Untitled Document

The Unified Theory of the Nervous System
and Behavior

Cognitive Philosophy /Brain Theory by Steven Michael Harris

Communications With That Neuroscientist - Part 2

My comments on Marvin Minsky's new book in progress - The Emotion Machine continue here. (The Emotion Machine - he invites commentary on the book - and is linked at http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/)

Me (Sunday, January 25, 2004 2:08 PM)

Dr. Minsky,

You write: “Of course, evolution selects only things that can happen. It is not in opposition to physics, but a consequence of physics.”

The problem in what is being said here is the conception of how much control occurs as a direct result of the information in genetics. The “things” you appear to be writing about here are the subsystems of the nervous system the various modules and/or areas of specialty or results in behavior or function. The complexity of the nervous system and the specific behaviors are assumed as being totally under the instructions from genetics, as if there is a map of the nervous system somewhere in those subtle changes in the timing and volume of proteins.

Suggesting that my argument is undermined by the observations of The Baldwin Effect is handing too much credit to that mathematical explanation of various problems concerning the nervous system appearing to be both determined (genetically) and therefore rigid and specialized and appearing to be plastic and flexible as well. It is a theory. I have a better explanation for the observations that are supposed to be explained by that theory - using the application of my theory.

The nervous system is not created and organized by genetics even though subtle genetic changes will have an effect on the nervous system being different in different species. The nervous system is a mathematical system that makes sense of the body it is attached too, automatically. It is a mathematical system that is designed to create the greatest good for the whole, the greatest balance and health, at every moment, but every moment is different because the calculations creating the greatest health are also computing the nature of the world in and out of the body, which is in constant change. Therefore the body learns.

There is a law that should be mentioned here. “Learning” equals “development” and/or “growth.” They are the same thing. Your learning is the changes in your body that occur with the variety of life. The body grows as a consequence of “learning” from the first moments of fertilization. Once the nervous system starts firing, the nervous system is having the greatest influence on the direction the body is taking in every adjustment of growth and function, causing the change with greater and greater proportional influence than genetics as life goes on. The older you get, the more your experience has effect on what you are compared to genetics (the start, mostly). You can say that learning occurs in a plant as a stake driven through the center of a tree will cause the tree to grow around that intrusion it “learns” to adjust the growth according to the environment. The same thing happens with any animated body, but the nervous system greatly changes the scale of time involved.

There appears to be another parallel factor that is in partnership with the theory of entropy that all systems will tend to go from greater plasticity to greater rigidity. This is a great factor in the accumulated mathematics of the firing and organizing of nerve systems. For this reason, my theory - that nerve cells organize according to mathematical factors that lead to the greatest amount of time possible firing at a desired (through mathematical factors) frequency also gives an explanation for an ever greater tendency to change from greater plasticity to greater specialization and rigidity.

We should go back to my metaphor of the rock being pushed from the pinnacle of a mountain:

If the exact same push of that rock down the side of the mountain always brings the exact same result of the rock ending up at a certain spot at the bottom, then a very subtle change in that push will create a bigger change at the bottom (although a relatively small change considering the much greater area of difference surrounding the mountain than the difference at the top. If you give credit to the push creating the entire path of that boulder getting to the bottom, you are giving too much credit to that push. The nature of the push definitely affects the variety of resting places at the bottom, but that same push on a level surface would only move the rock several inches. The push determined the resting spot, but gravity (and the laws of colliding bodies and frictionÉ) caused the journey to be as it was.

What determines the various nervous systems to appear to map out consistently with functions and systems appearing to be located in the same configuration is not the result of genetics (directly). It is a result of the repeating mathematical principles of the nervous system responding to the signals coming from within and without the body and making adjustments (using the same mathematical principles) to create changes in connectivity and changes in the growth of the body that keep this accumulative increase of ability and memory happening until the mathematical inhibitory factors (that I’ve written about in various ways already on my website) start to retard the development (maturity). You have to examine this with a lot of thought the operation of the nervous system as it has happened in the past is what determines what it will be (structurally) in the future and is what determines what the majority of the body will be as a result as well. The learning occurring in the nervous system creates what appears to be intelligent design (attributed to God or evolution) because the form of math that the nervous system uses is a kind of higher intelligence (not restricted to limited dimensions as our language is). This intelligence of the way nervous systems seek patterns and connectivity that creates an emergent mathematics that takes a repeating event and applies it to almost unlimited dimensions (different problems, functions, subject matterÉ) makes for a constant pattern recognition and constant learning by association (another way of saying the same thing). The brain wires itself consistently in the intricate way that it does, not through genetic instruction (the “push”) but through the consistent nature of the different realms of information as approached by this system (which is a consistent mathematical system as well).

