{"id":804,"date":"2010-03-15T20:37:00","date_gmt":"2010-03-15T20:37:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/2010\/03\/15\/804\/"},"modified":"2010-04-10T16:25:17","modified_gmt":"2010-04-10T21:25:17","slug":"804","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=804","title":{"rendered":"BOOK TIME"},"content":{"rendered":"

I just finished reading a book by Paul Churchland about the human brain and its neural network architecture (\u201cEngine of Reason, Seat of the Soul<\/a>\u201d). This book might be the best available introduction to neural networks and how they make things happen in the brain. It’s not highly technical, but it’s not light reading either; you need to be comfortable around basic scientific and math concepts. But if you can slog your way through it (it’s a slow read), Churchland will reward you with a lot of enlightenment about the operating system of the brain, about how things work below the level of thoughts and feelings and moods and sub-conscious motives, i.e. the paradigms of ordinary psychology. He gives you the basic outline of how small webs of brain neurons (small components of the brain) respond to signals coming in from the senses, as to translate these little blips of ion charges into something having meaning to the higher decision-making parts of the brain; e.g., how they identify a particular face, or a taste, or a color, etc. based on past experience. <\/p>\n

These higher areas themselves turn out to use the same techniques to bring together all of these sensory impressions, weaving them into an overall picture of where you are, what you are perceiving, what you think or feel, what you remember, and what you plan to do (or not do). Pretty interesting; it’s not the final blueprint for how the mind works, but it does explain what the primary building blocks are like. <\/p>\n

After his introduction to neural networks in the first half of the book, Churchland spends the second half discussing some of the implications of a neural-net understanding of the mind. Obviously there are lots of things about classic psychology that will need to be updated, including how we look at depression, schizophrenia, criminal behavior, perceptions and illusions, etc. I get the feeling that psychology is still swallowing this new understanding of the brain, despite neural networks being a hot topic since the late 1980s. <\/p>\n

But Churchland doesn’t stop with psychology; he delves into a variety of social, political and philosophical topics. Being a philosopher by trade, Churchland has to grind some axes about how we understand consciousness and the \u201cfeeling of being\u201d because of our new vistas about how the brain works. He and his wife Patricia (another accomplished philosopher) feel that the old notions about conscious subjectivity being \u201csomething special\u201d, something having characteristics beyond what physics and chemistry can impart, must go the way of the flat Earth paradigm. These are \u201cfolk views\u201d that must give way to the advances of science. Personally, I’m not convinced, despite all of the wonder that I felt from reading about the mechanics of neural nets and their conceptual \u201cprototypes\u201d of the external world, as embedded in the fine tuning of their synapses. <\/p>\n

In taking on some other philosophers who disagree with him on this point, Churchland gave a very short but cogent exposition of what the Godel paradox<\/a> regarding formal algorithms meant. I’ve read a lot about Godel’s determination that any defined set of rules of logic can be outwitted by a certain kind of logical proposition. I.e., using the rules of logic in question (e.g. Peano arithmetic), a certain proposition can be stated which those logical rules cannot judge as either true or false. And yet, humans can read the proposition and make a quick determination as to its truth status. Some philosophers (most notably Roger Penrose) seemed to think that because the brain and its neurons operated by logical processes, the fact that they in sum could judge something beyond what a logical system could evaluate must show that \u201csomething really big\u201d was going on in the brain (possibly having to do with quantum physics). Some people interpreted this as the source of the unique nature of subjective conscious experience, proof that consciousness was more than a computational output. <\/p>\n

Well, Churchland takes the air out of this balloon. He makes a strong argument that the brain’s neural networks can \u201cintuit\u201d things like the truth of a strange bit of logic, just as they intuit whether your finger feels something hot or cold, something rough or smooth, something sharp or dull, etc. This is just the sort of thing that neural networks do; no sweat. Sure, the processes in the neurons that make neural networks work are clearly logical and algorithmic; they could easily be computerized. The output from a neural networks operations, however, are emergent. And emergence is no great mystery; we experience emergence whenever we watch a flock of birds flying, or get stopped in a traffic jam on the highway where nothing seems wrong, no car crashes or fires, just a bit of volume. <\/p>\n

So, mystery solved. Or is it? Is emergence really so trivial? Do scientists and mathematicians really understand it? Only in the past 20 years have they started to think about it, and they are coming up with some interesting things. E.g., that there may be some inherent unpredictability in highly complex interactions that create emergent properties, even when all of the underlying forces are governed by predictable scientific laws. Maybe emergence isn’t such a tame animal after all. <\/p>\n

Consciousness itself, most would agree, is an emergent phenomenon, based on perhaps the most complex mechanism we know (the brain and it billions of neurons and inter-connections). In the emergent, interactive processes by which environments and bodies and neurons create consciousness, perhaps something beyond what our science can currently account for happens. Perhaps consciousness reflects some fundamental dimension beyond space-time, something embedded in the \u201cimplicate order\u201d of information that possibly underlies what we know of the quantum world, with its quarks, leptons, bosons, etc. <\/p>\n

And yes, perhaps we are \u201cmaking this reality up\u201d in our minds. But if our conscious minds are uniquely grounded in the fundamental layer of reality, then that’s just fine; then there is both an objective external reality and a subjective world, in harmony with one another (well, mostly anyway). It would be an ultimate complementarity, something hinted at in the weird, trans-logical things that we observe in the \u201cmiddle world\u201d of the quantum. I hope that it’s true!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I just finished reading a book by Paul Churchland about the human brain and its neural network architecture (\u201cEngine of Reason, Seat of the Soul\u201d). This book might be the best available introduction to neural networks and how they make things happen in the brain. It’s not highly technical, but it’s not light reading either; […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/804"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=804"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/804\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1092,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/804\/revisions\/1092"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=804"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=804"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=804"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}