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Thermodynamic Theory of the Brain
Aims To Understand Consciousness
News Feb 06, 2020 Original story from Medium
Consciousness
© Copyright 2020 by Ralph E Kenyon JrThis is reminiscent of Karl Pribram's holonomic theory. Other theories that depend on "waves" in sound and in EM frequencies as communications between part of the brain to somehow achieve consciousness both gestalt and subordinate among areas fancifully ignore the structural complexity as well as a disconnect from known neural networks and synaptic function. Frequencies measurable by devices outside the brain or in surface contact are too broad, as they are effectively measuring the "waste energy" that does not do work. Size incompatibility dictates that such measurable activity can only be an aggregate, or should I say aggravated, smoothed average of the myriad of minor signals at the nano-level of structure. Gross averages, like bundles of neurons, can show activity going from place to place, but that is not structurally connected to the well known neural synapse response and neural network functioning.
Brain complexity must smoothly unite functionality from the nano-level through intermediate levels to the macro-level.
The brain operates with and responds to more factors that the neurons. Nutrients,
hormones, inter-connectivity, temperature, and perhaps more can
influence the function of individual and groups of neurons. My
premise is simply that consciousness is not a "thing", it is not a
substance, and it is not a non-material substance. Consciousness
is the co-functioning of perception, representation, and reference, that
is explainable entirely in the cause-effect paradigm. My theses
explains the lowest core structures, the essential structure, of these
as interrelated, using a simple analogy between a limited brain and an
equally limited "computer". Perception, Representation, and Reference: Some Thoughts on an Essential Structure
The earliest "knowledge" relevant to a theory of consciousness begins with Plato's Allegory of the Cave, The Republic, Book VII, written in 517 B.C.E. The outside world is seen as shadows on the cave wall. We are "conscious" of our selves and of the "shadows" we see, both of which are different aspects of our brain's experiencing our self and our environment.
The structural differential, of general semantics fame, is a physical chart or three-dimensional model illustrating the abstracting processes of the human nervous system, patented on May 26, 1925, by Alfred Korzybski. It shows the environment level, the object level, and the language level. We can not know the environment level, as that is what happens before "the light hits our eyes. It represents what caused the shadows on the cave wall. Our task is to expand our knowledge of brain function to account for how we see and understand our personal knowledge and our scientific knowledge, both continually getting updated. What we experience consciously is our continuously changing perception of ourselves in the context of our continuously changing perception of our environment. In the third person, "figure on background", in the first person experiencing "activity on self".
Brain research has show that there are feed forward as well as feed back circuits connecting memory to higher levels. These work so that our slowly working brain is continually predicting what we are going to see (experience) in the next seconds (feed forward), and it uses the incoming data to tweak and correct the prediction. It does this through many levels of visual (and other) abstraction. One retinal cell works with others to turn on recognition of geometric line segments at various angles with varying lengths. These neurons turn on and work with others to recognize simple geometric figures. Many levels of this work with memory to "identify" past experiences using more feed back and feed forward. Eventually, a memory picture in the right place where I put "it" shows my brain my cellphone. But, if it's not there, that picture is washed out for the smooth table top also predicted.
I have a personal experience of this. When I was a lad of 18, I joined the Navy. On my enlistment day, I was driven to Albany, NY, for the beginning paperwork and being sworn in. After Dinner we were hustled to a nearby military airport for our trip to Great Lakes, IL, We arrived after midnight. We then marched from place to place collecting out beginner uniforms and our ditty bag of personal necessities. By 2:00 we were marched to a building that was all dark. The only light was a couple of small red lights that showed no discernible illumination other that near the light itself. I was lead to a spot and by touch "shown" a top bunk. Being exhausted I climbed in and slept. Sometime around 5:30 I was awakened by a horrible noise, which I found out later, was running a coke bottle around the inside of an empty GI can, thunderously loudly, to wake us new recruits. I popped up to a sitting position in my bunk, but I could not see anything except whiteness. I started repeating loudly, "I can't see! I can't see!" gradually my vision began to show graduated differences in the whiteness, some areas getting darker, some areas getting brighter. In a few seconds more, the shades of light and dark began to take on shapes. The light area became fluorescent lights hanging from the ceiling. The darker areas faded into rows and rows of bunk beds, some people milling around etc. By now the panic was fading. In my life I had never seen a barracks nor bunk beds. I had never seen this site nor one like it. That experience stayed with me for all my life. After the turn of the century I read Jeff Hawkin's book "On Intelligence", with explanation of how our slow wetware brain could come up with answers so fast, introducing the memory predictive model. The more brain function I read about the better I understood that what I had experienced on the morning of my first day in Navy Boot Camp was my slow brain having to build a new memory without anything in memory to build it from. My best estimate is that it took 5-10 seconds to establish the new memory so that wherever I turned my head, my brain already had a memory picture of that location ready for me to see.
Consciousness is figure on background of activity on self while operating both dynamically in adaptive resonance (Jeff Hawkins) subsets of neural nets, themselves dynamically changing, hierarchical organized in memory predictive levels with feed forward and feed back interaction. In this dynamic structure it is continuity of memory recall of self against continuity of environment, both generated by memory prediction corroborated and adjusted by sensory input in hierarchical stages. We are only conscious of deviations from the expected memory predictions in both environment and self at appropriate levels.
We are organisms that make a living by moving around. We also project the future and prepare for it. The predictive model helps us remember paths we previously followed, "especially if we found the cheese at a particular location in the maze". Most of our success is being able to remember sequences of activity through many steps. Adaptive resonance functions to enhance our ability to mix similar experiences and "adapt" to one we have not seen before. Feed forward and feed back neural networks enable length while adaptive resonance allows us to apply experiences to situations that are only similar. Activity in neural nets can active others connected to enhance an experience "extrapolate" at neural levels.
Have you ever seen a toad or a frog suddenly turn to one side to bring the image of a potential meal into front center visual area? We don't have to turn our heads to bring a remembered image into our virtual relative front center. We can "think" an image moved to our front center. We can also "set it aside" while we "think" something else moved. That virtual front center is the center of a part of our consciousness. Consciousness is activity in certain areas of the brain. It can be nothing else. The brain has maps of the body, the famous sensory and motor homunculus, distorted maps of our body feeds into our active consciousness areas. Our brain creates these experiences of prediction and corroboration with a delay. Our virtual experience is in our brains constructed and projected after the fact of that external "what is going on" that caused the experience.
Extrapolator Abstracts
General Semantics and Related Topics