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The Unified Theory of the Nervous System
and Behavior

Cognitive Philosophy /Brain Theory by Steven Michael Harris

 

Some of what I’m up against

These are extremely difficult concepts to communicate. Enormous changes are needed in the way science thinks about a great number of concepts in order to understand a unified theory. Such change practically requires that the change come from somebody not entrenched in the wrong ways of thinking. But so far the doors have been locked to new thought coming from this direction.

Over the years almost nobody who is qualified to debate these subjects has been willing to communicate with me.

Recently I sent e-mails to hundreds of those who do this kind of work in neuroscience, consciousness studies and neurological or mind-based philosophy and then watched the hit counter. 95% of the people that followed the link to this website never clicked through to any of the essays providing my argument. Several years ago one did write back, in a polite brush-off, that "grand pronouncements are looked down upon in science" as his excuse not to read my essays. This makes grand ideas almost impossible to communicate if they can’t be communicated quickly in one paragraph. (I have received a few replies from writers in these fields with requests that I provide a one-paragraph synopsis of my theory, but if you have read the majority of this website you should be smart enough to understand that this is a topic for which a quick synopsis is completely impossible.)

Some individuals will read a lot of the essays and I appreciate their curiosity and perseverance but they don’t contact me with whatever disagreements they have with my ideas. I feel that I am now very much prepared to argue any disagreements and any debate will be very helpful to me in correcting problems with how others perceive my terminology or problems in the arrangement of this website or in giving me insights into details which I have not been exposed to. (So far, every correction about some science that I have gotten wrong has strengthened my theory and not weakened it as I approached this by getting the mathematical concept together in my head and then looked to see if the science supported it later.)

I know that I could make my case about this theory, but I will need several meetings with the kind of people with the right minds and the right kind of knowledge. I will not have a chance to make my case if I am cut off after 30 minutes or if the professional giving me an audience is emotionally shut off from considering the possibility that I might be right and is only humoring me. Understanding a unified theory requires a lot of concentration/thought and several shifts in perception and time. They have to at least try to understand it. Several important aspects of the theory can’t be written in this website because I need to diagram some animated factors that keep repeating and show how the constellation of disorders can be predicted by a map of how stress collects in the nervous system due to logical maps and nervous system connection maps.

A few times a question or an objection has been sent to me and I have then included my responses in this website. Recently I had an e-mail debate with a scientist (currently working on cell migration and tumors but with past experience in neuroscience). This person was discounting certain aspects of my ideas as well, but, ironically, the debate continued because I did not approach this person professionally. (In the professional world, debate does not happen for me because they just avoid me if they think I am wrong. This is understandable because such work can keep a person very busy.) I met her through an online dating service and gave her the link to my website. (Her dating profile said she did not care about money or looks or the other usual desires, but that she was looking for a man who cared about ideas. I would love to establish emotional and intellectual intimacy with a nice atheist I find attractive who likes to laugh and dance and is supportive of my thinking and does not think I am automatically crazy to be doing this kind of work without an academic pedigree and who does not mind the poverty that the great amount of unsupported time and energy dedicated to this intellectual endeavor has created in my life. Not an easy task.) So the debate that follows is not so much because the scientist was intrigued by my ideas but because she probably thought that I was cute so then I could have a chance to keep her in the conversation.

There is a professional forum for online debates about this subject matter: the PSYCHE-B and PSYCHE-D bulletin boards on the net using Listserve. Those online postings are moderated and the moderators never let any of my essays reach the bulletin board and they would not post a link to my website either. (Some of my criticisms or support of other people’s ideas were allowed in and I received support for those small contributions.) Eventually I stopped participating in that forum, as it was clear I would never get the best of my work into consideration through that channel.

Bear in mind that the following writings are not as carefully edited as they might be because they are informal e-mail conversations but these writings should give an idea of the kind of thinking I am up against and my responses to this kind of argument. This page will be scattered because the messages were crossing each other on the wires and broke into several threads sent at the same time. Her messages are indented as block-quotes with some comments of mine that were not sent in the e-mail exchanges included here as caps in square brackets:

Scientist: Now that you have this theory it might really be worth your while to pick up a text on neuroscience to look for ways to apply it via what is known and also to learn some of the jargon so when you talk to someone in the field you will not confuse them by using words in a way that is contrary to what they know. Such words as memory and inhibitory and stimulatory, as you use them, could impede communication. So, for example, you mention drug addiction. Let’s say this first: the job of the nervous system is to notice change, to notice new information. That means the nerve cells adjust to current levels of input by turning down their sensitivity to a stimulus. [THIS IS A THEORY WITH NO EXPLANATION FOR THE MECHANISMS THAT TURN DOWN SENSITIVITY, SO PRONE TO MISTAKES.] So, when it is dark it takes less light to trigger a response, when there is an unpleasant odor that doesn’t go away you become adapted to it. Drugs, for the most part, mimic neurotransmittors, so the brain responds to this increase in stimulation by turning down its responsiveness to the real neurotransmittor so that normal physiological levels are not longer efficacious. Thus the brain literally cannot function now without drug and when you remove the drug your brain has to re- adjust (suddenly) to the change. [ANOTHER THEORY WITHOUT EXPLANATION OFFERED FOR THE MECHANISMS AND PRESENTED AS IF AGREEMENT SHOULD BE UNIVERSAL.] The exact symptoms will depend on what areas of the brain (different parts control different aspects of functioning) and whether the transmittor stimulates or inhibits that function. Now that you have this theory it might really be worth your while to pick up a text on neuroscience to look for ways to apply it via what is known and also to learn some of the jargon so when you talk to someone in the field you will not confuse them by using words in a way that is contrary to what they know. Such words as memory and inhibitory and stimulatory, as you use them, could impede communication. So, for example, you mention drug addiction. Let’s say this first: the job of the nervous system is to notice change, to notice new information. That means the nerve cells adjust to current levels of input by turning down their sensitivity to a stimulus. [BIG MISTAKES CAN OCCUR WITH NO EXPLANATION FOR HOW THESE ADJUSTMENTS ARE MADE.] So, when it is dark it takes less light to trigger a response, when there is an unpleasant odor that doesn’t go away you become adapted to it. Drugs, for the most part, mimic neurotransmittors, so the brain responds to this increase in stimulation by turning down its responsiveness to the real neurotransmittor so that normal physiological levels are not longer efficacious. Thus the brain literally cannot function now without drug and when you remove the drug your brain has to re-adjust (suddenly) to the change. The exact symptoms will depend on what areas of the brain (different parts control different aspects of functioning) and whether the transmittor stimulates or inhibits that function. [THIS EXPLANATION FOR HOW DRUGS WORK IS WITHOUT ANY EXPLANATION FOR THE MECHANISMS BEHIND THIS UNPROVEN THEORY. I CAN SHOW ANOTHER ANALOGY THAT IS MORE CONSISTENT BUT NOT AS SUPPORTIVE OF DRUGS GETTING THIS RESPONSE BECAUSE OF AN ASSUMPTION THAT THEY ARE NEEDED OR "DOING GOOD."]

So you use an analogy that the brain is "learning" by your being on the drug and is remembering and -- in a way that is true -- it is changing to fit the new "average" level of stimulation. But the words learning and memory in this context may cause confusion when talking to someone in the field. Also words like inhibition and stimulation have specific meanings. Light actually inhibits neural firing, for example, while visual cells (in some parts of the visual system---early in the processing) are active all the time in the dark.

Anyway, these are just minor points. The main point is that actual learning of some neuroscience may help you put your ideas into a context. You might be able to work up a specific example where your mathematical ideas correspond to actual physical events in a way that would predict both neurological and behavioral changes. Neuroscience isn’t really very hard either. You have to learn some about neurological maps, and some about ion channels and circuits, and you might need to work to find a good real life (so to speak) example where your ideas correspond to what is known and explain the outcome. Then you can see if it is generalizable.

But the devil is in the details. Biology is a mess and evolution tends to solve biological problems in distinct and somewhat arbitrary ways. [THIS WAY OF TALKING ABOUT EVOLUTION IS TRUE, GENERALLY, BUT NOT NECESSARILY TRUE ABOUT ANY PARTICULAR FUNCTION THAT MIGHT BE BETTER EXPLAINED BY SHOWING HOW A REPEATING MATHEMATICAL EVENT COULD HAVE CHARACTERISTICS THAT CAUSE SOME FUNCTIONS TO BE HANDLED IN CERTAIN WAYS ACCORDING TO THE MATHEMATICAL PROPERTIES OF NERVE CELL RELATIONSHIPS CONSISTENTLY IN A VARIETY OF ORGANISMS. THIS PERSON’S WAY OF ATTRIBUTING THE CHARACTERISTICS OF DISORDERS COMPLETELY TO EVOLUTION SHOULD PREDICT THAT THERE WOULD BE FAR LESS AGREEMENT IN THE CHARACTERISTICS OF VARIOUS DISORDERS IN DIFFERENT BRANCHES OF SPECIES BECAUSE THE EVOLUTION OF DISORDERS IN DIFFERENT SPECIES WOULD NOT HAVE TO HAVE AS MANY SIMILAR PATTERNS IN DISTANTLY RELATED SPECIES AS THEY DO IF EVOLUTION WAS THE ONLY CONTROLLING FACTOR.] But it is certainly true that the nervous system is designed to see change and therefore to adjust to current circumstances as "normal". This may mean that some disorders develop in a spiraling way. [ANOTHER THEORY AND I CAN OFFER AN ALTERNATIVE EXPLANATION FOR THE MECHANISMS BEHIND WHY A DISORDER DEVELOPS.]

Me: Your comments are helpful to me but not in the way you intended. I have been struggling to arrange the website in a way that communicates my ideas and that communication is very difficult.

Your suggestion that I should learn a little neuroscience definitely under-evaluates me and is a bit condescending. (I have read hundreds of books regarding various aspects of the subjects that I am considering in this realm.)

But I have reorganized some material to make it easier to understand. If you have any interest you could go straight to www.stevenharris.com/theory/097.htm

My comments were made after such a cursory examination that you should not feel offended at all! The fault lies with me entirely if I misjudged. I will look at the site again and I will print some of it out to make things easier for my also approaching bifocal eyes. My boss is a neuroscientist (more than I am) and is also well trained in math and physics. If your ideas are interesting and I can get him to look... The thing is that we are all busy, me poking around with my more detailed issues in my research and my boss with is own tasks. This is always a hurdle. But I will take a more careful look because what I saw was intriguing.

You wrote that you were looking for somebody interested in ideas and so I thought I’d overwhelm you with it.

You wrote about not comprehending the idea of a pleasure at the cellular level but I’m writing about a basic chemical-type experience and at the full-organism level it is a combination of many small events that creates our experience. Let me challenge you to find any experience that is absent of a feeling of being good or bad. What we consider a pleasure is always a pleasure applied to a subject matter. A lot to talk about here but several of my essays look at the evidence for this conclusion.

You will never believe how I came up with the theory (theories) but I gleaned it from behaviors and other macro data without any knowledge about the cellular processes or neuroscience and then predicted mathematical events that would be created at the cellular level and then had to start a crash course to see if I was right and I have been pleasantly surprised. So my way of writing about this material does seem strange to those of you working there, but I think I can show that various problems are inherent in the nature of the jargon and the current approaches.

I can go along with that, but most people and most philosophers would confine actual experience to conscious entities. You don’t really think cells have experiences and "feel" pain or pleasure do you? Qualia is applied to experiences which most philosophers would say WE have, not our cells. Though it is more than OK to anthropomorphize since often (usually) there is just no other way to approach talking about something in a comprehensible way. Words related to experience and its qualities have special poignancy and meaning to us after all.

I still haven't had a chance to look much at your site. Somehow it would be easier for me if it were all in one lump rather than broken into separate links, but that is just me.

First, the philosophers have no idea what "consciousness" is. There is no agreement on that account. If the bias is that consciousness relates to experiences that can be related, expressed in language, then an implication is that language is needed for consciousness. But then stroke victims with total loss of language ability would not have any consciousness and that could not be true.

