The University at Buffalo


From the first moments children are born, they are exposed to influences from significant others, media, and physical surroundings which they observe directly. These influences help individuals to resolve the continuous, ever-changing flow of experience into discrete “objects” which can be designated and referred to. Objects may be as material as a tree or as immaterial as joy. People, including oneself, are also objects. These objects are defined solely in relation to each other. In the Galileo system, relationships between objects are defined as “beliefs”. Beliefs about one’s own relationship to other objects are defined as “attitudes.”

Each social situation consists of a set of objects, one of which is the self. The self is defined in relationship to the objects in the situation. Behaviors are also objects, and appropriate choices of behavior in any situation depend on ones’ relationship to those behavioral objects in that situation.
These early experiences form the core of the self-concept, the primitive archetypal self. Physically, the self-concept is a set of interconnected neurons distributed across the brains of the individual and his/her significant others. Once formed, the self-concept in turn controls the individual’s behavior, which can result in changes in location in the physical and social environment, changes in significant other influence and changes in direct self-reflexive experiences, thus continually modifying the self-concept. These modifications to the self do not delete earlier structures, but rather are built onto them. The self-concept thus consists of a stable, archetypal core and a continuously changing surface that shifts with the streams of influence from significant others, media, self-reflexive observations and other situational factors.

When individuals communicate, they form a social network which is the substrate of the collective beliefs and attitudes of all the individuals together. This set of the collective beliefs and attitudes is what Emile Durkheim has called the conscience collectif or collective consciousness. Measuring the complex system of beliefs and attitudes at both the individual and collective level requires special methods and procedures. The Galileo System is a theory and set of procedures for measuring, understanding and engineering these cognitive processes at both the individual and collective levels.

The Galileo system emerged as a system for identifying the most important objects in any social situation and measuring their relationships to each other and to the persons in the situation. Because of the precision of measurement of the Galileo system, and due to the comparative nature of the measurements, Galileo also provided a powerful technology for influencing attitudes, beliefs and behavior. But by 1989, the Galileo system lacked an understanding of the physiological mechanism by which the brain “chopped up” the continuous stream of experience into discrete categories.

During the last few years at the University at Albany, Woelfel and his colleagues began to investigate the neurological basis of perception and thought. Scott Danielsen and Woelfel developed SPOT, an artificial intelligence based on key ideas in the Galileo model, the most important being that the intelligence of SPOT needed to be developed through interaction with others rather than programmed by the developers.

Perceptions and Conceptions

The physical world is a world of vibrating particles and waves. Streams of photons vibrating millions of times per second make up the light that strikes the eye; waves of air vibrating between about 30 and 20,000 times per second make up the sounds that strike the ears. Particles entering the nose, chemicals that touch the tongue and physical impacts with the skin set off oscillations in nerve cells of dozens to hundreds of pulses per second. Even “solid” objects such as ordinary tables and chairs are actually composed of mainly empty space with incredibly tiny vibrating atoms thinly dispersed throughout them.

Moreover, the visual field is always changing. With each step and turn of the head, the individual’s visual field and point of view changes. Trees blow in the wind; animals and people turn and move, and clouds fly past in the wind. Sounds and noises change continuously; patterns of light and darkness change as clouds cross the sun and then move on. Temperatures change as the wind blows. The world is a place of continuous motion and change. As Heraclitus said, one can’t step into the same river twice.

Yet this is not the way people experience the world. The human brain transforms this cacophony of ever changing vibration into solid, stable objects. The ever-changing tree in the yard, even as it grows from a seedling to a mature adult, dropping its leaves in winter, growing new ones in summer, blowing in the wind, losing limbs to storms, is experienced as a single, coherent “object”. The woman who is never seen from exactly the same angle, who is now young and then old, whose clothes change from day to day, whose hair is long and then short and then curly and then straight, now angry and now smiling, who wears glasses one moment and not another is always one “object,” Mom. Indeed, one of the central questions of philosophy has been how the world of continuously changing experience is transformed into stable, coherent, unchanging concepts.
How this happens has been the core of our speculations about ourselves and our relation to the world since ancient times. Plato believed that the objects of our thoughts have nothing to do with the ever-changing experiences the world provides us, but are rather recalled from a prior life in the world of ideas. Aristotle believed that the objects of our thoughts were induced from our experiences, but he provided no physical mechanism by which this happens. Philosophers and psychologists have lined up on one or the other side of this argument to this day, and the emotion underlying their commitment does not seem to have diminished.

The Brain as Substrate for the Self

The notion that the brain has something to do with perception is fairly recent. Aristotle thought the brain was a radiator for cooling the body. The discovery of the role of the brain in perception and human action is itself the result of over two centuries of painstaking scientific research. Freud himself¹ began his career by investigating the fine structure of the brain, and produced several good quality strains of neurons. This was Freud’s first – and last – scientific research. (This shouldn’t be taken as a criticism; Freud himself said that he considered himself an explorer rather than a scientist.) By 1891, Wilhelm Waldeyer suggested that the canal-like lattice work of threads extending from the brain down the spinal column and through the body were in fact not canals or hollow tubes through which spirits passed, but rather single cells or “neurons,” a hypothesis now called “The Neuron Doctrine.”

