The Unified Theory of the Nervous System
and Behavior
Cognitive Philosophy /Brain Theory by Steven Michael Harris
Here my intention is to summarize, as tersely as possible, the basic tenets of my theory. I am writing this essay on March 7, 2004 and it most likely has been a frustration to many that I have waited to write this until now. To many people, these principles will seem too simple to be true. Our perception will get in the way of considering these concepts enough to account for the enormous complexity of our function and experiences because what is repeated from a small level of scale becomes many things at a much larger level of scale and enormous consideration is required to believe that something so complex as a human life could be reduced to such a small list of repeating events and equations (although the list is not as small as those repeating principles that amount to the theory of evolution that people still can’t comprehend or embrace because of so many social/religious convictions that are in conflict). This website has to keep evolving as there is a massive amount of writing needed to make my case and I am just getting started, so I felt that I needed to write enough material to argue in support of the basic ideas before I could actually state those basic ideas or they would be instinctually discarded as too simplistic. That will still happen even though I have written enough now to convince some that I might be onto something. (I also needed to write this material over time to teach myself how best to simplify the explanation as the concepts I could see in my mind were complex emergent principals that I found before I used the complex thought to distill the simple concepts that support them.)
And so I am torn about where to place this list. If it is at the beginning, those who read it might consider it too simple to actually play out as possible until they read the essays that make the case, and so they will not read on to learn the many changes in perception needed to understand why these ideas are right. If it is at the end, those reading the essays at first will be frustrated by the many implications of the theory needed to make the case for the theory, and will be frustrated in trying to figure out what theory I am trying to present. I might experiment with the placement of this essay to see what organization of this website leads to the most people reading the most essays (perhaps placing it both at the beginning and the end as these concepts take a lot of thought).
This theory is not that difficult to learn. The concepts and the resulting discoveries that result from these concepts are many but they are consistent with each other in a way that will not happen with the many conflicting approaches coming from philosophy, the different specialties of medicine, the different areas of biology, psychology, evolutionary psychology... from every area of study that deals with behavior, life and the activities of groupings of living things. They all have some pieces of the puzzle right, to a greater or lesser degree, and they all have some wrong. But the many approaches add up to so many concepts being wrong that the relatively small list of correct principles of what adds up to answering the big questions concerning the function of life will be in enormous conflict with many of the currently held convictions of the current orthodoxies of the sciences and the paradigm shift involved is massive as a result.
I hope that some of the professionals who have knowledge and interest in this subject matter have some of the curiosity needed to read further in spite of the seemingly impossible claim I have made here and really think about these things. Look for how the principles laid out in this page of the website are consistently referred to when explaining the many various and extremely complex functions and experiences of life that are emergent at different levels of scale and notice how there is a way to bring these simple concepts into play in many facets of the activities of life although the different conceptions at different levels of scale appear to bring forth many new ideas and theories that are needed in so massive a paradigm shift.
The most important piece of my argument is something I could do in a few hours in person with the appropriate professionals, but not something I am able to do in writing on a website because it involves a lot of different animations. (Remember that the activities of a nervous system along with the body attached are animations.) The help of animators some day will be needed to communicate some of the concepts. These animations are needed to explain the kind of math that the body employs in making all of our functions, our development and our thought happen. This math is not just a math because it is also a convergence of medicine and philosophy as well. Understanding the principles behind life requires the understanding of a very important kind of math.
All of the basic units of perception are in the cells themselves.
The qualia of sense and thought and emotion are the result of the different states of cellular activity. The living cell is the component of life in the single-cell organism and in the complex colonies of cells such as the human organism as well. Thought is not projected, does not exist in any other dimensions, does not exist without the activity of a living body, and does not exist as some force or energy between the cells.
Changes in the number of cells firing or the nature of the way that they are firing is seen in changes of mental state and function, so it is the activity of the cells and which cells that are involved that is the right level of scale for explaining the basic nature of cognition and function. Not a greater level of scale and not smaller (some claim that cognition is in some quantum physics occuring in microtubules, for instance).