You give this mathematical system (the various mathematical principals behind changing connectivity of signal, inhibitions of connections, changes in strength and voting influence of signals) to a body to grow and the nervous system will grow it the best way it can. Give this system the same “push down the hill” (same genetics) and you will end up with pretty much the same body and brain at the end (with changes resulting from different experiences, the differences in experience being a much smaller proportion of experiences compared to the experiences that are the same). And this body will grow according to the principles of what the parts of the nervous system are “seeking.” The nervous system is an algorithm that seeks patterns for pleasure. Repeating patterns give it “pleasure” in a sense. Thus it seeks a symmetrical form of the body because that increases the repeating patterns of firing in mirrored sections of the brain that result. The brain that is in the mature animal is a result of the learning and function of the brain that existed at the earliest periods of development a body following a very different form and logic (as if it is the body of a very different animal in some respects). The end result is just the “evolution” of the logic of the nervous system that occurs from conception until death.

Parts of the brain that don’t appear to be “plastic” are not specialized and rigid (supposedly predetermined by genetics) but are less flexible because they are dealing with a pattern that is often multiplied and repeated so therefore the structure of the network of cells most related to that pattern and most strongly developed in signal intensity and growth and connectivity related to that pattern. The learning of a constant and unambiguous pattern results in less flexibility for that network to change into a cell dealing with a different kind of information. Parts of the brain that don’t deal with consistent and predictable information will be more “plastic.” A lot will need to be discussed about the way this system deals with logic to show the variety of characteristics of the nervous system that will arise from the possibilities created by this system.

You write: “Those effects are far less complete and functional than the press has said.” (About the transferred sections of brain taking on new function.)

And write: “As I said, that plasticity is overrated, and has not been shown to be very general. Only cells from closely related cell lines have been seen to take over similar functions.”

The system evolves from greater plasticity to greater specialization and rigidity as a law. (You must admit that stem cells are pretty darn “plastic.”)

You write: “As I said, I think qualia are descriptions that some parts of the brain make about what happens in some other parts.”

This explanation leaves a lot of holes. When you write that parts of the brain are “describing” or “talking” to each other, as your explanation of qualia, there is a bit of anthropomorphism and homunculus in this explanation. What does “talking” mean in a part of the nervous system, really? How does it do it? What similarities in the nature of how different senses and functions are handled can be explained by your explanation? What differences are explained by your explanation? How does this inform about how qualia comes about? Is there any explanation in this about the nature of what is happening in the basic unit of brain processing (the firing of a single cell)? What other phenomena is explained as a result of your explanation? (I don’t see any, but I see many that are concurrently explained by my theory.) Is this idea - that qualia is the describing between parts of the brain - something that is testable? (I can think of ways to test my ideas.)

You referred to your Society of Mind book. I enjoyed it a lot when I read it years ago. Your writing is very rich with topics that need to be discussed (the same with your work in progress). You ask a lot of questions that need to be asked in your writing (without necessarily offering answers to them though). You explore concepts and theories that are in conflict with each other but that should be examined (in an egalitarian approach). Your writing brings up a lot of my commentary that I need to get into in order to apply what is learned from my theory in approaching the problems that you bring up. Debating those ideas takes a lot of writing on my part.

My plate is full at this time with living out of my car as I travel across the south doing speaking presentations. I’ll write what I can when I get a break as I’m getting today.

I can answer the questions you pose in your writing with my theory. There is a lot to explain. You ask too many questions in your writing (some answers take a lot of explanation.) You give me a lot of homework if I am to comment on your new book.

Some comments about the beginning of your new book:

In your first chapters on love you make the case for portions of my argument when I write that the entire algorithm of the nervous system is an application of pleasure/pain to subject matter by your observation that love can be for anything a person, objects, events, beliefs.

The same for the other emotions that you cite ('pleasure', 'anger', 'fear' or 'pain') that can also be reduced to basic emotions of pleasure or pain applied to subject matter or the body.

You write: “Still, one thing seems common to every such change: In each of our different emotional states, we find ourselves thinking in different ways—in which our minds get directed toward different concerns, and with different descriptions of what we perceive.”

And: “When a person you know has fallen in love, it's almost as though someone new has emerged—a person who thinks in other ways, with altered goals and priorities. It's almost as though a switch had been thrown, and a different program has started to run.”

