IUBio

New Intelligence

ken collins kenpc at banet.net
Mon May 10 21:40:03 EST 1999


dag.stenberg at helsinki.nospam.fi wrote:

> Cijadrachon <cijadra at zedat.fu-berlin.de> wrote:
> > >> Which sectors of the brain are (not) counted as "mind"?
> and I answered
> > >"The whole" is my answer.
>
> > I stated for several areas which ones are (not) for me sectors of the
> > mind  before,  and am not in the mood to repeat that one, as I figure
> > who was interested paid attention to which ones I named as mind areas
> > and which as as not mind areas and which ones as special sectors.
>
> I have just finished a medical conference which I organized, and have a
> severe backlog of binet.neuroscience stuff. Will prehaps read and
> comment when I get to it.
>   Generally spoken, though, I do think that all areas of the brain
> contribute to the inner consciousness which we term "the mind", although
> some are more important than others, just like in an orchestra the
> conductor, the first violin and often lthorn have more influence than
> the guy sometimes striking the triangle.

and within "individual subsystems", there's also great "redundancy"...
parallelism... which is correlated with survival needs, which means, in the
end, that the thing that's important, within any "subsystem", is how much
functionality remains after a lesion? that is, within the overall functioning
of the nervous system, any non-redundant "area" is about as important as any
other non-redundant "area"... eliminate the redundancy within an "area" having
great parallelism, then eliminate any remaining, now-non-redundant thing, and
one readily observes a "hole" in nervous system function.

> > >Besides, I may be a Sperryan).
> > ?
>
> Roger Sperry, Nobelist, proposed a "monist" theory of brain and mind,
> saying that the mind is an emergent property of the function of the
> multiple cells and networks of the brain. The monist theory is opposed
> to dualist theory, which states that the mind is an epiphenomenon that
> cannot be explained by (in philosophical erms: "reduced to") brain
> function. Sir John Eccles was a famous dualist.

the Truth of the matter rests solidly with Eccles... but not for reasons that
are discussed in AoK... Neuroscientific Duality Theory, as it's discussed in
AoK, was intended, from the beginning, to be a one-theory... allowing folks to
see how behavior arises within the nervous system.

After i'd developed NDT, though (thanks to a challenge that the theory received
from a Physicist, on the grounds of "quantum mechanics"), i returned to Physics
and continued the development of what has become "Tapered Harmony" (that i
started developing when i was 11... just because i wanted to understand
Physical Reality).

where the dualism comes in, irrevokably, is in Tapered Harmony's new model of
what've been referred to as "atoms" (and which i've "discussed" a bit, in a
stictly-to-document-things way, from time to time here in bionet.neuroscience.)
the gist of it is that nervous systems, and their functioning are continuous
with the surrounding energy in which they are immersed... right down to the
"level" of single "ions"... and it's be-cause of this continuity that nervous
systems, and their functioning, are dependent upon the flux of energy in which
they are immersed...

at a fairly-basic "level", this isn't at all "difficult" to comprehend...
"sound" and "light", etc. (all the stuff that the senses "sense"), are,
obviously, "just" energy flows... absent such energy flows, nervous systems can
detect nothing.

fortunately, the energy surround is all-permeating, and, therefore,
unaviodable... but when this realization is carried through all the way, it
becomes just as easy (as above) to see that the totallity of what nervous
systems do is not wholly contained within nervous systems.

using NDT's synthesis, given a complete description of the energy impinging
within a nervous system, one can describe, and predict the outputs of the
nervous system in question... such is all well and good, until one realizes
that one cannot predict =all= of the energy that the nervous system will
encounter at any "moment"... the best one can do is to rely upon what's
described by 2nd Thermo (wdb2t), with respect to which, all experimental
observations hold, to date, hold True.

...which is some of why i've taken the approach that i've taken in this
Newsgroup... an approach which emphasizes the wdb2t Consequences within the
spectrum of the energy that's generated by Human behavior and cognition... you
know... how the behavior of one person will either elevate, or reduce, TD E/I
within the nervous system of another person... and how such augments within
groups (as is Tragically the case, at the present, in "Yugoslavia")...

...most importantly, i've been going over, again and again, the fact that,
be-cause folks've not comprehended the way nervous systems "seek" to blindly
minimize TD E/I, folks routinely act in ways that will certainly elevate TD E/I
within the nervous systems of others... when such happens, absent an
understanding of how nervous systems process information, folks give up Free
Will entirely, and wdb2t determines everything...

the =only= thing that nervous systems can do with respect to such is to
Understand such, and Choose, in enlightened ways with respect to such.

more later (and below).

>   In Sperry's viwe, a neural circuit (like the parts of the brain, or
> the whole brain, or a social sommunity) will be more than the sum of the
> elements: it will display properties that are not present in any
> single element, but emerges from the togetherness of these elements.
> Sperry added the important principle that the emergent cproperty will
> then feed back onto the elements and control them. The state of single
> neurons is influenced by the consciousness and the workings of the mind,
> the behavior of a community of individuals will influence the behavior
> of a single individual in a way that would not occur if he was alone, etc.
>   Sperry's ideas actually extend to a religious extrapolation, faintly
> (but rather faintly) resembling that of Spinoza (who talked about monads
> of higher and higher hierarchy, having each more psychic complexity and
> less materia, and the highest monad is God, who is no materia and all
> psyche - forgive me if I simplify too much). Sperry rather extrapolated
> that as the mind is an emerging property of the function of the many
> elements of brain materia, there may be a higher emergent "mind" of the
> earth, the universe etc. One may think of God as one wishes.
>   I recall that I saw parallels between the "Gaia" hypothesis and
> Sperry's writings when I used to read such literature. I hope Sperry
> will not be offended.
>   Consequently, Sperry was accused by the dualists to be an atheistic
> materialist. Others called his thinking on mind and brain fuzzy. I agree
> that his writing is not completely "Westie", but it inspired me when I
> devoured it as a slightly younger man.
>   The Nobel price was awarded to Sperry for other work. His main scientific
> achievements were related to brain plasticity during development, and
> to the study of the different functional abilities of the left and right
> hemispheres. Any textbook in neurophysiology will describe works by
> Sperry, but very few will discuss his monist theory of mind as an
> emergent property of the brain..
>
> Dag Stenberg

i stand on my prior comments with respect to "split-brain" preparations.

K. P. Collins (ken)





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