what they have to do with making logical conclusions? More examples: state “censorship” and internal “censorship”; individual “consciousness” and mass “consciousness” ( or, say, class “consciousness” of workers, by Marx); “interest” of an individual towards some interesting idea and bank “interest” rate, and state “interests” of USA (look, we unconsciously treat the USA and an individual as very similar things: they both can have “interests”); physical “person” and artificial (or legal) “person”. It is easy to explain why a human being is similar to a chimpanzee ape - they both have two legs, two hands and one head; but try to explain why a single human being is similar to a crowd of them. }

There are clear indications that images of physical objects in a real brain are not located each at a place - they are rather scattered all over the cortex. When a patient has a certain zone of his cortex damaged, (say, by tumor), he forgets the purpose of all things - he can not use spoons, forks, pencils, apples, etc. but he can call them by right words. When another zone is damaged, the patient can use things but can not name a shown thing, although he can repeat or even read the word aloud. There is no zone in the brain cortex, whose damage would make the patient forget one concept completely (along with it's purpose, it's name, and other properties) and at the same time would leave the rest of the concepts intact.

There exists the word a-p-p-l-e in our language, hence, as we supposed above, must exist a subject APPLE responsible for this word, and it must have something to do with organization APPLECONCRETE 1. Usually we think of the concept “apple” as a non-elementary concept: we believe, that it possesses some immanent properties - say, it is something “round, tasteful, hanging on the tree”. The question is a delicate one, now I am suggesting two different approaches to it:

APPROACH 1

The mentioned above properties are actually not immanent ones, since there exist apples, who are not round, but oblong; who are not tasteful; and an apple does not necessarily have to hang on a tree. A picture of an apple, drawn on a piece of paper is still relevant to the concept, though it hardly makes a physical body, it is just stains of paint on the paper. A chain of letters or sounds a-p-p-l-e is as closely associated in human brain with the “apple” concept as a sensory image including visual, taste, touch, etc. properties. So, within this approach, the concept can not possess any further properties, and therefore it is an elementary concept. The corresponding elementary subject APPLE goes among other property subjects on equal terms, it belongs to the SUBCENTR just like any of RED, ROUND, SWEET, and the like. Let us now consider a simple problem of the sort commonly used to teach little kids numeracy: “Pete had three apples and Ann had two; Pete gave one of his apples to Ann; how many apples ... (and so forth).” How are the images of such apples built? These are abstract mathematical apples - all their properties, such as “red”, “round” are omitted; the only property left is the “property of being an apple”. We don't know, and don't need to know, whether they are red, or yellow, round or oblong; while solving the problem we don't actually imagine their colors and shapes. Consequently, we have to suppose that each of these images A, B, C, ..., consists of it's central subject (A, for example), and just one single property subject APPLE belonging to it. All these organizations - A, B, C, ... , use one and the same property subject, so they can hardly function simultaneously. Indeed, human brain would have problems imagining and processing too many similar images at the same time: you can visualize, follow and process a complex situation with a lot of diverse details; but try to follow more then 3 apples simultaneously! Of course, real brain is more sophisticated then our model, subjects could be duplicated and triplicated to allow the processing of several simultaneous images. To count apples we need some means to distinguish between them (rather between their images, then their physical bodies, see the previous speculations). Since the property subjects of A, B, C, ..., are one and the same subject APPLE, the only thing that distinguishes them is different central subjects. As we see, this difference is enough to make the images countable, i.e. is enough for them to become mathematical units. Generally, these conditions - at least one common property (I am going to call a common property otherwise an “analogy between images”) and different central subjects - are necessary for a set of images to become countable units. You can count images (i. e. In a sense to add one image to another) of all red objects, presented to you - they have RED as the common property subject; or round objects - ROUND in common. But you can not add together dissimilar images - shall we say, cows and dinner tables. Not until you will find an analogy between them - they are both four-legged! And now you can start counting all four-legged objects presented to you - chairs, dogs, saw-horses, etc.

These speculations exactly coincide with that part of physics, which deals with dimensional representations - there also it is forbidden to add liters to kilograms. The analogy, or common property subject, seems to play the role of dimensional unit, and the central subject is somehow responsible for quantitative representation, for the quality of an image to be “one” unity.