The neuron is a complex and subtle cell; there are different kinds of neurons, and their functions are by no means completely understood. Moreover, the arrangement of neurons relative to one another in the human nervous system lends new meaning to the term “complexity.” No one would claim to understand the complete functioning of neurons, or the relation between neural networks in real brains and what we call “thinking,” “feeling,” or “consciousness.” Even the relationship between the simplest of neural structures and elementary perceptions is only now being uncovered.
The principles underlying the neuron, however, turn out to be quite simple and easy to understand. Each individual is born with perhaps 100 billion neurons, the basic element of mental processes. Tens of thousands of generations of Darwinian natural selection have given each newborn a brain built of vast numbers of interconnections among these cells, which represents the basic functional capabilities of vision, speech, smell, touch, hearing, feeling and motor activity.

But billions of cells remain unconnected at birth, and develop connections among each other based on experiences communicating with the environment and other people. When a child experiences any object – a cat, for example – nerves carry stimuli from the senses to neurons in the brain, which are activated. When they are activated, connections begin to grow among them. If the child observes the cat repeatedly, these neurons grow substantial connections, so that the “object” cat is an actual structure of interconnected neurons in the brain. Later in life, when the child experiences lions, tigers, panthers and other cats, the neurons which make up these images will be built on top of the existing “cat” structure. The cat pattern serves as an archetype for all cats precisely because later concepts of cats are literally additions to the same set of neurons.

Early experiences can be expected to produce deep archetypal concepts which serve as the foundation of later attitudes and beliefs. Whatever ideas people might have later in life, they will be based on archetypal concepts formed in childhood, which can themselves be found in deep neural patterns physically present in the brain itself.

In each child’s experience, certain patterns of stimuli recur frequently. Images of parents, siblings, relatives and neighbors, feelings of hunger and satiation, warmth, cold, sleep and much more recur again and again, forming the basic patterns of interconnected neurons which represent these recurrent experiences internally. Moreover, at this stage in life, significant others –those who significantly affect the child -- tend to call attention to these patterns, designate them and name them. When the child hears the name, patterns of neurons which represent the auditory stimuli connected to the sound of the name also become active. These neural patterns become connected to the patterns which represent the stimulus itself. The result is a series of named patterns which represent the primitive “objects” of experience². Since the auditory pattern of the name is physically connected to the neural pattern of the experience itself, hearing the name can physically bring about the recollection (activation) of the stored experience itself.³

One object that is present in every situation is the individual him/herself (wherever you go, there you are). Individuals and others present in situations can observe each other and communicate about each other. In this way, the self itself⁴ can be designated and referred to as an object in the social situation; that is, through the reactions of other people to ourselves, we become aware of ourselves as objects in a social situation. By the processes already described, the self-concept⁵ forms as a set of interconnected neurons⁶. The interconnections of the neurons represent relationships between the self and other objects of experience, which have also been constructed by the processes just described. Among the most important of those other objects are one’s feelings and sensations, other individual people, and behaviors.

Other Brains and the Collective Self

From the first moments of infancy, other persons observe individuals and react to them. They communicate to the infants that they are happy with them or dissatisfied, that they find the child bright or dull, cheerful or gloomy, beautiful or ugly, and so on. Every individual, of course, exhibits all kinds of behavior, and gloomy people are sometimes cheerful, bright people are sometimes dull, honest people sometimes cheat, and cheaters sometimes tell the truth. But behaviors, feelings, sensations and other experiences that are consistently and frequently designated by others as characteristics of the individual tend to grow neural connections to the self complex of neurons, and become part of the person’s self concept. Individuals thereby begin to develop repertoires or vocabularies of appropriate feelings and behaviors which are defining characteristics of their self-concepts, along with the circumstances under which they are appropriately enacted. Put more simply, the self-concept is a set of interconnected neurons which establishes who we are, and what kinds of feelings and behaviors are appropriate to us in the situations we are likely to encounter.
This set of interconnected neurons, however, seldom if ever lies in a single brain. Most commonly, the set of relations among a particular individual’s attributes, behaviors, emotions and other characteristics is encoded into several brains which are interconnected through the sounds, smells, sights, tastes and tactile sensations of ordinary human communication⁷.


¹ In spite of the vast amount of writing about Freud, few scholars are aware that “Freud” was a middle name; Freud’s actual last name was “Himself.”

² In this paper, an object is any pattern of stimuli that can be designated or referred to, following Blumer (1967)


³ This recollection is not an eidetic image of a single experience, but rather a hodgepodge of different viewpoints and accumulated experiences.

⁴ Not to be confused with Freud himself.

⁵ The theory presented here bears important relationship the that of George Herbert Mead, but does not make use of his concept of Mind, nor does it distinguish in any essential way between animal and human intelligence.

⁶ This doesn’t mean that there is a specific part of the brain where the self-concept is stored, since, while the neurons that represent the self do need to be interconnected, they don’t need to lie near each other.

⁷ The disorientation and even death of an individual after the death of a long time significant other follows naturally from the fact that the individual has actually lost a significant part of his/her self-concept; that is, the part that was stored in the significant other’s now dead brain.