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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Jun 27, 2016 - 09:08am PT
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On humans, FMRI's are apparently the best tool. It is not invasive. It is NOT the only way to study brains, though. There is also deep brain stimulation, where a surgeon places tiny electrodes into a targeted part of the brain, they work on the voltage, and listen to the patient, who is awake during the procedure, to report any changes.
There was a great show on CNN, and a woman with treatment resistant bipolar disorder was cured that way. She has a few hair thin wires stimulating a part of her brain, and the wires run to a battery beneath her left chest, much like a pacemaker.
Optogenetics is totally different. It stimulates teeny tiny parts of the brain, typically mice, who have been genetically engineered for their neurons to respond to light, and the technology is becoming huge. A precise map of the brain is fast becoming a reality. I've followed it for a while, and it has the potential to help those with mental illness.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optogenetics
Neuroscience is fast becoming a precise science, and the human brain is better understood every year. In 20 years, who knows where the technology will lead us, and new techniques are always being discovered.
I don't get why MikeL is dissing FMRI's, though. He doesn't believe that the meat brain does anything. Mind is supposed to be separate from brain, right? I wonder if he would volunteer to have his frontal cortex damaged.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Jun 27, 2016 - 06:00pm PT
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MH2:
You can inform me about what else neuroscience has shown. What I know about fMRI comes from research I’ve read about the work flow, technology, and administration of CT scanning in hospitals (among different functional experts—the technicians, the administrators, the MDs, etc.). That exposed the weakness (as far as I’m concerned) in the overall system (viz., interpretation). I also knew some drinking buddies in neuroscience while I was a doctoral student (which now must seem medieval history in the field), and there seemed to be a great need for definitions and rigor.
Thanks for adding in.
Base: I don't get why MikeL is dissing FMRI's, though. He doesn't believe that the meat brain does anything. Mind is supposed to be separate from brain, right? I wonder if he would volunteer to have his frontal cortex damaged.
The first sentence suggests to me you did not read what I wrote. How much more explicit could I articulate the measurement issues?
The second sentence refers to nothing I ever wrote (I don’t think).
The last sentence is the kind of writing I would expect from someone who is exasperated.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Jun 27, 2016 - 09:42pm PT
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You can inform me about what else neuroscience has shown.
I looked up consciousness on the McGill brain site and it was overwhelming.
http://thebrain.mcgill.ca/flash/i/i_12/i_12_p/i_12_p_con/i_12_p_con.html#4
I believe it best to leave thinking about consciousness (as a professional) to the philosophers, though amateurs seem interested in it, too. My opinion is that most of so-called cognitive neuroscience is fluff.
My main experience in neuroscience was with the vestibular system which senses angular and linear accelerations of the head and provides information of use to the eye muscles and to muscles involved in balance reflexes. The control of eye movement by this system is similar to the way inertial sensors on ships were used in WWII to stabilize the targeting of deck guns against roll, yaw, and pitch.
If we already have an idea about how a problem can be solved in an engineering sense, it makes it much easier to understand how the brain solves a similar problem.
I don't claim that the nematode C. elegans lives in a less complicated world than humans do, but it gets by with many fewer neurons. If one is interested in the functioning of a complete nervous system, it may be a good choice. But can the 10 billion neurons in the human brain understand the workings of the 300 or so neurons in the nematode?
Here is a study published in 2011 on the nematode C. elegans.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3233480/
No fMRI was used but calcium imaging, optogenetic interrogation, genetic manipulation, laser ablation, and electrophysiology were.
It would be best to read just the Discussion section.
Lest C. elegans be dismissed as irrelevant to the human case:
comparison of the human and C. elegans genomes confirmed that the majority of human disease genes and disease pathways are present in C. elegans
from
http://www.nature.com/nrd/journal/v5/n5/full/nrd2031.html
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Jun 27, 2016 - 10:29pm PT
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FWIW:
"Functionalism is a theory of the mind in contemporary philosophy, developed largely as an alternative to both the identity theory of mind and behaviorism. Its core idea is that mental states (beliefs, desires, being in pain, etc.) are constituted solely by their functional role – that is, they have causal relations to other mental states, numerous sensory inputs, and behavioral outputs.[1] Functionalism is a theoretical level between the physical implementation and behavioral output.[2] Therefore, it is different from its predecessors of Cartesian dualism (advocating independent mental and physical substances) and Skinnerian behaviorism and physicalism (declaring only physical substances) because it is only concerned with the effective functions of the brain, through its organization or its "software programs" (Wiki)
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Jun 28, 2016 - 07:24am PT
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MH2:
You get a gold star. No, make that three. Good Job! Everyone here on this thread should spend some time on the McGill website that you pointed to. It would help some people to make sure brains are loaded before shooting off their mouths. Really excellent website. Very complete. I will be returning to it to brush up on some areas I’m not up to speed on.
