Chaotic Brain Function +

T

Tao_Equus

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Two articles offered here the first of which for some may be something you already knew but never knew you knew sort of.. you know what I mean if you do :p Just paint in fractals.

It is so relevant that I think I could safely slide it right into many of the concepts that I work with and I could say it is probably the most important article I have read this year. And get used to me using it in my thinking in future debates.

Disorderly genius: How chaos drives the brain - life - 29 June 2009 - New Scientist

The second one is about lions but it is relevant to our species and even, I would stretch to say, may well be relevant to how human societies work.

BBC - Earth News - Lion prides form to win turf wars
 
A few of my thoughts...

First, earthquakes and avalanches are not entirely unpredictable, and we're getting better at it over time. The advent of GIS modeling has helped substantially with predicting earthquakes, for example. This stuff is not as random as it appears to be. We just don't have the right tools to predict it. Human behavior is also relatively predictable with suitable models. You might say that this stuff is predictably unpredictable. That is, it may not look like Old Faithful, but that doesn't mean it can't be modeled. I don't think this is a criticism of the science itself, but rather the author's analogies.

Second, this is not something new, except that neuroscience is now catching up (albeit with excellent new data) to cognitive studies. We've long known that spontaneous, seemingly random dreams and thoughts are actually related to subconscious information processing that suddenly crystallizes into conscious thought. Decisions are also often made this way, as people mull over options and data in their subconscious and then suddenly have a "flash of insight" or "gut feeling" about the "right" decision. People often feel like such dreams, visions, and insightful thoughts are given from an exterior, mysterious source. But they aren't. They come from within our own processing system, so to speak. We sort of hide ourself from ourself in this sort of cognition. There are layers of cognition that our conscious mind is unaware of, and so the conscious thought comes after the real decision-making or data processing has already occured at a level we simply are unaware of.

Other than that, very enjoyable article. I often already thought this type of thing, but it's nice to see neuroscience backing it up, which is (I imagine) what you were getting at, Tao. In myself, I often have noted that my most creative periods, where I am most productive either artistically or scientifically or both, are also close to my most fragile periods, in the sense that I can have an overwhelming number of thoughts, often chaotic. I handle this through a lot of diagramming and journaling so that in my quieter times I can make sense of it all and wrap up the projects and ideas I start. But yes, the concept of the brain as a self-organized critical system makes sense to me.

Oh, and maybe it's just me, but I have no idea what God or Satan have to do with any of this. Once you put aside boundaries between "self" and "other," the brain becomes a processing center for a web of information- the distinctions between this and that sort of blur, as does the idea of communication between entities as something distinct from self-generated awareness.
 
Well Kim in reference to your brief discussion on dreams and subconscious info processing, (and just to tweak our 2 resident arch-materialists in this thread), thought I'd post this brief blurb about about the Grateful Dead and ESP in dream states. Just as Tao loves to constantly remind folks of the materialist worldview and supportive evidence for such, I love to remind the materialists that that worldview can't and won't explain all phenomena.;) Besides, loved the early Grateful Dead music.:pearl
Revisiting a Dream ESP Experiment with "The Grateful Dead" - Parapsychology articles and blog

And no, Tao, not looking to debate with you re parapsychology but hey you know it is "science.":D
 
"What a long strange trip it's been"...is or maybe will be.

One cannot be sure from whence many things come, though, as they all pass through our brains, they do get filtered in the process of becoming uniquely our own. Keep on truckin'.:p earl
 
citizenzen said:
Have you been paying attention to the threads on Free Will recently?
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LOL- I avoid them. I find the argument against free will so... oh, how to politely say it... nonsensical(?) that I just save myself the hassle of debating on the subject.

It's more complicated than saying "we have free will [period]" but so far, in my experience, people who argue from a religious position that we have no free will aren't particularly interested in my nuanced thoughts about the nature of reality and consciousness. So I keep it to myself. ;)
 
path_of_one said:
LOL- I avoid them. I find the argument against free will so... oh, how to politely say it... nonsensical(?) that I just save myself the hassle of debating on the subject.