What a cell experiences is something that could never be known. It could only be inferred from a lot of subtle evidence and theory. You lose one nerve cell and you only lose 1/1,000,000,000,000 or so of your consciousness and such change is beyond notice... And the level of experience changes greatly depending on the firing of cells.

We have these experiences of the world and have these functions and they only occur when nerve cells are firing, so there must be a direct connection between our feelings and functions and the firing of nerve cells (as the rest of the body can keep functioning and life can go on without awareness when there is brain damage and coma).

That I might be "anthropomorphizing" the cell tells something about social/religious ideas about humanity. It makes sense to me that this concept would be very difficult to comprehend as part of our nature. What I am writing will tell something about the nature of how the brain can create empathy. Our greatest empathy will be for ourselves, a calculation that recognizes a much greater effect on my nervous system when a hammer hits my finger rather than another’s. Pattern recognition causing greater pleasure, as I write, would cause greater pleasure with more patterns that correspond with the patterns that make us what we are. So we calculate the greatest empathy for another that is the most like ourselves and another with whom we have the greatest amount of communication so that we recognize how others go through the same thought processes as ourselves. We feel more empathy for a person most like ourselves. So we feel slightly less empathy in ways with one of another sex, or from another culture speaking another language. It wasn’t long ago that people would say that black slaves did not experience love or pain because keeping them as others leads to less empathy, and in such a case to say that blacks have the same feelings and experiences would be akin to saying that we are anthropomorphizing them. And less empathy occurs for other species so we’d be the least likely to think that a simple organism could have any kind of "feeling".

So I say that pleasure and pain, or yes and no, or love and hate... All of that are emergent properties of the nature of how the nervous system communicates. This does not imply that cells have complex feelings or are going through anything like that of a complex organism, it is just that the creation of the complex organism is created by the cells and the cells are the substance that creates us. It is an alpha-experience, the basic component of the greater experience.

Yes, this topic requires endless conversation dealing with all of the stops in agreement or clarifications.

So cells are needed for experience, but what about the way they talk to each other? I know you’ll discuss that (some would say THAT is central). I am guessing that you are not going to be one of those people who talk about emergent properties!!

I am not sure what you are writing here. I don’t say that cells talk to each other. I say that they fire and that is the experience of the cell. All of consciousness comes from that. It is the mathematics of how the firing of one cell leads to the firing of other cells and how the connectivity and the structure of the cells change that have an effect on other cells that makes everything happen. That is all. It is the nature of that mathematics that is everything. The only things that matter are the factors that influence the firings of cells and the resultant groupings of cells and connectivity.

There are different ways to conceive of emergent properties and many of them I would disagree with. I write about an emergent form of mathematics in the cells.

So I am 1/3 of the way through. The analogy between the crowd and the nervous system is fine up to a point. But the intelligence of a crowd and its experience --- even if you looked over a long period of time --- would be less complex I believe than the individual components and I think the opposite is true between the cell and the brain. A key factor in this marked difference is the highly specialized way cells are wired together in the nervous system and the special ways they influence each other. At any moment a nerve cell receives many, many inputs separated in space from many, many different other cells with which it makes special contacts. (also the response of cells varied a lot as you know, are they basically the same?) Some cells inhibit others, some stimulate, and they can do these things a lot or a little and the "receiving cell" has to integrate all that info and produce outputs for other cells. You agree that the way connections are made and the highly specialized way of cell to cell communication is key to the organism as a whole!!

Also, personally, I would prefer words like cells have a range of responses (you can call them positive and negative responses) to pleasure and pain and emotion talk. Most folks want to talk about the whole organism as a fancy machine and to reduce the language. You seem to take an opposite approach and want to make each cell a little person, a little experiencer. That’s a bit hard to follow.

OK, back to why the cell is the basic unit of experience! I return to the web site.

No, I don’t think of the cell as a little person and I can understand how writing this way would give that wrong impression. This is a very difficult concept to communicate.

The word "responses" works as well, but I’m saying that the various states of the cell cause different states of health in the cell — cause different amounts of balance leading to the success or health of the cell. The cell has a different cellular experience when it is close to falling apart in death than when it is perfectly balanced chemically with what it needs to survive.

This idea that cells are highly specialized in different parts of the brain is something I believe evolves from the way cells respond to different kinds of information by the location of the connectivity, but evolves according to the same mathematical principles. It has already been shown that you can sever the auditory center of the brain of a rat (which some believe is "specialized" through evolution for dealing with hearing) and switch it with the severed visual center of the brain ("specialized" for dealing with very different patterns in the realm of vision) and those switched parts of the brain will take on the task of dealing with different kinds of information. The auditory cells will create vision and the visual cells will deal with hearing.

Yes, I need to tinker with my use of words. For a long time I have been learning how to communicate ideas for which I had no words in the beginning and coming from another direction I will naturally cause confusion this way. To think conceptually is a different skill than to communicate those concepts.

I like the main point that firing too fast is more like inhibition than stimulation and this seems to be key to your theory though I haven’t finished looking at it still. Though many details are not right. SAD is probably a circadian problem, for example, [WHO SAYS? AND HOW IS THIS PROVED AND WHAT ARE THE MECHANISMS THAT CONTROL THIS CIRCADIAN FUNCTION?] and many cells are inhibited by their stimulus. Light inhibits cells in early visual processing and those cells are active (firing) in the dark.

But your idea that too much activity is like inhibition and could lead to stress is interesting and the idea that I have only touched on that cells can switch from positive to negative because of this (in part) is interesting. I would definitely not use words like pain, pleasure, and experience as applied to a cell since a philosopher would say that only conscious entities have experiences (and pain and pleasure are words related to experience). I think this would be true by definition and cells are not conscious. You might talk of cells having responses that are healthful or not or positive for survival or positive for functioning. I know that it seems more satisfying to talk of pain and pleasure at the cellular level translating eventually (mathematically) to pain and pleasure at an organismal level, but it isn’t really a proper use of the words and as such is going to be distracting to many, I suspect, and offensive to others. Though it doesn’t bother me a great deal as long as you know what you are doing. It is really philosophical types that will object most.

I agree that I am causing confusion, but allow for the possibility that the current acceptable language is causing confusion for discovering the nature of the truth as well. There are great conflicts.

Hang with my unusual way of describing things because it creates a possibility for a link between psychology and cellular neuroscience when current ways of speaking about these things have no links whatsoever. But it will take a lot more writing for me to show how that might be possible.

My talk about the use of language is not in any way a criticism about your ideas. I just want to see you present things in such a way that you will not be dismissed based on use of words like experience applied to cells. You might consider words like "response," "event" or "state" describing cells and their range of activity and responses. You have some interesting ideas here, I think, and you want to make it as palatable as possible to a wide audience of neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers. The last two groups will have objections to your use of the word "experience" applied to non-conscious entities like cells. I will try to finish reading this weekend and I am sure I will understand more if we talk since it is hard to convey ideas in writing when you cannot easily anticipate how others’ brains will form ideas from your words.

And I thank you for this. It is very much the kind of help that I need.

By the way, the experience of a cell is just a flash of something chemical happening in the cell. I am not implying that the cell has any memory for an experience or has any reflection on experience of any kind or any other more complex form of experience as the word is used in common language, so clarification is needed on that and I think I wrote about that already, but I don’t want to have to clarify it every time I deal with the subject. A new word is what is really needed, but the cell is a component of experience in every case.

By the way, I cringe when I am lumped with "philosophers" because it is so common for that group to use word games and out of context mathematics to prove all kinds of nonsense like that we don’t really exist or that the mind is not in the brain or in the body or that God exists or other kinds of BS. When I went to a neuroscience conference once there was a symposium of philosophers, then doctors and others who don’t understand the field gave them respectful encouragement, but the way these philosophers described consciousness was the worst nonsense of the conference and they should have been called on it.

First, the philosophers have no idea what "consciousness" is. There is no agreement on that account. If the bias is that consciousness relates to experiences that can be related, expressed in language, then an implication is that language is needed for consciousness. But stroke victims with total loss of language ability would not have any consciousness and that could not be true.

Who said language was a must. Just awareness. Stroke victims rarely have all their language faculties disturbed at once anyway since understanding what you hear is processed is a different place than speech production and written language in a different place as well. Stroke victims virtually never loose all these abilities at once.

Words are used in specific ways. So experience is a conscious perception or apprehension of reality according to the dictionary and cells do not perceive or apprehend. In one place you said cells don't "know" things. Why not? If you are going to use the word experience to mean whatever, why not the word knowledge as well? What I know is just a sum total of what my cells know or so I could say. But who knows what it would mean since I would be using the word in a way that totally deviates from normal use?

I am certainly not denying materialism. We are material entities and we need to have a nervous system to experience. If my liver cells stopped functioning one by one my experiences of life would also change gradually until I eventually died. So is the sum total of my liver cells’ function the total of my experience? Obviously not.

We have these experiences of the world and have these functions and they only occur when nerve cells are firing, so there must be a direct connection between our feelings and functions and the firing of nerve cells (as the rest of the body can keep functioning and life can go on without awareness when there is brain damage and coma).

That you say I might be "anthropomorphizing" the cell tells something about social/religious ideas about humanity. It makes sense to me that this concept would be very difficult to comprehend as part of our nature. What I am writing will tell something about the nature of how the brain can create empathy. Our greatest empathy will be for ourselves, a calculation that recognizes a much greater effect on my nervous system when a hammer hits my finger rather than another’s.

No Kidding!

Pattern recognition causing greater pleasure, as I write, would cause greater pleasure with more patterns that correspond with the patterns that make us what we are. So we calculate the greatest empathy for another that is the most like ourselves and another with whom we have the greatest amount of communication so that we recognize how others go through the same thought processes as ourselves. We feel more empathy for a person most like ourselves. So we feel slightly less empathy in ways with one of another sex, or from another culture speaking another language. It wasn’t long ago that people would say that black slaves did not experience love or pain because keeping them as others leads to less empathy, and in such a case to say that blacks have the same feelings and experiences would be akin to saying that we are anthropomorphizing them. And less empathy for other species.

All you are really saying here is that we understand the experiences we actually have better than the ones that we have never had. I cannot disagree with that, but it isn’t clear that one can make conclusions about it at a cellular level. Naturally experiences we have not had are foreign to us and not understood by us. I don’t understand French either.

So I say that pleasure and pain, or yes and no, or love and hate...All of that are emergent properties of the nature of how the nervous system communicates.

Again, no rational person could deny this.

This does not imply that cells have complex feelings or are going through anything like that of a complex organism, it is just that the creation of the complex organism is created by the cells and the cells are the substance that creates us. It is an alpha-experience, the basic component of the greater experience.

I have to say that you will turn people off talking about cells having experience since the definition of the word strongly implies consciousness and if we are just gonna say everything and anything is conscious and defend that claim on the basis that philosophers don’t know what consciousness is then the word simply loses all meaning as do the words for every other phenomenon that we cannot understand. You can’t just make the word into something it isn’t; not if you want anyone to listen at least. Cells do not have experiences or awareness or pleasure or pain. They also do not see, hear, or know things. That’s just the way the words work.

I have never written that cells have complex feelings. All I am saying is that in a certain state there is a flash of chemical experience occurring in the cell. There is no law that says experience requires the "anthropomorphic" type of experience we have in the complexity of a complete human being.

The cell has no memory of the moment before. It does not compare the current state of feeling with the previous. It does not apply feeling to any subject matter. The cell has no knowledge of what sort of influence is causing the spiking (does not know if it is connected more closely to sources of light and dark, or sound, or to memory of Aunt Etna) or has any kind of knowledge at all. The cell has no past or future, only the present moment.

You apparently have a bias for the concept of feelings occurring as you have them as a complete organism. Feelings that involve assessment of value or comparisons or various states of health. The cell just has a certain feeling state in a certain firing state and that is it. You are putting words into my mouth. I am not writing that cells are little "beings" with personalities and memories or anything complex and conscious happening. But the cells are the building blocks of consciousness and so they must have a component of the experience of consciousness (especially the nerve cells).

