why there is a ghost in the machine

(pre-script- note on my last post- it turns out c-fibers are actually in the brain, which slightly wipes out a little of my argument, but not terribly)

It is very late, and I should be sleeping.  But alas, the insane school I go to, the job that I have, the violin lessons I pay $80/week for, literature club, Amnesty International, and Global Poverty Initiative guarantee that sleep is a distant memory (although I don't regret anything I do).  And now, when I could sleep for three and a half hours instead of three, I write.  It is the plight of us writers I suppose.  The impulse hits, and either we write or we lose it.

We learned today in neuroscience about the neural basis for learning and memory.  It has something to do with back-propagation from action potentials seeping back into the dendrites just when another excitatory post synaptic potential hits the dendrite, giving the membrane enough voltage to dislodge magnesium from the NMDA receptors, which through a G-protein process of some sort causes the expression of more AMPA receptors, which, I think, which allow influx of positive ions that cause more depolarization, enough to cause an action potential in that post-synaptic neuron.

I think that that is only the very rudimentary basis for learning.  I'm sure there is loads more they are not telling us, and honestly, considering the amount of information we have to absorb for our test, I am glad (see what education does to our curiosity?).  

Earlier today in philosophy we were also talking about Turing machines as computational models for the human brain.  The whole field of cognitive science is based on the idea that the brain works like a computer.  

These two things got me thinking.  First, it reminds me of the Chinese Room thought experiment in which someone that knows Chinese and someone that just has the programs to generate Chinese appear the same computationally but obviously have a fundamental difference.  I think the Chinese Room is the strongest argument against AI, and I think on some level it proves, to me at least, that there must be some kind of mind-brian dualism.

After learning about learning, I was humbled again at how complicated we are, and confused again about how any scientist could think life was just a grand coincidence.  I know that the argument to my protestation that life is too complicated and rich to be an accident can be countered with the idea that the exact conditions that led to life are all based on chance, and we just happened to draw the lucky straw.  But that just doesn't satisfy me.

I was talking to my friend about evolution, and she said that she has never had any trouble buying evolution, but that she views it as just a mechanism rather than a be-all, end-all.  We both believe pretty strongly in spirituality.  My argument is that the brain is like evolution, the same way it is like the ignorant man in the Chinese room- it is just a mechanism.  Real computation requires real consciousness, not just deterministic models of neurons.

This is where I always run into trouble though.  The work I am doing with Bayesian models of inference is based on the assumption that the brain is computational, which I just said I could accept if we considered it a computational mechanism controlled by a mind.  However, while I believe the mind is not deterministic, it seems that the brain is.  For some reason it is so much easier for me to accept that the world can be modeled by differential equations, that nature works according to calculus, than it is for me to accept that the human mind is also ruled by deterministic- albeit stochastic- math.  That makes us like any rock governed by forces whose action is entirely mathematically predictable.  How is there room for a mind in such a model?

And yet I am very certain that it is obvious through the Chinese test and my own opinion that there is a mind, and that the brain, if it is computational, is just a computer being used by that mind.  I guess the most logical counter is to make an analogy between the mind and a computer user.  I mean, sure, computers are deterministic.  They are made out of a lot of little circuits that employ a binary system that, though infinite seeming, isn't really infinite.  There are electronic rules that govern a computer.  However, we could still conceive of a computer using as having free will even when the computer does not because the user has some knowledge of causality within the computer and exercises free will in employing deterministic programs.  It could be argued that that is the way the mind utilizes the brain.  That seems kind of weak to me though for some reason.

The sad thing about neuroscience, cognitive science, and the philosophy of mind to me is that the more you know the less you can just believe in the things that feel right.  The general public believes in dualism while most of the scientific world does not.  The exception is free will, which most everyone just seems to want to believe in even when it is far from probable.  I think I learned last year in my psychology and free will class that most scientists, even if they held deterministic views about the world, believe in free will, even when it seems contradictory with their other beliefs.  Free will, it seems, is kind of an a-priori assumption.  If you don't believe in free will, you're not terribly happy, and the legal system falls apart.  How can a murderer be culpable for an inevitable crime?  Kind of like "Minority Report."

Anyway, I'm getting distracted.  My point is that life is too complicated to be an accident, and if the brain really is computational, it is controlled by some separate entity the mind.  The mind somehow avoids the deterministic nature of a computational brain to exercise free will.  I am not entirely sure how all of this works yet.  Somehow I think I will spend my life trying to fine-tune my opinion of the psychological model.

More to come.  Right now I'm dropping dead from exhaustion.

One more interesting but unrelated thing I learned today: when kids are acquiring language they make only grammar mistakes that are consistent with some human language.  i.e. they will invert word orderings only if there is some other human language has that inversion.  My linguistics professor described it as a child that knows he is learning a language but hasn't yet figured out that that language is English.  Children never make mistakes that are inconsistent with any other human grammar.

This lends support to Chomsky's universal grammar (I like Chomsky, even if he did shut me down last year when I emailed him my ideas about why his theory of the media showed that communism is impossible).  That's insane to me, really.  How can one be born with a capacity for German grammar structures when one has never heard German?  How can one actually employ German word ordering when one has only heard English?  It's quite the mystery to me.

Ok.  Now to bed for reals.  Peace.