>>> Everyone can see for themselves that that is true.
The activities of the brain is how they show up, duh.
[random_variety] [chance_variations.]
...This evolutionary angle on consciousness came naturally to Edelman
because of his own work in immunology. Edelman's Nobel prize had come
from helping prove that immune cells are produced through a
selectionist competition.
The problem for the body is that it cannot
predict what kinds of bugs or viruses it
might face in life,
so its solution is to manufacture
a huge and rather [random_variety]
of immune cell types.
All these cells float in the bloodstream. Then, when there is an
invader, whichever immune cell happens to have the right response
characteristics will be stimulated to reproduce itself in great
numbers, rapidly swamping the disease...
...Reproduction involves the copying of
patterns, sometimes with small
[chance_variations.]
Creativity may not always be a matter of copying errors and
recombination, but it is reasonable to expect that the brain is going
to make some use of this elementary darwinian mechanism for editing
out the nonsense and emphasizing variations on the better-fitting ones
in a next generation.
---------------------------------------------
Neural Dawrinism
...Edelman wrote that just as animals compete for food and living
space in the struggle for life, so sensations had to compete for space
on the mapping surfaces of the brain. Every moment would begin with a
battle in which some networks of activity would blossom, gaining the
neural territory needed to become conscious-level percepts, while
other, weaker, nerve ensembles withered away. Over the course of about
a tenth of a second or so, there would be a struggle in which only the
'fittest' patterns survived. Crucially, one of the factors determining
the success or failure of a new sensation was the support it received
from higher levels of the brain. If a sensation was anticipated, or
deemed important in some other way, positive feedback from higher
areas would help swell the mapping activity, elevating it above the
general clamour. Edelman called this feedback between levels of
processing a 're-entrant circuit'...
...This evolutionary angle on consciousness came naturally to Edelman
because of his own work in immunology. Edelman's Nobel prize had come
from helping prove that immune cells are produced through a
selectionist competition. The problem for the body is that it cannot
predict what kinds of bugs or viruses it might face in life, so its
solution is to manufacture a huge and rather random variety of immune
cell types. All these cells float in the bloodstream. Then, when there
is an invader, whichever immune cell happens to have the right
response characteristics will be stimulated to reproduce itself in
great numbers, rapidly swamping the disease...
Going Inside - A Tour Round a Single Moment of Consciousness
John McCrone - 1999
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0880642629/qid=1085586459/
The mind is at every stage a theatre of simultaneous possibilities.
Consciousness consists in the comparison of these with each other, the
selection of some, and the suppression of the rest by the reinforcing
and inhibiting agency of attention. The highest and most elaborated
mental products are filtered from the data chosen by the faculty next
beneath, out of the mass offered by the faculty below that, which mass
in turn was sifted from a still larger amount of yet simpler material,
and so on. The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much
as a sculptor works on his block of stone.
Note that mine is not a rival theory to such forms of neural
selectionism (except insofar as they claim to extend to the James-
Piaget-Popper aspect of consciousness). Rather, the ephemeral copying
competitions that I emphasize rest on the broad foundation of such
longer-term selectionism, which forms part of the environment that
biases cloning success (and faux faxing) on my short time scale of
milliseconds to minutes. As such, my ephemeral copying competitions
are one layer up from the connectionist layer, though they feed back
to it when altering the synaptic strengths, just as Edelman’s reentry
also shapes connectivity changes...
Six Essential Aspects of The Darwinian Process
Reproduction involves the copying of patterns, sometimes with small
chance variations. Creativity may not always be a matter of copying
errors and recombination, but it is reasonable to expect that the
brain is going to make some use of this elementary darwinian mechanism
for editing out the nonsense and emphasizing variations on the better-
fitting ones in a next generation.
Natural selection alone isn't sufficient for evolution, and neither is
copying alone -- not even copying with selection will suffice. I can
identify six essential aspects of the creative darwinian process that
bootstraps quality.
1. There must be a reasonably complex
pattern involved.
2. The pattern must be copied somehow
(indeed, that which is copied may serve
to define the pattern).
3. Variant patterns must sometimes be
produced by chance.
4. The pattern and its variant must compete
with one another for occupation of a limited
work space. For example, bluegrass and crab
grass compete for back yards.
5. The competition is biased by a multifaceted
environment, for example, how often the grass
is watered, cut, fertilized, and frozen, giving one
pattern more of the lawn than another.
That's natural selection.
