Brain Science

[Ginny]

http://www.freewebtown.com/natalye/index.html
There you go, I'll probably update the text a bit with some additions later, but it's uploaded.

Sure, electric impulses might be what goes through the nervous system and what is responsible for "how we are wired" (a fitting expression here). But, it's very hard for me to believe that the human mind (and I'm referring now to the vastness of our thoughts, feelings and awareness of the world around us) can be so complex and yet be nothing but electric signals sent through cells. I think that even if we took two peoplepbeings with completely identical brains (not twins, clones perhaps), they would, even without being affected by surroundings, behave, or at least think, differently. I can't be sure as such an experiment hasn't been conducted, and it would be very difficult to avoid affecting either of the beings. Any difference in behavious between clones or twins can easily be associated with them being affected by the outside world. This just shows how ever-changing and impressionable the mind is.

[fred]

Hey Ginny, thanks for the interesting read.

About the experiment, the brain is highly adaptive to sensory percepts, it grows new neurons and synapses all the time, while others perish. I guess there's no way of having two identical living brains, even with the same DNA, because human percepts are different (unless perhaps two identical persons could exist at exactly the same place and time).

I've taken some courses in Artificial Intelligence, and one of the approaches to intelligent processing is building Neural Networks. These are simplified models of the brain (or tiny parts of it) where neurons are connected by synapses.

Much like the brain, neurons in the net will 'fire' (transmit their activating/eletrical pulse to their 'child-neurons') in response to stimulation. Each neuron has a different, adaptable firing treshold, and a so-called 'activation function'. Input to the network is tested at each input neuron, that transmits it forward through the net, altering it according to treshold and activation, and when the signal is passed on from the output neuron(s), the result can be tested against desired result, and all the values in the net can be automatically modified so that next time the output will more closely match the desired output. This is called training the network, and it is a very smart method for problems where you wanna generalize from some data or approximate a mathematical function.

Depending on the intricacy of the nets, they can be trained to solve highly non-linear problems. Like recognizing handwritten digits, solving equations or filtering noise from sound signals.

Sorry, here's a link where it's better explained:
http://fbim.fh-regensburg.de/~saj39122/jfroehl/diplom/e-index.html

I find it interesting that things like reflexes are actually hardwired into the nervous system - probably becauseÃ,  individuals without reflexes have proved unsuccesfull in evolution and so their genes haven't spread. I'm wondering what other things may become hardwired in the human body in the future if they prove as vital as reflexes have been so far.

About the soul, I really don't know. I believe life started by coincidence somewhere in the mud long ago, for no higher reason, and that it's only around now because it could reproduce and adapt along the way. Survival and mating instincts also have no higher reason in my belief, except they must be hardwired by now, considering how much survival and reproduction has gone on since we were at the amoebae-state.

In Artificial Intelligence, programmers often have to chose between 'greedy' and 'explorative' behaviours of a given intelligent agent. Greedy behaviour is always doing what seems the best at the time, while explorative behaviour is sometimes doing other things in order to learn more about the environment and discover better behaviours that may possibly make the straying more than worthwhile. In AI, the most complex intelligent agenst are goal-based or utility-maximizing, and they create an internal model of the important aspects of their environment in order to chose actions from all possibly relevant data. Guess this is how the sensory system evolved for humans as well, and that the brain is simply processing and storing the percepts, inventing new abstractions when seen fit - like the soul, God, justice, life-quests and so forth.

Speaking of God, I like Kierkegaard's proof of God's existence better than Descartes' (as quoted by Tuomas): Without God, I would be too grand in my own opinion.Ã, Ã, 

Thanks again for summarizing your lecture, hope you keep doing it.

[Kinoko]

I can't add anything terribly intelligent to this conversation, but I personally don't believe in a "soul" of any kind. I think our 'personality' comes from our brains interacting with the rest of the world, and when we die, it just shuts off. I don't think it's too hard a concept to imagine that an organ could pull all the cool stuff we do off All those synapses, you know... science goes deeper than what we've learnt so far.

[Ginny]

Kinoko - I partially agree, but I may not have been entirely clear before:
These 5 approaches to the "body and soul mystery" are basically about how you should study the human being. Suppose all the cool stuff we think, do, feel are all a result of an immensely complex system in which our brain works. Should we, then, only study the brain as a physical organ, and claim there is no "soul", and no need to study it? I don't mean the soul in a spiritual sense, but more the psyche, the human mind.
The 1st approach indeed states that we should study only the brain, and not, for example, psychology. There is, according to this, no need to understand the soul, as there is only the physical brain.
The 5th is the mirror opposite, studying only the soul, but it also says we can't grasp what was never brought to our mind. If there's a world outside our soul, we can only grasp it in the way our soul limits us, and thus everything we see and everything we know is subjective. It's like being born with green subglasses that you can't remove - everything is green. This approach, I think, does not says that we think everything is green, that it seems green, but rather that things are what they are to us, to our soul. (You might replace the word soul with "mind".)
The other approaches deal with the same issue - the 2nd says we should study the brain in order to understand the soul, and the 4th is the mirror opposite of 2. And the 3rd approach says that both things should be studied, but that if they are studied together, the scientists from each field will only confuse each other.

When he asked us what approach we thought was more correct, I most connected with the 4th. The 3rd has much truth in it but it seperated the physical world and the mental world too much in my opinion. To every opinoon given though, the lecturer could give a counter argument, serving as the "Devil's advocate". It just goes to show that scientists, all of whom might be intelligent people, have different approaches to brain science, and any and each of these approaches can be true.

After some more thoughts, I actually think I'd like a 6th approach - a combination of 2 and 4. The brain must be studied, and through it we can understand the soul mind, and at the same time the soul mind must be studied and through it we can understand the brain.

EDIT:
From wikipedia(Psyche): "In psychology and related fields, the psyche is the entirety of the non-physical aspects of a person." and "A Greek word (also spelled Psykhē or Psukhē) which means either "soul" or "butterfly". psycho-, and psyche- are common English prefixes for mind or soul-related concepts."

[lo_res_man]

I think that personily the universe is best described as a vast "program" designed by some very lonley entity outside it. the soul is released on death, transcibed if you were into a differant medium, like cd to hard drive. The reason we cant see higher dimesions is like little mentel experiment i like to call finger bowl miracils. picture some life forms that live on the surface of a fingure bowl, living of the grease and oils on the surface and see the world like this |_____][][][][][][][][][___|
flatlanders, 2d beings,BUT living in a 3 (well 4) dimensionel universe(at LEAST)lets say someone dips there fingers in the bowl. to the beings its like someone just appeard out of nowere, then if if the dipper lifts , then dips somewer else. its like the being the precive TELEPORTED. the scientests of these flatlanders would say the witnesses imagined it or they lied, but we, 3d bings that we are could see that it happened and we could even LIFT one of the beings out of the bowl. a miricle! unexplainable to poor flatlander science. BUT it happened. could not angels and such(SOME of the time anyway) be truly beings of higher (just in NUMBER) then ours? could God be a lonley person, who wanted to create something, but not robots that only obey his/her(it don't seem right to say "it") will.it seems to me, maybe ONLY me, a good reason why the universe exists at all. a question I have never heard a scientest answer.

[Tom S. Fox]

I can't add anything terribly intelligent to this conversation, but I personally don't believe in a "soul" of any kind. I think our 'personality' comes from our brains interacting with the rest of the world, and when we die, it just shuts off.

I would agree with you, if it wasn't such a depressing thought.
Or should I say "soul-destroying"?Ã, 
Ah, I feel better again!