From Matter to Mind:

 The Evolution of Consciousness and Society

The journey from the simplest particles to the complex minds and societies we see today is a fascinating tale of increasing complexity driven by thermodynamics and the continuous input of energy from the sun. This process, characterized by the formation of feedback loops and the accumulation of information, has led to the emergence of consciousness and the development of advanced societies. Let's explore this evolutionary path step by step.

1. Basic Sensory Perception

The story begins with the formation of fundamental particles and forces following the Big Bang. As the universe cooled, simple atoms and molecules formed, eventually leading to the creation of stars and planets. On Earth, the presence of a heat source—the sun—provided the energy necessary for chemical evolution. Simple sensory receptors emerged in early organisms, allowing them to detect changes in their environment, such as light, temperature, and chemical signals.

2. Reflexive Responses

As organisms evolved, they developed more complex nervous systems that enabled reflexive responses to stimuli. These automatic reactions, such as pulling away from a hot surface, helped organisms avoid danger and seek out resources, enhancing their chances of survival.

3. Memory Formation

The ability to store and recall past experiences marked a significant evolutionary advancement. Memory formation allowed organisms to learn from their interactions with the environment, adapt to new situations, and improve their survival strategies.

4. Feedback Loops

With the development of feedback loops, organisms could process sensory information more effectively. These loops allowed for continuous monitoring and adjustment of responses based on past experiences and current conditions, leading to more sophisticated behaviors.

5. Pattern Recognition

Recognizing patterns in sensory data provided a significant advantage. Organisms could anticipate future events based on past experiences, leading to more strategic decision-making and problem-solving.

6. Meta-Awareness

Higher cognitive functions, such as meta-awareness, emerged. This involved reflecting on one's own thoughts and experiences, recognizing long-term patterns, and making decisions based on broader contexts. Meta-awareness allowed for purposeful navigation and planning, further enhancing survival and adaptation.

7. Purposeful Navigation

With advanced awareness, organisms could navigate their environment with intent. This involved planning movements and actions based on understanding and categorizing sensory experiences, leading to more effective hunting, gathering, and avoidance of predators.

8. Complex Social Interactions

The development of social behaviors and communication marked another significant evolutionary step. Organisms began to form complex social structures, cooperate, and share information, leading to the emergence of culture and collective awareness.

9. Language and Communication

The evolution of language allowed for the transmission of complex information between individuals. This enabled the sharing of knowledge, coordination of actions, and development of social norms, further enhancing the complexity of societies.

10. Collective Awareness

With the ability to communicate and share experiences, societies developed a collective consciousness. This collective awareness allowed communities to function as cohesive units, with shared knowledge, social coordination, and cultural evolution.

The Role of Thermodynamics

Throughout this evolutionary journey, the continuous input of energy from the sun has been a driving force. Thermodynamics, the study of energy and its transformations, explains how local complexity can increase over time with the addition of energy. The sun's energy has fueled the processes that led to the emergence of life, the development of complex organisms, and the evolution of consciousness.

The Future: Becoming Creators

As we continue to understand and replicate the processes by which consciousness arises, we have the potential to create new forms of societies and consciousness. This ability to harness energy and information to create complex systems mirrors the creative powers once attributed to the gods by ancient civilizations. By leveraging our understanding of thermodynamics and information theory, we can shape the future of humanity and our role as creators.

In conclusion, the journey from matter to mind to society is a testament to the power of thermodynamics and the continuous input of energy from the sun. By understanding and harnessing these processes, we can continue to evolve and create new forms of consciousness and societies, shaping the future in ways we can only imagine.

Genius Thinking?

Have you ever been shocked/surprised/blown away by the reasoning or behavior of someone you consider an outstandingly smart individual?

Here are some patterns observed on how genius thinks.  

Chaplin and Einstein

Extremely talented at going up and down levels of abstraction. Geniuses tend to be able to fit seemingly unrelated facts into the big picture almost instantly, and drill down to any level of detail. On a related note, when learning they tend to learn at every level of abstraction at once, rather than simply building from the bottom up or top down like most people.

