BRAIN DEVELOPS MIND

Interesting enough, studies of infants could enable us to observe how attention - a typical character of 'mind' or 'soul' -regulates other cognitive and emotional systems. There are impressive and striking changes in infant behavior over the first year of life. As the visual system matures during the first six months, infant behavior often appears dominated by visual orienting, a kind of attention. The body phenomena appear as previous to the mind phenomena, but minds hurry in showing their control. The same thing happens during the 'hominisation' of our species, during phylogenesis, and, as the famous von Baer recapitulation theory, once more onthogenesis recapitulates phylogenesis. Antonio Damaso clarifies that body precedes mind either ontogenically (in a childs evolution) or phylogenetically (in human species evolution). It appears to him that the physical is a necessary substrate of the mental. Brain develops mind, mind comes from brain, from body/brain. Marvin Minsky explains that both are brain stuff: A-Brain (the part of the net in contact with the external world, so as to give rise to the A-Brain world) and B-Brain (the part of the net in contact with A-Brain, so as to give rise to the interior world, the B-Brain world).

Whenever we mature a thought, biothermodynamics shows what happens. The maturing, the autoorganization is a process of communication between subnets and subsubnets. In the limit, single neurons. Blood flow as source of metabolites and draining the decomposed chemical species, and the heat produced. Ions and neurotransmitters in the synaptic bioreactors limiting the possibilities of a genius producing rich imaginative images. A mind in action. What else is needed? Nothing else? We do not know. The question is: is that all? The old sacred traditions have nothing to contribute? Mind is really something special. As an instance, medical art appears incomplete, our viewpoint appears incomplete, when leaving aside the fundamental human (the mind's) contribution - fully divine for some, or fully material, or a mix - in the processes which start and then heal mental and psychophysical sicknesses. So supernaturalism will always have a real influence, also in skeptics.

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• scope
• experience and physical-psychophysics
• artificial intelligence and problem spaces
• operating systems and robots
• architecture, space and the hard problem
• danger perception
• visual attention
• distress and attention
• external--->information....internal--->danger experience
• Shannon's surprise
• binary strings and extreme danger
• danger feelings
• danger related steps towards consciousness
• physics, biology and consciousness
• models revisited
• danger avoidance with little conscious attention
• conscious intentions and what memory is for
• starting with P-consciousness
• new models
• danger diagnostic and treatment as order parameters
• toward a theory of the brain?

2.feb.1999

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Glosario de Carlos von der Becke, where some specialized words are explained.