The Unified Theory of the Nervous System
and Behavior
Cognitive Philosophy /Brain Theory by Steven Michael Harris
I really like the mention of the William James idea that "consciousness is not a thing but a process" that is in the first paragraph. It is a process of cells reacting according to some mathematical rules that creates an emergent intelligence of pattern recognition about any subject matter that is engaged.
In the third paragraph the question of "How to explain mental events as being caused by the firing of large sets of neurons?" is followed by "Radically new concepts may indeed be needed."
Take a look here folks. I'm offering radically new concept. (Many of them if you look at it another way.)
Or does the establishment of medicine mean that they will consider "radically new concepts" only when they are not so radical as to appear out of alignment with protocol or out of alignment with the "chemistry controls function" paradigm of the current dogma or too destructive to the hierarchy of "authorities" in the various fields.
They then write about possible approaches to understanding consciousness: "Some psychologists feel that any satisfactory theory should try to explain as many aspects of consciousness as possible, including emotion, imagination, dreams, mystical experiences and so on." I have already explained, or I'm about to explain, all of these and many, many more. But the authors insist on the small focus specialization of medicine as being the only road to understanding when they say they decided to approach the problem by studying mammalian visual systems. So they don't really look for a theory that explains "emotion, imagination, dreams," etc., but want to find a theory of emotion alone and let somebody else find a theory of imagination or of visual experience and then hope these theories bring something together.
You must solve the big problem before you solve the little problems. The so-called "hard problems" of neuroscience are no more difficult to solve than the so-called "easy problems" because the same answer is involved in all of these problems.
Later they write: "We did not attempt to define consciousness itself because of the dangers of premature definition." Throughout this article there are examples of a bias of how to think of consciousness that in effect imply some definition, and these definitions are wrong. Let me look for some examples.
"Ray Jackendoff of Brandeis University postulates, as do most cognitive scientists, that the computations carried out by the brain are largely unconscious and that what we become aware of is the result of these computations. But while the customary view is that this awareness occurs at the highest levels of the computational system, Jackendoff has proposed an intermediate-level theory of consciousness."
In this example they are defining consciousness by saying, in effect, that consciousness does not exist in subconscious or unconscious thinking. They probably don't have a sense of how much of their bias in thinking about consciousness is that of a kind of thinking that is verbal, in words and symbols, and not in other kinds of thinking. (Remember that it is the part of their brain that deals with language that does all of their "thinking" and "talking" and "writing" for them, and this part of the brain only really knows language-based thought.) Better answers will come by thinking of consciousness as what the brain creates, in its many forms, higher and lower, language and instict, and not thinking of consciousness as one aspect of what the brain creates. (And if you must fall into that trap of thinking of consciousness as one kind of mental state, how can you pin down what state your consciousness is because there are so many different states possible that might fit into your consciousness: states of verbal or visual thought or intense concentration on something nearby or intense concentration with looking to memory or different emotional states and different levels of focus, or different kinds of thinking when about different subject matter... it goes on almost forever.)
That statement that "what we become aware of is the result of these computations " also implies that information moves from place to place in the mind, another fallacy. Our experience of thought is as much in the lower processing centers or the cells at the periphery of the system as it is in the so-called higher processing centers of the brain dealing more with language. This idea that information leaves some part of the brain to be dealt with in another part creates a very real problem in being able to conceptualize what is really happening, especially in understanding the nature and cause of qualia.
Our understanding is not "at the highest levels of the computational system" any more than it is at the lowest. Each cell has its proportional part of the experience (understanding is an experience) relative to its portion of the number of cells firing at any time. A cell might have more influence on more cells due to its place in the network at a particular time, but the cell has an equal part of the experience to all the other cells. This idea that thought moves into a particular part of the brain leads, philosophically, to the concept that thought is something that is projected from place to place and leads eventually to the homunculus concept.
"First, there is the representation of a face as a face: two eyes, a nose, a mouth and so on. The neurons involved are usually not too fussy about the exact size or position of this face in the visual field, nor are they very sensitive to small changes in its orientation."
