The Unified Theory of the Nervous System
and Behavior
Cognitive Philosophy /Brain Theory by Steven Michael Harris
We speak of the crowd having a mind and emotion. "The crowd is happy, excited..."
Inside the stadium every person is having a different experience and making a different contribution to the experience. Some are taking care of security. Some are providing the food or removing the waste.
Within the stadium, some connections to people are direct and influential and some are not. The conversations and emotions of those geographically close to your seat have much more influence on your experience than people seated in another section who you may never notice or see. Some of the people have many connections to the others and a great influence on the emotion or experience of the crowd as a whole. The actions of the quarterback or the referee influence the emotions of a great number of the people in the crowd.
An unusual event can change the influence of one of the parties on all of the others. A lone fan who is not noticed could gain the attention and influence the experience of most of the others in the stadium by openly shooting somebody dead with a handgun.
The crowd might be described as excited and elated and, at the same time during that crowd reaction somebody will be having a violent argument with a partner and another is being arrested and another is indifferent while serving the beer.
The crowd might be excited and elated because somebody is suffering pain such as the opposing team’s star player.
The spirit of the crowd is noticeable to and has an effect on all of the individuals in the stadium but the effect ranges from a little to a lot.
Within the stadium the crowd can sound like one voice with an intelligence and emotional expression, especially if few fans of the opposing team are represented.
Or, as in a bowl game, the crowd could appear conflicted with some events sparking two different reactions and some events sparking a reaction in unison among the patrons. (Inner conflict.)
The conflict of the crowd is easier to sense within the stadium but standing outside of the stadium the sound of the crowd gives the illusion of one voice with personality. Any inner conflict is more hidden as you observe from any distance. And much can be communicated by that crowd while you stand outside of the stadium unable to see the game without your ever being able hear one intelligible word. You can hear that the crowd is excited, or sad. You can tell when the crowd is focused and sense when a moment of suspense is occurring by an unusual silence (as they await a referee decision or to find out if a player on the field is seriously hurt).
The crowd is like a character showing emotion and intelligence.
A nervous system is much like a crowd. Each cell provides a limited piece of the experience and the intelligence. Our sense of one mind/consciousness that we think should be focused in one location of the brain or soul is an illusion. Our thinking is really millions, billions of thoughts happening at the same time but the collective experience appears as one experience just as the collective experiences of 100,000 people in a stadium appear as one experience that is presented by the crowd.
By the way, if you speeded up a sound recording of the game, the crowd would sound even more like one voice as it would be even more difficult to sense any of the individual experiences of people in the crowd. Our nervous systems work so fast and have ranges of experience so many times in a second that the illusion of a unified consciousness is even greater and our ability to sense or deduce the variety of experience of an individual cell is even more remote.
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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.
