How likely is it that a wiring system, sending little electrical charges, across hundreds of miles of cable has given rise to movement, awareness and consciousness, compassion, creativity and can generate daily, sufficient information needed to keep a human or even an animal alive? With no outside influence, no Watchmaker, nor Intelligent Designer, these self assembling units generated themselves from random noise in a system that ultimately became us.
How does Network Rail compare? It is certainly high maintenance, requiring generations of humans to keep it repaired and running. The design, not necessarily the most efficient, with thousands of historical quirks, lost sidings, trains and tracks, took decades and some of the finest minds of the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty first century to reach its present state.
That we think of the brain in terms of a sophisticated wiring diagram, is largely thanks to early researchers such as Golgi and Cajal, makeing sense of what they saw down the fuzzy lens of their primitive microscopes.
This is not a book purporting to show off the handiwork of an Intelligent Designer, or Blind Watchmaker, rather it grasps a far hotter potato. This is a book that challenges a model of the brain that has is the summit of trillions of dollars of investment. If you want to understand the crime, follow the money.
Very few researchers would disagree that the present model of the brain, as a wiring system run by neurones, has run aground when it comes to human or even mammalian qualities of creativity, compassion, intelligent solutions to novel and the generation of new information. Despite the most extreme claims of artificial intelligence, it is not intelligence in the sense of being truly smart. Yes computers can play any programmable game, better than their programmers,
This model is the equivalent of a self-programming computer, that with no human input, generates its own algorithms from watching, watching videos filmed by the space craft that went to the moon. Computers cannot self learn without a biological input. And it is that input that makes biological creations so remarkable. Out of biology, that messy sloppy inexact soup of life comes the ability to create life. This is well beyond the reach of any kind of machine, filled as it is with lifeless wire.
Biology and organic chemistry creates life, not a bunch of metal wiring, and no amount of quantum computing is going to create anything that does not obey the laws of physics. Biology on the other hand, does not necessarily obey the rules of physics because it spontaneously creates novel and inexplicable patterns and order.
Neurones are wires, just as a train track are strips of metal laid on ballast, that carry trains. Neurones are wires that carry signals, they cannot generate a signal in the absence of input that changes their electrical charge in a meaningful way, that generates meaning information as opposed to random signals. We all know that if you cut the nerves to an arm or a leg, that limb no longer works. Neurones are wires! they are sophisticated wires with all kinds of interesting connections, and adaptations, but they are still wires, connecting A to B and taking information from one point to another.
Why is this important? and why now? Because the richest and most powerful men on earth are obsessed with their computers, space programmes and vaccinations. They believe life is an automaton and they can create their own personal army of Terminators to fight the final wars, whether it is on the final frontiers of space, earth or any other dimension these poor deluded creatures think they can go.
Man cannot create life, any more than a man can get pregnant. Life in all its diversity, creativity and complexity is biological, and not the product of a manufacturing base from China. An AI model of humanity, where we are all cogs in a machine, each part interchangeable, where no one, no idea and no individual is special or unique; where each part can be programmed and replaced if it fails is a desperate, sad and lonely model of life that might populate a dead and dying universe but hardly one that is compatible with the exuberance of life we see around us at every turn.
Sadly, this is the model of humanity that is supported by a model that places the neurone centre stage. Neurones are a specialised type of Glial cell, specialised to connect one cell with another and it is in the glial cells that we can expect to find the true origins of our species.