The neurons they are talking about are a small number of neurons that have been identified statistically as firing in a more active pattern when specific subject matter is experienced. They could be writing about as few as four or five neurons that they claim are recognizing and responding to something as complicated as a nose in the visual field. How could a handful of neurons compute understanding of any kind? Millions must be involved for that portion of understanding going all the way to the eye. Granted that a small number or neurons, if damaged, would have a greater amount of influence on the success of that portion of understanding because that damage would interrupt the greatest number of pathways connecting the various parts of that processing. It is the greatest amount of intersection of processing that they are finding when they identify these regions of control as they call them, and it is not the processing itself that is in these locations (but only a very small part of that processing). And remember that these neurons are identified because of correlations of higher statistical levels of frequency in response to some stimulus. These cells are still firing when such subject matter is not present. These cells are active as a part of many other decisions. And some cells stop firing completely or statistically fire less during the same events. Could the portion of the processing control carried out by saying "no," by reducing frequency be just as important to the overall processing event? (Yes!) An important component of a processing event could happen at very small scale of time so that a portion of the calculation might happen and be influential in a decision at such a small unit of time as to be impossible to measure in terms of frequency.
Describing the neurons as "fussy" also implies a much greater amount of intelligence than is possible in a single neuron. An act of fussiness is a complicated intellectual and emotional state that requires a complicated behavior in a fairly advanced life-form. This might seem like nitpicking but innocent writing with such variations of language to keep the reader interested might also serve to project a concept that is wrong through subtle imagery.
"What we are aware of at any moment, in one sense or another, is not a simple matter. We have suggested that there may be a very transient form of fleeting awareness that represents only rather simple features and does not require an attentional mechanism. From this brief awareness the brain constructs a viewer-centered representation---what we see vividly and clearly---that does require attention. This in turn probably leads to three-dimensional object representations and thence to more cognitive ones."
Here they present some of the evidence for the answers but then, in the same paragraph, explain this evidence in a way that discards the real answer. What they call attention to is askew from what the real mechanisms of attention are. (This topic requires a bit more time and buildup than I'm prepared for in this website as of yet.) The evidence that smaller subsets of the brain might deal with a part of a face is then turned to language saying the brain constructs a representation (with the implication that this is projected to another region of the brain) and the word "leads" is still being used to suggest a movement of information as if the part of the brain claimed to be dealing with the nose moves that information to another part receives a more complicated grouping of information when the truth is that the parts dealing with the nose keep the nose there and this part of the nose processing does not exist in any other part of the brain. (But the real breakthrough in understanding comes from going much smaller than the nose in understanding to the smaller units of processingÉ it comes from going to the basic units of pleasure and pain occurring in each cell.) The nose representation in the brain is a subset of a large calculation, the large calculation that is the sum of experience for that organism. All that is happening in the brain is math and removal of a subset of a calculation always changes the greater whole of the rest of the calculation, and, conversely, once the subset of the calculation exists, it does not need to move to another part of the calculation in order to still be a factor, no matter how large that greater calculation is.
And the calculations occurring at the "higher levels of processing" have an effect on the calculations at the "lower levels" closer to the sensory inputs because all processing goes both ways to some greater or lesser extent. (Cells create connections to other cells firing in synchronicity only because a colony of such cells creates the greatest good for each cell, as well as for the colony as a whole or organism as a whole, when the other cells are creating connections to a particular cell when synchronous thus creating the most likelihood of increased synchronous input to foster the most excitation occuring at certain frequencies.)
"William James thought that consciousness involved both attention and short-term memory. Most psychologists today would agree with this view. Jackendoff writes that consciousness is 'enriched' by attention, implying that whereas attention may not be essential for certain limited types of consciousness, it is necessary for full consciousness. Yet it is not clear exactly which forms of memory are involved. Is long-term memory needed? Some forms of acquired knowledge are so embedded in the machinery of neural processing that they are almost certainly part of the process of becoming aware of something. On the other hand, there is evidence from studies of brain-damaged patients that the ability to lay down new long-term episodic memories is not essential for consciousness to be experienced."