Letters of our alphabet are also considered concepts, and, therefore, subjects - I will denote them, naturally, A, B, C, ..., Z. When we say “apple a”, we mean an organization having two property subjects - APPLE and A, exactly like “red apple” means organization with property subjects APPLE and RED. When we are labeling an image we are actually assigning an additional artificial property to it; and this is a convenient way to bypass the naming and denoting problems arising from multiplicity of various SUBCENTR subjects and impossibility of inventing a separate name for each of them.

Numbers are concepts and subjects as well; they can be used for labeling instead of letters; but they have many more fascinating qualities. I hope to discuss numbers in more detail later - it goes beyond presentation of “ideology”. This approach represents very conveniently many other basic mathematical concepts - such as “set”, for example, which consists of the set's elements (who are themselves concepts and hence subjects), belonging to a central subject, who is not an element of the set, but represents the set as a whole (it can, in it's own turn, be included as an element into another set - a set of sets).

APPROACH 2

On the other hand, if I was asked a riddle: “what is this: red, round, tasteful, hanging on a tree?”, I would be able to guess - “an apple”. So, this set of properties seems to be more relevant to an apple, then to any other object. “Red” or “yellow” colors would better suit an apple, then “blue” or “violet”, “round” shape better then “square”. Contrary to the approach 1 there must be links between APPLE and RED and between APPLE and YELLOW, for example, and these links must be much stronger then between APPLE and BLUE and APPLE and VIOLET. These links are just the ones who enable me to guess the riddle - i.e. to conclude, that if an image has the listed above properties, than it most probably has the property of “being an apple”, too. Identification of images by sight, touch, hearing, taste is in principal similar to guessing of a riddle - naming an image by a given incomplete list of properties. It is probabilistic, too - an unusually round pear can indeed be mistaken for an apple. There exists entire branch of science based on this approach - it deals with image recognition, decision making, artificial neuron nets with fuzzy probabilistic links, fuzzy logic, and so on. The notion of “elementary concept” becomes meaningless within this approach, and links seem to lose their resemblance to ownership relations; even formerly unrelated subjects, such as RED and SWEET establish links to each other - there is some correlation between taste and color of an apple - red one is probably more sweet, then green one.

Both approaches look consistent, each in it's own field, but rather contradictory. A real living brain must somehow execute both of the approaches without confusing them, how is it possible?

First of all, I should note, in the very reality a brain lacking the concept “apple” can exist and successfully function. It would examine, pluck, taste and eat each apple individually, without knowing that it is an “apple”, without setting them apart as a separate class of objects. In some book I read about one tribe in Russian Far East, which has no concept “tree”. They knew “pines”, “spruces”, “birches” and others separately, and could process these images quite successfully, but did not see an analogy between them. When a pupil from this tribe came to the primary school and was asked to do a sum like “Three pines and two birches grew on a hill. How many trees were there on the hill?”, he came to a halt - adding pines to birches sounded to him like adding liters to kilograms.

The most realistic explanation of what is the subject APPLE and how it manages to execute it's functions both in accordance to approaches 1 and 2, again requires analogy to a social organization. Let us suppose, that the society contains many individuals with similar demands - for example, they demand loafs of bread. To produce it, one needs several ingredients: flour, water, salt, firewood, a stove, etc. In a primitive society each individual bakes bread on his own, he gets all the necessary ingredients by himself (i.e. he must possess the ingredients as his own properties); there is no especial organization for bread baking. This situation resembles an uneducated brain, which has no subject APPLE, and where each of SUBCENTR subjects has to establish all the necessary links to the property subjects. In a more advanced society we would find an especial “bread agency” - a bakery - an organization, which has ready links (these are real ownership relations) to all bread ingredients and sells loafs to individuals. I shall take up the classic economist's idea of what is “selling” and “buying”: when an individual buys a loaf of bread from a bakery, that means he buys the working time of all it's employees, necessary for the production of one loaf (it can be a fraction of second), pays off all raw materials and depreciation of the equipment; in other words, the buyer becomes a virtual owner of the entire bakery for this short time. It is namely this “bread agency” that resembles the subject APPLE of an experienced brain - APPLE does some work for each of the SUBCENTR subjects - it provides them with ready links to the property subjects, and, in it's own turn, temporarily becomes SUBCENTR's property. Note, that existence of APPLE is justifiable only when there is sufficient quantity of apple images in the brain - an individual who saw an apple just few times in his life will hardly develop an especial concept for it, he would rather treat each apple as a separate concept. The same in society - a bakery can exist only when it has enough customers. So, the most realistic notion of subject APPLE is a rather sophisticated organization of many smaller subjects, and the graph, representing this subject, would remind a graph of a social agency. A human brain contains in average about 10.000.000.000 neurons; assuming that only 1% of them are responsible for processing of concepts, and the rest 99% deal with other tasks - control of locomotion, orientation, digestion, and the like, we have about 100.000.000 neurons responsible for concepts; to estimate the number of concepts familiar to a brain let us take a very big enormous dictionary, containing 1.000.000 entries. Under such estimation we should expect every concept subject to contain 100 neurons in average, i.e. we have a right to consider it a large sophisticated agency. Taking this into account, many links who within approach 2 looked like fuzzy, might appear to be ordinary links between smaller constituent subjects, or “subsubjects”, as I am going to call them sometimes.