It's more complicated than saying "we have free will [period]" but so far, in my experience, people who argue from a religious position that we have no free will aren't particularly interested in my nuanced thoughts about the nature of reality and consciousness. So I keep it to myself. ;)
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Did CZ cause you to say that?:D earl
 
Indeed, earl- it's a trip. Hopefully a mostly good one.

I think ESP and such are natural, normal things. But it doesn't make them any less spectacular. I do think the materialist worldview will probably always fall short on many of its explorations, as it is inherently limited, just as all single approaches/perspectives are. But some of us are specialists (in content area or in perspective) and others of us are generalists. Snoopy, on that other thread, is probably right in that whether in a single individual or in a group, diversity and debate balances out the tendency to be too extreme to be useful. :)

As for the lions and humans... well, such models for humans have serious limits. The problem comes in that early hominids were rather sparse on the land. In fact, even for most of anatomically modern human history, population was quite low. People weren't very concerned with territory, had no sense of property rights (even communal), and there was very little violence. It seems pretty clear that in our early evolution, we were fairly weak little prey animals with kids that took a long time to mature. Bad news for survival, except- if we banded together against predation and to take care of the kids. We needed a group to adequately provide for young. I guess you could say we needed the group for the turf war against predators, but it's really a different thing than the lions are dealing with.

Of course, later on, with the beginning of property rights in horticultural and pastoral societies (and particularly after agriculture), those turf wars began to be increasingly important- both as we settled down, dependent on more limited space and resources and as we increased in population, beginning a trend of running into many other people over time.
 
path_of_one said:
I think ESP and such are natural, normal things.
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"And such?"

Ghost? Demons? Bigfoot? Yeti? Telekinesis? UFOs? Moth Man? Skunk Man? Chupacabra? Crop Circles? Chemtrails? Men-in-black? Ouija Board? Tarot Cards? I Ching? Horoscopes? Bermuda Triangle? Prophecy? Psychic Healing?

Once you start down that path POO, where (how) does one stop?
 
citizenzen said:
"And such?"

Ghost? Demons? Bigfoot? Yeti? Telekinesis? UFOs? Moth Man? Skunk Man? Chupacabra? Crop Circles? Chemtrails? Men-in-black? Ouija Board? Tarot Cards? I Ching? Horoscopes? Bermuda Triangle? Prophecy? Psychic Healing?

Once you start down that path POO, where (how) does one stop?
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Oh, we can elaborate. Like I have said before, I tend to be about the nuances and details. I don't like to lump all of human experience I don't understand or can't quite explain (or don't experience myself) into a single category of "BS." Just not my style. Besides, I think ESP is really a very different item than most of this stuff, except perhaps the last two... ESP is an "in one's head" thing while the others are stuff people think exist in the exterior world.

In response to your list, here's what I'd offer on a very quick knee-jerk response:
Ghost? Combination of energetic signatures and human imagination. With a bit of complexity thrown in if you're talking about ancestral spirits, which is something different from poltergeists or those annoying repetitive ghosts that walk around the same room all night.

Demons? By the broad anthro definition, these are spirits that are non-human in origin and are harmful, malicious, etc. I have no opinion- seems possible but (thank God) I've never met one. I think demons and Satan are overrated in their ability to get people to do stuff, even if they do exist. They'd be just one more player in the game of life.

Bigfoot? Yeti? Unlikely, but then so was the giant squid. Not a subject of any interest to me, so I have no opinion.

Telekinesis? Probably possible, but difficult and unlikely. One could argue that it happens at least at the level of the very small, hence electrons show up where you look for them.

UFOs? Don't know. Why any super-intelligent species with time-space travel would choose to visit this backwoods locale is beyond me, but maybe they are sightseeing. Never particularly cared, but I suspect that most or all UFO experiences are misinterpretations of ordinary phenomena (sleep paralysis seems to be a big culprit for abduction experiences).

