Beyond Neurosciences. Interview with José Luis Díaz Gómez

SPIRIT AND MATTER
Carlos Maza: I’d like to start the conversation, José Luis, by asking you to tell us about this book that has just been published, El enredo mente~cuerpo, and about the scientific dissemination trajectory behind it that you have been doing in the press.
José Luis Díaz Gómez: The book has a long history that I’ll try to summarize. The relationship between mind and body is the topic of my professional life, to put it in a few words. It began while studying Medicine; I still remember the Neuroanatomy course (well, it was really an Anatomy course) in the first year of the career, in 1960, in a brand-new University City, by doctor Dionisio Nieto, my main teacher and tutor. He was a psychiatrist and neurobiologist, part of the Spanish exile, and a disciple of Santiago Ramón y Cajal (who is internationally considered the father of Contemporary Neuroscience [see box on p. 226, Nobel Prizes]).

He told us about the brain, he showed us what it consists of, what its evolution has been and, above all, about the mystery of how this biological organ, made up of neurons and other cells, engenders our mental life: our consciousness, our feelings, our beliefs, emotions, and all the courtship of the mind. I remember leaving the class with the sensation that it was my destiny to work on that subject.

So, I worked with several Neurosciences, I started in Neurophysiology, Neurochemistry, and the hard sciences of the nervous system. I went to the US, to Boston, to do very basic work on the effects of psychotropic drugs on neurotransmission, particularly on the neurotransmitter called serotonin. But I soon felt that I needed to consider other aspects: in addition to the biological, cellular, and neurochemical aspects of the brain, I also had to look at the behavior aspect, above all, and so I entered the world of behavior.

I was interested in ethology; I worked with groups of primates and on behavior for a long time, trying to correlate one thing with the other, and then I got into trouble, because they are very different sciences. Behavioral sciences have a different trajectory; there’s even who believes that social sciences are, at the end of the day, behavioral sciences. And I, trained as a neurobiologist, began to stumble in this matter. And I also began to turn to philosophy; I felt that it was necessary to have a theoretical foundation to address this, and in the next phase of my career, I was convinced that I had to “take the bull by the horns;” I mean that I realized that the problem of consciousness was the very central problem of the matter.

In 1993 I spent a sabbatical in Tucson, US, where an interdisciplinary study group on consciousness was being formed. I felt comfortable there because there were neurobiologists; behavior was being seriously addressed, there were also philosophers of the mind, and, in addition, a first congress called Towards a Science of Consciousness was organized, which brought together all the relevant disciplines. It was, I think, a radical shift in which consciousness went from being a vague subjective topic, strange and difficult to approach, to a problem of scientific elucidation at all levels, something very important. I presented papers in the first editions (the congress is still held every two years until today). These were wide open spaces that some considered too much because “borderline theories of consciousness” were admitted: there were people doing meditation (at that time it was not orthodox, now there is a whole neurobiology of meditation).

Then I came back to Mexico and dedicated a lot of time to these topics, even though I continued to do empirical research, especially with established colleagues. I did some neurobiology of music, I got a little into Neuro-aesthetics which is also a very important part of all this. But, above all, I began to try to systematize the mind~body problem through its historical development. From the most remote times, the earliest civilizations conceive of a relationship between spirit and matter, between the supernatural and the natural.

I started then to collaborate with a digital newspaper and every week I wrote a short chapter, in a more or less chronological order, on the development of the mind~body problem from ancient times to Renaissance; from Renaissance to Enlightenment; the 19^th century, and the 20^th century in two parts: before 1950, when cognitive science and fundamental subjects were born, which seems to me to have been a true scientific revolution that has not yet been sufficiently characterized. In those years, in the mid-20^th century, three important interdisciplinary theories were born: systems theory, information theory, and cybernetics. These three scientific paradigms that do not belong to any particular science and have an very wide scope, led me to approach the second part of the 20^th century starting with their appearing, as the last phase of the mind~body problem. 

I brought this work together in a very long manuscript that I initially published with Herder publishing house, where I had already published several books on dreams, on the cosmos (on the idea of cognitive cosmology, the reaction of the human being or the human mind to the astronomical cosmos, or simply to the starry sky). 
The original book is available in a digital version, but I wanted a physical one [see box]; I belong to a generation that, if we don’t see the paper, we feel that the book doesn’t exist.