I want to point out now, that the APPLE as a whole and any of it's constituent subsubjects are called by one and the same word “subject” and they really behave alike - they can establish links of similar sort with other subjects, they are responsible for concepts, they may have corresponding words in language. How it comes, that in this sense an assembly of constituents behaves like it's one single constituent? This seem to be the case indeed, smaller organizations seem to be built on the same principal as bigger ones, and the whole network of organizations therefore resembles self-modeling net. I can draw a similar example from sociology: to study international politics we would habitually choose for interacting subjects such large masses, as nations and states; to study interior policy of states it is convenient to divide the entire society into smaller subjects - towns, regions, or political parties. To understand personal relations we have to divide the society into separate individuals. All these enclosed social subjects behave alike, first of all, with respect to ownership relations - a state, a town, or an organization can have a property, it can own something, just like an individual. They also can have a thing called “interest” and many other things mentioned somewhere above. Very often people even personify large social subjects, creating images like “red bear”, “uncle Sam”, “British lion”, and thus revealing their similarity to individuals. Though, people also tend to personify concepts, thoughts, passions - recall Freud's analogies, and that prehistoric people saw living souls in every tree and stone, and that one can say such a phrase: “the engine does not “want” to work”. The self-modeling principal apparently goes not only beyond individual brain, but also inside it, and a graph representing a concept would resemble a graph of the whole brain.

This “ideology” treats all the thoughts and concepts inside our head as a quite real living creatures - they, after all, consist of real interacting gray cells, and their difference from the whole brain is mainly quantitative. They have no bones and muscles and bodies of their own, and have to share the body of the individual, and sometimes one of them or another can take complete possession of it.

Approaches 1 and 2 seem to be mutually exclusive, at least one and the same neuron net can hardly execute both of them, their links would interfere and cause confusion; to resolve this difficulty, I had to suppose that brain has an ability to switch temporarily off part of it's subjects, exclude them completely out of the game. When a brain is considering some arithmetical or logical problem, it switches on only those subsubjects of all concepts, who are responsible for approach 1, i.e. it considers all of the “apples”, “pears”, “dinner tables”, “cows”, “Petes”, “Anns”, etc. as elementary concepts having no further links. I will call such a phenomenon “consideration of a problem in an aspect ASP” ( in this particular case it is “mathematical aspect” - MATH or “arithmetical aspect” - ARITH), and thus set apart subsubjects of all concepts I will call “constituents of the ASP” (as we will later see, an aspect is organized very much like a concept, so I will also call them “properties of the ASP”). To clarify these things, I am going to bring forth a social analogy again: let us take a network factories, plants, and firms, linked together with innumerable links: they supply one another with goods and raw materials and know-hows, their employees are linked by friendship, marriage, through political parties, etc. Each of the factories or firms has it's boss (or manager), and let these bosses and managers come together in a top-level meeting to discuss their business, to sign deals, and so on. Although they represent their enterprises, they interact as ordinary separate people at this meeting, all other members of the enterprises are excluded from the interaction, and mentioned above innumerable links have no immediate influence. By the way, bosses and managers in real society are usually organized into organizations (formal or informal) just with the purpose of such interaction; it is just such an organization, who is similar to aspect MATH in a brain. An aspect does not necessarily encompass only top-level subjects. In society we can set apart, say, communist party members, instead of managers and bosses, from among those employees, and consider the social phenomenon of their meeting in exactly the same way. In brain we can consider images, for example, with respect to their color - when shape, size, “being an apple”, or “being a pear” are of no importance, we interest only about their color. That means, that we consider them in the aspect COLOR, in other words, we have right to switch on only property subjects RED, YELLOW, GREEN, ... VIOLET - these are constituents of the aspect COLOR, they belong to the central subject of this aspect COLOR just like property subjects of a concept belong to the central one. As we see, there is no substantial difference between concepts and aspects, it is often hard even to distinguish, where is concept and where is subject, and it is very seldom needed.

