The Unified Theory of the Nervous System
and Behavior
Cognitive Philosophy /Brain Theory by Steven Michael Harris
Patterns that can be witnessed in macro-organisms (animals) are useful in deducting the behaviors or experiences of micro-organisms, but the complexity of the chain of logic and mathematics necessary to understand the micro-organism components of behavior and experience (cellular experience) from observations of animal or human behavior and experience is prohibitive to your understanding at this point. Now that I have figured this out, it is much easier to explain in the opposite direction from the inside-out (small to big) rather than from the outside-in (big to small, complex to simple).
The inevitability of the evolution of intelligent life was set very early because of the remarkable design of the single-cell organism. The real mystery for future understanding is going to be in understanding how a single-cell organism can experience emotion.
To understand how the human brain works requires logical and mathematical proof that single-cell organisms have an (simple) emotional life.
Basic to all life is the need to seek sustenance and avoid starvation, to seek health and avoid disease, to seek safety and avoid danger... and the best way to make this possible is for life forms to coordinate health with pleasure and damage with pain. To seek pleasure and avoid pain is apparent in all examples of animal life. Wouldn’t the same rules apply for microscopic life forms as well?
The single-cell organism must have an emotional life with a basic language of seeking pleasure (health) and avoiding pain (damage or death).
And there are different rhythms or timings of reactions to pleasure (health) compared to the rhythms or timings of reactions to pain (danger, damage). In animal life, the approach towards a wanted object is never as fast as the reaction to a dangerous surprise or to a wound. The stop is always faster than the start. This is a basic mechanism for survival. Even under a microscope you can witness the slow approach of a micro-organism towards a food source and the quick movement or change in shape in response to a sharp probe. (These different timings also exist in the communications of the nervous system at the cellular level... I’ll explain this in more detail later.)
So in the beginning there were only the single-celled life forms with a basic and subtle emotional experience that aided in survival. Perhaps at that level the emotional event is just an inclination towards chemical stasis but chemical responses with the same timings as witnessed in the emotional responses of much larger organisms.
These simple micro-organisms would seek light or nutrition or bonding with others for reproduction or just react to happenstance meetings with food sources, dangers or other similar cellular organisms as they were carried through the currents. Some survived well by succeeding in ingesting food and by flinching in response to dangers so life could continue.
When the first small colonies of these cells were formed (multi-cellular organisms), the communication required for survival was very simple. A small colony of cells could probably communicate through chemical means and no diversity of response was needed. A chemical wave of communication could drive all of these cells toward a food source or away from a danger in unison.
But as these colonies became larger, survival required more complicated kinds of communication because with larger colonies it was more likely that situations would occur where the colony drifted into a location with a source of pleasure on one end of the colony (with cells communicating a desire to approach) but somewhere else in the colony were cells in contact with a danger or pain (and communicating a conflicting desire to retreat). In these situations it was important that the communication of a reaction to danger overruled any signaling for an approach to a pleasure.
And as these colonies grew larger and cells began to assume specialized functioning, a unison response to various stimuli was no longer a system for successful survival and was no longer possible because of the increased time for signaling to reach from one end of the organism to the other. Therefore there would be cells at parts of the colony reacting to positive stimuli or pleasures, and cells at other parts of the colony reacting to negative stimuli or pains. Cells in the inner reaches of the colony might be receiving chemical signals from various directions from the various parts of the colony and these signals could be at odds with one another. Taking into account that signals of distress would have more sway over signals of pleasure, reactions of the entire organism would entail a system of polling or voting... whichever signaling was the most intense would create the reaction in that part of the colony or organism. This was the beginning of mental processing.
An evolution of cellular specialization was needed for the much larger colonies of cells. Larger organisms could not function effectively if all of the cells communicated in the same early way of chemically signaling cell by cell, membrane by membrane, across the entire breadth of the colony. A type of cell that could quickly send a message from one end of the colony to another was very helpful to survival. This cell that quickly sent the messages (of pleasure or pain) from one end of the organism to the other needed to have more sway in the decisions of the accumulated cells for the success of the organism. (Otherwise the messenger cell, or nerve cell, signaling activity in the distant parts of the colony would always be overruled by the signaling of the local cells at various parts of the colony seeking a pleasure or avoiding a pain.)
Somehow these early nerve cells were able to evolve a lightning-fast action potential that could signal instantly from any point in the colony to another, and this type of cell also developed a magnified sensation of emotion (pleasure or pain) in the signaling so that the nerve cells (able to communicate the voting from the far reaches of the colony) had the greatest influence on decisions in the system making survival much more likely for the greater organism as a whole. (Think of nerve cells as the executive or national organization, and the other kinds of cells as the local organizations.)
This was the beginning of mental processing and higher intelligence and all that matters from this point on is the size and the organization of this nervous system as more and more complicated life forms evolved.
I will explain how this emotional communication is possible in another essay. One of the problems that needed to be solved involved the illusion that nerve cells can only send one message or have one experience: on or off. It is confusing that when nerve cells are not firing there is no sensation. So, at first, observations of nerve firings imply that it is a system with one message sent by a firing and no message when not firing. (Leading to an idea of the brain being like a piece of genetically created hardware with different logic in different regions.) Or a kind of analog system with the frequencies being the arbiter of communication. But they are all sending messages using mechanisms that are something other than binary as most think of it, other than analog as most think of it, with a wide range of expression from pain to pleasure.
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Many of the problems of medicine, biology, psychology and philosophy require an understanding of the basic mathematical principles behind how the nervous system does what it does to achieve function and experience, and that mathematics is not explained using narrowly-focused statistics. Understanding how this math works will be the tool for the discovery of many answers of great importance to humanity. The case for this concept and the offering of an explanation of this kind of math is made in the many essays of this website.
On these pages you will find ideas that should haunt you. Included are new concepts in science, medicine, sociology, evolutionary psychology, philosophy and more...
This website and the podcasts of Everyone's Revolution explain how the brain creates the mind, but many side issues must be resolved in order to teach this material. Once you realize that the "hard problems" are really the first problems to be answered, you then have a tool for changing all of science and medicine by explaining a massive number of discoveries that will fall into line in order to unify the evidence. All of the evidence is good. The interpretations of the evidence are mistaken in many cases. For ten years now there have been new discoveries of evidence that all move in the direction of supporting this theory (or this school of many theories) and its predictions. Quite a few people have started to pay attention to this theory as well.
