posted
One of the things I've noticed about my family is no one ever remembers the same event the same way. Everyone's version of what happened is different, and in my family usually dramatically so. If the brain was recording events as they happened, everyone would have the same memory of the event. But we remember our feelings and perceptions. Memory actually seems to enhance the personality influence over the facts.
So how do we define personality? Is it just biochemistry created by our responses to past events? And how different is that from a soul encoding its experiences in the brain? I don't think the two ideas, the scientific and the spiritual, have to be mutually exclusive.
I don't know anything about memory brain damage. But doesn't the brain tend to rewire itself and get back in touch with areas it lost contact with? Like stoke victims learning to walk again. Part of the brain is dead, so the brain has to make connections around that area before it can get use of the arm or leg back.
Doesn't the brain also rewire itself when the damage is too severe? Parts that should control one function take over for another function. And even if the damage is irreparable, people learn to live with the changes in their lives and can go on to be happy and productive. Why should where the memories are encoded and stored prove or disprove the soul?
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posted
AR, that's not particularly sensical. It makes far more sense to assume that everyone's memory of the event is different because everyone's perception of the event was different -- what was being focused on, how keen the senses of the person are, what sorts of things already have strong associations in his or her memory, if the person was thinking of something else strongly at the moment, all sorts of things. It would make no sense at all for people to have the exact same memory of the event were it being stored in chemicals or anything else, because even were the perception stored exactly (which nobody has been asserting it has been, because that seems silly based on experience) everyone's perceptions of an event are going to be different.
Also, since when are chemicals perfect? They're messy, inexact things, and given what we know of the brain often storing references to previous memories of perceptual items (people, things) instead of a particular instance's perception of the thing itself. Take DNA, for instance. Our cells (which luckily have error correcting capabilities) regularly mess up in handling.
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posted
I hold to the belief that the body having a spirit in such a fashion is probably not provable. But if I were to think of someplace to look for evidence, it would be identical twins. They have the same genetic structure, though their experiences are going to be different. And of course, some might believe that if they share the same genetics, they also share the same "soul".
But lets look at the idea that they have two different, unique spirits or souls within them. Do they tend to have differences than cannot be accounted for by experience alone? Measuring such a thing would be, well, impossible, but observations could still be meaningful.
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quote:I hold to the belief that the body having a spirit in such a fashion is probably not provable.
Which removes discussion from being a possibility. People used to hold the belief that sperm was "little people" who then housed themselves in the womb of a woman as fertilization. If actual discussion, study, and medical evidence was not an option to further explain it, we'd still believe as much.
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My thought on the spirit is that it "infiltrates" the whole body. I mean, look at the liver. The artery that once linked us to our placenta terminates in the liver. I've read that it has several hundred known functions. People can live without a heart, or an artificial one but not without a liver.
I think what's funny is that in Chinese Traditional medicine, the Central Nervous System was not recognized as being of much importance. I'm not sure what they thought the brain did. Not that this has much direct bearing on my theory of the spirit (I don't think, for instance, that it is necessarily attached at the accupuncture meridians).
P.S.
quote: What you are suggesting is that the laws of physics are wrong
Are we talking about the laws of physics that explain gravity or quantum physics? Physics is not a canon of truth unto itself.
posted
I don't see how what I wrote implied it wasn't, mack. I can see how they never noticed nerves, as they tend to follow blood vessels. But I don't understand how they could have overlooked the brain. I don't know what their history of gathering information through dissection or animal analogies is either.
Anway, I don't put the smackdown on folk's linguistic musings. Is what you want to tell us really going to have reference without 4 years of undergrad training? I realize there are folks here who are young and impressionable. In discussion like this, I think it's fair for folks to say what their credentials or lack thereof may be. My degree is in linguistics with a cognitive science emphasis. I've also read a few of the non-fiction books on the brain body connection.
I think the one I'm most influenced by is Emotional Intelligence , which is a lot about overcoming the predicted responses to messages from the limbic brain to the Prefrontal Cortex without losing the value of that communication. I don't think an extreme view on either side serves anyone very well.
