Hi Mr. Ex,
I'm always glad to get constructive, head-on responses. That's why we're here, right? To discuss what we know, ask questions, etc. When people face issues head-on, I feel the opportunity to learn and to be understood. It's a good feeling.
It seems to me that you're basically conclusing that mind (or consciousness) is a function of matter -- matter that has attained a certain degree of organization.
Am I correct with that assumption?
I would say it a little differently, but I think you've got it. I haven't seen evidence that forces any view of the mind as being anything more than due to 'matter that has attained a certain degree of organization.' I am certainly open to examining new evidence, or re-examining old evidence.
We have experimental data where people's brains are electrically stimulatd in order to cause them to move ... And invariably the patient (each one) would respond by saying something like, "I didn't do that. You did."
In other words, the patient clearly thinks of himself as having an existence separate from his body.
This can be explained physically by saying that motor function is localized in the brain, and that when motion is detected without internal stimulation, that it is interpreted as "not me doing it." This itself doesn't mean there's no physical instantiation of "will to move".
In fact, no matter how far Penfield probed the cerebral cortex, there was no place that he could find where an eletrical stimulation of the brain would cause a patient to "believe" or "decide".
Good. This is the kind of argument that is needed to complete the above.
Zhimbo is going to be a much better reference for this than me; looks like his work involves frontal lobe function (although maybe not medial frontal lobe). Anyway, I believe the medial frontal lobe, as well as the basal ganglia, have been implicated in what you call "decide".
Here's a link to the current behavioral test for "dysexecutive function", and a short quote to introduce it:
...dysexecutive syndrome, a cluster of impairmentsgenerally associated with damage to the frontal lobes ofthe brain. These impairments include difficulties withhigh-level tasks such as planning, organising, initiating,monitoring and adapting behaviour.
http://www.dwp.gov.uk/...d/vol5/no2_sum_03_test_review_2.pdf
The problem with excitatory electrical stimulation is that it's useful only in certain situations. It's useful only when a brain function is localized, not distributed. If a function requires the simultaneous or consecutive stimulation of multiple areas of the brain, and you stimulate just one, you're not going to get anything.
This is why
inhibitory electrical stimulation is much more useful; you can determine the necessity of an area of the brain in a function by inhibiting that area through stimulation, then asking the patient to attempt to do something. This is how, for example, language function is ascertained before resection (removal) of epileptic parts of the brain. You can't simply stimulate one part of the brain and get words out. Does that mean there's no physical instantiation of linguistic behavior? Far from it. It just means it's distributed and contentful (see below about 'contentful').
Oh right. One more thing about electrical stimulation. YOu can't stimulate parts of the cortex that aren't at the "surface". The brain has many folds, with lots of functional neurons not exposed when you remove the skull. Electrical stimulation deals only with the surface of the brain that is at the exterior surface. Any convolutions of the brain are not accessible. It means you're not testing a large percentage (I don't know offhand; 40% maybe) of the cereberal cortex (to ignore the other critical but "lower" parts of the brain)
And it's not useful for functions which require content. Even if there
were a localized "belief" part of the brain, if you stimulated it, what would you believe in? There's no content. It would require 'meaningful' stimulation from other parts of the brain to determine content. "Meaningful stimulation" ... it's hard to explain without some knowledge of how neurons interconnect and work together in networks. Suffice it to say that electrical stimulation cannot stimulate selectively enough to make such "meaningful stimulation".
To summarize. The evidence you gave, while useful evidence, is evidence against a localized, contentful expression of "belief" or "decision" in the brain. That's good, because we've got other evidence against such organization of the brain, and that's not how we think these functions are organized.
The work of Roger Sperry (and John Eccles) has shown us that the movements of consciousness trigger the patterns of neural events.
I'm quite certain that their work showed a
correlation between conscious perception of will and patterns of neural events. To take that as the acutal conscious expereince "triggering" something is unsupported by any studies that I know. There are studies that suggest the opposite though--that conscious perception of will is often delayed compared to the actual onset of a behavior.
I can't comment much more, because I can't read the study... unless you have a link somewhere? Anyway, Zhimbo can tell us about the neural correlates to "willful activity", such as dorsal prefrontal cortex for "willfully" keeping a string of numbers in mind or such the sort.
Another study showed a delay between the time an eletric shock was applied to the skin, its reaching the cerebral cortx, and the self conscious perception of it by the person. This too suggests that "the self" is more than just a machine that simply "reacts" to stimuli as it receives them.
I don't get this at all. Neurons are slow. Long axons take time to transmit information. Transmission of that signal across synaptic connections is slow. Exciting other neurons, involved in the conscous perception of pain is slow. Slow transmission tracing a path from skin to brain is exactly what physical models predict. What's the trouble?
Researchers can certainly know about the brain by studying it, but they can't know about the mind without asking the person to reveal it. It seems to me as though this is because "conscious states" have the feature of being inner and private whereas "brain states" don't.
With all due respect, it "seems" that way to you because you don't know much about the brain. There's two very basic reasons we can't ascertain these things without asking.
The first is that we have a really crude, totally incomplete understanding about, at a macroscopic level, how the brain works. NOw, one of the things that we know about the brain is that individual neurons interconnect in "networks", and it is this interconnectivity and the patterns of which neurons activate in a network over time that determine actual function. To do what you suggest, we would have to observe all neurons over time, and then compute, based on those observations, what is going on. The second problem is that we have neither the tools to observe any of the things I described, nor do we have the computational power to simulate and compute such a thing.
I could be a lot more specific and thus be more correct. I don't see the point so I'll just lay it out grossly at this high level.
As for autism, ... I'm reluctant to make a comment. Except to note that Tito is EXCEPTIONAL for a person with autism. And to say that without knowing Tito's specific physical deficit, it's impossible to correlate behavior with physical deficit. So.. it's impossible to say anything without more information. Information that I'm sure we don't have.
Maybe it sounds like a cop out. Unfortunately, those are the facts of life when it comes to studying the brain. It can be really frustrating.
the research of Ramachandran is rather interesting
He does tons of work. Don't swallow everything he says whole, but a lot of it is provocative. I was trying to refer you more to his work on phantom limbs, which made him famous and is well-respected and, to a lesser degree, his work on synaesthesia. It's all interesting stuff, having to do with unusual conscious perception and how they may manifest physically.
Finally,
The details of the neurophysiology of the brain can easilly be viewed as merely footprints (in a physical medium) of non-physical, non-genetic supersensible realities connected to the activity of human consciousness.
This says more about us than it says about the facts. It's also easy to view a really simple computer program as human, or a bee as having volition, or
patterns as being random. Our relatively uneducated thoughts on things we know relatively little about are amazingly flexible.
In fact, it seems as though the evidence currently points towards the view that consciousness exists independently of the brain.
The key in basing conclusions on facts is to be patient in waiting for them. Human consciousness as separate from the body is seemingly based on no facts. Only a lack of them. To me, that's a real red flag.
™ Version 4.2
