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Mapping the Mind
Rita Carter is a British medical writer. She was twice awarded the Medical Journalists' Association prize for outstanding contribution to medical journalism. The book gives a comprehensive description of our knowledge about the brain (as of 1998, when the book was written). It covers popular topics, such as the causes for optical illusions, the nature of the Mona Lisa's smile, the differences between the left and the right brain, between males and females, the mechanisms of drug addictions. It also delves into less popular subjects, such as the need for rationalization, the mechanisms of speech and reading, the "programmability" of patients with a lobotomy, the causes of face-blindness and many others. In fact, after finishing the book I can hardly name any aspect of the mind that the book didn't tell me about.
Throughout the book, Carter's descriptions invariably remain strict, rigorous and factual. The book doesn't make any empty claims about our minds, nor does it delve into controversies perpetrated by the uninformed. Everything written is always based on pure hard science, with references aplenty.
This doesn't prevent the book from being easy to read and immensely entertaining. Imagine the weirdness of thousands of clinical histories condensed into 330 pages for our education. The simplest way to understand the function of some part of the brain is to find a person in whom it is damaged. Here you have it all: A man who believed that copulating with the pavement was normal; the famous man who mistook his wife for a hat; Vladimir Nabokov and his account of synaesthesia; people with Fregoli's syndrome (who constantly mistake strangers for people they know, even though they realize they look totally different); chickens excited by Pink Floyd's "The Final Cut"; Nadean Cool, her false memories of baby-eating Satanic cults and her 120 different personalities, including a duck; and people with anosognosia, who refuse to realize their illnesses, such as blindness or paralysis. And what's even better, you will be able to find explanations for your own quirks and deficiencies. There are bugs in every program; your mind is no exception. It is an amazing feeling to be able to realize how your mind works, what makes you tick, what constitutes "you" -- why you feel, think and act the way you do.
The book is a treat for the eyes: the huge number of helpful, pretty illustrations makes it both easier to comprehend it and more pleasant to read. The numerous diagrams and brain scans illustrate every subject, showing which areas become more active when you have depression, which areas cause OCD (caudate), what causes eating disorders (faults in hypothalamus), the pathways activated during face recognition, etc. This helps dispel the illusion of our brain being an incomprehensible black box, letting you get a grip on the physical basis for thoughts. It's like ignoring the EULAs and looking at the source code for your mind for the first time.
The book consists of eight chapters. It begins with an introduction to the brain structure in "The Emerging Landscape," starting with an overview of the misconceptions of phrenology, and ending with a short comment by a neurophysiologist Horace Barlow, who explains the usefulness of a reductionist approach as a first step to studying the brain. The section covers all brain modules, the neural pathways and explains the evolution of the brain.
After we are through the basics, our journey around the brain starts. First, in the "The Great Divide," Carter explains the roles of the left and the right hemispheres and the corpus calossum -- the connection between them. Among other things Carter explains the alien hand phenomena, describes experiments that demonstrate that people whose corpus calossum have been severed exhibit two separate personalities, and touches the puzzle of left-handedness.
After that, we delve deep into the brain, into its more primitive part, the limbic system, which is responsible for our emotions. Then we are shown the nature of perceptions and how they achieve their meanings. After that the author breaks from the confines of the brain and explains the social nature of humans, and how language enables most of our social interactions.
Then Carter describes the nature of our memories. She explains amnesia and Alzheimer's disease, explains the amount of memory we have, and where different memories (such as procedural memory, fearful experiences, or normal memories) are stored. She describes H.M., a patient with most of the hippocampus and amygdala removed. His mind had no continuity at all; H.M. lost the ability to form most types of new memories, but he could form procedural memories and could learn some new music to play on the piano. Another man, after having a minor stroke in the middle of a family dinner, suddenly found that he didn't remember where he was, and no longer recognized the people at the table. He didn't do anything, though, and later told the doctor: "I felt quite happy being with them even though I didn't know who they were," and "they seemed rather an agreeable lot." We are shown why false memories are the norm, rather than an anomaly.
Finally, our most unique and advanced feature -- consciousness -- is explained. Carter describes the "working memory" model developed by Alan Baddeley, where images and speech-based information is held for short time in a cache-like space, while the "central executive" part co-ordinates the information processing. She demonstrates how complex programs can be easily triggered in patients with lobotomy. French neurologist Francois L'Hermitte once invited two of his patients, a man and a woman, to his home. He ushered the man into a bedroom without explanation. In the middle of the day the man saw the ready-to-use bed and immediately undressed, preparing to go to sleep. When a woman was let in and saw the rumpled bed, she immediately started to make it. Carter explains the illusion of the free will and its evolutionary origins.
She ends the book with the optimistic conclusion: "I believe one thing is already clear: there is no ghost in this place, no monsters in the depths, no lands ruled by dragons. What today's mind voyagers are discovering is instead a biological system of awe-inspiring complexity. There is no need for us to satisfy our sense of wonder by conjuring phantoms -- the world within our heads is more marvelous than anything we can dream up."
What does this book leaves the reader afterwards? It left me with the insatiable desire to immediately read it again, this time with a notebook and a pencil at hand, so that I do not miss a single fact, a single lesson, a single bit of truth about who I am. To me the book was perfect -- a unique combination of scientific rigor and entertaining writing. Each amusing medical account was always accompanied with a detailed explanation of the physiological basis for it and a handy illustration. It was complete, well-structured and accessible.
I think it was the best book (fiction or non-fiction) that I read in the past year. The only other book that approached it was another take on the nature of the mind - the amusing Permutation City by Greg Egan, which takes the technologically feasible idea of mind uploading and pushes it to its limits, exploring the philosophical and mathematical consequences along the way.
You can browse the book at Google Print. Please do so and then read it in full. Learning about yourself should be the top thing on your agenda, if you consider yourself an intelligent creature. And for a computer scientist or a programmer there can hardly be a more interesting subject than the most complex software application, written over the millions of years, an amalgamation of legacy features, sloppy code, perfectly optimized routines, special cases and the ever-harmful neural goto operators. "Gnothi seauton," and have fun doing it.
You can purchase Mapping the Mind from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews. To see your own review here, carefully read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
As a matter of fact, I used to have a sweatshirt that said "Know Thyself" with a picture of Socrates on it. That was in high school. People read it and told me that was gay. Then I tried wearing it in college once about 4 years later. People read it and told me it was a cool shirt. Go figure.