Moth Man? Skunk Man? Chupacabra? Never had any interest, don't care. Probably a bunch of imaginary stuff as none of them are cross-culturally prevalent (as are UFOs and magic). You've got stuff that is so culturally specific that it is almost sure to be a culture-bound condition and then you've got really widespread stuff that is either about human flaws in cognition or some sort of real experience.

Crop Circles? Pretty. But easier to make than people think.

Chemtrails? No clue what that is.

Men-in-black? A fun movie. I laughed.

Ouija Board? Communications with spirits for the intuitively challenged? LOL

Tarot Cards? Oh, I love Tarot and Oracle cards. I have a Jungian take on them. It's not about divining the future, but rather using symbols to better understand your own feelings, concerns, and desires. Used this way, they're really pretty helpful if you like going down the rabbit hole of your own psyche.

I Ching? I never dealt with it, but I suspect it's like Tarot cards.

Horoscopes? I don't get astrology. I've never met another person with the same sign where I thought "Hey, you're just like me!" Horoscopes are basically like another type of Tarot card- a type I find boring, but no offense to the astrologers. I'm just a visual type and I like the art of cool cards when doing my pyschological self-analysis. Horoscopes, like Tarot and all that, operate by giving symbols with very vague guidance. One's reaction to the guidance is what drives the value, not the guidance itself.

Bermuda Triangle? Maybe. But if so, it has a natural explanation.

Prophecy? Depends on if you mean telling the future (which is not the real definition of a prophet) or carrying a divine message.

Psychic Healing? As in, Reiki and whatnot? Or something else?

Whee- a fun diversion tonight! 20 Questions! :D
 
wil said:
So Tao is going to start using random chaotic responses in his posts...

Will we be able to notice the difference?
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I hope not ;) And you might begin to see they were not so random after all :D
 
path_of_one said:
Second, this is not something new, except that neuroscience is now catching up (albeit with excellent new data) to cognitive studies. We've long known that spontaneous, seemingly random dreams and thoughts are actually related to subconscious information processing that suddenly crystallizes into conscious thought. Decisions are also often made this way, as people mull over options and data in their subconscious and then suddenly have a "flash of insight" or "gut feeling" about the "right" decision. People often feel like such dreams, visions, and insightful thoughts are given from an exterior, mysterious source. But they aren't. They come from within our own processing system, so to speak. We sort of hide ourself from ourself in this sort of cognition. There are layers of cognition that our conscious mind is unaware of, and so the conscious thought comes after the real decision-making or data processing has already occured at a level we simply are unaware of.
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No. Decisions are always made this way, as many studies have revealed. We make no concious decisions at all. They are made in neural clusters of activity that are passed to nodes of meaning that link to other neural clusters that process them, according to training bias, and eventually they make their way up into our conciousness. It is the training, (education, saturation or indoctrination), that shapes the firing clusters, their prominence and their actualisation.

If you are filtering every bit of information through a very few well exercised clusters and these clusters fire off to these areas that make you think in terms of spirituality then you will feel a spititual experience. It does not make it something real though. It is purely a figment of your own training and imagination and requires the imposition of an artificial context. But it is more than that. It is laziness or a self-protection/limiting mechanism too. This is because trying to provide a question with an answer is itself an exercise in fractal geometry. Every answer gives rise to at least one other question. Belief provides a limit where by you can stop looking at further questions and so it prevents the brain from getting lost in the dizzying fractal branching of possibilty that stems from every question.

Other than that, very enjoyable article. I often already thought this type of thing, but it's nice to see neuroscience backing it up, which is (I imagine) what you were getting at, Tao.
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Yes. For me this article backs up much of what I have been trying to say for a long time on many subjects. I already knew it all but did not have the single description of it this articcle highlighted and backed up with studies. I started other threads before trying to get some thinking going on how emergence theory and chaos links in with the structure of the paradigms we evolved. Hopefully any references to what some of the theists here might have believed as me calling them mentally ill can now be thrown away and we can have rational discussion about how brain function fuels belief.


Oh, and maybe it's just me, but I have no idea what God or Satan have to do with any of this. Once you put aside boundaries between "self" and "other," the brain becomes a processing center for a web of information- the distinctions between this and that sort of blur, as does the idea of communication between entities as something distinct from self-generated awareness.
Click to expand...