(You didn’t go to McGill, did you? I had a job interview come to me after I had accepted my first real academic position at Warwick, so I turned it down. I wish I hadn’t. McGill is an excellent school with scholars I wanted to work with. Darn karma.)
A few comments that present nothing of value other than they are mine. They tend to be reflective.
1. The writers’ understanding on some issues struck me as particular. Of course, my own are particular, too, informed by my teachers. It’s always interesting and instructive to note how studies can be interpreted in different ways depending upon the values that one holds dear (through inculcation?). We can argue about what a dust mote means. :-) I thought everything written was fair.
2. The perspectives are not necessarily modern. The references to and interpretations of the works of Maturana, Varela, and Buddhist thinking was, I thought, a bit unusual from my experiences (perhaps because my instructors were very technically oriented, rather than humanistically oriented). But, good!
3. I liked very much the pastures that the writers put research and conversations in. Great articulations.
4. In those areas that I am not trained (especially for those other URLs you point to about nematodes, etc.), I am reminded how much research is specialized and how much my own areas of knowledge are brittle. I am downright ignorant and can’t say anything in those areas. Specialization does not enable us to communicate or integrate much at all.
5. There are a great many (many!) theories and perspectives exposed on the McGill website. It’s not like there is just “subjective versus objective” perspectives that tends to be bandied about here on this thread. If we are talking about ‘mind,’ then this is a fair indication of how imaginative and speculative mind can be (and with some data, yet). I won’t say what I think this ultimately means, but this should give some of us real pause about just how much we really know, or think we really know. Research is a game, a fun one, and that would be—for me at least—the reason we can be involved in it. And this description is only for one topic area (consciousness). One can see the same kind of thing in any field of study (rocks, software, theatre, business, ethics, etc.). To my mind, this has hugely significant implications for What This Is.
Again, Good Job! Excellent. I’ll be reading more. Thanks.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Jun 28, 2016 - 09:05am PT
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Not my job, really, Mike. I did like the way the McGill site gives careful attention to the various views which see subjective conscious experience as of a different nature than other brain activity. They articulate several of Largo's points very clearly.
I did not go to McGill. The university has a long history of worthy neuroscience, including innovative research on the sense of balance. During the time I was at Chicago we paid close attention to Geoffrey Melville Jones.
One of the simplest neural circuits in humans that traverses the central nervous system is the 3 neuron arc from
receptor in the inner ear to
interneuron in the brainstem to
eye motoneuron
That chain of 3 (types of) neurons is the basis for the reflex which moves your eyes counter to head movement so that you can fix your gaze on a target while you are walking or running. It must be speedy to be effective, and minimizing the number of neurons in the link is one way that speed is achieved.
Smart people like Melville Jones realized that the mechanics of the simple reflex could not be specified exactly by instructions internal to the organism. The dynamics would need adjustment according to variability during growth of the organism and after injury, aging, and many other sources of variation.
Melville Jones got volunteers to wear eyeglasses which changed the way the image of the world on the retina moved when the eye moved. He could measure head movement and eye movement with great accuracy. He could study the adaptation of the simple reflex to different degrees of disturbance. In a sense, he was studying learning, or plasticity. It was a beautifully simple kind of experiment and led to further investigations of plasticity and how the brain assesses its performance and adapts to change in a direction which improves performance.
http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/geoffrey-melvill-jones/
http://www.ucalgary.ca/hpsstm/node/260
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Jun 28, 2016 - 11:36am PT
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(OT)
Andy, was Bartlett Gym still there when you attended U of Chicago? In the late 1950s I would go there for gymnastics after class.
Excellent link to McGill!
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Jun 28, 2016 - 04:01pm PT
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Yes, hallowed father of bouldering.