Once again small aspects of the range of experience possible in consciousness are factored as major components of (a subset in reality) of consciousness, and thus a form of defining the nature of consciousness is taking place (in an article that claims to avoid premature definitions of consciousness). The factors behind attention are too complicated for this essay, but I must say that the word "attention" in regards to discussing brain processes will have to be redefined and perhaps more than one word will be necessary to describe different aspects of the realm of function that is discussed in current discourse on that subject.
Of course memory is involved because memory is involved in everything. Neuroscientists talk about memory as if it is a function that only exists in a module of the brain but memory is in every cell and every connection. Every synapse that adjusts in sensitivity to activity by changing the numbers of receptors or every cell that creates new connections and severs others or every fiber that adjusts connectivity closer to the nucleus or changes in size is involved in memory. All of these changes are memories of activity that has occurred before and a part of the memory (and once again the confusion comes from observing where signals converge as the location of function).
The basic sense of vision could not occur without memory, for instance, because an object that has been seen before is a very different image than one that has never been experienced before. The baby does not see the way an adult sees. The patterns in the visual field have not been sorted out much yet, so that vision is very different. It is memory that makes this vision eventually make sense.
Observing brain-damaged patients is not going to isolate consciousness because consciousness is the sum of the parts of brain activity, no matter what the capabilities of that nervous system might be. The only patient that is not experiencing some form of consciousness is the dead one.
In the next paragraph they write about iconic memory or working memory (very short-term and short-term memory) as if the various types of memory are functions that exist in different modules in the brain. Big mistakes are involved in the way memory is discussed in these circles. I'll have to flesh out a good deal more theory before I can be clear about these effects of the brain.
They then go on to ask that if the process of visual awareness is located in parts of the brain (one of the few occasions when some doubt is raised that a function might not be located somewhere), where might it be? But in the next sentence they say that "it is almost certain that the cerebral neocortex plays dominant role" so they write as if it is located in that center of the brain. This flip-flopping from doubt to confidence on the same issue without proof in the same paragraph is curious. The problem is that the language of medicine needs to save time by avoiding all the disclaimers of doubt about a wide range of topics. But this time-saving rhetoric also implies unproven theory.
"It is well known that if the corpus callosum is cut in a split-brain operation, as is done for certain cases of intractable epilepsy, one side of the brain is not aware of what the other side is seeing. In particular, the left side of the brain (in a right-handed person) appears not to be aware of visual information received exclusively by the right side. This shows that none of the information required for visual awareness can reach the other side of the brain by traveling down to the brain stem and, from there, back up. In a normal person, such information can get to the other side only by using the axons in the corpus callosum."
Once again the idea that information travels from place to place is expressed in this quote. It is better to say that a subset of the calculations is separated from another subset of calculations taking place in the brain. The information from one side of the corpus callosum in a healthy person never moves to the other side... it stays there. Without the corpus callosum the various information on either side is no longer coordinated together and the mathematical patterns that could be identified as occurring on both sides may no longer be identified. Confusions about this will abound by the fact that the language center of the brain (the part that allows me to write this essay) is relegated to one side of the brain and therefore any language expression of what is happening will not easily include information that resides in the other side.
The next suggestion that episodic memories reside in the hippocampal system and then move to the neocortex as long-term memory is an illusion created by factors much too complicated to illustrate at this time.
"Visual awareness is highly unlikely to occupy all the neurons in the neocortex that are firing above their background rate at a particular moment. We would expect that, theoretically, at least some of these neurons would be involved in doing computations---trying to arrive at the best coalitions---whereas others would express the results of these computations, in other words, what we see."