Real neurons are commonly thought to be binary units - at a given moment a neuron can be found in one of the two states: either excited, or non-excited. When it receives certain signal through it's receptor endings (who usually detect acetylcholine, secreted by secreting endings of other neurons), it gets excited; when the signal does not match the neuron's requirements, the later remains non-excited. It was found experimentally, that these requirements often can be described as so-called “excitement threshold”, i.e. that the neuron excites when the number of pulses, coming through it's receptor endings during certain time period exceeds certain threshold number. This can suggest a simple model of how the network of aspects and concepts function: excitement pulses spread through links contrariwise to the arrows on the graph, i.e. from center to properties; threshold of all subjects equals 2. Consideration of our concrete red apple in aspect of color means, that we excite two subjects: APPLECONCRETE and COLOR, each of whom sends one pulse to each of his properties; none of the properties can get excited, but RED, where two pulses from APPLECONCRETE and COLOR converge and reach the threshold of two. To get a bright and vivid picture of a concept we would have to consider it in many aspects simultaneously, i.e. to excite many aspects and accordingly lift the threshold of all subjects.

Pete and Ann from our arithmetical problem are concepts, too. Let Pete be black and Ann - white, meaning the color of their skin. Let one of Pete's apples be our concrete red apple. Then the properties of PETE are: BLACK and APPLECONCRETE, since the apple also belongs to Pete. But these properties belong to different aspects, the former to COLOR (in this very aspect APPLECONCRETE has RED), and the later - to SOCIALOWNERSIP, where APPLECONCRETE has no properties. Due to the difference of these aspects a speculation like: “APPLECONCRETE belongs to PETE; RED belongs to APPLECONCRETE; therefore, RED belongs to PETE, therefore, Pete is red” is incorrect. Nevertheless it would be correct when the aspect is one and the same: “POINT_A belongs to LINE_B; LINE_B belongs to PLANE_C; therefore, POINT_A belongs to PLANE_C”. Here we consider an aspect of “geometrical belongship”.

