The Unified Theory of the Nervous System
and Behavior
Cognitive Philosophy /Brain Theory by Steven Michael Harris
As I was figuring out how the system works and the puzzle was coming together, I had one big problem that took me some time to solve.
I knew that the system could only work if the cells had a range of experience... a range of emotional experience. But looking at the activity of the cells and looking at various events that occur with certain kinds of cellular activity it was difficult to imagine how such a range was possible.
Currently scientists and doctors describe nerve cell communication as analogue because of the different frequencies that cells will fire. From all appearances (in snapshots of time) it looks like they can only be on or off - send one message or send no message. That a cell could have a range of experience from pleasure to pain does not, at first, seem possible because if a cell is not firing it is asleep and not providing information or having any kind of experience.
Then I started playing with my sense of time as it occurs on the cellular level.
Through a variety of deductions I concluded that a cell experiences pleasure when it is firing rather than experiencing pain. A cell needs to seek the firing experience to make the mental processing an attractive activity for the success of the organism. (And an action potential/firing of a nerve cell should just be an evolved amplified sensation of experience that could exist in a smaller or slower way in all other kinds of cells.)
But a cell firing for pleasure but feeling nothing without firing does not give a range of experience from pleasure to pain with a variety of frequencies. That would only make possible a volume change in a singular kind of experience: a volume of pleasure relative to absence of experience.
And then it hit me! There is a great contrast from the experience of pleasure (firing) to the absence of experience. Perhaps a very small portion of transition time (small relative to the time of firing) is a time of dying or unpleasantness as the pleasant sensation of "on" changes to "off" as the cell goes to sleep. To have pleasure go away must be an unpleasant sensation.
Now imagine that the portion of time for this "dying" or pain experience is about 1% of the time of firing of the longer sustained action potentials (some fraction of a millisecond) as it is experienced at the tail end of the cell’s firing during slow frequency cell activity. A pain to pleasure ratio of 1 to 99 would only be experienced at the macro level (organism level) as pleasure or as whatever end of the spectrum of sensation that type of experience was assigned in any binary experience (as light would be on the pleasure end of the processing and dark would be on the pain end of the processing in the sensation of light, for instance). An extremely fast cycling of on and off, a fast frequency of firing, could change the ratio of pain to pleasure over to the pain side at the macro level if the amount of time experiencing the transition from on to off, experiencing the pain, was a constant but the time of firing is not a constant as is easily observed The proportion of time in pain relative to pleasure would increase with increased rate of frequency of a cell's firing on and off.
(Remember that this pain and pleasure becomes representational of other realms when attached to vision receptors, or auditory, or touch, etc...)
More logic is now needed to solve some other problems. One big piece of the puzzle is to show that a fast cycling (which appears to many as an very active site) is more akin to a state of being completely off than completely on. The more stops in a period of time the more of a signal to stop completely is in that communication. Fast cycling relates more to completely off (or inhibited) and slow cycling or slow frequency relates more to the state of being completely on (or excitation).
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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.
