What is the screen of the brain if the brain is like a computer?

[Cyperium]

Ok, so all of what you see around you is actually inside your brain in a different form (electrical/chemical signals from the sensory input which are processed through various structures in the brain). But where is the actual image that you see?

So we can see a orange colour in front of us, but of course that can't be found in the brain, as well as the image that we see can't be found in the brain (only in a different form, but remember that we aren't talking about a different form here, we mean the actual image that we see, the final result of the processing that makes it up).

By interpreting the signals of the brain scientists have been able, using computers, to actually render the scene that we see in front of us on a computer screen, perhaps they will one day make us able to record dreams and all sort of things. So we know that the brain uses sofisticated methods to assemble the image that we see in front of us, but we have no physical screen, and no physical "canvas" that the scene can be rendered upon. If physicality is all there is, then where is the actual image to be found (without resorting to measuring the brains signals)?

Simply put; where does the brain paint the picture that we see?

 

[C C]

Simply put; where does the brain paint the picture that we see?

To avoid the nested Russian doll syndrome, one might also assert that this metaphorical "screen" would not require the outside relation of a homunculus observing it, with yet its own "inner screen" (even though the "picture" may seem to consist of such a view from beyond itself). To break the redundant chain, a different kind of receiver (observer) has to enter: Understanding, where the "screen" is identified and interpreted by memory, concepts, etc. ("Concepts without appearances are empty; appearances without concepts are blind" [--Kant]). That is, even if a rock could organize absorbed environmental energies slash information into a "picture" [had a faculty of sensibility], it would be blind to the picture's presence without a faculty of understanding (intellectual templates / cognitive activity).

So we can see a orange colour in front of us, but of course that can't be found in the brain, as well as the image that we see can't be found in the brain (only in a different form, but remember that we aren't talking about a different form here, we mean the actual image that we see, the final result of the processing that makes it up).

Charles Peirce: Viewing a thing from the outside, considering its relations of action and reaction with other things, it appears as matter. Viewing it from the inside, looking at its immediate character as feeling, it appears as consciousness. --Man's Glassy Essence

The brain itself and indeed the views / representations of other objects would be manifested (given empirical evidence) by this figurative "screen" -- their existence portrayed or presented as if from outside themselves (rather than in themselves, or their existence as independent of observers / perception and the relational interdependencies of space). So science's approach of correlating the introspective / private half of experience (traditionally called mind, mental, etc) to the extrospective / public half of experience (traditionally called matter, physical, etc) is the extent of how far an explanatory account can go in natural methodology (this would include mapping out or charting functional structure and connections of brain tissue). But since the matter organization concerned here is the brain, its own public appearance (which includes measurements and useful constructs derived from research of it) gets circularly directed back to that outer appearance being responsible for explaining both itself as well the inner private / personal thoughts associated with it.

An ultimate explanation that would escape that loop -- to any supposed transcendent conditions that would make phenomenal consciousness possible -- which could thereby satisfactorily explain both appearances-- would accordingly be prior to experience and even the manner of human reasoning; and thus would never be intuitive or free of dependence upon inferred hand-wavings and technical symbolic descriptions, as a substitute or surrogate for "perceiving the answer". (Intuitive here equals: "Oh, I see now (the fictional ultimate explanation); that is, it is empirically brute, how this would produce the manifestations and qualitative properties of inner and outer sense. Just as it is self-evident from their very appearance how an arrangement of bricks constitutes or produces that older house over there. In regard to the latter I don't need one thousand pages of abstract propositional and quantitative techno-babble to explain how bricks could generate a house, which in the end still would produce no experiential evidence or presentation of the fact.")

Immanuel Kant: : No doubt I, as represented by the internal sense in time, and objects in space outside me, are two specifically different [classes of] phenomena, but they are not therefore conceived as different things ["stuffs", substances]. The transcendental object, which forms the foundation of external phenomena [extrospection], and the other, which forms the foundation of our internal intuition [introspection], is therefore neither matter, nor a thinking being by itself, but simply an unknown cause of phenomena which supply to us the empirical concept of both. --Critique of Pure Reason

It [metaphysical cognition or knowledge of the transcendent] can therefore have for its basis neither external experience, which is the source of physics proper, nor internal, which is the basis of empirical psychology. --preamble of Prolegomena To Any Future Metaphysics

 

[andy1033]

They have been able to record your memories for decades, stop listening to rubbish mainstream. When i was at school 21 years ago, they took all my memories remotely, and that includes dreams. Thats 21 years ago, so stop claiming one day they may do this. Your giving out false info.

