The Unified Theory of the Nervous System
and Behavior
Cognitive Philosophy /Brain Theory by Steven Michael Harris
In the development of the economy of a nation, there is no director, no designer, no homunculus - there is only the accumulated actions of many small agents (people) each seeking success and avoiding failure, each seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. Some suffer hardship today in order to have fortune tomorrow. Some suffer hardship but the greater good is served for the group as a result.
The agents do many different things in a country. There are many different skills and functions that are addressed and many different tasks to accomplish to make for the greatest success for the greatest whole (the country). Most don't plan their future work or end up following a different path even if they do plan. They just fall into a life where they get rewards for their actions and the choices they make are choices where they seek the greatest pleasure (pride, money, safety... there are many pleasures).
The complexity of our interrelated duties and occupations that make up the country as a whole might seem immense, but a country is actually a pretty slow and sluggish accumulated intelligence (if you think of a country of people as an organism) compared to the intelligence of a colony of cells living in a body (a country of cells). The intelligence of a country is slow because of the slow speed involved in the repercussions of your choices and actions as they are communicated to the rest of the country for the good of the country. If damage is done to one important cell a nervous system can communicate instantly to the rest of the colony when the damage to that cell has great repercussions of harm to the rest of the colony. (Whereas the death of a president - thinking of a president as one member of the colony that has much influence on many - can affect a country but with changes that might take years or decades to sense or understand.)
This is because people communicate very slowly with each other compared to the massive and speedy communication going on throughout a nervous system in the body of a colony of cells.
It will take some time to show you how the mathematics of nerve cell communication works using an algorithm of accelerating complexity based on seeking pleasure and avoiding pain but with some mathematical restrictions that lead to aging and disorders in a percentage of organisms.
It is difficult to conceive of how the many qualia, sensations, thoughts, consciousness, etc. can all be created by cells experiencing pleasure and pain. Accept that the conception of this is very difficult. Accept that you may never get a clear sense of it.
But accept also that each of us is seeking the many pleasures and avoiding the many pains (pleasure and pain have infinite forms in a nervous system) and you might be serving the needs of feeding the population while I might be involved in communication and your neighbor is dealing with elimination of waste and the many tasks that are accomplished are also just one thing - the seeking of pleasure and avoidance of pain.
(And so I predicted that in fMRI studies of pain the observations would be different from most studies involved in brain functioning. Instead of witnessing greater activity shifting from brain center to brain center as is observed with most fMRI studies and instead of seeing some parts of the brain shutting down as a part of the whatever kind of functioning, the numbers of cells involved and regions of the brain involved in pain events grow more active and more synchronous and increasing numbers of cells become involved and increasing numbers of regions of the brain become involved as well. With great pain there is no meaning and there is little thought. Intelligence involves a mixing of many decisions among cells that are experiencing a range from pleasure to pain and through the complex relationships of the cells as they influence the experiences of the other cells, the pleasure/pain experience becomes part of something else - a small piece of the qualia involved in representing "red" for instance - but when the cells are having the experience in sync there is less intelligence and more basic experience of either blind pleasure or pain. These are the universals of the brain: pleasure/pain. It is the universal events that will be the last to be understood by the medical community because they can't be located in the brain using the (faulty) approach of trying to identify the functions of different regions of the brain looking at drug studies, lesions, stimulation, etc. but they might mistakenly attribute these functions more to the regions of the brain with the greatest diversity of connections to other parts of the brain - switchboards of the brain, so to speak. Pain, emotion, memory and qualia are all synonyms as it turns out.)
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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.
The newest developments and communications concerning this broad-reaching theory are presented these days in podcast form. "Everyone's Revolution" is the podcast of The Unified Theory of the Nervous System and Behavior. With tens of thousands of downloads, it is the best place to be bringing forth new ideas and new implications concerning the basic ideas that were first articulated in these essays mostly a decade ago. As one neuroscience grad student fan of mine wrote - "you will be hard pressed to find a grad student without an iPod. The podcasts are a great place to hear your ideas." Besides - the broad reach of these theories causes some to pass judgment on my work as "crazy" without investigation, but it is easier to get a sense of what this is all about when you can hear the sound of my voice and the logic of the evidence presented in the podcasts. (The podcast form is much more forgiving and easier for me as well.)
