I see the need for a homunculus controlling everything to be a product of the human tendency to anthropomorphize everything, that is to try and understand the inanimate world the same way we understand how other humans behave, though our “theory of mind”.

People adopted the hypothesis of demons animating the natural world because it was a way (a poor way) for them to understand how the natural world behaved.

It has been said that if your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. If the only “cognitive engine” you have to think with is your “theory of mind”, used for understanding and communicating with other humans, everything else will look human through that anthropomorphic filter. That is an artifact of our thinking processes, not a property of the natural world.

I appreciate the explanation given above. I confess that I only partially understood what you said, but I think the gist of what you are saying is that the brain is composed of units that are chaotic in a mathematical sense and their responses are not completely predictable.

Fair enough! I can accept that, though only because of my profound ignorance in this subject. If you are saying that there are chaotic systems capable of generating unique and coherent actions given a set of initiators, and that there are similar models in existence, then, I suppose the realm of the soul must retreat to yet another trench.

The phenomena was first noticed when simulations of weather were being done. If the input was identical, the output was always the same that is the evolving system was fully deterministic. But if the input parameters were changed even slightly, even by a single digit in the last decimal place, the output would be similar for a while, but would eventually diverge and become completely different. A change of 0.000001% in the input would lead to a completely different output. This is a fundamental property of all chaotic systems. The final output is extremely sensitive to initial conditions. In physical systems it is not possible to specify the initial conditions precisely enough, or the interactions precisely enough to predict the outcome long term.

Some chaotic systems illustrate behaviors known as “strange attractors”. These are regions of stability that the system tends to evolve toward. The transitions between those strange attractors are chaotic. This results in an extremely advantageous property of chaotic systems regarding control. If the transitions between states are chaotic, than in principle it takes only a differential change to effect those transitions.

Natural neural networks self-regulate in the near percolation threshold that is they adjust their effective connectivity so that the network is only just fully connected. The percolation threshold is a mathematical “critical point” with the connectivity being the critical parameter. The properties of the network change exponentially with respect to the connectivity around the percolation threshold. In other words, as the critical point is approached, the sensitivity of the network to change with respect to the connectivity diverges and is actually infinite at the critical point (but that is a mathematical concept for infinite networks, but it holds pretty well for networks that are large enough, the brain is large enough). A critical point is fundamentally an extremely sensitive chaotic state.

The way that I understand where the impulse to do something comes from, is that it starts out as “noise”, (the flapping of the butterfly’s wing in the weather example), but then the evolution of the network leads the network to the final state (the strange attractor). The final output is an emergent property of the network, which has subtle differences depending on the “details” of the input (which butterflies’ wings flapped when) and the control parameters exerted during the evolution. The final state is a “strange attractor”, in that there are multiple paths to get there.

Chaotic behavior is observed in systems that are100.000% deterministic depending on slight differences in initial conditions. That is each state is absolutely and completely determined from the previous state. Neural systems are no where near to being that deterministic. Their output is going to be more complicated and less predictable than the chaotic systems that are known to be unpredictable. When those outputs become later inputs (inherent in the system being “coupled”) the system will only become less predictable long term. We should not be surprised if neural outputs are not predictable.

It is difficult to imagine that impulses originate de novo from the brain (ya ya I am aware of the appeal to personal incredulity fallacy, but I am not sure that it applies here). If I am a cell in the brain, what makes me generate the initial action potential that is the progenitor of a complex of impulses culiminating into a decision?

The problem is not unlike the origion of species; what brings on the initial impulse to a given decision? Are there any clues on this in brain research?

Person Expecting Compliance
Pea-brain Enabling Charlatanism
Perfectly Egomaniacal Commenter

what exact proof does pec require to agree with Steve?

Pec seem to be constantly confusing science with philosophy.
he just hides in the gaps of our current knowledge, and use those gaps to deny anything he feels like, and only what he feel like.

Pec on evolution: “We don’t know enough to say its true”

Pec on dualism: “We don’t know enough to say its not true”

Pec on intelligent universe : “I know its true”

The words “matter,” or “material,” don’t have any clear meaning. Matter is not made out of matter — so what is it? Maybe string theory or matrix theory are leading towards some kind of understanding, maybe not. But they certainly do no hypothesize that matter is made out of matter.

When the philosophy of materialism first became popular it was assumed that atoms are indivisible, hard little ultimate particles. But it turns out that atoms are mostly empty space, and their sub-particles aren’t “particles” either.

I think matter is made of relationships, information. If you want to call that materialism go ahead. It’s all vague and undefined blathering.

The main thing that we do know is that we do not know what mind is or what matter is. So making loud proclamations is dogmatic, not scientific.

This is actually the goal of yoga – the stilling of the thought waves of the mind. Quite different to the goal of mindfulness meditation.

I’m not sure what the EEG is for this state. However it reflects back on the “hard question” of consciousness. How do we explain how brain activity gives arise, not to mental phenomena, but to an awareness that observes this mental phenomena.

Indeed both mindfulness or awareness meditation – and stillness/absorption meditation – show us that consciousness is not simply thoughts. We can think thoughts (i.e. be involved in our thinking) – and we can step back and observe ourselves thinking.

This ability of a perceiving awareness to be aware of it’s mental phenomena as seperate to the perciever – and indeed to be able have an awareness of awareness itself… it is not so obvious to me how neurons firing or information processing models give rise to that.