The Unified Theory of the Nervous System
and Behavior
Cognitive Philosophy /Brain Theory by Steven Michael Harris
Imagine a world that developed in many ways like our own with a species of humanity that develops a significant amount and variety of culture, language, science, technology, philosophy, medicine, knowledge — but with one difference: this species and other life on this planet developed without the sense of sight or any knowledge of light’s existence at all.
Assume that these people have a very similar nervous system; the only difference being the absence of eyes and the difference in the way the brain organizes itself in the absence of a need for a visual processing center.
A variety of beliefs and practices in such a society would be very different from our own without the information that could come throughout the years through vision. (Interesting how we use the word 'vision' as a synonym for 'understanding' or 'discovery.')
Then aliens abduct one person of average or above average intelligence who has no particular expertise in any realm of this society, and transplant eyes into him.
[For the sake of convenience, assume that the bodies of such beings are the same as ours but for the absence of eyes, and forget that any life without eyesight would not be shaped at all like a life form that evolves with eyesight. Assume also that these aliens found some technique to make it possible for the nervous system of this abducted adult to have the plasticity of a newborn so that the brain would be able to develop vision in time. Such a technique could be possible through some new medication therapy or with implantation of a lot of stem cells.
Rethink the assumption that an evolution of genetics would be required to give the brain the capacity to develop visual processing centers as some of what that implies gets in the way of understanding the mathematics of how and why nerve cells self-organize the way they do only depending on the location of the wiring and the nature of the kind of information that part of the brain must process. I propose that the same kind of mathematical principals are used in visual processing as are used in auditory processing, or liver functioning, or any other part of the nervous system. Once the mechanisms of the nervous system were evolved in early life forms, the possibility of an advanced intelligence was already evident, but tinkering through evolution was needed for a variety of reasons. The logic of the design of the body that the nervous system resides in has the greatest effect on what that nervous system will then do and how it will grow, taking into account that it is always a two-way street as the nervous system will affect the logic of how that body grows through some mathematical principals I will get into some other day. Some evidence for this has already been presented with recent studies in which the visual and auditory centers of rats were removed and switched and the networks of cells that were moved took on the job of processing different kinds of functioning.
Remember that some portion of a sense of sight has been given to the blind using a camera attached to a device on the skin that converts an image to an array of touch sensations. It will eventually be possible to implant some kind of device into a human nervous system that uses a similar technique to give a human the ability to use echolocation and then render mute that philosophical argument about whether we can know what it feels like to be a bat.]
This being with a new set of eyes knows that a claim of alien abduction would be considered crazy so he keeps quiet about it. But things are changing for him as vision begins to develop.
At first he is just aware that he has a pair of very sensitive appendages on his head and discovers that it is painful to touch them when the lids are open at the same time he also discovers that he is prone to want the lids open and is attracted to looking in certain ways. There is pleasure in looking in certain directions and not in others and the direction he directs his head is becoming very different than any other time in his life. (He has no word in his vocabulary for "looking" and so has no thought about such a thing, he just notices a great change in his posture that causes some pain of adjustment. In a world where sound and smell are the only long-distance sources of information, vision would be a great and shocking change because vision is exactly directional information and sound and smell can only be vaguely directional.)
Soon there would be an awareness of light and dark, but yet again there would be no language of "light" or "dark" and no way of explaining such a thing should he try to explain it in his society. He would find himself attracted to light, stimulated by light rather than dark but also find that too much light could be painful. The eyes would learn to saccade, shift around, because any individual receptors and their associated nerve cells would experience less average pain and more average pleasure as part of a shifting gaze that avoids the possibility that any one receptor is kept locked on a source of light that is either too dark or too light. (Essays in my website explain how the language of the individual nerve cell can be an arrangement of pleasures and pains that translate into our universe of qualia.)
He is quickly in wonder over the fact that he is attracted to look in certain directions and certain times and that certain things and certain directions have consistent qualities in this kind of experience, and that it is coming from a great distance some times. (Remember that his world has not yet discovered the skyline or sky or sun or moon or stars as their understanding of the world comes only from the feeling of wind and warmth and cold and rain and their scientists have "proven" that high above is a membrane with warm or cold water above that, and this membrane sometimes leaks with a rip to cause rain and thunder. This world would have what we consider to be a lot of strange beliefs that make perfect sense to those with different senses.)
Then, as his nervous system develops higher and higher levels of processing of the information from his eyes, he starts to associate consistencies of experience in this vision with what he has always known of the world. Be begins to realize that things in his world have patterns that are repeated consistently in what he experiences through these new eyes. What is such a wonder is that the consistencies coming from his eye experiences are much more consistent with much more variety than he is able to perceive with his other long-distance senses of sound and smell. The world is beginning to appear very strange and new. (As his sense of sight develops, he would probably never be able to take it completely for granted in the same way as one who was born with sight, so this sense would not be used in as primary a way as for us. Sight for him would always be like strange new clothes - although this analogy is kind of silly because it is unlikely for his society to have developed the idea that to be seen nude is shameful when they can't see. Assuming this is a warm climate, clothing would be unlikely.)