The word “experience” is currently defined in a number of ways and the definition needs to be adjusted for reality. But a logical examination of what the word represents will show that any subset of an experience is also an experience. (You can experience the view of a sunset and also experience the red colors in that view as another experience.) The word is sometimes defined in regards to time and that is also problematic because small enough units of time reduce an experience until it is beyond comprehension. (This is because thought is an animation of small units of experience through time and without the movement there is no thought.)
It is impossible for a many-celled organism to directly perceive the range of experience of a single cell except through the use of logic. The experience of a single cell at one moment is proportionate to the whole of an animal’s experience at that moment at the ratio of one unit divided by the total number of cells in the body of that animal. The influence of the activity of any one cell on the total experience of a body during any moment is relative to the ratio of the number of cells experiencing changes in activity/experience during that moment divided by the total number of cells in the body.
This impossibility leads to the many illusions in the experience of life such as the various qualia of the experiences of the different senses and various thoughts and the illusion of the unity of thought.
If the cells look alike (if they are the same types of cells) then the range of experience for each cell is the same as the others that have the same construction/function.
I will take this further: all cells have the same range of experience, but the different kinds of cells have the experience in regards to different points in the cycle of activity of a different specialization of activity. The experience is a state regarding the activity of a living cell in relation to reaching the most beneficial state of balance of chemistry for the success and health of that cell.
In single-cell organisms floating through liquid, exposure to a food source is associated with a pattern of movement, which is also associated with the best state of balance and nutrition and health and pleasure for that cell. Complex organisms change the activity of specialized cells into a task that brings the greatest rewards (health/nutrition/pleasure) to the cell as a reward for performing the specialized task. (The pleasure of a cell is theoretically provable through the many essays that I am writing on this website, and is also a state that is not possible to be directly observed or understood through empathy by a many-celled organism such as a human because our conception of pleasure is always one of the calculations of many cellular states between pleasure and pain that is applied to subject matter in the emergent mathematics of a cellular network.)
All cells have a range of experience, but the perception is that thought and experience come from nervous system cells over other kinds of cells because of the scale of time in the speed of activity and the massive interconnectivity of nerve cells to each other cause nerve cells to have a much greater proportional influence on the totality of the body.
For any cell, there is an ideal point of time in the cycle of activity of that cell where the greatest amount of chemical balance in regards the success and health (and replication) of that cell has been reached and that moment in the cycle of activity equals the pleasure state of that cell. In comparison there are other states of activity and experience that are in contrast. No state in the cycles of activity can be maintained nor would a constant of any state be beneficial because of the nature of life forms needing movement of the body or cell and of the components within the body or cell (pumping and so forth requiring full and empty states to exist).
Learning (memory, skill acquisition, functional adjustment) is the same thing as changes in the structure of the body. I repeat: learning is the same thing as change in the body. That is all it is. And the equation goes both ways: changes in the structure of the body is learning.
This is a very important law for understanding the body and mind. The experience is in a different realm than the various subject matters of the experience that are understood or calculated. The experience is the summation of many small units of different states of experience with each cell having its proportion of the experience of the many cells in the body. The many different subject matters and calculations and emergent functions coming from the interactions of the cells is not in the realm of experience but in the realm of learning which is the change in the organization of the body.
This equation is also very important in coming to understand how much the mathematical forces behind learning are the same forces behind the organization/development/growth of the body. The vast majority of the emergent shapes and functions and characteristics and talents and instincts and personalities and habits of all animals is emergent from the learning that occurs when the mathematical principals of an evolving nervous system follow from the learning of this math system from signals coming from within and outside of the body starting at the smallest size in the uterus or egg. The body “learns” itself into its final shape into a form that becomes a species with predictable similarities with other members of the same species partly caused by the initial push of changes in genetics but more as a result of how the learning process brings forth the final product. The nervous system learns from the body and the world, and the body learns its shape from the nervous system (using the same learning process that might make a human able to learn the alphabet). A nervous system can learn almost anything proper for the kind of body of which it is a part, if it has enough cells that have been allowed to multiply before they have started to make sense of patterns and formed into a network in response to those patterns (and therefore become less plastic and so less able to learn new realms of information). The predictable complex patterns of connectivity and organization in a nervous system are not the product of a complex map that preordains that connectivity but the product of repeating mathematical principles that will form the nervous system in predictable ways in similar bodies because those bodies are exposed (without and within) to the same patterns (in similar bodies) that the changes in the nervous system reflect. Similarities in nervous systems are caused by similarities in the consistent patterns in the bodies, which is also from the similarities in the world the body is responding to. (The same parallel lines in my field of vision are the same in yours and have the same relationship to the up in regards to gravity that is the up in the gravity of your world. The bulk of nervous system processing and the bulk of the shape of the brain that is consistent from individual to individual is the result of the bulk of the patterns in our worlds that are the same for all of us and not the result of genetic instructions telling the brain to assume that shape.)
