#68. Consciousness is Google Searches Within Your Brain [neuroscience]

NE

Red, theory; black, fact.

The brain is like this because the long connections define the computations.

The Google search is too good a trick for Nature to miss and she didn't, and it's called consciousness.

Brain mechanism of consciousness

I conjecture that the human brain launches something like a Google search each time an attentional focus develops. This is not necessarily a literal focus of activity on the cortex; it is almost certainly a sub-network activation. The sub-net activity relays through the prefrontal cortex and then back to sensory cortex, where it activates several more sub-nets; each of these, in turn, activates further sub-nets via the prefrontal relay, and so on, exponentially. At each stage, however, the degree of activation declines, thereby keeping the total cortical activation limited.

Accounting for subjective experience

The first-generation associations are likely to be high in the search rankings, and thus subjectively "close" to the triggering attentional focus and relatively strongly in consciousness, although still in the penumbra that is subjectively "around" the attentional focus. Lower-ranking search results would form a vast crowd of associations only dimly in consciousness, but would give conscious experience its richness. Occasionally, an association far out in the penumbra will be just what you are looking for, and will therefore be promoted to the next attentional focus: you get an idea.

The role of emotions

The evaluation process responsible for this may involve the mediolateral connections of the cortex, which lead back to the limbic system, where emotions are thought to be mediated, at the cingulate gyrus. Some kind of pattern recognition seems necessary, whereby a representation of what you desire, itself a sub-network activation elaborated by the mediolateral system, is matched to retrieved associations. Your target may be only a part of the retrieved association, but will suffice to pull the association into the attentional focus.

This system would allow a mammal to converge everything it knows on every task, rather than having to perform as a blinkered if-then machine.

Brain mechanisms and our evolutionary history

Why should we have this back-and-forthing between the prefrontal cortex and the sensory association cortex? Two possible explanations are: 1) The backward projections serve a priming function, getting certain if-then rules closer to firing threshold in a context-sensitive manner; 2) This action is a uniquely human adaptation for our ecological niche as environment modifiers. In ordinary tool use and manufacturing dating back to Homo habilis, the built thing is smaller than the builder's body, but in environment modification, the built thing is larger than the builder's body. Thus, the builder can only see one part of it at a time. Viewings must therefore be interleaved with reorientations involving the eyes, neck, trunk, and feet. These reorientations, being motoric in nature, will be represented frontally, and I place these representations in the prefrontal cortex. The mental representation of the built thing therefore ends up being an interleaved collection of views and reorientations, in other words, a simulation. The reorientations would have to be calibrated by the vestibular system to allow the various views to be assembled into a coherent whole. By this theory, consciousness is associated with environment modification.

Consistent with this theory, the cortical representation of vestibular sense data is atypical. There is no "primary vestibular area." Rather, islands of vestibular-responsive neurons are scattered over the sensory cortex, distributing across the other senses. This seems analogous to a little annotation for xyz coordinates, etc., automatically inserted in a picture, as seen in computer-generated medical diagnostic images.

#67. The Trembling-Network Theory of Everything [physics]

PH

Red, theory; black, fact. 

The world of appearances is simulation-like, in that how we perceive it is strongly affected by the fact that our point of view is inside it, and illusions are rampant.

The slate-of-givens approach is intended to exploit consilience to arrive at a simplified physics that attributes as many phenomena as possible to historical factors and the observer's point of view. Simplified physics is viewed as a stepping-stone to the true theory of everything. The existence of widespread consilience implies that such exists.

The basic theory

The underlying reality is proposed to be a small-world network, whose nodes are our elementary particles and whose links ("edges" in graph theory) are seen collectively as the fields around those particles.

This network is a crude approximation to a scale-free network (fractal network), but is only a recursion of three generations (with a fourth in the process of forming), each comprised of two sub-generations, and not an infinite regress. The first generation to form after the big bang was triangular networks that we call baryons. In the next generation, they linked up to form the networks underlying light atomic nuclei. These, and individual protons, were big enough to stably bond to single nodes (electrons) to form the network version of atoms. Above the atomic/molecular/electromagnetic level, further super-clustering took on the characteristics of gravitation. At the grandest cosmological scales, we may be seeing a fourth "force" that produces the foamy structure of galaxy distribution. The observations attributed to the presence of dark matter may be a sign that, at the intra-galactic scale, the nature of the "fields" is beginning to shift again.