Make a lot of assumptions. This may seem counter-intuitive - we've often heard that creative thinking requires breaking existing assumptions. And this may be true, but it seems like geniuses tend to make a lot of assumptions very quickly, test their hypotheses, and then change their assumptions very slowly if it's necessary.

Come up with unique ways to compress information. A smart person might see a difficult Mathematical theorem as a connection of ten steps, whereas a genius might visualize it and see it all as one picture.

Separate emotion or external thoughts from their thinking. At least in science, geniuses tend to never attach any external meaning to their thoughts-as an example, they could think about how to efficiently invade a country or release a horrible weapon without feeling phased by the image of the devastation that would involve. Similarly, they can often focus on their work no matter what they're going through-whether it's loud noises or personal trauma.

Connect seemingly unrelated things. A genius will frequently follow a T-shaped model of learning: be an expert on one things and dabble in a lot. They will frequently get inspired by or make connections between things that are unrelated to their main research.


I'll not argue for or against these observations, but present them as an interesting data point worth taking a moment to consider.

Satvik Beri wrote this on Quora.  You can see more of his thoughts here.  

In the Beginning was the Word

What are Words?

Words are symbols to communicate with.  We have character symbols that represent the words we can write and read.  Vibrations in the air represent words too.  The words are not in the character symbols or vibrations in the air. 

Transforming senses into symbols

Words are ideas in our brains.  Words exist in our minds.  We can only physically sense the words when we imprint them or move the air.  Words must exist inside us before we can use them.

We experience the worlds with our senses.  Sight, smell, and sound inform our experience; our knowledge of the world.  These experiences are captured in our brains.  Networks of neurons capture what we sense.  Neurons do not capture the reality outside of us. 

Our minds store metaphors of reality.  Our brains have patterns that reflect our experience of reality.  Neurons capture a symbol of what we experienced.  The smell of a rose is not what we have in our brains.  A symbol that helps us recall the smell does exist.  When a similar symbol comes to us again, we know what it is through our experience. 

Learning the smell of roses

A child develops experience before words.  We lay down symbols of reality as soon as our senses and brains become engaged.  Only when enough experience of reality has shaped our brains with information, can we start to abstract that experience into words.

Words are how we share our experience.  Words are our shared model of reality.  We learn our words from each other.  Our brains learn to assign the words to what we have sensed.  

Meaning in Mind

Words are symbols held in our brains.  Our pattern of neurons hold these symbols of writing separate from the experience they represent.  The words “the rose smell” are stored in our brains.  “The rose smell" is stored both as remembered sensation and as a set of words associated with the sensation.  Words seem to have an existence of their own.  The words are not the remembered smell. Words are references of smell abstracted into other networks of neurons.

Creating meaning from links

These stored sense memories and their associations as words are models of the world made into physical reality.  The model of reality existing in our brains is a physical thing of matter and energy.  Words are written into our brains. 

Many kinds of living beings have sense memory.  Stored experience of reality as it is sensed is an old trick of life forms.  The storage of what is experienced as a symbol to be used later has a significant competitive advantage.  Symbols stored in physical reality and recalled for later use give primitive mind to even the lowest of creatures.

Meaning begins when symbols are linked with experience.  The very meaning of meaning is that some symbol is held to be similar to another.  These associations of stored symbols in our brain define the world to us.

Symbols give our minds existence.  Without a model of reality, thought can not exist.  Thoughts are models of reality moving from form to form in time.  Our brains sequence through models of reality, symbolic representations of experience, when we think. 

One can then say the word was the beginning of the human mind.  The human mind transformed by development of symbols.  Brains sharing symbols of experience was the start of culture.   We consider ourselves superior to other life forms because we share our internal metaphors of reality with each other.

Sharing symbols helps us all understand more reality.  Metaphors of reality not yet experienced directly can prepare us to deal with them when we do.  Words provide us with a tool to transcend beyond our own bodies to a larger time and space.  Our senses are extended by the words we associate with them.

