THE BRAIN IS A SCARECROW!

[b](Greetings faithful readers! This will (probably) be the last brain/consciousness/external world article that I will write, as I believe that I have said all that can be said on the subject. But fear not! I will gladly continue to discuss and answer questions about the above subject matter—as well as throw my two cents in here and there in respond to others’ threads and opinions in ILP. :sunglasses: )

Thanks for everything!

Yours, truly,

Jay M. Brewer[/b]

Novel read; LDS says the same thing without the scientific quantifiers…except that it’s not limited to only reductio ad absurdum and proving a contradiction for evidence of something else.

LDS just holds that the existence is the necessary for the condition of the argument that is life experience with ourselves so to hold capacity of reaching God in our own understanding; very similar concept.

TheStumps:

[b]Hmm…an entire novel reaching the same conclusion? I wondered if anyone else tumbled to the trick (“LDS”? What does it stand for?).

But I think scientific quantifiers are necessary in order to compel the skeptic. Charles Yanofsky’s, Beyond Biology and the paper: Without Miracles: Brain Evolution and Development, faculty.ed.uiuc.edu/g-cziko/wm/05.html verifies the “pool playing” between the external world and the brain:[/b]

Changeux provided no hard evidence for his hypothesis that synaptic variation in the form of overproduction would precede the elimination of synapses as part of the brain’s restructuring to permit the learning of new skills and acquisition of new knowledge. But such evidence was found a few years after the publication of his book. William Greenough and his associates, whose work on the maturational development of the rat’s brain was noted earlier, also conducted research on changes in the brain induced by placing adult rats in special, enriched environments. In one study this resulted in a 20% increase (roughly 2000) in the number of synapses per neuron in the upper layers of the visual cortex. Later research showed that such dramatic increases in synapses were not restricted to the rat’s visual cortex.

These and other similar findings led Greenough’s group to propose that the waves of synapse proliferation first described by Changeux could be elicited by the complex demands placed on the adult brain in a new, challenging environment. These researchers referred to this process as “experience-dependent” development since it depends on the environment triggering the formation of new synaptic growth on which the selective process can act.

But it was the question not so much of how the brain “knows” which synapses to form (even with selective overproduction and pruning by experience) to accurately portray future experience of the external world (and how the brain just happened to be equipped before the fact to do it)—but the speed in which this occurs in relation to speed of change in experience that “took the cake”, so to speak.

Plato, I think, also deduced that the existence of God may be derived from pure reason.

J.

Hey Postsynaptic,
on first read your OP went over my head - should I say through it to pun? - but what I got I liked. I will give it a couple more run throughs. Your response above made me think of Rupert Sheldrake’s work. Are you familiar with him? If so, do you connect his work with this thesis of yours?

edit 1: OK. Part way through a second read of the OP. Here’s my first question…

Would supporters of the theory you are challenging/mocking argue that it is not future experiences that are being prepared for but past ones and that this is (to the degree that it is) effective because the future will resemble to some degree the past?

edit 2:

In response to lower part of left hand panel: Wouldn’t the argument be that many other responses by organisms that were not functional were ‘tried’ along the way, and only those that are to some degree effective lasted. And I don’t think anyone thinks the neurons are working perfectly - of course you are being polemical.
To use the pool analogy. A wide variety of very simple organism aimed away from the cue ball with the cue stick - iow went away from nutrients. They died off. Others went toward - randomly - but they had this random in built proclivity. These latter lived and passed on their pool ‘skill.’

edit 3:
Again, though, the brain is using the past to make guesses about the future. So what seems faster than possible as reactions is in fact that, since we experience much via anticipation. We form gestalts - fill in the gaps in patterns – for example we do not notice our blind spots and fill these in — ahead of time based on the past. This does get us into trouble. On the other hand it keeps us from reinventing the wheel with every perception. (again, I am working in the model you are arguing against) Recent cognitive science has pointed out much of this. Also that much of how we time our own decision-making is off. We have already decided - this can be seen by scanning the body and action potentials, before the mind thinks ‘OK, I will do this’. A lot of this works very well with physical objects we have encountered before - iow the past matches the present - but really messes us up in comlicated new things - for example think of how we mess up projecting the past onto relationships.

I am going to leave it at that for now. I want to calibrate and triangulate - using your responses to me - until I actually think I understand your OP - which I am hoping is right on the money.