Input -> /dev/null
/dev/random -> Output
It was called Dianetics. ;^)
I have to stop wasting so much time reading Slashdot. It's interfering with my crystal meth addiction.
Google launches a new service the "Google map of your mind"! Find out what you are really thinking, zoom in on areas of interest, let your friends know where they stand in your mind! Only on Google, coming soon (beta).
Why we Lie, by David Livingston Smith
The Naked Ape, by Desmond Morris
-Hentai [in vita non pacem est]
Mapping the mind is easy. Just find neuron #1.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
The mind is more than the brain. The brain is merely a processing unit.
and Mind the Mapping
And he wonders why his karma is negative...
Sounds similar to "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" a book written in the late 60s (or early 70s) on the a doctors experience with patients with various mental illnesses. Excellent read.
Someone you trust is one of us.
...but now I have a headache
Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.
...the 2003 Reith lecture was also rather good.
Reductionism is a limited approach to discovering the mind - it works when it works, but that's not always the case.
I am willing to make a bold prediction - the abtract world of mental processes will never be reduced to the physical matter from which they arise. It's a one-way street.
they were just being juvenal.
Starsucks
...in the shower. And last night before bed. And in just a bit here to some gixmodo gadget pr0n. Oh, wait, not like that? My bad. Time to zip up and skidaddle...
Rita has certainly done a thorough job of covering the issue.
If you want to know why she is wrong read this link..........a chapter by chapter (blow by blow if you will) listing of faults in her research and reasoning.
http://human-brain.org/mapping.html
So, just what sort of licensing scheme would the average mind have anyways?
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
which acounts for emergent behavior and the like read Society of Mind by Marvin Minski ( http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0671 657135/102-0534525-9042506?v=glance )
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I'm not crazy, you're the one who's crazy! - suicidal tendencies
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
The review leaves one with the impression that this Rita Carter person explains more in this book than scientists actually know. Let me save everyone the suspense and say that no, she doesn't.
For instance, "explaining Alzheimer's" is an extremely misleading statement. She might explain what we currently know about Alzheimer's, but that is sadly little.
I'm not saying the book is no good (how should I know?), just that the review is a little misleading.
"Ceasar was a great dead badass! Join my hippy opinion pollin' union? Eat sewage rats, you bastard! Taxes are free! Savage war aftereffects reverberate, killin' my puppy. I jump on only plump greased stewardesses!"
Can somebody mod this as offtopic? The last State of the Union Address has nothing to do with the book we're discussing here.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
I think you hit the wrong submit button.
Fortunately for you, someone else has already taken the time to understand you and present the results in entertaining, easily digestible, but at the same time scientifically rigorous format.
How perfect for those of us who need instant results in this fast-food, breakneck-pace world. Who needs years of introspection and self-enlightenment when you can read about it on the train to work?
I'm not good in groups. It's difficult to work in a group when you're omnipotent. - Q
I am always very skeptical of any of these books and/or papers which purport to explain to you "how your mind works."
Although it seems to get forgotten quite often, there is a big, big difference between knowing _how_ something works and knowing _why_ it works.
From (semi?)direct observation we can see _how_ a brain functions. It's a collection of neronal fibers, little chemical receptors and excreeter's etc, but knowing _why_ these connections produce the complex behavior they do is still an unknown thing.
What differences in the way the connections are made determine whether someone will be a new Mozart? A new Newton? Why was this person so emotionally labile, while this other one was rock steady even from the samy family? Why do two children from the same parents, with very similar genes have vastly different likes, dislikes and personalities?
Remember that not everything can be ascribed to genetics and chance.
These are the interesting questions, but as of yet no one knows the answer to any of them.
Anyone who tells you different is trying to sell you something or get a grant approved.
That'd still be maps.google.com but with a better resolution than that provided by QuickBird.
Too many books have purported to finally explain this aspect or that aspect of the human psyche, or (worse yet) explain the entirety of the human mind. And invariably, three months later someone else writes an equally exhaustive study that contradicts many points of the previous one.
My conclusion? There is no such thing as the human mind. There's Fred's mind. There's Alice's mind. There's Bob's mind. But the human mind? Some catch-all that accurately describes why we, as a species, do the things we do? Don't believe it.
That's not to say this particular book wouldn't be a good read. In fact, it sounds fascinating. But I'm a lot more interested in how much of it will turn out to be bunk in three months.
Maybe not, but wait till Google Maps gets its next improvements.
I'm not good in groups. It's difficult to work in a group when you're omnipotent. - Q
That's actually somewhat amusing, now that it's pretty clear that whatever priestess was on duty there at any given time was probably stoned out of her mind on hallucinogenic gases rising out of rock fissures.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Bob: Hey Fred, how are you?
Fred: Terrible Bob; I hate my wife, but I don't know how to break it off with her.
Bob: Well, I had an uncle once who used to get rid of girlfriends he was tired of by acting insane.
Fred: Really? And that worked?
Bob: Oh, sure. He'd start pretending like he was hearing voices, or thought he was Prince Albert, stuff like that. Eventually the gals just got fed up and left him.
Fred: I don't know...How could this work on my wife? We've been married 10 years!
Bob: Well, just go for something really crazy. Pretend that you think she's a hat or something like that.
Fred: Say, great idea! I'll start tonight!
Bob: Just remember, gotta stick with it, no matter what!
no lands ruled by dragons.
I don't know, I kind of like the Dragons.
Who wants a map of my mind. It is way scary in there:)
How can you map the mind when it is constantally changing?
Apparently God has the right to inspect my thoughts at any time. I'm not allowed to hum or whistle any music that I do not have the appropriate rights for. Reverse engineering is a big NO, unless I am Norweigian. The good news is that I don't see any restrictions on interfacing with other minds, although non-consensual port scans will be construed as hostile.
I assure you, that it is quite anatomically impossible for a man to "know" himself... in the Biblical sense.
My copy of this book is littered with margin notes of exactly the type at the linked site.
Her lack of rigor was was a major disappointment.
It will be the last book authored by Rita Carter that I will ever read.
SteveM
That's not true, Rahl. We both know that you regularly take huge objects in your mouth.
I thought we had something special.
Speak for yourself. I am the center of my very own universe.
in the matrix movie "Know Thyself" is also what the sign in the oracle's kitchen says.
When the reductionists can accurately design input (via senses), or, even better, by-passing the primary senses and providing input at the brain-translated sensory areas, and ACCURATELY predict impressions, reactions, and responses, then I'll be impressed.
I promise.