Just because the easiest patterns to chart for statistical changes in a pattern of firing are those that are above the background rate of a particular moment using the crude methods of looking at the nervous system that are available today, this does not mean that all meaningful nervous system processing is to be found in above-average background rates. The language of the nervous system has meaning in the computations that are below average in background rate and a cell can have an effect on a decision in a moment that is beyond measurement using analysis according to frequencies.
The statement that other neurons "would express the results" of the computations of other cells, "in other words, what we see" is to imply a cartesian theater where the vision is passed to another part of the brain. This is not the case. Part of the vision experience is in the eye and close to it, and other parts of the experience, of the calculation, are in other parts considered as locations of "higher thinking."
Later some writing about the blind spot brings up the writing of Daniel C. Dennett:
"In his 1991 book, Consciousness Explained, he argues that it is wrong to talk about filling in. He concludes, correctly, that 'an absence of information is not the same as information about an absence.' From this general principle he argues that the brain does not fill in the blind spot but rather ignores it."
Both explanations are wrong. A massive amount of portions of brain calculation that is involved in vision is the projecting of seen patterns into a three-dimensional model of the world that is out there. Memory is involved with every seen entity that can be identified for what it is and what it's visual properties are. A strange darkened shape will be understood for what it is and "seen" with much more awareness of its properties than are actually given in the conditions of light. This is a form of filling in, I guess. But with the blind spot the saccading eyes and the the binocular perspective that provides information about that blind part of one eye's visual field by the other eye all provide the needed information for the more complicated computations that provide the model of the world at that moment. A missing region of vision in the eye is such a small percentage of all the processing that is going on that it is hardly noticable. (In effect, every part of the visual field that is not in the center of vision - all of the peripheral vision, especially the furthest reaches of the peripheral - is a blind spot. The movement of the eye and they way the brain makes sense of this moving point of view is what creates the illusion that everything in sight is vivid.)
In this article there are several more repetitions of various mistakes in perception and explanation like the ones I've quoted. (These problems are ingrained into the language of medicine so much that they have lost the ability to see the flaws in the language they use to explain these data.) The assumptions are taken to another level of theory and the assumptions are wrong and the mistaken notions are rampant as this article comes to a close.
"We believe that once we have mastered the secret of this simple [visual] form of awareness, we may be close to understanding a central mystery of human life: how the physical events occurring in our brains while we think and act in the world relate to our subjective sensations---that is, how the brain relates to the mind."
The big mistake in this quote is the idea that by taking unproven assumptions and using them to focus a study on a very small area of specialization where the mistaken biases of current jargon (the wrong paradigm) are applied to that specialized study, you will be able to see the answers to the big question: What is mind? This is a forest that you can't see by looking at a single tree. It is too complicated. The way to see it is to throw out all unproven assumptions (by having the strength and willingness to figure out what is proven and not proven) and then to take all of the information and look for patterns that have not been seen before, realizing that statistics is a terrible method for discovering anything about the real nature of the brain (although it has provided a lot of clues that are very useful).
In the postscript:
"It now seems likely that there are rapid 'online' systems for stereotyped motor responses such as hand and eye movement. These systems are unconscious and lack memory. Conscious seeing, on the other hand, seems to be slower and more subject to visual illusions. The brain needs to form a conscious representation of the visual scene that it can then employ for many different actions or thoughts.
"Why is consciousness needed?"
In this excerpt there seems to be a different subject matter for the word conscious (the subject of focus, in a sense) and then the word "consciousness" is thrown in talking about the whole ball of wax of the experience of thinking as if they are defining the word as the property of focus. (A bad implication for understanding.)
Then there is some writing suggesting that consciousness is a slower form of thinking to allow time for context of information to be digested. (Another definition by implication that is wrong.) The last paragraph takes this further suggesting that some experimental evidence shows that "primates are not directly aware of what is happening in the primary visual cortex, even though most of the visual information flows through it." This is the seed of an explanation of consciousness as something that only occurs in humans or very few life forms and is just a relic of religious bias (and language bias) that humans operate with a consciousness that has no representation in other life forms.
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