Untitled Document

The Unified Theory of the Nervous System
and Behavior

Cognitive Philosophy /Brain Theory by Steven Michael Harris

Churchland: Can Neurobiology Teach Us Anything About Consciousness?

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Whether science will finally succeed in reducing psychological phenomena to neurobiological phenomena is, needless to say, yet another empirical question.

Now this depends slightly on which definition of "empirical" you embrace. My dictionary gives two definitions:

1. relying or based solely on experiments or experience; as, the empirical method.
2. relying or based on practical experience without reference to scientific principles; as, an empirical remedy.

The answer is not exactly either. To solve these problems requires all of the observations and experiments of science, but it also requires a practical discovery of basic flaws in the scientific approach and scientific ways of describing certain events. To find the answers that unite these different fields with their different points of view and different jargons, you need to show the flaws in their languages that make it so difficult to see the answers. Understanding requires a different language with a different logic.

Sometimes it takes a realization that a question that is being asked is a flawed question and can never be answered as the question makes an assumption that throws the scientist off track.

Yes, it is currently possible to describe a system that explains (and predicts) the various observations of all of the fields concerned with behavior and neurology. The answer comes from a new kind of mathematical logic that describes behavior (symptoms) in a way that can predict a system that can be observed following certain rules at the cellular level. But such an answer, while using all available science, needs to come from relinquishing various concepts that are taken for granted as true and basic to the current interpretations of how these biological systems work.

Recently there has been a debate about how long it will take to achieve a unified theory considering all of the "hard" problems that need to be addressed. Most were arguing that it will take another 100 or 200 years. Sometimes you are making the problem greater than it needs to be. Sometimes a goal is difficult because it is very far away. Sometimes a goal is within reach but you are just looking in the wrong direction and you will never achieve your goal by keeping the current coarse.

If you do not have the engineering designs available for reference, you resort to reverse engineering -- the tactic of taking apart a device to see how it works.

Churchland then goes on to describe what she means by reductionism. I am on her side on this issue and now know why those who think it is ridiculous to attempt to reduce human behavior in order to explain the workings of the brain are wrong. But solving the problem is not an either/or proposition. It is a mistake to argue the direction of the approach for solving the problems (micro to macro, or macro to micro). The problem is solved by looking from all directions and discarding all theories but looking at all data. The problem is solved by looking at very subtle mathematical patterns in behavior and then theorizing at how a system could be built that could make such a system possible, then applying these various theories to the data that is available about the nervous system and the behaviors until there is an absence of conflict. This requires very complicated math and what seems an unnatural application of math to behavior. (And luckily this is possible because nerve cells are mathematical constructs. Understanding how emotional math is possible is a big clue to finding the answers.) It is very much like trying to break a code or language.

To look at all sides at the same time is very difficult and the current scientific climate is an obstacle because specialization is expected and specialization gets in the way of solving the big problems.

Much of her argument is directed to those who don’t believe a reduction is possible. Knowing how it can be done shows me the ignorance of those skeptics (and those whose religious beliefs will not allow for such discovery). My problem is in communicating this information. Understanding this takes a substantial shift in thinking (as in most major discoveries).

Many have not managed the shift in thinking required to embrace evolution, which is easy compared to this. Once discovered, the principals of evolution can be understood by most who are not indoctrinated too much by religion to keep them from such understanding. The mechanisms of the brain that create all function and consciousness will take much more education to be understood and many will never be able to comprehend this. (Just give me enough time with the right people and I can show them how it works. But understanding the brain can be somewhat maddening because it gives you a different language to explain the nature of all your perceptions and the frequent impulses to "translate" your experiences and thoughts into this other language, thus solving a wide variety of theoretical problems, resulting in a very busy mind.)

Other existing characterizations of capacities may have a core of adequacy but undergo major redrawings, in something like the way Mendel’s notion of "factor" came to be modified by genetics into the notion of "gene" which itself was modified and deepened with the development of molecular biology.

This statement is very right. There is a basic language of the nervous system that once discovered through logic will show how many human and animal characteristics and capacities are actually very much the same thing but appearing much different when applied to different information or sensory data or combinations of different types of information in the nervous system. The most important discovery will come from very subtle patterns that are everywhere to the point of invisibility. We need to understand the logic the brain uses for itself (or better said that the brain cells use for themselves) rather than the logic described by the chemist.

Some categories such as "attitude" are extremely vague and might be replaced altogether; others, such as "is sleeping" have already undergone a fractionation as EEG and neurophysiological research has revealed important brain differences in various stages of sleep. Categories such as "memory", "attention" and "reasoning" are likewise undergoing revision, as experimental psychology and neuroscience proceed.

