The Mind is a Corporation of Neurons
Corporations1 are strange things. We don’t generally think of them as persons, yet they have characteristics we usually only attribute to persons: They know things, they make choices, they can be creative, cruel, dogmatic, just, etc. Of course, we really just mean that the people who make up the corporation do these things. Right?
The trouble is, we don’t mean that. Not exactly, anyway. We know that not everyone in a corporation knows everything the corporation knows, nor that they assented to its choices, nor that they share its other characteristics. We don’t even need the majority to have a characteristic for the corporation to have it; a company can know something just so long as one employee knows and is willing to share/use that knowledge with the rest of the company. Nor does the knowledge need to be located at the head of the company.
Everything the corporation knows is something a member of it knows—that much is true. But they do not necessarily know it as individuals. For example, two people may know how to work together to produce X, each having only a rough idea of the work the other does, but on their own, either one would be useless. One person enhances the capabilities of another. This is why we have corporations in the first place: The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
So, a corporation has powers that cannot be simply attributed to all or most of its members, its leadership, or even its members taken in isolation. It is something more than all of this. What’s happening is that the relationships and communication between members allow them to share, coordinate, and enhance their individual powers. Communication forms many individuals into one superorganism.
This is an example of emergence. We have a large-scale phenomenon (a corporation) composed of smaller-scale components (persons) and yet possessing characteristics not possessed by those components taken separately.
My proposal is that this is how the mind works: The mind is a “corporation” of neurons. The brain is made up of 86 billion neurons, with ~1 trillion connections between them. Each neuron is a living cell with a basic degree of intelligence that learns, predicts, communicates and makes decisions2. Like employees of a corporation, on their own each neuron is relatively unimpressive. But when they communicate and work together their capacities are shared, co-ordinated and mutually enhanced. Together, they are capable of incredible things.
The key point here is that mental characteristics do not just belong to the brain as a whole but to specific neurons in the brain. Just as everything a corporation does is something a person does, so everything the mind does is something a neuron does. Every bit of knowledge, experience, emotion, will, desire, understanding, or memory belongs to some neuron(s) somewhere in the brain. Your experience of wanting a sandwich? That’s neurons at work. Feeling excited? Neurons. Your concept of justice? Neurons again.
How can something as simple as a neuron have such complex ideas and feelings? How could it have the concept of a “sandwich”, let alone “justice”? Well, consider how you and I come to have a concept like “France”. “France” is an abstraction that we have received and formed via our communication with others. No one has ever individually encountered “France”. We might have met the French president, eaten a baguette, and stepped onto French soil, but this falls far short of knowing the full conceptual reality of what is meant by “France”. Instead, we know France via the combined shared experiences of millions of people, simplified and abstracted and packaged into the concept of “France”.
This is, I believe, how neurons can know about sandwiches and justice. They communicate with each other via neural signals, sending electrical pulses to each other. These neural signals operate as symbols (almost even as words), representing more complex realities behind themselves and allowing these complex realities to be handled with relative ease. As Alfred North Whitehead wrote, ‘Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.’3 And just like words in human language, these neural signals/symbols gain their meaning from their usage and their contextual roles. The signals between neurons do not just allow neurons to relate to one another but are themselves relational.
It also helps that each neuron doesn’t need to know everything for itself: it just needs to know who to ask. Each neuron can work with a massively simplified idea of what it’s doing, so long as it knows who to ask/direct towards when that simplified version is insufficient. This is exactly how corporations operate. No one knows everything, but (hopefully) they know what they need to work together and who to go to when they need something more.
Where does this leave us? What does it mean to be human if the human mind is a “corporation”? Are we a single unified self? Does a company have a “self”? Are we neurons in society? Are neurons “corporations” made of yet simpler components? Where does this leave consciousness? I will leave these questions for future posts, but if you have any thoughts on these, please share them in the comments!
I’m using corporations for the sake of this post, but any other large human organization, like a government or NGO, would work. But I think most people are more familiar with the inner life of a corporation, so it serves my purposes a bit better. I do not mean that the mind is seeking to profit maximise, or is owned by share-holders, or anything like that.
See for example, ‘Neurons learn by predicting future activity’ from the journal Nature, for more info
from ‘An Introduction to Mathematics’, p46
It’s a nice analogy, and I think one can make an argument that brain corporations do seek to maximize their profits for a brain-related version of profits. (It does perhaps break down a little in that there’s no single CEO neuron steering the “corporation”.) I’ll add that, not only is knowledge distributed across all “employees”, there is also stored knowledge unknown to any active employee. The stored history of the corporation, which would be stored in corporate documents.
I did encounter a minor speed bump with regard to the idea that every neuron “knows who to ask” just because neurons cannot communicate directly with any other neuron. OTOH, in most corporations, neither can most employees. There’s usually a hierarchy or chain of command. But I think it may point to another small speed bump in that neurons are less specialized than people in corporations are.
Overall, it seems a pretty good analogy.