Both statements are further argument for my theory. An algorithm that uses a goal of pleasure and pain as the basis for all processing of information will have that logic affected/changed if the overall calculations of pleasure/pain in the entire network (the emotional state of the organism) are different. Reciprocal connections will cause changes in higher processing (emotion, executive decisions) to cause change in the nature of lower processing (the nature of how things look, smell of how different functions operate effectively or not).

You write: “What could cause so dramatic a change? What makes our minds keep switching around? What happens inside a person's brain, to cause such a transformation? This book will argue that when we change what we commonly call our ‘emotional states,’ we’re switching between different “Ways to Think.” For some of these, our language has names—such as ‘suffering, 'anger', 'fear' or 'pain'—but others are harder to classify.”

My explanation that the brain operates according to a networking of pattern-seeking with pleasure/pain being the basic unit of experience completely explains the questions you ask here. And explains it much more simply. There are lots of explanations that are not included in your “different ways to think.” Of course those are different ways to think, but what is the mechanism behind it. Blank spots are in your explanations about this. (I will show that different choices different calculations will highlight different portions of the subject matter, a mechanism of focus, and that will be one aspect of different ways to think. This is a broad topic and is behind a lot of different phenomena.)

I would think that if the brain “evolved” these different ways to think for advantage, there would be much more control over which ways to think as a choice for the best processing. That does not exist in these systems. That is because the “way to think” or emotion is just the accumulated processing of the entire system related to experience and the nature of what is getting the most focus from the system and there is no control over this calculation. It just is the result of many conflicting sub-thoughts that emerge from the billions of “sub-thoughts” at the cellular level (fluctuations of experience flipping back and forth between pleasure and pain many times a second in each cell) and the emergent mathematics of how firings of cells (and changes in cells) affect the firings of other cells (and changes in other cells).

You write about love. Love is pleasure. It is a lot of calculations of pattern-seeking related to another person. We love members of our own species over members of other species because there are more patterns that match the patterns that refer to ourselves in other people. Patterns bring pleasure. We have more empathy for other humans because our brains recognize the patterns observable in others that refer to our own thoughts and bodies. Empathy is a recognition of patterns in ourselves (happenings to parts of our own bodies have a greater effect on other parts of our nervous system recognized patterns- than happenings to other people’s bodies, but happenings to other bodies like our own cause greater empathy and recognition in the very parts of our own bodies or the parts of the nervous system dealing with those parts). We have greater love for patterns that are most like ourselves and for patterns that give us pleasure or admiration (admiration being another calculation of pleasure). We look for things in common with a love, not things in conflict. It is pattern recognition in relation to pleasures.

This gets me up to the beginning of section 1-3 (a section that starts with a lot of questions I can answer them all). I’ll go further another day.

Me (Tuesday, January 27, 2004 3:17 PM)

Dr. Minsky,

Getting into section 1-3.

In the artistic way that you begin this section, you bring up a variety of questions that deal with higher-level executive concepts. To break these questions down to the basics of nerve-cell mathematics is difficult conceptually as it is much easier to work your way up to these problems starting with explanations of much simpler subsets of the system. I’ll do my best.

You write a series of questions:

Why do I waste so much of my time?

What determines whom I’m attracted to?

Why do I have such strange fantasies?

What makes me find mathematics so hard?

Why am I afraid of heights and crowds?

What makes me addicted to exercise?

(Why do I waste so much of my time?)

The pleasure or pain of a subset of processing, the yes or no, becomes the part of the next level of calculation (pleasure/pain, yes/no) for all processing. Your body’s pleasure/health is the constant moving calculation responding to the changing experience of the outside world as it is translated into that sort of logic. If at a moment the calculation of the totality of your sub-thoughts results in choosing greater pleasure over not acting rather than acting, then the organism will choose not acting. Your memories will be calculated into that choice (and considerations of the future are always really predictions based on experiences of the past, or examinations of the past in whole) so that you might choose discomfort in the present because you have enough sub-thoughts of the benefits to the past (and therefore to the future) to add up to a greater pleasure in choosing to put off pleasure in the present. But often people will make the wrong choice for their own good in procrastinating an action that would bring the greatest benefit (pleasure). This can be caused by a number of factors in the nature of how the brain is organized.

In several of my essays on my website I have written about how there is an overflow switch of sorts in the decisions of nerve cells (too much pleasure becomes a pain, too much “yes” becomes a “no”). The more executive the decision in the brain, the more subsets of decisions are involved in more different realms of information. All thinking is an accumulation of simple decisions. But different realms of information have greater conflict the patterns that the brain is seeking are not clear and the pattern-seeking nature of all thinking causes problems as the brain will include similar patterns to the voting that are not appropriate factors for the realm of a particular decision (emotions conflicting with the right logic in a decision, for instance, because an painful memory is associated with a similar event in the past but an event that is similar but not really the same). Hormonal influences also change the volume levels of different realms of thinking (quite quickly too) so that subsets of the subject matter can be considered with a different focus (different focus being the isolation of different kinds of subsets through inhibitory factors) and the greatest pleasure for the organism as a whole might be to focus on a subset that brings the greatest pleasure of the moment but is not the appropriate subset for the most logical executive decision.