P.S. I'm also a mental health consumer and a survivor of traumatic memory loss
My bachelor's degree is in English. I didn't take biology. The only psychology I took was abnormal psychology, child psychopathology, and clinical psychology.
So, considering I've been able to learn this stuff in the past six weeks, I hardly think 4 years of undergraduate education is necessary for understanding it.
And I DO think an extreme view is necessarily in comprehending the physical nature of the nervous system before applying philosophical ideas. Why? Because if you don't, the resulting theory is all full of holes and can easily be proven wrong. So taking a different approach and learning enough to understand the basic concepts that you're musing about is a much better approach.
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posted
Pooka, I'm a survivor of not only traumatic memory loss, but actual brain damage where I really did have to redevelop a portion of my memory skills. So, don't begin to toss credentials at me and then use bad science (supposition and un-backed hypothesis), because I've been there, dealt with the numerous doctors and neurophsychologists who are far more accredited than you are, and there are loads of biological science references that you can go find at your local library to back all of it up.
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quote: I hold to the belief that the body having a spirit in such a fashion is probably not provable.
Which removes discussion from being a possibility.
What are you saying, John? That it is impossible to discuss something that cannot be proven? This thread obviously refutes that. Or are you saying that something unprovable cannot be true? I would think that the fact that people are using such terms as soul and spirit tould make it obvious that they are talking about things that might be true and yet unprovable.
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posted
I'm saying that it removes anything but religion and flowery interpretations of religion from the conversation. I have zero faith in any god, so you're not talking with me by telling me that your beliefs are true and that's how it works, you're talking at me.
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quote:There are quantum levels where the firing of the neuron is an issue of probability. Will it fire, or not? Is that chance, or the will of the spirit?
Even in that case science should be able to measure the probabilities as being not as random as they should be, if the soul were controlling it. Chance would be totally random, whereas I would think the will of the soul would not be random.
quote:Tell you what, Tres: when you can form an opinion on philosophy that is cogent enough to make publication and remain an argument for more than a century, then I'll weigh your opinion as much as those that have withstood millenia.
John, my stance on the existence of a soul or mind IS the one that has withstood millenia. Only in the past hundred years or so has the idea that the mind could be a physical part of the brain gained any popularity, and if you are ruling out arguments that haven't lasted a century, none of those arguments have.
quote:In my opinion, you're someone who will gladly disregard all logic, science, and reality as long as it fits your idea of how the world should or does work. This thread has just strengthened that opinion of you.
I think that merits a Posts: 2432 | Registered: Feb 2001
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Well, if people just want to ignore science, then I suppose there's no point in my participating in the discussion by providing scientific basis for our current understanding of brain function.
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Um... no, I didn't. I never made any reference to religion.
If you're talking about the millenia comment (which you brought into the discussion, I might add) I was referring to philosophy and the theories on the existence of mind that have existed since Greek times and before, and are built on arguments and proofs, not religion.
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Tres, those "philosophies" you're referencing are old religious ones.
Seriously, dude, if all you want to do is turn this into a philosophy argument excluding scientific evidence to the contrary, then I have nothing to say to you about it. Continue living in your fantasy world.
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quote: And the brain does order and reorder as it forms. Neurons (not glial cells but the neurons that have axons and dentrites) head to areas of specificity. As they make proper connections through synapses, neurons that are not needed once circuits are completed, die off. This process is called apoptosis.
See, mack, if I didn't know that all cell death is referred to as apoptosis, I might think you were saying the overall process of reordering the brain is called apoptosis.
I appreciate you guys are trying to "clean up" the science here, but it's just as silly as me trying to clean up the moral content of this board.
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posted
John, You asked for millenia-old theories, and those are about as nonreligious as you can find in those times. In more recent years (the last 500 or so) arguments along the same lines have been accepted by many an atheist philosopher.
