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The Unified Theory of the Nervous System
and Behavior

Cognitive Philosophy /Brain Theory by Steven Michael Harris

Comments on the Scientific American issue of August 2002 titled The Hidden Mind - Article: How the Brain Creates the Mind by Antonio R. Damasio

The first sentence of the article:

"At the start of the new millennium, it is apparent that one question towers above all others in life sciences: How does the set of processes we call mind emerge from the activity of the organ we call brain?"

That is the question that I am answering in this website. That is the question that most theories of brain don't even come close to explaining. That is the question that struts out into the territory of sociology and psychiatry and history and evolutionary science and philosophy and religion and medicine. It is not an easy question, but, more to the point, it is not an easy answer. You can ask the question in one sentence. I'll be answering it for years with every essay I write.

In the next paragraph of the article: "More may have been learned about the brain and the mind in the 1990's---the so-called decade of the brain---than during the entire previous history of psychology and neuro-science." This statement will seem prophetic when it is eventually discovered how much I discovered at the tail end of the 1990's and how little of what I discovered has been put into print as of yet.

It is nice to start out agreeing with Damasio on various points. Especially with his belief that the problems can be solved and that the discovery of how consciousness can be generated from the nervous system is out there to be found. (He may not believe it is out there to be found by me - by somebody who is not a doctor and who has no college degrees because I doubt that I will be able to get any time with him to show my theories of how the system works.)

"The final negative contention is the reminder that elucidating the emergence of the conscious mind depends on the existence of that same conscious mind. Conducting an investigation with the very instrument being investigated makes both the definition of the problem and the approach to a solution especially complicated. Given the conflict between observer and observed, we are told, the human intellect is unlikely to be up to the task of comprehending how mind emerges from brain. This conflict is real, but the notion that it is insurmountable is inaccurate."

Bravo to Damasio. There are other problems with trying to understand these things that have never been considered by Damasio (as far as I can tell). When I write about the kind of mathematics that is used by the brain I'm getting into this. The problems with perceiving concepts that explode into many dimensions using a two-dimensional system of discourse is a major obstacle.

Damasio digs a hole for his argument when he starts looking into a lack of understanding of physics as the problem getting us to understand how consciousness is emergent from brain activity. No new physics knowledge is needed. It is not a problem of physics (although there might be some physics involved in deciphering how the basic units of pleasure and pain can be produced in the single cell). It is a problem of mathematics and logic that is needed to solve this mystery.

The idea that quantum physics is needed to explain the mind is something I find ridiculous. The same for genetic controls being involved in separate decisions. The mathematics of how brain cells fire is consistent down to the dendrites and axons and the synapses. The tendency for a cell to fire depends on the amount of firing that has occurred in the past. Changes in the numbers of receptors in the synapses and changes in the connectivity occur in response according to the amount of firing activity that has occurred in a cell and other cells that are connected or firing in synchronicity. These rules due not change according to some "decision" that is happening genetically or in microtubules within the cells so no mind can be effecting function or decision-making at a level smaller than the cell (axons, dendrites and synaptic changes). The microtubules will be found to have some purpose for making the cell what it is, but they will not be included in the mind or in the mathematics of function.

Damasio writes: "The quantum level of operations might help explain how we have a mind, but I regard it as unnecessary to explain how we know that we own that mind---the issue I regard as most critical for a comprehensive account of consciousness." I say that quantum operations will explain nothing of importance in this subject matter. I find his idea that how we know that we own a mind is a factor of consciousness is just a matter of language bias (as you can only say you know you have a mind if you have a word for the mind or carry a concept of the mind in your thought) so you can make a claim that other animals do not have consciousness or a strange idea that higher levels of knowledge go beyond just function. This is almost like saying that a higher level of philosophical explanation is needed for the bear that can ride a bicycle on a tight-wire over the other bear who can only ride the bicycle. This defining of consciousness as a certain form of thinking and focus rather than realizing that consciousness can take many forms -complex and simple - and is the product of all nervous systems (in all life forms with nervous systems) will get in the way of finding the real answers and understanding how our experiences and function are the product of many smaller units of experience interacting as a connected community. The function of the brain does not magically create our mind from nothing and the brain does not project our thoughts out of our body like a radio. The mind is an emergent property from the activity of smaller units of thought and function occurring at the cellular level.

He is also careful not to call the pessimists on the religious basis of their concept that understanding the mind is beyond the mind of man. There is a great deal of conflict with religion when you start to really understand how the mind emerges from the interactions of the cells. Much like it is impossible to think of a circle being a square (two conflicting concepts applied to one subject matter) it is impossible to understand how the mind is emergent from the nervous system while still holding onto a number of religious concepts (for instance the idea of mind or soul being something outside of the body or something that survives the body after death, but many other much more subtle conflicts created by beliefs are just as important).

But Damasio is right on the mark when he says "that the private, personal mind, precious and unique, indeed is biological and will one day be described in terms both biological and mental." And that is what I'm trying to do with my writings.

He goes on to show a variety of examples of how parts of thinking can be found in different parts of the brain. There is a great deal of evidence here that the unity of thought is not a unity at all but many small parts of experience and thought and processing occurring in different parts of the brain creating an illusion of unity. He writes with confidence about the many regions that control various functions although he should not make these claims. These regions have a high degree of statistical relationship to those various functions but they don't control those functions alone. Any part of the brain that fires in synchronicity with a particular event or, when damaged, causes that function to stop working is not the only factor in that function but could be a place where the greatest amount of intersection of the cells involved in that function takes place (as I've written about in an earlier essay).

He writes: "But the skeptics will still find it difficult to accept that the second part of the conscious-mind problem---the emergence of a sense of self---can be solved at all." Come on! The sense of self is just another mathematical calculation of any brain as is the mathematical calculations of the visual field to make vision possible. Any animal can calculate that it has greater control of the movement of its own body parts through thought or intention than it has control of moving that rock over there. Any animal can calculate that dropping that rock on its own foot will hurt much more than dropping it on that plant. We may both be members of the same species and I may love you dearly but your pain is very different than my pain and any animal can sense such. The calculation that my parts feel for me and that the rest of the world does not feel for me or react to my thinking is just a calculation like any in the brain and does not need to imply the existence of a homunculus. The words "I" or "me" are just representations of a different calculation or subject matter than other words that have their own calculations.

Damasio is onto something quite good when he writes: "Brain cells are assigned by design to be about other things and other doings. They are born cartographers of the geography of an organism and of the events that take place within that geography." ..."evolution has crafted a brain that is in the business of directly representing the organism and indirectly representing whatever the organism interacts with."

But he goes on with his hypothesis suggesting "that the brain uses structures designed to map both the organism and external objects to create a fresh, second-order representation. This representation indicates that the organism, as mapped in the brain, is involved in interacting with an object, also mapped in the brain. The second-order representation is no abstraction; it occurs in neural structures such as the thalamus and the cingulate cortices."

His hypothesis is wrong. It is wrong because he keeps making the mistake to think that different regions of the brain do different things. He has not figured out how to break what is happening down to the basic units. But the mathematics of the brain does create a model of the world - a representation that is like a massive sculpture that is in many dimensions - so that the movie in the mind can be created not by bringing up a tape of an event happening that is stored somehow in the brain but by illuminating this ever-changing model of the world so that the movement of the "illumination" of cells firing over this model of the world (moving over the calculations of memory that are in every part of the nervous system to some degree) creates the illusion of a moving picture in the mind.

And he is right in that the wonder of the mind will survive explanation. The wonder is even greater when you really understand it.

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