Often words are used with multiple meanings.  One symbol can be associated to different sensed realities.  Take the word Kind for instance.  Kind is linked with “things that are similar”.  Kind is also linked with “friendly, generous or empathy”.  These different meanings are stored separately in our brains and only linked by how communicate them.  The spoken or written use of the word Kind is the same. The meaning, the association, the link to our sense experience with the word Kind is different.

Symbolic Limits

The average human knows less than 20,000 words.  English contains about 600,000 words if you include root words and derivatives.  This means most of us know about 3% of the words existing in our own culture.

Some words get used more than others.  Some parts of reality are experienced by few of us, often in one special practice or another.  Plumbers have their own words for their trade.  Physicists have special words rarely used by others.  Preachers have a vocabulary of their own.  Unique sensory experience provides each of our minds with its own set of metaphors for engaging reality with.

Words are links to stored sensations.

There are many words we each know.  There are many more we do not yet know.  Of all the possible sensory experiences of reality, we are limited to only those we are exposed too.  Even by extending our experience using the words of others, we are still limited to the total set of experiences that all minds have. Our limits in time and space place a limit on the vocabulary we can ever develop.

Discovering new means of sensing the world expands our vocabulary.  Sensing electricity transformed our experience of reality.  Close observation of the planets allowed us to sense gravity differently.  The microscope opened a new set of sensory data to us.  Each of these new experiences caused a change in words. Some words were transformed and others created to help us give meaning to the novel experience.

Are there an infinite number of sensory experiences?  If so then there are infinite numbers of words. 

There are certainly more experiences and words to call them than we can all ever imagine.

Meme Wars (Part 4)

 A war for mind share is going on around us.  Ideas struggle for territory in our brains.  In Part 4 of Meme Wars we consider current technologies enabling memes to struggle for mind share.

Meme Wars: Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3  - Part 4 - Part 5 – Part 6 – Part 7

Global internet map of connections between minds

American Information Revolution

Microprocessors, internet and social media technologies combined representing a new revolution in communications.  Effects of this technology, like printing of books, is radically transforming what it means to be human.

First with personal computers, expanded by internet, and then democratized by smart phones; we have destroyed distance and time as barriers to communication.  No longer do we have one way communication from a far-off past.  We speak and listen, almost exclusively in the now, everywhere.

Memes are forming from minds to machines and be transferred to previously unreachable brains.  Meme reproduction between minds has accelerated out of the ability for anyone to control.

With a revolution of book printing, thoughts of minds from a distant and formerly unknown past were broadcast far and wide.  Printer’s who owned presses had enormous power to choose which ideas were disseminated.  Moving from writing centers to reading edges, thoughts moved in one direction. 

This printing broadcast technology provided a means for church, king or others to control information.  Broadcasting allows filtering of memes prior to reproduction.

Writing ones thoughts can now be transferred to readers instantly by practically anyone with minimal economic stability.  Memes move about at the speed of light, reproducing uncontrolled.  We write our posts, send our tweets, share our links providing near instant communication.

Brains are connecting everywhere

Today we each can be broadcasters, speaking with anyone connected via novel technologies across the entire planet.  Our generation’s information technology revolution is about multi-point communications.  A chaotic and almost uncontrollable density of thought is transferred between brains.

People funnel ideas

Meme Overload

Readers have unprecedented access to others thoughts.  Like readers of the first printed Bibles, we are seeing new things for the first time and forming opinions quickly and easily.

We are overwhelmed with information.  There is more information on Facebook, Google+, or LinkedIn published in a day, than we can read in a lifetime.  We are forced to select which information streams we read, letting others go by unknown. 

With only limited space in our brains and time to process ideas, we are forced to create our own filters to stop the flood from overwhelming us.  Where centralized broadcast allowed filtering to happen for us, we now must do the filtering for ourselves.

These filters are not new, we have always tried to stay away from ideas we consider harmful.  As our bodies avoid disease and bad behaviors, our minds stay away from ideas that could infect us or lead to bad action.

In part 5 of Meme Wars we continue our journey into our current information revolution.