And since this is about the interaction between souls in brains, which is something science touches on but lacks the tools to really get into, this IS a philosophical debate. If you try to turn it into a purely scientific debate, you're going to have great difficulty talking about souls and internal experiences, as science can only measure observable, physical stuff and can't talk about souls.
If there IS any scientific evidence to the contrary, feel free to state it, but as of yet nobody has - so please give up on the baseless claims and ad hominem attacks. You haven't given an actual argument to me yet, beyond "that's religion and religion doesn't count" and "there's a strong argument for anything, so your strong argument means nothing."
posted
Bok, that was one of my first thoughts when I was reading this thread. Descartes and his pineal gland. Though it does do some interesting stuff.
I hope all the memories I don't care about aren't stored. Like being asleep, or driving while I'm thinking about something else.
I actually struggle with the definition of the spirit on mormon.org (what happens after we die, in the video), that it includes our memories. I mean, what would be the point of an afterlife if our consciousness is substantially the same as it is now?
posted
Just to back Tres up a bit, the original philosophy of the separation of mind and body was thought up by Plato, and did not originate from any religious views he might've had. The particular arguments that back up Tres's dualism are due to philosophers like Frank Jackson and John Searle, who are not religious so far as I know. So he's not playing "the religion card."
Of course, I agree with Leto that his view is wrong. But he and I have been over this often enough that I'm not sure there'd be much benefit in arguing. And as I've said before, if you concede (as any scientifically-informed dualist must) that behavior is fully determined by physiology, the "soul" that remains doesn't seem to provide much basis for religious views about an afterlife. For instance, if my soul doesn't dictate how I behave, why should it be rewarded or punished for my sinful actions?
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Cellular apoptosis is whenever a cell becomes dispensible. Failure of apoptosis is the main problem of molecular biologists studying cancer.
Or do you mean cleaning up the board? I'm saying we can't expect someone to adhere to the rigor of the discipline we have personally chosen.
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Actually, although I will concede that my behavior is determined by my physiology, I won't concede (not without more proof at least) that my physiology is not to some degree determined by my soul, and thus I don't have to concede that the soul does not determine my behavior. For one thing, we don't yet have the capacity or complete model of the brain to be sure that the laws of physics aren't "bent" in the brain in some way.
For the moment, I think it's uncertain to what degree the "soul" can control the body's behavior, if it can at all.
However, I definitely think that, in contrast to things like God's existence which much be taken to a large degree on faith, the existence of the soul is something that can and has been proven to a fairly high level of confidence. There are a number of arguments out there against this theory, and they are widely popular arguments, but so far each that I've seen is based on assumptions that I take to be directly observably wrong (in the way 1+1=3 is observably wrong).
quote:we can't expect someone to adhere to the rigor of the discipline we have personally chosen
No, but basic, factual knowledge would lead to better discussion rather than going on little to no knowledge.
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posted
I'm going to have to back off from my initial assertion that all memories are stored in the spirit.
Remembering back to my freshman psych class, which is as far as I got, there is quite a bit known about olfaction and the memory of smells. If I recall correctly, the olfactory portion of the brain is the most primitive, and the memories of smells are the most persistent. Numerous experiments have been performed on animals, establishing the olfactory as the repository for smell memories.
Also, in the LDS religion, there is no scriptural basis for the assertion that memories reside in the spirit. The only scripture that I can think of is a statement by Joseph Smith that whatever principle of intelligence that we attain in this life will rise with us in the resurrection . This suggests to me that our set of memories is not complete without our bodies.
I would guess that there are both brain memories and spirit memories, but I have no idea where to draw the line between the two. Maybe we could say that the brain stores memories related to the physical senses, and maybe we could ascribe memories of higher thought processes to the spirit.
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posted
There is more than one set of laws of physics. I'm personally okay with there being two primary forces in the universe that can never be reconciled.
P.S. Is unified field theory the same as the search for a single description of force?
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posted
skillery: even catholic theology says that the body is resurrected as well. which is why I do believe that even religiously that memories are held within the working of brain neurons.
Did you still want me to explain neurological stuff on this thread?