The Mexican Psychiatric Association (APM) decided to publish it. It was a complex editorial process during which the APM’s editor sadly died, but the book was finally published and I presented it at the Guadalajara International Book Fair 2024.


It is a central work because it represents my fundamental interest. I review there the conceptions on this matter, the mind~body relationship, which is controversial, and is not resolved (otherwise it would not be a problem). It is an issue that gives rise to very, let’s say, heated and, sometimes, acrimonious controversies between the different positions.

There are materialists, for example, with a strong neuroscience or neurophysiology basis, and there are people who, on the contrary, are dualists and consider undeniable that there is a spiritual world, a world of the mind that is not particularly that of neurons but is related to them. Dualists have to explain how both sectors, mind and body, contact and influence each other. And there are idealists even today, including some physicists. It is thought that physicists are the toughest materialists, but it turns out that they are not; some of the quantum physicists of 1920s, of the Copenhagen school, were idealists considering the existence of only the mental or spiritual realm.

I have my own position: what seems fundamental to me is to express every theory as best as possible, with the utmost respect for their postulates, their positions, and trying to establish a critical position before their difficulties. My own position has difficulties, it is not resolved.

SOMETHING
CM: You mention alternatively consciousness and mind. Is there a difference between these two concepts?
JLDG: I think so. It is a semantic difference about how mind and consciousness have been regarded throughout the ages. I believe that the clearest distinction was established by William James, one of the great pioneers of the late 19th and early 20^th centuries, who in his book The Principles of Psychology makes very clear definitions of what we consider to be mind: the set of capacities that human beings have related to sensation,  perception, emotion, thought, beliefs, will. It’s a very broad concept that encompasses all these functions—James devotes a chapter to each. Consciousness is the capacity to be aware of these elements, to be present; it is a basic ability to feel, to feel one’s own body, one’s own mind, and to be living, having what we call experiences.

So, consciousness would be a facet, a particular mental capacity of great magnitude because it can encompass any of these aspects of the mind, but in the present tense. Its main characteristic is subjectivity; the fact that consciousness is something individual, personal; something we feel, that no one can share except through communication. No one can directly witness or feel the consciousness of others: we call this subjectivity, and it is one of the biggest problems of the matter for science, especially for and positivism. In the 19^th century, the need to be objective was established for science, but how can we be objective about the subjective?

Another very important characteristic of consciousness is the point of view. Consciousness is always situated in a particular time and place where one refers to one’s own body, that is, one’s own eyes and senses. Vision, the ability of seeing, is a good condition for discussing consciousness: one always sees with one’s own eyes; the point of view is that of one’s head, that of one’s eyes, from where the world is seen.

But one thing is the function, the ability to see, and another is what is seen, the content, which is also part of the consciousness. I call it the Something, something with a capital S, because with any of these faculties, when you have a sensation, you have a feeling of something; you perceive something, you get excited about something, you want something, you think about something. That something is the content of mental acts and is fundamental in the characterization of the mind and consciousness phenomenon.

NO ONE CAN DIRECTLY WITNESS OR FEEL THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF OTHERS: WE CALL THIS SUBJECTIVITY

THE PARAMECIUM’S CONSCIOUSNESS 
CM: This leads us to reflect on whether consciousness, as you describe it, as a mental faculty, is characteristic exclusively of human beings, or if there is some form of consciousness in other living beings on the planet.
JLDG: There is controversy here too. My position, if I’m not a panpsychic, meaning that everything has a mind (I don’t believe that sticks and stones have a mind or consciousness), I do believe that all living beings have a particular form of consciousness that is very much related—there are a couple of indexes—with their behavior and with their nervous system. When I teach on the evolution of consciousness, I start with the paramecium, a single-celled being that has what I call sentido (in Spanish, sentido has a wider meaning than the English “sense”, evoking also “orientation” and “direction”), which is a very nice word, because not only describes feeling but also the direction of behavior towards a goal. A paramecium has this sentido, it wanders or, rather, swims in its liquid medium and has two behaviors with sentido: either it goes towards a gradient of nutrients or it goes against a gradient of toxins. In other words, it already has two sentidos. It is extraordinarily simple. I believe that its consciousness, the paramecian consciousness, if it exists (I bet it does), is that small, it has only two possibilities, to go or to flee. To me, behavior is a very important indirect index of consciousness.

