The Human Brain

[Mythra]

I find it interesting learning about the workings of the human brain, and its complexity. As science continues to learn more and more about it, it seems that it's headed in a certain direction. And that direction is - that every single thing about a person's identity, belief system, and self-awareness is contained somewhere in the complex of gray matter contained within a person's skull. I wonder, as the years and decades progress (within our lifetimes) how people will still find room for the idea of a soul. As it stands now, the explanation is reduced to "mystery", which to me, is a synonym for "magic". In other words, they don't know - they can't provide any real evidence for it - they just make an assumption, based on faith. And we are idiots if we don't join them.

 

Here is an article that I highly recommend: http://www.ebonmusings.org/atheism/ghost.html

 

Here is the results of another recent study, in which they took a look at how the human brain processes belief, unbelief, and uncertainty.

I'm sure in the future, there will be many more such studies. Click on the PDF or the Full Text link to get the article: http://www.samharris.org/site/articles/

[Amanda]

Intriguing topic Mythra.

 

I find it interesting, there is only presented two basic concepts of what the soul might be. Does it have to be either a "ghost in the machine", or the "makings of chemical reactions in the brain"?

 

Does the CAT scan activity show the brain's reaction to the question, based on prior information stored in the brain? How does prior information effect our acceptance of what is believeable, individually and collectively? Does the brain create consciousness? Does the brain just record our history in different compartments? I would be interested to know if they can create an emotion, that the person had not experienced it in the past, by triggering one spot on the brain.

 

Eckert Tolle suggests that our "thoughts" are not who we are, but instead we are that "awareness" of our thoughts. Our thoughts go masquerading as us, yet are not us. If we have that perception, then it seems we can more easily evaluate the validity of what our thoughts are saying to "us". Interestingly, the soul is sometimes referenced as "no thing", or maybe just "energy".

 

Amit Goswami says that matter did NOT create consciousness, but that consciousness created matter. What else could it be that causes the quantum wave of possibilities to collapse onto one event? Isn't the quantum wave of possibilities the precursor to everything, but perhaps not to an all pervasive underlying consciousness? More here.

 

"The brain is fluid, a constantly changing instrument of extreme subtlety. Just as no one can step into the same river twice, so too can no one think the same thought twice. For the act of thinking changes the thinker. Indeed, the thinker is the thought; the thought gives birth to the thinker who, in turn, creates the thought anew....The unfolding of meaning in time produces the whole gesture of the mind's dance. Within this gesture, brain and consciousness are sustained just as the fountain lives by virtue of the water that flows through it." - David Peat

 

Even Carl Sagan says that we are part of the cosmos trying to know itself.

[Mythra]

Even Carl Sagan says that we are part of the cosmos trying to know itself.

 

Well, since Sagan said this in February 1996 in an interview with Psychology Today, I'm not sure he would have supported the idea of a collective consciousness from which the human brain receives information somehow, if that's indeed what you're trying to get at.

 

On the other hand, I see spectacular potential in imaging analysis of brain function. That is an amazing development, and you can see really major understandings of brain function coming out of that. Also tremendous]y exciting is the work on neurotransmitters, work on endorphins, and on the small brain proteins. Those are all tremendously exciting, and all of them, by the way, tend to support the idea that the mind is merely what the brain does. There's nothing else, there's no soul or psyche that's not made out of matter, that isn't a function of 10 to the 14th synapses in the brain.

[Amanda]

On the other hand, I see spectacular potential in imaging analysis of brain function. That is an amazing development, and you can see really major understandings of brain function coming out of that. Also tremendous]y exciting is the work on neurotransmitters, work on endorphins, and on the small brain proteins. Those are all tremendously exciting, and all of them, by the way, tend to support the idea that the mind is merely what the brain does. There's nothing else, there's no soul or psyche that's not made out of matter, that isn't a function of 10 to the 14th synapses in the brain.

 

Hey Mythra, I still think Carl Sagan saw the universe as one. Also, I'm not saying that anything transcends our body when we die, IDK, but I am inclined to think so. Whatever, "it" surely never makes a trip to the pearly gates.

 

I'm curious as to how "they" know that the brain is creating these emotions/decisions and not just recording them? I thought that synapses just carry a chemical message from one neuron to another, perhaps stimulating associating info also... but to infer it is all rather mechanized? I don't know... Maybe there's more, and we just can't put our finger on it yet?