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posted
Well I think that at least to some degree, memories have to be held spirtually, for the LDS faith anyways. This is because it is very clear that God lives within our universe (in a body much like ours), and also that God knows the entire universe. Thus, if He knew everything and it was all stored in the temporal world then He would also have to know everything about his body too, wich loops back on itself into a storage space of inifite size.
But even if you thought you could do it without looping, the fact is that each piece of matter can only store a finite amount of information, and all the matter in the universe is, by defenition, storing the maximium amount of information. So God's brain (where the knolwedge is stored if it's stored in the brain in general) must be the size of the universe.
quote:Did you still want me to explain neurological stuff on this thread?
Yes. We're all here to learn.
But I want the poor disembodied spirits to have some memory of the life they just completed. I would hate to think that we have to wait until the resurrection to get back our learning of physics and math and languages and such.
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If God is coming into this, I'm not sure there's any need to believe God has a brain, or is within the physical world.
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Mack, I should warn you that I don't understand what the somatic nervous system is. My grasp of the sympathetic/parasympathetic delineation isn't that great either.
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Jamie & John (and others), I appreciate your input on our terribly unscientific discussion. You could be, like, referees and call foul when we say something that doesn't jive with current scientific knowledge.
My two cents: We have in scripture the concept of a spiritual creation before the physical. To me this has always inferred that the operations of the spiritual mirror the operations of the physical. In fact, this is inferred numerous times in scripture. I have always assumed that memories are recorded in the spirit body and the physical body both.
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The brain and consciousness (not as in awake, but as in alive and aware of being alive) has quite a few different views.
Dualism: mind and body are composed to two different substances that exist independently but somehow interact.
Monism: bloief that the universe is made of only one type of existence. There are a few different types of monism--materialism (everything exists in the physica), mentalism (only the mind really exists), identity position (mental processes are the same as brain processes but described in different terms).
Neurons in humans: 12-15 billion neurons in cerebral cortex and associated areas, 70 billion neurons in the cerebellum (hindbrain), 1 billion neurons in the spinal cord.
The body of a sensory (specialized at one end to be very sensitive to a particular kind of stimulation) or motor neuron (gets mesages from other neurons and sends messages from its body in the spinal cord to muscle or gland cells) is composed (basically) of soma (cell body)and axon (this is the information sender of the neuron. The axon ends in a "bulb" type swelling--this is called the presynaptic terminal, and is where neurotransmitters are released.
Nerve Impulse: The outside of a neuron (the membrane) keeps an electrical gradient (a difference in electrical charge between the inside and outside of the cell). Without outside disturbance, the membrane keeps a polarization of a slightly negative electrical potential as opposed to the outside (slightly positive). This difference between inside and outside voltage is called the resting potential.
In keeping this polarization, the cell membrane has two ion channels: sodium (Na+) and potassium (K+).
Now this resting potential, as I said before, remains stable unless stimulated. Usually, this stimulation takes place at the synapses (where the neurotransmitters are released and received). When stimulated enough (enough neurotransmitters for example), the cell has a rapid depolarization (evening the polarization to zero) followed by a slight reversal of the normal polarization. This response is called the action potential. Action potential, basically, is what allows neurons to communicate.
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How a synapse works: 1. The neurotransmitter is made in the presynaptic neuron. 2. Neurotransmitter is stored in little containers called vesicles. 3. If a neurotransmitter leaks from that container, it's destroyed. 4. When an impulse arrives, the containers fuse with the presynaptic membrane (the outside of the message sending cell) and the neurotransmitters are released. 5. The release of neurotransmitters is decreased BY this release of neurotransmitters. 6. These neurotransmitters travel across the synapse (the gap between the sending and receiving neurons) and attach to receptors on the postsynaptic membrane. 7. The release neurotransmitter is sucked back up by the cell that released it or its destroyed by enzymes.
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Bev: I essentially agree with your idea about spiritual creation/physical creation except for the fall apparently brought about more changes of the physical.