This last quote is interesting to me because almost every category mentioned will be understood knowing the mechanisms of a single cell. Learning (memory) is an activity that happens in every cellular connection. Understanding attention means an understanding of the language the brain uses, a clear understanding of how stress is a part of that basic language and what stress does to processing when it is out of balance, and an understanding of very complicated mathematical trends that exist in a system with billions of connections as a result of this setup. Sleep occurs in every cell as a result of the slight mathematical inclination towards increased inhibition in cells (and groups or networks of cells) that increases when they are very busy. (A necessary protective mechanism.) (I will show how sleep at the cellular level is an activity that occurs 24 hours a day but the sleep we describe and measure in an organism is an evolved coordination of sleep for the parts of the brain that need a break from activity. An understanding of the brain’s language will show why the EEG’s show certain activities during periods of sleep and an understanding of the nature of stress building up in centers that measure emotion and deal with language will eventually show why certain stages of sleep increase activity in some parts of the system.) And, yes, "attitude" is a word that can be applied to every system or to the organism as a whole and it is a useless word for today’s science but useful to me because it is another piece of evidence that all nervous system activity involves emotion.

The possibility of nontrivial revision and even replacement of existing high level descriptions by 'neurobiologically harmonious' high level categories is the crux of what makes eliminative materialism eliminative.

I don’t believe Churchland has any idea of the amount of needed truth there is in this statement. Basic theory comes with an understanding of the universal factors in a system being studied. Basic theory comes from looking at similarities (in a way that will explain how these consistent factors can contribute to a great diversity of behaviors and functioning). The way disorders are described in the DSM-IV is the enemy to such understanding. An understanding of how the brain really communicates will explain why there is so much co-morbidity of disorders and so much drift from one disorder to another (even mental to physical and visa versa). Trying to understand this through chemistry has been a useful method but it makes it next to impossible to see the code the brain uses in passing information around the system. Basic unified theory will show that almost all disorders are actually an expression of the same problem as expressed in different geography of the nervous system (regardless of the particular type of neurotransmitter often affected in that area of the brain). [See my essay: Switchboard example]

According to the current rules of identifying neurological-realm disorders a new disorder is being added about every month. It is almost as if the world of physics was trying to discover gravity by saying a different force or science was involved when a cow fell to the ground than when a duck fell to the ground and then trying to discover duck gravity and cow gravity and fork gravity and feather gravity and dust gravity (all having different kinds of gravity).

The answers will come from showing what is similar and universal. (For instance the lack of control of focus that exists with all disorders and an understanding that schizophrenia is really late onset autism from the brain’s point of view but such is an understanding that only comes with an understanding of the changes that occur in the brain with development and the acquisition of language. Or the needed observation that any neurological symptom that progresses and gets worse over time is caused by the mechanisms behind learning that have gone awry... as any behavior or symptom that is experienced over and over is being practiced by the system.)

From the vantage point of considerable ignorance, failure to imagine some possibility is only that: a failure of imagination-- one psychological capacity amongst others. It does not betoken any metaphysical limitations on what we can come to understand , and it cannot predict anything significant about the future of scientific research.

Brava! She says this so well.

Another factor that will get in the way such "imagination" of the answers is that language is so inherently flawed that it gets in the way of understanding. The brain uses mathematical principles to communicate with itself. But the language we have evolved to communicate with other colonies of single-cell organisms (other people) has no mathematical precision and therefore creates a kind of stressful conflict in communication that gets in the way of certain kinds of understanding. (More on this later.)

A variation of the "cannot imagine" proposal is expressed as "we can never, never know....", or "it is impossible to ever understand...." or "it is forever beyond science to show that....". The idea here is that something's being impossible to conceive says something decisive about its empirical or logical impossibility. I am not insisting that such proposals are never relevant. Sometimes they may be. But they are surprisingly high-handed when science is in the very early stages of studying a phenomenon.

This statement is very right. I just want to make a personal point. It is good to read such statements from those in the medical field, but it is difficult to accept such a statement as genuine when coming from a doctor. Remember that I have been ignored by scores of doctors who have refused to listen to any of my ideas because I don’t have the right degree. My ideas have not been heard because I am not a doctor. Yes, there are many doctors (and scientists and academics) who will state that we know very little about what is happening in the human body and nervous system and are very early in this work, but at the same time they will arrogantly claim that only those who are professionals with the "right" degrees are capable of making any contribution. This is insulting the power of that same brain/mind that they are building up in their examination of it.