The implications emergent from this concept are many and very difficult to conceive. For instance: almost everything ever written in the field of evolutionary psychology has to either be adjusted or thrown out because the nervous system is not told to adapt any behaviors through the mapping of genetic instructions directly but the nervous system uses its type of mathematics to make the best sense of the body with which it becomes a partner and of the world in which that body is placed (but genetics evolves, to a degree, that body which the nervous system learning process then makes rational for that body). Some characteristics of logic in the behavior of various species have been explained with a variety of creative writing by evolutionary psychologist that is completely wrong because, without a knowledge of the basic nature of nervous system mathematics, they attribute behaviors to evolved mechanisms that are really behaviors that give evidence for universal mechanisms in the basic nature of the nervous system but these universal mechanisms have different flavors when operant in different bodies.
This applies to plants as well as animals. A tree "learns" to grow around the rock because the influence of the obstruction changes the structure of the tree and the tree "learns" the new shape as it learns to lean towards the light or is bent by the forces of the wind in time. But the difference in learning for the tree as opposed to any animate object/animal is the scale of time required for changes to occur in the connectivity of the nerve connections dealing with various subject matter compared to the changes that occur in connection to subject matter having the effect on the tree. The only difference in learning that compares plants and animals is the scale of time (very fast for animals/animate objects).
Repeat: the body learns its way into its various shapes and functions more than it is genetically instructed into its various shapes and functions.
The scale of time for the range of function and experience of a cell is a very small unit of time and very different from the scale of time of a large organism.
The range of activity of any cell is the “day” of that cell. The range of activity from firing to not firing during one spike of a nerve cell is the day of that cell (or portion of a cell) in the course of that activity and the various states of chemical balance and health and pleasure/pain/blank-feeling that are associated with those parts of the cycle of one spike of signal from a nerve cell. An organism is the summation of the many smaller units of cells and their activity. So being awake is the product of a great many firings of cells and the state of being awake for the full organism is the state during a period of time when a greater proportion of the units are in the firing (awake) state than during sleep, the period of time when a much smaller proportion of the units are in that state. (And the variety of different subsets being "awake" or "asleep" explains different states of consciousness as well.)
The ideal state of a cell for health, the point in the cycle of the cell's activity in which it is in the state of pleasure/balance/nutritional-saturation, is not a state that can be maintained.
But reaching that state as many times per unit of time as possible leads to the greatest success for the life of that cell. Because it can’t be a constant state there is a possibility of reaching that state too often per unit of time than would be good for that cell. Therefore, there is an ideal frequency for that state to be reached for the health of that cell. So at the next scale of time closer to the scale of time of the entire organism is the scale of time of frequency of the activity of that cell. This ideal frequency can be undershot and it can be exceeded and this ideal frequency will be a factor in cells specialized for any function in the body, not just nerve cells. (The ideal frequencies of cells outside the nervous system are a part of the mathematics of how the nervous system calculates and thinks.) Pain is akin to a part of the cycle of activity of a cellular activity when the balance of chemistry in that cell is at a low point. In a frequency of activity in a cell all three possibilities of pain/pleasure/neutral are all repeating with each repetition in the frequency, but the proportions of these experiences to each other can change at different frequencies. This is the level of scale where the range of qualia is experienced by the full organism, but it is the number of cells affected, the arrangement of cells affected and the type of subject matter that is connected to the cells affected that creates the illusion of various different qualia but the basic units of all experience are these basic units of alpha-pleasure, alpha-pain (I write “alpha” because the perception of that basic beneficial-or-not chemical state in a single cell is not perceptible at our level of scale), and neutral. The ideal form and function of any cell for the greatest success of that cell would be such that that cell would be able to succeed as often as possible reaching that ideal frequency for the success (and replication) of that cell.