Take the 90-Day Challenge! http://rwmurker.bodybyvi.com/
Definition of: gnothi seauton
gnothi seauton (Greek): Know thyself. (A precept inscribed in gold letters over the portico of the temple at Delphi. Its authorship has been ascribed to Pythagoras, to several of the wise men of Greece, and to Phemonoe, a mythical Greek poetess. According to Juvenal, this precept descended from heaven.
San Francisco Photographers
Finally, our most unique and advanced feature -- consciousness -- is explained.
Oh, really.
Carter describes the "working memory" model developed by Alan Baddeley, where images and speech-based information is held for short time in a cache-like space, while the "central executive" part co-ordinates the information processing. She demonstrates how complex programs can be easily triggered in patients with lobotomy.
Is the ability to be programmed the same as being conscious? So my computer in front of me here is conscious, because I can program it?
Tell me, can she explain why it is that we aren't all just unconscious zombies, doing exactly what we do?
What difference can it possibly make that I experience anything? Don't talk to me about processing- that can all happen equally well if I'm not staring at it.
A movie playing in a theater plays just as well and just the same whether anybody's sitting in it or not.
So, why are we here? Why are we in the theater, watching the show, rather than there just being a theater playing the story of the universe, but nobody's watching it?
Can her explanation of the machinery of the mind- can it answer that one?
(More to my immediate position: Why the hell am I watching a movie about people who argue that nobody's watching the movie? I want my money back!)
Carter explains the illusion of the free will and its evolutionary origins.
So,... Since when is Consciousness the same thing as free will?
I don't care about free will, I care about Consciousness. Experiencing.
While I respect the good doctor's understanding of mechanics, i'm still not understanding how this explains why we're having an experience at all.
You can explain processing mechanisms until you're blue in the face, it's still not going to convince me that there needs to be any anything out there at all- it could all run, exactly as you say, just as well in a program in a supercomputer in a dark closet somewhere, that nobody every saw or heard of.
The eagerness to say "Consciousness is Explained" when it really isn't- that's got to tell you something.
I mean, sure- maybe you have an explanation. But not a convincing one. I could say that blue fairies make people conscious, and my explanation would be: "Blue fairies are why you're conscious." but that doesn't really convince anyone.
Sadly, everyone seems caught up in the Scientists' version of the God of the Gaps: "We just need more complexity. Make it complex enough, and consciousness will just emerge." Yeah. There's a scientific exlpanation for you: "Consciousness just emerges." Just replace the word "emerge" with the word "magicly appear."
Remember, we're not interested in the behavior of machinery. We're interested in why there is an experience, any experience, period. By experience, we're not talking about neural encodings and other Neural Correlates of Consciousness. We're talking about the actual experience, itself.
Why do I care? I'd like a model of the world that includes me in it. I find it inconvenient to keep justifying a world that can account for every single last thing, except the mechanism I use to actually experience it. It's like being able to use a microscope, but not being able to talk about the microscope itself.
You believe in "Know Thyself?" I posit that understanding the motions of the neurons in your brain is only a hair closer to understanding yourself, than understanding the operation of the digits of your fingers, or the brake in your car.
To really know yourself, you have to go all the way.
"Every cognitive scientist but me is an moron. Someday, they will all recognize my greatness! In the meantime, the have censored my ideas from their journals because I prove what idiots they all are, so I have to publish everything I write on the web."
Seriously, this site hits all of the "angry crackpot" buttons. The author, one Yehouda Harpaz, has a chemistry degree, did "some research in protein engineering, published several papers, but lost interest. Part of this is because of the stupid way scientific articles are published currently." Direct quote from the site. I suggest taking this site with a big grain of salt.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
As a flaming faggot of a man myself, I am incensed that you would label this dribbling trash "omgwtfFAGG)T". This is a disgrace even to the cum-smeared faces of frothy cockgobblers worldwide. Shame on all of you!
Not really, of course, but in this case "three months" was an arbitrary stretch of time. It takes longer for some "definitive" works on the mind to become not-so-definitive, but it happens all of them eventually, at least so far.
Perhaps this one's different, but like I said, I'm skeptical. I don't think anyone has all the answers on the human mind. And as I meantioned earlier, I don't really believe in the human mind as a catch-all for all people.
I know this is slashdot, where everyone thinks they are a super-genius, but that intro was arrogant and pretentious beyond belief. Was the rest of the review any good? I couldn't read anymore past that intro.
This book by her is more recent than Mapping The Mind. Does that mean Mapping the Mind is obsolete?
Carter, Rita, 1949-
TITLE Exploring consciousness / Rita Carter.
PUBLISHER Berkeley : University of California Press, c2002.
DESCRIPT 320 p. : ill. (chiefly col.) ; 23 cm.
BIBLIOG Includes bibliographical references and index.
I am Nolan Ryan, and I approve this methage.
That should be genothi seauton (gamma, epsilon, nu, omicron, theta, iota; sigma, epsilon, alpha, upsilon, tau, omicron, nu; since slashdot doesn't allow HTML entities).
What is the world coming to if people can't even transliterate 5th century Athenian Greek properly?
...En að Besta Sem Guð Hefur Skapað Er Nýr Dagur
UPDATE - Shave your balls.
1) Map the female mind first
2) Ladies, before your relationship gets too serious, give your man a compimentary copy instead of expecting him to know what your thinking (and more importantly, feeling) all of the time
It would save us all a lot of time and trouble. Most guys are easy to figure out: sex, money, power, position, and a good time. The exact order depends on the person, and there may be a few other factors thrown in the mix and one or two on the list that I gave that may not be much of a factor, but that's basically it. Almost anything your typical guy will say or do can be explained by that list, with minor modifications based on his personality and personal traits.
You women, on the other hand. Many of you are impossible to figure out. We could use a little help.
You know, when I hear about "the illusion of free will", I always wonder about one thing: what about the quantum brain idea? Has it been debunked? And, even if there is no free will: we cannot determine it either way. For this to be possible, we need to know all factors, from the past AND the present.
This sig does not contain any SCO code.
I highly recommend the book "How The Mind Works" by Steven Pinker. It does an awesome job at explaining the workings of the human mind. He treats the mind as software that was written by evolution. Unlike the book "Mapping The Mind", it doesn't really get into the physical details of the brain at all. After you read the book I guarantee that you'll have a much larger appreciation for the amazing tasks that our mind performs. Truly remarkable book. It's the only non-fiction science book that I felt like reading cover-to-cover in one sitting, and the only non-fiction science book that I'm considering reading a second time.