A third variation on this "nay, nay, never" theme draws conclusions about how the world must actually be, based on linguistic properties of certain central categories in current use to describe the world. Permit me to give a boiled down instance: "the category 'mental' is remote in meaning -- means something completely different -- from the category 'physical' . It is absurd therefore to talk of the brain seeing or feeling, just as it is absurd to talk of the mind having neurotransmitters or conducting current." Allegedly, this categorial absurdity undercuts the very possibility that science could discover that feeling pain is activity in neurons in the brain. The epithet "category error" is sometimes considered sufficient to reveal the naked nonsense of reductionism.

Churchland is on the verge of a great discovery with this point. When an understanding of the brain is really there, such understanding will show that certain kinds of activity in any nerve cell in the system are experienced by that particular cell as pain or pleasure or something in-between and this is the basis for all processing. As an organism we cannot sense what an individual cell is experiencing... we only can sense what large numbers are expressing or feeling and such sensations are different for the organism depending on what sensations or combinations of sensations are being interpreted by the cells that are currently firing in the system. It is so very difficult to communicate how so many different experiences and understanding could be created by variations of a simple cellular language (and there are some people who cannot comprehend how a picture in the newspaper is really just an arrangement of black or white dots). [See my essay: What is Emotion?]

Scientific discoveries that a certain macro phenomenon is a complex result of the micro structure and its dynamics are typically surprising and typically sound funny -- at first.

Yes.

The core of this objection is that if a macro phenomenon can be the outcome of more than one mechanism (organization and dynamics of components), then it cannot be identified with any one mechanism, and hence the reduction of the macrophenonomenon to the (singular) underlying micro phenomenon is impossible. This objection seems to me totally uninteresting to science.

Yes.

Similarly, the engineering of artificial neurons and artificial neural nets (ANNs) facilitates and is facilitated by neurobiological approaches to how real neurons work; the engineering undertakings do not mean the search for the basic principles of nervous system function is misguided.

Once you have an understanding of the language of the nervous system, you will realize the problems with artificial neural nets or any other kind of logic that tries to show the logic of the brain or create an artificial intelligence and then apply it to the workings of the brain: the real logic of the brain is very plastic and powerful and it can create many ways of solving any problem. The brain is only limited by the limits of mathematics (and mathematics far beyond anybody’s understanding of mathematics and a mathematics that works much better without being expressed in our "language of mathematics" that will slow it down). (More on this later.)

Another problem of using machine models to explain the real brain is that no machine could ever duplicate what life does in processing because the language of the brain requires life, requires emotion, as processing and consciousness is a pattern of emotion that is experienced in this massive network of cells that all have an emotional part of the understanding. Each cell is a processor with a small emotional bit of the understanding of the processing. So to create artificial neurons will require creating a life form that has emotional range depending on the nature of its firings.

Is it perhaps that we should not get our hopes up too high? What, precisely, is "too high" here? Is it the hope that we shall discover the general principles of how the brain works? Why is that too high a hope?

Religion is the biggest obstacle here. Too much understanding of the brain conflicts with many religious beliefs. Religion often does not want too much understanding. A good many of our cultural beliefs come from a long history with religion and more understanding of this will be needed to get past some of the obstacles to understanding as well. (For instance to understand which mental illness symptoms are reactions to problems with culture that cause stress for the organism... where the culture is the illness... an example being the problems of health caused by shame. What other animal takes on stress by assuming pain with the witnessing of it’s own body?)

The bias of thinking that humans are apart from animals as declared by God is another problem in seeking the truth. The bias that consciousness has to do with language is part of this. When you really understand the brain you can see how language was a big development in the advance of our species but also will see some drawbacks in the functioning of the brain caused by language as that language creates a much slower kind of mind in certain ways. (This is a big subject and it also deals with culture and religion as they are embedded in the language as well.) Consider the slower reflexes of humans in comparison to many other animals. Consider how much more difficult it is to perform various athletic feats when you are "thinking your way" through the actions (using language instead of instinct during a learning process while acquiring new techniques). Consider how the runner slows down when counting the steps (language) or worrying (in words) about how the running is being performed. Or consider how the autistic savant has special abilities that are not in the language realm with a disorder that involves the shutting down of emotions and language in most cases. I’ll eventually write about why this occurs.