Now I would like to consider two individuals, otherwise two brains, communicating by means of language. If we are still adhering to the recently described model (subjects are binary elements, and their state can be changed by pulses, coming from other subjects), the language communication means that state of one's brain subjects can somehow change the state of the other brain's subjects trough pronouncing and detecting of sounds (or writing and reading of signs; language of gestures and face expressions are considered the same things in principal). We also know, that in all languages of the world these sounds (or signs) are organized into words, who, accordingly to our hypothesis, correspond to subjects - concepts and aspects. In a simple case of declarative sentence, when the first brain B1 sees a red apple and says: “This is a red apple”, B2 (who does not see it) must conceive roughly the same image as B1, after this chain of sounds have reached B2, as if he has actually seen the apple. Subject RED in B1 - RED_B1 receives exciting pulse supposedly immediately from red-sensitive cells of retina, to whom it is naturally linked, and APPLE_B1 gets excited owing to it's fuzzy links of the approach 2. { As to “how B1 unifies these property subjects under a SUBCENTR?” is separate important question; for the moment I can propose the following model: physical time is broken up into equal short intervals, called steps; during each step a subject emerge, who will later play the role of SUBCENTR; all the subjects, who happened to be excited during this step (RED and APPLE in our case) automatically become linked to the future SUBCENTR as it's property subjects. There are some indications (some facts about brain waves and others) concerning step nature of the image processing in real brain}. So, RED_B2 and APPLE_B2 must receive simultaneous exciting pulses due to the heard sentence; it seems that the word r-e-d results into a pulse that somehow reaches RED_B2 trough the network of B2's links, and the word a-p-p-l-e simultaneously results into the same thing for APPLE_B2. When RED_B2 and APPLE_B2 thus get excited during one and the same step, they automatically become property subjects of the newly organized APPLECONCRETE_B2, similarly to APPLECONCRETE_B1. If so, there must exist an organization inside B2 (a sort of subnet inside it), that executes this function: it finds a right subject by a given chain of letters, and delivers the excitement pulse to it. Respectively, inside B1 there must be an organization, transforming the excitement of a certain subject into the chain of letters, i.e. finding the right one of the subjects A, B, C, ... Z at a right time and delivering the pulse to it. {In fact, the elementary unit of a word is not just a letter - it is the letter coupled with it's position, which can be represented by a cardinal number. Such a unit can conveniently be modeled by a subject, having two property subjects - a letter and a cardinal number}. Naturally, both B1 and B2 have both these organizations, since they are supposed to communicate quite symmetrically. It is just these two organizations that I will call “language” and denote LANGUAGE. (there is some experimental evidence that the two functions - recognition of a word and pronunciation of it are executed by apparatuses interlinked so closely, that they can be almost considered one apparatus. When a volunteer was asked to name aloud pictures, appearing on a screen, and at the same time other words sounded from a loudspeaker, he made a lot of mistakes: recognition of a word interfered with pronunciation of another one.) Now again I want to resort to a social analogy: of course, I am going to compare LANGUAGE to a postal system (or a telephone company) in society. Than a word will remind a send letter, the chain of letters itself is similar to the address, written on the envelope (or to a phone number) - by this the organization finds the right subject, the addressee. The contents of the envelope are just one excitement pulse to be delivered to the addressee. When you speak before several individuals - say, before Pete and Ann, any of your words will have several addressees - for example, a-p-p-l-e will have APPLE_PETE and APPLE_ANN. To avoid confusion you may add the “domain name” to the address, i.e. to say: “Pete, apple” or “Ann, apple”. In this sense words are merely “extensions”, added to real postal addresses and individual names to find necessary subjects inside individuals. As well as post or phone company, language uses some “technical means” and natural phenomena, such as vocal cords, eardrums, and propagation of sound waves to convey information over long distances, but the time scale of the communication can dramatically change: in an oral talk you can expect answer to follow a question within seconds, but if you write messages you will wait for an answer for days. Intercellular communication within brain is very quick - it takes fractions of milliseconds for acetylcholine to diffuse across synaptic gap, while language conversation between brains is thousand times slower. Nevertheless it does not seem to impair the quality of communication, or impose some principal restrictions upon it: all that can be achieved by immediate contact can, in principal, be achieved by mail. (here I mean one-channel language immediate contact, void of gestures, mimics, etc.).

This definition of language, (an organization like postal system, allowing several brains (several sets of subjects) to communicate like distant parts of society through mail), I believe, is quite productive, this is just another field where something can be done with mathematical accuracy. Few simple models I have so far developed, happened to coincide amazingly with classical mathematical linguistics, but they look more vivid and understandable.

Accordingly to the common binary model, receptor cells, such as light-sensitive cells of retina, sensitive cells inside ear cochlea, taste cells on the tongue are binary units, too. They get excited in response to the presence of certain correspondent factor in the external world ( EW ), and when excited, they generate pulses just like ordinary neurons, their endings secrete acetylcholine to be detected by other neurons. Nasal smell-sensitive cells, for instance, even look very much like neurons, the only difference is that their detectors are adjusted not to the acetylcholine, but to other chemicals. To the other hand, all final-control bodies - muscles and glands are driven by neurons, to whom their cells are connected by synapses; they contract or secret chemicals in response to the coming excitement pulses. If we have set a subject SUB apart from a brain B, we can regard it as a separate small brain, and all the rest of B as EW with respect to SUB; all incoming links of SUB are to be considered SUB's imaginary receptors (their correspondent factors are excitements of those subjects, from whom the links originate; or, otherwise, the factor is acetylcholine, secreted at that point in space, where the pre-synaptic ending of the link is located). All the outgoing links are to be considered glands, secreting acetylcholine into a certain parts of surrounding space. (Sure, some of the SUB's links may happen to be real receptors and effectors in real EW). In such a peculiar environment a subject lives, acts and conducts his own line of behavior, just like an individual in society. Thus we can set aside only subjects we are interested about, and exclude the rest of the brain out of consideration as a part of “new” external world, which is a fruitful way of analysis. Sociologists habitually use the same trick when they set a social subject aside, say a country, a firm or even an individual, and then regard all the rest of the society together with all non-social natural factors as it's EW.