There is nothing at all the same between the minds of different people. Me for instance, I don't have a left and right brain, I have an north and south brain. I process visual information in my pinkie toe. I can't imagine what anyone else is feeling in a given situation because my empathy centers are made out of broccoli. Instead of a hippocampus, I have a hippopotamus.
Seriously, there are things that are alike in all of our brains. Language, for instance. If there were no deep structures in the brain that dictated how languages are formed, many languages would have different basic structures. Instead, at a deep level all languages are similar enough that any person can learn any language. When seeing another person experienceing a particular feeling, almost everyone will experience the same feeling.
We are still a long way from understanding the human psyche, and some things that this book says will undoubtedly be proven incorrect. That is how science works. The human psyche is the most complex thing known to man, but ultimately it will be understood.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
with the facts then the reviewer. Many of the reviewer's comments seem to impute causality to certain structures of the brain, but it's often an open question whether the deviant structures are cause or effect or side-effect. The question is open because these are simply correlations between behaviour and structure, but there is no causal explanation. It's somewhat similar to these "studies" that come out every so often about diet. People who drink coffee die earlier than people that don't. Then the next study says, "Oh wait, no, it's the other way around!" And so on... They flip-flop because they have no fucking clue by what causal mechanism the effect is produced. So, till a causal mechanism is elucidated, I recommend taking these "studies" that map function to location as the beginning of the inquiry, not the end.
But with philosophers, you never know, really...
My synaesthesia is a feature, not a bug.
I wouldn't say we're 95% there yet. My doctor, for one, asks me in I'm in pain, he doesn't scan for firing c-fibers.
Furthermore many reject your belief that is is only a matter of time. There is a so-called explanatory gap that science may never conquer. Just because there's always a physical correlate/identity to mental states doesn't mean they're the same thing.
How a bat "sees" with just sonar and how it can be explained by physics are very different. Speaking of which, Nagel's bat essay and this bibliography have more on this if anyone's interested.
"I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, when he said, 'I drank what?'"
>
>Can somebody mod this as offtopic? The last State of the Union Address has nothing to do with the book we're discussing here.
Obviously the mods aren't touch typists.
If free will is an illusion, how can I go on believing that I am a better person than all those bad, evil, stupid people out there? I have made better choices in my life and therefore am more deserving of all the good things I have. Why, I might actually have to feel empathy for them instead of the smug superiority I feel now!
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
The main site has a bit of questionable material (not all bad, but not all good, either), but his criticism of Rita's work rings true to me.
First of all, he does tell you to feel free to take it with a grain of salt, but "to check it with an expert on brain anatomy or clinical neuroscience".
Secondly, what he says (for the most part) agrees with what I've learned in my research. I am no expert, but my research does involve reproducing cognitive and neurophysiological phenomena of the hippocampus (working on a Ph.D. in Computer Science), and much of my background reading agrees with what Yehouda is saying. Assuming that his quotes of Rita's are valid (I have not read her book), Rita is vastly exaggerating what we know about the brain.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Carter explains the illusion of the free will and its evolutionary origins.
Jesus H., another pseudo-intellectual blathering on about the 'illusion' of free will. I certainly hope this sophomoric proclamation is an invention of the reviewer and not the author. The last thing I'd want to read is a book by someone who never got past how 'cool' it was to be able to use what he learned in Philosophy 101 to annoy the shit out of his party guests.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
Shouldn't that be Thales to Aristotle? :) (Sorry, trying to regurgitate from my Humanities class in the hope that I will retain enough of it to impress someone someday.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
...in Soviet Russia, the Map minds You!
(oh christ I can't believe I just did that...)
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
Cool, now that it's feasible perhaps you can explain how to make it work...
I hardly think that Consciousness can ever be explained as many would like to believe by reducing our brains to "computers". Where our brains are simply computers manipulating input and generating a specific output according to a set of rules - programs if you will.
A great argument for this is that of John Searle, called the Chinese room argument. Rather than type out the whole argument I will cut and past from this site: http://www.iep.utm.edu/c/chineser.htm
The Chinese room argument - John Searle's (1980a) thought experiment and associated (1984) derivation - is one of the best known and widely credited counters to claims of artificial intelligence (AI), i.e., to claims that computers do or at least can (someday might) think. According to Searle's original presentation, the argument is based on two truths: brains cause minds, and syntax doesn't suffice for semantics. Its target, Searle dubs "strong AI": "according to strong AI," according to Searle, "the computer is not merely a tool in the study of the mind, rather the appropriately programmed computer really is a mind in the sense that computers given the right programs can be literally said to understand and have other cognitive states" (1980a, p. 417). Searle contrasts "strong AI" to "weak AI". According to weak AI, according to Searle, computers just simulate thought, their seeming understanding isn't real (just as-if) understanding, their seeming calculation as-if calculation, etc.; nevertheless, computer simulation is useful for studying the mind (as for studying the weather and other things).
Against "strong AI," Searle (1980a) asks you to imagine yourself a monolingual English speaker "locked in a room, and given a large batch of Chinese writing" plus "a second batch of Chinese script" and "a set of rules" in English "for correlating the second batch with the first batch." The rules "correlate one set of formal symbols with another set of formal symbols"; "formal" (or "syntactic") meaning you "can identify the symbols entirely by their shapes." A third batch of Chinese symbols and more instructions in English enable you "to correlate elements of this third batch with elements of the first two batches" and instruct you, thereby, "to give back certain sorts of Chinese symbols with certain sorts of shapes in response." Those giving you the symbols "call the first batch 'a script' [a data structure with natural language processing applications], "they call the second batch 'a story', and they call the third batch 'questions'; the symbols you give back "they call . . . 'answers to the questions'"; "the set of rules in English . . . they call 'the program'": you yourself know none of this. Nevertheless, you "get so good at following the instructions" that "from the point of view of someone outside the room" your responses are "absolutely indistinguishable from those of Chinese speakers." Just by looking at your answers, nobody can tell you "don't speak a word of Chinese." Producing answers "by manipulating uninterpreted formal symbols," it seems "[a]s far as the Chinese is concerned," you "simply behave like a computer"; specifically, like a computer running Schank and Abelson's (1977) "Script Applier Mechanism" story understanding program (SAM), which Searle's takes for his example. But in imagining himself to be the person in the room, Searle thinks it's "quite obvious . . . I do not understand a word of the Chinese stories. I have inputs and outputs that are indistinguishable from those of the native Chinese speaker, and I can have any formal program you like, but I still understand nothing." "For the same reasons," Searle concludes, "Schank's computer understands nothing of any stories" since "the computer has nothing more than I have in the case where I understand nothing" (1980a, p. 418). Furthermore, since in the thought experiment "nothing . . . depends on the details of Schank's programs," the same "would apply to any [computer] simulation" of any "human mental phenomenon" (1980a, p. 417); that's all it would be, simulation. Cont
Gerald Edelman, nobel laureate, and author of a series of books on human consciousness, is the only author I've read who has openly stated he has defined consciousness. His book Bright Air, Brilliant Fire is a summary of his previous findings. Antonio Domasio has studied consciousness for decades. His earlier work Descartes' Error : Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain is a good jumping off point, especially as he starts off with a recounting of the case of Phineas Gage, a patient whose case was key to studies of the brain by way of studying brain injuries. Damasio's other book, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness should be of interest to those studying AI, as the book takes a close look at the issue of emotion/feeling in decision making. It takes note of interesting cases where damage to areas of the brain leave patients able to reason clearly but unable to arrive at decisions as their emotional centres are impaired.Calvin Williams is worth a read, recently he published A Brief History of the Mind: From Apes to Intellect and Beyond which makes for a quick, easy read and an intro to his ideas. Generally the best and the brightest still view consciousness as an enigma but much has been accomplished in unraveling the mystery. Perhaps the most telling point is that neuroscience has taken the lead and the philosphers now follow in their footsteps.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
"Mapping the mind is easy. Just find neuron #1."