They can understand the brain, but not the mind. Your mind is unique to you, and they cannot picture the mind, only take scientific scans of your brain.

Your brain is like a computer, your mind is not, not any computer we know of anyway.

If they take a brain scan of 10 people thinking the word hello, the same spark will enter the brain. But how those individuals understand that word, or the meaning and context at that moment is in the eye of the beholder, not the person doing the scans. The same brain spark will appear in all 10 people, but the meanings behind that word is unique to the individual. It could have no meaning, or a meaning that is bizarre, or a meaning that is simple. No one can understand anothers thoughts, even though brain scans can take words and pics from the brain.

The brain is an interface to the mind, and you cannot take scans of the mind, only the brain.

 

[Fraggle Rocker]

They have been able to record your memories for decades, stop listening to rubbish mainstream. When i was at school 21 years ago, they took all my memories remotely, and that includes dreams. Thats 21 years ago, so stop claiming one day they may do this. Your giving out false info.

WARNING FROM A MODERATOR

Andy, you continue to post anti-scientific nonsense. I've warned you about this before. This is a place of science. If you wish to discuss telepathy, past-life regression, reincarnation, spoon-bending, the paranormal, and other nonsensentific garbage, please restrict yourself to the subforums we have set up specifically for that purpose.

If you continue to post it here, on the subforums for science and other legitimate scholarship, it is a textbook example of trolling, which is a violation of the SciForums rules.

You have now been warned a second time. If you do this again I will consult with the moderator of this subforum and make sure you are started on your way up the ban cycle.

-- Fraggle Rocker, Moderator of the Linguistics and Arts & Culture subforums.

 

[Magical Realist]

The space of the screen is no longer like that of a stage before which one gazes passively upon a presentation. The screen is now the interface, the zone of interactivity between the user and the internet. The gazer is now part of the construction of the image and the text itself, it's selection and cropping and magnification all controlled by the unconsciously-manipulated keyboard. The user is now a mere extended prosthesis to a self-interactive system of electronic visualization and self-stimulation The threshold between screen and mind is becoming vanishingly thin, video games and pornography and you tube sucking us up into an alternate reality where real and virtual are no longer distinguishable. Where indeed does the brain paint the pictures it sees, when its very mode of consciousness is becoming increasingly screen-like, ubiquitous, and image-fixated?

"Machines produce only machines. This is increasingly true as the virtual technologies develop. At a certain level of machination, of immersion in virtual machinery, there is no longer any man-machine distinction: the machine is on both sides of the interface. Perhaps you are indeed merely the machine's space now--the human being having become the virtual reality of the machine, its mirror operator. This has to do with the very essence of the screen. There is no "through" the screen the way there is a "through" the looking-glass or the mirror. The dimensions of time itself merge there in "real time" And, the characteristics of any virtual surface being first of all to be there, to be empty and thus capable of being filled with anything, it is left to you to enter in real time into interactivity with the void."--- "Screened Out", Jean Baudrillard

 

[Cyperium]

To avoid the nested Russian doll syndrome, one might also assert that this metaphorical "screen" would not require the outside relation of a homunculus observing it, with yet its own "inner screen" (even though the "picture" may seem to consist of such a view from beyond itself). To break the redundant chain, a different kind of receiver (observer) has to enter: Understanding, where the "screen" is identified and interpreted by memory, concepts, etc. ("Concepts without appearances are empty; appearances without concepts are blind" [--Kant]). That is, even if a rock could organize absorbed environmental energies slash information into a "picture" [had a faculty of sensibility], it would be blind to the picture's presence without a faculty of understanding (intellectual templates / cognitive activity).

We have both inner pictures and "outer" pictures, we see the external world which pictures are very clear to us, then we have the inner pictures which are less clear when we are awake and as clear as external pictures when we are dreaming. So by viewing a image that we have imagined we aren't setting ourselves outside of the picture as when we are looking at a picture of the external world, instead we are looking at a picture from within ourselves.