I will continue to use the word "feeling" though because it is important to note that this is the only theory that is attempting to explain what is behind the qualia.

And what does it matter if stroke victims rarely lose all of the language faculties at once? I know that. So give them two or three different strokes to allow for my point. (It is possible. My point is that consciousness still exists for one with no language faculties.)

The sum total of your liver cells function will affect the sum total of all of the other cells in your system, so they would have an effect on your consciousness. Nothing I wrote implies that the sum total of your liver function is the sum total of your consciousness. I don’t get your train of logic here.

Why would my claim of a single cell having a simple experience imply that the cell has consciousness? I say that the cell is a component of consciousness and if not then consciousness will have to come from some magical realm (such as outside the body).

I don’t say that cells talk to each other. I say that they fire and that is the experience of the cell. All of consciousness comes from that. It is the mathematics of how the firing of one cell leads to the firing of other cells and how the connectivity and the structure of the cells change that have an effect on other cells that makes everything happen.

That is what I meant by how they talk to each other. Honestly, Steve, if cells can have experiences they can certainly talk to each other!! That is a way of describing how they communicate. As you know what makes the brain different from the liver is the complex network of interconnections and the effects cells have on each other via these interconnections. We agree on this. But I am suggesting that consciousness arises from the nature of these connections in a way that is more than the sum total of the individual cells. That was my objection to the stadium crowd analogy. It’s OK, but a crowd doesn’t have the elaborate connections and inter-communication that make the nervous system what it is. Anyway, that is all "talk to each other" meant.

That is a totally illogical leap. By virtue of that logic you’d better drop all of your animal studies because apparently talking to each other makes us the only animals that have experiences and so our nervous systems can’t be at all close enough to each other to extrapolate human applications from animal experiments.

Of course the crowd in stadium analogy is just an analogy and is not about how the system works. The elaborate interconnections of the brain create incredible functions that emerge from the architecture. But we have a feeling of what it is like to think and live and all, a qualia, and that will never be explained if you keep insisting that the brain is a massive machine-like structure with all of its complexity accounted for by evolution.

The stadium crowd analogy is just to try to find ways for people, such as you, who have a difficult time thinking that the complexity of our experiences could be caused by an illusion of unity. Nothing is really unified in the brain and thought and experience. It is broken into parts that create an illusion of unity. And the parts can be one dichotomy of the same range of simple pleasure/pain events applied to different subject matter. Apparently this is very difficult for you to comprehend even though you have worked in neuroscience and know that brain damage causes loss of portions of both function and experience.

No, I don’t think of the cell as a little person and I can understand how writing this way would give that wrong impression. This is a very difficult concept to communicate. The word "responses" works as well, but I’m saying that the various states of the cell cause different states of health in the cell... cause different amounts of balance leading to the success or health of the cell.

Yes, Steve, that was clear. States is a good word, experience isn’t. Sorry. By the way when you switch auditory cells to connect to visual cells one now sees sound. In other words, the visual center sees! [SUCH A STATEMENT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO MAKE WITH CONFIDENCE UNTIL SUCH AN EXPERIMENT IS PERFORMED ON HUMANS AND NOT JUST ON RATS.] The wiring is the KEY! As far as I am concerned the wiring is the whole shebang. Of course, one needs the individual components (the cells) to work and be healthy for the brain to work. If I had a boat made of wood and I kept removing a piece soon the boat would sink. But the fact that the boat needs all those pieces of wood to work as a boat, does not mean the boat is just a sum of all the pieces of wood. Or that the experience of the planks is a sum of the experience of the boat (just razing on you there Steve).

Listen I did not see the rest of your argument. I didn’t see the math or the predictions. Because I know you are saying more than you need nerve cells to have a brain and those cells have to work well for the brain to work well or that they have to be connected together the right way. This is stuff everybody already knows, so I know you are saying a lot more than that.

By the way, the visual system supports your notion that too much inhibitions of cells leads to death. Closing the eyes (or darkness) is important to allow cells to fire again.

I am going to stick with the word "experience" because the firing states of the cells are the building blocks of our experiences as entire organisms. I must make it clear that I am addressing the cause of the qualia and not just the functions. "State" is too general a word and "state of simple experience" is just too wordy.

If wiring is the whole shebang, then the experience of consciousness and various qualia are just magically emergent properties that can be explained by all manner of religious and non-religious nonsense. So you don’t even care to try to explain it, it seems.

Your boat example is flawed. If you wrote "raft" I could say it is the sum of all those pieces of wood having the buoyancy needed or in the case of a boat or ship, the floatation is not coming from the steel or the wood but caused by the sum of the units of air that displace the water because of the structure of the boat. You are looking at the wrong kind of unit when you write that analogy and you are avoiding an important unit when you reject the possibility of my ideas.

By the way, I cringe when I am lumped with "philosophers" because it is so common for that group to word games and out-of-context mathematics to "prove" all kinds of nonsense.

Now Steve, that isn’t nice! Philosophers can be brilliant. You should read Daniel Dennett. You would like him. He talks about the intelligence of evolution...saying that is a kind of information processing going on at a very sssslllloooowwww speed and therefore not easily recognized as information processing. You would really like him. Also a book by David Chalmers called "The Conscious Mind". He is a brilliant guy, but strongly disagrees with Dennett. [THERE IS NOTHING MORE DANGEROUS THAN A "BRILLIANT" PERSON WHO IS ARTICULATE IN PROMOTING BAD IDEAS.] Both worth reading and both lacking nonsense.

Philosophy is a strange mixture of the brilliant and the ridiculous. If philosophy was a person it would be an idiot-savant!

Listen, I haven’t gotten to the meat of your theory. [SHE ALREADY REJECTED ONE PART OF THE MEAT OF THE THEORY BY REJECTING THE NOTION OF A SIMPLE EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCE IN A CELL.] I’ll read a bit more this weekend and then maybe we could talk. I do like this idea that firing too fast is more like inhibition than excitation and what you say about activity leading to inhibition and stress!! That is very nice.

I wasn’t thinking about Dennett in that e-mail (about bad philosophy). Few are as good as he is. Those who are the closest to the truth -of the popular philosophers and writers in this field who I disagree with the least - are Dennett and Churchland. If I could argue my points to anyone I would like to have the time to do so with them. (Unfortunately they have been completely inaccessible to me - I have tried more than once.) Damasio is very good too. His work at the University of Iowa provides all kinds of helpful evidence to me but his own theories and interpretations of the data I find to be further from the truth than Dennett and Churchland. And I have read "The Conscious Mind" and other work by Chalmers and he is so far from the truth it wouldn’t be worth trying with him. He is a dualist of a sort that might as well be arguing for Universal Consciousness and religion.

(Do I detect an assumption of my ignorance in your suggestion that I read them? I think I have mentioned all of them somewhere on my website.)

[You apparently have a bias for feelings occurring as you have them as a complete organism.]

Steve: believe me I am smart and I know exactly what you mean. I didn’t complain about the word "feeling" either. I complained about the word "experience" as applied to cells. An experience includes a "feeling" state but is more than that and usually even the word qualia means more than emotion since it is largely emotion as applied to some mental processing. This has nothing to do with bias. It is simply a fact that in the English language the word "experience" has a meaning that INCLUDES conscious awareness.

As for stroke victims and the involvement of language: what’s your point? No one claimed that consciousness involved language (some might say so but I would not). Though it is VERY difficult to imagine that you lose language ability to the point where you do not even think in words, which is the only case your question would have any meaning for. [EXAMPLES OF SUCH DEFICITS ARE BELIEVED TO EXIST.] Let’s say that consciousness does not require language. It is still a brute fact that cells are not conscious, are not even aware, and thus do not have experiences. So I think that word should be dropped.

Feeling words carry less of a link to consciousness and awareness and are OK with me! Consciousness may include feeling, but feeling does not include consciousness. But I would also be careful of the word qualia since that means something very specific to many people whereas qualitative and other qual words do not.

There was a time when lightning and thunder were believed to be an expression of the anger of the gods. When better knowledge became available, it was not required that the word be replaced. The word was redefined.

I say that our consciousness is just the sum total of our thinking/experiencing state that is in constant flux with immense variety. (The word "consciousness" needs a better definition as well.) We should consider sleep or coma as a state of consciousness but a different state of consciousness. There are artists of various sorts that lose language-based thought during certain levels of focus where the lines are seen (while drawing, for instance) but the meaning of the lines and the words that go with what is being drawn are out of awareness, but that is still a kind of consciousness, just a different kind.

When a stroke victim loses awareness of the left side in vision and function, that person has lost the "experience" of the left side of the world. That person has the right side still as an experience. A portion of an experience is still an experience. I’m saying that the portions of experience are still experience and those portions that exist or that can be lost can be so small that they can no longer be in awareness. If the portion is so small that it is out of awareness, which does not mean that the portion no longer exists.

This insistence that "experience" must include conscious awareness (and there is no agreement about how to define consciousness) is a bogus requirement and is creating a block of circular bad logic.

The need for this argument is a big frustration to me. I see no conflict in my use of the language and I find it very easy to see in my mind how all these parts go together but I’m held back from communicating it because of these trivial requirements.

You write about these requirements for the use of the word "experience" as if it is a complete thing, the sum of all experience and consciousness, but the word is commonly used in other ways without such restrictions whatever your dictionary says. And I say that your dictionary is wrong if that is the case. I can have the experience of touching my left shoulder and the experience of licking my lips at the same time. Those experiences may be parts of one experience of a moment of consciousness, but they are also separate experiences although I might be focusing my thought on one or the other (or both) during a moment of time. Both are experiences. Both at the same time are an experience as well. Experiences can be divided and still be experiences. I say that the divisions of experience are still experience divided down to the experience of one cell. That such a concept is new does not mean that it is wrong. If you think the word is wrong, be flexible and redefine the word.

I am trying to explain how qualia is created by the nervous system and experience is an important word in making that possible. I grabbed the first book off my shelf with a definition of qualia. It is Philosophy and the Neurosciences, A Reader edited by Bechtel, Mandik and all. Page 269:

"What is it that puzzles philosophers? Broadly speaking, it is qualia - the blueness of blue, the painfulness of pain, and so on."

"This problem of qualia is what Chalmers (1995) calls ’the hard problem’: a full account of the manner in which subjective experience arises from cerebral processes. As we see it, the hard problem can be broken down into several questions, of which the first is the major problem: How do we experience anything at all? What leads to a particular conscious experience (such as the blueness of blue)? What is the function of conscious experience? Why are some aspects of subjective experience impossible to convey to other people (in other words, why are they private)?"

So right off the bat the word "qualia" is defined as an experience. But I look across the room and I have the experience of the blueness of blue and the redness of red, and thousands of other experiences according to this logic and language, and these many experiences are happening at the same time and they are all experiences so, again, I find that a portion of an experience is an experience. Your semantic requirement is not holding water. Our conscious experience can be divided into much smaller experiences than we can be aware of. A person can lose an ability that can be discovered through testing but have no awareness that such an ability (and the experience of having that ability) is missing.

I am using the right words in this case. The understanding of those words and the definition of those words are in need of change if there is a problem.

"Honestly, Steve, if cells can have experiences they can certainly talk to each other!!"

Honestly, Steve, this was a joke!!!!!!!

You should know that jokes don’t always communicate in e-mail without the social signals that go with jokes told in person. The concept I am trying to communicate is very important so my defense of the idea deserves seriousness.

I am going to stick with the word "experience"because the firing states of the cells are the building blocks of our experiences as entire organisms. I must make it clear that I am addressing the cause of the qualia and not just the functions. "State" is too general a word and "state of simple experience" is just too wordy.

If wiring is the whole shebang, then the experience of consciousness and various qualia are just magically emergent properties that can be explained by all manner of religious and non-religious nonsense. So you don’t even care to try to explain it, it seems.

