Is the mind all chemical and electricity? - Page 31

On July 04 2013 04:29 knOxStarcraft wrote:
The interesting question is, what different types of input have to be put together for one to be "self aware"?

On July 04 2013 11:06 biology]major wrote:
the mind is not in physical reality.

Your brain is a bunch of sodium/potassium channels opening and closing which propagate some electrical signals to each other. These neurons, the sodium channels and their physiology can be completely observed by scientists. However experience itself can never be observed. You can interpret other people's brains electrical activity and generate your own approximations, but the experience of each person is unique to him/her.

The question, "show me your mind" often asked by zen masters can not be answered by science, because it lies within the realm of philosophy.

On July 04 2013 13:30 TritaN wrote:


As the "mind" is a direct product of the structure and interactions of the chemicals in the physical brain, it is a bit presumptuous to assume that science will never be able to observe it. The "experience itself" that you talk about is shaped entirely by the brain.

If I poke one area of your brain, it might leave you (and your "mind") permanently unable to recognize people's faces.

If I poke a different area, it could cause you to believe that your loved ones have been replaced by body-snatching aliens.

Brains can encode experiences and learned skills in a form that persists for decades or longer. The physical instantiation of such stable traces of activity is not known, but it seems likely to us that they are embodied in the same way intrinsic behaviors (such as reflexes) are: that is, in the specific pattern of connections between nerve cells. In this view, experience alters connections between nerve cells to record a memory for later recall. Both the sensory experience that lays down a memory and its later recall are indeed trains of action potentials, but in-between, and persisting for long periods, is a stable physical structural entity that holds that memory. In this sense, a map of all the things the brain has put to memory is found in the structure—the connectional map. An 'activity map' of the brain that only shows trains of action potentials would certainly be an incomplete map, as most behaviors and memories will not be visible in any finite recording session. Decoding the way experience via electrical activity becomes stably embedded in physical neuronal networks is the unmet challenge that connectomics attempts to solve.

On July 04 2013 14:25 Djzapz wrote:
A popular suggestion seems to be that since we don't know, we can invent an answer and that one does not require evidence. Quite peculiar.

On July 04 2013 14:41 FallDownMarigold wrote:

Seems like an even cooler suggestion is that we can build on the evidence we have to predict and pursue the answers that currently elude us based on whatever makes most sense given the available information.

Lately Nobelist L. Montagnier's group has published three articles deeply challenging the standard views about genetic code and providing strong support for the notion of water memory [1{3]. In a series of delicate experiments [1, 2] they demonstrated the possi-bility of the emission of low-frequency electromagnetic Extremely Low Frequency (ELF) waves from bacte-rial DNA sequences and the apparent ability of these waves to organize nucleotides (the "building" mate-rial of DNA) into new bacterial DNA by mediation of structures within water [4].

Research published in 2005 on hydrogen bond network dynamics in water showed that "liquid water essentially loses the memory of persistent correlations in its structure" within fifty millionths of a nanosecond.

The experiments make three claims that will stretch most people's credulity: under certain conditions, DNA can project copies of itself onto electromagnetic waves; these same waves can be picked up by pure water and, through quantum effects, create a "nanostructure" in the shape of the original DNA; and if enzymes which replicate DNA are present in a "receiving" solution, they can recreate the original DNA from the teleported "nanostructure", as if DNA was really there

Friedemann Freund doesn't shrink from taking on the really big problems. His research has elucidated such important phenomena as the fact that rocks under stress behave like batteries that can produce currents deep within the crust of the Earth. These are not piddling currents, either - they can be hundreds of thousand amperes, maybe as large as several million of amperes, sufficient to be measured above ground, and perhaps even from orbit. Understanding this phenomenon and exploiting it could lead to a breakthrough in earthquake forecasting.

In June 2011, in a session chaired by my son Mino at a brain mapping conference in San Francisco, California, I gave a talk, in which I pointed to the ionosphere. The ionosphere, which wraps around the globe at an altitude of 100-1000 km, carries a set of standing waves in the ULF end of the electromagnetic frequency spectrum known as Schumann Resonances.

The Schumann Resonances are constantly fed by lighting strikes in the lower atmosphere. The reason is that every lighting bolt that hits the Earth emits electromagnetic radiation from very high frequencies, which one can actually hear in the old radios as a crackling noise from distant lightening strikes, to very low frequencies. One component, around 8 Hz, is the frequency that an electromagnetic (EM) wave needs to travel around the entire Earth. It can thus form a standing wave. I became interested in the influence these extremely low frequency waves might have on living organisms.

It turns out that our brains also emit EM radiation at sharply defined frequencies around 8 Hz. Prior to an earthquake, however, the earth sends out bursts of low and extremely low frequencies that cover the entire spectrum from 0.001 Hz to 100 Hz. These EM waves come from the belly of the earth. There are very interesting studies that link psychological and physiological phenomena in humans and animals to the approach of large earthquakes.

On July 04 2013 18:12 DertoQq wrote:
@xM(Z

so ? this is not even remotely related to this thread. I have no idea what you are trying to say. There is nothing non-physical about all this stuff.

On July 04 2013 14:37 Tewks44 wrote:
I think the most important aspect of the brain is the ability to make decisions. That is to say, we as humans are able to take action to increase the probability of our survival, as we perceive such a probability. A very simple example is, if a clearly aggressive animal is coming towards us we make a judgement. If the animal is a massive sloth that could crush us in an instant, but can only move 5 mph, we will run, if the animal is a vicious hamster that can easily outrun us, we will fight. This is a very simple example, but it highlights the central idea, and I think most rational people will agree. This highlights the basic fight/flight response of the brain.

It gets more complicated, obviously, when we deal with less simple matters. But I think all of our decisions are based on this very simple survival instinct. Our brains are designed to allow us to reproduce. It's as simple as that. If we can survive certain dangers, we are able to reproduce. Interestingly enough, once we reproduce our natural instinct to survive doesn't fade, and if we choose not to have children, we still possess our survival instinct.

But the root of our behavior is based on our perception of how to maximize the chances of our survival. There are many examples that could be brought up that challenge this assertion, but I'd be happy to address such examples. That being said I think it's very easy to say that our actions and behavior are very chemical and electrical in nature.

On July 04 2013 18:15 xM(Z wrote:

last i checked that was still on the debate table here, with people strongly claiming that we are more then matter and souls were flying around.
plus, i told your mind what it has to do to evolve!

On July 04 2013 18:18 Rassy wrote:



Hmm interesting, to me the ability to make decissions is not that important,I can imagine computers beeing verry good decission makers at one point in the future.
For me the most interesting aspect of the mind is its imagination and creativity, that wich allowed newton to devellop his mathematics and physical laws basicly out of nowhere , and without real aim other then the desire to understand the world. I can not imagine computers ever beeing able to make such giant leaps.