Self-organization model of the mind still actively researched
| April 8, 2014 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Mind, Neuroscience, News |
Move over, perceptronium, Quanta Magazine is taking a new model of the mind, self-organized criticality, courtesy theoretical physicist Per Bak (1948–2002), out for a spin:
Bak introduced self-organized criticality in a landmark 1987 paper — one of the most highly cited physics papers of the last 30 years. Bak began to see the stabilizing role of frequent smaller collapses wherever he looked. His 1996 book, “How Nature Works,” extended the concept beyond simple sand piles to other complex systems: earthquakes, financial markets, traffic jams, biological evolution, the distribution of galaxies in the universe — and the brain. Bak’s hypothesis implies that most of the time, the brain teeters on the edge of a phase transition, hovering between order and disorder.
The brain is an incredibly complex machine. Each of its tens of billions of neurons is connected to thousands of others, and their interactions give rise to the emergent process we call “thinking.” According to Bak, the electrical activity of brain cells shift back and forth between calm periods and avalanches — just like the grains of sand in his sand pile — so that the brain is always balanced precariously right at that the critical point.
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Self-organized criticality has a certain intuitive appeal. But a good scientific theory must be more than elegant and beautiful. Bak’s notion has had its share of critics, in part because his approach strikes many as ridiculously broad: He saw nothing strange about leaping across disciplinary boundaries and using self-organized criticality to link the dynamics of forest fires, measles and the large-scale structure of the universe — often in a single talk. Nor was he one to mince words. His abrasive personality did not endear him to his critics, although Lee Smolin, a physicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, in Canada, has chalked this up to “childlike simplicity,” rather than arrogance. “It would not have occurred to him that there was any other way to be,” Smolin wrote in a remembrance after Bak’s death in 2002. “Science is hard, and we have to say what we think.” More.
Smolin? Oh yes, see “Black holes produce new universes, physics laws.
Apparently, today, “about 150 scientists worldwide investigate so-called ‘critical’ phenomena in the brain, the topic of at least three focused workshops in 2013 alone.”
It’s the sort of “gotta have” theory that life never really matches, but never tarnishes either.
7 Responses to Self-organization model of the mind still actively researched
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Yes, well there’s a reason for that…
Quantity vs quality. Annoying people is easy, persuading them is quite another matter.
I’ve started collecting and reading Henry P. Stapp papers and books on the mind & consciousness and their relationship with physical processes in the brain at the quantum level. Stapp is the author of the seminal “The Copenhagen Interpretation” of quantum mechanics and he is a leading advocate for faster-than-light transfer of information in quantum processes.
Stapp doesn’t mention or cite Per Bak in the dozen or so of Stapp’s papers and books I’ve collected, who it would seem in Stapp’s view is not even wrong.
Thomas Nagel never mentions Per Bak either.
I might add that Per bak wasn’t mentioned in “The Spiritual Brain” 🙂 either, though Bak doesn’t seem to address himself to the spiritual aspects of the mind, so perhaps I should cut him some slack.
For me personally, the term ‘self organization’, like the term ’emergent property’, is one of those ‘hand-wavey’ terms that people (mainly atheists) like to throw around without much substance (i.e. ‘conscious thought’) behind it 🙂 . This following neuroscientist agrees that the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness is never honestly addressed by atheists in these ’emergent/self organization’ models they are forever postulating:
In other words, materialists/atheists, with their elaborate descriptions of what is happening in the brain,,,
,,,never really ever honestly address the question(s) being asked of the brain:
David Chalmers is semi-famous for getting the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness across to lay people in a very easy to understand manner:
a bit more in-depth look at the ‘hard problem’ is here:
Here are a few more comments, from atheists, that agree with Chalmers on the insolubility of ‘hard problem’ of consciousness,,
Here a Harvard neurosurgeon, who is now a former atheist who had a life changing Near Death Experience, comments on the ‘hard problem:
Basically, Materialists/Atheists, when they proclaim that consciousness is merely an ’emergent property’ of the brain, are, in essence, saying that consciousness is merely an illusion. But as Chalmers pointed out in his video via Rene Decartes (i.e. ‘I think therefore I am’), the fact that we are conscious is the most concrete thing we can know about reality. And as Decartes first elucidated, we can reasonably doubt everything else we perceive about reality, but the fact that we ourselves are conscious, within this reality we are trying to describe, is the thing that we can doubt least about reality. In fact, if consciousness is held to be merely an illusion (merely ‘an emergent property’ of the brain), as atheists hold, then our ability to know anything else is real/true about reality is undermined from within by that presupposition (see Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism and Bruce Gordon on Boltzmann’s Brain). This ‘undermined from within’ epistemological failure inherent within the atheist’s materialistic worldview is reveled in a rather humorous fashion here:
William J Murray gets the basic point of the necessity of the ‘primacy of consciousness’ across more clearly than anyone else I’ve ever read:
William J Murray is in VERY good company in his reasoning:
Although atheists have the impossible problem of trying to ‘explain away’ the hard problem of consciousness, the Theist has a much easier task at hand. The Theist merely has to show that the mind is not the same thing as the brain. Here are a few simple ways to prove that the mind is not the brain.
