The Brain, Chaos and Whatnot

[Diego Santana de la Vega]

mongo kills horses doesn't he?

[Mission]

Nah, as I recall he only knocks them out. (Which was -freaking- hilarious!)

[Diego Santana de la Vega]

Nah, as I recall he only knocks them out. (Which was -freaking- hilarious!)

right!

[blackjohn]

brainsssss...

brainsssss...

http://www.williamcalvin.com/index.html

[Mission]

There are actually two other points I want to discuss from one of the books I read. They are both directly related to the brain as Chaos Theoreticians have viewed it. I will look at the first in this post. Norman Packard, another member of the "Chaos Cabel" had this to say:

"At the pinnacle of complicated dynamics are processes of biological evolution of thought processes. Intuitively, there seems a clear sense in which these ulitimately complicated systems are generating information. Billions of years ago there were just blobs of protoplasm; now billions of years later here we are. So information has been created and stored in our structure. In the development of one person's mind from childhood, information methods became critical to the applicability of chaos to real-world problems."

He is, in essence, saying that chaos is crucial to our minds in that we apply it to real-world situations and problems. Somehow, underlying our intellectual processes there is some innate recognition of Chaos Theory that the Chaos scientists are just beginning to comprehend and apply to the environment in which we live.

What interests me is that we use this process and it is apparently integral to our minds, yet we don't understand it and have a hard time grasping it. Then again, I have always liked the example that the very intelligent Unitarian minister Eric Butterworth used to highlight the reasons we can't explain the ever-precense of God in our lives very well: it's like asking a fish to explain water. The fish exists in water and cannot, therefore, easily distance itself from this all-surrounding medium. In fact, the fish would have no concept of the water until he left it. (Then he would be a fish out of water. )

So it may be with Chaos Systems. They are so wired into our minds that distancing ourselves from the system is nigh impossible. We may live and move within the realm of Chaos Systems and to even recognize this fact requires a focused effort of mental will. We have to distance ourselves from ourselves and literally watch what we do as an impartial observer. (This is a fascinating thing to do and I highly recommend experimenting with it.)

Lest I dip too deeply into the realm of mysicism, however, let me return to my central point. If each part of the world functions in a Chaotic Theory fashion with order-within-chaos reigning, and our minds work likewise, it is a difficult thing to recognize. In fact, past scientific studies have specifically excluded a great deal of the influence of Chaos Theory upon the systems we study and dismissed them as irrelevant.

This could be in part because these systems are so complex and may be difficult to comprehend at first blush. The mathematics have proven to me to be exquisitely complex in one way and startling simple in another. It may also be that we just weren't ready to understand this component of systems. Science is built piece by piece, like a brick wall that must be started at the ground level with a layer of blocks before one can proceed up. The higher you go, the larger a foundation you require.

Still, Chaos Theory seems so integral to our minds that I like the fish and water example better. I think our mind and physiology are so wired that chaos theory is an intergral part of our makeup, our environment and our universe. Chaotic Systems appear in astronomy, topological and biological systems and, apparently, in our very make-up.

My impression is that we do not yet fully comprehend the Chaotic Theory and are still delightedly finding it in so many places that Chaos scientists have a hard time focusing on where to begin. (In their defense, Chaos Theory was essentially discovered in so many disparate scientific inquiries at once that it took a few big system minded people to even see the pattern of chaos in Chaos Theory. )

Still, I believe that a key component to understanding our own minds is to first understand how chaos theory works at the base level so that we can begin to grok where it fits into our minds. The digital computer is not a successful model of the human brain, as time has revealed. It coontains a better understanding than past endeavors, but it is too rigid and precise; two things our minds have not proven to be. The more I read about and (at least think) I understand about chaos theory, the more I think our minds intuitively comprehend and use it.

I will leave you with this wonderful quote from Packard:

"Billions of years ago there were just blobs of protoplasm; now billions of years later here we are." Bang, dirt simple.

[blackjohn]

How do you feel about the science of memetics? Personally, I think it is the neatest thing since... fire!

[Mission]

I came across the concept in the book The Selfish Gene. It's kind of a fuzzy thing conceptually, but I really like the word. Meme. Having some programming background, it's appealing on that level as well. Sort of reminds me of classes of objects a bit.

