The Unified Theory of the Nervous System
and Behavior
Cognitive Philosophy /Brain Theory by Steven Michael Harris
Page 8: "Second, FP has not progressed significantly in at least 2500 years. The Greeks appear to have used essentially the same framework that we deploy. If anything, FP has been in steady retreat during this period, as intentional explanations have been withdrawn from yet one domain after another - from the heavenly bodies, from the wind and the sea, from a plethora of minor gods and spirits, from the visitation of disease, and so forth."
Page 9: "To the second complaint, it is replied that folk psychology has indeed changed somewhat over the centuries, although its approximate truth has never required of it more than minor adjustments. And to the third complaint there are voiced a number of tertiam quids - proposed alternatives to the stark choice, 'Either reduce FP, or eliminate it.'"
Folk psychology is not the only realm that will need to retreat from bringing in religion. Basic problems occur in regard to that topic in western medicine of all forms as well, but in subtle ways in many cases. The social requirement of humility as a positive characteristic, even when it requires dishonesty, will not help in honest approaches to certain situations. The regard for status and title as opposed to ideas is a problem as well. I'm getting personal in this paragraph, but I'm forced into it. Any social constraint on honesty that arises out of social rules of this sort (that originate in religious teachings) will cause problems.
But an honest approach to finding the neurological reasons for such thinking is valuable. Why is it so common for man to defer to a belief in higher intelligences? And so to claim weakness as a virtue? I get into this topic in a subsequent essay I've written.
Look for the patterns that can be found in FP and found in all types of behavior and thought. This is where a bounty of insight can be found if you can see the patterns.
FP is not a language that gives the answers. It is a language that gives the evidence for finding the answers.
10: "However, it must be noted that, according to the most fertile theoretical accounts currently under exploration in computational neuroscience (Anderson and Rosenfeld 1988; P.S. Churchland and Sejnowski 1992), the basic unit of occurrent cognition is apparently not the sentence-like state, but rather the high-dimensional neuronal activation vector (that is, a pattern of excitation levels across a large population of neurons). And the basic unit of cognitive processing is apparently not the inference from sentence to sentence, but rather the synapse-induced transformation of large activation vectors into other such vectors. It is not certain that such accounts of cognition are true, nor even if they are, that FP will fail to find some reduction thereto. But recent science already suggests that Jones's linguaformal theory - folk psychology - fails utterly to capture the basic kinematics and dynamics of human and animal cognition."
I've already written about some of my ideas about the basic units of cognition. I don't think the basic unit is a pattern of excitation across large populations of neurons. The basic unit is in each neuron. The relationships of each neuron forms a system with many kinds of bigger units of cognition possible as the cells arrange themselves through communication. This idea of large populations creating the basis for computation could serve to show ways for the computational process of the brain but does not supply any reasoning to explain the qualia of experience.
By the way, I love the way that Churchland cites the "most fertile theoretical accounts under exploration" with references to works written by himself. I must admit that I'm doing the same but I'm admitting my bias for my own work. This paragraph is a bit sneakier.
Page 10: "Some play down the predictive and explanatory role of FP, and focus attention instead on the many social activities conducted with its vocabulary, such as promising, greeting, joking, threatening, congratulating, insulting, reassuring, inviting, provoking, sympathizing, questioning, demanding, cajoling, sniping, offering, advising, directing, confiding, and so forth (Wilkes 1981, 1984). On this view, FP is less an empirical theory than an intricate social practice, one in which all normal humans learn to participate (see also Putnam 1988). A supporting consideration is the clearly normative character of many of the so-called laws of FP, a feature at odds with the presumably descriptive character of any empirical theory. And if FP is not a theory, then there is no danger that it might be false and hence no question of its being eliminated."
True, FP is a social practice. But all languages of science and medicine are also social practices, right or wrong as they might be. Confidence in the validity of a theory for some time will etch that theory into social practice long after the theory is proven of little value. The word "ego" survives in common social language now that Freudian ideas have lost theoretical cachet. Today's theoretical invention will form a piece of tomorrow's FP or tomorrow's social language. Let's admit that the official world of science and medicine and philosophy is just a social construct as well. But then Churchland goes on to say what I just said in the next paragraph. (I hadn't read it when I started this paragraph.)
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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.