I conjecture that throughout this clustering process, a continuous thermal-like agitation was running through all the links, and especially violent spikes in the agitation pattern could rupture links not sufficiently braced by other, parallel links. This would have been the basis of a trial-and error process of creation of small-world characteristics. The nature of the different "forces" we seem to see at different scales would be entirely conditioned by the type of clusters the links join at that scale, because cluster type would condition the opportunities for network stabilization by cooperative bracing. 

Mapping to known science

Formation and rupture of links would correspond to the quantum-mechanical phenomenon of wave-function collapse, and the endless converging, mixing, and re-diverging of the heat signals carried by the network would correspond to the smooth, reversible time-evolution of the wave-function between collapses. The experience of periodic motions would arise from resonances in closed paths embedded in the network. 

The photoelectric effect that Einstein made famous can be given a network interpretation: the work function is the energy needed to simultaneously break all the links holding the electron to the cluster that is the electrode, and the observation of an electron that then seems to fly away from the electrode happens by calculation in the remaining network after it has been energized by energy in excess of that needed to break the links, reflecting back into the network from the broken ends.

Distance

All the ineffably large number of nodes in the universe would be equidistant from each other, which is possible if they exist in a space with no distance measure. Distance would be the number of nodes that an observer cluster contains divided by the number of links connecting it with the observed cluster.

The finite speed of light

The time-delay effect of distance can be described by a hose-and-bucket model if we assume that all measurements require link breaking in the observer network. The energy received by the measuring system from the measured system is like water from a hose progressively filling a bucket. The delayed overflow of the bucket would correspond to the received energy reaching threshold for breaking a link in the observer network. The fewer the links connecting observer to observed relative to the observer size (i.e., the greater the distance), the slower the bucket fills and the longer signal transmission is observed to take.

The above mechanism cannot transmit a pulsatile event such as a supernova explosion. It takes not one, but two integrations to convert an impulse into a ramp function suitable for implementing a precise delay. Signal theory tells us that if you can transmit an impulse, you can transmit anything. The second integration has already been located in the observer cluster, so the obvious place in which to locate the first integration is in the observed cluster. Then when the link in the observer cluster breaks, which is an endothermic event, energy is sucked out of both integrators at once, resetting them to zero. That would describe an observer located in the near field of the observed cluster. In the far field, the endothermic rupture would cool only the observer cluster; most of the radiative cooling of the observed cluster would come from the rupture of inter-cluster links, not intra-cluster links. Thus, hot clusters such as stars are becoming increasingly disconnected from the rest of the universe. This can account for the apparent recessional velocity of the galaxies, since distance is inversely proportional to numbers of inter-cluster links.

Oscillations

Oscillating systems feature 4 clusters and thus 4 integrators connected in a loop to form a phase-shift oscillator. These integrators could be modeled as a pair of masses connected by a spring ( = 2 integrators) in each of the observer and observed systems (2 x 2 = 4 integrators).

Motion and gravity

Motion would be an energetically balanced breaking of links on one side of a cluster and making of links on the other side. This could happen on a hypothetical background of spontaneous, random link making and breaking. Acceleration in a gravitational field would happen if more links are coming in from one side than the opposite side. More links will correspond to a stronger mutual bracing effect, preferentially inhibiting link breaking on that side. This will shift the making/breaking equilibrium toward making on that side, resulting in an acceleration. The universal gravitational constant G could be interpreted as expressing the probability of a link spontaneously forming between any two nodes per unit of time.

Dimension

That the universe is spatially at least three-dimensional can be reduced to a rule that links do not cross. Why the minimum dimensionality permitted by this rule is the one we observe remains to be explained. 

