The Unified Theory of the Nervous System
and Behavior
Cognitive Philosophy /Brain Theory by Steven Michael Harris
Yesterday I sent e-mail messages to over a hundred people working in the MIT Brain and Cognitive Science departments and a couple of related departments (linguistics and philosophy) that deal with brain and mind issues. These are all people who are trying to figure out how the brain works in some small or big way. If I have something to contribute, my ideas would have an effect on all of their work.
My braintheory.com website had about a hundred hits come in from that direction according to the hit counter. Most of them did not look further than the first page.
Remember that these are all people with a professional interest in finding out how the brain works. That is their life's work (and perhaps their goal as well - different issue). My website says that it is a Unified Theory of the brain, the big kahuna, and they had no interest in looking forward beyond the first page.
Of course they probably thought this website is a joke, or naive, or a delusion. I did write it without the "proper" amount of humility (and with an ambiguous style concerning whether it is serious or not, to make it more interesting to read for the general public as I have not found any style of writing that works to bring these ideas to the scientific community). But is humility the proper method for introducing a big idea? If I have succeeded, then humility would be a lie. Would a great idea be the product of somebody with a tendency to avoid the truth?
As all of these people (doctors, professors, assistant professors, teaching assistants, and some students) are in the game of trying to figure out the workings of the brain and many are working directly on the brain/mind problem, they should have great interest in the discovery of how the brain works to create mind which is the topic I'm starting to address with these essays, but they didn't look further than the first page of my website. I know my website is outrageous according to the terms of the usual scientific writings, but they were not even curious to look at any of my essays to see what I had in mind. They think such a claim is impossible, and therefore I'm delusional or not serious.
How will they ever solve these problems if they believe that the problems can't be solved?
About a fifth of the people who clicked into the index page also looked at just a couple of my introductory essays (not the essays that get into the meat of my argument) and they also clicked my other homepage (a link found at the bottom of the braintheory.net index page to my stevenharris.com page) and they clicked into my professional background page that mentions my performing history. That is all they looked at. They basically did the same thing that most professionals I have tried to communicate with have done, they asked for my credentials instead of asking about the nature of my ideas. Since I don't have the right credentials they had no interest in my ideas. (The fact that I have a substantial resume of performing and comedy makes the problem worse. Scientists tend to be a group suffering from Humor Deficit Disorder.)
About six people looked at (I can't prove if they read them or not) six essays. Five people looked at nine essays. One person looked at almost every essay and another looked at every essay on my website.
The possibility that a couple of professionals in brain science working at what might be the world center for such work could give me confidence that what I'm writing is interesting enough to be worthy of further pursuit. It takes some time to read all that I've written so far. There are no flashy graphics so it is only the ideas that would hold a person to this website.
But the only responses I've received from yesterday are three e-mails.
One was a message from somebody saying that he was not the right person to help me with no other comment. I think this was just his polite way of brushing me off without wasting his time reading my essays.
One message threatened me for sending "spam." (Spam is unwanted e-mail. I suppose this person did not read my essays and did not want to learn how the brain works even though that is the basis for his work.)
The third message said:
"I'm afraid, as someone who is pretty used to the normal scientific establishment, your writings do come off as bordering on the ramblings of a delusional. People in science tend to be turned off by grand pronouncements. If you want your ideas to be taken seriously, you should start making more contact with established scientific findings in the field. Scientists pay remarkably little attention to pure philosophers."
This person most likely did not read very far into my website. Much of what I write about is the problem with the current paradigms of medicine and biological science. The language of "established scientific findings" is flawed. Perhaps that language is the wrong way to find the answers.
As for his statement that scientists pay little attention to philosophers, I want to let it be known that if you have the wrong philosophical approach to your scientific data, your science will be wrong. And if you have the wrong scientific approach, your philosophy will be wrong. Perhaps the answer will come from making changes to both the science and the philosophy. I'm attempting this, but attempting it with the handicap of being locked out of both the philosophy and science fields because of my lack of credentials (and the small awkwardnesses of jargon that I have in the various fields as a result).
I do understand how my website could look this way. I write it this way on purpose as a stunt. This stunt is the product of my trying to contact people directly and being told in some cases that I'm psychotic to think I could have an idea to contribute in their fields without being a doctor. The medical establishment has said that it is no longer possible for somebody outside of their professional world to have the ability to contribute because the work is too complicated. I've been ignored without being able to present any idea for that idea to be judged. I've been ignored in spite of the absence of any other "signs of mental illness" in my behavior or speech or symptomology. My writing does not show disjointed thinking or flight of ideas. The only sign of mental illness that brings the accusations is that I dare to have an idea that belongs in their realm and dare to say that the idea is big. I have a sense of humor (I've made my living by having a sense of humor) so I took that problem tongue-in-cheek and made my website outrageous and ambiguous to get more attention. The truth of my situation seems like a fiction to me as well anyway.
For those that consider this website as possibly delusional, try another approach: think of this as science fiction and then consider if it is good science fiction or bad science fiction. In bad science fiction you would have impossibilities such as space ships doing bank turns and creating the sound of explosions in a vacuum without gravity as in Star Wars. In good science fiction the ideas are not currently realizable, but are not totally ruled out by physical and other laws of science. Are my ideas and the things I say about myself totally impossible according to any law of science?
My way of talking about the nervous system is unusual. But which of my ideas can be proven to be wrong or impossible? Give me a specific and let me give a rebuttal if you think you have an example.
Many big discoveries of science in the past were performed by people who were able to continue working and speaking out when others called them crazy. But these people continued because they did not care or they were just so focused that they were unaware of the criticism. That implies that they were able to continue because they were impaired in social awareness (much like autistic savants). Must we require that people be socially impaired (Einstein is an example) in order to bring big changes to the world? I've become shy about approaching the professionals I think I should be talking to about these matters because I'm not unaware of or immune to the criticisms leveled at me since I started trying to participate in these debates. It hurts, frankly.
I wrote some other essays about the issue of having a hassle getting my ideas to be heard. I removed them from my website some time ago because I thought they made me look too defensive. Some essays I removed because they admitted some illegal activity concerning experiments with medication a few years ago. Some of the essays pushed really hard to make me look crazy on purpose with a bit of fiction, because I was experimenting with an approach that made the reader assume at first that I was crazy, or assume at first that I was creating a fictional character who was crazy. [For my own protection let me say that any part of this website might be fiction. I want the freedom to deny these statements if there is future trouble. I also want to encourage the reader to think for his/herself.] I thought it would be fun to create a form where an assumption of fiction was the first impression (with the website saying that it was fiction) but as the reader read this "fiction" they would become confused about this really being fiction or non-fiction because the essays written by the character made sense.
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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.