John Searle's strategy is to say that although the brain causes conscious states, any identification of conscious states with brain activities is unsound. Traditionally, it has been opined that the best the reductionist can hope for are correlations between subjective states and brain states, and although correlations can be evidence for causality they are not evidence for identity. Searle has tried to bolster that objection by saying that whereas a/b identifications elsewhere in science reveal the reality behind the appearance, in the case of awareness, the reality and the appearance are inseparable -- there is no reality to awareness except what is present in awareness. There is, therefore, no reduction to be had.

Synoptically, here is why Searle's manoeuvre is unconvincing: he fails to appreciate why scientists opt for identifications when they do. Depending on the data, cross-level identifications to the effect that a is b may be less troublesome and more comprehensible scientifically than supposing thing a causes separate thing b.

Maybe I’m dense, but I can’t see how anyone would not identify conscious states with brain activities.

More reduction is possible and the correlation of consciousness and brain states just requires different ways of looking at behavior. The patterns that are mathematical and universal are constantly being witnessed in many ways by all of us. Such constancy makes these patterns practically invisible.

In the case at hand, I am predicting that explanatory power, coherence and economy will favor the hypothesis that awareness just is some pattern of activity in neurons. I may turn out to be wrong. If I am wrong, it will not be because an introspectively-based intuition is immutable, but because the science leads us in a different direction. If I am right, and certain patterns of brain activity are the reality behind the experience, this fact does not in and of itself change my experience and suddenly allow me (my brain) to view my brain as an MR scanner or a neurosurgeon might view it.

Churchland is right. And, as she observes, such a fact does not change your experience (or it would have already changed all of our experiences). To really observe such a fact requires an ability to look at many interrelating factors at a time much like the brain calculates in many (millions) of dimensions at the same time. Training is needed to really see how the brain works, but such intuition and discovery makes it possible to reduce much of this discovery in a way that can be understood by the general public. Remember, the brain is a mathematical-construct/voting-mechanism with a quorum and a shifting weight of various influences... all math and coordinated in so many dimensions at the same time that it is impossible to completely communicate the complexity to each other because we need to communicate in two-dimensional linear language. Understanding the brain shows that there really is a higher power, an ability to think that is beyond words, in our brains. But this higher power does not translate very well into the languages we use. Besides, when understanding how the nerve cells compute you will understand that all processing is a form of seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, so any higher power that exists in us must be tricked into applying that power to any purpose but the pleasure and health of the organism.

We have two minds within us. To describe such as conscious and subconscious confuses the reality of this. All experience and function is conscious. We are biased to think that language is what makes us superior and gives us consciousness. We are trained to apply words to describe and experience everything we witness. To look at a scene without words is to see many things. To apply words to the scene reduces the experience to the rules of the words (one after another in a certain order following certain rules). If our consciousness was defined by our inner use of language, then we would be describing an unconscious experience when we were required to spend several days in court describing and explaining a crime that was witnessed in a few seconds of terror. The crime was witnessed without words in the mind, but reducing the experience to language could fill a book with language (later when there was time to reflect). To say that our language makes us conscious would mean that we could only testify to the actual words that were in our minds during the experience of the crime (or we would be testifying to an unconscious experience). To say that our language defines consciousness is to say that the person with a better vocabulary has more consciousness. (I could go on and on, but this concept I’m arguing against is so ridiculous that it is not worth any more time.)

Which brings up the next quote:

This is the view of D. C. Dennett. Like Searle, Dennett is no dualist. Unlike Searle, who thinks that quite a lot, if not all, about consciousness can be discovered by neuroscience, Dennett has long been convinced that study of the brain itself -- its physiology and anatomy -- is largely a waste of time so far as understanding the nature of consciousness and cognition are concerned. Simplified, the crux of his idea is this: humans become conscious as they acquire language and learn to talk to themselves. What happens in this transformation is that a parallel machine (the neural networks of the brain) simulates a serial machine (operations are performed one at a time, in a sequence, according to rules, which may be recursive.)

Dennett is both right and wrong in this.

Churchland has written that the brain is a parallel processor using the observation that serial machines are good at mathematical calculation but people are not so good at math, and that parallel machines are better at object recognition and other kinds of processing that people are good at... thus we are more like a parallel processing computer. She is both right and wrong in this.

The brain is a massively parallel system and nothing can change that. But the acquisition of language constantly refocuses the thinking (processing) along the lines of the linear rules and logic of the language once the person has been taught to think in the terms of language. Much more needs to be said about this.

