“The brain must be used according to its intended purpose”

Continued from the previous issue.

L.I.: “Still, are there any other forms of fighting for a more intellectual space? We are a special case. Ukraine is reviving within the borders in which it did not exist as an independent state for a long time. So we must learn – extramurally – the lessons of our enormous, complex, and interesting history. We must transform our institutions. We must occupy a worthy place in the competitive world. Are scientists active enough as citizens today? In the Soviet era scientists were freethinkers: generations of dissidents were raised on the basis of the views of Prof. Kapitsa and many other people.”

O.K.: “Sakharov!”

L.I.: “Did you know him?”

O.K.: “No.”

L.I.: “Were there dissident tendencies in the Ukrainian academe at the time? Who did they rest on? Everybody knew, for example, Antonov, his incredible character, straightforwardness, and ability to openly say the truth and not to sign what others did. Who else did active citizenship rest on, in what condition is it now?”

O.K.: “Active citizenship existed then in two strata: it was expressed in the dissident movement and was present among the public. You know, these are very difficult questions which require decisions on the level of collective reason. Vernadsky spoke about the biosphere and de Chardin about the noosphere. Listening to these teachers, I came to the conclusion that we are on the way to the formation of a new language. For the current language of word sequence will prove to be too poor for the next forms of human association and communication. It is clear even now that our brain is such a complex system that a professor will not be able to graphically explain to his student how this system works – in such details that may help understand how memory or the learning mechanism works. Therefore, we need a collective brain whose links will be closer than those formed by language alone. I do not know what kind of links there will be. But I am absolutely convinced that the Metalanguage is our future.

“This is why the ideas you are speaking about were of a fragmentary nature in society. Every element was at the same time a part of evil and a part of good. I will not raise the question why our parliament failed to vote for honoring the memory of Holodomor victims, which is undoubtedly a shame. But I am not condemning them. If they could do so, this means they feel no pain. And if they feel no pain, we do not need to sympathize with them. For sympathy is an innate and one of the fundamental human features. We were created to be able to sympathize.”

L.I.: “And do the ‘sympathetically disabled’ exist?”

O.K.: “I will answer you with a Nietzsche aphorism: ‘You can pity a sick man, a captive, and a beggar – but you cannot pity a personality.’ We are created in such a way that we cannot but sympathize. This has been proved with many physiological experiments. For example, an individual is shown somebody being pricked with a needle. The encephalogram of the man under experiment shows the activity of the same brain segments that are responsible for the pricked muscles of the man he was looking at. On the other hand, culture determines which emotions will go out of sympathy. Fatal fights of gladiators were popular in Ancient Rome. Was there any sympathy? For, in physiological terms, those people were the same as we are, but they were born in different culture and a different world entered their eyes in childhood. For this reason, their sympathy for gladiators aroused delight in them. We can speak here about the importance of the emerging Christianity at the time.”

L.I.: “But did it matter that in the Soviet era Christianity receded from certain territories?”

O.K.: “I have just begun to read a book which I am afraid to read on. It is Red Apocalypse by Dmytro Hoichenko. I have already read about 40 pages which concern the problem we are speaking about. The book’s hero, a boy who grew up in a religious family until his teens, watches the advent of communist ideas and the desecration and suppression of his ideals. He will end his life in a Jesuit monastery. In other words, communism fell on religiousness and allowed man to do evil. But his true – religious – ego understood deep in his heart what is the truth and what is evil. A Jew I know once said: ‘To put up a monument to Stalin in Ukraine is the same as to Hitler in Jerusalem.’”

MAN LIVES NOT ONLY THE LIFE OF HIS CONSCIOUS EGO, BUT ALSO THE MANY LIVES WHICH HE PARTIALLY TRANSFERS TO HIS CHILDREN

L.I.: “Who do you think will win – man or artificial intelligence?”

O.K.: “The idea of artificial intelligence emerged at the same time when computers appeared.

“The first ever computer was not made in Kyiv – our city saw the first computer on the European continent.

“Alan Turing can be considered the inventor of the computer. That was an absolutely fantastic brain and an extremely tragic figure. He said: ‘people will believe that artificial intelligence has been created when the individual who speaks to a computer fails to understand that he is speaking to a computer.’ This has not yet happened, but I think it will occur. The computer is already able to outplay our chess champions. Likewise, the computer may pretend to be human. But this does not mean at all that it will really become human because man is a biological creature. How can you vest your computer with, say, sexual sensation?”

M.K.: “Is this an advantage or a weakness?”

O.K.: “From whose viewpoint? We can only speak about advantages and weaknesses when it is about a game. Who will win and who will lose?”

L.I.: “They will outdo us because they have no feelings.”

O.K.: “They will need a motivation. And it is man who must install it.”

L.I.: “Somebody may want to install the motivation of victory – for example, to take revenge on his boss.”

O.K.: “These scenarios are very good for a science fiction novel. But still they might as well happen.”

L.I.: “Many science fiction plots, which were written very long ago, then came true…”

O.K.: “Practically all of them.”