A very entertaining presentation Jay. As you have so clearly grasped the secular equivalent of the Biblical question “What is man that thou art mindful of him” is THE question of our age. Neuroscience won’t sit still for the idea that the correlation between brain states and cognition is a divine slight of hand. Our skeptical friends will see a neural reductio ad absurdum as more “God of the gaps” theology.

Obviously we are “fearfully and wonderfully made” as the psalmist says. Part of that “wonder” is our ever increasing knowledge of how we the human organism works and how we evolved to be as we are. Moresillystuff’s evolutionary hypothesis makes sense. Greater neuroscientific knowledge may make us more aware of our limitations. But it does not threaten our open ended relationship with the Ultimate.

moresillystuff:

The thesis is the result of an epiphany that struck me one night at work (I’ve never read Sheldrake, but I’ll “wiki” him up. Thanks).

Your observation has some merit. Much of the time we walk about in similar surroundings and see pretty much the same things day in and day out, so it’s very plausible that, if psychophysicalism is true, the brain doesn’t have much to worry about in its creation of the future; it can simply draw upon past perception to map out future sensation.

But…

The general consensus (for those who have moved beyond naive realism) is that we do not perceive the world itself, but a virtual reality simulation of the world. Thus, the argument goes, the brain must map and integrate sensory inputs from the environment and body to form real-time virtual simulations of the real-time evolution of the external world. Given this, it isn’t really a matter of the brain drawing upon the past to form makeshift perceptions of a possible future—it’s a matter of the brain keeping up with the physical evolution of the external world—which is what it is and will be what it will be without regard to its past. If there is any use of the past by neurons in order to set up for the future, this will be only because the future experience happens to resemble the past/future of the external world beyond consciousness: it will not be a matter of the brain simply borrowing from the past to create the future “for it’s health”.

[b]If alternative responses in the neurons were “tried” along the way (but proved not functional) in the setting up of neural representation of the external world, this further aggravates the problem described in the OP piece above. The comic ultimately questions whether or not it is physically possible for the speed of thousands of chemical and electrical processes—that must take place in order to activate a neural circuit responsible for a given experience-- to outstrip or surpass the rapid-fire subjective speed of experience itself (which it must do, given that in psychophysicalism the neural activation must precede the experience!)

[Note: even if one were to argue that neural activation is simultaneous to experience (how this can be proven, of course, is a problem in itself)–the same psychophysical gap exists]

Here’s the thing:

  1. Simply thinking a sentence, like: “I’m going to the watch that movie tonight” involves rapid changes (faster than a second per syllable, actually) during the course of the thought (which itself probably takes a little more than a second to think, if that).

  2. If psychophysicalism is true, there must be a neural change or electric modulation corresponding to EACH syllable “spoken” in the thought! Perhaps not in synaptic change and repositioning, but in some type of change in frequency and number of action potential (the firing of the neuron) in the responsible circuit.

  3. There’s a lot of things that must go on in order for a single neuron to fire, and according to those in the know, whether or not a neuron will fire at any given time is “iffy” at best. There are ion gates that must open and close, allowing the right concentrations of sodium and potassium ions to cross the border of the neural membrane of an neuron that’s about to fire (or is made not to fire), there are inputs from thousands of other neurons sending their signals to the appropriate neural team (responsible for the very next experience you are going to have)—and these thousands of inputs determine whether or not the individual neurons in the neural team will fire, there is the refractory period of each individual neuron, in which a neuron will not fire under any circumstance once it has done so (what’s handling the next experience, coming around the bend the in the next nanosecond, if the neurons responsible for the last experience is resting up in their refractory periods?), and so on.

  4. These things take place above the molecular level (neurons are vastly larger than molecules) so the “smaller makes faster” defense doesn’t fly. The big question then becomes: how are the thousands of processes, even if they occur simultaneously able to “do their thing” and activate the appropriate neural team in the nick of time BEFORE the onset of a new, future experience, which—following the thought-syllable example above, can occur in nanoseconds (or less!)?

This question begs even if we’re talking about synaptic “pruning” or even synaptic overproduction before the fact (Gould’s notion of “exadaptation”—the making of “more than enough” of a thing that environmental pressure then “prunes” into “enough”): aside from random chance, how does the brain “know” which synaptic hookups to keep and which to throw away—and what (besides pure random chance) ensures that things work out so that the synaptic hookups that survive are indeed the very ones that yield representation of the external world?[/b]

[b]It seems more likely that the brain must manipulate its neurons in order to constantly keep up with the subtle or overt changes in the external world (if one subscribes to psychophysicalism and Facsimile Realism), as opposed to calculating possible futures and building this based on what it’s already created in the past. Sure, we’re dealing with the same neurons sitting around in their same respective places in the cerebral cortex (neurogenesis notwithstanding: but even here, how are new neurons incorporated into the “old guard”?), but new synaptic changes form, playing a constant game of “musical chairs” with the synapses (and somas) of other neurons in the vicinity due to new experiences. Presumably, no two experiences are exactly alike (though they may visually appear alike)—thus we have neural change every second (in terms of frequency of action potential and synaptic connection).