[Mission]

At last, the last. I half suspect that blackjohn and I are the only ones reading it anyhow. I've even caught him going cross-eyed on occasion. (Crom! Where is the man these many days?)

The last thing I came across that I wanted to discuss was the idea of ideas as strange attractors in the mind.

First, what is a strange attractor? Heck, what is an attractor?

An attractor is a thing that...attracts. There you go, let's all head for the pub. No, of course it's not that simple - well it is, but it isn't. When you plot a dynamic system (thinking would be a dynamic system) (so would a leaf falling off a tree) in phase-space (a place where you plot dynamic systems) you get a diagram explaining (more or less) changes in whatever is moving dynamically. Of course, it's much more alarmingly complex than that, but that's enough to get to attractors.

Most dynamic systems are deterministic. They tend to go to some end point or repetitive cycle. The leaf falling above will end up on the ground - that's the end point. A pendulum pushed once with with no other forces acting upon it will go back and forth the same distance forever - that's the deterministic cyclical motion.

Attractors are things that the line representing changes tend toward. Sort of like a planet orbiting a sun; The planet is attracted to the sun and thus it goes through a fairly regular path over time, always being acted upon (by gravity) and thus attracted to the sun. So the sun in that example would be an attractor and the path of the planet the dynamic system.

Strange attractors are attractors that cause the dynamic system to tend to be attracted to the attractor except that they have chaotic movement. That is, the path moves like our example planet around the sun, without truly following the same path twice.

At least that's how I understand it. Note that this is all tremendously oversimplified and the real chaotic plots in phase space do not necessarily look like planets orbiting an imaginary sun. But the idea is fairly well the same I think.

Blah, blah, blah. All that to get to the notion that the brain operates in a chaotic fashion with ideas as strange attractors.

Ideas skitter through our minds splitting, dividing, yes, bifurcating if you will. That is they divide, tend to move here and there and act, for all the world, like a chaotic system as I comprehend this whole mess.

Let's take the idea "Halloweenie" from the avatar post. That's the strange attractor (strange, indeed) for ideas flowing through my mind. Now, everytime I think of the notion "Halloweenie" I start off with the Bugs Bunny quote I listed in that post. (Sensitive dependence on initial conditions. Ok, that's all wrong, but I thought it was funny.)

From there, my ideas caroom off each other, taking a different path, possibly chaotic if you believe any of this stuff. Each time, I start with the strange attractor "Halloweenie" move onto Bugs Bunny and Marvin Martian, then my mind diverges every time. Maybe I think of the relationship of Marvin to K-9 and start thinking about my relationship to my old dog Scooper as a kid. Or maybe I don't go that way and I think of Daffy Duck in Duck Dodgers in the 24th and Half Century. Maybe I think of halloween and carving pumpkins. All this from "Halloweenie" which attracts my thoughts as the circulate around this strange (very strange) attractor and create variations on that theme.

The amazing thing is, I can ideate three times in this writing alone and come up with three very different outcomes. Our minds are amazing that way and the more you use them, the better they become at associating. At least mine has. I love associating - I'm sitting here doing it now. But there is a pattern to all this and an order to the chaos (if you will), that suggest to me that chaos mathematics may well describe how our minds work.

This means (if it's true) that we could create an artificial intellegence using chaos mathematics that may, if it had our experiences, possibly replicate our way of thinking. It would not necessarily replicate our thinking, though. Just as I have created three different paths in mental phase-space from one idea (which actually is, most likely, due to sensitivity to initial conditions), so an accurately functioning artificial intelligence machine would probably come up with many different outcomes based on it's initial conditions.

Gee, now I want to try it.

[Mission]

The reading of Feynman's lectures will pretty much point out that this:

The problem with Schrödinger's mangy cat is that it is a deterministic event: the damned thing is either dead or it's not. It's only indeterminate in the observer's mind. This "viewer affects the results at the quantum level" thing sounds awfully bizarre to poor old Mission. It has given way in several cases to what appears to me to be mysticism. I have heard religious maunderings where the speaker tries to coopt quantum mechanics as proof God is at work and man cannot control his destiny, etc. I wonder if God created us to amuse him - "Look at what they've come up with this time!"

is all wrong. Or it will drive you batty. It's a tosser.