Indeed, when we are imagining things then we need to conceptualise it, we could also draw it but that takes considerably much longer time and is more memory-consuming (as we have to remember each strike) through this we have the ability to actually construct a image that aren't conceptualised through earlier memories. Instead each stroke is memorised and conceptualised (in order to remember what the image looks like at each stroke). It's easy to construct any kind of image and it is as if we draw this image somewhere, in a kind of canvas. The canvas strictly physically speaking is the pathways of the brain and alterations of either processes or to a limited degree even structure. But since we aren't strictly physically speaking here, we need some kind of canvas for which the physical represents (or which represents the physical in a subjective way instead of objective).

Charles Peirce: Viewing a thing from the outside, considering its relations of action and reaction with other things, it appears as matter. Viewing it from the inside, looking at its immediate character as feeling, it appears as consciousness. --Man's Glassy Essence

The brain itself and indeed the views / representations of other objects would be manifested (given empirical evidence) by this figurative "screen" -- their existence portrayed or presented as if from outside themselves (rather than in themselves, or their existence as independent of observers / perception and the relational interdependencies of space). So science's approach of correlating the introspective / private half of experience (traditionally called mind, mental, etc) to the extrospective / public half of experience (traditionally called matter, physical, etc) is the extent of how far an explanatory account can go in natural methodology (this would include mapping out or charting functional structure and connections of brain tissue). But since the matter organization concerned here is the brain, its own public appearance (which includes measurements and useful constructs derived from research of it) gets circularly directed back to that outer appearance being responsible for explaining both itself as well the inner private / personal thoughts associated with it.

An ultimate explanation that would escape that loop -- to any supposed transcendent conditions that would make phenomenal consciousness possible -- which could thereby satisfactorily explain both appearances-- would accordingly be prior to experience and even the manner of human reasoning; and thus would never be intuitive or free of dependence upon inferred hand-wavings and technical symbolic descriptions, as a substitute or surrogate for "perceiving the answer". (Intuitive here equals: "Oh, I see now (the fictional ultimate explanation); that is, it is empirically brute, how this would produce the manifestations and qualitative properties of inner and outer sense. Just as it is self-evident from their very appearance how an arrangement of bricks constitutes or produces that older house over there. In regard to the latter I don't need one thousand pages of abstract propositional and quantitative techno-babble to explain how bricks could generate a house, which in the end still would produce no experiential evidence or presentation of the fact.")

Immanuel Kant: : No doubt I, as represented by the internal sense in time, and objects in space outside me, are two specifically different [classes of] phenomena, but they are not therefore conceived as different things ["stuffs", substances]. The transcendental object, which forms the foundation of external phenomena [extrospection], and the other, which forms the foundation of our internal intuition [introspection], is therefore neither matter, nor a thinking being by itself, but simply an unknown cause of phenomena which supply to us the empirical concept of both. --Critique of Pure Reason

It [metaphysical cognition or knowledge of the transcendent] can therefore have for its basis neither external experience, which is the source of physics proper, nor internal, which is the basis of empirical psychology. --preamble of Prolegomena To Any Future Metaphysics

I was curious as to the unknown phenomena which would "bridge" the external with the internal, is there any idea as to what phenomena that would be and would it be physics in any way?

They have been able to record your memories for decades, stop listening to rubbish mainstream. When i was at school 21 years ago, they took all my memories remotely, and that includes dreams. Thats 21 years ago, so stop claiming one day they may do this. Your giving out false info.

They can understand the brain, but not the mind. Your mind is unique to you, and they cannot picture the mind, only take scientific scans of your brain.

Your brain is like a computer, your mind is not, not any computer we know of anyway.

If they take a brain scan of 10 people thinking the word hello, the same spark will enter the brain. But how those individuals understand that word, or the meaning and context at that moment is in the eye of the beholder, not the person doing the scans. The same brain spark will appear in all 10 people, but the meanings behind that word is unique to the individual. It could have no meaning, or a meaning that is bizarre, or a meaning that is simple. No one can understand anothers thoughts, even though brain scans can take words and pics from the brain.

The brain is an interface to the mind, and you cannot take scans of the mind, only the brain.