Meme Wars: Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3  - Part 4 - Part 5 – Part 6 – Part 7

Meme Wars (Part 2)

A war for mind share is going on around us.  Ideas struggle for the territory in our brains.  In Part 2 of Meme Wars we examine how printing technology started a war between memes. 

Meme Wars: Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3  - Part 4 - Part 5 – Part 6 – Part 7

German Information Revolution

Hand crafted meme

Prior to Gutenberg’s popularization of printing presses, communication was largely by hand or mouth.  Scratching surface of clay, putting ink on papyrus, and carving in stone where skilled manual labors that few could master. 

Access to communication was limited to those with wealth or power.  This focused writing for future minds and listening to past minds on a small subset of humanity.

The printing press took the power of communication from the hands of a few and democratized it.  Meme’s could spread from central places to many minds.

Before printing presses (about 1450) there were only a few thousand books in all of Europe.  A hundred years after Gutenberg’s invention, there were 20 million.  By 1650 200 million books had come into existence. Literacy, listening to past minds and speaking to future ones, became common.

Before mass printing, Bibles where read almost exclusively by priests and nobles.  These fountains of wisdom were under tight control.  The Church doctrine was that lay people would not understand the Bible’s mysteries and should be sheltered from actually reading its words for themselves. 

It is no accident that a Protestant Reformation occurred when it did.  Among the first mass produced books were Bible translations from Latin into local languages.  Within three generations, Church thought control was challenged by Martin Luther. 

The meme’s of the Bible spread and flourished into fertile and unfilled minds.  This initial wave of meme growth had profound effects on culture, thought, and how people lived.

As literacy spread, wisdom became democratized.   Access to information promoted independent thinking.  As more people came to read past minds, they changed their futures.

Gutenberg's meme reproducer

Reading Past, Making Future

With the printing press came an immediate and overwhelming demand for new content.  Previously written books were mass produced profitably.  New content was rare, old content readily available. Ancient Roman and Greek books became the stock and trade of these new high tech printing firms. 

Reading the minds of the long ago dead became common and easy.  The ancients spoke to people about philosophy, mathematics, and politics.  Old ideas created revolutionary new memes jumping from mind to mind. 

Challenging Church’s interpretation of the Bible, people began to challenge other ideas.  Copernicus revealed the earth was not the center of the universe.  Columbus sailed beyond the known, finding new lands.  Northern Italy began to discover and translate Roman and Greek knowledge beyond the Bible.

With each new discovery of ideas from past minds, new ideas were explored.  When people read good thoughts from the past, society can benefit.  Good memes entered into to peoples brains and were passed around.

Machiavelli, after reading Plato and Aristotle, described a world of princes acting outside of religious doctrine and control.  Reading Roman thoughts from long ago, the first Republic in a thousand years formed in Florence.  The humanist movement sprung from revived ancient ideas that each person could study poetry, grammar, history, morality and rhetoric to advance their lives and their communities.

When people read bad thoughts from the past, society can be hurt.  Bad memes fight for a share of mind and communication with good memes.

Nostradamus published prophecies that distorted later minds with false ideas about the future.  Reading from the mind of Dante, irrational concepts of hell placed irrational fear into ignorant brains.  Ancient ideas of leech bleeding and laxatives killed thousands as old misconceptions about medicine became popularized. 

In part 3 of Meme Wars looks at power struggles between ideas/memes occurring in renaissance minds.

Meme Wars: Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3  - Part 4 - Part 5 – Part 6 – Part 7

Meme Wars (Part 1)

There is a war for minds occurring, enabled by revolutionary technologies.  New ideas struggle with old ones to shape our destiny.  Our brains are the battleground between thoughts about how we should play, work and live together. 

Meme Wars: Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3  - Part 4 - Part 5 – Part 6 – Part 7

Meme battleground

Idea creators build mental weapons that clash with one another in minds across the planet.  Mind share is the spoil of this war in this conflict of ideas.

When I read, I listen to past minds.  When I write, I speak to future minds.  This is true for all forms of communication.  Our literacy of what was said in past times will limit our future thoughts. 

The printing revolution allowed past minds to speak to many future minds.  Our current information revolution allows all current minds to speak with each other in almost real time.