Your boat example is flawed. If you wrote "raft" I could say it is the sum of all those pieces of wood having the buoyancy needed or in the case of a boat or ship, the floatation is not coming from the steel or the wood but caused by the sum of the units of air that displace the water because of the structure of the boat. You are looking at the wrong kind of unit when you write that analogy and you are avoiding an important unit when you reject the possibility of my ideas.

I think my analogy is perfect since cells are part of neural maps that are constructed in specific ways. I do not agree that one has to reduce all our experience to the cellular level or we are not explaining anything. That simply isn’t true. Besides you yourself --- with your crowd analogy --- suggest the very same thing. How these cells "talk" to each other is a big part of how the brain works. And I am not rejecting your ideas. But saying that we see red or love our mothers because of healthy brain cells firing isn’t saying anything at all in terms of explaining. And I know that is not what you are saying. Honestly, I haven’t had a chance to look at the rest of your site (there are lots of words there and I always forget to do it at work where I could print it out and spare my eyes). I am not rejecting your ideas since I do not yet know fully what they are.

I say that the neural maps are constructed by a repeating form of mathematics that will lead to these predictable and specific arrangements according to repeating mathematical principals in response to development and experience occurring at the same time and not constructed in such complexity according to genetic instructions with a genome that has been discovered to have fewer genes than would be necessary to control all of that complex structure. Those "specific ways" of mapping change a lot if some factor such as excessive cerebral fluid pressure or an injury of some kind occurs during early development.

(Do I detect an assumption of ignorance in your suggestion that I read them (Dennett, Chalmers)? I think I have mentioned all of them somewhere on my website.)

Steve you are a very sensitive person. I am not claiming anything about what you have or have not read. I haven’t finished with your site. But maybe I will or will not agree with every thing you say. I do not agree that the brain is a raft and the individual cells are the planks. That may describe your theory (I do not know since I haven’t finished) but it does not describe the brain!!! No way. The brain is very much a boat with the cells as individual components that are part of a structure that is more than a simple summation of its parts. But I guess that belief means I am just giving up on understanding the brain, as you suggested in a previous message. After all, we would have to rely on some emergent properties to explain the boat, like the ability of the structure to displace water!!! Can’t have an explanation like that that has any meaning. Only rafts make sense.

I would not describe the brain as a raft and the cells as planks. I was responding to your analogy, not mine.

Your intransigence in saying the brain is a structure that is more than a simple summation of its parts seems to totally give up on dealing with the "hard questions" and deals with the various portions of the brain as specialized mechanical constructions. This focus on function alone is in conflict with a variety of my earlier arguments. (For instance, it leaves unexplained why sections of the brain can be transplanted to another region of the brain and take on the new functions or why sections of the brain will automatically take on new assignments after strokes or after amputations or shift naturally when functions shift over a bit in the brain.)

And you would be sensitive too if you had worked on something as extensive as this theory with no pay (you get paid if your work is successful and useful or not) for seven years and were told that you were insane to try such a thing because you did not have the proper sanction from the authorities to do so.

Listen Steve if you are gonna email about complicated stuff you have to expect that understanding is going to be seriously impaired. You misunderstood MANY things I said, most everything in any cases. Like when I joked about cells talking to each other. And there is surely no way to convey emotions etc. I didn’t recommend Dennett because I assumed you hadn’t read him but because I admire Dennett. That’s simple. Though I also suggested a book by David Chalmers and you were not offended by that.

But the funniest message you sent was the one telling me that my boat analogy was a bad one and that a raft would have been better!!! No, I do not think the brain is simply the sum of the cells that comprise it and thus it is not a raft, but a boat. That WAS the whole point of my analogy. Otherwise the brain would be little different than a liver or kidney (actually they are not rafts either since they have specialized cells with special function in a certain configuration). The raft analogy might apply to a simple sponge (not even that completely!!). Actually I think the brain is more like a modular space craft. If human artifacts are more than the sum of their parts, then surely the human brain is. And I am NOT saying that is what your theory says. I haven’t finished exploring what you have to say and I was perfectly willing to keep an open mind. But if I am expected to agree 100% with everything then I think you should talk to someone else about it. I am just not going to do that. I am in no way dismissing what you are saying. On the contrary.

My response to your reading suggestions was influenced by the language you used. "You should read" instead of asking "Have you read?" Looked like an assumption that I was not exposed to the writing as far as I could tell. (The appearance of an assumption of ignorance didn’t matter if it was Dennett or Chalmers and I don’t think my writing expressed such a difference in response. Is it possible you put meaning into my words that was not there? (And I apologize for any meaning I put into your words through misreading, such as missing your joke.)

I didn’t offer the raft analogy as a better analogy; I just offered both analogies because the basic units of floatation are the smaller units of substance that are lighter than water. (Buoyant wood in the case of a raft and buoyant displaced air in the hold of a ship or boat.)

You do seem to have a firm concept (with a lot that is unexplained) of how the brain works and does not work so there is a lot of resistance to what I am trying to convey. I don’t think the problem is with my ideas. I think the problem is with the way you have been trained to think about how the brain works (and does not work) through the language of science that is offering unproven theories as if they are facts. I have written a lot that argues that topic so I will not write more here.

Steve: you said "why would your talking about the experience of a cell mean you were suggesting the cell was conscious?". Look the word "experience" up in the dictionary. I do not get why when I tell you verbatim what the dictionary says that you cannot see that experiences are events of consciousness. This is simply WHAT the word means in the language we speak. If you say a cell has an experience you are saying a cell is consci"conscious awareness of reality". That is just what the word means in standard English. This should not be a contentious issue. You might use the word in " " after you explain at least one place early on exactly what YOU mean by "experience". Otherwise it is a nonsensical use of the word. I have a vague notion of what you mean by it because of the whole sum of what you wrote. You could also coin a similar word phrase such as "cellular experience". I can guarantee you that if you appear to be explaining consciousness or experience based on a sum of little cellular experiences you will harm your own case. It is a suggestion well worth considering if it is the ONLY intelligent thing I have to say on this theory and it may be for all I know.

By the way, you have said a lot of things I could easily take offense at that seem to suggest I ain’t so awfully bright. But I don’t take offense because I know myself. And you should not take offense either.

I have made my argument about the word "experience." (Let me add that you have less agreement with emotion words but I believe "emotion" is a much more complex computation concerning various realms of subject matter in the brain as we think of it and much too vague, but "experiences" can have greater variety and be subdivided into other experiences. The word is defined poorly for the truth.)

We are both smart people with confidence in our conflicting ideas. That is all.

Yes, I like Damasio too. For him consciousness is a whole organism phenomena. I always felt suspicious of the "brain in a vat". Anyway his ideas about our sense of self are interesting. Indeed not only are cells not conscious and livers are not conscious, brains are not conscious either. People and some other living organisms are conscious and we seem to need nervous systems to be conscious. We love our mothers, our brains do not love our mothers.

I disagree that only some other organisms are conscious. I think all life forms with nervous systems have a form of consciousness, just different kinds of consciousness. (How could you know if another species has consciousness or not? Is your consciousness defined by the existence of language?)

The love of our mothers is a product of our brains and experiences and our brains are a part of us. I think love is half of the language of the brain (as pleasure is half the language of the brain and love is just the sum of pleasures regarding certain subject matter that we think of as appropriate for the application of love).

So our brains are the organs that love our mothers too. (The brain must be more involved in this than the liver or heart.)

Just to spell out my joke (again it is hard to communicate in writing, but you obviously didn’t see what I meant).

When I said ’how cells talk to each other’ I was referring to which cells communicate to which others (wiring) and what signals they send and receive, neurotransmitters from one cell stimulating or inhibiting other cells).

Cells communicate and I was using the phrase "talk to each other" as a way of summing up this communication. When you objected and said cells do not talk to each other (no one said they speak English--that is a joke too) I was amused since you are talking about cells having experiences which are by definition events of conscious awareness and you are OK with that kind of talk, but you object to me saying they talk to each other. So I said "Honestly, Steve, if cells can have experiences, surely they can talk to each other" as a joke. My point was that most people would readily and clearly understand what it means to say cells talk to each other (ie that they exchange chemical signals) but virtually NO ONE would understand what it means for a cell to have an experience. Even you admit this is a hard to describe concept (and I still strongly feel you should coin a word or phrase for it and write out a one-time definition of what YOU mean by it). So you see I was teasing you a bit and making a small joke to tease us both. Me too for using such anthropomorphic language as "talking to each other".

Listen, you are clearly a smart and creative person. I am not trying to attack you here. But in the world of ideas you will find people will challenge, criticize and poke holes in your ideas. That is the way the game is played and it is a valuable process. No need to take any of it to heart. If you want your ideas to be known, part of them being known will be having them discussed in a variety of ways. I am used to this as a daily reality of my life. But you may not be used to it. But please do not take it to heart.

All I am doing is continuing my effort to communicate. And so I disagree with your insistence that the word "experience" is misused. The word cannot be both an event of conscious experience (taken as a whole without any allowance of division into parts) and also be used as part of the definition of qualia, which is, by definition, a portion of a conscious experience.

When philosophers talk about using verbal reports as a way to study consciousness they are NOT NECESSARILY saying that verbal ability is essential to have a conscious experience. What they are saying is that conscious experiences are private events that happen in our minds and we have no way of knowing IF they happen or knowing anything else about them EXCEPT through verbal reports on the part of the person having the conscious experience. Behavior is NOT an adequate criterion to determine if a conscious experience has occurred. So, for example, if a bacterium encounters a noxious chemical and swims in the opposite direction could we conclude "the bacteria became aware of a harmful substance and decided to swim away" Clearly bacteria are not consciously AWARE of anything and clearly bacteria do NOT make conscious decisions. Clearly bacteria do not have conscious experiences, but their behavior looks like the products of such an experience just the same.

So, we have no way of knowing if another person has a conscious experience except through their telling us they did. Now some people say verbal reports are just another form of behavior and thus do not address the issue of conscious experience. They mention the idea of a zombie, someone who behaves just like you and me, but has no conscious experience. That individual may talk to no end about their experiences and not ever actually have one. I do not agree that such an individual could actually exist, but in principle he could exist simply because conscious experience is a private matter. Others like Dennett feel we have no choice but to assume that when people talk about their conscious experiences they are really having them and that this is thus the best way to learn about such conscious experiences.

So the emphasis on verbal reports is not because everyone agrees language is needed for a conscious experience, but everyone mostly agrees that language is needed to convey to another the nature and existence of the experience.

Lastly, it may be true that conscious experience always has a qualitative feel. However, the reverse is not true. An entity can have an emotion such as pain and pleasure, without having a conscious experience of that emotion. As Dennett would say "my cat can feel pain, but she cannot suffer". [I DISAGREE WITH DENNETT THAT ANOTHER ANIMAL CANNOT SUFFER. BUT IT IS UNLIKELY THAT THE CAT WILL MAKE ME SUFFER BY TALKING ABOUT THE PAIN ENDLESSLY.]

For this reason, I am willing to accept your talk of pain and pleasure as loose definitions for some state of a cell. However, in the English language the word experience= conscious experience! There simply is no other kind. I strongly suggest coining a phrase and defining what you mean by that phrase and avoiding the word experience. Maybe "Cell-experiences" or some such. And define it. Then you are on safer ground and also maybe communicating more effectively.

Well, I guess I have beaten a dead horse here. Sorry for that.

(I don’t think a dead horse has any experience. That is a joke.)

I wrote "alpha-pleasure" as a form of definition. But a pleasure is one experience and a pain another experience. We are the sum of many smaller functions of our life and many smaller experiences as well. The word CAN be defined differently. I’m finished making this point.

The zombie argument makes sense with the way you define your "boat" of a nervous system because it only offers a theory for functions but not for the experience of having those functions. So, I believe, that the current dominant ways of describing the nervous system are describing the zombie but not informing the nature of what we really are.

And if emergent properties means to you that the whole is more than the sum of its parts then nearly everything around is an example of emergent properties... boats, cars, telephones, telephone poles, trees, and even the lowly sponge. I fail to see why this fact of existence in any way precludes explanation or understanding. We (not me but someone will) know how my phone works.