I don't want to encourage you to get banned, so it's probably better if we stick to the subject if we are going to discuss this. The interesting thing is that even though they can scan 10 people saying hello, it isn't the same spark that appears in all those people. Each person has a original way of assembling "hello" based on their earlier experiences. The test-persons that they scanned had to train the computer to their associations of the patterns that make up a picture before the computer could render it correctly. In the other aspects (aside from the "they have scanned people for years" argument) I agree fully though.

The space of the screen is no longer like that of a stage before which one gazes passively upon a presentation. The screen is now the interface, the zone of interactivity between the user and the internet. The gazer is now part of the construction of the image and the text itself, it's selection and cropping and magnification all controlled by the unconsciously-manipulated keyboard. The user is now a mere extended prosthesis to a self-interactive system of electronic visualization and self-stimulation The threshold between screen and mind is becoming vanishingly thin, video games and pornography and you tube sucking us up into an alternate reality where real and virtual are no longer distinguishable. Where indeed does the brain paint the pictures it sees, when its very mode of consciousness is becoming increasingly screen-like, ubiquitous, and image-fixated?

Imaging in the brain takes up most of the resources (and has taken up a lot ever since the dawn of man, because of it's importance for survival and making bonds with other people), so it has always been very important (but before the age of computers and the internet we would explore the world and nature around us as a means of satisfaction, as well as of course explore people that we find arousing). The internet hasn't made anything new in respect to imaging, it has simply made it easier to have instant satisfaction. As in other technologies the biggest concern here (I think) is that it makes us lazy, and perhaps even incapable of socialising with people we meet in the real-world. I think it becomes increasingly important that we try to go out and meet people instead of chatting with them on facebook or other social medias.

"Machines produce only machines. This is increasingly true as the virtual technologies develop. At a certain level of machination, of immersion in virtual machinery, there is no longer any man-machine distinction: the machine is on both sides of the interface. Perhaps you are indeed merely the machine's space now--the human being having become the virtual reality of the machine, its mirror operator. This has to do with the very essence of the screen. There is no "through" the screen the way there is a "through" the looking-glass or the mirror. The dimensions of time itself merge there in "real time" And, the characteristics of any virtual surface being first of all to be there, to be empty and thus capable of being filled with anything, it is left to you to enter in real time into interactivity with the void."--- "Screened Out", Jean Baudrillard

Interesting and thought provoking. Real? I don't know, perhaps we extend ourselves not only through brain connections but also interactions with the world - and in this case the computer.

 

[C C]

I was curious as to the unknown phenomena which would "bridge" the external with the internal, is there any idea as to what phenomena that would be and would it be physics in any way?

As a metaphysical option in philosophical naturalism, neutral monism is a non-dualism view that also departs from the historical banality of declaring its fundamental substance / principle / reality to be either mental or material (generalizations abstracted from inner experience and outer experience, respectively). Yet NM doesn't take the stance of leaving its neutral element or agency unknowable / unverifiable or beyond consciousness -- that is, it isn't Kantianism and not quite Double Aspect Theory, either. It plugs a candidate taken from the content of perception and intellective thought into its monism placeholder (just as traditional idealism and materialism did). Physics obviously can't entertain NM; though the individual scientist might favor it in personal philosophical pursuits.

neutral monism: A position according to which the difference between minds and bodies derives from different arrangements of the same neutral entities [or neutral "stuff"]. The entities are neutral because they themselves are neither mental nor physical. This position proposed a solution to the mind-body problem, but there are difficulties with the neutral status of that which constitutes minds and bodies and with how arrangements of what is neutral can issue in minds and bodies. If experiences [uniquely considered independent of mind] are proposed as the neutral entities, it is not clear whether neutral monism clarifies or obscures the nature of experience. --Glosario de términos filosóficos (en inglés)

Kenneth Sayre perhaps offers the most novel, contemporary candidate for NM:

Neutral Monism is the view that neither mind nor matter is ontologically basic, but are both reducible (in some appropriate sense of reduction that requires specification) to another more fundamental principle that is “neutral” between them. The neutral monism I advocate holds that the fundamental principle to which both mind and matter are reducible is not a substance in any sense (Aristotelian, Cartesian, whatever), but is rather [a] structure of a sort that can only be represented mathematically. This structure is what information theorists…call “information.” The neutral monism I advocate, accordingly, has more in common with the ontology of the late Platonic dialogues than with that of the early Russell which the name ‘neutral monism’ commonly brings to mind. --Memo circulated in the Notre Dame philosophy department