His sleep pattern would quickly start changing from that of others in his world and he would start adjusting to the light of the day. It is likely that before getting sight he would have been more active during the night because coolness of the night is stimulating and warmth slows you down. Awareness of light changes the mix of stimulation affecting the nervous system. (Our internal clocks are not a development of genetics but a natural and necessary part of the inherent mathematics of any complicated nervous system that self-organizes due to a need to give busy parts of the system a break now and then, and due to influences of various sources such as light and cold, etc.)
Eventually he would start to recognize the variety of what we take for granted in vision and be overwhelmed with sensations and realizations as his nervous system arranges itself to react to all of the mathematical patterns that are possible in vision while using a nervous system that uses pleasure and pain as the method doing this math. So understanding will always come with sensation or emotion. All patterns are accompanied by beauty or ugliness based on the way the way the nervous system seeks patterns that give the most opportunity for cells to fire in slow frequency synchronicity.
So he begins to find a visual correlation to everything he has ever known in his life and because vision shows much more variation from much greater distances he discovers many things that have never been known before in his world.
He can see but because he is the first in his world with this ability and because he developed this ability late in life, it does not seem to be possible. There is a massive conflict between the world as he sees it, and the world that was presented to him before this change occurred.
To explain this ability to others is impossible. (It is impossible to give an understanding of vision or any of its components such as color or light to a blind person who has never experienced sight, even in our world where such a state is taken for granted as a handicap and where the language is riddled with visually based words and concepts and where there is thus social assurance of the existence of such that can be taken in confidence anyway. In a world where light was never perceptually experienced and there was no language evolved from any visual understanding, it would be impossible to even convince most people of the existence of light. It has been said that a picture is worth a thousand words, but an infinite number of words could never give an understanding of sight to the blind.) He is forced to couch his observations only in the language of touch, sound, taste and smell.
In a world where blindness is the norm, any claim of sight would be considered insane.
The first person to experience sight in such a world would be in danger.
He would begin to make sense of the world with his vision and immediately be able to contribute new understanding in almost every field of inquiry. He could look up at the sky and tell of previously unknown clouds that appear to be carrying the rain and instantly change scientific understanding and theory. He could see changes in the coloring of the skin that precede certain sicknesses and instantly make a difference in medicine. He could climb to the top of a big hill and discover previously undiscovered places to live or avoid. He could change public safety.
He would experience great visual beauty for the first time and experience exceptional loneliness in not being able to share a sunset or a clear starry sky and have no person with which to share his thoughts about the nature of the universe due to such evidence.
He would be able to move much more quickly and confidently through the world and in places where a blind community would avoid without previous discovery. He could expand the world and give the illusion that he was athletically gifted to others.
Witnessing how a flying object was about to hit a friend, he could shout "duck" or "look out" if such words existed in his world, but they wouldn’t, and any warning he gave to protect another would be considered evidence that he had thrown the object at them and he would be accused of attempted harm because it is impossible for anyone to give such a warning in a blind world without being the source of the flying object.
To see a lightning flash and then predict the thunder to follow could lead others to believe he was psychic.
Some of the insights and new knowledge that he could provide would be considered amazing and he would be labeled a genius even though he was not much beyond average before getting sight. The nature of genius must be revisited in this kind of an example because the additional sense would give him additional intellectual ability - infinitely more genius in the realm of visual understanding than other people. He would be "light years" ahead of others in knowing the world.
He might be forced to keep all of his understanding to himself to avoid being eliminated.
Offering to share his insights ('insights' being another obvious word from the visual realm), he would be rejected by professionals who have spent a lifetime learning the logic and jargon of their various specialties because he would quickly give away the fact that he did not know the language of their faulty current state of ignorance. Remember that the world has libraries filled with complicated technical explanations and sensible sounding complex logic to support wrong ideas. Just because you don’t have a grasp of their arguments does not mean that you are wrong and they are right. Incredibly dense ideas have the support of multitudes of books and specialists claiming that their scholarship in this material gives them the right over others to be right. Look at religious theory!
Religions would be especially threatened by this first person with vision because religion always steps confidently into any void of knowledge that they think will never be explained and then claim to explain it. Religion is the most resistant to any changes required in what they claim. In any argument it is the most irrational party that is the most dangerous when shown the light of a strong argument.