As books created rebellions from medieval ideas, this new revolution of communication will lead to changes in how we live our lives.  The winners are not yet clear, but our culture and the nature of the human experience is in the balance.

In this series, we will consider past battles for brains and see how they might help us better understand our current mental wars. 

Memes and Memetics

Ideas striking the brain

Memes are ideas that spread from person to person in a culture.  Memes reside in our brains and affect our understanding of the world.

Memes are the mental equivalent of genes in the cell.  They have structures that create understanding in the minds they occupy.  Ideas can change the very structure of our brains and therefore our actions.

Memes reproduce by spreading from brain to brain through communication. Printing provided a means for memes to spread widely from a central source.  Printing could be thought of as a new method of meme reproduction.

Each mind can only hold so many memes.  Memes compete with each other for human minds like genes compete for resources.  Memes struggle for limited mind share in people’s brains.

In part two, we will consider Gutenberg’s printing technology revolution.  Examining how old ideas created new ones, we will illuminate battlegrounds and combatants in a war for minds.

Meme Wars: Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3  - Part 4 - Part 5 – Part 6 – Part 7

Kill Them. Kill Them All.

Zombies.
Zombies want brains.
Zombies want my brain.
Zombies want my baby's brain.
Kill them.
Kill them all.
After all, they are just zombies.

Read the signs! They are here!

Pretend, for a moment, that the fictional but funly imagined Zombie Apocalypse has come. You have your shotgun. You know how to double-tap. Your chainsaw is well oiled and you've got plenty of gas. You're a fast draw and a faster runner and these are slow zombies.  Not the zombies from 28 Days Later, or The Dawn of the Dead.  These are zombies who shuffle along, whose fastest movement is slower than a Sunday stroll.

Our imagined zombies are just about totally independent from physical needs or wants of any sort. They do not eat for energy.  They eat just because it is what they do.

 Our zombies feel no pain. They have less mind than a slug, but more mind than a tree. They can open doors by accident, but ladders stop them cold.  Zombies are mostly not there at all, otherwise they wouldn't be zombies!

Zombie's Existentially

A good read.

Zombies are infectious. Their bite can make you become a zombie too, if they do not eat your brains first. According to “The Zombie Survival Guide” zombies became zombies because of a virus called solanum. Typically zombies are given an origin resulting from a virus or biological organism, disease, or some other source of physical damage. 

Zombies do not choose to be zombies, it just happens to them. Like cancer or the measles, there is no intent, there is no choice in getting the zombie sickness. You might want to say that “they could have tried harder to avoid it”. Try telling that to your eight year old boy picking his nose in the corner. Or your eighty-eight year old grandma drooling in her mid-day nap for that matter.

Many of us will just kill the zombies. The basic logic goes something like this; “They can infect me.  We will protect ourselves.  Zombies must die.” The desire for self defense is strong in we humans, especially when it comes to those we identify with as family.

After a little consideration you may well notice that when we take this view, we tend to say the word 'kill' rather than 'murder'. I kill the chicken for my diner, I do not murder it. Yet to the chicken and the zombie, our intent in murder or killing doesn't matter. It should matter to us.  Very much!

Animals slaughtered by necessity.

If we consider the zombies as humans with a terminal disease, then the word 'kill' gets a little bit harder to justify. If the zombie was your nice uncle Ralph, or the sweet old man next door who sometimes shovels your sidewalk when it snows, it would feel like 'murder'.  Even if you try to think you are doing them a favor. Have you ever heard of someone putting a clause in their will that says “If I become a zombie, please kill me.”? 

The threat that zombies pose is from instinct and not intent. How can we judge a zombie's character when they are obviously, and literally, dumber than door knobs? This reduction of the zombies brain to something less than human may give hope to the would-be-zombie killer to find some moral justification in their pursuit to eliminate zombies violently. To whit we must then ask; "Do zombies have a soul?"

Soul Brothers and Sisters?

Spirits in the world.

If you believe in dualism, that humans have an immortal soul, a separate from the body piece of the universe that makes up your mind or spirit, then you must ask "Does the soul still inhabit the body of a zombie?"