The brain uses math to do all of the work. It calculates according to mathematical principals in millions of dimensions at the same time. No languageas we know language can communicate in so many different dimensions. To use language requires an expression of information as can be expressed using the vocal cords (and later in a written representation of the spoken language) and only one sound can be uttered at a time. Therefore a system that can communicate in millions of directions with millions of different pieces of information in the same instant must learn to translate thinking into the one sound at a time linear format.

One person talking to another person is like a supercomputer communicating with another supercomputer through two old men using Morse Code (which is better than two supercomputers with no old men — with no language to connect). Of course there are many other non-verbal pieces of information that are passed back and forth (when the two parties are in each other’s presence).

It might appear that this is a form of forcing the brain into a serial processor, but that is only an illusion. The brain does not work in the way a machine works and nothing could stop this kind of communication from being an expression of a massively parallel processing of information.

Let’s say I present you with the word "cup" (out of any context):

This word brings up many images and understandings. My contention is that the brain is always firing every thought (ever thought possible with healthy neurology) that has an appropriate connection to any other piece of information, until it is signaled to reduce the possible meanings with new information that focuses those calculations down to the most appropriate choices. (This is one of several mechanisms for controlling thought/focus.) We don’t have to be aware of this happening for it to be happening. (For instance, that I’m talking to you about the word "cup" does not mean that your nervous system has no consciousness of the sensations in your left second toe. You might not be focused on the sensations in that toe but the information is there just the same.)

And the many meanings of the word "cup" are not processed in any one part of the brain. The sound of the word "cup" is experienced in the part of the brain that processes auditory information. The appearance of the word as it is spelled and written on a piece of paper is visualized in the visual processing center (and the language center). And that is not the only image processed there. Various cups of different types, shapes and sizes that have been witnessed might be seen in the mind’s eye (visual processing center) and the way these various cups might feel when held in the hand(s) could simultaneously be remembered in the brain center that processes kinesthetic experience. The sound of a cup landing on the table or the squeak of a Styrofoam cup as squeezed in the hand might be remembered as well. Smells remembered in the olfactory processing centers, tastes as well... The image and understanding of athletic supporter can be thrown into the mix as well as memories of events in the past life that involved the word "cup" or the objects represented by the word "cup."

Millions of bits of information could be fired by that one word and all fired at the same time. According to our conception of thinking (in terms of interior monologue) nothing might be happening at all because too much information can be sensed as no thinking. Remember that there is no way all of this information can be expressed in an interior monologue as such an interior language would require millions of words to express all of the resonance in that single word. (Such thinking gives poetry its beauty and power... but also takes away the accuracy of meaning in language.)

Because of so much observation of the mind predicting whenever possible (for instance people finishing other people’s sentences while being spoken without pause), I believe this goes much further. In saying the word "cup" the mind hears the consonant "c" before the rest of the word is spoken and probably fires all of the connections leading to "c" words that could possibly make sense in the context of when that sound is uttered and these choices are narrowed down to the "cu" choices with the addition of the vowel sound.

Remember that a nerve cell can receive a signal from a variety of sources but will not fire until a sufficient number of impulses are received that can send that impulse along down the line. But a cell can be firing and then stop firing when an inhibitory signal is received that eliminates that line of thought. (Inhibitory signals are an important factor in the control of focus.)

A great deal of parallel information is exchanged with every word we utter in language and nothing could make this system run as anything like what we understand to be a serial computer. But the rules of the language very much change the nature of thinking once we have learned to let our language dominate our thinking.

The development of a language center sends connections to many other centers of the brain and, in effect, creates a second emotional center. Most animals use the centers that measure emotion for the governor (control) of the system. Humans move much of that control from emotion to the language center creating a second emotional register. [See my essay: What is Emotion?]

This brain uses math to run everything. It uses math to run language. Incredible (indescribably) powerful math is required to run our language because all languages spoken by humans have no clear mathematical logic. "Bad" can be "good" or "bad" depending on how it is spoken. Words have many meanings and many of the meanings are opposites depending on context and implication (or irony or emotion...). Massive amounts of information must be calculated just to bring in the emotional/social factors when a word is spoken. Mathematical logic is still used but the flaws in the language very much slow down the passing of information when the language is used as the medium of presenting the information or processing the information (internal dialogue used for reasoning).

Remember that math is pure and any factor that messes with the data also messes with the results of the calculations. When working out a mathematical calculation, one small piece of wrong information will ruin the results of such reasoning. Our brains need to run massive calculations in order to ferret out these flaws in logic when using the mathematical hardware of our brains to run the different-mathematical (software) of our language thinking.

