The Unified Theory of the Nervous System
and Behavior
Cognitive Philosophy /Brain Theory by Steven Michael Harris
Page 7: "First, Sellars's account yields a modern version of the Kantian claim that one can know oneself, in consciousness, only as one represents oneself with one's own concepts. On Sellars's view, one represents oneself with the concepts of FP (Folk Psychology), a speculative empirical theory. Introspective knowledge is thus denied any special epistemological status: one's spontaneous first-person psychological judgments are no better (and no worse) than one's spontaneous observation judgments generally."
Right off the bat there is a flavor of bias for language as the foundation for consciousness in some of this writing. (Implying that babies or other animals don't have consciousness. This can logically lead to an argument that the more education you have or the smarter you are, the more consciousness you have or the higher level of consciousness you attain. To say that FP is the basis for this is limiting.
So I am agreeing with Churchland that introspective knowledge should be given status or value beyond spontaneous FP. Without knowledge of the mathematics that can be played with in a unified theory, he would not be able to imagine the massive extent of new information that can be available with another way of looking at the contents of consciousness that goes far beyond FP but also serves to explain the reasons for all FP as it has developed and to explain the mathematical foundations of FP that can also be examined to provide the foundations of the universal grammars found in all languages and cultures as the system is seen through another facet of the lens in the work on languages done by Chomsky and Pinker et al.
Folk psychology is the kind of thing that just happens when language develops in a nervous system and it can be greatly flawed in some ways as mankind moves from ignorance to greater understanding. Mistaken notions remain in language and culture (and therefore reside in FP as well) long after science and discovery make changes. But changes in the language of FP do evolve that will shift the substance of how we describe ourselves and others. Modern psychology and medicine have people using those terms to instinctually assess themselves and others. (Many disproved Freudian ideas seem to have become ingrained in our language to assess each other. You can occasionally catch a doctor or researcher who knows better using Freudian catch phrases in informal conversation.) Yes, I know that this is not what is meant in describing FP, but I'm sure that FP has evolved. And then again, I believe the basis for FP is in the mathematics of how nervous systems work that was a part of nervous systems long before homo sapiens evolved.)
Page 7: "If FP reduces smoothly to a materialist successor theory, then the identity they will be vindicated. If it proves disjunctively so 'reducible,' then functionalism will be vindicated. If it proves irreducible by reason of finding no adequate materialist successor at all, then some form of dualism will be vindicated. And if it proves irreducible by reason of failing utterly to map onto its successful materialist successor theory, then a position called eliminative materialism will be vindicated. The successor theory will then displace Jones's antique theory in our social and explanatory practices, and the ontology of FP will go the way of phlogiston, caloric fluid, and the crystal spheres of ancient astronomy."
The materialists win, but with a bone thrown to those espousing dualism. Everything is happening in the brain and in the cells. The dualism part comes partly from the issue that the mathematical principals behind the experience of the cells are different from the mathematics involved in the functioning. Everything is happening in the cells and the cells each hold a small portion of the qualia/consciousness. Nothing comes together anywhere. The total experience is accumulative. FP can be reduced to my theory. My theory also shows that there are some inherent predictable flaws in logic that occur in a nervous system (for important reasons related to survival) and so flaws in FP become a part of that. But the flaws and mistakes that are a part of FP will occur in certain predictable ways and not in other ways to as great an extent. (This issue is just too complicated for me to get a grasp of how to articulate it at the moment.) FP can be improved with greater knowledge of the nervous system, but FP will never be perfected much in the way that no system of language could ever write a book explaining the nature of a sunset to the blind. It is beyond words because of the limitations in the mathematical structure of language in relation to the mathematical structure/code of the brain itself (our higher power). Until we can wire our brains together and use the nervous system language to communicate with each other, we will need the much less powerful language to communicate these concepts and therefore will need FP. Our science will explain FP with very different terms and understanding, and will have an effect on the nature of future FP, but it will never replace it or we will be tortured with inflation of language when FP gets the job done much more succinctly. (But I suppose that a society that someday includes many people who can understand the brain will also include new words that revolutionize FP. I don't see how that can be done as of yet.)
Folk psychology may be close to the best understanding of others and ourselves that can be expressed with the limitations of language (in relation to the TRUTH). Writing about the brain at this level starts to take on a feel much like religious writingÉ but it must, because an understanding of the brain must explain the nature of religious experience and why people think or feel they must believe in the various religious explanations of the world and self. When you really understand the brain you really understand that religion is the wrong road to take in looking for the truth. But you must honestly include religious observations and explain them in a new way to pull together any unified theory.
Page 8: "First, FP fails utterly to explain a considerable variety of central psychological phenomena: mental illness, sleep, creativity, memory, intelligence differences, and the many forms of learning, to cite just a few. A true theory should not have such yawning explanatory gaps."
Yes, FP has big gaps in explanation. It is not the brain activity reduced to the basic mathematical elements. When I explain those various phenomena, it will involve much repetition and also in another way appear that I'm using different theories to explain the various aspects of life. That first sentence I just quoted provides a pretty big assignment for me to approach and explain. I'll give it a go but must use some shorthand and not go through the full explanations of these various phenomena. (What I need to explain it is some new form of animation that will have to be developed to make it better understood. I don't have any animation skills but hope to someday work with people that have such abilities to start bringing to light better understanding of how this works.) Some parts of my explanations have already been attempted with other essays I've already written. In all cases the essays interrelate with one another and all explanations in my essays are appropriate as part of the explanations, although some essays bring better explanation to some phenomena than other essays.