At the end of the day, we have to concentrate on the mechanistic aspect of perception. In order to form gestalts or perceptual patterns—which are subjective and not physical in nature—there are physical things going on beneath the surface that (presumably) corresponds to these “effects”—and it is the speed of the underlying mechanical process (that must go on in order for one to even have a certain experience) that’s highly suspect, given all of the thousands of elements and steps that must be taken in order to get just ONE—count it—ONE neuron to fire on time.

Hope this helps, and thanks for your take on things so far!

J[/b]

felix dakat:

Thank you.

Sure, but I think that it’s more than a “God of the gaps” thing going on here (although in the strip above I jumped to the “Judeo-Christian God” conclusion–but this is merely religious prejudice): it’s a matter of logical, conceptual, and even physical impossibility. As stated above (to moresillystuff), there’s a lot going on just to get even one neuron to fire–it’s a veritable “water wheel” contraption of a process—and there are thousands of neurons and neural hookups (via synapses) involved in the activation of just one neural correlate of consciousness (presumably). Parallelism of neural process does nothing to solve the problem: it’s just the same convolution taking place everywhere at once rather than one at a time. How everything works “in the nick of time” before the onset of suddenly-appearing new experience doesn’t quite “jibe” with the confident assurances of neuroscience.

[b]True. But I’m thinking that it’s probably all “virtual” in aspect. In my view, we live under a Theonomous Simulism, in which the world is a virtual world with virtual people, pre-programmed to follow a particular course by the Judeo-Christian God, and it is in this virtual determinism that, as Paul stated on Mars Hill: “he is not far from each one of us” (Acts 19).

Thanks again for your response, felix.

J.[/b]

Jay, you have suggested that your subjective experience changes from one nanosecond to the next. Do you really believe this? If so, can you tell me the difference in your experience between the moment you finish this sentence and the following nanosecond?

aporia:

It’'s not as if we are subjectively aware of the passage of a “nanosecond”—I use the term in a quasi-poetic sense to denote experience that upon reflection seems to pass faster than a second. For example, it is common myth that one can speak in one second simply by stating the phrase: “one-one thousand”. If one were to use a stopwatch and time oneself to see if the phrase takes exactly (give or take) a second to speak, then the act of simply simply stating the “one…” in the “one-one thousand” presumably takes less than a second to say (and as the statement of the phrase is subjectively experienced, stating the “one” from the phrase is experienced faster than a second).

Surely my argument does not stand or fall upon whether or not I can tell the difference in speed between one experience and the next, and whether or not I (or anyone) could accurately measure a nanosecond in time between the experiences. [b]To argue this would be a strawman. The point is that there are experiences that pass faster than a second (example: the visual perception of a stopwatch counting seconds is proof enough: surely between the points in time in which the stopwatch reads: “0:001” and o:002" one is currently experiencing a second of passing experience: presumably there are gradients of experience that collectively make up the experience of the passing second of which one is aware—if experience is not a purely non-quantized projection, there are “micro-experiences” collectively making up the experience of watching the stopwatch click from one number to the next that probably takes a nanosecond or less to pass.

At the end of the day, it is not feasible to believe that every experience takes longer than a second (and that the neural processes “responsible” for every experience goes through their precariously balanced mechanizations faster than “faster-than-second” experience). Why, thinking a single word involves the mental pronouncement of syllables that presumably one mentally “speaks” faster than it takes one to say: “one-one thousand” or faster than it takes a stopwatch to flip from one second to the next.

J.[/b]

How could you ever test that? What evidence could possibly be brought to bear? This is just idle speculation.

From what we can see and test, we’ve concluded that “moments of experience” come at us faster than one per second, and slower than one per nanosecond. Here’s how I would estimate it. If you watch the digits fly by on a watch that keeps track of microseconds, you the ones past 1/100th of a second will seem a totally indistinguishable blur. So our moments of experience probably come at us around 100 per second, give or take an order of magnitude depending on the situation. That means that experience is 10,000,000 times slower than the nanoscopic electrical processes taking place in our brains. That implies for each of our experiences, our brains may be doing electrochemical works of staggering complexity!

