Repeat from 35.13)

Well, let’s returned to the narrower question of emergence of mental aspects of the world or perhaps the development of an account of the non mental world that can be unified with some, if the physics chemistry model turns out to be accurate, the scale of the gap that remains and the very dubious grounds for the general optimism about overcoming it are revealed very clearly in the American academy symposium that reviewed at the state of understanding at the end of the millennium one leading specialist on vision who was godly optimistic end of the spectrum and nevertheless reminded the reader that how the brain combines the responses specialized cells to indicate a continuous vertical line is a mystery that morality has not yet solved or even for that matter how one-liners differentiated from others, from the visual surround, Samuel Zaky.

The triple AS journal American association for advancement of science, journal “Science”, a year ago they devoted an issue to neuroscience. The summary article was coauthored by E. Kandelve, Nobel laureate. It was titled, subtitled breaking down scientific barriers to the study of brain and mind.

The article covers a lot of interesting ground, but it ends up with the conclusion that the neuroscience of higher cognitive processes is only beginning. That’s surely beginning from a higher plane then was constructed by Decart, who was in many ways the founder of modern neuroscience, but nonetheless it still beginning.

Fundamental questions remain beyond even dreams of resolution. That includes those that were traditionally considered at the heart of the theory of mind, such as for example, choosing some action or even thinking doing so. There’s been very valuable work about the narrower questions, for example, how an organism executes a plan for integrated motor action say how cockroach walks or how person reaches for a cup on a table.

40.23

But no one even raises the question of wily person or a cockroach executes one plan rather than some other one like question is raised only for the very simplest organisms single cell organism. In fact the same is true even of visual perception, which is often considered a passive process. Couple years ago, if you are, two cognitive neuroscientists, one colleague of mine, published a review of research on a problem that was posed in eighteen fifty by Helmholds. His words: “Even without moving a rise we can focus our attention on different objects that will resulting in very different perceptual experiences of the same visual field”. This … work, but the phrase “at will” points to an area that’s beyond serious empirical inquiry yet remains as much of a mystery as it was for a Newton at the end of his life when he was still seeking, we call this supple spirit that lies hidden them all bodies and that might without absurdity account for their properties of attraction and repulsion the nature than effects of light, sensation and the way members of animal bodies moved at the command of the will. These are all comparable mysteries for Newton, perhaps even beyond our understanding he thought like the principles of motion and the classical problems of the theory of mind at least since take art who incidentally also regarded themas possibly beyond human understanding.

Even if we restrict their selves to the study of mechanisms, the gaps are quite substantial. One of the leading cognitive neuroscientists rounding gala still, pointed out recently, that we clearly do not understand how the nervous system computes or even the foundations of its ability to compute even for the small set of arithmetic and logical operations that are fundamental to any computation, yet to be talking about insects but obviously extends beyond. In another domain one of the founders of the contemporary cognitive neuroscience Hans Lucas Toiler. He introduced an important review of perception a neurophysiology by writing. It may seem strange to begin with the claim that there is no adequate definition of perception and to end with the admission that we lack of neurophysiological theory. Though it was the most that could be said. Not true that was forty years ago and there were dramatic discoveries right at the time that he was writing and since. But I suspect that Toiler, whose since died would have expressed much the same judgment today.

Date: 2014-12-29; view: 1257