Of course, the development of language has made a much greater amount of communication available between organisms in our species. And such language (and language is always welded with social influence) has forced a greatly increased desire to expand knowledge in our species. But, in a sense, the communications between the cells in the brain of one single rat in an afternoon are much more powerful and expansive and perfect than the communications between two humans talking to one another in a lifetime. (There are billions of connections in the brain of the rat but a language only creates one connection between two humans.) All organisms are colonies of single-cell organisms communicating and cooperating together. Evolution has created very powerful communication in the nervous systems of these colonies. But there are no such massive connections between one colony and another colony (with the exception of some conjoined/Siamese twins).

In effect we have a verbal mind (following the direction of the rules of language) and a non-verbal mind using the pure pleasure/health-seeking mathematical processing of nerve cells in coordination with one another. Communication between these two minds can be difficult but there are many examples of such communication. For instance the autistic savant with a tendency to dissociate from language and emotion who is able to perform amazing calculations (visual, musical, mathematical) instantly and then sometimes get that information into the form of words. Or the scientist who tries to reason (interior dialogue) in order to solve a problem but with no luck, but then sees a picture (non-verbal) in a dream or thought that gives the answer to the problem - an example being the picture of snakes in a ring to solve the problem of the molecular structure of Benzene. Such discovery almost always comes when away from stress while sleeping or relaxing or doing something that is unrelated to the work. (This because the brain seeks pleasure as a rule in processing and the non-verbal parts of processing are less effective or less affected by the social demands that lead one to work or concentrate and seek stress in doing so.)

Churchland has mentioned that people are particularly bad at doing mathematical calculations that are performed easily by a serial computer and has cited this as evidence that we are a parallel system. (By the way, are parallel computer systems bad at doing mathematical calculations?) I believe we are better at performing mathematical calculations than any computer that has been conceived, but we are using our flawed language center to represent math to each other and our language-based mathematics needs to be represented in the linear two-dimensional language form that we can communicate to each other. Our language center is dealing with information that is far from precise so the signals in that part of the brain can more easily be corrupted. Remember that any corruption in a mathematical calculation can destroy the end result so a language driven mathematics is susceptible to the inaccuracies of language. (Which takes us back to the example of the autistic savant who with a damaged brain is able to perform amazing mathematical/visual/spatial/musical feats. Such is possible by dimming the less precise language and emotional centers of the brain.)

The final section of Churchland’s paper considers neural mechanisms of consciousness.

For example, the hippocampus might have seemed a likely candidate for a central role in consciousness because it is a region of tremendous convergence of fibres from diverse areas in the brain. We now know, however, that bilateral loss of the hippocampus, though it impairs the capacity to learn new things, does not entail loss of consciousness.

I find it very convenient that Churchland mentions the hippocampus at this point in her essay.

Think now about what I have written about the many thoughts happening at a time and the narrowing down of choices necessary to concentrate focus (and thus then make "conscious"). The various wrong choices would need to be inhibited. Consider now that most of the output from the hippocampus is inhibitory. [Now consider again my essays: Switchboard example and What is Emotion?]

If reduction of processing choices channels energy into the right choices, then such an activity would be a mechanism for memory, memory recall and what we call conscious awareness.

Lesions of the hippocampus have a great effect on memory. Some believe that memories are stored in the hippocampus and then transferred elsewhere in the form of long-term memory.

Memory is stored everywhere, but a focal point in the nervous system such as the hippocampus, if damaged, would have a great effect on memory because such a mechanism of focus would be necessary for coordinating memory. (This is not the only mechanism of focus. More later.)

We want to find a thread which, when pulled, will unloose a whole lot else. To achieve that, we need to devise testable hypotheses that can connect macro effects with micro dynamics.

The best test will be the cure. You really don’t know what is going on until you know almost everything that is going on. This all requires massive change in the application of scientific method and a realization that the current medical approaches of scientific method might be flawed in the absence of basic theory about how these systems work. Cryptography is needed.

Churchland then goes on to mention theories suggested by Crick and Llinas. Both of these approaches will have limited value in getting to unified theory. The Llinas approach of suggesting that consciousness has something to do with oscillators and certain frequencies (as we can measure them with the EEG) is very much a blind lead. Coordination of firings will serve some purposes in the brain but such a coordination is not itself the thinking. (All processing is thinking.)

In Churchland’s concluding remarks:

The deeper truths are all too easy to miss of course, just as it is all too easy for us to miss whatever it is that explains why animals sleep and dream, and what autism is.

I will be explaining all of this.

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