Add to all of this the accumulated inhibitory factors that collect in the mathematics of the brain (I’ve written several essays about this on my website) that is a “stress” that collects in the most executive regions of the brain (and the language center as well) to a greater extent. These stresses cause bad logic changes. These stresses also stop the parts of the information (all thinking is an emergent logic from a lot of much smaller pieces of logic) from getting together at the same time. If the most executive region is stressed the various subsets of the logic don’t connect into one calculation at the same time so that the brain can only look at one part of the argument at a time or connects the various parts using weaker links. The past is not connected to the future or the present and decisions don’t seem to be made using the same foresight. Increasing the stress (over time, with aging, with drugs, with sleeplessness) greatly increases this phenomenon of the parts of logic remaining separated form each other. Only one thing at a time can be handled. (The impaired person changes the radio channel and the car swerves out of the lane even though both the radio and the road ahead are still in the field of vision, because the subsets of vision have the various parts of the field of vision out of unity and the person can only think of the radio or the road but not both at the same time anymore.)

(What determines whom I’m attracted to?)

This is absolutely a summation of the patterns that give you the most pleasure being considered in another person.

All pattern-seeking is also pleasure-seeking in the mathematics of the brain. The summation of the brain is also the summation of a logic that seeks the greatest pleasure for the greatest number of cells in relation to the body and the world which becomes a growing intelligence that models the world as the brain networks according to this logic and according to the body/world at the same time. The patterns that have the most influence on the happiness of the whole system are those patterns that relate to the self. (Events happening in your own nervous system will have a much greater relationship to your happiness than events happening in nervous systems that are not connected with your own.) Observing other humans is an observation of more patterns that are similar to the patterns in yourself, so you’d be most attracted to a member of your own species. Then, there are many other levels of pattern-recognition that figure into the patterns in another that push your buttons the most in the realm of pleasure (love). Memories of what gave you pleasure in the past become part of the patterns that give you pleasure in the present (breasts, commonality with family, similar interests). Pains from the past figure into the calculation of who you will feel comfortable with in attempting love (a person may be calculated to be too attractive and in association with that attractive person in the past who gave you pain through rejection you will reject the person who is likely to reject you, so you seek your “own level” through this mathematics). Love offered when it is not coming from another (better) prospect becomes part of the calculation. The magnitude of your loneliness and the pattern that looks a lot like your ex-wife, a painful memory, provide calculations of balance and counter-balance. It is all math using the pleasure/pain basic nature of the nervous system.

(Why do I have such strange fantasies?)

The answers to offer will depend on the specific examples of fantasies and the states of mind during which such fantasies occur.

During certain states of focus (sleep, for instance), the system is so subdued, so inhibited, that the parts of a subject matter don’t get together with any ease with the parts that are normally subsets of that subject matter. Dreams are random firings of the nervous system looking for a logic that is changed when the executive functions that bring everything together are shut down, so the parts come together not with the other logical part, but with something not quite right or in association with something very wrong but just another sub-thought that happens to be happening at the same time (instigated by other random firings, and most influenced by the most recent memories that have left tracks of firing patterns in the system through the recent changes, short-term memory, of nerve connectivity and strengths of synapses). When you daydream you are shutting down some part of your thinking in some way that leads to less executive connectivity to thoughts as well, but to a lesser degree.

Strange fantasies might be strange in the sexual realm. The brain learns to associate patterns that happen in sync, at the same time, and so pains can be associated with pleasures in a strange way if the organism is raised in a culture that forces ways of thinking that are in conflict with the logic of the body. (Humans are the only animals that teach the young to think that their own body is bad. Nakedness is bad. The logic of the body is to seek the greatest health through the following of pleasure and avoidance of pain. But the logic of our cultures is to teach that life is bad and death is good, or that the body is bad, or that pleasure (sex) is shameful. This creates conflicts within the nervous system that associate opposite logics. It is the sickness of our culture that creates masochism in a number of people. This is all still the result of pleasure/pain decisions in the brain.

(What makes me find mathematics so hard?)