Now I am going to implement this trick, namely, I want to exclude subjects LANGUAGE from both B1 and B2. Speech apparatuses go to the EW, but instead of them virtual links between B1 and B2 appear; these links function very much like ordinary synaptic links. We are not interested now about what factor mediates between subjects in the link, is it just a chemical like acetylcholine, or an entire sophisticated apparatus using sound waves. All we require from the link is to conduct excitement pulses, so I am even going to denote such virtual links by arrows on a graph, exactly like real links. Then, if we display B1 and B2 on such a graph, we will not see any border dividing them, they will look just like one brain. Owing to the existence of language, the whole society in this sense can be considered one huge brain - million or billion time more powerful then individual. {Here I have to point out a serious difficulty: unlike real links, the virtual ones can not work simultaneously, they can only conduct pulses one at a time, since a brain has only one speech apparatus. For the moment I appeal to the example of two social organizations, connected by a single telephone line. Although their members can talk by the phone only one at a time, I feel that this communication is not principally poorer (though slower) then immediate oral conversation. I feel that the two organizations can even unite into one this way}.

From the “ideological” standpoint this conclusion is very important: for example, “intelligence” is commonly thought of as a kind of mysterious substance, found nowhere in nature, but in human brain; it is this substance that allows humans to send a rocket to the moon. Accordingly to the present hypothesis, the explanation is much simpler: human brain in principal does not differ from an ape's or a dog's one; single human being is no more capable of flying to the moon than a dog or an ape. But humans have advanced language, and their brains are united into one, incomparably more powerful and experienced (it exists hundreds of times longer) than a single one. It is this monstrous being, called “mankind”, that can launch moon rocket; “intelligence” is a quality relevant only to this huge collective brain, but not to a single individual. Some people dream of “artificial intelligence”, or intelligent computer; sometimes they expect a computer to become intelligent when it's complicity level will equal to that of a human brain, i.e. when the number of elements (triggers or transistors) contained in it will reach the number of neurons in the brain. If this is the case, they have to lift the plank millions times higher - to count neurons of the whole society, but not of one brain.

There was another example in evolution history, when a plenty of smaller beings have united together to build much more powerful body out of themselves - when one-celled organisms integrated into multicellular one. There the cells share functions and specialize, and so do individuals in society, where each of them specialize on his job.

Let us now consider another, more abstract concept - “energy”, dwelling in the brains of two individuals - a farmer (B_FARMER) and a physicist (B_PHYSICIST). In B_FARMER ENERGY has subsubjects in very few utility aspects, it is somehow associated with “electric illumination”, “kilowatt-hours” and “horse-powers”. It has no links there in mathematical aspect to “force”, “distance”, “mass”, “speed of light”, “volts” and “coulombs”; but beyond any doubt, these links are crucial to the very existence of the concept. When isolated inside B_FARMER, ENERGY would lose it's sense and will soon bankrupt and die out. If this does not really happen, then only owing to the fact that the farmer belongs to the society which contains physicists, too. Within B_PHYSICIST ENERGY is supposed to have all the necessary subsubjects and links; these links seem to provide for the existence of the concept not only in the physicist's own brain, but also in many other brains. As we see, a concept can seldom be considered a self-sufficient unit within a single brain - it is rather a part of much bigger organization, scattered part by part among all the brains of the society. (Social analogy - a political party, having cells in many factories and plants; none of these cells can exist on their own.) Nearly all concepts are such “interindividual” organizations - the physicist might be unaware of some aspects of “apple” and it's cultivation - but the farmer know them. So our united-social-brain approach will be very convenient in studying concepts.

Now I want to perform a mental experiment: let us take a man, having no concepts, acquired from society - he is completely uneducated, and having no material properties, acquired from it- he is naked. In other words, he has nothing to do with the society. Suppose, he is a born genius, like Newton or Einstein. Let us place him into virgin jungles and watch if he invents the law of gravitation. Sure, he would perish within days without inventing it, but why? Well, he need food, shelter, etc. These things are usually provided by certain social structures to the society members, so to have gravitation law we must have these structures first, and our genius must occupy an appropriate position in that society. But this explanation sounds too earthy, too low, let us modify the conditions: put him into “nutrient medium”, a place, where he can easily find all material products of civilization - food, housing, clothes, scientific instruments, ink and paper. But his mind is completely blank - he has no concepts to think with or language to write with. In this situation he can develop some basic concepts, he can even denote them with signs on paper - this would be no smaller invention for him, than the gravitation law, which he would not reach this way in his life-span. But such a lonely explorer still does look somewhat unrealistic - he can do it, but would he? We have to recall now, that motivations are also related to certain subjects. Vast majority of motivations (apart from pure physiological ones, like hunger) are social: their subjects are “interindividual”, they can not exist in one isolated brain, just like most of the concepts, (see above). We usually imagine, that we act on our own free will, which originates within us, and fully controls our bodies. But think, how often your hands and legs move to accomplish a purpose, originating in someone else's head: people can pay you, or ask you; they can force you or inspire you; there is a lot of ways to induce someone to do something. Being isolated from society we would cease to “want” most of the things we “want” while inside it, our “free will” would fail to supply us with motivations - most of the motivation organizations need a space of several brains to be contained. So, probably, the only activities of that genius would be desperate seeking for contacts and looking for fellow humans. ( I read that a child, completely deprived of communication with people, would suffer lethal brain disorders, so the experiment is not feasible).