Cells will best be designed for success if their interactions with each other lead to greater likelihood of reaching that successful frequency. Single-cell organisms find a frequency of a sort by doing their activity as often as they find nutrition (as often as possible but not to excess) and cells specialized in a larger organism find their frequency, do their activity as often as is best healthy for them, which brings nutrition to them from the rest of the organism, but many individuals will be required to take on activity that is not healthy/pleasurable/desired because the collective now controls the subsets. (Take pretty much any cell type and put a some of them into a Petri dish and they will organize in a way to start firing at a frequency in unison.)
Nerve cells are designed to use a variety of changes in structure to create the greatest likelihood of reaching that frequency (thus seeking pleasure and avoiding pain). By creating or strengthening new connections to other cells that are firing in unison with them, they make the achievement of this frequency more likely. But because the nervous system is not isolated in a Petri dish, but is connected to the outside and inside world of the body, the cells are also responding to frequencies relating to much different subject matter. The design of the single nerve cell to find its greatest pleasure and health becomes subsumed into the collected organization of the body and nervous system so that the entire system makes changes to become a collective organization seeking the greatest collective pleasure/health/balance and the individuals end up having the full variety of activities possible. The collective change makes decisions that makes subsets suffer hardship and pain for the good of the whole and the burden is shifted from subset to subset as this pattern-seeking for the individual good becomes pattern-seeking for the collective health of the organism. This is a very powerful form of mathematics when you examine what it can do. It is a form of mathematics of powers far beyond the limits of explanation in language, but language can explain it in many ways as well. (It is a "higher power.")
Balance is important in a complicated organism.
Balance is incorporated into the basic characteristics of nerve cell interactions. Various structural changes and the nature of the chemistry comparing excitatory chemicals and inhibitory chemicals provide for a collective repeating characteristic of the mathematics that too much excitation becomes inhibition (and therefore over-excitation is akin to completely stopping the firing in the language of this math). Cells that connect to each other have no altruistic designs in the nervous system. That design just increases the amount of signals coming back to the cell itself (because other cells have the same design) leading to stronger firing signals (until an excess of the ideal frequency is reached and then the excesses accelerate leading to shorter periods of relative time at frequencies higher than the ideal range). The cell can self-generate a few spikes per second alone but the more ideal higher frequencies can only be reached with the chemical/electrical influences coming from other cells.
The success of new connections to other cells (that are firing in relative synchronicity) will depend on the increase or decrease in synchronicity that occurs following the creating of the new connection. No decision-making ability is required in the structure of the cell to have this function emerge, but decision-making ability is emergent if randomly some of the new connections are excitatory and some are inhibitory. The connections will succeed if the firing of the cell is more successful after the connection. This will lead to all kinds of changes in the structure of the brain network as parts of the brain will find success by inhibiting other parts and/or exciting other parts. Massive flips in logic (the logic of assigning pleasure or pain to subject matter) will thus occur (and the emergent mathematical ability that is created is extremely complex with the trillions of connections). The individual cells seeking an ideal frequency create an organism that spots patterns of greater and greater subtlety and complexity across the many dimensions of information (that are gleaned from the many dimensions of different kinds of cells responsive to light or sound or chemistry or whatever - all coded into pleasure/pain in response to pattern recognition). Patterns that cause the greatest number of cells to fire in synchronicity will cause the greatest amount of pleasure (for instance, music notes that have convergent waves will cause more cells to find the emergent patterns of synchronicity in those waves and cause more pleasure when those notes are played at the same time creating harmony). Patterns can be measured in any realm and over time as well in any subject matter. The pattern-recognition in the central nervous system can find benefit for the whole by flipping the pleasure/pain assessment of some realm at the periphery (such as the pleasure frequency responding to darkness in the eyes and flipping the logic to a greater collective pleasure for light over darkness because light is needed to spot emergent patterns, or the pleasure coordination with a relaxed/expanded state in some muscle cells or back and forth with these assignments with muscle cells because of opposing muscle groups, etc.).
