Untitled Document

The Unified Theory of the Nervous System
and Behavior

Cognitive Philosophy /Brain Theory by Steven Michael Harris

The brain works from the infinite to the specific rather than from nothing to something

Try to explain everything about a topic, all at once. You can't do it. Language has limits to the amount of information that can be produced with the need for a form using one sound following another and there is no language without the rules of the language that produce that information in a linear fashion, one word after another, one topic after another, following established rules that limit the way information is processed.

The brain is able to produce language, but the brain does not work using those rules or is limited by those rules. The brain can do many things at once.

Think of your mind, your lifetime storehouse of knowledge and ability, as a massive sculpture but sculpted in many dimensions rather the three dimensions of an object in clay. This entirety of your mind is not a moving thing, an animated thing, but something of a solid nature that has been sculpted over time. In one instant frozen in time its shape is an unchanging solid "model of the world" that you have created in a life. But in truth thought has no existence without animation, without the movement of thought and body, or there is no life. But the animation does not come from the way this mind, this model of the world, this sculpture moves, but from the constantly changing view of this massive model, from the way the "light" constantly shifts from one area to another of this model of the world. Your memories are not moving, but your illumination of the memories creates an illusion that your memories are moving. You illuminate different aspects of this model of the world that has developed through a lifetime. To view different aspects of this model and calculate the relationships of these different viewpoints (memories) with each other is thought. The model itself is the medium through which these calculations are performed.

Also think of this model as being extremely soft. The sculpture, the model of the world, has a shape but the very act of viewing the sculpture changes the sculpture slightly. Parts of the sculpture that have been viewed many times in the past become even easier and more likely to be spotted in the future. Parts of the sculpture that have been constantly in use also become harder to change. (Consider of the aspects of the brain discussed in my previous Mud Swamp Essay.)

To find a particular thought, a particular part of this model of the world, you don't come up from nothing to find the something, you look at everything and then narrow down to the particular.

When you are trying to remember a particular word, your brain can first look at all of the words in your history of language, all at once, then at those in narrower and narrower classifications until you eventually find the word that satisfies all of your search criteria for the moment. When you try to think of words that associate with a word, you are not aware that in the moment before you thought of the word in the first place the associations preceded the distillation of the word. But the rules of language don't allow you a way to express the infinite because language requires the specific. What most people call thinking is just the language component of thinking that requires a very narrow scope of linked specifics following other specifics using the rules of that language's grammar. Our interior monologue is unable to explain anything but that which can be translated into that kind of logic.

If I ask "Do you know the book Huckleberry Finn or the book Tom Sawyer" you immediately can tell me you know those books and have a confident sense that you know those books - instantly. But to know those books you must know the many things that happened in those books and know many of the words that are in those books and you might not be able to give an exact quote from the book but you would be able to recognize each book if I read a paragraph. You might be confident of what you can give me about each book, have a strong sense of how much you are able to quote and be able to tell me that "the actual title of one is The Adventures of É" without having those words of that thought actually entering into your internal monologue. You can instantly know how much information you can pass to me about those books without having any of that information actually pass through your mind at the moment when I ask you that question.

When I mention those two books you have a feeling of each book. You might have no words at all cross your mind when I mention the books but you instantly have a feeling of the book and know if you can answer yes or no to the question of whether you know the book. You might think you have pictures in your mind when the book is mentioned, but there is no specific picture but a kind of feeling of many images in your mind all at once.

Should I mention thirty books in rapid succession, you might know every one of the books and have a "feeling" for each of those books that you have experienced. The feeling for each book is different than the feeling for any of the others. A sense of images in your mind appears but not specific images in most cases.

This feeling of the book is actually the instantaneous experience of remembering every word in the book, every event and every character and every description and every experience of reading the book - all at once and instantly. Every hour of your life experienced with that work of literature in your past (and also many experiences that are very similar or in common in ways with that literature experience) are remembered simultaneously. But language does not allow us to express anything but the specific. We can start to explain everything we know about that work and the explanation could be longer than the actual book itself, but we can't provide this information without doing it one word at a time whether it be spoken or in interior monologue.

This knowledge that is much greater but beyond the limits of language is often identified as emotion, or instinct, or as a higher power.

The language that gives us so much over other animals we think is the most powerful of our thinking. In ways it makes us so much smarter because the rules of language and society of language cause us to consider topics of interest that we would never bother with without language as an ability. The rules of language create a kind of focus that would not exist without the language. The language makes a much greater communication possible between colonies of cells (organisms) but the amount of information that can be communicated within any particular organism throughout a particular organism is far far greater than the amount of information that can be communicated from organism to organism through the linear organization of sounds and of the written expressions of those rules that exist in a language.

Our language sets us apart and makes the greatest intelligence of our culture of a species possible, but it is not the greatest intelligence within our individual minds.

When we fail to come up with the right word in a conversation but, instead, come up with a word that is close but not quite right. Or we come up with a thought that is a distraction, but linked in some way to the earlier thoughts, we are experiencing the problems that occur when the thoughts are narrowed to the specific with the influences of mistakes in the nervous system when a channel of thought is inhibited in some way, when the switchboards of the brain (emotion and language/logic) are inhibited to the point that walls are up in the way of getting all of the search factors into the same place so that thoughts converge in a healthy way. This inhibition is stress and all people experience these problems when under stress of some kind.

Many people who have had near-death experiences have reported the experience of seeing their life pass before their eyes. Such a thing occurs in a way all of the time. But our thoughts of this moment are limited by the restrictions posed by the experiences of the moment before. When our brain goes from the infinite to the specific, it does not need to go to every experience of our lifetime at the beginning of the search because the previous thought (and the narrowing down of thoughts according to the rules of language and the need to limit the expressions of the current word to the rules of what goes with the words immediately preceding) limits the amount of this model of the world that needs to be illuminated. But when the person is near death, everything can be turned off for a moment, a rare event in a lifetime. This person who comes back from near death probably experienced what happens when the brain is struggling to survive and there is no moment before, no clear thought of any kind remaining in short-term memory, no linkage of thoughts. This brain has stopped and is struggling not to let that stop be a permanent thing (death) so the brain turns up the volume on everything trying to get nervous processing coordinated again, so the entire model of the world, the entire memory of life, is illuminated by massive firings of cells without any choices of thought, without any search parameters, being a part of that lighting up of the brain. In rare cases the person has a sense that everything was experienced at once and this sense of a life flashing before the eyes is a non-verbal sense of the life without any internal monologue because language makes the infinite experience impossible.

This movement of thought from the infinite to the finite that I describe in this essay also occurs in advance whenever possible. The kind of computing that cells use involves the seeking of patterns and the avoidance of conflict that causes pain and anything that can be predicted is predicted. When I write this sentence and leave out the last

You might have ended that sentence in your mind before you got to the missing word. The word you experience in this moment will instantly conjure up the infinite possibilities of words that could logically be next following the rules of the grammar and the logic of the information that was just presented. If there is one choice that is the most likely in your mind, you will often think of that word before it is given to you. If the choices are more infinite, those many choices are in your mind just as much as a singular word that you predict and experience in your interior monologue, but you are unable to think of those words in the terms of language because language requires a choice of a particular, of one word at a time. You might have a sense of many words in your mind that could fill in the blank and be aware of them in your language center of your mind, but you won't "consciously" think of those words at the same time but in rapid succession, one at a time, because language doesn't work without making choices. (Rarely a person might have the ability to keep more than one string of interior monologue going at the same time or understand more than one conversation happening at the same time, but this ability is probably using a very rapid shifting back and forth between conversations of focus in the mind rather than actually staying focused on two conversations at the same time.)

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