Actually I think it would be wonderful to publish a collection of peoples personal theories on physics. And maybe a companion piece on peoples theories about what Physicists are covering up.

Oh, yes. Feynman took me to task on that one. He gave me quite the tongue lashing in his Basic Physical Laws tape. (Only he gave it to me over 40 years ago.) I am duly humbled and will never forget the lesson of the double-slit experiment on light. Hooray, photons.

(Just in passing, he mentioned pi-plus mesons, which I foolishly felt compelled to look up so that I could determine that there is no depth to my ignorance.)

[blackjohn]

At last, the last. I half suspect that blackjohn and I are the only ones reading it anyhow. I've even caught him going cross-eyed on occasion. (Crom! Where is the man these many days?)

Yours is a path that parallels my own, possibly converging somewhere in the far distance...

(btw, in case you haven't guessed, I was out having fun, thinking about pirates...)

[Mission]

Yours is a path that parallels my own, possibly converging somewhere in the far distance...

(btw, in case you haven't guessed, I was out having fun, thinking about pirates...)

Except you have several offspring. Our future paths will diverge there. Widely. (You'll appreciate this, John. I considered the pros and cons of such actions, weighted things according to my current plan and desires and created a rule based on rational choice.)

[blackjohn]

Ever tha rational thinker. Good on ya mate. Honestly, I don't believe kids or lack of kids diverts one from following one's path. Maybe makes it a little more tricky in the navigating, but then what's life without challenges?

[Mission]

Funny you should say that. I'm off to give a training this noon to college students called Making Problems Work For You.

[Mission]

Did you kown taht it's pssolbie to raed eevn wehn the wrdos are all jbmueld up isndie? The olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteers be in the rghit pclae. The rset of the wrod can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Prephas Cahos Teohry can hlep us disrcebe tihs phnoemnea?

(So mcuh for the iprmtonace of cerocet splelnig...)

[blackjohn]

Yep, I knew that. There's another that's similar. If I can find it, I'll post it.

[Mission]

You know, though, I've been playing with it a bit and it only works up to a point. If the letters are too scrambled or the words not as common, it doesn't work nearly as well. The second point is pretty easy to comprehend, but the first suggests it's not quite as true as it would first seem. Try this out:

Pobltbiaisirc and qnnaltiue (pilrnectee) fnniotucs are cnmlmooy uesd for the asiaylns of mldoes wtih utrtiancnees or vltbiaaiiiers in ptaameerrs.

[Probablilistic and quantile (percentile) functions are commonly used for the analysis of models with uncertainties or variabilites in parameters.]

[Caraccioli]

As I was walking

back out

on the forest path

I noticed that nothing seemed the same

as when I had walked

in.

"It must be be-

cause I am

seeing it differently,"

I decided.

"Perception."

I mused

to myself.

But the forest

didn't

listen.

It was too busy dealing

with

other travellers.

The dozens

of mammals moving,

The hundreds

of birds flitting,

The thousands

of branches falling,

The tens of thousands

of insects shifting,

The hundreds of thousands

of leaves falling,

The millions

of grains of sand stirring by the riverbank,

The billions

of grains of dirt moving along the ground.

No

it was not just

my perception of

the forest

that changed,

you see.

The forest

found only

one

more

disturbing

element

in me

and

went about

changing

regardless

constant-

ly.

[Caraccioli]

"Because we don't understand the brain very well we're constantly tempted to use the latest technology as a model for trying to understand it. In my childhood we were always assured that the brain was a telephone switchboard. (What else could it be?) And I was amused to see that Sherrington, the great British neuroscientist, thought that the brain worked like a telegraph system. Freud often compared the brain to hydraulic and electromagnetic systems. Leibniz compared it to a mill, and now, obviously, the metaphor is the digital computer." -John R. Searle

Apparently, I've succumbed to this tendency in this post. It must be an amazing bit of wizardry, our mind.

[blackjohn]

Christmas morning? shouldn't you be opening presents or something?

[Caraccioli]

I was giving myself mental presence.

[Caraccioli]

A friend came across some research on consciousness that she thought I would find interesting. It's a pair of papers by an anesthesioligist with Baylor University in Dallas. Basically, Doctor Walling cites research by Walter Freeman of University of California Berkley. He believes that by plotting EEG scans of various animal's brains, he can prove that consiousness in humans follows non-linear dynamic equations (which are at the core of chaos theory).