Obviously, as the evolution of species progresses, behaviors become ever more complex, until they reach those that deal with one’s own being, one’s own body. We call this self-consciousness, the consciousness of oneself. In the book La neurofilosofía del yo [Neurophylosophy of the Self], about self-consciousness, which is a particular form of consciousness, I addressed the subject. It is very important to distinguish basic consciousness, the awareness of something, of the world, of the environment, which all living beings have in one way or another, from the consciousness that is aware of itself. Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit paleontologist, used to say “The dog knows, but it does not know that it knows.” Animals are clearly aware of the world; they have perceptual and action capacities, but they are probably not conscious in the sense of thinking about themselves, but they are surely aware of their bodies.

Nevertheless, in recent times this same notion has seemed problematic to me because there is a tendency in the cognitive science of consciousness to think that self-consciousness is not the apex of consciousness, as in human beings, who have language and can refer to themselves, but that it is an absolutely basic characteristic, the most basic of all: the most elementary thing is to have a notion of oneself, a basic notion, which in philosophy of mind is called minimal consciousness.

For there to be consciousness of all kinds, the creature must necessarily have a consciousness of itself. I think it is a very interesting and very important point to be elucidated. In human beings it occurs like this: I do not have to elaborate thoughts or introspection to realize that I am thinking or feeling, in a kind of split personality; on the contrary, without thinking about it, I have a basic sensation of being me, of being in my body. This is a fundamental consciousness, the minimum consciousness.

Self-consciousness also has, then, an evolution that goes from very primitive beings to us who have language to be able to talk about our own states. We do not only have thoughts in the form of internal language, but we can also observe them, e.g. we have thoughts about thought, we think about thinking. This kind of personality splitting depends a lot on linguistic capacity and, in that sense, it would be fundamentally human.

THERE’S WHERE MORAL CONSCIENCE IS BORN: THE MOMENT I GRANT OR ATTRIBUTE FEELINGS, THOUGHTS, AND EMOTIONS TO THE OTHER, I HAVE TO TAKE CARE OF THEM, BECAUSE THEY ARE LIKE ME

CM: Would you say that this vision of consciousness per se, self-consciousness, could have a correlation with what Hegelian philosophy proposed in terms of plain consciousness, self-consciousness, consciousness-for-itself, which Marx later adopted to speak of class consciousness? Is there a relationship with the research you describe?
JLDG: Yes, there is. Who worked this very well and, curiously, is not so well known for it, but for other things, was Jean-Paul Sartre. In an early work on the self, he makes a very clear and very interesting distinction between the subjective self, the one we are talking about, the feeling of “myself,” this implicit, tacit awareness that anyone has of being who they are, and the more objective self. The first self is the subjective, inaccessible, closed self. The other is treatable. In La neurofilosofía del yo, I propose 10 functions of this self, including minimal consciousness, introspection, agency, will, all the capacities that together form my self-consciousness.

Sometimes it’s more introspective, sometimes it’s more active, when I deliberately act on the world or direct my attention to something; these are all capacities of self-awareness. I believe that animals have it to some degree; they have no language, that is clear, they do not refer to themselves as such; that is a higher capacity for self-awareness.

In the last analysis, the highest of all, I believe is moral conscience. If there is no otherness, if there are no others who are like me, to whom I attribute what I have (thoughts, feelings, will, and so on), if there are no others that I see who are like me, there is no me either. It is a necessary relationship between self-consciousness and what I call heteroconsciousness, the consciousness of others. There’s where moral conscience is born: the moment I grant or attribute feelings, thoughts, and emotions to the other, I have to take care of them, because they are like me. Ethics appear here.

