The Unified Theory of the Nervous System
and Behavior
Cognitive Philosophy /Brain Theory by Steven Michael Harris
There are few among the "big names" of cognitive science and philosophy that I consider more off the mark than I do Chalmers. I find it annoying that he is given the final word by having the last article in this issue of Scientific American to make it appear that he is providing the summary of commentary on the issue. (I must admit that this editorial decision was tempered by putting the Crick/Koch article first in the issue and by giving Crick and Koch rebuttal space on the same pages as the Chalmers essay.) But some of Chalmers' writing is useful in helping me build some of my own argument.
Apart from commenting on his ridiculous theories of what is to be needed to solve the "hard" problems, I find it useful that he points out the flaws in all of the other reductionist theories (after citing the ideas of Crick and Koch and then Dennett) that "almost all the current work addresses only the easy problems of consciousness. The confidence of the reductionist view comes from the progress on the easy problems, but none of this makes any difference where the hard problem is concerned."
He does a good job of explaining the differences:
"The easy problems of consciousness include the following: How can a human subject discriminate sensory stimuli and react to them appropriately? How does the brain integrate information from many different sources and use this information to control behavior? How is it that subjects can verbalize their internal states? Although all these questions are associated with consciousness, they all concern the objective mechanisms of the cognitive system. Consequently, we have every reason to expect that continued work in cognitive psychology and neuroscience will answer them.
"The hard problem, in contrast, is the question of how physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experience. This puzzle involves the inner aspect of thought and perception: the way things feel for the subject. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations, such as that of vivid blue. Or think of the ineffable sound of a distant oboe, the agony of an intense pain, the sparkle of a happiness or the meditative quality of a moment lost in thought. All are part of what I call consciousness. It is these phenomena that pose the real mystery of the mind."
He points out that all the theories being posited so far have been theories of the "easy problems." If you read all of my essays you will see that my theory (theories) address the "hard problem" first. It is the only way to solve this mystery. The qualia, I write, are emergent properties from smaller units of experience at the cellular level that are all the same but appear to be different because of the differences of types of information these small units are responding to and because of the greater or lesser influence each of these cells has on the system as a whole and/or the various parts of the system influenced. My theory is one of the "hard problem" first. Thank you Mr. Chalmers for pointing out that nobody else is addressing the hard problem, but you are wrong in saying that there are no theories that address the issue. I'm doing it, but I'm just not on your radar screens yet because of the limitations of academia. (The big limitation is that one is not allowed to contribute an idea to this academia if one is not a member of the club in any official capacity or if one is suggesting ideas that require too much change in current thought. I'm sorry that I have to keep getting personal in making my case, but the situation forces the topic.)
"The myriad views within the field range from reductionist theories, according to which consciousness can be explained by the standard methods of neuroscience and psychology, to the position of the so-called mysterians, who say we will never understand consciousness at all. I believe that on close analysis both of these views can be seen to be mistaken and that the truth lies somewhere in the middle."
You are all wrong. The reductionist (specialist) approach of looking at aspects of the nervous system as if they are massively complicated modules doing different things in different parts of the brain will never get the answer because it is the commonality of the cellular events and how they represent information that is universal in the brain and the reductionist approach makes it difficult to see how it works (mostly because it does not reduce the experience enough - it does not really reduce the logic down to the cell). The mysterians are wrong because they are under far too much influence from the religious doctrine that man is special or that soul is outside of the body or that consciousness is some kind of way of communicating with God or other such fiction. Chalmers is wrong because he is a dualist in thinking that consciousness is not in the body (although he avoids labeling himself this way in this particular article). Chalmers does not think the problem is solvable.
The labeling of these problems as "easy" and "hard" is a big hindrance in getting to the solution because no real answer to the "easy problems" will come without using the answer to the "hard problem" to get there. The same answer deals with both problems. (The "hard problem" was a very hard problem to solve, no matter, but it is the answer to the hard problem that serves as the key to unraveling all the other problems.)
Mr. Chalmers writes that a new physics may be needed. The answer is not to come from physics at all. The limitations in getting to the answer don't lie in the limitations of the state of our current physics knowledge. The limitation in understanding how the nervous system works lies in the limitation of our ability to reason mathematically in understanding the mathematics of this massively connected system of cells and the similar limitation in our ability to observe the subtle mathematics that keeps repeating in the macro event of the behaviors of the organisms as a whole (and the mathematics of how symptoms group together which gives evidence for the logical organization of the brain).
One of the problems that keeps coming up with these people is that they can't see the possibility that language ability can arise from the same mechanisms of neural mathematics as provide for sensory information, etc. in all animals. They see language as special and of immense complexity probably provided for by numerous controls coming from genetics. This is not the right approach. The capacity for language is in all nervous systems for if they were not all hampered by the mathematics that slows down all nervous systems, all animals would have unlimited intellectual capacity. Evolution is a tinkering with these factors that serve to slow nervous systems down in a variety of characteristic ways. The other problem with language is that it requires the organism to consider information that goes against its own pleasure and health because of mistakes in social information. Language has to somehow become pleasant to an organism for it to be learned. The evolutionary hurdle that had to be leaped for language to develop was considerable because language involves considerable contortion of the kind of logic used by the rest of the brain but still using that same kind of logic in the language centers as well. (This is a very difficult concept to communicate... sorry for any confusion.)