You seem to argue that the brain’s physical substrate is “too slow” to keep up with the quick changes of our experience. Well, they may seem quick to us, but given the above, our experience is a total slowpoke compared to our brain’s processes. So in what sense is the brain too slow to account for consciousness?

I was meaning, “new, interesting, striking” with the word, “novel”, and was referring to your work.

LDS: Latter-Day Saints, short-hand for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
The preference is LDS instead of “Mormon” (this is for purposes of identification as there are a few different sects of Mormonsim).

Agreed; they are needed for the scientific skeptic.

Close to the same thought, yes.

But they do not attempt to reason the existence itself, but reason with it as a given more, “tidily”.
LDS seems to “tie-up loose ends” of other forms of Christianity.

aporia:

[b]And once again, naive realism raises its ugly head. Where has this (that experience has been clocked at faster than one per second but slower than one per nanaosecond) been observed or tested? Do we have watches that track nanoseconds, and are these watches used to race the verbal report of a subject who states that he or she has had this or that experience? Do we use the watch to time OUR change in experience, if so, how do we simultaneously observe the watch (which measures nanoseconds, for God’s sake) and introspectively mark the passage of personal experience?

I’m being facetious here, but you get the point (I hope).[/b]

The pot calling the kettle black, eh? This sounds like idle speculation, too.

[b]REALLY? Then given that our consciousness is supposed to be in the business of keeping up with the currently appearance and disposition of the external world (if one accepts psychophysicalism and Facsimile Realism), it would seem that the “nanoscopic electrical processes taking place in our brains” surpasses representation of the real-time dispositions of the external world itself. Consider:

  1. The external world shoots “pool” with the “pool balls” of the neural processes themselves (if one buys psychophysicalism)—our brains supposedly grant visual perception that more or less accurately represents the current real-time appearance and behavior of the external world.

  2. If experience is keeping track with the external world (which presumably also includes processes at the nanoscopic level and lower), and if this temporal isomorphism is slower than neural process, then neural process is moving faster than the external world.

  3. This is a logical contradiction, unless we’re talking about fanciful subdivisions of universal dimension in which Einsteinian relativism yields differences of speed between “micro-neural” passage of time, subjective passage of time, and external world passage of time (when the three should be logically inseparable). And if one is desperate enough to go so far as to propose this, then—quoting your question to me above: "How could you ever test that? What evidence could possibly be brought to bear? "

(Disparity in speed notwithstanding, one must also explain the uncanny accuracy that “nanoscopic electrical processes moving 10,000,000 times fast than currently perceived experience” captures the likeness of an external world that cannot be experienced—but this is another story)

Remember, the life of the brain (and the life of its conceivable connection to consciousness) is the[/b] action potential[b]. Charles Yanofsky states that there’s a lot that must go on before the action potential of just one neuron fires, and this is contingent at best. Neurons and their action potentials are supra-nanoscopic in size. An individual neuron is, at the end of the day, a cell, and it is (according to Yanofsky) not that different from every other cell save in it’s dendritic and axonal processes and its specialized communicative function (passing electrical charge from one neuron to another and to muscle and glandular tissue)—unless you wish to say that cells are themselves nanoscopic in size, and that the size of nanotechnology begins at the size of the cell.

Action potentials themselves are “macro” electric charges: they are not sub-molecular electrical events taking place in some tiny microscopic corner of a neuron. Even if they were, unless they were summated to form one BIG action potential, it seems odd for a neuroscientist to assume that a micro-pulse of electrical energy in a part of a neuron a little larger than a protein molecule is somehow, all by itself, responsible for a subject’s current experience of happiness. The action potential is a “macro” event that occurs throughout and among long lines of whole neurons before final deactivation and repolarization. Experience is believed to depend, in turn, upon many such action potentials coursing through thousands of neurons synaptically linked a particular pattern or chain in some part of the brain: anything below this “macroscopic” scope is merely a mirco-gradient of the action potential needed for experience.

Are you attempting to claim that the thousands of neurons and thousands of pulses of action potential per neuron, ALL of which summates to form just ONE experience—given their supra-nanoscopic size and restriction to Newton’s laws, etc.—perform their “waterwheel”-like contraption of mechanization 10,000,000 times faster than rapid-fire subjective experience? Wouldn’t this outstrip the experience itself, the RESULT of the neural processing? If such super-fast processing is setting up for the next experience, what, besides random chance, enables accurate representation of the far-slower-moving external world?