I’ve written about how stresses collect in various parts of the brain. Collections of stress can be caused by genetics, birth trauma, life experiences, poisoning, anything taken to an extreme. If stress has collected in the parts of the brain that deal with mathematics, then you might find math to be hard. A careful examination of the particularities of your dysfunction is needed. You might be very gifted in mathematical conceptual thinking, but not good at language and the language center is involved in the notation system of math and the language of math. Or you might have visual/spatial deficits. There are different flavors of this problem. But whatever mathematical factors there are that cause a disorder are also the same factors that cause a talent (or lack of talent) or personality characteristic or habit. It’s all the same stuff. (And your ability to perform this function will change in the short run if you are stressed in the short-term in some wayÉ. It is the same stress, just not as permanent.)

(Why am I afraid of heights and crowds?)

This is another pleasure/pain calculation of many smaller pleasure/pain calculations.

Here it is the combination of the pleasure/pain awareness of the current environment with the calculations of the memory of a past pleasure or pain. (You fell from a tree and the pain of what happens when you fall from a height makes you afraid of heights and repeating thinking that occurred about that subject reinforced this thought. Or you were crushed by a crowd when you were a small child and that memory of what can happen in a crowd, at a time when you were small and less able to maintain your safety in a crowd, is a factor in your present calculation about the costs or benefits of being in a crowd now. Any obsessive thinking will change the calculations, good or bad, because obsessive thinking is thinking that is being practiced and the connections of any cells that are being repeatedly fired will be strengthened with practice, and practiced sub-thoughts will gain influence to a greater degree over sub-thoughts that are not practiced as often.) Still these are pleasure/pain calculations.

(What makes me addicted to exercise?)

Addictions are a complicated topic.

Addictions always involve some aspect of the mixing of pleasure and pain. I wrote in a variety of essays about how too much of a pleasure becomes a pain and also about how too much pain becomes a coma (firing stops “coma” could be a stopping of a particular subset). If you add stress to stressed subset, that subset stops firing and then stops forwarding stressful signals to the many places that are connected. Exercise can be painful, but there comes a point when you get a “runner’s high” or other good feeling that is caused by reaching a level with enough stress that subsets start shutting down and the subsets giving the bad feeling go into selective coma and the good feeling from extra oxygen in the body and other such give a great change in feeling. Stress (of exertion) causes a high but with some time away from the stress the withdrawal mechanisms come into play and subsets that were shut off turn on again in a stressed state.

(Endorphins are believed to cause pleasure but consider another way of interpreting what endorphins do is to selectively dampen, selectively inhibit, selectively stress already stressed parts of the nervous system that are closest to the edge, closest to being totally inhibited and therefore more sensitive to hormonally delivered inhibitory chemical and thus giving the sensation of greater pleasure caused by further limiting the function of the parts that are adding more to the collective pain/emotion.)

This topic is not an easy one to discuss without animating how the math of the nervous system works in some visual format.

Me (Wednesday, February 11, 2004 8:30 PM)

Dr. Minsky:

Back to section 1-3 of your new book.

You ask: “How do our minds build new ideas?”

Everything in the brain is a pattern-recognition form of mathematics the seeking of frequencies happening at the same time in synch. This can take many forms. Metaphors are patterns of similarity in different objects/symbols/words. The parts of any idea or observation can be broken down to much smaller units of cellular firing that as so small as to no longer have any meaning. Two different objects can have a lot of similar sub-sets as innocuous as both having parallel lines in various places. There is a lot of efficiency in that the brain uses the firing of the same cells to handle the processing of similar features in different objects. The more similar sub-sets to any unit of thought, the more connectivity there will be to the super-sets of subject matter. Those connections are automatically a part of the same thoughts and the connections are automatically made by the brain (although for the most part this is out of conscious/language thinking/awareness). Emotional thinking (the accumulation of all thinking calculations at any moment) accumulate all of these calculations that taken down to the basic unit are just oscillations between pain and pleasure at different frequencies (and therefore at different proportions of pain to pleasure). Similar subsets of any current thought, even though inappropriate for the specific thought, are still taken into account for the emotional poll-taking of thinking (and these subsets will be at different volumes depending on the volume controls of greater regions of processing that occur with different brain choices in the types of thinking that are getting the focus of the moment). The brain can inhibit much of the thinking in visual processing if the attention is being placed on what is being heard during a moment, for instance. The constant adjustments to focus change the nature of how many and which similar subsets are fired up and if enough subsets of an inappropriate thought fire up that thought, then that inappropriate thought will be brought into play at the same time as the appropriate thought and then the brain will calculate how much value that other thought has in respect to the thinking that has been in play. So (presto!) comes a new idea. Another factor that also explains why people with neurological disorders all the way from ADD/ADHD to schizoprenia can be more creative is that the inhibition of the nervous system makes the most subtle connections of subsets or the most global points in bringing diverse subject matter together clogged or inhibited, so the subsets don’t get fully together to make the most appropriate superset of calculations and then the subsets connect with whatever supersets are close or similar. This causes a person to use almost the right word (in meaning or sound) instead of the right one or almost the right idea or person or whatever thought, and mistakes of this sort can be evaluated for correctness or for value (funny, creative, inspired, pleasure/pain) very quickly by the thinker and then a creative and new thought is born. People who are very creative can either have more connections going in their brain from a lot more previous thinking, or a lot of clogged thinking that causes interesting mistakes that the person might be smart enough to recognize in real time as they come along. This makes for a creative person.