Chalmers writes that making the leap to understand consciousness requires a new kind of theory. (It must be admitted that I'm offering a new kind of theory.) He assumes that this new kind of theory requires a new kind of physics or other new kind of entity.
"If the existence of consciousness cannot be derived from physical laws, a theory of physics is not a true theory of everything. So a final theory must contain an additional fundamental component.
"Towards this end, I propose that conscious experience be considered a fundamental feature, irreducible to anything more basic. The idea may seem strange at first, but consistency seems to demand it."
The only thing that seems to demand it , Mr. Chalmers, is your lack of ability to conceptualize the truth. This fundamental feature of his is open to the idea that information and consciousness can be outside the body leaving open the concept of a "universal consciousness" and this basic concept is something that exists as a completed entity that is projected (homunculus problem) or is not broken up into smaller units in construction. (What is the smallest unit in his concept of consciousness? And then how does this take into account the number of facets of consciousness that can be debilitated by the use of drugs or with lesions? Can he comprehend the idea that the basic unit of consciousness is so small as to be almost invisible - the difference in experience noticed when one dendrite of one cell is removed from the brain?)
"Thus, a complete theory will have two components: physical laws, telling us about the behavior of physical systems, from the infinitesimal to the cosmological, and what we might call psychophysical laws, telling us how some of those systems are associated with conscious experience. These two components will constitute a true theory of everything."
"These theories will not be conclusively testable, so they will inevitably be more speculative than those of more conventional scientific disciplines. Nevertheless, there is no reason they should not be strongly constrained to account accurately for our own first-person experiences, as well as the evidence from subjects' reports. If we find a theory that fits the data better than any other theory of equal simplicity, we will have good reason to accept it. Right now we do not have even a single theory that fits the data, so worries about testability are premature."
I'm offering a theory that fits the data. I'm offering a new way of looking at the data and a new way of interpreting it. And my ideas are testable. I haven't gotten to the ways it can be tested in my writing yet. But it can be tested by looking at already existing data of which there is too much to comprehend pulling together in one theory. It can be tested by showing predictable mathematical relationships between subjects with disorders that have not yet been observed or studied. It can be tested by showing previously unwitnessed paradoxical responses to medications when delivered in different ways that are predicted by the theory. It can be tested by curing people. (I've already offered some small ways in which it could be tested. Look for my mention of the connection between allergy and 'spontaneous' emergence from coma. Test it somebody! Although I have yet to offer the more complete way to try to pull some patients out of coma I've given enough information to test. You could possibly save some lives.)
Perhaps these "psychophysical laws" would leave open room for psychic phenomena and religious experience and other concepts that any skeptic would not consider without some proof?
Chalmers then goes on to posit a definition of consciousness that muddles the issue further, a common problem:
"The basic contour of such a law might be gleaned from the observation that when we are conscious of something, we are generally able to act on it and speak about it---which are objective, physical functions. Conversely, when some information is directly available for action and speech, it is generally conscious. Thus, consciousness correlates well with what we might call "awareness": the process by which information in the brain is made globally available to motor processes such as speech and bodily action."
"Some refinements to the definition of awareness are needed, in order to extend the concept to animals and infants, which cannot speak. But at least in familiar cases, it is possible to see the rough outlines of a psychophysical law: where there is awareness, there is consciousness, and vice versa."
This is on the edge of stating that consciousness is something that involves language processing. What we are able to speak about is what our language center is dealing with or able to deal with and that is not all that consciousness entails. Our consciousness is the entire experience of being and thinking and not a part of it. The language bias that bonds "awareness" with "reportability" is defining consciousness as a part of the experience or a facet of the experience of living and thinking and not the whole ball of wax. You need to consider everything as equal and not any kind of thinking or a subset of the thinking experience as the definition of consciousness. Most people find it impossible to consider any thinking without language to be thinking at all. Every time one of these people poses a definition of consciousness, they get further from the kind of conception that is required to solve the problem.
A network of cells operating according to repeating rules concerning survival with a range of experience (repeated often in very small units of time) can be the host of almost unlimited amounts of information that will be embedded in the experience of this group of cells through strengthened and weakened connections using physical growth and changes in connectivity and changes in sensitivity to excitation and inhibition according to a mathematics of cellular relationships like that of a system of economics. This is all that is needed for the vastly complicated function and experience of a living body. Understanding this will lead to a "grander theory of information." The grander theory of information does not need new physics with a theory of consciousness that involves some new force or field like that found in physics as well... it needs an ability to conceive of a new kind of mathematics unhampered by symbols and the ability to play with that mathematics to flesh out the implications of such caused by function and structure (a very difficult trick).
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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.
