Clearly, you're disinclined to go in the only way I could lead you. Be at Peace
"on my account". ken collins
John wrote:
>kkollins at pop3.concentric.net wrote in message
> <365F84BE.85A8869A at pop3.concentric.net>...
>> >Is there anything like a metl fork involved? Or does it just happen
> >"spontaneously"?
>> Spontaneous.
>> If it's the latter thing, it's more difficult. Whenever the innateneural
> >circuitry is mucked-around-with, there's the possibility that, to a greater
> or
> >lesser extent, the resulting "circuitry" will still signal, but in a
> different
> >way... yielding something akin to "referred pain", but artificially
> >"engineered". This's analogous to the difference between using a computer
> >program as it's shipped, and opening the ".exe" in a binary editor and
> snipping
> >out a few bits of binary data... snip the stuff in the right way and the
> program
> >still runs... but it "says 'ouch'" every now-and-then... because the
> "circuitry"
> >of the
> >
> >>[...] Is there something unique about pain that precludes it being a sense
> like
> >hearing, smell, vision, touch, and taste? Or is that we just live in a
> culture
> >with the vestiges of atavistic Calvinist morals?
> >
> >We "sense" (experience) "pain", but "pain" doesn't drive the creation of
> >"memory" of itself...
>> Tell a post traumatic stress syndrome soul or a severely abused child that.
> Pain does create its own form of memory. I had extensive neurosurgery at
> four years of age and approaching a hospital can sometimes put the horrors
> through me. Most who have experienced severe pain know its mnemonic echoes.
> Given the specific regions of the neocortex have been demonstrated to be
> implicated in pain sensation I see no reason why we should eliminate pain
> from the memory store. Pain can shape us as much as pleasure.
>> it drives creation of memory with respect to the energy
> >gradients inherent in the external environment when the "pain" is
> experienced,
> >and which is topologically-distributed within the nervous system in a way
> that
> >will functionally-"prefer" TD E/I-minimization with respect to "moving away
> >from" similarities to such "pain"-coupled environmental energy
> distribution..
>> Ok I 'm stupid, but I really would prefer it if people would construct their
> statements in simple English. Save the jargon for the experts, I'm just a
> vagabond in Popper's World 3 and de Chardin's Noosphere. I'm interested in
> the neuroanatomy\chemistry of this, not ideas concerning energy
> distributions. Reductionism is a methodology, don't turn it into a
> philosophy.
>> "At some point then, every attempt to reduce psychology to neuroscience must
> fail."
>> Edelman, Bright Air, Brilliant Fire.
>> All the moreso when others try to invoke physics as the exemplary
> explanation of every phenomenon. The whole reductionist philosophy (not
> method!) is contradicted by the historical fact that human knowledge and
> understanding has increased through the proliferation of multitudinous
> models, theories, paradigms whatever. After all, the three interacting
> bodies dilemma (cf Poincare's 1889 theorem) still plagues us, so how can
> reductionist methodologies down to atomic\field levels ever find relevance
> in the greater body of biosciences (molecular genetics is one *occasional*
> exception, Van der Waal forces can be invoked to explain genetic drift),
> particularly given that despite nearly a century of Quantum mechanics only 3
> or 4 chemical reactions have been explained via quantum mechanics? I believe
> the concept of domain relevance may also be applicable here. We cannot and
> never will squeeze the universe into a ball, to steal a line from TS Eliot.
>> Reductionism is a powerful methodology but that doesn't make it final (think
> of Newton). Dualism, it still haunts all of us (with due respect to the fine
> work of John Eccles!). These two statements are apparently contradictory but
> then consider these.
>> Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the soul
>> "If revealed religions have revealed anything it is that they are wrong."
>> John Barrow, mathematical physicist.
>> "If we define a religion to be a system of thought which contains unprovable
> statements, so it contains an element of faith, then Godel has taught us
> that not only is mathematics a religion but it is the only religion able to
> prove itself to be one."
>> Cited in:
> "Frontiers of Complexity: The Search for Order in a Chaotic World, Peter
> Coveney & Roger Highfield [Interested in time? read The Arrow of Time by
> these two excellent scientists and writers.]
>> Lower order syntheses are a dream, albeit an occasionally reified one (watch
> that process reach the zero point with time), but it is delusional to expect
> this to always be the case or that it should always be the case. What
> matters is what works, and in that regard the final truth is not always
> necessary. Plato was great, but that doesn't mean he was always right. Great
> thinkers make great mistakes. (Ernst Mach and atomism, Einstein and quantum
> mechanics, Popper and Eccles "The Self and its Brain", Penrose and
> microtubules[Hah!], Watson [founder of bloody behaviourism] and "physics is
> the only science and the rest is social work" [idiot]).
>> "A man's errors are his portals of discovery."
>> James Joyce.
>> Better still that another man's errors are my portals of discovery.
>> So Ken, forgive my ignorance, consider me grossly ignorant in these matters,
> and please frame your responses accordingly.
>> "To write well, express yourself like the common person, but think like a
> wise person."
>> Aristotle
>> John
>> Who occasionally expresses himself like a common person and is assiduously
> persuing the latter.
>> Now, I have this pain in my tooth ... .