Is it really just this simple?

So the human mind…memory…thoughts…ideas…dreams….why don’t we understand these things. Why is it that we can make a map of the universe but we can’t seem to figure out how our brains seem to work. Okay we know several things, we know that they are working in paralell – passing information between themselves in certain patterns, where memories are formed and what process happens during the formation … we know how the brain interprets the signals from the eye and the manner in which it converts it into a lovely high resolution image from us to navigate by, so why can’t we figure out about what or where that little spark happens that is human thought.

What I figure is we are just extremely efficient organic ‘machines’. Now I don’t mean we are all robots – I mean we are mechanical in how we work. In other words – I believe that just like a car – our functions and composure can be fully explained and there is none of this mystical stuff that people call the soul or even that the mind is anything intangible.

If you look at your computer – you can see all the information on the screen, the words, the colors , the pictures. But none of these images actually exist inside the computer or anywhere else for that matter (other than other computer monitors). So this information only exists as 1’s and 0’s on a hard drive. Thats not an impossible method for the brain to work either – I mean the computer interprets the positioning of your mouse for example purely by mathematical process – rather than ‘looking’ at where it is now and ‘seeing’ where you move the mouse on the mousepad to work it out.

Filing, Dancing - what can't they do!

Lets use our brains awesome ability to think of impossible scenarios and ideas to do a little thought experiment. Take a lake of any size you like, and

populate it with lilly pads, on each lilly pad is a frog who sorts files and passes them between eachother. Now lets assume each frogs folder for filing can only hold a maximum of 100 files. Now lets understand that when a frog moves and shuffles around on his lilly pad – he’s making ripples in the water. Now when these frogs start filing they tend to work in certain pattern based on the weather.

Okay now lets just remember this is a thought experiement to explain my concept 🙂 I know frogs don’t tend to do filling out on the lake…Now each frog depending on the pattern they are working in – will exchange files appropriately with neighbouring frogs. As each frog files away a page or passes it to another – he’s making ripples – these ripples are standing in for the electrochemical signal that we in the real world, monitor to determine the state or activity of a brain cell.

As they pass information between eachother depending on the weather, which paralells simple situational input. That is to say rainy windy weather vs sunny calm weather. Each different weather pattern will cause different work patterns in the frogs in the same way that different sensory input to humans causes various patterns of neruactivity. Now lets assume these pages are abstract representations with different shapes and sizes and colors, smells and textures and even have unique sounds when they crumple. Each page is a packet of sensory data.The data is random but it is tagged and

This is how neurons connect to eachother.

associated with similar pages in this filing process. They can be assembled again to recreate the full memory – however paper degrades and will decay with moisture (water) and how I figure the brain forgets things is of a similar idea.

If you take it that each brain cell has a certain capacity of axons and dendrites it can support – then lets assume that the memories are ‘stored’ in these connections. Now if a connection doesn’t recieve much activity – it will start to degrade and eventually become broken – ie that part of the memory or detail no longer exists. Now all you need to have is inside each neuron – an indexing like function – purely storing a copy of the protein that formed that specific dendrite or axon. The reason for the index is because the neuron needs a way of knowing which connections he currently has open and which are non-existant. So now each neuron knows exactly what he’s connected to and what types of information go where – we also have a method in which unused memories can fade and replenish the neurons capacity to create new memorys.

So if you see the paralells in our hypothetical brain – the functions between the frogs on the lake – are the exact same as the concepts of how I suppose the brain works. This however brings me to the idea that our mind and thoughts and ability to compose intricate ideas as well as be self aware – is purely just a result of a massive amount of information passing through a highly efficient system – designed to do exactly what it does. Survive. Our entire body is a vehicle for our brain – we have muscles to move our arms so we can gather resources to put into our ‘vehicle’ to give it fuel to make our bodies go. Thats a well known fact – but the point is our bodies are tools of our brains – which in itself is only doing what it does because if it didn’t – it would be dead.

Now thats the beauty of evolution – the reason we all live and work ect – is because all the people ever born whos brains decided to just not work continously – were never living , especially not long enough to reproduce. So that type of behaviour or function of the brain could never evolved. Nothing can evolve to die at birth which is an obvious statement. Its common sense.

If you think of it like this – our brain is just a bunch of cells who are working in a continous loop and our awareness and apparent self awareness are all just illusions created by the massive movement and processing of mass amounts of data – which is only required to allow our brain to continue its existance. This to me makes life and humans all the more interesting because we are just products of years of highly efficient optimization.

To be honest – the whole idea might seem a little odd or nonsensical – but I challenge you to come up with a sounder argument that accurately depicts the processes of the mind. I’m sure you will find that its difficult to come up with a concept that doesn’t explain a self prepetuating machine thats only purpose is to gain experiences.

🙂 Probably my randomest article but my opinions stand 🙂