Too much excitation takes the cell beyond the ideal frequency, so too much pleasure becomes pain.
Too much inhibition is always inhibitory though, so too much pain is still pain, but complete inhibition leads to a resting state or stop or neutral state or coma and so too much pain can sometimes lead to nothing (numb or a false feeling of comparative pleasure when the subset of activity has gone into a “coma”). Too much pleasure could lead to a state of total inhibition too, but first there will be a short period of pain during the transition. This is a characteristic that is emergent but emergent from the very basics of what is happening in every cell of the nervous system, and this creates a logic that leads to some very bad mistakes in the interpretation of data during this current state of knowledge in the medical community. If too much excitation is inhibitory, then any drug that interferes with the balances in the brain and takes the control of the balances in the brain away from the brain itself, will cause illusions of improvement when decline is really the result of the medication. (If a subset of the brain activity is communicating stressful activity exponentially to ten-thousand times the number of cells at the start of this stress, and this subset can be put into a “coma” of not firing at all by being more sensitive to increases in the stress that caused the problem to begin with, then the resultant “coma” of the subset will reduce the stress to that number of cells times 10,000 although function and memory of the subset is lost using this technique.) These ideas along with the concept that current medical approaches are actually making the nervous systems more stressed and worse to get the benefits provide a much better way of explaining the number of paradoxical reactions to medication and other treatments and provide a much better way of explaining the underside of the therapeutic range of medications.
This mathematics creates incredible intelligence focused on the greatest health/pleasure of the organism. If some chemical volume produced by a subset of the liver gives less pleasure to the whole, changes will automatically make the adjustment. Many of these small adjustments will automatically be made to create the best response to an invader during immune response. It does everything.
Because of the mathematical advantage emergent for inhibition over excitation, a mathematical collection of inhibition (stress) will occur over time and especially during periods of any kind of excess.
It is difficult to reverse this collection of mathematics as it requires going against the basic mathematical edge of inhibition over excitation, but the brain can do it to a degree. But cellular decisions (remember that each cell can be involved in many cellular decisions of different “flavors”) that have been inhibited into a coma must pass back through that hump of high-cycling firing (beyond the ideal frequencies) and may not get back through to normal frequencies without making new connections and this will be possible for some and not for others. The extremes of a drug/alcohol problem cause a lot of events of this sort in the brain where stress has collected and the cellular decisions (one cell can be involved in many different cellular decisions at different or the same times) can’t get back to ideal frequencies and so improvement will appear to be decline when the coma of the subset goes through a period of finding again the ability to fire at a better frequency when the drug/alcohol use has stopped. These mechanisms behind what causes drug withdrawal are also basic to the working of the nervous system and basic to any kind of improvement of lost function with implications that are massive for the pharmaceutical industry because any drug that gives you benefits while you must still take the drug (especially with a “therapeutic range” where you get worse if you take too little of the drug) is akin to taking heroin as a cure for a problem caused by heroin withdrawal.
Current interpretations from various observations and pharmaceutical response appear to indicate otherwise, but all problems are caused by a form of inhibition. The confusion comes from how inhibition of a subset of nervous system firings can lead to greater excitation of other subsets of nervous system firings causing improvement of some functions (while causing decline of other functions), so an observation of greater excitation in regards some problem is the caused by an unobserved inhibition.
The greater the amount of synchronous firing of cells in the nervous system, the less emergent pattern-seeking is involved (the less thought possible and the less function of the whole organism possible) and the closer you get to the basics of pain or pleasure and the closer you get to the basics behind the goals of the individual units rather than the collective.