Strangely, though, LDS are materialists by the description mack gave. Or Mentalists. But definitely monists. But for the purpose of this discussion, I'm fine with assuming I'm a dualist and just discussing the physcial without trying to draw a parallel.
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posted
Okay, so in this chain of events "presynaptic" refers to the neuron's relation to the synapse and not a part of the neuron?
And because of action potential the release of NTs supresses additional release?
Other than that, I think I'm following you.
Action potential would also explain the theory that pain is the result of cells leaking their contents. If a cell ruptures near by, it's going to screw up the action potential.
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posted
Types of Neurotransmitters: acetylcholine, dopamine, norepinephrine, epinephrine, serotonin...and many more.
Structure of the nervous system: Central Nervous System (CNS): brain and spinal cord Peripheral Nervous System (PNS, don't say that out loud, you'll giggle): nerves outside the brain and spinal cord
Somatic Nervous System: made of nerves that send messages from the sense organs to the CNS and from the CNS to muscles and glands.
Autonomic Nervous System: controls the heart, intestines, and other organs.
Gray matter: densely packed cell bodies and denrites.
White Matter: made of mostly myelinated axons (axons with a "coating" for protection).
In the Autonomic Nervous System, there's the sympathetic nervous system, which prepares the organs for vigorous activity. The parasympathetic nervous system organizes vegetative, nonemergency reponses from organs.
The hindbrain is the most "primitive" part of the brain. It consists of the medulla, pons, and cerebellum (contributes to movement, balance, coordination, attention shifting, detecting timing.
Midbrain (middle of the brain): tectum (roof of the midbrain), superior and inferior colliculus, tegmentum, and substantia nigra (has a dopamine containing path).
Forebrain: The outer portion is the cerebral cortex. A bunch of interlinked structures forming a border around the brainstem form the limbic system. These structures are important for emotions, motivations, the four F's (feeding, fighting, fear, and...sexual activity). The structures of the limbic system are the olefactory bulb, hypothalamus, hippocampus, hippocampus, amygdala, and cingulate gyrus of the cerebral cortex. The thalamus is a structure at the center of the forebrain. Most sensory information is FIRST sent to the thalamus, it processes the info and kicks it back out to the rest of the cerebral cortex. The hypothalamus is a structure just below the thalamus and it sends messages to the pituitary gland (the endocrine glands that releases hormones). The basal ganglia are composed of the caudate nucleus, the putamen, and the globus pallidus. This structure is responsible for planning sequences of behavior, some memory and some emotional expression. The hippocampus is responsible for storing certain kinds of memory, but not all. Folks with damage to the hippocampus have trouble keepin new memories, but don't lose the memories they had before the damage occurred.
Organization of the cerebral cortex: Contains six different distinct cell layers called laminae. Each have different tasks for each different connection. The cortex is also arranged in columns of cells with similar properties as well, arranged perpendicular to the laminae.
Occipital lobe (back of the cortex): contains the primary visual cortex. Parietal lobe: contains the primary somatosensory cortex. Temporal lobe: responsible for auditory processing.
Frontal Lobe: primary motor cortex, prefrontal cortex (large proportion of the brain). This cortex gets messages from all sensory systems once its been processed.
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quote:Okay, so in this chain of events "presynaptic" refers to the neuron's relation to the synapse and not a part of the neuron
No, presynaptic refers to the neuron itself in relation to the synapse--presynaptic neuron sends, post synaptic neuron receives. '
quote:And because of action potential the release of NTs supresses additional release
No, the supression of additional neurotransmitter release is controlled by autoreceptors on the presynaptic nerve membrane.
quote:Action potential would also explain the theory that pain is the result of cells leaking their contents. If a cell ruptures near by, it's going to screw up the action potential.
Not quite. I'll get into that soon.
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quote: However, I definitely think that, in contrast to things like God's existence which much be taken to a large degree on faith, the existence of the soul is something that can and has been proven to a fairly high level of confidence.
Right...