We perhaps ran 'round the same peculiarly tight indoor track and used the same horse.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Jun 28, 2016 - 04:31pm PT
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Thanks for that McGill link, MH2. Good summary presentation of the subject. I would say that the one subject that was left out, that I believe is very pertinent to the discussion is evolution. Also, in the Philosophical section, I would have added Empiricism or Naturalism, which is lumped under Materialism. Materialism, as a word, doesn't convey the fact that materials, organized in certain ways, become information, and information is the key to consciousness. Empiricism, on the other hand, includes, implicitly, what can be observed from the natural world. Knowing that elephants mourn for their dead children, for example, is a pertinent fact, not covered in the site's categories.
Let me just point out what I would hope is the obvious, that few of us science types would adhere to the Classical Model of Consciousness as described (and linked to) in the article. In fact, I would say that, not only do I agree with all of the points in the Flaws in the Classical Model section, I have several posts on this thread as do others, that say much the same things. So, I really wonder what MikeL is crowing about in insinuating that many of the science-minded posters have in some way been repudiated by what is in this web site.
A couple of quotes from the article under the Flaws in the Classical Model section.
The "Classical Model".
As noted above, people use the word “consciousness” to mean many different things. But one image that it brings to mind for many of us is that little “me” sitting comfortably inside our heads, watching what’s going on in the world as if it were a movie. From time to time, your inner me may even comment on this movie, in the “small inner voice” that we all know so well, or appear to freely decide on a course of action or behavior on the basis of what it sees in this movie.
In this popular view, consciousness is seen as a container for ideas and images, with a window onto the world for purposes both of perceiving it and of taking action in it. Some call this the “naïve realist” model of consciousness; it is the model that appeals to our common sense, the model that we typically have by default.
This line fits perfectly with what the science types have been saying.
The demonstration that the majority of our cognitive processes are in fact unconscious is regarded as a veritable revolution that has ended the reign of the classical model of consciousness. This unconscious part of our minds, which is also far more “intelligent” than had previously been believed (see sidebar on difficult choices), continues to amaze scientists with the diversity of its processes: mental and sensorimotor automatisms, implicit knowledge and even implicit reasoning, semantic processing, and so on.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Jun 28, 2016 - 04:47pm PT
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I almost hate to say this, but it occurs to me that maybe the fastest way we could achieve "human-engineered consciousness" is to use genetic engineering on our closest relative, the chimpanzee. We share 97-ish percent (I'm too lazy to look it up (Ed wouldn't be)) of our genes with them. We only gots 3-ish percent to go. The more I think about it, the more I want to write a futuristic novel set like maybe 5 years in the future (if only I could write, and come to think of it, it's already been written).
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WBraun
climber
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Jun 28, 2016 - 05:14pm PT
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human-engineered consciousness
Can't be done, nor will ever be done.
Consciousness is already there .......
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Jun 28, 2016 - 06:57pm PT
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The latest Greg Cameron Model for the evolution of consciousness, humans at the top.
Humans (consciousness)
Chimpanzees
..........
The Tree of Life
__
Replication
__
Information
__
Recursion
Pattern
Random is also part of the model, but it is not something that has actually evolved. It's an important variable, nonetheless.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Jun 28, 2016 - 07:06pm PT
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I want to write a futuristic novel set like maybe 5 years in the future (if only I could write, and come to think of it, it's already been written).
Are you referring to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uplift_Universe
?
And I agree with your criticisms of some of the McGill site treatment of consciousness, but it seems to be an oddly personal field of knowledge with a lot of dissension among the people who study it.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jun 28, 2016 - 07:31pm PT
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(I'm too lazy to look it up (Ed wouldn't be)
probably needs a bit of qualification... but there is much in common... see, e.g.:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_evolutionary_genetics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimpanzee_genome_project
Another such region on chromosome 4 may contain elements regulating the expression of a nearby protocadherin gene that may be important for brain development and function. Although changes in expression of genes that are expressed in the brain tend to be less than for other organs (such as liver) on average, gene expression changes in the brain have been more dramatic in the human lineage than in the chimp lineage.[10] This is consistent with the dramatic divergence of the unique pattern of human brain development seen in the human lineage compared to the ancestral great ape pattern. The protocadherin-beta gene cluster on chromosome 5 also shows evidence of possible positive selection.[11]
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zBrown
Ice climber
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Jun 28, 2016 - 07:45pm PT
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But what about the unconscious mind and the collective unconscious?