And:

The basic error of materialism, as I have characterized it (others may view it differently), is to have taken sides prematurely on a speculative issue before the alternatives are clearly defined. The materialist rejects dualism, according to which mind and body cannot be understood within a common conceptual framework, in favor of the thesis that both mind and body are ultimately accountable in a framework based upon the categories of physics. Another alternative, however, is that both can be understood within a framework accommodating physics but in which physics is not basic to all other science. Since the current isolation of physics from other sciences in fact is part of the mind-body problem, it is reasonable to pursue this latter alternative in search of another set of basic categories not dependent upon physics. To provide the foundations for such an alternative is the primary goal of this present study. In this respect, the present approach is like the second traditional form of attack on the mind-body problem, that of creating a set of 'neutral' categories in terms of which concepts in either field can be defined, and through which accordingly they can be interrelated. A classic example is Russell's theory of sensibilia, or 'neutral monism.'
http://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/philosophers/sayre/

Double-aspect theory has a resemblance to NM -- in the sense of mental and physical being two distinct perspectives on the same primary being. In DAT, however, the double aspects are always inseparable (perhaps like two rooms composing a house).

William James: The positivism or agnosticism of our times, which is proud of its roots in the natural sciences, is happy to describe itself by the name of monism. But it is a monism in name only. It poses an unknown reality, but tells us that this reality always presents itself under two “aspects,” the conscious aspect and the material aspect, And these two sides remain as irreducible as extension and thought, the fundamental attributes of Spinoza's God. In effect, contemporary monism is pure Spinozism.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/neutral-monism/#9.4

 

[IncogNegro]

I would rather believe the body and its nerves are the computer reaching out to the senses all encompassing surroundings. The mind is the screen, the processor of this information meant to visualize the parts we wish to see.

 

[Magical Realist]

I was curious as to the unknown phenomena which would "bridge" the external with the internal, is there any idea as to what phenomena that would be and would it be physics in any way?

I propose the linkage between mind and matter to be the dualistic nature of energy as both particle and wave. When electrons/photons are unobserved they have a probablistic nature as waves. But the moment they are observed these distributions of probabilities collapse into an actual physical particle. I propose energy at the quantum level as the hybrid phenomenon between the probablistic (mind) and the physical (matter). I think the mind influences the brain by manipulating statistical events in phase space involving basins of attraction, attractors, repellors, evolutionary algorithms, and even chaotic indeterminacy towards it's own ends. At the same time the brain reciprocrates affectivity upon the mind thru self-synchronizing synaptic firings, tangled hierarchies, and strange loops in physical spacetime. The brain is thus whatever is happening in our heads at the moment, while the mind is whatever happens in our heads NEXT.

 

[wellwisher]

The brain is mostly water with nothing in the brain, down to the smallest molecule or ions able to move without the displacement of water. Water is not inert but forms hydrogen bonds, which are relatively strong. Liquid water is denser that solid water. This internal bonding results in ordered domains of water, which can switch between high and low density structures; see below. If you need something to move through the water, such as cations on nerves, the water has to cooperate by switching between these binary domaine states. All the chemicals and proteins face the same water properties and limitations and can't move without moving the water.

Most model oversimplify and assume swimming in water is like swimming in air, which is not the case. Far more energy is needed that can be explained with ATP energy alone. Picture being a rock concert near the stage with the crowd squishing you. You can't just walk to the rest room but need to fight for every inch of movement unless the crowd helps you.

With computer memory all data, no matter what it is represents, reduces to binary switches, with the sequence of switches defining specific memory. One binary in water are the high and low density switches. The screen of the human mind is fluid and based on water, with these domaine switch sequences able to define any chemical state in motion or not.

I would guess the screen of the brain is within the ventricles; water of the cerebral spinal fluid. The brain releases low concentrations of chemicals into the water matrix of the cerebral spinal fluid, allowing specific layers of the brain's memory to become projected. If you have dots of all colors on a paper, and wore red glasses, all the red dots would disappear so the other colors are easier to see. The chemicals released into the ventricles help to open up a memory layer.

