An avalanche of scientific evidence proves that the human psyche rebels against conscious control.

As Adrian Johnston (Johnston, 2011) argues, it is not necessary to go down into the world of quantum physics to give scientific status to the indeterminacy that is characteristic of human subjectivity. According to Johnston, a veritable avalanche of current research in genetics and neuroscience reveals that brains and human bodies are much less determined by preestablished rules than we previously thought. The biomateriality of nature establishes a relatively small number of limiting parameters for the living being. It hardly functions as something that determines all the details of life. The biologist Francisco Varela and his collaborators (Varela et al., 1991), for example, describe the ontogenetic and phylogenetic unfolding of living beings as satisfactory/sufficient processes that work only to achieve what is good enough to survive, for long enough to reproduce. Evolution doesn’t compel the production of what would be Ideal, allowing the arising of a great diversity at all levels of interaction with the environment, and may even permit the persistence of highly dysfunctional gaps in life: “The second step, then, is to analyze the evolutionary process as having a solution that is satisfactory rather than optimal: in this perspective [natural] selection functions as a broad survival filter that admits any structure that has enough integrity to persist. In this point of view, the focus of the analysis is no longer directed at the characteristic features, but rather at the patterns of organisms, via their life history. Another metaphor recently suggested for this post-Darwinian conception of the evolutionary process is evolution as bricolage, the joining of parts and elements into complex matrices, not because they fulfill some ideal project, but simply because they are possible. Here the evolutionary problem is no more like forcing a precise trajectory of the requirements of ideal aptitude; it is rather how to prune the multiplicity of viable paths that exist at any point” (Varela et al., 1991, p. 196).

The French philosopher Catherine Malabou (2008) develop the philosophical issues that arise with the discovery of neuroplasticity. For her, this discovery entails that we have to acknowledge that human brain is organized and reorganized “dialectically,” continually suffering multiple oscillations between its “malleable flexibility” and its “resistant fixity.” Catherine Malabou states that we have not yet fully assimilated the results of the revolutionary discoveries made by neurosciences in the last 50 years. In particular, we have not yet assimilated the importance of the constitutive historicity of the brain, which is implicated in the discovery of brain plasticity: “Our brain is plastic, and we do not know it. We are completely ignorant of this dynamic, this organization, and this structure. We continue to believe in the “stiffness” of a fully genetic brain” (Malabou, 2008. p. 4). For Malabou, the relatively recent discovery of brain neuroplasticity should change our conception of the brain as entirely predetermined by the laws of nature, allowing us to see the brain as something modifiable, “formable” and formative at the same time. Malabou identifies three levels in which cerebral neuroplasticity operates: (1) in the modeling of neural connections during embryonic and childhood development; (2) in the modification of the neuronal connections that occur through the plasticity of the synaptic modulation to lifelong learning; and (3) the ability to repair after some kind of injury.

In the book Le cerveau intime (Jeannerod, 2002), Marc Jeannerod argues that if a synapse belongs to a circuit often used, it tends to increase in volume, permeability, and effectiveness. On the contrary, if a synapse is poorly used it tends to become less effective. According to Jeannerod, it is a biological mechanism of individuation that makes each brain unique: “The theory of synaptic efficacy allows us to explain the gradual molding of a brain under the influence of individual experience, to the point of it is possible for us in principle to account for the individual characteristics and particularities of each brain. We are dealing here with a mechanism of individuation that makes each brain a single object, despite its adherence to a common model” (Jeannerod, p.63).

The psychoanalyst François Ansermet and the neuroscientist Pierre Magistretti also emphasize this aspect of brain plasticity as a biological indicator of the uniqueness of the brain, which is shaped by experience. In the book, A chacun son cerveau (Ansermet and Magistretti, 2004) these authors argue that the recent discoveries of neurobiology demonstrate that the plasticity of the neural network allows the inscription of the lived experience in the brain. The traces are inscribed, associated and modified throughout life through the mechanisms of brain plasticity. Plasticity would thus be the mechanism by which each brain is unique, giving place for a materiality of singularity. They note, however, that the traits left by the lived experiences can be lasting or even permanent. Plasticity, according to the authors, is not synonymous with flexibility or permanent adaptability, it also constitutes a certain determinism that gives each individual a destiny that is his own.

The cognitive scientist Stanovich (2004) describe in the book Robot’s Rebellion: Finding Meaning in the Age of Darwin, that the evolutionary processes that gave birth to humans reached such a high degree of complexity, especially neural complexity, that two interrelated results occurred: first the brain was modeled in a highly elaborated anatomical differentiation, from a plurality of constituent elements that are not synchronized with each other, often leading to intracerebral conflicts, in which different parts present incompatible functions. Secondly, these intracerebral conflicts – understood as a materialized result of the sedimentation of several distinct periods of evolutionary history in the human central nervous system – make possible something unique to humans, which Stanovich calls “rebellion” against nature, insofar that it makes us humans prone to evolve against genetic and evolutionary determinism. According to Stanovich’s perspective, the evolution shaped human beings as vehicles capable of transmitting genetic material, with incredibly elaborate and flexible intelligence, also involving a sensitive and receptive plastic brain, so that evolutionary genetic deterministic control, in our case, would have been relatively loosened to the point of producing creatures that escaped the control of genes in a completely unpredictable way. From the perspective of genes as “blind” replicators, the high complexity of the human body/brain system, is a kind of double-edged sword: while it allows replication strategies that are broader and more sophisticated than those of other living beings, the exceptional complexity of humans gives birth to biological processes that are disruptive to the natural dictates of evolution as they are transmitted by genes.

The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio (Damasio, 2010), also assumes a perspective quite similar to Stanovich’s, formulating that in man [humans,] the emergence of consciousness and the creation of culture are a radical novelty in the history of evolution, for these often offer imperfect or even “rebellious” responses, many of which go against the dictates of nature’s own laws: “If nature can be considered as indifferent, unpredictable, unpredictable, then human consciousness creates the possibility of question the ways of nature. The emergence of human consciousness is associated with evolutionary developments in the brain, behavior, and mind that ultimately lead to the creation of culture, a radical novelty in the movement of natural history. The emergence of neurons, with the emergence of the diversification of behavior and the paving of the path to the mind, is a momentary event in the great trajectory. But the appearance of the conscious brain, capable of self-reflection, is the next great moment. It is the opening of the way to a rebellious and imperfect response to the dictates of a careless nature” (Damasio, 2010, p.287).

As Adrian Johnston argues, the biological sciences need to be able to detach themselves from the idea of organicity (in the sense of a complete and harmonic whole) to conceive the brain in a way that is more compatible with the richness and complexity of human beings as speaking beings, as beings carrying within themselves something more than the organic. For him, to do justice to the rich and unpredictable kind of subject humans beings are, life sciences should complement the worldview of their spontaneous organicism with the notion that there is something more in the organic than the organic itself (Johnston, 2013). However, this non-organicity of the human brain should not be understood simply as equivalent to the inorganic. Johnston proposes that we call “anorganic” this non-organicity that is distinct from the inorganic. Unlike the inorganic, the term anorganic, as Johnston conceives it, designates the flaws in the organic structure and the dynamics engendered in and by the non-whole biological systems. For Johnston, scientific findings as those described above, show that the biomaterial substance of evolution seems to reflexively negate its own controls and causal influences, giving rise to beings whose complex plasticity escapes governance evolutionary-genetic nature.