Louisville Process Theology Network

On Neuroscience and Personhood

MIT neuroscientist Sebastian Seung believes the essence of personhood is not so much in our genetic codes as in the arrangement of the 100 billion neurons in our brains. “Genes alone cannot explain how your brain got to be the way it is,” he writes.

“As you lay nestled in your mother’s womb, you already possessed your genome but not yet the memory of your first kiss.” Memories and thoughts, he explains, cause changes in your brain. These changes are no pre-ordained by your DNA.

So, your behavior evolves during your lifetime even though the content of your genome is fixed.

Seung would like to make a detailed map of the neural connections in the human brain. Although, he readily admits that would be a massive undertaking not possible in our lifetimes. For now, Seung’s lab is developing software intended to identify neural pathways.

Seung also admits that maps of our neural pathway would still not constitute the whole picture. For one thing, there appear to be hundreds of types of neurons with different behaviors. A map would only help us find them.

In Seung’s view, our brain is not so much a tangled forest as tropical jungle, rich in diversity.

He is apparently not afraid to speculate beyond what scientists know today. Could the neural pathways of an aging brain be frozen in nitrogen and revived in the future, he wonders? If we can find these neural pathways and their circuitry, could that information be uploaded into a computer and live in simulation?

Closer to home, Seung thinks that a better understanding of the neural pathways might help us develop new therapies for treating connection disorders such as autism and schizophrenia.

From “Connectome: How the Brain’s Wiring Makes Us Who We Are” by Sebastian Seung.