Below are representations of the two main ordered domains found in liquid water. These cages of 280 water molecules can collapse or expand, altering local free energy. This allows water to provide the energy to open the crowd. The second diagram shows individual hydrogen bonds, which are a binary switch, that can transmit information faster than any chemical diffusion within water.

As soon as neurons fire (like slow motion displacement in water) the water is already transmitting information through the water to accept the diffusion of the cations through the water, way before the cations arrive.

An analogy is sonar in water. We can hear the sound way before the ship arrives. This gives us time to set up the tug boat and dock to assist the ship back into port. Say the ship begins to turn, the sonar hears that and we can abort the tug ahead of time. You need this speed to coordinate the huge volumes of activity within even one cell, seeing all have displace sticky water. If we minimize the free energy within the waves addition within the water, this translates to all the molecular and ionics ducks in a row.

 

[IncogNegro]

OOOO pretty colors. I concur with your simplistic assertions. They just make too much sense.

 

[IncogNegro]

The brain is mostly water with nothing in the brain, down to the smallest molecule or ions able to move without the displacement of water. Water is not inert but forms hydrogen bonds, which are relatively strong. Liquid water is denser that solid water. This internal bonding results in ordered domains of water, which can switch between high and low density structures; see below. If you need something to move through the water, such as cations on nerves, the water has to cooperate by switching between these binary domaine states. All the chemicals and proteins face the same water properties and limitations and can't move without moving the water.

Most model oversimplify and assume swimming in water is like swimming in air, which is not the case. Far more energy is needed that can be explained with ATP energy alone. Picture being a rock concert near the stage with the crowd squishing you. You can't just walk to the rest room but need to fight for every inch of movement unless the crowd helps you.

With computer memory all data, no matter what it is represents, reduces to binary switches, with the sequence of switches defining specific memory. One binary in water are the high and low density switches. The screen of the human mind is fluid and based on water, with these domaine switch sequences able to define any chemical state in motion or not.

I would guess the screen of the brain is within the ventricles; water of the cerebral spinal fluid. The brain releases low concentrations of chemicals into the water matrix of the cerebral spinal fluid, allowing specific layers of the brain's memory to become projected. If you have dots of all colors on a paper, and wore red glasses, all the red dots would disappear so the other colors are easier to see. The chemicals released into the ventricles help to open up a memory layer.

Below are representations of the two main ordered domains found in liquid water. These cages of 280 water molecules can collapse or expand, altering local free energy. This allows water to provide the energy to open the crowd. The second diagram shows individual hydrogen bonds, which are a binary switch, that can transmit information faster than any chemical diffusion within water.

As soon as neurons fire (like slow motion displacement in water) the water is already transmitting information through the water to accept the diffusion of the cations through the water, way before the cations arrive.

An analogy is sonar in water. We can hear the sound way before the ship arrives. This gives us time to set up the tug boat and dock to assist the ship back into port. Say the ship begins to turn, the sonar hears that and we can abort the tug ahead of time. You need this speed to coordinate the huge volumes of activity within even one cell, seeing all have displace sticky water. If we minimize the free energy within the waves addition within the water, this translates to all the molecular and ionics ducks in a row.

Nicely put... Have you ever noticed the majority of iron in the body is found in the CSF not only in the spine but in the water the brain rests upon? Knowing what you just said iron would have to be the go between from the mind to the body itself.

 

[Magical Realist]

OOOO pretty colors. I concur with your simplistic assertions. They just make too much sense.

I think these are at least SOME plausible ways to understand the mind. I leave it to the experts to work out the details. I'm a firm believer in "the kitchen sink'' approach towards explaining consciousness. I feel like when evolution evolves an advantageous trait, it leaves no stone unturned in finding ways to make it happen. It throws everything into the mix. And with the mind, you basically have something that not only evolved for survival reasons but changes the very nature of evolution itself. Today, thru knowledge and technology and culture, we are accelerating the process far beyond the genetic roulette of prehistoric days. Consciousness is like evolution sped up from millions of years to a matter of centuries and even decades. As a species we now learn more in a few years than mankind used to learn in a whole millenium. It's an exciting time to be alive, eh?

 

[IncogNegro]

All I heard was blah dee blah de blah... I'm a fucking genius where DNA and the mind converge blah dee blah dee blah modesty...

But I suppose all people get from me is blah dee blah dee blah... I'm a slow person... Bubble bubble rip....