A Scientific Explanation of the Human Mind

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This is a very short video, ie. five minutes, but I really like the way the guy handles this. Who knows - I might have to see what he has to say in his book.

He's dealing with a lot of the topics and issues as well that I find most interesting; ie. self-organization, downward causality or bundling/governance from higher levels of supervenience back on lower ones, etc.. IMHO it takes our examination of how stuff aggregates and interacts in a very profitable direction - ie. having a likely much more accurate frames and terminology to explain them in public discourse. It's both concise and at the same time I think conveying the real complexity that's at hand.

It strikes me as being more of a philosophical position than a naturalistic one, while I agree that at some level the mind must be an emergent property of a universe, I feel his notion that the mind is a process that exists both inside and outside the skull is flaky at best - he ignores the notion of the mind as periphery through interfaces: the informational traces that our minds leave around us are because of the interaction of a mind with it's environment - there is a translation that is caused by the interface (hands, keyboards, tools etc), at which point the information ceases to be in the mind itself, and instead becomes an artefact that a mind created in the environment by manipulating those interfaces.

It doesn't stand to reason that the mind extends outside the skull, if the mind (consciousness) is an emergent property of a brain.

I really need to learn this math, so I can hope to respond to the usual arguments.

I wonder if there's some social programming that people get which makes them reject self-organization. It seems like a desirable program for people who want blind obedience to their commands. Or perhaps, people simply prefer their minds as a black box.

I felt like the speaker rejected the idea of the mind being inside the brain without comment, as though the idea was unworthy of comment.

Pseudo-scientific bunk--the mind is the product of physical brain states and nothing more. Our reactions to the world are a product of a long chain of cause and effect.

I think what he gave is just a data-analytic description, not a meat-description. You can look at it in multiple ways.

The attached video I think touches on some of what he's talking about and I'm guessing the author in my OP is probably referring to Ontic Structural Realism as well.

That seems to happen often if someone comes at it from physics rather than biology. I don't know how much I can follow him on the skin and skull bit but comparing human hierarchical cognition to the recursive shaping of clouds made a lot of sense to me.

Yeah, I've watched a lot of lectures from this guy.... The idea of infinite complexity, randomness, chaos, etc. is interesting, but it does not give us emergence.

The whole idea of emergence and/or infinite complexity, is just an excuse to throw our hands up in the air and give up on trying to understand how things actually work.

Even in that first video, the guy talks about the mind as this interaction between the brain, energy and information, and he claims that what emerges is greater that the sum of its parts. But here's the thing, it is still completely dependent upon the brain and the input you give to it. That's it. It is not some magical emergent process. We just don't understand how it works yet.

All this other stuff about the brain being in two places is just silly semantics, or fluffy-headed pseudo-science--take away the brain, or don't give it any inputs and the mind will never form.

If you want to use some emergence model as a frame to think about the mind, that's fine. But it is not scientific, it's philosophical...

Where I've run into problems in the past with this, there's nothing in a neuron to give an 'I' experience unless you're a panpsychist and you'd consider all matter sort-of sentient.'I' ness, qualia, or whatever you might call it would either have to be something that's inherently in the universe but organized in a far superior way to most others by means of the structure of neurons, or if the 'I' experience is divisible into distinct layers the subject matter of those sources could come together in the activity of neurons. Otherwise neurons are a bit like flying carpets in that there's nothing in their chemistry or fundamental particles that explain their ability to carry qualia thus we end up running on magic.

All that he is saying is that "your brain is brainless".

That's been the emerging concensus for a while.

There was a discussion on the radio about "self organizing systems" a few weeks ago that I caught the tail end of. Many systems: trends on the internet, the stock market, all markets for that matter, have patterns the look like they are dictated from above by authority. But are really the opposite: bottom up emergent self organizing systems. The human "mind" is basically the same. Takes in data emotion and instinct and outputs actions. There is no "little man" sitting at the helm of your brain steering you around. Its an emergent system like market forces that drive millons of people in an economic system.

But its all INside your skull. The output of your mind interacts with the outside world (including the outputs of other minds). That external action is not mind, but culture, language, and physical artifacts. Products of mind, but not themselves mind.

Well, along with what you said it reminds me of Dennett's claims in that if his rubric is essentially correct it could on one hand walk out that we're all hallucinating an 'I' experience we're not having or, if we feel like that's multiplying 0 by 0 to get a different number, it might have suggestions embedded in it that Dennett never would have wanted to support.

I think the most interesting thing here is the downward causality element. Clearly to examine our own 'I' experiences it feels like we're essentially noses lording over physical bodies and a physical domain that we move those bodies through. We generally feel like sensory data gets filtered, from the cell level (rods and cones, skin sensors, etc..) up to 'us', the floating noses, and formulate/delegate responses to both internal problems (like being cold and putting a hoodie on as a solution). I like his analogy of clouds being carved by something like the effect of the unified aggregate of what the are and rules that asserts downward. We're kind of like that - ie. the apex point of that information loop. I know people get bent out of shape with the issue of downward causality because it starts sounding spooky but to just say that a certain area assembles like currents, decides which ones are most salient, and bundles the effects downward - there's a simple terminology we have for this both in political structure and engineering; governance.

That said though out of fairness I do have to admit, I combine that with my own experiences and reading and tend to come up with a sort of open-system radical functionalism. I tend to leave that out of the arguments because I don't know there's anything persuasive across ideological isles, but I do think it's good to help people get their assemblies of common-ground factors in order.

Something far more groan-inspiring than I've posted yet in this thread:



My reason for even bringing it up, I remember this pattern also being linked to internet and telecom networks and it has to something to do with information architecture. I get a funny feeling that as the research continues we might be able to figure out some more fundamental issues regarding information conveyance in nature and what drives their generation when it isn't, say, human beings making things in the likeness of their own neurons just so we're not stuck in the loop of constantly referring back to neurons. Slime molds bear this resemblance and we've noticed they have some uncanny talents for solving mazes and the like so they might be a promising place to start.