Because the cells are designed to allow the greatest likelihood of achieving an ideal frequency, and by collective design designed to shorten the length of time spent in the higher-than-ideal frequencies that would accelerate to a stop in the absence of dealing with patterns from the outside world without that design, the higher frequencies beyond the ideal and the lowest frequencies closest to resting frequency are more representative of the opposite decision in the logic of the brain than the frequencies closest to the middle.
Part of this logic is the effect that the characteristics of the firing of one cell will have on the many cells receiving those signals and how the inhibitory effect of the very highest frequencies of a cell on the cells receiving that input with greater excitatory and inhibitory influences as a result and the math of how excessive excitation becomes inhibition as an emergent factor.
When the logic of this emergent math is representing a different logic from the middle frequencies (“yes” or “pleasure”) in contrast with the lowest and highest frequencies (“no” or “pain” or subset-coma/stop) then the observations of the brain using the current techniques can radically misinterpret the data. The current fMRI and other approaches look at statistical increases in activity of a large number of cells not taken into isolation in most cases and use computers to find associations with the highest frequencies and certain functions or subject matter. They are finding activity that has some association with the function, but it is skewed towards the “no” decisions and missing most of the “yes” decisions (and the way the subject matter is spread so much further around the brain) and that approach creates enormous theoretical roadblocks to discovery. The math of the nervous system is very much between the lines from the current observations of activity in the brain and the current language of how observations are interpreted.
“Sensitivity” at the cellular level is defined as the relative state of any cellular decision performed by a cell in regards to how much change in incoming spiking influences are needed to change a “yes” decision to a “no” decision or visa-versa, and that change occurs at some line between the ideal frequencies and the higher frequencies.
Sensitivity is pretty much a greater chance of reaction to some change regarding some subject matter and the realm of where decisions might easily change with any more or less yes or no votes coming from other cells is where there is the greatest sensitivity. Because of the way stress collects from the mathematics of how the no decisions have a mathematical edge, stress in general can cause more sensitivity in general because solid yes decisions become more fragile to change with the addition of stress.
A very important aspect of this sensitivity issue is that cellular decisions have an extremely wide range of sensitivity settings. A nerve cell is a voting mechanism with a quorum that needs to be reached before a firing occurs (apart from the few self-generated spikes a second that will occur nonetheless). One cellular decision might have 99% of dendrites lighting up and reaching a very solid quorum and another might have 3% of the dendrites lighting up synchronously and be on the edge of quorum and any change in the number of cells firing that way or change in the frequency of any of the firings or the strength of any of the connections could cause a change in the outgoing decision from a yes to a no or a no to a yes. This great sensitivity in a number of subsets of decisions in the brain has great implication for the theory of what happens whenever you cause excesses in the environment of the brain by introducing pharmaceuticals as every drug treatment will cause a percentage of cellular decisions to change from a yes to a no (add stress) whether the drug is excitatory or inhibitory.
The massively intricate connectivity of the brain and how the moving mathematical influences change the firing or not firing of cells (and the emergent math of cellular decisions with massively more yes and no decisions happening) IS the activity and the processing of the nervous system.
The range of different chemical markers for synapses (neurotransmitters such as serotonin) is a very small number. A massively large number of cellular decisions involving synapses using serotonin, for instance, at any moment in time, will have many yes and many no decisions. Any type of function performed by the brain is performed by the many different decisions and the changes in the structure that happen as a result of brain activity in relation to the body and the world. Serotonin is neither performing any function nor regulating any function nor is any other neurotransmitter. The statistical relationship of any neurotransmitter to any activity has nothing to do with anything but a rough geography of the brain and the use of statistics here has led to a lot of bad theory about the nature of how the brain works. The brain does not use any neurotransmitter to regulate any function. But the brain has the ability to change the volumes of particular neurotransmitters as a component of focus so that the quick and temporary influence of different neurotransmitters can turn up and down the volume levels on different subsets of the brain to cause different subsets of subject matter to have greater or lesser influence on finding the strongest logic for some subject matter and then give a moment to strengthen the strong logic to have a stronger influence on that same subject matter when the volume controls are changed back. And this has nothing to do with the unnatural influence of a pharmaceutical causing an unnatural change that cannot be quickly changed back by the brain. So much statistical observation of this is also causing very bad leaps of interpretation - very often identifying the “cart” as the “horse,” so to speak.