Consider for a moment a person in a vegetative state like a coma. Do they still have a soul? If you can answer 'yes' to the presence of a soul, then morality well may push you to save the zombies soul, to care for it, to make it at peace. We, as the superior mind, have a responsibility to care for those less fortunate; for shouldn't a person and even a society be judged for how it cares for the least of its souls?  Run like hell from the zombies. Build a barricade to hide behind, quarantine all the zombies in a pit, but do not under any circumstances kill them, for it is murder plain and simple.

Destroying barrels was fun!

On the other hand, the dualist who thinks the zombie's soul has already left their body can chain-saw away at will. Since zombies are just inanimate matter like a brick, the word 'kill' does not even apply. Zombies are already dead. In fact, it is good and proper to take pleasure killing zombies.
I would recommend whistling while you work at your de-zombification.  Singing an old chain gang song like “De Camptown Races” would be a wonderful way to spend an afternoon with friends while slicing and slashing and double-tapping; doing your duty for your fellow man.

Empirically Void?

The inventor of utilitarianism
looks a bit like a zombie.

What though, if you believe the there is no soul, but rather that the mind is emergent from the body? Your monist philosophy would dictate a different kind of assessment on the morality of whacking and hacking at the zombie critters. Thoughts on morality here fall into two camps; consequence and categorical.

The consequence, or sometimes called utilitarian, view is that questions about morality should be looked at in terms of what would be the greatest good. How do we help the most people? The consequence moralist would ask the question “If I terminate the zombies existence will it benefit more people?” Since clearly one zombie can infect many non-zombies, the zombie has got to go. With haste! The sum of the people saved must be greater than the sum of the people hurt. As long as I am saving non-zombie lives, its good and proper to grind zombie flesh.

If however, you think the golden rule should apply, then you would be taking the categorical idea and ask the question “If I became a zombie would I want someone to kill me?” Your answer to this question becomes the moral basis for whacking or running, double-tapping or containing. If you found yourself with a group of survivors, using logic and reason you would try to figure out together what is the group's view was. You would consider together what should be done if any of you became zombies. This would allow you to have the basis of law and order, probably on democratic terms about which zombies should be taken out.

Ummm.... Ooohhhmmm?

Lastly, a view from eastern philosophy.  The Buddhist tradition would absolutely forbid killing zombies.  This thought stream holds that killing is always a wrong thing to do.  The Buddha is said to have avoided killing any living creature, mosquito, ox, or human.  It is written in the Dhammapada "Everyone fears punishment; everyone fears death, just as you do. Therefore do not kill or cause to kill."

Would Buddha have survived the zombie invasion?  We may never know, but I rather doubt it, unless an impregnable fortress could be built to protect all non-zombie life.

Just Kill'em!

I do not know about what you would do, but I can speak for myself.

If come the zombie apocalypse and it is between a zombie or me, I would with great effort and little forethought be sure to separate its brain from its body.

 I'll shake them and break them nary pause to ask “is it right" or "is it wrong” or even “is there a better way”because...

Dad' gum' it! Im'a protect me and mine! Honey, wars the double-barrel? Git me dat der hatchet!  

And Kill Them!  Kill Them All!

Free Won't

My hand is poised by the handle of the coffee cup. I desire the coffee. I desire to prove I have the free will to not take the coffee. The competing desires hover in my mind, choice not yet taken.

Instead, my mind wanders to the heat death of the universe and the seeming deterministic end that with or without the coffee dissipates all into incoherence.

That cat only dies or not when observed. What then observes my hand near the handle of the coffee cup? Some Cartesian theater inside my head? Some probability wave collapsing in 100 billion neuron connections cohering into a choice? Have I already decided and am just waiting to observe the decision?

Photo By Roslyn

Whatever the mechanism, the observing appears to allow choice to be made. As a practical matter of existence in a culture with law and morality there is a common assumption of some degree of personal choice effecting actions. To argue against the existence of free will appears to take concepts like "responsibility" and slap them like a bad puppy.