This book must be for females. Males don't need directions.
...allow one to interface with multiple minds at once?
...or let one transmit data to a null port when a beautiful mind is within visible range (or on a computer screen) and interface is not possible or likely?
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
Yeah, people who survey the esoteric knowledge of scientists and present it in a summary form so that non-experts can learn something are monsters. They are ripping off the scientists who spend decades getting to the frontier of their field. The knowledge was hard for them to get - it should be hard for everyone else too!
Don't stand on the shoulders of giants! Pick your field of specialization and be completely ignorant about everything else! Knowledge is scare and should be hoarded! Fight the educators!! TAKE BACK THE KNOWLEDGE FROM THE LAYMEN!
Stop the Slashdot Effect! Don't read the articles!
here
The creationists (and other pseudoscientists) keep making that "bold" prediction.
Then science comes in and stomps out all the fun, and then the charlatans move to the *next* thing we don't know and start claming that we'll *NEVER* know it cause it's *way too hard*...
Pah!
For a mind-expanding book with many wonderful insights about the mind, Lily's essay, though old, is still excellent.
Tell me again, who knew Mary was a virgin, and how did they know?
o, why are we here? Why are we in the theater, watching the show, rather than there just being a theater playing the story of the universe, but nobody's watching it?
Because the theater is showing a live feed of a camera trained on the theater itself. We are *in* the movie as well as watching it. That we experience the movie is an essential element *of* the movie; otherwise, it would be a different movie.
This is just the Anthropic Principle all over again. There are other, empty theaters with nobody watching themselves on the screen, and thus nobody in those theaters is marveling at their own existence on screen and wondering how they got there. In our theater, there are people, and many of them think it's really weird and strange that they can see themselves and everyone in the movie.
Others just realize that we are the movie and enjoy the show.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
An excellent complementary reading would be On Intelligence, by Jeff Hawkins, the founder of Palm, Handspring, and most recently, Numenta. It specifically explores the workings of intelligence and memory. (Don't let the rather uninspired title deter you. It was actually a very fascinating read, and very easy to understand -- full of metaphors and examples.)
I haven't read "Mapping the Mind," but it sounds like an equally good read.
Signature.
It would'nt have to be that complicated and I'd argue that it passed the Turing test (in a way). It would be handled the same as a human troll (ignored, modded down, banned). Trolls would have moved the goalposts for the Turing test. As an logical alternative I point out that trolls, by definition, are not capable of coherant discussion, so themselves fail the turing test.
The only question is where to test it?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
The quoted review displays the sort of vehement ignorance characteristic of religious types, who seem to think that impassioned handwaving and endless repetition can somehow substitute for a cogent argument.
Specific thoughts, memories etc can already be mapped (with the subject's cooperation) fairly precisely to areas of the brain. F'rinstance, stimulating a particular point can reproducibly trigger a particular memory - a face, a place, a Guns'n'Roses song. Similarly with brain damage to particular areas disrupting particular functions. There are numerous examples quoted in Dennett's excellent (if over-ambitiously titled) "Consciousness Explained", which must be a decade or so old now. Denying this stuff is heading into Flat-Earther territory.
The "objective correlate" bit is bizarre; it reads like a sort of reverse epiphenomenalism. As if subjective qualia were the only "significant" aspects of a mental occurrence, and the physical aspects are just an irrelevant side-effect. There are certainly open questions regarding qualia and their place in an ontology of the mind, but religious prejudices like this don't contribute anything to the debate.
The last two sentences are nonsensical garbage. I'm not sure whether the author is deliberately misrepresenting physicalism or just misunderstanding it, but the claim made is roughly equivalent to "software can't just be a bunch of bits, because there's a Slashdot page in my browser window and there are no 'Slashdot' bits versus 'kuro5hin' bits, there are simply bits".
(Yes, I'm aware that you were just quoting this review, not necessarily supporting it. As you can tell, this kind of dogma-dressed-up-as-argument gets me riled.)
To know theyself one must understand how one
has reached the moment they are at and what processes
govern their actions nad reactions.
It will take several years to properly read and understand everything in that book about your conciousness.
If you find material like this interesting, you'll also find Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the mysteries of the Human Mind and The Man who mistook his wife for a hat: And other clinical tales by V. S. Ramachandran and Oliver Sacks. I've read the first one and Amazon is shipping the second one to me. Ramachandran goes into detail about Phantom limbs and phantom pain, vision processing by the brain, and gleans information about the brain by examining patients who have different kinds of neurological disorders. He makes some really amazing and intuitive hypotheses and tries out some amazingly simple, yet brilliant experiments to figure how exactly certain parts of the brain work.
Vivin Suresh Paliath
http://vivin.net
I like
I know it's bad form to reply to the same topic twice, but I realized I wanted to add something...
It's like being able to use a microscope, but not being able to talk about the microscope itself.
No, it's like being unable to put the microscope under itself. It's just not possible, and never will be. An eye cannot look at itself and examine the lenses and optic nerves; an ear cannot hear its own mechanism, only the 'sound' they make; the taste buds on your tongue cannot possibly taste themselves. On a non-sensory level, the Incompleteness Theorem has shown that no system of logic can prove its own validity.