Every different subset of nervous system firing is in two realms. One realm is that of the individual cells that are dealing with one subject matter in having a design that gives the greatest possibility for that cell of finding its ideal frequency of activity for the greatest health/pleasure/success of that cell. The other emergent realm is the information that a network of cells can represent when the they are connected to a variety of cells specialized to respond to the frequencies giving information about the outside world and the body, and the emergent mathematics that is created when the collective design of a network of cells now becomes a system of seeking pleasure in the spotting of patterns in frequencies (and the subject matters that those frequencies represent). So in the emergent mathematics every subset of the group of cells in a system and every subset in the activity of those cells is representing a different realm of information.
This will be better explained if I animate the changes in cellular organization and activity in some simple life designs and show how the collective always makes the best collective change for the success/health of the collective with the way the cells interact. When I animate it I will use an example of a simple network of nerve cells attached to some cells designed for movement (muscle), some designed for response to chemical identification (taste/smell), some designed to respond to physical damage (touch) and some designed to respond to light/dark (vision, but just a few light-sensitive cells so that few patterns can be explained) and I will show how the whole system learns to change its wiring to keep improving the success of its activity. After I illustrate how the simple organism learns, according to the collective design of seeking health/pleasure for the units, something that keeps adding up to the collective health/pleasure for the colony, then I will show what changes have occurred in the connectivity of the nerve cells involved and then get into a discussion of how the simple organism acted with influence from light and chemistry and dangerous particles, etc and then examine the implications of subject matter of the different nerve cells. Nerve cells receiving signals from the light sensitive cells are not transmitting light to the other cells that receive the signal passed along, they only represent that information about light in another form. The same for the cells responding to a sharp object or the cells attracted by a desired chemical (food) or repelled by a chemical that is not desired. The accumulated decisions to move in either this direction or that direction by calculating the various votes of “yes” or “no” coming from the different realms (light, chemistry, touch) will by calculated by the network in the collective voting of seeking the best pleasure and avoiding pain and if the various factors repeat, causing growth of the successful connectivity and change in the body with increased growth for the regions most rewarded by the good decisions, then the structure will change and it will accumulate an intelligence of a kind by the design of the simple life form and the improvements of the design that this simple organism will incur through learning. Then the philosophical question must be addressed: What realm is this cell responding to? Or this cell? (And what is different about the realm of the cell when different signals are coming from different cells?) If the nerve cell is more closely connected to the light-sensitive cell, then you might say the cell is dealing with the realm of vision. But that same cell is receiving reciprocal signals from a cell that is more closely connected to the touch receptor and has some relationship to inputs coming from a cell that responds to chemistry. The realm of information, the subject matter of that cell, is no longer clear. Cells closer to an organ of sense receive frequency information from those cells and are representing that information in another realm of discourse (pleasure/pain) that has some greater or lesser degree of representation concerning that realm, but never completely because the firing of nerve cells is never the passing of light or taste or touch or sound, it is something else. When you look at it logically, every subset of the firings in the network is doing one thing (the individual cell seeking its greatest health leading to the collective organization of the cells seeking the greatest collective health) and dealing with an emergent representation of realms of information in which every subset of the firings is representing different subject matter with different mathematical relationships and degrees of relationship to subject matter (a certain percentage in regards light or a pattern emergent from light and a pattern resulting from sound waves occurring at the same time and on and on). When you consider the difficulty in comprehending the four dimensions of space and time dealt with in coming up with Einstein’s theory, and then consider the massive number of dimensions dealt with by the nervous system, you might get some idea of the complexity of this concept. (Many of the most complicated mathematical theories with complex equations for proofs are dealing with just one subject matter.)
Learning takes place in every cell of the brain and in every change in every structure of every cell in the brain.
There is a current misconception that different types of memory take place in different regions of the brain. This mistake is the result of illusions that are caused by a lack of current understanding of some aspects of how the brain functions. All change in the brain organization is learning/memory.