6. There is a skewed survival to reproductive
maturity (environmental selection is mostly juvenile
mortality) or a skewed distribution of those adults
who successfully mate (sexual selection), so new
variants always preferentially occur around the
more successful of the current patterns.
THE CEREBRAL CODE
Thinking a Thought in the Mosaics
of the Mind. By William H. Calvin
http://williamcalvin.com/bk9/index.htm
...- NEURAL DARWINISM
IN THE EARLY STAGES of development, neurons travel freely in the
brain, though guided in general pathways by genetic instruction. As
they float around, some divide into more neurons, some die, and others
settle down at permanent sites and make connections with neighbors,
building the brain's complex circuitry. Genes provide the basic
guidelines that control how the neurons form functioning networks. But
the precise chemical environment influences which neurons connect with
which.
All of our brains have the same general features that make us human,
but each neural connection is unique, reflecting a person's special
genetic endowment and life experience. Circuit connections are made
stronger or weaker throughout a lifetime according to use. Neurologist
and Nobel laureate Gerald Edelman, head of the Neuro-sciences
Institute at the Scripps Clinic in La Jolla, California, calls the
process neural Darwinism. Connections that cope well with the sensory
inputs they receive, which they can convert into effective actions,
stay intact and become strong. Those that do not, die off in a process
that resembles natural selection. Neurons and the circuits they form
part of compete with other neurons for survival, and those that are
best adapted to the environment survive. The environment around us-
what we ingest and inhale, the amount and type of light and sound-
actually changes the physical interconnection of synapses within the
brain, providing us with more efficient circuitry, and allowing each
of us to develop an exclusive brain suited to our particular needs.
Neural Darwinism is the theory that explains why the brain needs to be
plastic, that is, able to change as our environment and experiences
change. That is why we can learn in the first place, and unlearn too,
and why people with brain injuries can recover lost functions. The
concept also underlies two of the mantras of this book. "Neurons that
fire together wire together" means that the more we repeat the same
actions and thoughts-from practicing a tennis serve to memorizing
multiplication tables-the more we encourage the formation of certain
connections and the more fixed the neural circuits in the brain for
that activity become. "Use it or lose it" is the corollary: if you
don't exercise brain circuits, the connections will not be adaptive
and will slowly weaken and could be lost.
A user's guide to the brain:
perception, attention, and
the four theaters of the brain
John J. Ratey.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0375701079/
It is an inductive belief based probabilistic theory, and therefore;
Epistemologists find a number of problems with finding an meta-
justification standard for justifying emperical beliefs.
http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/TKno/TKnoHowa.htm
1. Suppose, that there are basic empirical beliefs, that is, emperical
beliefs (a) which are epistemically justified, and (b) whose
justification does not depend on that of any further emperical
beliefs.
2. For a belief to be episemically justified requires that there be a
reason why it is likely to be true.
3. A belief is justified for a person only if he is in cognitive
possession of such a reason.
4. A person is in cognitive possession of such a reason only if he
believes with justification the premises from which it follows that
the belief is likely to be true.
5. The premises of such a justifying argument must include at least
one empirical premise.
6. So, the justification of a supposed basic empirical belief depends
on the justification of at least one other empirical belief,
contradicting 1.
7. So, there can be no basic empirical beliefs including completely
justified sceptical beliefs.
The 7 propositions seem to eliminate the possibility of emperical
justification of any and all emperical beliefs. But it can lead to
this untruthfullness of human beliefs in three ways which deal with
the apparent "regress" of one belief depending upon another which
depends upon another and so on:
If the regress of emperical justification does not terminate in basic
emperical beliefs, then it must either:
(1) terminate in unjustified beleifs
(2) go on infinitely (without circularity)
(3) circle back upon itself in some way.
If we think about justification moving in a linear direction, with one
proposition becomeing the justification for another we run into an
viscious regress that doesnt seem to end. It can be open ended and go
on forever or it can become circular where each support depending on
the last leads to the same supports over time. This is how scepticism
defeated foundationalism. It seems that all we were left with a hope
for escape from this dilemma of no certain knowledge is a modified
version of the circular argument. Instead of a linear regress of
justifiactions we seek a nonlinear context of groups of evidences or
propositions emerging more evidence than other means of gaining
supports from evidences and propositions. Though we close the circle,
different circlular arguments, corespond to, predict, and manilulate,
events in the world, than other such arguments. If we have a
competition amoungst such partial certainties, we gain at least the
best knowledge we can find.