You ask: “How do we learn from experience?”

Thoughts, actions, functions etc. that give us pleasure (health, success, insight as all insights and discoveries are the seeking of pleasure as all thinking is the seeking of pleasure) will be repeated, those that give pain (disease/imbalance, failure, confusion) are not. The behaviorists were onto something here, but the statistical approach caused some confusion along with the lack of awareness that the mathematics of the brain includes the changes in the math caused by how too much pleasure is always a pain (the cause of habituation, by the way).

“How do we manage to reason and think?”

Cells are automatically designed to seek firing at an ideal frequency but the influences of other cells firing (as they are attached to the signals coming from the rest of the body and the world at large) can be good or bad for the cell and the automatic nature of the changing connectivity causes the network to grow itself for the greatest pleasure of the whole. Firing of cells gives pleasure and is automatic, so thinking is automatic until death. The cells turn down the volumes of firing (for focus or sleep or particular thoughtÉ) for the greatest pleasure when the greater changes still give the most pleasure for the whole. Sleep occurs after a lot of activity has collected greater sensitivity to inhibition and the wrong frequencies in active subsets of the brain so those active subsets are then communicating this stress in the changed frequency to the many places (each cell can have connections to a hundred-thousand other cells) so that the greatest pleasure for the whole can be helped by regularly shutting down those active parts of the brain for a time for a reset (change in sensitivity to excitatory influences) but since those parts of the brain are very active, they are also an important subset for thinking consciously and so a state of sleep will occur where the sense of the world is subdued and active parts of the body are rested as well. Dreaming is caused by the less active parts of the brain that are in less need of rest firing but not being able to pull all of the various parts of thinking together and so irrational thought then occurs as whatever parts of the brain that are not subdued will still try to make sense of the irrational thought and this causes firings of connections in thought that have most recently been active (the flow of connections is still “hot” so to speak) and thus dreaming helps long-term memory by making connections between subsets of recently used thinking that firms up the memories without the usual points of connection being involved and creates new points of connection outside of the more executive regions of the brain that are shut down. This causes insight to be greater sometimes when the person reawakens and causes a firming of memory and “moves” the memory away from the executive cells bringing together the most diverse subject matter of subsets of a thought. The executive cells are making the decisions of the greatest pleasure of the whole in moving from one subset of the brain to another and this section of the brain is reused for new thoughts that will tend to erase the previous connectivity of short-term memory from that region of the brain.

“Why do we hold so many beliefs for which we lack good evidence?”

I already answered this question by answering one of the previous questions. Similar subsets of different subjects of thought use the same cells for processing and in some way these subsets are strengthened during thought so that inappropriate subject matter is also strengthened (or a portion of the subset of that thought, at least). Emotions bring inappropriate subject matter into play for instance: if you had a bad experience with somebody throwing an apple at you once, that memory will be a part of seeing somebody carrying an apple even if that memory is not conscious for you it is still a part of the emotional calculation of seeing somebody carry an apple and therefore an irrational consideration of that subject (for that moment) will be a portion of your response at that moment. How irrational you respond will be a matter of degree of connectivity to that subset of thought. Thinking of this sort can involve similar subsets to a very small and almost meaningless (and therefore beyond “conscious” thought) degree. Because portions of thought that are similar use the same parts of the brain even though subsets of different greater super-sets of thought, new memories will write over similar older ideas that have been replaced, but the earlier replaced thinking is still in memory although the complete traces of such thoughts are weaker now. For instance, when you were a baby, your parents appeared to be omnipotent. From the point of view of the very young the parents can read your mind and provide everything and have no limits. Eventually the child grows and realizes that the parents are not omnipotent and may forget that they ever thought such a thing about their parents, but this earlier conviction that there is an omnipotent being is still a memory in the brain (and so, in other words, is still a belief in the brain although this belief has been weakened to no longer add up to a belief anymore) but the conviction and feeling that there is an omnipotent being is still in their brains, so it is natural for them to later apply this conviction that there is an omnipotent being to a god. For this reason it is natural for a belief in God to be universal even if it is a belief for which there is no good evidence. (This is why it is damaging for us to teach our children to believe in fictions of any kind because all mistaken beliefs never really go away, they become a part of all similar later beliefs even though they are weakened by a other beliefs that win the vote of reason.)

