The Unified Theory of the Nervous System
and Behavior
Cognitive Philosophy /Brain Theory by Steven Michael Harris
Page 3: "Folk psychology" denotes the prescientific, commonsense conceptual framework that all normally socialized humans deploy in order to comprehend, predict, explain, and manipulate the behavior of humans and the higher animals."
As a person with an early impairment for quickly and naturally reading the feelings and intentions of others, I had a flawed sense of folk psychology or theory of mind - other minds. I was not "normally socialized." I learned to use other kinds of logic to try to make sense of this realm. I have approached my understanding of other people as if they operated like machines whenever possible. I looked for mathematical sorts of patterns in the way people looked and acted in order to find the right responses to use in social situations and failed often during my early years. This has been my advantage leading to my eventual discoveries although it has often been a very painful adventure.
Inventing my own folk psychology has made it possible for me to eventually be very good at reading people in most ways except in the realms of dating, etc. where people give dishonest cues in the name of modesty or to avoid appearing too eager... such as when somebody says "no" when they really mean "yes"... and that is probably only because of insecurity that comes from so many times when I was shot down or misunderstood in the past. To be just a little bit different in your approach to people is often a social disaster if you are not in a bar where everyone is impaired socially because of the alcohol or drugs.
When change is necessary in order to come up with a unified theory of the nervous system - such as change in psychology (any psychology including folk psychology) - then the ability to discard current thinking in this realm whether such thinking comes from genius or impairment, or both, is an advantage.
"In particular, the claim that our commonsense conception of human nature is like an empirical theory has been strongly contested by a number of writers, as has the related claim that it might be empirically false."
When you begin to really understand how the nervous system works and the language the nervous system uses to create its many manifestations, you will find that folk psychology is neither wrong nor right (in the way that Mr. Churchland is probably arguing). What you learn is that it is just a clumsy way to express what is really happening and that the scale of the information is wrong.
Folk psychology might be as right as it can possibly be considering that it is a product of culture and language and because language is mathematically flawed for being able to express the mathematical nature of biological math or nervous system math.
Folk psychology is wrong but it is explainable through new approaches to explaining the nature of thought. You need to figure out how to break thought down to smaller units, down to the neuron, in order to reconstruct a psychology that is more consistent with neurology and psychiatry (to rethink chemical approaches to treatment). All language involves groupings of many smaller units of information (many neurons) and it takes a great trick in thinking to conceive of the structure of knowledge down to the micro level.
Folk psychology is only as right as it can be in accord with the need to communicate with the current language and culture but wrong in the ways that our languages and cultures must be wrong. It brings to light common assumptions to make communication possible but those common assumptions are wrong. Such as when allusions to scripture/bible are used to make a point that is commonly understood (even if religion is completely wrong). [Only the truth is the greatest moral in living successfully in the world, whatever the truth may be. And if religion is not the truth or the road to truth, then it is immoral.]
On Page 4: Churchland cites the work of Wilfrid Sellars and mentions "an imaginary stage of human prehistory" where people with language "have not yet developed the vocabulary for, nor even any conception of, the complex mental states and processes routinely recognized by humans."
This example already points the reader in the wrong direction for understanding what is going on. The algorithm of how the brain works is a constantly self-complicating organization of cells choosing between pain and pleasure. With higher and higher levels of processing the pleasure/pain is dealing with greater and greater complexity but with the same simplicity as part of it on the cellular level. Millions of different decisions to accumulate into greater complexity are no longer recognized as simply pleasure or pain, but it is still the makeup of consciousness. In a way, the younger the person (baby) or the least complex the organism with a nervous system, the more pure will be the nature of the "theory of mind" even in the absence of language. Language can confuse things. (Look at the messes created by complex philosophical language to try to describe mechanisms that were eventually explained very simply with scientific discovery.)
In the beginning the baby has a very pure theory of mind but no words to communicate this consciousness to others. "Good boy" = pleasure and "bad boy" = pain even before there is understanding of why the criticism was being leveled. "Mommy" is eventually associated with a particular loved presence, loved person, before it is known that the word is a label for that person. ("Mommy" = pleasure and is taught using vocal/emotional cues signaling pleasure with a smile and raised and excited voice with caressesÉ all pleasure cues. And you will find that universally all language instruction to babies is basically taught using simple pleasure or pain cues concerning the timing of the word and the tone of voice and other actions coinciding with the use of words. This is only the beginning of a massively new approach to explaining early development in neurology and psychology.)