Any method of examining something, be it sensory or logical, or emotional (your cannot justify your intuition WITH your intuition), or communicative (you cannot take someone's word that they are telling the truth), or anything.... no source of ideas can examine or verify even its own existence.
We cannot perceive our own perception. But, like an eye looking in the mirror, or at another eye, we can perceive the METHOD of our perception, and other methods of perception, and understand that when this part of a brain physically does that, then the subjective experience is this. There is no distinction between the two, they are actually one and the same, and there is no reason to think otherwise; it's only a matter of perspective.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
No EEG, EOG, EMG, PET, CAT, or MRI will tell you what I'm thinking or feeling. They might tell you _that_ I'm thinking, but not _what_ I'm thinking. No empirical procedure can determine whether I'm thinking about picking up litter on Earth Day or planning a local bank heist.
They may not be able to tell that you are thinking about a bank heist, but there are currently devices that can tell what direction you want a cursor to move on a computer screen. (Google will turn up lots of related links for you.) This disproves your statement: a physical device does exist that has been implanted in a human brain (of a 24-year old paraplegiac) that is capable of telling the specific content of a thought. It's a simple thought, but a thought nonetheless.
Is this significant? Well, this particular application makes it easier for the patient to live his life. It lets him do things like check e-mail (and presumably perform other related tasks on a computer) that he would otherwise have more difficulty doing.
Many of the reviewer's comments seem to impute causality to certain structures of the brain, but it's often an open question whether the deviant structures are cause or effect or side-effect. The question is open because these are simply correlations...
From an epistemological point of view, the only way we know anything other than what we can directly sense is by "simple correlations", as David Hume noticed long ago. How do I know that the bread I eat today will nourish me and not poison me? Only because that is what happened yesterday and the day before, for as long as I have lived.
In the case of the brain, we know, for example, that Broca's area must have something important to do specifically with speech because damage to that area (say by a stroke) will cause a characteristic type of aphasia, but leave intact most other functions including cognition and motor control of the mouth and tongue. Note that a stroke is not the only way of acquiring brain damage. To say that it is all "simple correlation" leaves us with the choice of backward causality (loss of speech causes brain damage), which is a bizarre assertion, or some unidentified factor that causes all possible forms of damage specifically to Broca's area and independently causes aphasia - equally bizarre.
"The good reader is a rarer swan than the good writer."
we do not know how the brain works. sure we understand the chemical processes and can correlate them to trends in personality. we have some idea about memory and the input mechanism of the brain. however higher functions like language and consciousness we have only guesses on how these things come about.
the computer model of a brain is very popular when describing the brain. is the brain a simply a wet version of a turing machine? my own opinion the brain is a probabilistic version of a turing machine described in quantum mechanics. the argument against this is where is quantum mechanical behavior found in the brain? does the brain have processes that are small enough to take advantage of quantum mechanics?
the idea that the brain is a non-probabilistic turing machine or just a normal turing machine i believe is weak. evidence shows that some savants can crunch prime numbers faster than computers which are normal turing machines. it's known that quantum algorithms for prime number factorization are must faster then normal algorithms.
anyway we have a far way to go to understand how the brain works...
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
Know Thyself! It is also very true to me. However, the brain and the mind is not the same. Brain: millions of cells in your head Mind: a machine handling pictures, sensations, emotions, voices, sounds. You can look at these things without a body :)
as objects like we know the things around us. The Greeks probably meant knowing ourselves as subjects as we have always been able to do but so seldom do. Also, the temple at Delphi was the Temple of Apollo.
I'm getting so sick of science worship, and people who cannot grasp the fact that there are (not can be) some things that science cannot describe. And no, I'm not going to talk about pseudoscience, but elements in nature itself.
As for the pop-"scientific" finding religion in the brain stuff, I call BUNK. Being that religious experience differs from one religion to the next, and further, from one individual to the next, it would be impossible to point to one area of the brain and say it causes religious experience. But then again you might be claiming a hit of LSD is a spiritual experience, which it may be to some individuals, but it completely fails to encompass the latin mass, a deep state of meditation, the joy of ritual dance, or sacrfice to your divine reality of choice.
I'm sick of people of the church of science actively going against religion and spirituosity, while bitching about the christian right attacking them. I am an atheist, and science enthusiast btw, I just get sick of people who hype science up beyond what it is, an inductive logical method for building simple understandable general models of complex and unique events, based mostly on mere probability.
Looking at that definition, we can see that if you do your "paranoid delusional murder" experiment, it might work on some portion of society, but there is no guarentee of universality. Also that statment shows a lack of psychological understanding, since all three conditions are mutally exclusive.
Next you confuse application, with knowledge, just like the guy who misunderstood (or didn't read) Nagel's bat essay. People have been doing neurosurgery for millenia, but only recently have we understood how it worked. Same thing with the brainwashing you describe, it has been happening as long as their has been humans, but only recently have we understood. Same with drugs. Same with most medicines. Application and knowlege are completely different.
Then understanding and knowlege is completely different as well. You might UNDERSTAND my neural connections, and firings, but you can never KNOW them, or what they mean. Unless of course I do have a specific center of my brain devoted to the coffee shop from where I type this, and from which the memory of my typeing this will be formed and based. And to make a universal understanding, then everyone must have an identical symbol of this place, whether or not they have visited it. And yes, they must be identical, for the more variation between this ONE symbol the LESS we will ever be able to understand a person in their totality (as a thing-in-itself to use philosophy jargon). And now that you cannot understand that one symbol, what about all cognative structure built upon it?
I posit that it might be one day possible to tell the complete state of the individual AT THE MOMENT, but impossible to ever tell the reason behind that state with any degree of accuracy, nor to be able to predict future states occuring from that state.
To paraphrase Kant, you can never KNOW the thing-in-itself, but you are capable of understanding properties of the thing-in-itself (representations).
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
The whole basis of the anti-materialism today comes from one man. Saul Kripke in his book Naming and Necessity describes the problem of the mind/brain identity reduction. The following is a summary of his argument from one of my unpublished papers...
------------------
An interesting implication of Kripke semantics is the argument against identity theorists. Identity theorists hold that mental states can be identical to physical states. Take the sentence 'Pain is C-fiber stimulation'; for this sentence to be true in all possible worlds, 'pain' must be a rigid designator and so must 'C-fiber stimulation'. 'Pain' is obviously a rigid designator but what about 'C-fiber stimulation'. Surely we can conceive of a world where there are entities that lack C-fiber stimulation but feel pain or have C-fiber stimulation but do not feel pain. Is there any material identity to pain? Kripke says no, 'pain' is to have pain or is essential to pain. Therefore anything that fixes a reference to 'pain' must be pain.