When we communicate with someone, we soon come to “understand” him, i.e. we acquire an ability to predict his actions, anticipate his thoughts, opinions, reasons and feelings. This can only indicate that we create a working model of our partner's brain inside our own. The human ability to model fellow humans is amazingly quick indeed; partly this quickness can be explained by the fact of our making a tacit supposition that the partner's brain is organized just like our own - this supposition allows us to utilize the vast information we have about our own brain for the model construction. (We usually call this trick “to put oneself into someone else's place”; the supposition is not always justifiable and sometimes leads to deep misunderstandings.) It would be only natural to think that the model is organized on the same principle as the original brain, after all it consists of the similar “blocks” (neurons), connected by similar synaptic links. The model is just a simplified replica of the original brain, living inside another brain. Now, if we put together all such replicas of your brain, existing in the heads of all your friends, relatives and other communication partners, we might get an assembly of neurons surpassing your own brain in size. Presuming that “personality” is the organization of your brain, we are forced to conclude that a great deal of one's personality dwells outside his scull; moreover, it will continue to live even after the original brain is dead. All valuable features of a personality can further replicate and pass from brain to brain for unlimited time. This phenomenon is quite a material thing, but it behaves alarmingly like what religion calls a “soul”.{ it is an essence of a personality, which can leave it's original body and exist forever; “forever” does not mean physical infinity - the right term is “le dorei dorot” or “le dorot olam” i.e. “for generations of generations” or “for generations of the world”}. Prominent and famous people have more “soul”, than ordinary ones, since they have replicas in greater number of brains; generally, the main object of an individual's existence is seemingly to provide for the future existence of his “soul” - hence the common wish to become prominent and Christian talks about salvation of souls. There can be imagined situations when the whole “soul” would be benefited by sacrificing it's original brain - when the individual commits suicide in order to save his “honor”, or puts his life in danger in a brave exploit. By this his “soul” can acquire new strong and valuable features like “honesty”, “courage”, or gain in size by becoming popular, and it's vitality can dramatically increase in spite of the loss of the original brain. In this sense our minds consist almost completely of the “souls” of people who lived before us - the very words and letters I am typing right now were invented by someone who lived may by thousand years ago, but as organizations in my brain they still live and work. Along with “souls” of real people, there live “artificial souls”, who never had their own bodies - literature or movie heroes and mythical persons.

By the way, these models of communication partners can play another important role - do you remember that difficulty arising from the slowness of virtual links and their inability to conduct pulses simultaneously? Natural solution would be something like hard disk cache in a computer, an agency which would accumulate and store information, coming slowly through language channel, and then make this information accessible thousand times quicker. It seems that the described models execute this function - my partner's words at first reach this model of his in my brain, they modify and refine it; then the model continue to function even when disconnected from the original. When I actually think about what to answer him, subjects of my brain interact with this model at full speed and intensity of real synaptic links, connecting the model to the rest of my brain. For example, I am thinking quite alone right now; but such models of people I once communicated with (parts of their “souls”, if you want), are at hard work: they are ceaselessly criticising the ideas I am writing down, asking questions, expressing opinions; they are even checking my English for possible mistakes. And not less important, they are supplying me with motivation to write. It looks to me as a kind of internal dialogue; I believe that most of my creative mental activities are of this nature. Robinson Crusoe, although deprived of communication, retained most of the motivations and concepts. This means that he had a good stable model of the society in his head, the model which could sustain a communication delay of many years.