I am left then with the lack of knowledge on the "how free will happens?" question. That region of our explorations where it appears thar' be dragons.

The action I take will have consequences unforeseen, but in the end-of-ends inconsequential. Instead I'll let that last sip of coffee go and brew some more.

Mind What We Are Doing

One way to discover more about our minds, is to change one's chemistry and observe the effects.  Here is a video from 1956 where a "normal" housewife is given LSD (Lysergic acid diethylamide) and her behavior is observed.  

This woman had no expectations of the journey she went on ahead of time, so her responses are genuine.  While her experience is fantastic and the response of the "expert" seems dated; it is clear she is living a different kind of reality after her brain chemistry was altered.

Changing the physical brain changes our means of thinking.

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is a tool which utilizes pulses of radio energy to take a picture of what is happening inside something.  MRI operates similar to Sonar for submarines, but the radio waves, unlike Sonar's sound waves, can penetrate the skin and enable us to see inside a thing.

We can use these radio waves on the soft tissue of our bodies to see pictures of our insides in three dimensions.  Like with a movie, these pictures can be taken quickly over time to result in a record of what happened.  When applied to our brains, this tool can record a movie of our thoughts as they happen.

It has even become possible to see what happens in the brain when we think certain thoughts.  What we see can cause patterns of thought.  Here are six perspectives of a brain while watching a movie trailer. 

The technique permits us to see the web of brain cells as they store and recall memories   Amazingly, the patterns we see are the same for most normal, healthy brains.  We humans, at a biological level, demonstrably think alike.

Some scientists have begun to try to reconstruct what is going on in our brains using the output of the MRI machines.  The research has led to the capability to display an image of what a person is seeing as they see it.  This video shows how the technology can scan the brain and reproduce the images the cells are processing.  These infant abilities of the MRI tool and the viewer attached to it should quickly be expanded as more precise tools are built and better practice comes from using them.

Where will this technology take us?  Noted futurist and theoretical physicist Michio Kaku has given this some thought and in this last video discusses the applications that most probably will come.  

One of his ideas is that we may actually be able to build a "dictionary of thought", models of the organization operation of our brain that we all share in common.  

Like after the initial atom bomb was dropped or when the Wright brothers first flew, at the start of a new technology is when we humans struggle to determine where the new tool will take us.  Here is short list of some of the questions that we, our children, and our grand-children will be trying to wrestle with:

• What does it mean to be "free" when your mind can be read?  
• Do we have an obligation to monitor our children's minds?  
• Should we scan people in public places?
• Will the scanning of other animals allow us to communicate with them more fully?
• How will the law be enforced using brain scans?
• Can we enhance our ability to learn?
• Are there some thoughts that should be illegal, immoral, or stopped?

I hope to stick around long enough to see these questions debated!

Model Mind

Earth I touch though it be too large to feel all.

Sun I see but dare not look lest lose my sight.

Air I hear and only your voice has my attention.

Water I taste with just dissoluble flavor.

I do not know these elements as they are.

I only know my sense of them,

The world is the other, the outside, my imagined.

Each hair is linked with the nervous system. When energy affects a cell, a chain reaction falls up a column of cell dominoes, connecting in bundles, threading inside a spinal bone shield, terminating at the base of our brains where a switchboard prioritizes and directs signals to banks of memory cells.

This path from skin to mind is our sense of the world. Heat, motion, or electrical energy cause different chemical signals flowing from our finger to our head. The more intense the energy, the stronger the signal, the more intense our experience.

Sense Detectors

Each of our senses has many and diverse detectors. Touch has inputs for pressure, temperature, and damage.

Hearing uses 20,000 hairs bending to vibrations, triggering other pathways to our memory.

Sight has 120,000,000 rods to detecting batches of light photons; along with 6,000,000 cones that detect their vibrations in hues of yellow, red, or blue.

The patterns of light which bounced off the strangers face, the high energy heat from the stove top, the vibrations from your own footsteps are all detected and sent to your pattern holding brain.

These millions upon millions of detectors are always in operation, sending an onslaught of new information which we process and store.

