I. Intro

The "network of pipes and switches" metaphor we have used to understand the internet in this class is also useful for understanding how brains work. At a high level of abstraction, a network of pipes and switches is a system where there are two basic categories of things, things that receive, process, and transmit information ("switches"), and things that serves a conduits along which information can flow ("pipes").

To apply a consilient approach, the network model is useful for thinking about brains on two levels, personal psychology and social sociology.

II. Personal Psychology

On the level of personal psychology, to use a two-category model to describe something as complex as the brain may seem at first to be a gross oversimplification. But theoretical models can be useful for reasons other than descriptive accuracy. In fact, parsimony, the quality of having as little detail as possible, is a positive virtue for a model.

However, the primary benefit of this model is that it highlights the importance of multiple networked agencies within what we often understand as a unitary self. Our conscious mind, the stream of phenomena we experience, is at any moment, just one switch connected by pipes to many unconscious switches doing important receiving, processing, and transmitting work.

Understanding that our subjective experience is shaped decisively by information-processing and transmitting units within us the operation of which we do not perceive helps us think in productive ways. We realize that our views are shaped by unconscious biases, and that our thinking can influenced by our context. We can try to take corrective measures. Realizing that we have only partial agency helps make the smartest, best use of that agency.

Another beneficial valence of the network metaphor, which reinforces that sense of agency, is its presumption of regularity. Computer networks are incredibly complex, but we operate with the assumption that there are knowable regularities to computer networks. We can use knowledge of those regularities to engineer them.

Often in our culture the subconscious is depicted as an irrational "Wild West" (see Heart of Darkness, Apocalypse Now, etc). It contributes to a sense of empowerment and agency, however, if we can think of it as subject to knowable regularities.

If the brain is a network, we might be puzzled by the activity of its "invisible switches," but we keep in mind that with systematic observation, we can understand something of how they work and try to improve system performance (however defined).

These knowable regularities might be thought of as emerging from the interaction of genes and experience (in the form of memories encoded in the brain). We might call that the source code of a person. If, in Larry Lessig's metaphor, software code does some of the work of law, this psychological source code also does some of the work of law. Genes may be fixed, but memories can be added to or reinterpreted, further reinforcing a sense of agency.

II. Social Psychology

Moving up a level of analysis, the network metaphor is also generative of useful insights when applied to social psychology. The principle of knowable regularities is also useful when thinking about social phenomena. This may seem trivial, but the concept of "social engineering" has received bad press in recent decades in the United States. However, optimizing a complex system is difficult, but not impossible.

More importantly, one quality of a using a network metaphor to look out at the social world is that it highlights the critical importance of information flows.

the role of information. what do we see when we look out at the social world? mackaye quote.

Memes. tailored information clusters. can change the psychological source code of many people. arab spring: exchanging info changed people from feeling isolated. information is key. bridges social psychology and personal psychology.

=