AGGRESSION AND VIOLENCE
CM: Regarding this birth of the moral perspective, of empathy towards the rest of the people, where would evil be? How do we explain evil from that point of view?
JLDG: Probably, on this, a possible answer has to do with the evolution of hominids, with a very broad biological root. We must distinguish two very interesting things: aggression and violence. What is the difference between them? Aggression appears in many animal species. It was systematically studied by Konrad Lorenz, founder of modern Ethology; Nobel Prize for it in 1973. He has a great book, On Aggression, the Pretended Evil. It’s funny how the word “evil,” the one you just asked me about, appears here. Aggression is not evil in animal behavior; it is a resource present in almost all animals that have a social life. It is a resource for survival. Attacking to survive, to defend oneself, to establish social hierarchies—among primates and in many other species. It is the basis of social arrangement. But what is the difference, then, with violence? How does this capacity to injure, to produce or threaten to produce injury or pain in another (which is the operative definition of aggression), become violence? The difference is in the word itself: violence implies transgression, violating laws or customs. It is an aggression that breaks certain limits.

For example, in animals that confront each other, having agonistic behavior, there is one that suddenly submits, throws itself on its back as dogs do. At that point, submitting behavior works as an inhibiting factor for the other animal’s aggression. The moment one of them gives up, it no longer makes sense to continue attacking. The “winning” animal may continue to threaten, but will no longer injure the other one.

What happens, instead, when an opponent who has given up continues to be attacked? That is violence, it is breaking with an unspoken norm. Until recently, it was assumed that with this distinction, so strong, violence would be exclusively human: it breaks legal or moral norms and animals have no law or morals. This idea has also been overcome. There is a whole trend in contemporary Ethology about animal morality: support behaviors for the helpless, defense behaviors, repression behaviors of those who violate certain norms, and so on.

The evidence that somehow put an end to this idea that was apparently so clear, that violence transgresses norms and is therefore fundamentally human, was proportionated by Jane Goodall, the famous scientist of chimpanzees who worked for decades observing chimpanzees in several locations in Africa. They looked like Rousseau’s good savages, with a relaxed life based on looking for food, copulating, and raising their offspring. There was aggression, but it was clearly inhibited by submission. Suddenly, without knowing how, when, or why, a war broke out in a troop of chimpanzees that broke all the observed rules. The animals attacked each other in groups; aggression did not subside with submission. There were injuries as strong as mutilations; there was rape and cannibalism. And again, suddenly, just as it had begun, the war ended, and the groups returned to their usual atmosphere. There was clearly violence there.

Almost everything human—I am a fervent believer in this—has evolutionary background. It is questionable that only human beings have self-awareness. Chimpanzees, if you put a mark on their forehead and place them in front of a mirror, they don’t touch the mirror, they touch the mark on their forehead. This is known as the mark or the mirror test, and it is evidence of self-awareness, according to Gallup, the psychologist who designed it in the 1970s.

In short, is there is anything particularly human? Maybe symbolism, and that would have to be seen. Language is symbolic, and animals, as far as we know, don’t have symbolic language, although there are some hints. For example, dolphins, orcas, and whales, aquatic mammals totally different to humans in their physiognomy, have interesting behaviors, such as the songs of humpback whales. What is the meaning of such complex vocal behavior? It is thought that it is probably communication, but what do they communicate? There is a series of investigations into the very remarkable behavior of these whales. They eat mainly krill, huge krill banks that are not easy to catch. You may think that the whale goes with its open mouth catching what it can from these banks, but that would not be enough for it to nourish itself. What they do is that, when they find a krill bank (they usually travel in groups), they dive to a huge depth and from there, with the krill on top, they begin to circle the bank releasing bubbles that surround it as in a net, and then they swim up, coordinated, until they reach the surface, and they all open their jaws and eat, each, half a ton of krill. This behavior implies coordination, a language of coordinated hunting. It also implies a very elaborate cognition; not only the fact of knowing that krill banks work in a certain way, but also of how it is possible to enclose them, to lock them in the bubble cage. They are extraordinarily complex social and learning behaviors.

CM: Do you think it will be possible at some point that neuroscience, cognitive sciences, will be able to solve behavioral problems by moving a screw in the brain? Are we going to be able to cure depression, for example, with a neural adjustment?
JLDG: Something like this is already happening, which makes us think about those possibilities that are a bit of science fiction. When I began to study, I worked with maestro Nieto in “La Castañeda;” I wanted to be a psychiatrist. The teacher took me to the lab and made me a neuroscientist. I respect psychiatrists very much, I have psychiatrist friends, and I was in the Psychiatry Department at Harvard, in Boston, but I would not have been a good psychiatrist.