L.I.: “Sci-fi writers gave free rein to their imagination – all this circulated freely and, therefore, occurred. But we in fact do not know our potential. Speaking of the future, is there any evolution underway of some other species that would like to develop in a human way? And one more opinion about our consciousness and reason. Many wise people used to reach a certain threshold of knowledge and stop, saying: ‘we know for sure that this is science, and we don’t know what is further on.’ These boundaries of our knowledge and consciousness are always intriguing us.”

O.K.: “What do we know about consciousness? Firstly, there is no perfect definition of what consciousness is. If we open the Internet, we will see hundreds of definitions, but scientists say none of them will do.

“Francis Crick, a prominent 20th-century scientist who studied consciousness, said: ‘For now, it is better to avoid a precise definition of consciousness because of the dangers of premature definition.’ But we, neurophysiologists, know quite a lot about the brain. In the second half of the 20th century, we deciphered all the physical and chemical processes in our brain. We know the mechanisms. The brain is an interaction between molecules and electric signals. As for consciousness, everybody knows that he or she has it, although they cannot say what it is. We perceive life as if we were watching a movie. We can hear, see, and, what is more, smell. This sensation – being able to smell – is much more important to us than we know. But all this is behind the wall. In reality, the smells of affection, love, etc., are a very important thing. All this remains subconscious to a large extent. The conclusion is that man does not live only the life of his or her conscious ego, when he can say: ‘I, Ivan Ivanov, belong to no political parties.’ A human being also lives a host of various other lives which are partially transferred to our children. And we do not know what we transfer. I was asked recently if the brain of a Ukrainian differs from that of a foreigner. Naturally, it does because the Ukrainian was shown Ukrainian reality which was embedded in him.

“Therefore, there is nothing malignant in nationalism – it is even benign as long as we do not absolutize our differences. As Freud said, fascism is the narcissism of minor differences.

“We know the mechanisms by which we can see, hear, and smell, and will know still more. US President Barack Obama will allocate money, and humankind will work to eliminate neurodegenerative diseases. What a happy opportunity for research! You know, the mechanism of a movie theater is called an easy problem of consciousness. We know how to solve it, and it will be solved. But there is another problem: who watches this movie?”

L.I.: “And who chooses the plots?”

O.K.: “They come from behind the wall. Just ponder over how you think, and you will see that you are not thinking – thoughts are coming to you.”

THERE MAY BE NOBEL PRIZE WINNERS AMONG THE UKRAINIANS, BUT NOT IN UKRAINE

M.K.: “When is Ukraine going to have its own Nobel Prize winners? What about you?”

O.K.: “I can boast of having several Nobel laureates as my friends, I would even say good friends. But my bus has gone – I failed in this. I may have had this opportunity, at least in theory, about 20 years ago.

“There may be Nobel Prize winners among the Ukrainians, but not in Ukraine. Nobody will win the prize in Ukraine due to the lack of available funding and equipment. Research has become a difficult job. Research ‘toys’ are too expensive. From this viewpoint, we stand no chances here today. I mentioned the journal Nature. If you have a publication there, you will be in chocolate, as Ukrainians say, – you can apply for good grants, etc. I have three publications in this journal, but they were done at a time when, as my English lady friend said, there were too few of us. And now it costs from a million dollars upwards (not to pay a bribe but to do research work) to place a publication in this journal. And the total annual budget of our institute is about two million dollars, while a good individual grant to a US laboratory – which means 3 to 5 people – is a million dollars.

“We are struggling with this. We managed to create a historic precedent in Ukrainian science. The State Agency for Science and Innovations accepted our proposal to set up a key laboratory. It is not our idea. It is the idea of the Chinese who have successfully established a system of these small laboratories, which gave a powerful impetus to their research. We opened one laboratory on the basis of our institute and the Institute of Molecular Biology – the two institutes had to share two million dollars over two years. This is the first time a laboratory is being monitored by a supervisory board of world-renowned scientists who decide whether or not to give money. We set a precedent, when the money of Ukrainian taxpayers is channeled into research by decision of foreign citizens – prominent scientists – rather than this country’s bureaucrats. This is a common practice all over the developed world. Although we were hindered, we managed to overcome the obstacles. But I don’t know, I am not sure if there will be any further development.”

M.S.: “As for the funding of research, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) still does not distribute finances on the basis of the priority of scientific sectors and directions. Is it necessary to reform the NAS and focus on top priorities?”

O.K.: “Is the Academy of Sciences a sacred cow? It should also develop and be reformed. But the question is whether there are conditions in society to ensure a high quality of this reform. My answer is negative. So we must guard the NAS of Ukraine precisely like a sacred cow because, in spite of all its defects, the NAS concentrates almost the entire scientific potential of this country, our educated brains. We must protect it like a sacred cow, waiting for a time when science is really and adequately in societal demand. And now innovations are not socially protected. An economist friend of mine says that as long as politics is the most profit-making occupation in society, this society will need no scientific innovations at all. I fully agree.”

L.I.: “But it is very difficult and takes too long a time to wait for the situation to change. So intellectuals should aim their efforts at society in order to reduce this distance and time. Should these anti-rules persist for another 15 years or so, we will find it very hard to restore a blooming country.”

O.K. (laughs): “I laughed in response to your words, and it was a nervous laugh. I would not like to share your pessimism.”