Our detectors lay patterns into the very structure of our brains. Large interconnected groups of cells that form webs act as storage spaces for the signals the body's sensors have received. 


Pattern Forms

Over and over and over again signals are sent to the brain until patterns begin to slowly form. The individual cells in our brain connect and reconnect as signals are reinforced or fade away. The very structure of these cells become a metaphor for the reality our sensors sensed.

We call this pattern forming of senses to the brain “learning”. The brain has about 100,000,000,000 (100 billion) individual memory cells handling these inputs and holding on to patterns of information expressed within them.

Each memory cell is connected with thousands of other memory cells. These connections between cells shift and change as memories form and fade. Some memories cause many connections, others only a few.  Some memories create more connections and we remember while others lose connections and we forget.

Bio Start-up

The entire system from sensor to memory starts to develop at about twenty-five days after conception. The first signals start laying patterns almost immediately and continue under heavy, constant change for many years.

 Initially memory cells join and break connections quickly; gradually slowing until we die. More and more memory cells are produced during our body's entire life, although the majority of them appear when young.

In this whole system of body and brain that forms our sense and memory, we do not experience the world directly. Rather we have detected the energy on the surface of our bodies and translated it into patterns of memory within our brains.  These memory patterns are what we know the world to be.

Model Mind

Thinking that the world we know is only a metaphor or model of the world as it actually is can be a strange thing to understand at first.

We have built a model of the world in our brains that reliably allows us to estimate what is there, to predict what will happen next.

We think we know the earth, the sun, the air, and the water; but we do not. We sense energy and model it into a memory world within us.

Distant Mother

When we see our mother's face, we actually have light vibrations in our eye that are only the reflections from our mother.

When we feel her cuddle us tight, we felt the pressure of her touch, but not actually her cells.

Our ears feel the vibration in the air from her lips, but do not hear her.

Only when we suckle do we take in a part of her into us, but even that part of her we do not sense directly as it quickly becomes a part of us instead.

Sensible Beauty

It is beautiful and strange that the world we know is sensed and imagined, but never known directly. We have, perhaps, a mutual shared model of the world that is outside us. Practically, we must use our internal model of the world as if it were real. Accepting our model as the world allows us to interact with it, act in response to it, and impose our will upon it.

We live in a self-built artificial bubble of reality called mind. A beautiful model of what we believe is.

Past As Now

The moment before is gone. We cannot go back to it. Yet we live in a now that is composed of what was and not of what is.

It Takes Time

It takes a long time for the light from a star to reach my eye. Each of the stars in the sky is a different distance away. I see each star from a different time in the past.

The same is true of all the objects around us. We see each part of each object at a different time in the past.

The light itself contains a pattern reflected off the surface of thing perceived. We decode this pattern to construct a sensual experience of the moment, of the now.

Mind Constructs

Our mind constructs a now from the past. The reflections of the light are combined into a now. It is not the now that is, it is our personal internal representation of the now we think is happening.

Imagine I touch your toe with a feather. It takes a few micro seconds for the feeling from your toe to reach your brain.

Now imagine I touch your lip with the feather. It takes less time for the signal from your lip to reach your brain than from your toe.

What if I touch both your toe and your lip with a feather at the same time? We think we experience both touches at the same time. However, this is only how our mind chose to arrange the sequence of events.

 Our brains make it seem like events happened at the same time, even though our brain got the signals of touches at different times.

Memory Sediment

Our memory of the past is a residue of what was. The layers of sediment in a river are the residue of the river. The sediment is where the river was. The sediment is not the river.

Sediment is the arrangement of sand and rock and dirt that were carried by the river. Those pieces left the river of the moment and stayed behind as the river flowed on.

Our memory occurs when we use the now to reflect on the past. The light bouncing off our skin must move to the mirror then be reflected back to our eyes. The light we perceive is of an object in the past, not the now.


Now is Past

Even our experience of the moment now is of the past.

We live in the now, but what we experience is not the now, rather we live in our perception of what happened before.

We live in our idea of the past our whole lives.

I am all that -  What good manners demand - Matter Drifts - Santa's Claws - Past As Now