I think you’re simply hashing out speculative “speeds” to neural processing (that one must unthinkingly accept) in order to save psychophysicalism.[/b]

J.

TheStumps:

[b]Oops. #-o . Well, thanks for the compliment. Talk about your double entendres (or perceived double entendres)…

When you said: [/b]

I read it as: “Interesting…he’s read a novel entitled “LDS” on the subject.” Heh. :blush:

Thanks for the clarification.

[b]Agreed. I think the “reductio ad absurdum” leading to the “given more” may follow from the even deeper logical abyss that remains if no gods exist AND the nature and content of our experience does not mimic the appearance and behavior of the external world.

J.[/b]

If one can advance two different reasonable-sounding speculations giving opposite conclusions on the same topic, most likely they’re both just speculation and the real answer requires further investigation.

I dunno if that number is all that accurate, but something like that.

What makes you think one would outstrip the other?

Look, your computer can add numbers right? I bet that it’s never added 208460389745089475023984230 + 2398236591782360298740395895839458394 before. But if I ask it to add those two numbers, it will do so near-instantaneously and accurately, because its design enables it to add any pair of numbers (so long as they’re not TOO big). Similarly, perhaps our brains have been shaped by evolution so that they can quickly and consistently process changing sensory data to accurately represent the external world. Getting accurate information about the state of the world is useful for acting within it, hence it seems plausible that natural selection would prefer brains which represent the external world accurately.

aporia:

True enough.

[b]If the external world passes at the same speed as visual perception (arguably the only aspect of consciousness having a counterpart in the external world), and if neural process supposedly representing experience of the external world passes 10,000,000 times faster than experience, neural processes (refractory periods notwithstanding) will not, presumably, wait for experience and the external world to catch up. Neural process in the cerebral cortex, the only area of the brain responsible for consciousness, is in the business of routing forces exerted against it from the external world to the “correct” neural circuits (pre-existing in their respective places in the cortex before the fact) that then supposedly yield our virtual experience of that aspect of the e.w. to which we are currently observing. At the speeds you propose, representational process outstrips even the external world—if we assume that the speed of the e.w. is reflected in the speed of experience. This is the conceptual constant, if Facsimile Realism is true. It seems more plausible that the speed of representative process will be almost equal to or slower than the isomorphic speeds of the external world and experience—given that representative process comes first, followed fast on its heels by the next experience we have.

(Note: At least we know that the speed of neural process is slower than that of electric current in wires):[/b]

Action potentials can travel along axons at speeds of 0.1-100 m/s. This means that nerve impulses can get from one part of a body to another in a few milliseconds, which allows for fast responses to stimuli. (Impulses are much slower than electrical currents in wires, which travel at close to the speed of light, 3x108 m/s.)

(Nerve Impulses, biologymad.com/NervousSystem … pulses.htm)

[b]Sure, but visual observation of the addition and the solution will take place within the parameters of visual speed. Granted, one may have a compelling argument for Facsimile Realism if one proposes that the calculations take place in the external world, but then again, it takes faith to believe that there are things going on beyond perception itself (and it takes greater presumption and faith to say exactly what’s going on in the external world and how fast it’s occuring). At the end of the day, an opponent can argue that if reality is only ‘virtual’, a (virtual) computer can add 208460389745089475023984230 + 239823659178236029874039589583945 with the solution being granted within the parameter of experience by an outside Programmer, without making the jump to faster-than-visual calculations of objects (below or beyond the threshold of experience) in the external world.

As far as the evolution of the brain and its ability to accurately represent the external world, a lot of faith is needed in a godless world to produce the set-up. In the absence of a governing intelligence, everything depends upon “roll-of-the-die” chance, and this includes trial-and-error formation of a physical structure that somehow—as opposed to every other object in the universe—gives rise to subjective experience, and even further, subjective experience that represents a world that has never been experienced. Everything, to us, is ‘virtual’. Even explanation of visual process must take it on faith that there are ‘external world-photons’ acting upon ‘external world-retinas’ and ‘external world-optic nerves and occipital lobes’ to produce visual perception. One must believe that the cerebral cortex just happens to be the object of choice allowing representation of the external world, rather than the experienced world being only a virtual creation of an outside agency–with allows “useful acting within it”.[/b]