The Unified Theory of the Nervous System
and Behavior
Cognitive Philosophy /Brain Theory by Steven Michael Harris
A variety of times I have received or witnessed attempts to provide some kind of synopsis of my theory in a short form and each time the interpretation of my theory has been flawed to either a greater or lesser degree. This is a very complicated theory and any approach that uses an angle of approach (from the viewpoint of only one area of study such as psychology, in most cases) will be flawed. This theory creates a new system of study and requires changes in all of the current associated areas of study to a great degree.
I just received a message (August, 2004) that offers a list of my main points for consideration and it is pretty good, although I will comment on various aspects of it and it is not a complete list (there are more aspects of the theory yet to be written). As for writing more theory, it seems to be getting in the way of getting attention to these ideas as most complaints are that the writing is too long. I write about many related subjects that are important for communicating the theory for a variety of reasons. The biggest reason against brevity is that simplified summations of the major points of the theory seem too simple to possibly solve such a major scientific problem without arguing the premises using a lot of different evidence and logic. (This is an emotional problem with communication because the theory “feels” too good to be true as most who hit this website only read the major claim of Unified Theory and then never read further to discover if I can deliver on the promise. They say the theory is nonsense without actually reading it for emotional reasons and not logical reasons.) Another reason for offering many different angles of argument is that it brings people to this website for many more topics entered in the search engines and I have been surprised by the different kinds of interests among those who find that my ideas do resonate and in how my different approaches in different essays seem to resonate with different people.
Message:
Steven,
I saw a message by you on an Ayn Rand forum and it took me awhile to track down your Theory pages.
I read most everything on there and think it seems to make some sense. I want to encourage you so I am listing some ideas that I gleaned from your essays. Maybe you can tell me if I have it right or not.
1. The pursuing of pleasure and the avoidance of pain goes down to the cellular level.
Yes.
2. Neurons have a range of experience from pleasure, to pain, to neutral. (When we say “experience”, “pleasure” or “pain,” we mean the most rudimentary form of it.)
Yes.
3. The pleasure or pain in the cells of the nervous system has to do with the rate of their firing. Too much or too little is not healthy.
It is more complicated than this, but, essentially the answer is yes.
4. The main experience we have at any time is the total of all the individual cells in the body (especially the neurons).
Yes, or better stated as the total of all of the experience states of the cells in the body over a chosen period of time.
5. Learning takes place as a change in the structure of the body (either in the nervous system or in other parts of the body).
Yes.
6. Man’s advancement has developed not so much from evolution like the lower animals, but more from his ability to learn.
No. That is not what I mean. Man evolves just like the lower animals when you talk about natural selection. I write that the nervous system evolves itself during every lifetime based on the information it can deal with and it also evolves the body with relatively predictable outcomes (species characteristics) according to the different genetic settings AND the nervous system learning as it responds to the signals learned from the previous body states and from the nature of the world environment. But, yes, once the species has evolved a nervous system that can be grown large enough (before the mathematical factors that will inhibit a nervous system take over) to handle language with the right kind of body for production of language, then the nervous system that is dealing with language will evolve in a much different way than if that individual was never exposed to any language during the lifetime. All animals learn their way into their final shapes and behaviors and function as all nervous systems operate according to the same principles. All animals grow into the next state through learning that is based on the previous state but using the same kind of mathematics, but genetics causes a different initial state (with initial states repeating through a lifetime because there are subtle differences in the individual cells because of DNA). Genetics is always there, but its influence on the growth of a body is of a lesser percentage than the current scientific language would indicate.
7. People’s minds are similar in the structure and abilities not because of genetic instructions but because of what it learns in its interaction with reality and that reality is the same for everyone.
Just replace the word “mind” with “brain” here as all animals have predictable organizations of their brains mostly because the “evolution of previous states” in the body and the world follow constants that are the same in the world for all of these individuals. (A much slower example to explain this would be in the plant world: if all of the trees in a field are leaning to the North, it is not because they are genetically designed to grow to the north, but because they are living in an environment where there is almost always a wind going in that direction.) All of the experiences and previous states of animals are the "winds" that form them.
8. How the brain works is mathematics - but we are not able to describe this mathematics right now.
Everything that I am writing is my attempt to explain this mathematics. I can see it and no other mathematicians have been trained to see this math yet, but others can be trained to see it just like theoretical physics can be trained for those with the right kinds of minds. (I’d have to work one-on-one with such persons to train them. Different approaches would be required for different individuals.)
9. Psychological and physical problems are caused by what might be called stress”.... mainly having to do with synchronous firings of groups of neurons, which interfere with the normal optimum state of activity of the cells.
No. You misunderstand what I write about stress. Emergent in that mathematics that is so difficult to describe are changes in decisions that occur very quickly going from some middle frequency of firing to just above that frequency, and stress is caused by the tendency for the adjustments made in the synapses and connectivity in busy combinations of firings to adjust for inhibition over excitation which creates a change in the speed of a change in decision or changes the actual decision and so eventually a combination of firings that earlier caused a spike down-line to other cells no longer causes a spike. Thus changes in function occur because of the same factors that cause learning. This is an extremely difficult concept to explain and I have written a lot and I am not able, either, to come up with a quick synopsis of this concept and still be correct in explaining it.
10. Medication for psychological problems is a wrong approach because these problems are essentially withdrawal symptoms that came after the initial experience of stress. The medication re-introduces the stress thereby reducing the symptoms.