 

David Peat, a well known physicist says this here:

 

But this seems to suggest that the free and imaginative products of human consciousness become the instruments by which we observe the natural world? And if it is truly the case it means that consciousness has also created the very instruments by which to observe its own functioning!! In this sense, while it still provides an objective and testable account of the natural world, at the same time science takes its place beside the great myths of history as a story we tell about the world and ourselves in order to understand and support our society and all its values.

 

At first there was matter in interaction. But then physicists began to direct their attention towards energy - energy is what sets matter in motion, energy is what brings about the transformations of matter - from ice to water to steam, energy produces growth, energy brings about self organization. And so matter is like the clay in a potter's hands and the name of those hands is energy.

 

Thus in place of the duality matter-energy we have a triangle matter-energy-information. Active Information knows about particular dispositions of matter, it then gives form to energy that brings about transformation that, in turn feedback into active information.

 

According to Bohm this processes takes place even at the level of the electron. The quantum ground state contains a vast amount of information about the disposition of the universe, in turn this information is "read" by the electrons and hence guides the electrons movements. Or rather, the electron itself is a complex process of enfolding and unfolding that is guided by active information. In this sense what could perhaps be called a proto-mind exists right down to the quantum level of the cosmos.

 

In this sense mind and matter cannot be separated or divided, they are aspects of one greater whole. Whereas to Newton the world appeared to be regulated like giant clockwork today we see the cosmos in a more organic way, almost as a living thing. The nature of matter allows for the possibility of endless subtleties and even exhibits mind-like qualities. In short there is no longer a fixed division between matter and mind.

(emphasis mine)

 

You are surely more informed than I, yet there are some physicist that have ideas similar to my position too. What would really be interesting, is to go a hundred years into the future and see/hear what the popular concensus is then.

[Mythra]

You are surely more informed than I, yet there are some physicist that have ideas similar to my position too. What would really be interesting, is to go a hundred years into the future and see/hear what the popular concensus is then.

 

I don't know whether I'm better informed or not, but we've obviously been looking at things from a different angle.

 

Neuroscientists are not undecided at all on this. They know that all cognitive function, including emotions, begin and end in the human brain. Once you begin to grasp the immense complexity (100 billion nerve cells that form trillions of synapses - or connections - our brains form a million new connections every second that we are alive). Source: http://www.newscientist.com/channel/being-human/brain

 

Neuroscientists are able to observe and do in-depth studies on how very specific brain injuries, or very specific drugs are able to incapacitate or enhance very specific emotions and cognitive functions.

 

A very interesting book on the brain and how it works is "Phantoms in the Brain" by V.S. Ramachandrian, M.D., PhD.

[Guest Marty]

A very interesting book on the brain and how it works is "Phantoms in the Brain" by V.S. Ramachandrian, M.D., PhD.

 

I LOVE that book! Really opened my eyes. Another great read is "How the Mind Works" by Stephan Pinker. It is truly amazing how much processing our brains do every second.

[Amanda]

I don't know whether I'm better informed or not, but we've obviously been looking at things from a different angle.

Mythra... you are more informed overall than I. However, we are looking at it from different angles... and there's probably at least hundreds of other angles also! :ohmy:

 

That certainly keeps life from ever being boring...

Neuroscientists are not undecided at all on this. They know that all cognitive function, including emotions, begin and end in the human brain. Once you begin to grasp the immense complexity (100 billion nerve cells that form trillions of synapses - or connections - our brains form a million new connections every second that we are alive). Source: http://www.newscientist.com/channel/being-human/brain

 

Neuroscientists are able to observe and do in-depth studies on how very specific brain injuries, or very specific drugs are able to incapacitate or enhance very specific emotions and cognitive functions.

That article was very interesting, yet it seems to me that the brain is acting similar to a computer. It stores different aspects in different compartments. Yes, if some of its "circuitry" is compromised, it will show the lack of its ability to function. However, the "user" and the "computer" could be so closely enmeshed that they appear to be "one" to the outside world, or to "cyber world" in this example. Because of this enmeshment, I don't see how anyone could ever prove your perspective, nor mine.

 

The same article I cited previously, says this:

Today I would argue that such a reductionist program will not work. In place of matter and energy we have matter, energy and information. The science of mind can certainly learn from biology and physics but so too physics can learn from mind. As the great physicist Wolfgang Pauli said - physics must confront the irrational in matter and physics must allow for the subjective in matter.

