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Daniel Wolpert: The Real Reason for Brains!
DaltheJigsaw
Mountain View Veteran
Comments
"a) Why is it that masters of meditation emphasize complete absence of active movement (stillness) in order to achieve higher awareness/consciousness?
b) Why do so many scientists, especially neuroscientists, insist on saying that we and/or our brains are machines? I've heard a few neuroscientists say that on TED. What seems difficult for them is to differentiate being able to describe or understand something in machine terms, and that thing actually being a machine. In other words, just because we can use our understanding of computers and machines to describe some aspects of brain function, doesn't mean that the brain IS a computer/machine!
It's a very ugly habit to say that people are machines. Machines are created/built by humans specifically to serve their needs and desires (i.e. mechanical slaves). Unfortunately, that's also how many people treat each other:"
As for the second, I think it's all about motion and work. The philosophers have always used the most advanced invention of the time that produces motion in order to explain the brain. Back in preindustrial days, it was all about fluids and heat because we only had fire and water and steam engines as the example. The brain was actually described in terms of fluid mechanics as a cooling and filtering mechanism for the body's "humors" and blood. Water powers gears, and we still talk of the "gears of the mind turning" left over from those days.
Then we invented electricity and motors, and the brain because a switch box. We still have the cartoon image of a switched on light bulb as a reminder of those days. Enter the calculator, and then computer, and we see our brain as an organic computer. We filled our fantasy literature with stories of computers that gain consciousness once they become as evolved as the brain.
Now it's the internet and quantum physics. The brain is an evolving network of processes interacting with each other on multiple levels like the internet. But it's still just the most recent machine held up in front of our faces.
So what will be the next great advance in machines that we will immediately apply as a paradigm to our brains? Well, we have quantum physics engineers struggling to create actual computers and useful products that utilize the maybe-maybenot rules of the subatomic instead of the yes-no world of electrons.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Given identical input, two people will assign meaning to their perceptions entirely different. An easy example. I see a yellow light and immediately start slowing down, because I perceive a warning that it's dangerous to continue and risk getting hit by someone or get a ticket. My wife speeds up, because she has the perception that the yellow light means she'd better hurry through the door before it closes. Yet we both see the same yellow light. It's just that it means something different to each of us. Feedback is weak to useless against our belief system. I have gone through plenty of yellow lights and never had an accident or ticket, and in fact was once rear-ended for slowing quickly. My wife has actually gotten tickets from trying to beat the light, but in neither case does the rational mind change our perceptions.
So our minds have to assign meaning to what our senses are telling us, and then we act on that meaning, not on the input. Our minds constantly ignore what our perceptions seem to be telling us. So our motions ("form" in the Buddhist skandha system) depend more on what we believe and memories are what we think is happening, not some camera being objective.
Skandhas, all working together, effecting each other and none in control. Our minds are not computers. What are they, then? Ah, now you're talking Zen. Sit down and take a look at your mind.