All mental functioning uses the same mathematical principals of cells firing and relating to each other in particular ways that change sensitivities to excitation and inhibition and create new connections and eliminate others. The same things are repeating throughout the nervous system but applied to different kinds of information and thought.. The same mathematical principals are involved in visual processing, higher thought, language, auditory processing, homeostasis, digestive functioning... everything. But these repeating events on the cellular scale accumulate into a universe of different qualia (sensations) as well as abilities - and the thought and experience appears to be unified as if it were being projected someplace (to a soul or homunculus or self) but that unity is an illusion.
To understand the nature of how the mind works, how the nervous system works, is as much of a step in understanding as it would be for a person to get sight in a blind world.
To understand how the factors work behind the massive calculations (and everything in the brain is math) of vision, you have to understand how the same factors create the very different experiences of taste or touch. It is all the same thing, but this kind of understanding is so complicated and requires equally complex parallel computations as that required to produce understanding of a visual field. Such understanding rises to the level of a new sense.
To be the first to discover the nature of how the nervous system works is very much like this analogy of what it is like to be the first to see in a blind world.
When you discover the nature of how the brain and mind works, you know what creates knowledge and therefore you begin finding ways to contribute to understanding in all fields because you know how understanding itself works.
Without any previous knowledge of the history of philosophy you immediately have enormous contributions to make in this world because most philosophy connects to this topic is some way. (You might have the ability to explode philosophy and make most of it disappear. Language itself is inherently flawed as a way to explain the mind.)
Massive changes in medical understanding are possible. You can see new ways to approach the discovery of treatments. You will know what stress really is, mathematically, and discover that most current treatments get results by adding stress rather than reducing it. You will discover that any cure of a disorder will also cure certain aspects of aging because the same factors are behind both.
Other fields of study such as economics, and sociology will be massively affected. (The mathematical principals behind the workings of the brain are very similar to some economic models.)
A knowledge of the brain reaches into so many different areas of study that the big discovery will never be by somebody who has a grasp of the terminology and understanding of the many fields of interest that could be changed. So he will appear ignorant or naive (or, worse, crazy) when approaching with his ideas.
Much like explaining sight to the blind, an understanding of the brain/mind/nervous system can’t be explained with an infinite number of words because of problems that are inherent in language. The brain uses a form of mathematics that is not the same as any language of mathematics (meaning the entire history and knowledge of mathematics that has ever been explored or taught in universities - all using symbolism, therefore language) because any language has to be reducible to a form that can be expressed through speech and is therefore in a form that is reduced to a linear form of one sound following another. But the brain uses a form of mathematics that can be indirectly explained but never directly explained because it uses a form that uses massive numbers of dimensions at the same time (the number of dimensions is not the same thing as the number of factors). On a similar but less complicated scale the same thing happens when you can’t explain vision to the blind.
Part of the problem with explaining the nature of how the mind works is that when you solve problems in this realm you have to learn to do a form of thinking that turns off the language center of the brain while you solve the problem, then translate that understanding into language a bit at a time.
What kind of person could develop this kind of ability?
He would have to have significant intelligence. He would have to be able to think out of the box. He would not be likely to be indoctrinated by current thinking that is wrong and makes it impossible to see other ways of solving the problem. He would have to be a bit odd according to current "norms" because he would, by definition, be going beyond the norm.
He couldn’t be too much of a specialist. He would need the ability to use logic where others did not. He would find unusual ways to overcome his limitations. He would need to be a visual thinker (or think in a way that is mistaken for visual thinking only because it is not language-based thinking).
He would need to have obsessive focus in order to achieve this kind of discovery. (By the way, vision is an obsession once you get it as you keep on using vision to make sense of the world, so learning how the mind works will become as much as a habit as using vision once you learn how to do it.) His obsession will need to be as intense as that found in autism, but without the reduced range of interests and abilities found in such a disorder.
As it turns out and as you might have guessed, I’m claiming this ability. I have been sitting with this discovery for about seven years now. And it has ruined my life in a number of ways, so far.
The obsession to figure things out once I discovered this new filter of how to perceive the world has made it difficult to keep the other aspects of mylife in perfect order because it requires such a great deal of effort in thought and reading. But I have needed to put it out of my mind to deal with living for extended periods of time.
I have tried to share these ideas with others but I have had no success when approaching the people most likely to have the knowledge required to understand what I have to offer. Academics and doctors don’t ask what my ideas are. They only ask one question: "What are your credentials?" I have not gone to college so that stops them cold.
I made a stir with a variety of people when I contributed a few ideas and disputed a few theories at a recent scientific conference. But they assumed that I was another researcher with a doctorate and I did have problems with some areas of discussion in which I just have not had enough time to learn enough to avoid appearing too ignorant or idiotic.