This communication delay problem often raised in society, too, specifically in ancient and medieval times, when mail and traveling was slow. The problem is solved in exactly the same way, by creating internal agencies, modeling distant partner subjects. These are embassies of partner states, various trade chambers and delegations. They act on behalf of their distant “originals”, but they are accessible at “talking” speed rather than “mailing” speed.

Now I want to discuss still more “ideological” question - the question of “god”. One thing, called by this word g-o-d does exist beyond any doubt: this is the concept of god in people's heads. Accordingly to our hypothesis, there must exist a subject GOD, responsible for the concept. This subject is evidently “interindividual”, in other words, it is an organization scattered among all individuals in the society. People tend to personify this subject only too often, hence all these images of white-bearded old man, sitting on a cloud, and Jesus Christ and others. It is also supposed to dwell somewhere “high” in the sky, in the heaven. All important and prominent officials in the society (on a tree-shaped graph of society they occupy closer to the root nodes) are also called “high” people, they occupy “high”, “top-level” positions. Clearly, the word h-i-g-h is on some unknown reason associated with close-to-the-root nodes in hierarchic organizations. {By the way, this analogy with static mechanics goes further: here the word h-i-g-h is relevant to a body which has more potential energy in gravitation field; but “high” people also supposed to have more “weight” in society, and can have more “power” or “force”. “Libido” is also thought of as a kind of energy; if the present hypothesis is right and “money” (or “wealth”) is indeed similar to “libido”, it is like energy, too. (There seem to be even something like “conservation principle” about money.) More “wealthy” social subjects have more properties, i.e. have links to more subjects, and therefore, they are closer to the root of the graph }. Besides, GOD has very peculiar links: in some aspect (this aspect is very much like SOCIALOWNERSHIP) it is linked to all other subjects, they are GOD's properties. In other words, god possesses everything and everybody, it is lord, master and owner. Thus the subject GOD looks like the very root subject of the entire society. If so, it might indeed rule everything and know everything, in a sense. It is often associated with top government officials, like pharaohs in Egypt (they were considered gods), who are also root subjects in some other aspect; god is often compared to a “king” beyond all real kings; now I can say that this “king” might be indeed a living creature, consisting of real gray cells. In the book of one of the prophets ( I don't remember, which, and I can not recall the exact quotation) there is a phrase like: “don't look for the god high in the sky; don't look for him deep in the sea; god is within yourselves”. Many such “interindividual” hidden organizations reflect some of their aspects openly into social organizations, consisting of individuals; GOD reflects into the organization of “church” in Christian society.

Phenomena of “consciousness” and “self-awareness” can now be attributed to two things:

1) Self-modeling and hierarchy principles of brain organization: root subject EGO of a brain can be regarded as a smaller brain inside bigger one; EGO treats the rest of the brain along with it's body as a part of EW, but from these peculiar parts of the EW the EGO receives a lot more information, since they are connected to it by plentiful synaptic links. When you pinch your left arm with your right hand, your EGO treats this just like someone else's hand pinching someone else's arm, but in the case of your body EGO gets real information about pressure, pain, etc. , through skin receptors.

2) Supposed presence of specific agencies in a brain, who function like newspapers, radio or TV in society, carrying the same information simultaneously to large numbers of subjects. When a baker bakes a loaf of bread, the society is usually unconscious of it; this resembles an unconscious action of an individual. But when a newspaper correspondent arrives at the bakery, writes an article about the baker and his work and plenty of people read it, then the society becomes conscious of it; this resembles the transition of an action into consciousness.

These two processes can combine and cause a lot of excitement, when one is meditatively pinching himself an feeling utterly his “self-awareness”.(by “excitement” I mean just the excitement of his subjects, or neurons, if you want). Note that we presume here that “consciousness” is not a quality unique to a human brain only: it can occur in other subjects. For instance, GOD seem to play in social “consciousness” a role similar to that of EGO in individual.

To conclude with, I want to adduce a physiological argument “pro” the hypothesis: big parts of the brain cortex (up to a half of it or more) can be removed by surgery, but the brain recovers all it's functions afterwards. When it was done in early childhood, the recovery can be so complete, that changes in the patient's behavior are practically unnoticeable, although total “quickness” and “brightness” of the person has diminished. (this is often compared to holography, where a holographic plate can be broken and part of it removed, but size of the picture remains the same - it is it's resolution that diminishes.) Exactly the same thing can be expected if a part of individuals was removed from a society - it would impair the society at first, but it will soon reorganize and resume to work as before, though slower.

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