Plotting non-linear dynamic equations in chaos mathematics is sort of funky. I won't go into a lot of details because it gets confusing, but you basically plot intevals of current data against the last data (integration) and look for something called attractors. Normal systems settle into a regular pattern that sort of revolve around or devolve into a geometric pattern. The shape of this pattern is the attractor. The movement of a non-chaotic system will generally be attracted to points, curves or manifolds (Oyyyy, topology. Maybe Blackjohn can explain that to us.)

Non-linear systems don't follow such neat patterns and tend to create all kinds of weird system attractors - so weird that they've been named "strange attractors". Fractal structures are an example of a strange attractor at work. In a normal system if you upset the movement, the system will wobble and eventually return back to moving along the path of the attractor. (A clock pendulum is often used as an example. It typically swings back and forth. If you upset it, it will wobble in a "non-normal" way until it eventually settles back into its regular motion - swinging back and forth.) However, some systems are chaotic and when you upset their movement, they move wildly, never returning to a "normal" pattern of motion. (This is why a faucet may drip in an inconsistent manner - drip...drip drip...drip.drip and so forth.) Blah, blah, blah. Point being, you find chaotic systems by their "motion" which is distinctly different than non-chaotic systems.

Ok, so Walter Freeman has been plotting data from the EEGs of various animals including humans. What he's discovered is that the "higher" up you go in the animal kingdom, the more the plotted EEG data follows fractal attractors. Some animals show regular, linear patterns - these include anemones, starfish, moth larva and earthworms. However, Freeman found in his data that the EEG data starts to exhibit chaotic behavior in Crayfish and continues to become more chaotic as we move through Perch, Catfish, Minnow, Bullfrogs and Dogs. The highest fractal dimension appears in humans.

Walling says that "the fractal attractor we observe could be evidence of a repository for the information required for higher-dimensional brain activity." He therefore believes that consciousness may be described by a 4 dinmensional phase space (a mathematical space where all of the dimensions of a system can be accurately respresented) which means that consciousness is outside of a "normal" 3D anatomical space.

Basically, consiousness exists outside of your body, based on chaotic mathematical representations of the EEG data.

It all seems a bit tenuous to me. You have to buy into the idea that the EEG data accurately represents consciousness. I wonder a great deal about the whole concept of consciousness in the first place. For example, if you (whoever actually has read this far) and I watch a car crash, we will almost certainly give different descriptions of what happened. This makes me wonder - is your version of consciousness the same as mine? If they're different, then is any data set truly valid? If we're all unique, we may each have higher or lower order representations of the EEG data. What if some people actually do function in 3d phase space?

Still, it was interesting to find scientific data relating chaos theory to the functioning of the brain. Y'know. (Follow all that? :angry: )

[Caraccioli]

Two companies are working on making caps that will allow you to control games using your mind, possibly within the next year! Cool. Soon we may be able to control our computers using brain waves (to some degree). I don't think we'll be able to think text and have the computer type it up for us any time soon (if ever), but...it's still pretty neat.

This is all from an article I read in the March 17th The Economist. (You can actually read the whole article on-line as the The Economist is one of those strange publications that thinks giving away everything for free on the net will help their bottom line. The article can be viewed here: http://www.economist.com/science/displayst...tory_id=8847846 )

Some excerpts:

"...Emotiv Systems and NeuroSky, two young companies based in California, that plan to transport the measurement of brain waves from the medical sphere into the realm of computer games. If all goes well, their first products should be on the market next year. People will then be able to tell a computer what they want it to do just by thinking about it. Tedious fiddling about with mice and joysticks will become irritants of the past."

"Emotiv recently unveiled a prototype headset that has a mere 18 electrodes. Moreover, no gel is needed for these electrodes to make a good contact with the headset-wearer's scalp. Emotiv claims that its system can detect brain signals associated with facial expressions such as smiles and winks, different emotional states such as excitement and calmness, and even conscious thoughts such as the desire to move a particular object. It will not say precisely how this trick is done, but it seems to work well enough to make a virtual character in a game mimic a player's own facial expression, as well as permitting that player to move things around just by thinking about it."