I grew up with a mild form of autism/aspergers and recovered from much of what that entails, but somehow developed a significant ability to do some of the things that autistic savants do. I used mathematical logic to figure out a variety of different things in a private way. My social impairment was hidden very well because I am smart enough to figure out the social world using logic when others do it by instinct. I learned how to use methods of focus (similar to what Buddhists use in meditation) in order to make language disappear when I developed some early bursts of ability in drawing and music. I was extremely clumsy physically when I was young and found ways to use tricks of logic and focus to become a good dancer and have other physical abilities that found me eventually making a living doing physical things that most others could not do. I was extremely impaired in comedy, not being able to understand subtle humor early on and not being able to have the ability to be funny to anyone socially until I was an adult, and through an extreme amount of practice in this became professional at being funny. I don’t use instinct to be funny, but logic and timing much in the way that an autistic savant might approach music. My background is not in neurology and cognitive science, but I used personal explorations in thinking about such subject matter to develop other abilities that are on my resume. I was a stutterer when young and then became a public speaker. I’ve spent a lifetime trying to overcome limitations using my own private logic in doing so.
Writing this essay is taking some guts as it is dangerous in various ways.
Any doubt about my sensibility could destroy my ability to get work and make money with my speaking engagements in schools. I talk about the subject of writing in schools around the country. I will have no links to this website from my website that gets the school bookings because the doubts concerning my sanity caused by this website will lose work for me, but after two years of trying to get those school appearances going well enough to give me time to write the nervous system essays it is not working. I was getting enough work to start pulling out of debt and find some time to write this material, but it fell apart when the terrorists hit the World Trade Center. Schools stopped spending as much money on extra events with the worries about reduced tax revenue and increased security. I’m finding myself driving an average of two thousand miles a week and not making a profit. A further problem comes with the fact that my school presentation is considered genius by some and offensive to others (there are a lot of small minds working in schools who just don't "get it") has caused problems when the occasional teacher or administrator spreads word to avoid my program. (The biggest problem with that program is not the amount of educational information that I present, but the inability of many, adults mostly, to see the information as valuable when presented with a lot of humor. My humor almost always comes from providing some twist on an observed truth - the best place to find humor as far as I’m concerned - but there are many who have bought into the idea that what is funny can’t also be serious, or that what is serious must be morose, or that you shouldn’t laugh before Christmas to keep control in the classroom or that students who are laughing too much must be doing something bad.) In American education, the lowest common denominator has the most power in such a situation because ten great references and one bad one will stop people from hiring you. Popular programs that make the most money are usually bland and offer no controversy or artistic bravery and often insult the intelligence of the smarter children.
I’ve just written some things that might have an affect on my family should they read it. The financial problems of trying to do this work and make aliving at the same time do affect my ability to support my son.
I don’t want to be doing other kinds of work anymore. It is not right. I have information that could affect the health and well-being of millions of people right now, if only I could get a hearing in the right places. I need to find somebody, in a major institution such as MIT where they are doing the right kind of work in brain understanding, who is willing to spend a lot of time discussing my discoveries. I don’t need another academic who brushes me off by telling me to write a synopsis of my ideas in one paragraph and send it in because my discoveries can’t be reduced to a sound byte. What I have to offer is in the form of hundreds, maybe thousands, of new theories.
I could be writing one or more essays a day about a wide range of topics. Almost everything I read or hear inspires another essay. (Much like in the blind world analogy I just wrote, I can "see" the answer to a problem instantly but must spend some time trying to figure out how to articulate an answer - and some answers just can’t be articulated but to another who, someday, might have this same ability. Some people could learn to do what I’m doing.) To do this writing takes a lot of energy and time. I can’t do it while trying to make money in another field every day. I need some help. (If anybody could help me with understanding the world of writing grants or introduce me to the right people, please do. I need financial support to continue this work.) I should be associated with a learning institution with the right resources. I shouldn’t be sitting alone with this information anymore. I can instantly explain how to start curing people of some particular disorders. I have information that could create a substantial amount of wealth for some with the mind and resources to use it in the right way. I know how to rock the world of science and medicine and philosophy. I can show new explanations for music and art theory. I could frighten you with the amount I have to offer.
I have some exceptional abilities. I know it is considered improper, but sometimes it is absolutely necessary to blow your own horn. Even to me, my situation appears like a fiction... appears crazy. Now, let’s see if this truthful essay, grandiose as it might appear, increases or decreases the numbers of people reading the other essays on this website. (The "arrogance" of certain geniuses such as Einstein or John Nash is a necessary part of their genius. A major discovery requires enormous honesty in dealing with the world through observation and thought. The so-called "arrogance" of claiming their own genius is really an expression of their honesty as this kind of claim is true in these cases. A lying nature about any fact would get in the way of finding a difficult truth.)
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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.