Mental Illness: First, look at the following essays written previously that apply to explaining mental illness: What is a brain cell?; Another very big clue; Differences versus Similarities; Hans Selye was on the right track; Look for patterns; Let's face it - some people with outstanding abilities are friggin' weird; Movements of stress; The answer is in math; Factors in the brain are mathematically very much like the evolution of a mud swamp; and Places in the brain that collect stress.
The factors that cause mental illness are the same factors that create all of our characteristics and variety of ability and personality traits. The factors just get out of hand eventually. Every personality trait taken to an extreme becomes a disorder. Your unique stride, way of holding your head, the characteristics of your speechÉ everything is caused by patterns of excitation and inhibition (strengths and weaknesses) all emanating from the nervous system. Limps stay with a person long after the damage has repaired and the pain is gone because patterns imprint on the nervous system. Personality traits form in this way in a very subtle way when young, but become much more pronounced with age because any pattern that is in use is being practiced, and everything becomes better with practice, etched into behavior through repetition. Stresses collect until they express themselves as disorders sometimes.
To understand mental illness you need to understand everything that makes us unique. We all have mental illness. Every child that loses some of that marvelous ability to learn and soak up information with a little bit of age is developing a universal mental illness (the slowness of adulthood compared with early childhood) as the same mechanisms behind that are the same behind all disorders. Old age is not just to be accepted because the cure for developmental disorders is also the cure for age-related short-term memory problems, loss of focus, inflexibility, sleep disordersÉ the list of age-related disorders is the same list of disorders that occur at any age (but age-related disorders are considered acceptable because of being so common).
Stress is a not a chemical event, not a magical accumulation of problems, not a genetically programmed life-clock for life expectancy, not an idea, not evil, not a problem with the physical structure of brain cells or other cells for that matter. Stress is a pattern of changes in the decisions of cells that with the massive numbers of connections in the brain following a particular grouping of mathematical influences are moving in a direction towards greater inhibition and as the changes of sensitivity between inhibition and excitation in nerve cell connections is the language of the brain, any movements away from great flexibility towards inhibition will create flaws in the logic of the brain as well. This takes a long time but inexorably happens with all of us. It can happen with young cells and old cells. It happens faster with damaged cells but the damage is not the stress. The stress is just the software. The stress is the networking of the cells. The hardware can be perfect and still the problems with stress can occur. All extremes increase the stress. Almost all current medication treatments create extremes so therefore treat by increasing stress.
I explain Sleep to some degree in my essay: In answer to a question that was e-mailed to me.
Creativity is the greatest in nervous systems that are inhibited/stressed or in systems that are extremely healthy (especially in children who can quickly pick up information and make connections with little inhibition in their brains and also with the factor that they know relatively little about the world so they make associations between things based on similarities that would be squashed by a learned person with an understanding that some associations must be inhibited as wrong or silly or whatever). Some part of the explanation is several of my essays but a big clue is in: Factors in the brain are mathematically very much like the evolution of a mud swamp. People with inhibited nervous systems have cell networks that bring disperate parts of a thought together and get close to pulling together the right combinations of cells firing but not quite. Therefore mistakes (such as saying a word that is almost right, but not quite, such as a word with one letter wrong or a word that has a similar meaning but not exactly, lead to new ideas and connections and associations and these new ideas can be considered creative. (Creativity is not always good when the person is making mistakes of great scale and without the ability to judge the value of the thoughts/ideas as with retardation or schizophrenia.)
Look also to my essays: Switchboard example and The brain works from the infinite to the specific rather than from nothing to something. When the pattern of thought is to work from the general to the specific by controlling the inhibition of the cell firings, but the brain has too much sensitivity to inhibition, then the brain will not be as able to use as much hormonal control (general chemical control) as a focus mechanism because sensitive cellular events that are close to being changed from yes decisions to no decisions will stop a thought from completing if the hormonal focus mechanisms are used. So the brain must operate at a higher general level of excitation to complete thoughts in a logical way. This leads to the hyperactivity and the creativity and therefore the shifting focus found in ADD/ADHD. Thus is created the paradox of the more active person with an inhibited brain. (Unfortunately the medication treatments for ADD create a constant focus change the excites many cellular events and inhibits others, as all medication influences do. Other problems occur with the medication which are too complicated to write about at this time.)
Almost everything I have written is also talking about Memory. Patterns in the brain that are changed and develop are memories. As I said before, every cell has a small piece of the consciousness, and every connection between cells along with every development of sensitivity causing either greater excitation of greater inhibition is a memory as well. It is all memory. Some confusion about memory being located in a part or parts of the brain are discussed in my essay: A change in perception that explains the problem with a common kind of assumption.
Intelligence Differences I just explained somewhat in my explanations about mental illness being caused by the same mechanisms that cause our various characteristics. (The variety of inhibitions in the cell networks and the differences in where that stress may reside from brain to brain. The Many Forms of Learning is the same thing too. Brains develop with different pathways for the easiest firings concerning the inputs they get. If you have inhibition in your visual processing regions, then you might be better at learning with your auditory regions as dominant. If you have a generally stressed brain (read: Places in the brain that collect stress) then you will have a greater likelihood of not being as good at language and focus and then might need kinesthetic inputs (kinesthetic processing is not as likely to be stressed as language/auditory) to learn or need to be in a great mood of excitement to learn. (Because too much yes might flip to no - read: Another very big clue - then way too much excitement might make the problem worse instead of better.)
I only got through one page of the Churchland book in this entry. I left out a lot because many subjects were broached in that page and each subject needs a book or more to explain. But I think I gave a sense that my theory can offer explanations for phenomena that Churchland listed in the quote above.
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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.
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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.