All the modern dualist arguments basically boil down to this: point at phenomenal conscious experience. Say, "We now know, for absolute certain, that no future science will ever be able to explain this."
Even if you reject every physicalist account of the mind offered so far, I don't see how you can miss the arrogance of this argument. We don't know the limits of future science, any more than Descartes knew the limits of our modern science when he wrote that it was impossible to construct a machine that could mimic human speech. The greatest mind of the 17th century couldn't forsee that it was possible for an object to speak without possessing a soul. Couldn't our modern worries about how conscious experience might arise from matter be just this sort of misunderstanding?
posted
Depends on what you mean by mimicking human speech. A tape recorder? A computer hooked up to a speaker? A program that could extrapolate a complete grammar with partial input? A program that can be taught Egyptian Arabic but implicity understand Iraqi Arabic? As far as I know, the last two of these has yet to be done. Please do link me, I haven't been following the field very close.
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Growth and differentiation of the brain: Proliferation: production of new cells Migration: cells moving to eventual destination Differentiation: cell forms its axon and dendrites that provides its distinctive shape. Synaptogenesis: formation of synapses--this continues throughout life. Cholesterol is essential for synapse formation. A protein called Nerve Grown Factor (NGF): promotes survival and growth of a neuron; neurotrophin. Neurotrophins increase regrowth of axons after brain damage. Apoptosis: programmed mechanism of cell death
All areas of the nervous system initially make more neurons than needed. Each brain area has a period of massive cell death. Maturation is marked by these die-offs (such as the final maturation of the prefrontal cortex in teens and young adults).
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While I have, when I was younger, briefly considered some of the things that Amka said here, it really helped to see it all laid out and to read it instead of just thinking about it. To me, a Christian, I think it has some religious implications, too. Correct me if I'm wrong in this.
We think of Jesus as fully God, and also fully man, and yet it's difficult to grasp how this concept would be. I had always struggled with the verse where Jesus says that no one knows when Heaven and earth will pass away but the Father. Not even the Son. I thought, how could Jesus not know, if he's God? While I still consider it to be one of those mysteries that I'll never fully understand, it makes some sense to look at it as God (the Son) using a man's imperfect interface.
There are a million and one questions that arise when I type that, and I can't answer any of them. But it does open up a new way of seeing things that is pretty nifty.
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I heard a theory that autism could be related to the lack of die off. Also why Bean will die in the books, because the brain cells just keep proliferating without dying. These are just theories. Of course, I don't know how Bean could live very long without some die off. Maybe the die off mechanism was, in sci fi theory, merely hampered. Sorry to digress.
P.S. PSI, I know what you mean. While I don't agree with Amka's premise, I think the discussion that has arisen from it is very fertile.
quote:All the modern dualist arguments basically boil down to this: point at phenomenal conscious experience. Say, "We now know, for absolute certain, that no future science will ever be able to explain this."
That's not a very good portrayal of the dualist argument at all. Dualism is only concerned with the limits of science in an indirect sense. I don't think many at all would frame an argument in terms of the limits of science, or what science can explain. Science might be able to explain the nonphysical some day somehow, for instance, which would be entirely consistent with dualism.
The dualist argument actually boils down to this: Point at phenomenal conscious experience. Say "We know this exists, and we know it is nonphysical." Point at external world. "We know this exists, and we know it is physical. Therefore, there is both physical and nonphysical."
It's no more arrogant than any theory predicting that something must be true before it is actually observed experimentally. Physics does that sort of thing all the time (and physics arguments tend to be much more complicated.)
There are four basic ways to refute it (two materialist, and two mentalist.) 1. There is no phenomenal conscious experience (Eliminative Materialism) 2. Phenomenal conscious experience is actually a physical thing, made of matter and energy in some way (Behaviorism, Identity Theory, standard Functionalism) 3. There is no external world (Solipsism) 4. The external world is a mental thing, made of the same thing as phenomenal conscious experience (Berkeley)
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Maybe the die off mechanism was, in sci fi theory, merely hampered. Sorry to digress.![[Cool]](cool.gif)