I’m lost on what you intend here. Let me guess that somebody knows about the emergent properties explaining cars and how they work, but in explaining all of these things (except the life forms) there are complete chains of logic explaining the physics and the physical processes and chemical processes. Such is not true with the brain and mind. The mind emerges from the body and brain, yes, but there is no current chain of explanation that is working. I am offering one.

I said I think it is mostly in the wiring and the way cells talk to each other and you said that meant that we were left with emergent properties and that I was giving up on explaining how the brain works. Those were almost exactly your words. So I am saying I disagree that believing the wiring is key means I am throwing up my hands and giving in to magical emergent properties. You could go back and look at the exchange. You may be offering some explanation, but I am not sure what exactly it is but if it is that the brain is a collection of cells each seeking their own pleasure and that the health, pleasure etc. of the individual is a sum of those smaller pleasures, I would have a hard time agreeing with that. Maybe you are saying something else.

I have written that there is a basic unit of experience of a very simple nature occurring in the cell regarding the cell’s health and survival in relation to states of chemical balance. The "seeking" you quote is not in a cellular mind of any kind. The cell has no mind. The seeking is emergent in the mathematics that result from the nature of how a cell evolves, changes and connects to other cells. Evolution would quickly eliminate any cell that had mathematical properties that went against the greatest survival of that cell or any other kind of cell. There is a way to show how such a mathematics helping one cell could accumulate into a much more complex mathematics as the cells interrelate in a colony. (I have not made that case yet and that argument requires animations impossible to explain in text.)

I actually know something about how the nervous system gets wired and it is largely through a series of chemical cues and largely happens before meaningful information is being processed. You don’t need a gene for every connection. You need a set of interchangeable cells responding to cues in series (it is like a branching pattern where early cues may apply to several cell equivalent types and later cues to more specific ones-- for example if I wanted to go to Florida and you wanted to go to NJ, from CT we would both start out on 95S). These chemical cues in series and in overlapping patterns generate basic maps and experience does the final wiring. Now if your theory applies to this final stage of how wiring happens, that’s all well and good. But the basic maps are in place by genetic, and chemical means. Every body has a Weirneke’s area and a Broca’s area etc. and these are roughly in the same place for everyone and this is determined chemically ala Sperry. The fine-grained mapping does require electrical activity and maybe that is what you are referring to????

I never said or implied that you don’t know something about how the nervous system gets wired but you don’t seem to be able to understand my arguments about how the line between facts/observations and theories can be misplaced in the tenured approaches to the subject matter.

You have been trained first in chemistry, I assume, and you have been exposed to constant references to "brain chemistry" implying that chemistry is the controlling mathematical factor in creating the functioning and that is not necessarily true. The chemistry is in there and changing the chemistry through medication does create change, but the interpretations for why such changes occur or for what is the important factor to focus on in order to understand the workings of the brain can be wrong.

What is important for the mathematics of the firing of a cell is in the firing of other cells and the connectivity and in whether the signals coming from other cells are inhibitory or excitatory. The particular chemical in use for inhibition or excitation is less important to that mathematics. What you mean by "chemical means" can be wrong in subtle or not so subtle ways. The implication can be an unproven theory (instead of a "fact" as it is presented).

The function and location of a region of the brain can be very predictable (with some rare variation in a population of subjects that can put into doubt assumptions about genetic control over this mapping of the brain). That mapping, I write, can be created by a form of mathematics that is in the nature of nerve cells and how that mathematics responds to different kinds of influences based on connectivity and placement (handling more "information" regarding vision if connected closer to the eyes than to the ears, for instance).

Nerve cells very close to the eyes, for instance, will be very "plastic" in that they will be effected by the outside world and not by consistent pattern recognition. The response will be both excitatory or inhibitory completely influenced by light and dark. Further into the visual centers, cells apply that mathematics to emergent patterns caused by earlier patterns. If a cell is in a place of the nervous system where a lot of activity of a certain type (and the type of pattern with the greatest influence on a cell has not been provided with any confidence by current understanding of the brain in the sciences) occurs in regards to horizontal lines in the field of vision, for instance, and the experience of horizontal lines keeps occurring in nature, then the mathematics of cells will cause an increase of connectivity of a sort that will cause that cell to respond more efficiently to horizontal lines and the repetitions will cause a firming up of the structure of the cell and the connectivity to increase the likelihood of firing when that pattern occurs. The emergent property is that the cell will become more responsive to that pattern and less responsive to other types of information (although that cell could be responsive to other types of information at the same time as well and play a part in many divergent kinds of "information"). The repetitions cause a loss in "plasticity" compared to other regions of the brain where conflicts of signaling don’t provide for such repetitions of patterns. Regions of the brain where predictable information settles will be less flexible - have less plasticity. Because of the nature of the way the body is shaped and the geographical relationships between different realms of information (eyes on one side of the brain, ears on another, for instance) the places in the brain where certain kinds of information will be processed will be very predictable. The inclination to think that such a predictable structure is created entirely by genetic controls is very strong, and genetics is a part of the solution, but the interpretation of how much is controlled by genetics can be mistaken.

The different neurotransmitters don’t control the functions but they have an effect on the functioning. The functions are much too complex for such blunt controls. Having different chemicals as neurotransmitters in the brain makes the control of focus much easier. That way the brain can turn the volumes of different geographies of the brain up and down as such activity serves the health of the system at any time. Certain kinds of activity then will eventually form alliances with certain volume controls of hormonal activity and then these constantly fluctuating volumes will have an effect on the development of specific functions (to some greater or lesser degree) as those fluctuations will have an influence on the activity and thus the development of connectivity and sensitivities of individual cells in the brain.

The chemicals are not controlling the functions, but they are a factor.

Consciousness is a mess and has different meanings depending on whom you talk to, but for the philosophers it is certainly more than awareness. And they use qualia as a way of describing the qualitative nature of experience. But I am willing to accede that in common usage we may use experience differently. Though your licking your lips can be conscious even if you are not focusing on it. If you were never at any second aware that you were licking your lips I am not sure you could say you had the experience of licking your lips. But I can tell you a story of someone working on Drosophila that used the word pain referring to something that sure would look like pain and he ran into trouble. I am just telling you that you will have trouble using this language. But do what you must.

I will.

(By the way, where does the event where somebody tells you that you were licking your lips five minutes ago and you then remember that, yes, you were licking your lips at that time, even though you were unaware of it at the time, fall into your argument?)

Nothing you say above suggests that any of these experiences are not conscious. You don’t have to be focusing on something to know it is happening or to experience it. However, if you have no idea that it happened then you did not have the experience.

Consider the possibility that you might have parts of your brain that do have experiences or awareness’s that don’t get to your language center but the brain and your behavior can show that such an awareness exists and a memory for such an awareness is possible as well. Split-brain studies will show a patient giving a different answer to a question with the right side of the body than the left, but only one answer is reportable in language. In such a person a report might be that they had no idea of something happening that the non-language hemisphere of the brain could report on but only through visual or other non-verbal communication. Your argument has serious limitations in dealing with this kind of evidence.

> So right off the bat the word qualia is defined as an experience.

I disagree. Qualia is an aspect of experience - it is not THE experience itself.

Your argument continues to provide fodder for the implication that there is unity in our experience in the brain. There is not. There is no place where it comes together. This idea that the only experience we have is that experience on which we are focused is misleading. Our experience is a lot of separate activities occurring at any moment in time. In order to continue your argument about this point, you should have disputed the description of qualia I quoted from that book and you haven’t.

If I look at a person I can see and notice a person’s face and a person’s arm at the same time. I have the experience of seeing the person but it is proven that the understanding of the face (and that portion of the experience, which is an experience as well) is processed in a different portion of the brain than the grouping of cells dealing with the arm.

Swallow your pride and release yourself from this semantic straightjacket. Allow for the possibility that the experiences divide into smaller experiences just as the functions divide into smaller functions.

Steve: You are not telling me that all these little experiences that aren’t conscious just add up to consciousness are you? Why don’t you do me a favor and cut and paste the main bits of your argument into a whole. Your web site is driving me nuts with all the links scattered here and the swamp mud analogies etc. If you are really saying that our experience as humans is just a summation of the experience of the cells in our nervous system and all that fancy wiring is there to make us do fancy things but not for us to have conscious experience, I would have trouble with that. So sum it up for me as a professional neuroscientist. That would really help.

Sorry about the structure of my website but there is no easy solution. Putting all of this information on one web page would take too long for most people to download at once.

Hell! Look how much debate has been necessary for us to consider the use of one word that deals with a very small portion of the many factors to consider. This is not a quick subject. Patience is required.

That mud swamp essay is describing a very real mathematical event that can occur in the emergent mathematics of cells. Fully explaining this is, again, something that requires animations but what I will show is that stress will collect in certain regions of the brain more than others in a predictable way much in the same way that specialized regions of the brain will develop in a predictable way through repetitions of smaller coordinated mathematical events. The connectivity and the knowledge of how this stress collects will predict the percentage of occurrences of the various disorders as a result of the way the brain works. The many disorders are the result of the mechanisms of success in the brain and the way the brain works. They are only partially or indirectly the result of genetic influences.

At least consider that the answers might come from releasing yourself from the language and assumptions of "professional neuroscientists."

The brain is plastic up to a point and can rewire---up to a point, though there really are severe limitations on this. So what? That doesn’t meant the wiring doesn’t matter. Otherwise why doesn’t it look like a liver with cells that don’t talk to each other much?

I believe consciousness is an emergent property that arises out of all this fancy function. If consciousness were really more simple than the basis for the function then why do only pretty complex organisms have the property? My cat can do a lot of things I cannot including lots of smell recognition etc., but does she have conscious experiences? Now you seem to be saying consciousness is simple, it is just all the other things the brain does that are complicated.

Let me ask you this. If we could somehow keep all the cells firing in some certain state without them actually interacting with each other and with the outside world would we have a conscious experience? If I could dissociate the cells in your brain into a very large dish so they no longer were connected to each other and I could then make each cell fire by some magical process in exactly the way they are firing the second you look at the sky, even if I could make their firing patterns change over the next 5 minutes so the individual cells were firing exactly as they would for the five minutes you are enjoying a beautiful summer sky, would there be a conscious experience of a summer sky in the large dish of dissociated cells? Would the experience of the sum total of the cells in the dish equal YOUR experience when you look at the sky with your brain intact? Common sense tells me NO. The answer is NO.

Consciousness isn’t simpler than language processing or vision. It is something above that in my book.

I never said that consciousness is simple. I think the definition of consciousness can be simple though. Our consciousness of any moment is just the totality of our many experiences of functioning at any given time and such a totality can take many forms at different times in one species (our many states of mind and awareness and focus) or many forms in different species.

Our consciousness can have greater or lesser amounts of language domination, for instance. Other animals with nervous systems have forms of consciousness but without complex language and the resultant knowledge, communication and complex social influences that result.

You are apparently defining consciousness differently if you think only a few species can have it.

My definition has consciousness including language processing and vision and everything else, so it is something above or more inclusive for me as well.

Language and culture and the many ways such effects our thinking and behavior will force us into mental processing about subject matter that will never reach the cat, but that doesn’t mean that the cat has no consciousness or that the cat has no form of logic in its responses to the world.

Your questions about a nervous system with no connections but firing in exactly the same way as a nervous system with connections makes no sense to me as a way to the truth. You don’t learn the truth about the world by examining an impossible event. But I think your answer is wrong. I think it would be the same consciousness if the cells were firing in exactly the same way, including the firing of the parts of the cells, dendrites and axons, and the same activity in every other kind of cell in the body according to the same mathematical relationships of an intact body. (Your answer would be right if the brain were some kind of broadcasting structure sending "thoughts" outside of the body or if the mind were in someplace besides the cells of the brain, or if there was a place where all of the components of thought actually came together, but they don’t. They are separate and always remain separate.) All answers are as much nonsense as the analogy or the completely separated brain would be nonsense.

