One phrase that occasionally pops up when speaking of the goal of computational neuroscience is “reverse engineering the brain”. This is quite an interesting phrase from an epistemological point of view. The analogy is to see the brain as an engineered device, the “engineer” being evolution, of which we do not possess the design plans. We are supposed to understand it by opening it, and trying to guess what mechanisms are at play.

What is interesting is that observing and trying to understand the mechanisms is basically what science is about, not only neuroscience, so there must be something else in this analogy. For example, we would not describe the goal of astronomy as reverse engineering the planets. What is implied in the phrase is the notion that there is a plan, and that this plan is meant to achieve a function. It is a reference to the teleonomic nature of life in general, and of the nervous system in particular: the brain is not just a soup of neurons, these neurons coordinate their action so as to achieve some function (to survive, to reproduce, etc).

So the analogy is meaningful from this point of view, but as any analogy it has its limits. Is there no difference between a living being and an engineered artifact? This question points at what is life, which is a very broad question, but here I will just focus on two differences that I think are relevant for the present matter.

There is one very important specificity that was well explained by the philosopher Humberto Maturana (“The Organization of the living”, 1974). Engineered things have a structure that is designed so as to fulfill some function, that is, they are made of specific components that have to be arranged in a specific way, according to a plan. So all you need to understand is the structure, and its relation with the function. But as Maturana pointed out, living things have a structure (the body, the wiring of neurons, etc) but they also have an organization that produces that structure. The organization is a set of processes that produce the structure, which is itself responsible for the organization. But what defines the living being is its organization, not its structure, which can change. In the case of the nervous system, the wiring between neurons changes dramatically in the course of life, or even in the course of one hour, and the living being remains the same. The function of the organization is to maintain the conditions for its existence, and since it exists in a body interacting with an external environment, it is in fact necessary that the structure changes so as to maintain the organization. This is what is usually termed “plasticity” or “learning”. Therefore living things are defined by their organization, while engineered things are defined by their structure.

This is one aspect in which the engineering analogy is weak, because it misses this important distinction. Another one is that an engineered thing is made by an engineer, that is, by someone external to the object. Therefore the function is defined with respect to an external point of view. The plan would typically include elements that are defined in terms of physics, concepts that can only be grasped and measured by some external observer with appropriate tools. But a living organism only has its own senses and ways of interacting with the environment to make sense of the world. This is true of the nervous system as a whole, but also of individual cells: a cell has ways of interacting with other cells and possibly with the outside world, but it does not have a global picture of the organism. For example, an engineer plan would specify where each component should go, e.g. with Euclidian coordinates. But this is not how development can work in a living thing. Instead, the plan should come in the form of mechanisms that specify not “where” a thing is, but rather “how to get there”, or perhaps even when a component should transform into a new component – specific ways of interacting that end up in the desired result.

Therefore the nature of the “plan” is really quite different from the plan of an engineer. To make my point, I will draw an analogy with philosophy of knowledge. A plan is a form of knowledge, or at least it includes some knowledge. For example, if the plan includes the statement “part A should be placed at such coordinates”, then there is an implicit knowledge on part of the organism that executes the plan about Euclidian geometry. For an engineer, knowledge comes from physics, and is based on the use of specific tools to measure things in the world. But for a cell, knowledge about the world comes just from the interaction with the world: different ways to sense it (e.g. incoming spikes for a neuron), different ways to act on it (e.g. producing a spike, releasing some molecules in the extracellular medium). A plan can be specified in terms of physics if it is to be executed by an engineer, but it cannot be specified in these terms if it is to be executed by a cell: instead, it would be specified in terms of mechanisms that make sense given the ways the cell can interact with the world. Implicit knowledge about the world that is included in an engineer plan is what I could call “metaphysical knowledge”, in relationship with the corresponding notion in philosophy of science.

Science is made of universal statements, such as the law of gravitation. But not all statements are scientific, for example “there is a God”. In philosophy of science, Karl Popper proposed that a scientific statement is one that can potentially be falsified by an observation, whereas a metaphysical statement is a statement that cannot be falsified. For example, the statement “all penguins are black” is scientific, because I could imagine that one day I see a white penguin. On the other hand, the statement “there is a God” is metaphysical, because there is no way I can check. Closer to the matter of this text, the statement “the world is actually five-dimensional but we live in a three-dimensional subspace” is also metaphysical because independently of whether it is true or not, we have no way to confirm it or to falsify it given the way we interact with the world.

So what I call “metaphysical knowledge” in an engineer plan is knowledge that cannot be corroborated or falsified by the organism that executes the plan, given its senses and possibilities for action. For example, consider the following statement: neurons in the lateral geniculate nucleus project to the occipital region of the brain. This includes metaphysical knowledge about where that region is, which is specified from the point of view of an external observer. This cannot be a biological plan. Instead, a biological plan would rather have to specify what kind of interaction a growing axon should have with its environment in order to end up in the desired region.

In summary, although the phrase “reverse engineering” acknowledges the fact that, contrary to physical things of nature such as planets, living things have a function, it misses several important specificities of life. One is that living things are defined by their organization, rather than by the changing structure that the organization produces, while engineered things are defined by their structure. Another one is that the “plan”, which defines that organization, is of a very different nature than the plan made by and for an engineer, because in the latter case the function and the design are conceived from an external point of view, which generally includes “metaphysical knowledge”, i.e., knowledge that cannot be grasped from the perspective of the organism.