Look at things this way and you will eventually calculate a pure and more powerful theory of mind. With greater intellectual development it is no longer possible to perceive the theory of mind purely in terms of pain or pleasure without a lot of mental work, because this is the language at the cellular level and with many cells rapidly shifting from pleasure to pain depending on the subject matter of the various inputs - all millions of cells shifting in a very much faster arena of time involving thousands of changes each every second - it appears to us as concepts of many different mental states and experiences. But look closely and you will see that all language about mental states is really a pleasure or pain measurement relating to a different subject matter (or complex combination of subject matters).
Making the problem of conceiving this more difficult is that there are many assumptions built into our language and culture (cultures of language) that are just wrong. The early development of knowledge with early man involved a lot of very bad and very wrong assumptions about the nature of the world and the nature of man and everything. Built into our language (even into what we consider our current "advanced" language of science and medicine) are many mistaken assumptions and perspectives.
Before understanding the brain medicine and science have evolved a language of how to describe the body and biology (using mostly chemistry as the basis for explaining events) that has been institutionalized before any real understanding of the body/brain has been accomplished. The current language gets in the way of figuring it out even though there is plenty of data to make it possible to make the big discovery. You can't find the language before the discovery. The discovery is a conception that will determine the language to explain it. (It also determines that another entirely different approach or field of medicine must be created to deal with the language the brain uses and this approach must be applied to the data in all the other fields, especially concerning the use of medications, to find the real explanations of what is going on in those other fields as well. This approach that I'm introducing in my writings will make a lot of change in explanations and approaches in research and hospitals.
By the way, another problem with folk psychology is that the greater complexity of the algorithm (of cellular pleasures and pains) that creates our current complex variety of explanations of mind and emotion makes it less likely that completely accurate and similar experiences of the same concepts pass from individual to individual. The baby who experiences pleasure with the word/concept "ball" and the experience of playing with a favorite ball will be much more in alignment with another baby with the same level of health and the same attitude toward a favorite ball than two adults experiences and understandings towards the word/concept "jealousy" because it is a much more complex arrangement of pleasures/pains neurologically (jealousy could be considered a combination of pleasure of a desire combined with a pain that you don't have it and another does have it, also always combined with every memory in the past that involves that kind of experience which goes into the mix and other various differences that come with age as we are much more alike when young than when we are all old).
Churchland writes about these ascriptions to mental states being ways to create hypotheses that make it possible to anticipate behavior. Actually all thought involves anticipation - every mechanism of the nervous system and every part of the nervous system from liver function to visual processing is using predictive mechanisms. The brain always goes to the universal first and then the specific. Any input now could be predicted to lead to a wide range of possible next steps and they are all lit up first before the exact nature of what is happening (or about to happen) becomes clear as choices that no longer fit into the scenario are eliminated. We think 'everything' before we think 'something.' Just look at slow motion scans showing brain activity where there is a constant pattern of bright flashes of activity lighting up large regions that then narrow down to continued firings in more and more restricted groupings of cells before the pattern repeats with activity moving to different combinations of regions that narrow down (this can be confusing in observation because the brain can do this with more than one "thought" at a time).
Page 6: "Any search of this kind quickly turns up hundreds of putative laws, all of which have the familiar ring of the obvious. These range from the very simple to the quite complex. For example:
- People who suffer bodily damage generally feel pain.
- People who are angry are generally impatient.
- People who fear that P generally hope that not-P.
- People who desire that P, and believe that Q is a means to P, and have no overriding desires or preferred strategies, will generally try to bring it about that Q.
"These 'laws,' and thousands more like them, were claimed to sustain commonsense explanations and predictions in the standard deductive-nomological or 'covering-law' fashion. And the specific content of those laws was claimed to account for the relevance of the explanatory factors standardly appealed to in our daily practice."
As in all thought and experience and functioning, everything in this excerpt can be broken down into mathematics applied to pleasure and pain.
Number 1 is obvious. People feel pain.
2: Anger is pain. (You might think of anger as pain driven to action, a calculation that hurting the source of anger will bring less pain and therefore bring pleasure. Depression is pain without any ability to see how to stop the pain or pain driven to inaction. So impatience is an offshoot of being driven to action as anger is a desire to damage something that causes pain and the sooner you stop the pain - or get revenge - the sooner the pleasure or catharsis or reduction of pain will occur = impatience. It is all math.)