> I disagree that only some other organisms are conscious. I think all > life > forms with nervous systems have a form of consciousness, just > different > kinds of consciousness. (How could you know if another species has > consciousness or not? Is your consciousness defined by the existence > of > language?) >

Different? Or less complex? Some other organisms include those with nervous systems, by the way which is a VERY TINY fraction of the total organisms on the planet---less that a fraction of a percent.

It might be typing or a missing word that makes me unable to understand your point here.

Earlier I made an analogy with the liver and you said you didn’t follow my logic. Why is the sum total of our conscious experience the sum total of the cells in our nervous systems, Steve, as you seem to suggest and not the sum total of the pleasure and pain of the cells in the liver or kidney? And if you say "those cells contribute as well" why do the cells in the nervous system contribute so much MORE!!! Come on, Steve, what is special about the nervous system is the elaborate way the cells are hooked together and the elaborate signals they exchange...ie, the way they talk to each other as I said from the start. Otherwise your comment would be that any organism with organs would have a conscious experience, not any organism with a nervous system. And what about all those liver cells? They get no pain or pleasure since they do not happen to fire action potentials? Yet they still must stay alive and function and all the rest. By the way, an action potential is nothing more than a way for a cell to trigger release of neurotransmitters to signal to the next cell. Cells fire and this firing leads directly, in well understood ways, to release of neurotransmitter to target cells. An action potential in a cell lacking neurotransmitter or a cell not connecter to other cells is accomplishing nothing neurologically speaking and that is way a bunch of dissociated cells in a dish, no matter how they were firing, no matter how much pleasure they each experienced would never have a conscious experience. Consciousness IS part and parcel of all this information processing not something different. You are advocating a kind of dualism too, property dualism. Chalmers, by the way, is a MATERIALIST. He believes that consciousness is caused by matter. So his form of dualism doesn’t allow for fairies and religion etc. He is not advocating a non-materialist view. He is saying we need a whole new set of laws to deal with and talk about consciousness. But the laws would be physical. You are advocating a property dualism. And I just do not agree.

What makes the nervous system have the greatest influence on our collective experience of consciousness is the massive change in the scale of time and massive change in the scale of distance that the nervous system conveys signals to other cells as well as the connectivity (which is the reason for the speed of transmission of signals through a greater distance at greater speed). Also, the signaling of nerve cells is a mathematical adjustment from a mathematics of movement to a mathematics that represents movement and is able to represent other realms as well, all encoded into frequencies.

You seem to be agreeing with Chalmers here and then you are totally resistant to my attempt to provide "a new set of laws to deal with and talk about consciousness."

The word "dualism" implies different things to different people so some confusion is occurring here. That there is a function and a feeling of various functions suggests that there is more than one realm to explain so dual realms need to be addressed even if I am not providing the usual kind of dualism or if my ideas do not agree with past beliefs that are "dualism."

So all this neural firing is playing a central role in information processing via how neurons are connected to each other and what signals they are exchanging (since firing is what triggers these chemical signals and is in turn triggered by them). And yet this same neural firing just happens to be responsible for the qualitative feel of experience independent of the way cells are wired together? You talk about cells wanting to fire at a certain rate etc., but experiences (the kind you and I have) induce firing that is dependent on the mode of experience (that is not inconsistent with your ideas I realize). Firing has meaning way above and beyond the cell’s "feeling good" as you know. And I contend that if all those cells could be made to fire at their optimal rate, or at a rate they would fire when you see the sky, and this firing was happening in a dish where they were not connected to each other there would be no consciousness and no summing of little experiences to make a larger experience.

It is the combination of the mathematics of what the cells would try to achieve in frequency (which, if isolated from the world and the body, would deal with no information whatsoever) attached to the inputs of various information encoded into that system from inside and outside of the body, thus changing that inclination of the nervous system cells to seek a frequency to an inclination to apply the mathematics to making sense of other signals of other realms (light/dark, sweet/sour, etc.) that changes the mathematics from a frequency seeking to a pattern seeking mathematics that creates all of the ability through associations of events happening consistently at the same times. I‘d have to animate the concept to make it clear, something impossible to do in text.

(Perhaps it will help you to point out that in such a system, a minority of cells are "experiencing" a majority of periods of time in greater alpha pain than pleasure because the algorithm of the system needs that to provide understanding and calculation. Eventually a majority of cells will experience a majority of time in the pain state and the system will start shutting down sections of processing in order to change that state into a success for the majority of cells, the body, and then, if things don’t turn around quickly, death follows.)

I contend that wiring doesn’t just explain how we do what we do (information processing), but ultimately how we know we are doing and all the rest. This idea is more parsimonious than this dual role in firing that you propose. And where does the knowledge of all these little cellular experiences get summed so that YOU know how you feel and what you are doing and what it is like to do what you are doing?

Once again, I repeat, there is no summation there is no place where it comes all together and all of the evidence is against any such summation in spite of the illusion of unity.

It still all has to be brought together somehow for YOU to be aware of it (the binding problem holds for consciousness as for all information processing). If consciousness is part and parcel of information processing then the solution to this binding problem will be one solution. If neural firing plays two roles one in information processing and one in qualia production than there will have to be two solutions to the binding problem. Let me explain. The solution to the binding problem for how we see whole visual image (just one example) instead of all the little parts of the image and how we see and hear the same experience together would be fundamentally different than the solution to the binding problem for how all our experiences together at a moment sum up to the qualia (qualitative nature) of a conscious experience. So by dismissing the wiring and instead having this dual role for neural firing per se you are introducing a dual solution to the binding problem. It is a kind of dualism all through the system.

It does not have to come together. Period. Apparently you are either unwilling or unable to conceive of that.

Qualia refers to the qualitative aspects of conscious experience, the "what it is like to see blue" as the philosophers say. By the way, they mean much more by this than emotion. Color doesn’t exist in the world at all, only light of different wavelengths. Color is OUR interpretation of that light. So seeing blue has a quality that has no corresponding thing in the world, namely the blueness, not just the emotional feelings that blue evokes, but the actual experience of blue itself. This is what they really mean by qualia, it is not an emotion word, as you must know if you read Chalmers, though emotions can come along for the ride.

There is nothing in my writing that would let one think that I don’t understand the meaning of qualia, whether you agree with my solution to the problem or not. This is just plain condescending. Then you write that emotions just "come along for the ride." Why would emotions just come along for the ride unless the components for emotion are also the components for the understanding of any particular qualia?

By the way, I don’t say that emotion isn’t complicated, just that emotional words are less clearly defined than the word experience generally is and so the word can be used a bit more loosely. That has nothing to do with the phenomenon of emotion in us. Language is complicated too, but cells communicate and thus everyone knows what you mean when you say they talk to each other.

No. There are different ways to interpret what is happening when signals go from cell to cell so saying that cells "talk to each other" can lead to confusion.

Then there would be the meta binding problem of your theory where you first bind all the information together into a whole picture and you separately combine all the cellular qualia into a whole qualia of experience and lastly you have to bind these two very differently acquired properties together into a whole since a coherent experience involves a unified information picture coupled with the "what it is like" component. All that gets very complicated don’t you think? It certainly is a property dualism that permeates at all levels to make for a more complicated notion of conscious experience than does the notion that consciousness is part and parcel of information processing. What’s more if these two "calculations" are separate with firing contributing to info processing via how cells communicate and firing contributing to the pleasure of the cell and thus to the overall conscious qualia then you should be able to separate these two things and the dissociated brain in a dish would have qualia even if it could not process info, and that idea is clearly incoherent.

I hope my thought experiment and my discussion of the binding issue is helpful.

You have great confidence in unproven concepts that cause a lot of conflict with the evidence. You write about how it all comes together but you have no way of identifying how it comes together or where it comes together. It does not come together. The unity is an illusion and there is a great body of evidence against it coming together. When parts of the brain are lost, parts of functioning are lost and parts of the experience of the functioning are lost too.

I am facing a deadline now. I must get my taxes done before the extension deadline and then I’m spending a week with my son before hitting the road doing school performances. So I don’t have any more time for this debate and I’ve lost hope that you will ever be able to grasp a great many of these concepts. Too much change in your way of thinking is required and you might not be able to get past such change. This is a complicated issue and history has shown us that difficult concepts are usually embraced by the youth when it is impossible past a certain age. (Einstein’s ideas were not accepted by the entrenched establishment of physics until the next generation came along, in part because the nervous system is less flexible with age and a new generation must be willing to consider the new ideas before they’ve become dedicated to the concepts that must be replaced. I have already offered explanations for the mechanisms behind such a problem with change.)

I need to stop this debate now. Let’s just go our separate ways.

Thank you for trying, anyhow.

This entire debate took five days during the month of August, 2003. Gosh! Dating is a lot of work! (That is a joke for the readers of this website, in case there is any confusion.) I have included the entire exchange of messages here except for some biographical details to protect her privacy. I also edited the messages for spelling and other errors.

In the 48 hours after I sent the message saying that I need to stop now, she sent exactly 23 e mail messages back to me. Her messages offered debate of ideas, compliments, insults, accusations of sexism, and that method of debate I keep running into where the other party argues by referring to his/her title/degrees and the name of the famous school he/she attended as a reason for the authority of that person’s ideas over mine (which makes me want to respond "The fact of your Harvard Ph.D is as pertinent to the argument of any idea as is the fact that I graduated from Clown College" — although she was much more subtle in this regard, unlike those who use this method only) — there was a lot to respond to but I sent one message back for closure. I meant it when I wrote that I have no time for any more work on this. It will probably be four months before I can get back to presenting my theory as my financial situation is desperate and I need to travel to schools to do my comedy presentation of information about writing. I would much rather be doing this work on the nervous system but I have no financial supporters for doing this work and it would be impossible for me to arrange a grant for this work (at this point, anyway) because my lack of educational credentials would stop any such efforts at securing any grants. (I will have time to do mind experiments in my car in order to make further discoveries as I am driving an average of 2,000 miles a week but it takes much more time to write out any discoveries or to figure out how to articulate the ideas than it does to "see" the answers.) I don’t have the time to write this paragraph or post the remainder of her messages even though I will do so now without providing my side of the debate about those messages.

Her follow up messages are posted after my comments here. I am letting her have the last word. I am confident that I can provide a clear argument for my side of the debate and more insights about the nervous system in response to her writing but I do not have the time to do that now. I can’t edit her messages or clean up the website now as I have no easy web design program and so I have to create this website with cut and paste straight to HTML. I will write some responses to her argument some day down the road when I get some time and can clear my mind to concentrate on these problems. This work requires a lot of concentration. This is like arguing religion. It is arguing against religion because understanding of the brain/mind will be in conflict with many religious beliefs. (Just as it is considered alright for somebody to say that "I know that Jesus Christ is my lord and savior" with complete confidence and not be held accountable, I should be allowed to say "I know that the belief in God is a mistaken belief in a myth, there is no God" with the same confidence but it is not a level playing field. And I can show neurological reasons for why a belief in God would be common to mankind even though there is no evidence for any God. (I know that such a statement is considered offensive to many, but I believe that the only morality is the truth and anything that is not the truth is immoral, and if I could show a truth that could start improving the health and happiness of millions of people, then I should be considered moral for expressing that truth.) A theory about subject matter this complicated can not be approached or explained without being confident and that will look like arrogance, but then the mistaken ideas that I am trying to debate are defended with the same kind of confidence gained by the feeling of safety in numbers of the medical/scientific community. Every day I see an advertisement for some drug with an explanation for why it works that is expressing a wrong theory as if it is a fact and all in the name of selling that pharmaceutical and I believe that is terribly wrong!)