-----------------
To explain further take the example H2O. Water is H2O is a necessary statement. The symbol H2O points to a model in which water is reduced down to it's chemical components. A world(universe) where the symbol H2O exists is also a world where water must also exist. There can be no other thing that H2O points towards that is not water and vice versa. Something similar is a bachelor is unmarried. This is a tautology.
Now think about the mental state of a color. Think of a patch of red. Then let XYZ equal the reduction of the color red. Today we think the symbol XYZ as a wavelength of photons. Now is there a possible world where XYZ exists and not the color red? Sure maybe when someone perceives XYZ they see the color blue. XYZ is red is not the same sort of statement as H2O is water.
So there are weaknesses in scientific materialism. Personally I believe materialism is true but needs to be adapted. I think Information Theory may lead to resolve some of these problems. But we must first understand that these problems do indeed exist and not shew them off because our own philosophical agenda is materialism.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
People use the fact that we are functional creatures all the time. People like to think they have free will and can make chaotic choices but the fact is every choice is a product of inputs. Social Engineering is figuring out what inputs produce what outputs and then engaging peoples "free will" to get them to make the choices the SE wanted them to make.
That's where Gorgias' argument about whether or not Helen was to blame for the Trojan war falls apart. He couldn't fatham the possibility that Helen made a choice in her own mind because it wasn't a situational vacuum. Therefore the situation must be to blame in some way. He doesn't even consider the possibility that Helen actually wanted to go with Paris because she wanted to and for no other reason.
People act like if you convince somebody of something it diminishes their ability to make a choice of their own mind because you provided input.
This lack of free will comes in handy at parties where nobody is drinking the punch but everyone wants vodka. The obvious solution is to put the vodka in the punch and then everyone is happy. Despite obviously manipulating the situation people did make the choice of their own mind to drink the punch.
Determinism isn't about *what* choices you make, it's about *why* you make them.
Work Safe Porn
The very ancient Vedic civilization in India understood the importance of this as well, and there is identical word in Samskrita for this: "Swadhyay". It means, literally, study of the self (Swa = self + Adhyaya = study)
There is also a spiritual movement in India with the same name, started by Rev. Pandurang Shastri Athavale.
DesiDude
Finally, our most unique and advanced feature -- consciousness -- is explained. Carter describes the "working memory" model developed by Alan Baddeley, where images and speech-based information is held for short time in a cache-like space, while the "central executive" part co-ordinates the information processing.
...
Coincidentally, today the journal PLoS Biology released an article, where researchers describe a neuronal model they've devised of certain aspects of consciousness.
Synopsis (for the layman): Assessing Consciousness: Of Vigilance and Distractedness
Research paper: Ongoing Spontaneous Activity Controls Access to Consciousness: A Neuronal Model for Inattentional Blindness
In general, Stanislas Dehaene (one of the paper's authors) has some very cool publications on neuroscience, consciousness, cognition, and so forth. You can find them here.
Here's a quote from the aforementioned synopsis:
Have you ever walked smack into a parking meter or tripped over something on the sidewalk? Embarrassing as such incidents may be, they're the product of normal brain function. The brain is continuously bombarded with sensory information about the environment but perceives just a fraction of these inputs. The rest--pertinent details or not--is filtered out. It's thought that consciousness emerges from the activity of multiple spontaneous neural processors that run in parallel and connect to a higher order cognitive network that mediates the conscious perception. But this higher order network has limited processing capacity. That means if you're distracted, your brain can't accommodate additional sensory information, like "there's a parking meter in front of you, look out!"
To understand how spontaneous brain processing interacts with higher order cognition, Stanislas Dehaene and Jean-Pierre Changeux modeled the dynamic properties of brain activity with computer simulations. Their simulations show that while spontaneous brain activity sometimes facilitates processing, more often it competes with external stimuli for access to consciousness. Intriguingly, the results of the computer simulations very closely match physiological and psychophysical experimental data and thus shed new light on how intrinsic brain activity modulates conscious perception.
With higher vigilance states, weaker external stimuli are able to ignite the global workspace. But paying attention to one thing narrows your perceptive capacity. Once ignited by one stimulus, the network cannot consciously process any others. Dehaene and Changeux propose that spontaneous activity--which operates within an "anatomically distinct set of workplace neurons"--offers an organism a measure of autonomy relative to the external world. While this decoupling of internal thought and external stimuli does have its disadvantages--like that pesky parking meter--it also provides the opportunity for introspection and creativity, which the authors argue is likely to "play a crucial role in the spontaneous generation of novel, flexible behavior."
There is no objectively knowing mind from within mind, so don't be fooled by no stinkin' namby-pamby scientist. The combined knowledge of all the world's scientists can't claim shit on mind compared to a diligent Buddhist.
Over and out.
- IP
That's because most people in college have come to terms with their feelings of homosexuality.
In Soviet Russia, minds limit YOU!
I looked this up on my library's website catalog, and it's listed in the Young Adult section... perhaps this book isn't quite as scholarly as the reviewer seems to think?
Perfectly Normal Industries
A) Expiration of license to be determined by licenser at any time, but may be prematurely terminated by the licensee.
B) Extensive use of drugs or long periods of inactivity may void the software.
C) For optimal software performance, hardware should be kept at a temperature of 37 degrees C.
Partial Credit: The Engineer's Best friend
"Well, the bridge didn't fall all the way down!"
Books like Rita Carter's are the junk-tabloids of brain studies. Our understanding of the brain is so small and limited...why these books keep coming out? Why do they push fragile disputed theories as "Consciousness Explained!" ?
If you want to learn about neuroscience in an easy-to-swallow format, read Oliver Sacks
* He's a practicing neurologist, with a deep knowledge of the subjects he covers (unlike Rita Carter, who's a clueless popularizer)
* He covers many of the same cases at Rita Carter with greater insight
* He doesn't throw around wild exaggerations, (it seems that Rita Carter is hoping her reader won't know any better).
Forget Rita Carter, go pick up Oliver Sacks's "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat".
'Pas mi Ellin varvaros'
Finally, our most unique and advanced feature -- consciousness -- is explained.
That's great. But I'd be happier if someone could define it for me first.