One simple way of demonstrating that the mind is not the brain comes from utilizing the ‘Law Of Identity’ to separate properties of mind from properties of brain:
Alvin Plantinga has a humorous way of getting this ‘Law of Identity’ point across:
Another simple way of proving the mind is not the brain is by utilizing Godel’s incompleteness theorem.
Alan Turing, who invented computers, infamously thought that his brain was merely a ‘Turing Machine’. This following poem teases the ‘merely a machine’ notion of Turing
Yet, in spite of Turing’s irrational belief, and although I don’t believe Turing ever actually admitted it, Alan Turing actually succeeded in extending Godel’s incompleteness to material computers, and thus undermining his own materialistic belief that he was merely a machine in the process. This point is illustrated in the following videos and quotes:
It is also interesting to note that even though, as was shown in the Godel-Turing video, Alan Turing believed humans were merely machines, much like the computers he had envisioned, Turing failed to realize that his entire idea for computers came to him suddenly, ‘in a vision’ as he put it, thus confirming, in fairly dramatic fashion, Godel’s contention that humans had access to the ‘divine spark of intuition’. A divine spark which enables humans to transcend the limits he, and Godel, had found in the incompleteness theorem for computers, mathematics, (and even for all of material reality in general (Jaki)).
Of related note, the following paper gives the ‘secret’ away for defeating the infamous ‘Turing test’:
I consider the preceding proofs (Law of Identity and Incompleteness) to be a pretty simple and solid proofs for demonstrating that the mind is not the brain. But there is another way, though not quite as simple, to show that the mind is not the brain.
An absolutely astonishing fact that seems to be completely lost on hard core Darwinists is that a single human brain has more switches than all the computers and routers and Internet connections on Earth. Yet supercomputers with many switches have a huge problem dissipating heat,,,
But the brain, though having more switches than all the computers and routers and Internet connections on Earth, does not have such a problem dissipating heat,,,
Moreover, one source for the heat generated by computers, that is of primary concern for us, is caused by the erasure of information from the computer in logical operations,,,
And any computer that has anything close to as many switches as the brain has, then this source of heat will become prohibitive for the computer:
Thus the brain is either operating on reversible computation principles no computer can come close to emulating (Charles Bennett) (and memory would be ‘consumed’ in the process of reversible computation), or, as is much more likely, the brain is not erasing information from its memory as material computers are required to do because our memories are stored on a ‘spiritual’ level rather than on a material level,,, Extensive research lends support to this conclusion,,,
To add more support to this view that ‘memory/information’ is not stored in the material brain, but on a higher ‘spiritual’ level, one of the most common features of extremely deep near death experiences is the ‘life review’ of a person where every minute detail of a person’s life is reviewed in the presence of God:
Here some ‘simple’ ways to empirically demonstrate that the mind is not the same thing as the brain:
Here is a touching proof that the mind is not the same thing as the brain
This following video, although the girl in the video was written off as hopelessly retarded by everyone who saw her, reveals that there was/is indeed a gentle intelligence, a “me”, a “soul’, within the girl that was/is trapped within her body. And that that “me” was/is unable to express herself properly to others because of her neurological disorder. Here is a short teaser for her book telling the struggle of her ‘miracle’ breakthrough to be able to communicate with the outside world:
Here is another proof that the mind is not the brain. If the mind of a person were merely the brain, as materialists hold, then if half of a brain were removed a ‘person’ should only be ‘half the person’, or at least somewhat less of a ‘person’, as they were before, but that is not the case. The ‘whole person’ stays intact even though the brain suffers severe impairment during a hemispherectomy:
The preceding evidence from hemispherectomies is rather dramatic, and convincing, confirmation for the ‘argument from divisibility’ for the soul:
Another rather dramatic proof that the mind is not the same thing as the brain has been from the studies of people who were born blind who have had Near Death Experience. Bling people who could see for the first time in their life during their NDE. There simply is no rational explanation within the materialistic framework for why this should happen, whereas, in the theistic framework, this is result expected:
And then, though not nearly as simple as the preceding proofs that the mind is not the same thing as the brain, there is the argument for God from consciousness in quantum mechanics. i.e. due to advances in quantum mechanics, the argument for God from consciousness can now be framed like this:
Verse and Music:
Indeed the mind is not the brain.
i say we are just souls meshed to a great memory machine. in fact it might be that the MIND is nothing more then the great operations conducted byb the memory.
our soul just uses our mind or rather our memory, Just thinking here as i’m not sure if the bible says the mind is a real thing.
Anyways i am sure the memory is most of what we use in thinking and living.
probably the mind is just very organized results of memory .