It is impossible to conceive of conflicting concepts at the same time. You can not think of a circle as being a square. That is the kind of problem I am dealing with here. It is impossible to understand how the brain and mind work while believing in concepts that are in conflict with that truth. And the trouble is that those conflicting ideas and beliefs are very numerous. Beliefs that are in complete conflict with the truth are scientific, medical, social, religious, philosophical — those wrong beliefs are everywhere and so common that they are not even considered to be beliefs or theories, but considered to be facts. This creates a very big communication problem for me. The other big obstacle is that the kind of mathematics used by the nervous system the mathematics of intelligence is not a language based or symbol based kind of mathematics. It is impossible to convey in an equation. (The scientist accused me of "refusing" to send her the mathematics but, if you read these exchanges, you will see that I said I was "unable" to send her the mathematics.) I could teach gifted mathameticians how to do mind experiments with this kind of mathematics, teach them to understand it, but it will take a lot of time with many falling by the wayside in frustration because it requires you to release yourself from your inner monologue to turn off or turn down your language center and your emotional center so that you can get into the right state of mind to do this work. (The most gifted mathematicians tend to do this already to various degrees which explains a lot of their autistic traits. Einstein thought in this way when working his mind experiments.) But to teach this enormous concept requires my teaching them to disregard a lot of their sacred cows which means I will have to teach about a lot of their ideas that can be disproven. I have started that process with this website. The enormous task of learning this very complicated material will require that they at least have faith in me or faith that I might be onto something here. Perhaps the only way to gain that faith would be to start curing people.

I know a method that could cure a variety of life threatening and non life­threatening disorders starting tomorrow! (This treatment was performed first on me to deal with a constellation of symptoms that was seriously misdiagnosed and I have been symptom free now for six and a half years and the treatment was performed on two other people with different disorders who have been greatly improved as well. I am talking about a cure of symptoms that persists for many years without any taking of medication after the initial treatment that takes a few weeks. I broke several laws in order to do this and I am not willing to take that chance now. I am waiting for doctors and scientists willing to test this treatment legally.) The treatment involves coordinating a variety of approaches and using a new way of understanding the way pharmaceuticals influence the brain and then using a new pharmaceutical approach that creates a significant amount of discomfort and increase of symptoms in people for a few weeks (only a few days are really bad) so that people go into a kind of "withdrawal" from their stressed state so that their previous symptoms go away permanently, in effect. (The aging process is the same process that creates disorders, so treatments might be necessary again in several years.) This treatment could be performed safely, with my help, and safely without my help eventually even if those performing it have very little understanding for why it works. But this treatment will show evidence going completely against the current assumptions of how the brain and body work. With a very large team of doctors, scientists, philosophers and researchers helping me I could amaze the world with what is possible, but I have yet to get that first professional on my side.

I know this will be impossible for most people to believe, but I can "see" in my mind how the nervous system works in an instant, in the way that Mozart claimed that he could see and hear in his mind an entire symphony in an instant in completion (and I can explain why such an ability is possible by explaining more about the way the nervous system works). It is as if I can "see" an enormous puzzle with thousands of pieces all put together, but the only way to explain what I can "see" is to explain every piece of the puzzle and each piece of the puzzle can take a lot of explanation to make clear to another person who must change a lot of ways of thinking about things.

The scientist’s remaining messages follow (with my one other message that I sent to her at the end):

First, why do you assume if you rewire the brain that experience doesn’t change? In most people rewiring is fairly limited to new connections in surrounding areas. But if we send auditory nerves to the visual system maybe you now SEE sounds. WHo knows. If I rewire your brain so the neruons that recognize middle C are not wired to the area of the brain that normally processes information from neurons that see blue light you might now see blue when I struck the middle C on the piano. Maybe the ferrets whose auditory nerves are now connected to their visual center see sound. Why assume experience doesn't change with substantial wiring changes?

So I should call your theory more of a functional dualism since you have action potentials serving two seperable purposes: one is information processing which surely is related to how cells communicate and which cells communicate with which other cells. Then you have action potentials serving the purpose of mediating "cellular experience" which when summed together, by a totally different criteria than the info processing uses, produce qualia.

Then when we have to face the binding problem of how we have whole intergrated experineces, we would have to integrate all the info. processing in one way (we don’t see lines and color seperate from eachother even though we process in the info separately and we see people's lips move while they speak even though we process the component parts separately... that is the binding problem, ie how to bring all the info. streams together to form a whole picture) and we would have to integrate the qualia components in your mathematical model (a different, wiring independet model). We would thus have an info. processing binding problem that worked one way and a qualia integrating problem that worked a different way and then we would have to integrate those two subintegrations to on top of that to produce all the components of an experience.

And the cells dissociated in a dish that were magically firing with the same frequencies as all those same cells would have fired in the brain when you were looking at a blue sky (but now they do not talk to eachother via synapses since they are kept firing by some other magic) ; these dissociated cells would retain the qualia aspect of experience, but loose the information processing component of experience. Does this make sense? To me, it doesn't. But that is just an opinion.

 

I said: First, why do you assume if you rewire the brain that experience doesn't change? In most people rewiring is fairly limited to new connections in surrounding areas. But if we send auditory nerves to the visual system maybe you now SEE sounds. WHo knows. If I rewire your brain so the neruons that recognize middle C are not wired to the area of the brain that normally processes information from neurons that see blue light you might now see blue when I struck the middle C on the piano. Maybe the ferrets whose auditory nerves are now connected to their visual center see sound.

Now I say: The word not above is supposed to be NOW. NOW the neurons that fire at the sound of middle C are wired (suddenly) to the neurons that used to receive input from neurons that fire in response to blue light. Maybe you would see blue when I hit middle C on the piano. Rewiring in real animals is never local. The whole info. stream rewires and changes in one place can change other places. But if I suddenly made this change while you were sleeping why assume you would not see blue in response to middle C?

 

> You have great confidence in unproven concepts that cause a lot of > conflict > with the evidence. You write about how it all comes together but you > have > no way of identifying how it comes together or where it comes > together. It > does not come together. The unity is an illusion and there is a > great body > of evidence against it coming together. When parts of the brain are > lost, > parts of functioning are lost and parts of the experience of the > functioning > are lost too.

That may be but by coming together I mean we do not see lines and color sperately. Name me one disorder where the person experiences lines and color not as part of a whole visual experience. It doesn't happen. If it as an illusion it is damned effective. I never see parallel lines separately from perpendicular lines separate from color etc. We always have ONE image.

 

 

No matter how your theory works it is possible to imagine dissociated cells that fire exactly as the cells in the brain would at any moment under the constraints of your theory and the end result, according to your theory, would have to have the qualia aspect of an experience be definition! You cannot say the cell needs all the inputs but all that matters in your theory is the actual firing of the individual components without taking this thought experiement seriously!!! Really you just dismiss it but I do not see how you can since I am proposing a system that repliactes the firing of cells that your theory would predict/ require. If the component cells and NOT their connections and NOT the global structure of the brain is what is important that this imaginary dissociated brain would have experience.

To look at structure think of a TV with ll the compnents exactly as they are only you move the tubes from behind the screen to in front of the screen. A small structural change and the whole thing is broke.

ANd this idea that we do not have coherent experiences is nonsense. DO you really know what the binding problem is? I do not see color off in one corner of my visual field and up and down linews in another part and across lines somewhere else. Of course the coloor could be missing, but it is never separate from the rest of the image. It is never separate as it is in the processing centers of the brain. Even if you can have a disorder where parts are missing so what? That doesn't mean we have disorders where lines are in one place and color is off somwhere else. We DO see coherent images. To say we do not is just to not understand what the issue is, I suspect (though I could be wrong).

No matter how complicated your theory is to just dismiss structure as being important to our experiences is pretty ballsy.

 

 

 

The thought experiment is useful even if it cannot happen. You say structure isn’t important! And I am saying if we took structure away and left everything else the same it would be hard for me to imagine the system working right. And you know if you damage a specific area you lose a specific function. But still structure isn’t important, just the mathematical relationship between a bunch of cells. I mentioned a TV analogy.....

 

 

 

> > > What makes the nervous system have the greatest influence on our > collective > experience of consciousness is the massive change in the scale of > time and > massive change in the scale of distance that the nervous system > conveys > signals to other cells as well as the connectivity (which is the > reason for > the speed of transmission of signals through a greater distance at > greater > speed). >

All my messages were prompted by your claim that the structure of the nervous system isn't what makes conscious experience possible. Now you turn around and say exactly the opposite. You have done this SEVERAL times, Steve. You change what you are saying in every email exchange. SOrry, but I think thisis getting us no where since you want to push your theory, but when the ideas in that theory are challeneged you turn around and expound all the other possible ways it could happen. Is wiring important or not, Steve? You cannot e4ven seem to make up your mind. One day you say one thing, next day you say the oppoiste. This is just frustrating. I think we should cool it for a good long time. Unvelievable that you would make the above comments after telling me yesterday that "if wiring is what is important then I am just postulating emergent properites and therefore giving up on an explanation." When I pointed out that emergent properties ar everywhere in places where we easily exlpain them you claimed you didn't know why I said any of this. Then when I offer thought experiment that suggests to me that wiring and structure matters you turn around and say the nervous system is more important than the liver to consciouness because of it structure!!!!!!

You need to have a consistent set of beliefs about this if you want to put forth a theory. Ok, I am going away because I am just getting annoyed.

 

 

 

By the way, I NEVER said I agreed with Chalmers. You said you disagreed with him and then procede to offer a theory that seems very dualistic....or at least it seemed that way when you were claiming that structure and wiring weren't key for consciousness but then-- as we know-- yo changed your mind about that and told me the nervous system is special because of its structure. You also keep taking what I say and characterizing it in simple silly ways that have nothing to do with what I said at times. I know you are a guy and you have an ego, but I am not sure that is my problem. Oh well. Hope you can make this theory clearer and make final decisions about what is in and what is out because if everything is in then you aren't offering a theory at all. Dennett must have asked you ?s and told you why he thought your ideas were not new. I happen to agree with him most, by the way, not Chalmers, though Chalmers is brilliant.

 

 

 

You keep talking about math but you never show a single bit or explain what all this math is proving. Truth is I am a smart girl, Harvard PhD and all, and I have no idea what the heck you are talking about at all and there is something seriously wrong with that. Not to mention that you keep changing what you are saying.

> > > I have written that there is a basic unit of experience of a very > simple > nature occurring in the cell regarding the cells health and survival > in > relation to states of chemical balance. The seeking you quote is > not in a > cellular mind of any kind. The cell has no mind. The seeking is > emergent > in the mathematics that result from the nature of how a cell > evolves, > changes and connects to other cells. Evolution would quickly > eliminate any > cell that had mathematical properties that went against the > greatest > survival of that cell or any other kind of cell. There is a way to > show how > such a mathematics helping one cell could accumulate into a much > more > complex mathematics as the cells interrelate in a colony. (I have > not made > that case yet and that argument requires animations impossible to > explain in > text.) >

 

 

 

 

 

 

You said: > >> I disagree that only some other organisms are conscious. > > > >

I said: "Some other organisms" includes those > with > > nervous sytems which is a VERY TINY fraction of the > total > > organisms on the planet---less that a fraction of a percent.

There was a typo!

> > It might be typing or a missing word that makes me unable to > understand your > point here

 

 

 

 

Why not try Chalmers? He seems to know math quite well so you could really spell out all the math which you refuse to even describe to me (sorry, getting testy).

 

 

 

You keep conflating what I say so you can knock down straw men, Steve. I NEVER said you have to be able to verbally report to have had a conscious experience. In the split brain situation above you talk about someone being aware of an event without having verbal access. Fine, I said you cannot have an experience you are not aware of. You, as seesm to be your want, are tryin gto have it both ways. You say it is possible to have experiece that you doesn’t make it to the verbal center as if that disproves what I am saying. The only way that would disprove what I am saying is if the experience not having access to the verbal center meant you were not aware of it. Yet, last message you said (and I agree) that having verbal ability doesn’t mean you can’t have awareness.

You keep defining my statements in ways that have nothing to do with what I say and then telling me why they are not right. Furthermore you want to claim that because you can have experiences that are not verbally accessable that "proves" that experience is divisible whatever the hell that means. You do that A LOT, Steve, make these outrageous leaps of logic. I NEVER SAID verbal abilities were needed for conscious experience, wuite the opposite. I told you why philosophers insist they are the only way to study consciousness. Then you tell me I am saying verbal reports are needed and that the fact that they aren't needed proves that you canhave experiences that you are not aware of. What total BS. Awareness doesn' t mean being able to verbally report. Awareness, like consiousness is private. And YOU CANNOT have a conscious experience that you are not aware of, by defintition.