At that time, the 1960s, the possibilities of intervention by the psychiatrist in serious conditions, such as depression with suicidal risk or schizophrenia, extraordinary behavioral alterations, was really very limited. The fundamental drugs, antipsychotics and antidepressants, had already been discovered—and doctor Nieto was crucial for them to enter Mexico, which made a very big difference. Nowadays they are a bit stigmatized because they have been misused, and not by specialists. Many non-specialized doctors prescribe psychiatric drugs, which are tools to modify a mental state. Before their appearance in 1952, hard treatments, such as electroshocks, had been established and are still used today because there are extreme situations of depressive patients who do not get ahead with drugs or psychotherapy, and with one or more sessions of electroshocks that are applied in a highly controlled way, they may find a result; these therapies can take a person out of a suicide risk. It’s not ideal, of course, but it’s close to the “screw” you mention. It is a careful intervention, electroshocks that produce seizures are no longer applied, but directed electrical stimuli in such a way that the psychiatrist can stimulate a particular area deep in the brain.

You used a word too harsh, to “heal”. I think that healing may be to far, but therapies do help. And I think that all these tools: drugs, electrical stimulation, and others that neuroscience can develop—neuromodulation implants, brain-computer interfaces—help a lot, not only in psychiatric diseases, but also in neurological diseases. These and other advances are vanishing the limit, which was previously very well established, between the neurological and the psychiatric realms. Today there are specialists, neuropsychiatrists, who study both things, and that is very important because there are many diseases that are both, such as Alzheimer’s, a clearly neurological disease—a brain injury that upsets the mental faculties.

I am in favor of producing tools of all kinds, increasingly useful to help in the treatment of mental illnesses, but with the caveat that these, even drugs, should be used by experts, by people who know what they are doing. A specialist is required to know when, how and why to administer a certain solution, to evaluate the opportunity, and to know when to discontinue. Drugs are useful, but they are not curative, they are corrective, palliative.

AN ARTIFICIAL CONSCIOUSNESS?
CM: Finally, is artificial intelligence a human evolution result?
JLDG: Yes, I think so. This is one of the beautiful things about being able to do some history, one suddenly finds, for example, the work that gave rise to artificial intelligence and cognitive science. It was a work published by Alan Turing, the English mathematician (there is a good film about him, The Imitation Game, by Morten Tyldum, 2014), in 1950, in the journal Mind, where he provides the conceptual bases of modern computing: the idea that, with a binary code, yes or no, and a machine, the Turing machine, that was just a mental machine running a yes and no tape, it could generate a complicated language, capable of transmitting algorithms, of programming. It came from a mathematical genius, but from a consideration of what human knowledge is and how it can be understood or modeled in an artificial way.

At the time, the phrase “artificial intelligence” seemed like a contradiction in terms. Turing was responsible for producing a machine that was intelligent in the sense that it could imitate forms or capabilities of human intelligence such as problem solving. But the discussion that particularly interests me is whether a machine that does that is conscious or not. I don’t think so, but that is another discussion.

CM: It made me think of some of the articles in this issue of UNAM Internacional that address the subject of protein transmission among neurons and how some inhibit, and others activate responses. Does it mean that the brain also works with a binary code?
JLDG: The idea of the computational model of the mind arose shortly after Turing, based on his work, in the 1960s. It was the model of the original cognitive science, the computational model of the mind. The mind would be like a computer, but a computer, nonetheless, working binarily on a system of symbols. Either the brain is a wet computer, or the computer is an electronic brain: I think that is an oversimplification. The thing is much more complicated, the neuron not only transmits or does not transmit an action potential, all or nothing, but there are qualitatively different potentials, inhibitory or facilitating synaptic potentials. They gave the Nobel Prize to Eccles for that finding. By the way, Eccles was a Cartesian dualist, a Christian, a Nobel laureate in neuroscience who was a dualist, who believed that there is a soul, as if to show that not all neuroscientists are hard materialists.

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