:wq
The simplest way to understand the function of some part of the brain is to find a person in whom it is damaged. Here you have it all: A man who believed that copulating with the pavement was normal; the famous man who mistook his wife for a hat;
I understood Oliver Sacks book to be a presentation of case studies where the reductionist approach to the brain was inadequate. At the end of "the man who mistook his wife for a hat" he says "Of course, the brain is a machine and a computer - everything in classical neurology is correct. But our mental processes, which constitute our being and our life, are not just abstract and mechanical, but personal as well - and, as such, involve not just classifying and categorising but judging and feeling also."
He describes this case as "a radical challenge to one of the most entrenched axions or assumptions of classical neurology - the notion that brain damage, any brain damage, reduces or removes the abstract and categorical attitude."
At no point does Dr Sacks pretend to identify what part of the guys brain has been damaged. And it is not entirely clear what 'functions' are missing from his brain. He can see perfectly, recognize and identify abstract shapes such as the platonic solids, and recognize people by their 'body music' - the way they move. Yet he describes a glove as 'a continuous surface, infolded on itself. It appears to have five outpouchings' and, of course, mistakes his wife's head for a hat. What has changed in neuroscience since that book was written?
I don't believe that understanding the brain is synonymous with understanding yourself.
:wq
http://www.newpath4.com/theuniversalwall_doesitexi st.htm > http://www.newpath4.com/forsalespacecraftenginecon stantpowertheory.htm > http://www.newpath4.com/formulaeperpetual_perpetua ltimeperpetualspaceperpetualpowerperpetualmomentum perpetualmotion_3plus4equals5.gif but they're WELCOME TO TRY... as long as they're handing out free Darvon.
Apparently they mapped the brains of some enlightened buddhist monks, and it turns out that the difference between the map of a normal brain and the map of an enlightened brain is that the enlightened brain map lacks the "You are here->" bit.
Then realize that the poster (and author) use the word "all" as a catchphrase to mean "the overwhelmingly vast majority."
... is actually The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali. AKA The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. One translation is even entitled How To Know God.
It's all right there. Have a read.
Astro
I know its not a simple task.
How can I apply this book to help me map the nuerons in a human brain?
If you want to accept Hume's epistemology, then all we have are correlations, however, I don't think you or anyone else would want to accept Hume's epistemology as it would commit you to many other beliefs that are repugnant (e.g. other organic beings that appear to look like me are not really people because I cannot directly sense their thoughts). In any case, Hume's epistemology contradicts his ontology or vice versa depending on which you favor. So we are left to wonder to which he was really comitted (probably his epistemology as he was uncomfortable with his ontology) but his overall philisophical project is incoherent. There is some validity to Hume's point, belief is a component of truth but he over plays his hand and doesn't consider some important issues.
I think most people would accept a more realistic position in which a causal explanation is agreed to be one in which the fewest possible steps are taken from what is known to what is to be explained. Of course, this may entail restructuring the framework from which the explanation is derived based on results discovered during the inquiry into the unexplained phenomenon.
I do not object to using correlations as a place to begin an inquiry, as I said: "So, till a causal mechanism is elucidated, I recommend taking these "studies" that map function to location as the beginning of the inquiry, not the end." That to which I do object is saying that x causes y rather than as you said "Broca's area must have something important to do specifically with speech", as this is not a claim of causality. It admits that there may be other possibilities. It may be that another area as well as Broca's area is damaged during a stroke. It also may be that Broca's area is merely a path between two parts of the brain that are responsible for speech and therefore the Broca area is not responsible for speech per se although it would be involved in it. I have no idea what the true explanation is as I'm not an expert in the field. The possibilities are only limited by your imagination.
I can't wait to find out how the brains works, but it's counter-productive to believe or lead others to believe that we know more than we actually do.
Oh come on now - it takes a fraction of a second to realise how little we know about people. It's a little like saying you know everything about computers because you have pulled one apart and worked out what all the components do and worked out how Windows pop up and the mouse can click on things on the screen and then This happens, or This.
This book doesn't touch anything about what motivates people to excel or how to overcome feelings of inadequacy or why they don't get on well with their siblings or why they can't keep a relationship together or why they sabotage their own success or why they try to keep up with the Joneses when they know the Joneses are unhappy or why they feel hollow in their successful job/family or why they have trouble talking to their kids etc etc etc.
Then there's the fact that most people in the world believe in something metaphysical (god, whatever) and most modern science (including the writer of this book it seems, and the reviewer) believes that those people are self delusional or just plain simpletons.
It reminds me of scienists at the end of the 18th century proclaiming man was on the verge of knowing everything there was to know about the universe, or those in the early 19th century who proved mathematically that rockets would not work and you could never escape Earth's gravity.
I hate to categorise but it seems the author and reviewer fall firmly into this genre of thinking. I guess one has to consider though that to both these people the contents of the books *are* complete and that's a wonderful thing to them to see their whole known world defined so nicely. The fact that most people see them as standing in a little world neatly cordoned off from most other people's reality is irrelevant to them as they do not see the rest of the world and trying to explain to them that it exists is a pointless exercise. Just like the patients in the book who refuse to acknowledge their own illness, trying to show a rational and intelligent person the narrowness of their thinking is pointless. I hat e to say it, but first off they have to "want" to see if there's anything beyond the walls they have defined around themselves.
pithy comment
It currently *seems* that we will not need quantum theory in order to map out consciousness, ie, that our existing approximations will work just fine on the scale of something as huge as neurons.
However, the last claim you make, the "what it means to make an observation", is in no way shape or form up for debate. When quantum theory talks about "an observer" it isn't to imply that this observer is intelligent, or you, or me, simply that an interaction has occurred, and this interaction has changed the state of things. It require a you, or a me, it requires a photon or an electron.
Actually, my method works ALL the time, not none of the time. It is not stupid. It works 100% of the time.
The only thing that is correct is part about the head death of the universe: it's computationally retarded to try that solution.
WE WERE NOT DISCUSSING COMPUTATIONALLY INTELLIGENT THINGS
We were talking about, "in theory". The post I was responding to brought up MD5, not as a practical point, but as an example of how one way functions are not invertible. Except that, they are. MD5 was brought up to talk about whether the brain, the physical brain, can be fully responsible for the mind, and whether the mind and the brain map together. They also talked about "reductionism", which is what scientists get called when they do something that explains almost everything.
So, please examine the content of the conversation before posting. My post was accurate and relevant. Yours was inaccurate, inaccurate, accurate, accurate, and altogether didn't get what was being discussed.