Steve, you just do not use language in a very precise way and as a result you misconstrue what other people say, you say things you end up not really meaning (like structure and wiring are not important for qualia) and you make a conceptual muddle of things. You really are not being clear or hearing clearly or thinking clearly as far as I can see. I understand this is not an easy way to communicate but when you again and again and again make totally contradiciting remarks and use this weird twisted logic with huge leaps to boot to come to conclusions that are unwarranted I have to wonder what is going on. Nothing about your stroke vicitm sceanrio addresses the issue of whether you have to be aware of something to have experiences it and nothing about it says anything that suggests that conscious experience is divisisble into events that there is no awareness of. A stroke victim or a spilt-brain patient may be PERFECTLY AWARE of all sort sof events that he is not able to report on. His failure to report says nothing about his awareness which is a PRIVATE event. Do you know what PRIVATE means? WHat a mass of twisted logic you use. If I cut your tongue out I would not conclude that you were not aware of the round red ball I tossed to you, just because you couldn't tell me about it. This is twisted logic. And now you seem to want me to believe that we have conscious experinences that we are not conscious of (not aware of) and when I insist that we do not have conscious experiences that we are not aware of (ie not conscious of) you tell me I am being closed minded!!!! Ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous.

 

 

 

 

Let me repeay myself and this is my last message because you just do not even listen.

Language is not needed for awareness and it is not needed to have a conscious experience. It is needed to convey those private conscious experiences to others like philosophers who are interested in studying consciousness. Therefore an inability to report conscious experience for any reason does not preclude having such experiencs. However, one cannot have conscious experiences one is not aware of. Period, It is a tautaology and when someone starts argiung with tautologies there is something very wrong with the conversation. I do not want to have that kind of ridiculous conversation.

As for the bidning problem: it is not a theory of any kind, It is siomply a question. Since we break visual info into bits for procesing why is it not represented in bits that are separate. the fact that a bit can be removed proves nothing, a person can be colorblind, so what? He still does not see a mess when he looks at the world of lines in opne plane over here and lines in another plane over there and color (or shades of grey) in yet another place unrelated to the lines. That is the way we process info, we break it into bits that are processed in different places and yet we see a whole. That is what we experience and to call it an illusion is less than meaningless. Then all experience is an illusion. Why do we see wholes from a system that separates out the parts? That is the binsing propblem. It isn't some crazy unproved theory because it isn't a theory at all! It is a question. You can always read about it before you respond. Sorry but your calling it an unproved theory makes me think you don't know what I am referring to at all. Removing just means that different parts are processed differently. What we never see is someone who sees a mess of lines and color with no relationship to eachother. A hell of an illusion I would say.

If you are just saying there are levels of awarness, Yes, there are. Does that mean that awareness is infinitely divisible. No. There are volume levels possible on my stereo too but when I turn it down so I can't hear it anymore (I have good hearing) it is pointless to say it is still making sound and the sound is infinitely divisible. It reminds me of the ancient philosopher's argument about why one runner could never pass a runner in front of him even if he was running faster. He talked about halving the distance between them over and over again and there is never any point at which he passes the guy. That is what your argument about conscuousness being divisible reminds me of. I am not saying that it isn't. I am saying your arguments with split brain people etc. do not even address the question. You think you are proving to me with a logical argument that consciousness is divisible but you are comparing apples to otanges and have given me no reasob to think that is true. Can we have experiences of different intensities, yes. So what? Doesn't prove your point.

Listen, I should apologize, email makes me nuts sometimes with frustration but I should not take it out on you. That was unreasonable.

Steve: I actually have a right to be ticked, but sense I am a woman and you are a man you do not think I do.

I mention the binding problem, you have no real idea what it is (it is not a theory of anything and it is not a philosophical issue) and yet you are dismissive in this consescending way. Men always feel they have a right to behave ot women this way, but if a woman did it to them they would be very upset. When we get annoyed justifiably WE have to apologize because YOU as a man have a right to behave this way (at least you think you do). I am not angry about this, it is just the way the world is. When we look at an object the information is broken down into different information streams, color is processed in a physically different place then lines and lines of one kind are dealt with in a different place than lines of a different orientation etc. So the visual map very quickly doesn't correspond to real things in the world. There is coding but no one to one correspondance of points in space. However, if I ask you what you see you say a red coach or a wooden table. You do not say I see lines over here and color over there, you see objects with properties like color and luminosity (sp?). So that is the binding problem. How do the information streams, lines here and colors there get integrated into a whole picture. Being able to remove one part doesn't in any way the parts are not integrated. Do you see that? The colored chair is made of parts (neurologically speaking) but that doesn't mean you are not seeing a whole object. You see an object, you don't see lines here and color over there, the color is a property of an object, but that is not the way they are mapped in the brain. This is just true and why it is true is the binding problem. It isn't a theory at all.

So when you don’t know what I am talking about don’t make fun of me in some dismissive way. It is obnoxious and it will annoy me and then I will want to be dismissive and obnoxious back. then we will stop talking and it will all be my fault because I am the girl and we all know girls have no ego, only boys and so boys are allowed to be rude and girls just have to say "gee thanks".

The binding problem isn’t a theory, it is a statement of reality. We see things with properties, we don’t see a mess. What we see is not mapped in our brains in a one to one map. Just a statement if reality that has to be explained eventually. And saying it is an illusion is saying all experience is an illusion in which case we are wasting our time. At least read about it in a neuroscience text. I am a neuroscientist with an advanced degree so I think I know something.

 

 

 

I should add that a theory cn predict and still be wrong. It could prediect because of one assumption that is co’incident with reality even when otherwise there is no reality to the causal links proposed in the theory. Also we can make somehting appear to be predicitive when we know in advance what we are trying to predict. The curre thinking on schizophrenia is very different than what you describe and I think the other ideas are probably correct.

Have you read "The Illusion of Conscious Will"? by some Harvard psychologist? Try it if you haven't. You'll like it.

 

 

The fact that language and emotion are more "global" ie more complex and requiring more parts of the brain will surely lead to those systems being affected more often in pathology and I can guarantee you that that is not an original thought. I also fail to see how it lends support to your basic theory of cellular experience since there are many other possible explanations. Again a theory correctly prediocting something is not proof that the theory is correct, as you must know. My mind is open, Steve, really it is, but the best I can offer you about consciousness is that you could be right, who knows? I don't know how it workls so I cannot tell you you are wrong. I might have a gut level reaction that your ideas miss the mark but I cannot prove it so it's just a gut level feeling. But I do know good logic when I hear it and sometimes you engage in very questionable logic. I admire you for even hving a theory but I would caution against getting too emotionally attached to it and losing your own perspective. The best minds have dealt with this problem and failed and highly trained minds too, so if you were not wildly successful it would hardly be a mark against you. You don't want your ego to get tangled up with such a serious problem or you are asking for your own trouble. Just a word of warning, though I admire you for tackling it either way.

How do you actually make a living?

You don’t want to be like Thomas Aquinas who proves there is a God by redifining God and then switching the definitions at the end of the argument to show us how we ought to believe in Jesus and all the rest of the Christian mythology. On the surface such arguments look good, but they are fundamentally unsound.

 

 

 

The reason I insist on clear and consistent definitions is not to restrict the free flow of ideas but to insure clarity and consistency in the arguments. Your switchboard analogy is a wiring analogy despite your claim that wiring is not crucial for qaulia etc. And if you want to claim the wirin gis only important in producing the "correct" responses in the individual cells that is not a distinction from the standard ideas about how the brain works since no on e thinks the wiring and structure produce experience indepdendent of neural activity. It is just a rewording. So is wiring in or out of your theory? The switchboard analogy is a wiring/connectivity analogy.

 

 

 

 

Also it is much easier to criticize an argument than it is to make one so you are still doing something much more difficlut that what I am doing. Feel good about your efforts no matter what the outcome.

 

 

 

 

You seem to be arguing that since there are different levls of awareness (some richer due to a verbal component, some less "rich") that argues that consciousness is divisible. But I can trun the sound up and down on my stereo too. Does that mean the sound of Duke Ellington coming from my stereo is divisible into non audible bits? Intensity changes do not argue for divisibility. Again I want to say it is impressive to try and tackle this issue, but since it is an enormously difficult problem I would be careful not to invest too much of your semse of yourself into solving it. MAybe you aren’t. Try Chalmers.

Once again I need to say that I am swamped and it will probably be months before I can put the time and concentration needed to attend to this kind of debate or other writing concerning the theory. I thank you for engaging me in this debate this past week and I wish you all the best.

Steven

Well done! I'm sure Dennett could not have done it better.

 

 

 

 

Good luck finding a woman that will read your web site, I should add. I bet you'll find almost all of them will run from sheer unawareness of what the issues even are (and thus total boredom for them). Early on I said "you should read" and you got upset, but you repeatedly make fun of me when I say perfectly valid things and I am not supposed to mind at all. I hope you are aware enough to realize that this is just the way the world is: men have to feel smarter, they can be dismissive etc., and the woman is suposed to be OK with this lop sidedness no matter what she knows or how much ability she may have. It is a disadvantage for a woman to know anything a man doesn’t. And what an F ing drag that is. You want a kinda smart woman who is smart enough to almost, kinda appreciate what you have to say, but not one who actually says anything that might be too provocative. The problem is almost every woman you run into will know nothing and be bored by this whole issue and if they are smart they just may be outspoken. Good luck finding this magic just right combination, a woman smart enough to know what you want them to know, yet dumb enough not to have an opinion and dumb enough not to know when she is being treated with a lack of respect, while she on the other hand walks the fine line around the male ego. Good luck with that. And if you find you made a mistake throwing the baby out with the bath water, here I am. Ciao.

I find it amazing that she left the door open for a relationship after this exchange. Frankly, I find it impossible to start a relationship just for the fact that I have to live in a 25 year old motor home with a leaky roof (the leak is right over the table where I need to use my computer) and on the brink of being evicted from a campground for a bounced check and surrounded by the kind of people commonly found on the Jerry Springer Show. To be honest, I never thought of her as a woman and I misled her in this, I only thought of her as a scientist and as my first opportunity to debate whatever objections might be thrown at me about my theories. This is my first debate defending my ideas and I should get better at it with practice. As I was unable to get an audience with any professionals over the past seven years by approaching them or sending messages (as I can never get past their first question which never has anything to do with ideas but is "What is your background?" my point being that the idea can only be debated on the merit of the idea and not on the merit of the person presenting the idea), I came up with a plan to do the same through on line dating and it worked this time. It was quickly clear to me that I was not attracted to this person for my own personal attraction reasons and it had nothing to do with her accepting my ideas or not. (I was turned off by various accusations about my character based on misreadings of my writing and her reading meanings between the lines that were not there.) I would have been just as confident and insistent in my arguments with a man as with a woman. But it is a problem for me to find intimacy with smart women as they are more likely to be smart enough to think these efforts by a person without any college degree are insane (and without actually reading my ideas) and smart enough to think that a man without money at the age of 46 is a loser. (If I ever gain any professional backing for this work, I would hope the financial problems could then be addressed.) How can you have intimacy with a person who is unable to understand or is unwilling to accept the most important efforts of your life? I could use some emotional support in my life. For seven years the professional world and my personal world have treated me as if I should be ashamed of doing this work. I am most bothered by the fact that my 15 year old son must be exposed to people who believe his dad is irresponsible and crazy for following this "delusion." (Because of this I am forced to keep quiet about my theoretical efforts with my son who has doubts about his father in this.) I hope that, by now, my writings here could convince thinking people that I am not pursuing a "delusion." I don’t waste my time worrying about what non thinking people think.

In case you are a person with an inclination to use this website to become a danger to me, I will use my comedy background to protect myself and say that this website is just an elaborate joke. I have spent many years being dedicated to comedy and I am willing to go out of my way for a good joke. My real intention is to win the first MacArthur Genius Grant for the best joke. (That this is a joke, is a joke.)

 

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