3: Fear is a calculation of pain applied to time - an expectation of pain that will come considering current factors or predicted factors or an accumulation of memory of pains. You seek pleasure and avoid pain. If P is pain, then not-P is pleasure or not pain. Hope is a calculation of pleasure (or not-pain) applied to time or applied to the future. (Remember also that a pleasure in these examples might better be explained as a vote of many cells where the many pleasure aspects or cellular votes outnumbers the pain votes. Because of a variety of factors in the cells, the pain votes have a bit more weight than the pleasure votes. The stop is always faster than the start. A protective mechanism.) The same applies to example 4.
All thought and language and experience break down into combinations of cells experiencing pain and pleasure. Some of the thousands of laws in folk psychology alluded to will require very subtle or complex explanations in these terms. But folk psychology shows the pain/pleasure basis much better than other areas of intellect and knowledge where it is much more subtle and difficult to see. (Pick any word in this sentence and the pleasure/pain issue started with a pleasure that was experienced when the brain learned to associate the arrangement of lines in the letters of the word with the concept or object, and, as mentioned above, that association may have occurred long before there was real understanding of other associations that need to occur to come up with a complete understanding of a word.)
This might seem too simple to be true, but it is the simple that repeated in many ways can create the complex realities of our world.
This writing so far gets me through about four pages of the Churchland book. My! this process slows down my reading. But I'm dealing with universals here and the act of reflective writing or criticism slows down everyone's writing. This is ground I've covered in thought long ago. I have much, much more to say about these four pages, but no energy for writing all of those thoughts.
When you learn to work logic in your brain without using the language centers of the brain involved, you can solve many more problems and your mind works much faster. This is one reason why autistic savants can do massive mathematical calculations in their heads faster than a computer, but not be able to tell you how they do it and at the same time not be able to understand the usual mathematical logic used to solve such problems. (They claim to just be able to "feel" or "see" the answerÉ instantly.)
When I read anything I am constantly solving new problems and coming up with new theories (an illusion when they are all just different ways of explaining parts of one unexplainable theory that I can 'sense'). I do this thinking at a very rapid clip. Normally I don't translate these discoveries into "words" or "interior monologue" but leave them in non-language form. To articulate these ideas in language takes a lot of energy and is very tiring. Thinking these ideas is very pleasurable. Writing these ideas is a big pain but I can do it. I believe I have now discovered so much this way that it will be impossible for me to communicate it all with the remaining time of my life (perhaps 60 years). But others could learn to do the same thing once they "get it" about how the brain works and learn these techniques in thinking. There is a lot of repetition that occurs in the answers that come from applying the theory to various problems.
As an experiment to give you a sense of what I can offer, I have decided to use a new book I just bought as a catalyst for thought and comments as I read the thing. To write this next series of essays I will approach the book very slowly and write my thoughts that are inspired by this reading as I go along. I don't know what positions this book takes and I don't know the subject matters of the essays in this book, but I know I'll have a lot to say about what I read. (Which book I choose does not matter very much because this is a constant process within my mind.) I will not be writing all of my thoughts, just those thoughts and observations that I think will be possible for some readers to understand considering what I've already written up to this point. Some concepts are just impossible for me to write as of yet. Not everything I write will be theoretically important as I'll not be planning ahead to give order to this writing experiment. These Criticism and Comment essays will be a kind of online journal to see what comes up. I promise that some cool ideas will come out of this.
The book I've chosen is On The Contrary, Critical Essays, 1987-1997 by Paul M. Churchland & Patricia S. Churchland. I bought the book on Friday, November 23, 2001 without having read any part of it. The page numbers I'll cite will be from a paperback version of this book that was published in 1998 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
One reason I picked a book by the Churchlands is that they have a lot of fame and status in the world of cognitive philosophy, and therefore, if the only way to present my ideas is by posting them on the Internet, my essays that include their names will come up on a lot of searches and then have a better chance of being read.
I'll write what I can when I can. It will take some time between my writings because my time will be occupied most of the time by trying to make a living doing my humorous speaking presentations in schools around the country. If I had other financial support I would be writing these essays full-time.
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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.
