A Maze of Mirrors

by Benny Mattis

I recently watched a TED talk about mirror neurons, newly discovered brain cells that "reflect" the brain activity of other people.  When a particular action is performed, a specific corresponding neural firing pattern is, unsurprisingly, consistently conjoined with the performance of that action.  There is a subset of these activated neurons, called the mirror neurons, that is also activated when someone else is seen performing the action in question.  So, if "firing pattern X" is the activity observed in my brain when I open a door, a part of that pattern will also show up when I'm watching someone else open a door.  Upon observing me performing the action, roughly the same cluster of mirror neurons will be excited in their own brain, as well.

I think a good example of how these neurons presumably work is found in competitive rowing.  Crew is one sport that cannot be taught in books; the proper movements feel unnatural at first, and must be synchronized with everyone else in the boat.  How does this happen?  There are coaches, who definitely play an important role in noticing the shortcomings of each and every team member's technique--after all, mistakes that would be unnoticeable to an uneducated observer could make a noticeable impact over the course of a six-kilometer race.  But how do they point out flaws in technique?  Words usually aren't very useful, so they set the novice rowers in a place where they can view the varsity team.  When a novice is doing something incorrectly, they point to a varsity rower and say "See the way Jim is keeping his back at an angle?  Do that."  By seeing Jim's correct technique in action, the novice learns more than they ever could from mere language or still pictures.

Is this extra learning capacity the result of mirror neurons?  That's certainly a possibility.  In fact, Vilayanur Ramachandran suggests in the TED talk that these specific cells may have enabled us to accelerate the proliferation of tool use, shelter-building skills, language, and other technical knowledge for the last few hundred thousand years.   The idea is basically that mirror neurons turned us into evolutionary X-Men, building our civilization through technological (in the broadest sense of the word) leaps and bounds rather than slow hereditary adaptations.  If this is true, the ability to imitate others is a pillar of our modern industrial civilization.

Enter Isak Gerson.  In January of 2012, the then 19-year-old Swedish student succeeded in gaining official recognition from the Swedish government for the Missionary Church of Kopimism, a "religion" built around the practice of file-sharing.  The principles of Kopimism are posted on the Church's website:

-All knowledge to all

-The search for knowledge is sacred

-The circulation of knowledge is sacred

-The act of copying is sacred

In an interview with New Scientist, Gerson discloses that the Kopimists "worship the value of information by copying it."  Questioned about a Kopimist belief in the afterlife, Gerson responded: "Information doesn't really have a life, but I guess it can be forgotten, but as long as it is copied it won't be."

The apolitical aspects of Kopimism may seem like ad-hoc justifications for an organized illegal file-sharing culture, but I actually find in them a reflection of my own worldview.  My mother, for example, often says that you should be kind to others, follow the golden rule, etc. because others may end up imitating you, beginning a chain reaction of negativity.  Everyone is copying everyone else, and from this arises a sort of crude community-wide karmic reaction to nastiness.  To me, at least, this seems like one of the best ways to convince a hedonist to follow the golden rule.  A Kopimist basis for morality, perhaps?

Even eternal life is granted in some way through the communication of thoughts between people--as V proclaims in V for Vendetta (Warner Bros., 2005), "Ideas are bulletproof."  People looking for immortality usually don't care much about the fact that their matter and energy can't be destroyed--they want their phenomenal experience, what it is like to be them, to escape that very embodiment of mass and energy, even when it can no longer pump oxygen to the brain.  But what is language but the very transfer of this mental content?  Singularitarians like Ray Kurzweil want us to upload our souls into computers for eternal life, but the extent to which language actually communicates ideas is the extent to which we've already achieved this futuristic goal.  Who can listen to a particularly moving love song without feeling what it was like for the songwriter?  How can we even speak of "love" without communicating a complex mixture of feelings to the listener?  Of course, language isn't perfect, and this truth isn't likely to sate Kurzweil's appetite for immortality.  But there is more to earthly immortality than just a conscious memory of the dead; their habits and ideas, uploaded and preserved through spoken language and mirror neurons, could very well prolong the survival of what it was like to be them.

One must always be careful when mixing science with religion, and I suspect all this talk about immortality and karma sounds like a desperate pseudoscientific attempt at the resuscitation of dead gods.  Clearly, these things aren't the same as supernatural immortality or karma as found in popular Christianity or Buddhism, but they are facts about reality that do have similar consequences as--and grounds for analogy with--those religious concepts.  The importance of mirror neurons is that they show how these duplications of phenomenal information might transcend, and likely precede, the requirements of shared language or even shared species.