The Unified Theory of the Nervous System
and Behavior
Cognitive Philosophy /Brain Theory by Steven Michael Harris
A person with symptoms of mental illness or neurological disorder has no clear path to follow for treatment.
Psychologists have a wide array of theories and schools of thought. Each of these approaches has its own language and technique. The various psychological methods and theories are often in conflict with each other. Clinical and laboratory studies can do damage to some theories and support others. But every approach has some data that supports the method, some data that shows the method as suspect, and some data that can’t be accounted for.
To unify the many "sciences" of psychology alone appears to be impossible.
But there are other ways to deal with these disorders.
Psychiatrists have gotten away from talk-therapy these days and now focus on medication. Medication appears to help assuage the symptoms of many disorders much faster than talk-therapy (when the patient is lucky enough to get a medication that works) but with considerable side-effects and with a dependence on continuing the expensive treatment that might also be harmful to other aspects of the patient’s health. There is also some conflict in the various theories of psychiatry.
Neurologists look at different processes in the patient for understanding, and, although neurologists speak a similar language as that of the psychiatrists, neurological approaches are not the same as the psychiatric approaches. The theories are not completely coordinated and do sometimes conflict with each other.
Those who talk about the possibility of a unified theory are usually talking about the unification of psychology, psychiatry and neurobiology.
Current debates among the philosophers of consciousness have predicted that a unified theory will not be possible for 100 or 200 years. Too many problems need to be solved, they say.
As has always been the case with scientific advancement, the answers are a simplification of current understanding, not another way of increasing the sense of the complexity of the biology. But the simplification shows how massive complexity of logic can be performed through the networking of these simple factors in a nervous system.
In some ways, the problem is even bigger than they think. It is also necessary to explain the processes that can make eastern medicine work... and new age approaches, and voodoo, etc... Without those answers, you don't understand how the nervous system works. (I will not be supporting the theories of these various approaches at all, only showing why their observations occur and why the therapies get the results that they do.)
And the neurology of the body controls everything so physical illnesses are involved and that brings in the general practitioner and various theories of the workings of various organs that might need tinkering because of understanding the way nerve cells communicate to all of the systems of the body. Placebo effect is a neurological event, and every function that can benefit from placebo effect will be understood in new ways when placebo effect is finally understood. (So there will be implications for the gastroenterologists, dermatologists, urologists, allergy specialists, oncologists, cardiologists....)
Ways of thinking about these processes need to be changed, so a large amount of new philosophy is required. The right way to look at this data requires an entirely new way of looking at the body and at the nervous system. When the right theories are found, contradictions no longer exist. Everything can be explained. (And that is a big "everything.")
Unfortunately, there are commonalities to the behaviors and experiences in religious events that need to be approached and explained as well. So religion will be effected too. (I write "unfortunately" because explanations that debunk religious belief create a lot of anger in the religious. I find thereligious to be particularly dangerous when faced with truth. Even today we have public debates about the validity of evolution theory. Kansas is in such an intellectual vacuum today.)
The truth is not convenient. But it is the truth. The only morality comes from truth and I’ve never seen the religions explaining the truth about how the world works.
But does it end there? No. A full understanding of the brain will teach us how to better treat our ill and our elderly, how to better educate our young, how to better rehabilitate our criminals and how to better write our laws.
A unified theory will bring on enormous change in the understanding of every field related to human and animal function, experience, behavior and culture.
There will be many points of view to accommodate when explaining this(these) theory(s).
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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.
On these pages you will find ideas that should haunt you. Included are new concepts in science, medicine, sociology, evolutionary psychology, philosophy and more...
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.