Medication, as it is used today with no theoretical understanding, gets the results by increasing the same stress that caused the problem to begin with. But medication used in a new way can reduce the stress and when stress is reduced, an event similar to drug withdrawal will have to occur to improve function as the nervous system seeks out new pathways to function in the new atmosphere of settings.
11. What we call emotion is a “straw poll” of what is going on in all the various parts and systems of the body. (pain and pleasure)
Yes, but it is better explained that emotion is always the processing of more topics of subject matter than can be explained in words or experienced in one sense. A subset of the experiences of the body and thinking that is not the entire body can be an emotion as in you can have an attitude about a thing or person that is an emotion at the same time as you are in another general mood which is also an emotion. Every subset is emotion, really, because the components of emotion are the same components of all thinking (pain/pleasure).
12. The first reaction to stress is to become numb. Later, when the body tries to heal itself, there is the withdrawal effect. Our avoiding of the pain of the withdrawal by medication or other evasion makes the problem worse.
Yes, but to become numb in a small subset of processing can be an “experience” that is beyond perception as we can only be aware of parts of ourselves through focus mechanisms and sometimes the awareness of a subset even existing (or an amnesia) goes along with such a ‘numbness’ so that the absence of any notice of something is the same as being numb such as amnesia for a repressed memory of a stressful event. (So that waking the memory brings pain along with increased functioning - parallel to the withdrawal metaphor.)
13. The brain is a massively parallel processing machine. This parallel computer can create a serial-linear machine on top of it. This serial machine is used for communication. This is the language mind. This is the conceptual mind. Language cannot directly communicate what is happening in the parallel machine because it is a totally different mathematics from the linear mind.
Our voice can only make one sound at a time; we can only say one word at a time.
“One person talking to another person is like a supercomputer talking to another supercomputer through Morse Code.”
The purpose of the linear mind is to compress as much information as possible into word-packets that can be transferred from mind to mind. (and decoded at the other end). This is done through (Ayn Rand’s) concept-formation.
The serial processor is an illusion though, like Windows simulation software running on a Mac computer.
Pretty much right, or as correct as a computer metaphor can be. The metaphor of an economic system with a bunch of mathematical factors that increase the success of a unit adding up to intelligence and a collective success of the collective is a better metaphor for what is happening (which is a massively parallel system anyway).
14. There is no mind that is in any way separate or outside of the physical cellular processing.
Yes.
15. Allergies are caused by the mind when under stress, interpreting that what it has been normally eating must be harmful. This is why most allergies are for common foods that people normally eat - like wheat and milk.
Allergies are the product of how the brain does everything by matching patterns happening at the same time or learning by association and any pain that occurs consistently at the same time as eating a certain food will be associated with that food (so if you have some form of constant pain or constant deficit, then a greater association will occur with the foods that are eaten more often).
16. Cellular structures in the brain can get habituated into patterns of inhibition or excitation by stress. This is the cause of psychological problems, bad habits, etc.
The mathematical factors that define stress are behind all learning and function as stress is half of all learning, but are also behind all disorders and decline and aging and damage from drug use and personality differences and changes of mood and sleep... understanding stress is pretty much involved in understanding everything.
17. “Language doesn’t work without making choices.” Human choice has to do with choosing what particular idea I use to communicate out of all the possible appropriate ideas in the brain.
And the limitations of language interfere with communication because of the many ways different people interpret different words at different times in different context.
18. The intelligence of the conscious language mind is only a small fraction of our whole intelligence within us. Before ideas come into existence into our conscious mind they are sorted by the massively parallel process that goes through every memory and experience we ever had. (Probably every experience we have ever had is stored in the brain.)
Yes, the conscious language mind is only a small fraction of our intelligence. But yes and no that every experience we have ever had is stored in our brain because the brain rewrites over the similar subsets of new memories and reshapes earlier memories so that our present experience is contorted by the memories and the earlier memories are contorted by the present experience. Two memories that are very similar to each other will contort each other the most. Memory is not exact and changeable but pretty good anyway.
19. The mathematics of our conscious logic, reason, concepts and language is only a subset of multi-dimensional mathematics of the whole brain.
Yes.
20. In Laissez Faire capitalism there is no director or designer of the economy. There are only the accumulated actions of many individuals, driven by the principle of pleasure and pain. Likewise, the mind is the accumulation of the seeking of every individual cell.
Yes, but a difference is that with the individual cells they almost never get what they want in their design seeking that ideal frequency except when they are severed from the logic of the world/senses and the body and a seizure occurs that enlists as many cells as possible into that frequency. To get the individual goal interferes with the collective goal in the case of nerves. But put those cells together in a Petri dish and they find a frequency that they prolong as that is the nature of their design to make a nervous system work.
21. (my interpretation): A person can build a small bridge by himself without having any concepts. But in order to build a large bridge he needs help from other people. Therefore he needs to create concepts in his mind in order to communicate them to other people.
If there were a Robinson Crusoe that lived completely alone, he would not need or have concepts in his mind. And therefore would not have any self-conscious ego either.
I disagree with this in that I believe that animals without language have more ego or rather a more unified ego in that the pleasure of the self is not so contorted by the ravages of culture and religion that go against the self and so are therefore unnatural. An animal is all “self-conscious” as it is language that makes one more “other-conscious.”
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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.