Again referring to section 1-3 and the next group of questions:

“What is the nature of consciousness?”

This is a problem of a question mostly because the word is defined poorly and defined differently by just about every person who defines it because everyone is in a different state of consciousness as an individual and in different states of consciousness constantly as the nature of one’s thinking is in constant flux. Your consciousness is whatever state of thinking and experience and awake/asleep-state that you are in. It is the accumulated state of many sub-states and accumulated function of the many sub-functions of your nervous system activity in any given moment. To try to define it by any particular state of thinking (language-based or non-language/non-reason, instinctual or measured, alert or numb, intent of focus on sound or sight or smell or itch or worryÉ) is to reduce your definition of consciousness to a subset that is not consciousness anymore but only one of the options of consciousness. Your consciousness is whatever thinking and feeling and functioning state that you are in as any animal at any given moment. To define it any other way is to miss the point of defining it and then to imply wrong theory such as that animals have no feelings/consciousness (if you use a language-bias, for instance). Consciousness is just the accumulated calculations of nerve cells (and the body attached as well) that can be broken into the smallest units of function and experience that is a unit so small as to have relatively no meaning (one out of a trillion units) and no feeling (one out of a trillion units) (and further complicated in that thought is movement of these units so in the point of time a point with no movement by definition there is no thought or feeling in the entire system with all of the trillion units). Mathematical reasoning will give you the answer to this evaluation of the basic unit in the same way that mathematical reasoning will give you the basic unit of the substances around us in theoretical physics.

“How does imagination work?”

The same answer to this question is in the answer to what is creativity? But all thinking is pleasure and any activity will be followed if it is the best choice for please and so will any thought if it gives pleasure, and all thought is movement and can never be static so one image in the brain that gives pleasure will lead to the next and the next and that is imagination.

“What are Sorrow, Pleasure, Anger and Joy?”

All are pleasure/pain words applied to subject matter. Sorrow is pain applied to something or somebody you want but you are not getting, perhaps. Pleasure is the basic unit of the brain in partnership with pain. Anger is pain of a kind where the system is still with the ability to act in regard to that pain. (Sorrow or depression are pain to the point that the system is inhibited without as much ability to act. Anger is pain taken into action against that which might give depression, and if the anger harms that which gives pain, pleasure is the goal as an indirect result.) Joy is pleasure, but in the realm of a much more executive grouping of calculations of diverse subject matter adding up to a more small units of pleasure so that you have a general (and often indefinable as a result) emotion.

“How does the body relate to the mind?”

The mind is just the summation of the basic units of experience of the basic units of the body (the cells).

“What are values, goals and ideals?”

A value is a summation of calculations (pleasure/pain) about some subject matter that would be identified as a subject matter appropriate for the word “value.”

A goal is a calculation that a pleasure exists in reaching for a value.

An ideal is another calculation of pleasure/pain in regard to subject matter that is appropriate in regard to how we define the word “ideal.”

“Why could our scientists discover so much about atoms and oceans and planets and stars—yet so little about the nature of minds? Thus Galileo in 1589 and Newton in 1687 discovered that much of the behavior of physical objects could be explained by just three 'laws of motion'—each described by a single short sentence. Then Maxwell in 1873 discovered four statements that explained almost every aspect of electricity and magnetism, and Einstein in 1905 and 1915 combined all these into yet simpler laws. One reason why Physics developed so well was that those scientists used an amazing technique: to seek simple answers to complex questions.”

Is not what I am giving you here exactly what you write about in this paragraph? It does take a lot of thought to consider how it might be true in all the various ways it plays out. Take the time to consider it.

You then go on to write about how we have a concept of the self that does our thinking and you are right about how it gets in the way of the discovery. But then you take the position that we must give up on simple laws that might explain cognition, that it is hopeless because of the method of looking from the outside-in to notice different functions (statistically implicated only, by the way) in different regions of the brain and so you state that simple answers are not possible. You are only right if you insist on keeping to the same metaphors for describing these subsets of cognition and brain. The revolution of finding the answers requires a shift in the way you think of these parts and what they are doing and you have not made that shift yet. So you make a wrong turn here. You gave up to early by doing this. You don’t realize how different sections of the brain can be both specialized (like different chemicals in our environment are specialized in physics) and also universally the same as well (like the basic quanta of energy making up the different chemicals as explained in physics). Let me answer the questions you then put forth:

“How do you recognize what you see?”