"For Stanley Yang, the boss of NeuroSky, even 18 sensors seems too clunky. His firm's technology has reduced the brainwave pickup to the minimum specification imaginable—a single electrode. Existing versions of this electrode are small enough to fit into a mobile phone and Mr Yang claims they will soon be shrunk to the size of a thumbnail, enabling people to wear them without noticing.

Reducing the mind-reader to this bare minimum makes it cheap—about $20, compared with several hundred for Emotiv's headset—though it is not as precise. But that lack of precision may not matter. According to Klaus-Robert Müller, a computer scientist at the Fraunhofer Institute in Berlin who has been studying the problem for years, a single well-placed electrode is sufficient to gather meaningful information from brain waves. On the other hand, Dr Müller and his team have been unable, as yet, to produce a device that works well outside the cosseted environment of a laboratory. "

[Caraccioli]

I was listening to the book on tape about economic history (The Birth of Plenty : How the Prosperity of the Modern World was Created by William Bernstein - very interesting) and the author made the point that Western prosperity is sort of a perpetual motion machine. (Sorry, Phil. ). Which is interesting, but will probably not ultimately be true in a historical sense. However it lead me to thinking...

The perpetual motion machine is considered a physical impossibility in a mechanical sense. (Wiki has a nice discussion of the history of the ppms if it interests you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_pe...motion_machines

Side note: Feynman proposed Brownian motion as having the potential to create perpetual motion, although he also proved that it wouldn't work in practice. )

Anyhow, where I think the author missed the boat on the "mental ppm" is in the way he defined it. (I am going frame my point in light of the collective consciousness concept (if you believe in this sort of thing.)) Rather than limiting perpetual mental motion to commerce, I think you need to look at the whole of human history and see what has driven things like commerce. It really comes down to creativity. I think creativity is the single most valuable human trait we possess and it never seems to give out. When you factor the collective consciousness in, creativity builds upon itself, reaching to ever higher and higher heights.

We start with a simple idea (say traveling) and we create ever better ways to improve upon that idea (harnessing the horse comfortably, the wheel, the wagon, the bicycle, the addition of the steam engine to the wheel (trains), the automobile, the glider, the airplane and so forth...) And you could offer examples in every man-made endeavor from the dwelling to quantum physics. It isn't necessarily commerce and gain that drive creativity (although they often help), it's man's innate creativity. And creativity is limited only to the timescale of mankind.

That's a mental perpetual motion machine.

[PyratePhil]

Now see...we're both going to the same place, but we're once again taking different paths.

I would say that perpetual motion does indeed exist as regards human endeavor, but I would place the motive force upon greed, ego and constant nerve-wracking striving.

Creativity, although an amazing tool in the proper hands and initially a wonderful thing, is usually co-opted and corrupted by the merchants and "visionaries" of the world.

Look at the automobile. Fine idea; initially it was limited production, low speed, few problems other than availability of parts and petrol LOL.

Then - Ford came along with his mass production - quality dropped and death rates skyrocketed.

Advance to the beginning of the 21st century - we have Volvos that warn the driver that there's a car in front of them, so maybe they should think about getting their mind back on the road instead of ogling their female companion.

Ever see that commercial? They drive like hell to get to a food stand. Nice. Can you see what a development like that says for the human condition? That you're either too stupid to know there's something in front of you, or you're going so damn fast that you need Longbow radar to see it in time. Either choice is pitiful.

Technology has outstripped human development 4:1. Mores the pity. But since it IS a recurring theme throughout history, I think that we, or our children or grandchildren, will see another major collapse. Whether its economic or social I don't pretend to know, but the signs are there for those willing to see them.

Now - stoke the flames for the ol' Doomsayer...

[Caraccioli]

Gee and I was beginning to think I was writing to myself in this thread. (Not that I mind doing that. Some day, I really must copy this stuff into a Word file so I can look back upon it in my doddering years and laugh at myself. )

I see your point, caustic though it tends to be. I think you're shooting the messenger, myself. I am still listening to that book on tape and the guy made a very interesting point that can be worked into this discussion.

