The Unified Theory of the Nervous System
and Behavior
Cognitive Philosophy /Brain Theory by Steven Michael Harris
Q. How does a philosopher say "Hi?"
A. With a 600-page manuscript titled "Volume 1" as a start.
This conference was a great place to get the latest data and thought in the search for the understanding of consciousness, and to realize the extent of how ridiculous some of the arguments have become. I found the fMRI studies to be greatly useful and supportive of the work I'm doing but would have to make big shifts in my thinking of what was being said when the researchers then started to interpret the data and explain the meaning of the observations they were reporting. As I have written earlier, there are massive problems with the language of how these data are being explained that gets in the way of understanding the mathematical nature of what is happening in the brain. Because of this I'm greatly pleased when the lectures include a lot of data and annoyed when they then start interpreting the data. Most annoying was the debate of the philosophers who do nothing but build their explanations of the processes (and of the nature of consciousness and/or qualia) through argument that uses the earlier (false) conclusions of earlier philosophy as a starting point as if these other theories were data.
The focus of a plenary session had three philosophy professors presenting arguments based on the fictional examination of what would happen in the case of a zombie or of a person without sight who then gains sight or of the proposition of what the experience of "red" would be in the case of a person who never had experienced "red" for a lifetime and then was presented with "red" for the first time or the case of a person with colorblindness who is given instructions that fully explain the qualities of red in various terms (wavelengths, tone, relationship to other colorsÉ) and other such specious arguments.
The arguments are very wordy expansions of mathematical ideas that often refer to mathematical notation (most likely to give an impression of scientific method or seriousness). But all thought, perception and function is mathematical and they ignore the basic truth that, in dealing with math, to examine a piece of an equation only tells you about a piece of the equation and may have no relationship to another equation even if the logic that is examined appears to be a subset of the greater combination of calculations.
For instance, they examine the idea of what the experience of sight would be for someone who did not have sight (temporarily ignoring the cases of restored sight where the neurology of the person was unable to make much sense of the newly introduced optical information, but looking into the difference between someone who lost sight or never had it). All thought is math and the understanding of visual information is all math as well. The qualia of such experience is based on that math and differences in the nature of the brains of different people will change the mathematics of the experience even if the different people report the same understanding of color and shape, etc. If you changed some of the arrangement of the brain so that visual processing was located closer or further in the brain from auditory processing or from olfactory, the brain would have a different mathematical understanding of the mathematical relationships between vision and sound (or whatever) and different qualia would be possible. Such a possibility is already documented in the cases of synesthesia.
All nervous system processing is math and the current philosophical arguments are only proving that you don't know anything if you think you are using mathematical logic but missing some part of the equation (ignoring some part of the mathematical logic used in the brain). All is math and if you change the math you are not dealing with the same reality.
One argument concerned the idea that if experience A equals experience B, then an understanding of experience A would mean that you also understand the experience B. But synesthesia implies that the experience of A is different for different people. So experience A may not equal experience B.
The problem about explaining this is that almost nobody has the capacity to comprehend the entire mathematics of what is going on and these people ignore the fact that incomplete mathematics cannot tell you what is going on in complete mathematics.
If A=B an understanding of experience A does not give you an understanding of experience B because perspective can change when looking at different equal events or perspective can change even when observing the same event. Just the labeling of A and B changes perspective even when the labels apply to the very same item. A synonym can represent the exact same item with no subtleties of difference and the change of the label can change the item. (The qualia of the perception of the different labels are enough change alone. A different language, especially with different rules of grammar and culture, can change the nature of thought and of the wiring of the brain. A good example is of the different use of the visual processing centers in the brains of those using symbolic forms of written language as opposed to those using phonetic written languages.)
The current philosophical arguments are misguided and practically useless. Language is not the way you get to this understanding and yet I'm forced to try to use language to communicate this understanding. The brain uses a very powerful form of mathematics that produces qualia while multiplying the dimensions of mathematics (not just the factors). Language represents many dimensions but with the restriction that the information be communicated in two-dimensional (one sound following another through time) form while the brain can think without the restrictions of mathematical logic required to produce language.
It is all math but it is impossible to explain with words the nature of this math. This is our "higher power."
Any moment of consciousness, any moment of experience, depends on the moments before and after for existence. There is no such thing as a snapshot of thought at one exact moment of time. You can't freeze a moment of thought in the way that you can freeze a moment of visual experience in a snapshot. (You can't appreciate a snapshot in a moment either because it takes time to process understanding of a snapshot that is affected by the choices you make in where you direct your focus in the picture.) You can't really explain the thought of a moment. A moment of thought is the change of experience from moment to moment and the recollection of the thinking of a moment in the past changes that experience of consciousness so that it is impossible to repeat any moment of thought.
Our qualia of experience and consciousness is the result of the nature of the firings and patterns of firings of many smaller units of experience. (Each cell has it's own small portion of the experience.) [See the essays "Think of the brain structure creating mind/consciousness as being like a stadium full of people at a football game" and "What is Emotion?"] All thought and experience is in the mathematics of how the cells fire and the movements of firing patterns throughout the nervous system.
Any consistency of experience is only an illusion.
Take the issue of your experience of the color "red" and my or anyone else's experience of the same. Should you see the work that is being done on the neurological processing of vision and color, you'd see that colors are never consistent as an event in the world because our perception of color has more to do with the mathematical relationships of colors in relationship with other colors rather than as static frequencies of light (tone, color, intensity, etc.) as different conditions of light greatly change the reality of colors that appear to remain the same in perception. (If I'm not articulating this very well you can check out some studies that have been done to show how a color can appear to be an opposite color on the color wheel without changing the nature of the light but by changing the nature of other colors also seen in proximity. The brain gives an impression of color more to do with previous experiences of color and predicted impressions relative to the nature of light and of other objects being seen at the same time.)
In the example of the person who sees "red" the first time, the next time that person experiences what you might assume to be the same color of red (looking at the same object in the same light), the experience of that "red" the next time can't be the same as the first time because our experiences change when there is a different thought at the same time as the experience, or a different preceding thought, and the memory of having seen "red" one time will change the experience of seeing it a second time because the memory also becomes a factor (memory having its own qualia). The experience of colors changes in many ways. Color experience is different when you are old rather than young - different when under the influence of alcohol or drugs - different when neurologically impaired. The qualia of seeing red on a fire engine rather than on a stop sign is different even if you think it is the same shade of red because the shapes and meaning of objects also have their own representations in qualia that have an effect on other experiences as well. Sensation and meaning and thought all have their own qualia or own influence on the accumulation of qualia as our experience of consciousness is only an illusion of a unified experience.
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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.