I’ve already written that the entire system of the nervous system is that of pattern recognition as expressed in the seeking of greater connectivity to cells that are firing in synchrony. That is recognition. (And the system changes with such recognition in that patterns that are constantly in abundance as observed in mental processing or functions of organs or portions of the visual field are repeated so that the connectivity regarding such patterns becomes much less flexible but much more efficient as a result, giving the illusion that there are parts of the brain that are specialized but that specialization was learned by the nervous system early in development and practiced until it became permanent and of a particular nature in the connectivity of the cells that is a reflection of the particular nature of the constant exposure to that subset of information that the organism has been exposed to many times throughout life.)

“How do you know how to move your arm?”

Learning how to move your arm starts with and is part of learning how to grow the arm. If the system gets more pleasure for budding in a certain way following the push of genetics following a logic in the earliest development creating the arm (which will be a very different logic of pleasures and pains to follow later in development, but at every moment the state of the body is perfect for that body in pleasure/health/balance according to the way the nervous system will always seek balance using its continuous algorithm of seeking health and balance and pleasure). If your body grows an arm this way, a different logic than is easy to articulate is in play in the earlier stages, but I can explain it using the fiction that the arm was just there and the body now must need to figure out how to use it:

If a muscle group moves and a body part gets closer to something seen that gives pleasure, then more pleasure will come about by getting closer to the object of desire, and a movement of use is learned. If a muscle group contracts, but causes interference in an oppositional muscle group, a pleasure can be achieved by executive cells in the nervous system by reversing the logic of cells controlling oppositional muscle groups. If greater ease of movement is achieved by relaxing oppositional muscle groups to those flexing, then a pleasure is achieved and a pleasure/pain algorithm will achieve another aspect of coordination of movement of a bodyÉ

“How do you choose which words to say?”

Have you every noticed how the first words we instinctively teach our children and the first words the children learn are of the basic units of pleasure and pain? “Good” is pleasure. “Bad” is pain. “Yes” is pleasure. “No” is pain. It takes longer to learn words that are not of the basic units (such as that your name refers to you instead of just being a word of pleasure that is expressed in a pleasurable way by mommy or daddy). The logic of language builds up from pleasure and pain and then with recognition of the patterns of certain words happening in synch with experiences of certain objects or happenings. It is all pattern recognition (and therefore association) and pleasure and pain.

“How do you understand what they mean?”

I just answered that question.

“How does commonsense reasoning work?”

“Commonsense” is usually defined best by what is missing when you don’t have it. Autistic people are missing in commonsense and what it means is that it is a bringing together of many calculations that most people can instinctively sense (or calculate in their thinking) involving emotional/social cues and laws of society or thinking through what might happen as a result of something else and because it brings together multi-faceted information and subject matter, the person with the greatest stress in the nervous system will have blockages caused by mathematically collected inhibitions that tend to collect to a greater degree in regions of the brain noticing patterns in diverse subject matter and therefore subject to more conflict and more subtle patterns that are complicated and if stress occurs in a part of the brain it shuts down so the parts don’t get together (or the calculations that occur don’t take into account all the parts together but must do them one at a time). This can cause mistakes in “commonsense.”

“What makes you like pleasure more than pain?”

I’ve already answered that. Pleasure and pain define the brain in all ways. The cells seek to fire and in the scale of time of an organism (rather than the scale of time of a cell) greater pleasure occurs with certain frequencies occurring in a greater number of cells as long as it does not get in the way of function. (A long discussion of what is happening with C-fibers and during seizures is required here because in those cases the cells Are getting the frequency they desire but that frequency has no meaning anymore and is now interfering with the functioning of all of the cells around that are doing a task but are distracted by the desire to join that frequency. This is a big subject and I will not cover it completely yet.)

“What is ‘liking’ anyway?”

I answered this already. It is the calculation of cells concerning some subject matter using the basic assessment of the brain using pleasure or pain.

Then you finish that section of your book with a slew of questions and every one of them I have answered already. Look at your questions from the point of view of my theory and there is a lot of repetition in them.

[What is thinking and how does it work? What decides upon your next state of mind? What determines which ideas you'll think about, and which processes you’ll apply to them? What chooses which decisions you’ll make—and what budgets how much time these will take? We rarely think about these in our daily lives—perhaps because we all recognize that we don’t have enough good ideas about them. ]

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