He was talking about the various innovations in the early centuries (the small ones with less than 2 numbers in them or even "pre-" history) and he noted some of the marvelous things that had been developed by the Greeks and Romans, but which were left aside as - guess who - the church became the dominant power in the European world. Interestingly, this behavior wasn't confined to the European nations during this period. In Asia, they had other, smaller despots controlling the development of "technology" (I will explain the quotes in a minute). For example, the Emperor of China co-opted all kinds of ingenious creations like paper, the bill of sale and probably fireworks. (Some would also argue that the Eastern "religions" themselves work against embracing technology. In fact, it might be the basis of your argument.)

The church could not control an unruly, creative populace, so they squelched all that by making themselves keepers of the truth. The upshot is that the Church, more than stopping innovation, actually pushed the frontiers back quite dramatically. It had been suggested that the most logical explanation for various astronomical observances was that the Earth rotated around the Sun long before Copernicus figured it out. The author thus suggested that we may have reached the moon five hundred years earlier had this not occurred. (Think of it. The mind reels at what we might be doing today (er, restricting my imaginings to positive events as is my wont.)

I must define "technology" though. (At least define it as I see it.) In my mental maundering, technology is simply a better way to do something. If you determine that putting your produce on a simple raft and poling down the gently wandering stream that flows through your property is better than carrying it by the armload, you have "discovered" new technology that will serve you. By the same token, if you figure that crushed gooseberries can be added to the wash to create a nicely hued cloth, you have a new technology.

Of course, technologies are, by their very nature, linked directly to commerce. Our views on commerce are quite different, though. While the siren song of striving and accumulating calls many, I don't see it as a negative until it has consumed one's life and become an addiction. In fact, commerce is really an enabler of masters. After all, we can't all be philosophers. (In fact, most people aren't suited to it at all.) So people may as well do the work that they are suited for and that suits them as (I believe) it will make them happiest, give them the potential for mastery and (if they avoid the addictive aspects) ultimately make them the most prosperous.

Note too...I think prosperity is a good thing in a general sense. It too can balloon beyond all reasonable bounds (and you might argue that it has - and I would even agree with you in some cases), but when you factor Maslow's Hierarchy in...well, it just makes sense that we are best to embrace it - up to a point.

See that we have returned with the inevitability of summer rain to the discussion of mastery. In my (possibly rose-colored) view, a master is someone who loves the craft of his mastery and is constantly searching for better, more efficient ways of producing top-quality output. I must pause again for a definition, so as to be clear. A "craft of mastery" is not limited to a creative product or even any product. One can master jurisprudence or statesmanship or teaching or quantum physics (ah, one of my favorite great people Feynman comes to mind again.) So, while craftsmanship is often associated with furniture and pottery, I think that is a narrow and dismissive view of an important idea. But I digress again (I do that.) My point is that my "master" is ever exploring new technology, embracing that which adds and rejecting that which deducts. It's true even in the teaching field.

You know, I've got about another page of material in my head, but I'm going to stop with one last comment. Your comment about automobiles... I can see why you think this, but I think the benefits outweigh the risks. (From an Eastern POV, I suspect this is practically an illogical statement.) I've a good friend, John, who is essentially a Luddite (and proud of this fact) and craves simplicity in all things, but grudgingly accepts the conditions of living in a Western culture. So he carves out a little Eastern-style niche in his home. (Although he doesn't think of it as being particularly Eastern - he embraced the, er, "technology of simplicity" through experimentation. His concession to spirituality is a small icon to the goddess of nature in his garden.)

My view is that being able to move more things and with greater speed enriches our lives. We could go backwards (as John might want) and return to transport by horse or some such - but we would also have to embrace the resultant spread of disease and the sullied conditions of the roadways - a trade-off of risks. Or we could go all out and say there is no reason to ever travel more than 20 miles from your origin and be right back in the dark ages (literally) when the church controlled innovation. The only difference would be that we choose to impede our progress rather than have it shoved down our throats.

Me? I like eating a banana most mornings, purchased at 39¢ - 49¢ a pound - and I couldn't do that without modern ocean/air and motor/rail transportation, competition between large supermarkets and other, similar "technologies." So, for me, the benefits outweigh the costs. Of course, my pal John would say I have sold my soul for a banana. (This is why I am committed to having Sunday dinner with he, his wife, son and brother Rick (an ex-Cappuchin monk) at least twice a month for as long as they'll feed me. (Note: they buy bananas too.))