It is the information and its processing that is key. That is filtered through exercised regions of the brain that gain prominence according to usage. They can be education trained clusters of neurons or ones constructed by beliefs. If you are not filtering everything through artificial belief collectives you do not believe. It is that simple. If you believe in the devil you harvest information and run it through that belief making it a bit bigger. If you have blind and absolute belief it passes through there first and no matter which other cluster the information is sent to it will always leave by the devil neurons as concious thought. But it does not exist outside the human brain and its capacity to reject information unprocessed by anything else. This theory states that persistant beliefs are dominant cul-de-sac's of neural activity. The implications are obvious. It is natural that we have evolved coping mechanisms to try and reach some meaningful resolution to our questions. But they are artificial limiters.
 
earl said:
Just as Tao loves to constantly remind folks of the materialist worldview and supportive evidence for such, I love to remind the materialists that that worldview can't and won't explain all phenomena.;)
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No. It cannot. But it can and does try. What it does not do is say "this is real" without any evidence to support it. And that, to me, is what makes it superior. It is not only what it says it is also what it does not say.
And no, Tao, not looking to debate with you re parapsychology but hey you know it is "science.":D
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There is much real science done in the field of parapsychology. After many 10s of 1000s of experiments results that confirm any claim of anything amount to a couple and even they only show a tiny sway above pure chance. Which suggests modelling problems. Pseudoscientific books on the subject are amongst the most lucrative niche markets in publishing however. Having read many of them down the years I find them impossible to trust. Yet I do not trust a scientific paper either, I do not 'believe' it. I slide it into a much bigger picture only if it fits well enough to be able to slide in. If it chafes in places I know there are unresolved issues. If it slides in effortlessly then its likely a pretty solid theory. But still just a theory. But I do not have that lens of belief I pass everything through before I open my mouth. And this is critical to be able to evaluate the combined thinking of science as a whole. If you are passing it to a cul-de-sac of belief that is what will define its form in your thinking. I personaly do not trust myself bright enough to have a belief and am content just to work with the evidence ;)
 
citizenzen said:
"And such?"

Ghost? Demons? Bigfoot? Yeti? Telekinesis? UFOs? Moth Man? Skunk Man? Chupacabra? Crop Circles? Chemtrails? Men-in-black? Ouija Board? Tarot Cards? I Ching? Horoscopes? Bermuda Triangle? Prophecy? Psychic Healing?

Once you start down that path POO, where (how) does one stop?
Click to expand...





Oooooooooo another fractal!! :cool:
 
Tao_Equus said:
No. It cannot. But it can and does try. What it does not do is say "this is real" without any evidence to support it. And that, to me, is what makes it superior. It is not only what it says it is also what it does not say.
There is much real science done in the field of parapsychology. After many 10s of 1000s of experiments results that confirm any claim of anything amount to a couple and even they only show a tiny sway above pure chance. Which suggests modelling problems. Pseudoscientific books on the subject are amongst the most lucrative niche markets in publishing however. Having read many of them down the years I find them impossible to trust. Yet I do not trust a scientific paper either, I do not 'believe' it. I slide it into a much bigger picture only if it fits well enough to be able to slide in. If it chafes in places I know there are unresolved issues. If it slides in effortlessly then its likely a pretty solid theory. But still just a theory. But I do not have that lens of belief I pass everything through before I open my mouth. And this is critical to be able to evaluate the combined thinking of science as a whole. If you are passing it to a cul-de-sac of belief that is what will define its form in your thinking. I personaly do not trust myself bright enough to have a belief and am content just to work with the evidence ;)
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There are at least some kernels in that post with which I can agree, Tao. :) As I'm having fun by posting various fringey, weirdnesses to this thread, thought I'd pass along this training manual from the US military for remote viewing, (not because I necessarily endorse its existence, just because I thought it a unique document). earl
http://www.remoteviewed.com/files/4.2.07/1985_CRV_manual.pdf
 
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