One aspect of nerve cell mathematics that causes the illusion is that parts of the brain that deal constantly with patterns that are always consistent such as subsets of the processing of the visual field that are always a part of any visual field (such as parallel lines) will have very strong connectivity and the least plasticity to change from that subject matter to another subject matter, and the consistent patterns dealt with will cause an illusion that these regions are hardwired modules that genetics has mapped out through evolution but parts of the brain dealing with less consistent patterns will be more plastic and appear to be performing a very different form of cognition. The illusion will always lead to a misconception (according to the current language of talking about the brain and mind) that the most plastic parts of the brain dealing with the least consistent patterns are the parts of the brain that are storing memory when memory is actually spread throughout the entire brain.
Another aspect of the brain that causes mistaken current notions is that in a complex brain a region or grouping of cells (grouped through connectivity and not spatial geography of the brain necessarily) a collective subset of the cells will attend to patterns that amount to seeking “pleasure” in an executive function of inhibiting large swaths of the brain (large subsets of information). This is important in any animal and most important in humans with language because of the very different mathematical nature of language compared to the many-dimensions-of-subject-matter-of-thought-at-the-same-time kind of thought of how the brain works mathematically. The brain takes incoming information and lights up everything possible in regard to that subject matter then reduces the possibilities until the most appropriate subsets of the large subsets are left, giving the specifics that are most appropriate for that moment of that information, the parts giving the most collective "pleasure.". (Going from the infinite to the specific, or from the vague to the specific.) This is most easily seen in language when the beginning of the sentence has enormous variety of possibility of final subject matter but in time the further information of the sentence comes with the rest of the words and narrows down the topic of the first words as modified by the later words. The brain does all thinking by lighting up as much as possible and then subduing large swaths of the brain - where some conflicts with the appropriate choices cause inhibition - until the volume levels are left up on the smallest subsets of subject matter most appropriate (or least in conflict with each other - causing less stress/pain/inhibition - as a better way of explaining this kind of mathematical computation) for that moment of cognition. (This happens very quickly, and when the most concepts are held at the same time - vagueness - the illusion is that no specific concepts are being held at all because language cannot express very many concepts at the same time.) When the most selective subset is left firing the extra time firing causes more memory connections to occur for that subset and reduces the strengthening of connections to the wrong associations of information that have great similarity to the specifics of the moment (although some strengthening of those connections will occur). That subset of the brain that assumes this executive role of changing the large subsets of focus - think of the hippocampus - is firing at the same time with reciprocal signaling coming back, so strengthening of connections of the specific subsets in the rest of the brain will also be connected to the other subsets through the subset that is moving the focus around the brain. Then during sleep, which is another kind of focus where the executive subsets that are busy moving focus around during the awake state are subdued themselves, the remaining subsets that are left most active during dreaming will have a tendency to fire the most recently fired subsets together but will not be able to follow the connections through the subset that controls focus during this time and so will make more connections directly to each other during that sleep. This gives an illusion that long-term and short-term memories are stored in different parts of the brain.
[Click to Go Back to Unified Theory Directory Page]
Many of the problems of medicine, biology, psychology and philosophy require an understanding of the basic mathematical principles behind how the nervous system does what it does to achieve function and experience, and that mathematics is not explained using narrowly-focused statistics. Understanding how this math works will be the tool for the discovery of many answers of great importance to humanity. The case for this concept and the offering of an explanation of this kind of math is made in the many essays of this website.
On these pages you will find ideas that should haunt you. Included are new concepts in science, medicine, sociology, evolutionary psychology, philosophy and more...
This website and the podcasts of Everyone's Revolution explain how the brain creates the mind, but many side issues must be resolved in order to teach this material. Once you realize that the "hard problems" are really the first problems to be answered, you then have a tool for changing all of science and medicine by explaining a massive number of discoveries that will fall into line in order to unify the evidence. All of the evidence is good. The interpretations of the evidence are mistaken in many cases. For ten years now there have been new discoveries of evidence that all move in the direction of supporting this theory (or this school of many theories) and its predictions. Quite a few people have started to pay attention to this theory as well.