 

What seems interesting to me, is that we seem to have at the core of life... a force/energy that progresses the evolution of life, through its DNA/information, that can be seen through matter. The laws/energy of nature put this in action.... and what will be the result of this millions of years from now? Is there a collective maturation stage, then a decline as we see it in each individual life cycle?

[PandaPirate]

Ah, but if you take into account the Holographic Paradigm of the human brain, then you get another whole viewpoint on consciousness.

 

The holographic paradigm is rooted in the concept that all organisms and forms are holograms embedded within a universal hologram, which physicist David Bohm[1] called the holomovement. It is an extrapolation of the optical discovery of 2-dimensional holograms by Dennis Gabor in 1947 [2]. Holography created an explosion of scientific and industrial interest starting in 1948.

 

Engineer Thomas Bearden describes holograms as “photographic recordings of the patterns of interference between coherent light reflected from the object of interest, and light that comes directly from the same source or is reflected by a mirror. When this photo image is illuminated from behind by coherent light, a three-dimensional image of the object appears in space. The characteristic of a hypothetically perfect hologram is that all its content is contained in any finite part of itself (at lower resolution). Observationally and perceptually, the universe is a hologram and in each part of itself, since all of it can be detected from/in each internal particle.â€[3]

 

In 1973, what has come to be known as the Pribram-Bohm Holographic Model was non-existent. But the Seattle thinktank, Organization for the Advancement of Knowledge (OAK), lead by Richard Alan Miller and Burt Webb were able to synthesize the work of Northrup and Burr on the electromagnetic nature of the human being with Dennis Gabor's work on optical holograms and come up with a new notion – a holographic paradigm.

 

In Languages of the Brain (1971), Pribram[4] had postulated that 2-dimensional interference patterns, physical holograms, underlie all thinking. The holographic component, for him, represented the associative mechanisms and contributed to memory retrieval and storage and problem solving.

 

However, Miller, Webb and Dickson extrapolated that the holographic metaphor extends to n-dimensions and therefore constitutes a fundamental description of the universe and our electromagnetic embedding within that greater field. It suggested the human energy body or bioenergetics was more fundamental than the biochemical domain.

 

The "Holographic Concept of Reality" (1973)[5] was presented at the 1st Psychotronic Conference in Prague in 1973, and later published by Gordon & Breach in 1975, and again in 1979 in Psychoenergetic Systems: the Interaction of Consciousness, Energy and Matter, edited by Dr. Stanley Krippner.

 

Miller and Webb followed up their ground-breaking paper with "Embryonic Holography,"[6] which was also presented at the Omniversal Symposium at California State College at Sonoma, hosted by Dr. Stanley Krippner, September 29, 1973. Arguably, this is the first paper to address the quantum biological properties of human beings--the first illustrations of the sources of quantum mindbody.

 

The premise is based in this hypothesis:

 

The organization of any biological system is established by a complex electrodynamic field which is, in part, determined by its atomic physiochemical components. This field, in turn, determines the behavior and orientation of these components. This dynamic is mediated through wave-based genomes wherein DNA functions as the holographic projector of the psychophysical system - a quantum biohologram.

Dropping a level of observation below quantum biochemistry and conventional biophysics, this holographic paradigm proposes that a biohologram determines the development of the human embryo; that we are a quantum bodymind with consciousness informing the whole process through the level of information. They postulated DNA as the possible holographic projector of the biohologram, patterning the three-dimensional electromagnetic standing and moving wave front that constitutes our psychophysical being -- quantum bioholography.

 

Read full article HERE

[Dhampir]

Does that have anything to do with the idea that we are all two-dimensional beings that perceive ourselves to be 3-dimensional?

[Amanda]

 

Panda Pirate, thanks for sharing that! I've heard of this idea, yet your article gives much more details.

 

Does that have anything to do with the idea that we are all two-dimensional beings that perceive ourselves to be 3-dimensional?

 

Dhampir, thanks for that insight!

 

I read the article, and that went right over my head... as I'm sure lots more did too. However, I read it again, and you seem to be onto something, as the article does say this:

 

The holographic paradigm is rooted in the concept that all organisms and forms are holograms embedded within a universal hologram, which physicist David Bohm[1] called the holomovement. It is an extrapolation of the optical discovery of 2-dimensional holograms by Dennis Gabor in 1947 [2].

 

Is this inferring all things are two dimensional?

 

I'm curious how the sense of touch seems to contradict that idea. If the hologram idea is only based on the reflective characteristic of light, it seems that people born blind can also "feel" the dimensional qualities of different depths found in a face, etc..