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jstan
climber
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Jun 28, 2016 - 09:27pm PT
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the vestibular system which senses angular and linear accelerations of the head and provides information of use to the eye muscles and to muscles involved in balance reflexes
Andy:
In 1974 when I was suffering from meniere's the doctor said there was not much they could do, other than cut the nerve. After that my eyes would just point up in the air when I would tilt my head back. To me that did not sound like an answer. As it turned out I could avoid attacks of nausea by not moving my eyes at all. When a system is broken not inputing a signal was a good strategy.
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allapah
climber
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Jun 29, 2016 - 01:34am PT
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"make sure brain is loaded before shooting off mouth..."
the cusp of one's personal death attractor is never too far away; activities such as base jumping or high-risk / high reward climbing manipulate the proximity of the death attractor toward one's present space/time; the fewer chambers in the gun of the russian roulette game one is playing, the higher the probability that death attractor cusp is going to start hoving into view like a rip line across the ocean;
this tightening of the death attractor cusp has the curious effect of energizing one's energy body (the secondary electromagnetic field generated by nervous system, in which synapses have an interface with weak, too-small-to-measure pulses from more distant areas of space/time, transmitted at subatomic level) in such a way that the thinking processes are altered by the experience; I have been spending time in icefalls under seracs and find it elevated my consciousness in a good way that i needed, even though, let's face it, isn't it kind of a russian roulette game?
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Jun 29, 2016 - 07:41am PT
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eeyonkee: So, I really wonder what MikeL is crowing about in insinuating that many of the science-minded posters have in some way been repudiated by what is in this web site.
Either you have misread, or I have mis-written. (I don’t see where I said or implied anything about repudiation in that post.)
What I was praising was what I think is a good summary (none can be complete) of where the various fields have been and where they have gotten to up until the first decade of the 2000’s. I also meant that rather than simply writing the first thing that pops into one’s mind here on this thread, it might be helpful to do a little studying.
McGill indicated territories that have a lot of research being them beyond what some errant website or article in a non-peer reviewed magazine presents. The combined field of studies in consciousness and cognition are nuanced, complicated, and perhaps beyond the ability of any one person to understand how they all came together up to this point. (That task usually requires a seasoned journal editor to do it well.)
I repudiate nothing but ignorance, stupidity, and intellectual arrogance. I read the McGill website as largely a report of scientific research studies, and I would think that many “science-minded posters” here would have appreciated its articulations.
To be honest, I find many “science-minded posters” here not all that well-informed by the broad multi-disciplinary swath of work that’s been done around consciousness and cognition, such as that summarized by the McGill website.
I would say the same thing when it comes to the understanding what a few thousand years of mediation and spiritual practices have provided. People who disregard that “body of work” out-of-hand without reading or direct experience also strike me as ignorant and stupid.
Personally, I like it all; I believe none of it absolutely; I certainly like to think for myself, but from an informed basis as a 30-year practitioner in contemplative traditions, as a student of cognitive science with a terminal degree, and as a researcher who had produced a little bit of work in social cognition and metaphor. None of my understanding about consciousness or cognition is definitive or final. As I’ve written here, I believe in *And* rather than *only.*
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Jun 29, 2016 - 07:50am PT
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I was suffering from meniere's the doctor said there was not much they could do, other than cut the nerve.
It could have made you a good astronaut by becoming less prone to nausea, as long as you were in zero gravity. And you should have passed along to NASA your solution of not moving your eyes.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
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Jun 29, 2016 - 09:28am PT
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Today is the 350th anniversary of the Royal Society for Science, the first scientific organization in the world. It was founded after the wars of religion in Europe since, as the founding charter put it, "Science seems to be the only subject that gentlemen can discuss without coming to blows". Women were admitted only in 1945.
Today the Guardian asked a combination of scientists and nonscientists who are well known in their fields, what they thought the ten most important questions involving science were.
Roughly, they could be divided into three groups.
Brain/Mind
What is consciousness?
Will I be able to record my brain like I can record a programme on television?
Cosmology
What happened before the Big Bang?
Is there a pattern to the prime numbers?
Can someone explain adequately the meaning of infinite space?
Can humanity get to the stars?
Humanistic
Will science and engineering give us back our individuality?
(Related to mass Production and the 3D printer)
How are we going to cope with the world's burgeoning population?
Can we make a scientific way of thinking all pervasive?
How do we ensure humanity survives and flourishes?
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2010/nov/30/10-big-questions-science-must-answer
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