A universal law 

Heat of link formation = heat of link rupture + increases in network heat content due to increases in network melting point due to increases in mutual bracing efficiency. Melting point measures the density of triangles in the network.

Repulsive forces

Repulsive forces are only seen with electromagnetism and then only after ionization. When particles said to be oppositely charged recombine, neutral atoms are re-formed, which creates new triangles and thus increases melting point. The recombination of particles said to be of like charge creates relatively few triangles and is therefore disfavored, creating the impression of mutual repulsion.

 

Momentum

Links are directional in their heat conduction. A direction imbalance in the interior of a cluster causes motion by spontaneously transporting heat from front to back. Front and back are defined by differences in numbers of links to an arbitrary external cluster between front and back sub-clusters.

Case study of a rocket motor

A directional link can only be burned out by heat applied to its inlet end. During liftoff, the intense heat down in the thruster chambers burns out links extending up into the remainder of the craft. This leaves an imbalanced excess of links within the rocket body going the other way, leading to a persistent flow of heat downward from the nose cone. This cooling stabilizes links from overhead gravitationally sized clusters ending in the nose cone, causing them to accumulate, thereby shortening the "distance" from the nose cone to those clusters. Meanwhile, the heat deposited at the bottom of the rocket progressively burns out links from the rocket to the Earth, thereby increasing the "distance" between the rocket and the Earth. The exhaust gasses have an imbalanced excess of upward-directed asymmetric links due to the temperature gradient along the exhaust plume that serves to break their connection to the rocket and create the kind of highly asymmetrical cluster required for space travel. Link stabilization is likewise only responsive to what happens at the inlet end. 

Future directions

Links in the universal network are the real things and the nodes are just their meeting places, which only appear to be real things because this is where the angle of the flow of energy changes. All links are directional and pairing of oppositely-directed links was an early step in the evolution of the universe. Directional links are representable as an inlet part joined to an outlet part. With this decomposition, a link pair looks like this:

⚪⚫

⚫⚪

A purely directional link recalls the one-way nature of time and may represent undifferentiated space and time. 

#66. Neuromodulators as Peril Specialists [neuroscience]

NE

Red: theory; black, fact.

Solanum dulcamara, a plant with anticholinesterase activity.

“Life is Difficulty”

My PhD thesis was about a neuromodulator (acetylcholine) acting on mammalian brain. It was tough to decapitate all those rats; I never got used to it. But if you can’t stand the formaldehyde, get out of the lab.

The basic theory

I conjecture that the primordial function of any type of transmitter substance acting on the g-protein-coupled cell-surface receptors or nuclear receptors of neurons was to coordinate the whole-organism response to some class of perils.

Table 1.

Peril	Substance	Failure mode
Extremes of heat and cold	glutamate and GABA	?
Predator	serotonin	depression
Parasite	histamine	phobia
Rival conspecific	noradrenaline	paranoia
Social isolation

#65. Baryogenesis [physics]

PH

(Part 5, Deprecated)

#64. The Drill Sergeants of the Apocalypse [evolutionary psychology, population]

EP     PO     

Red, theory; black, fact.

Seen in a hospital ward.

The trickster type may really be Nature's penetration tester. The type probably emerges in contexts of unequal power (Elmer Fudd has the shotgun; Bugs Bunny doesn’t). Thus, an abiding fear is the soil out of which tricksterism grows, by the following positive feedback: A successful trick shows up the Fudds and shows them in a feckless light, which reduces the fear level of the trickster, which reinforces trick-playing. This is a short-term high that comes at the expense of worse relations with the Fudds and thus eventually even greater fear levels for the tricksters, which they try to remedy with still more tricks. An example of an unequal power relationship is between a foreign invader and the defenders. Invasion is such a common event in history that by now, countermeasures will have evolved. Tricksterism is likely to be a tile in the mosaic of any such adaptation. Tricksterism also seems to be a form of play. A result from animal ethology is that the play of young animals is a form of learning. The thing learned in playing tricks may be how to manage power inequalities.

A biological precedent for penetration testing?

Evidence for a biological precedent may be the many retroviruses integrated into the human genome. One of these becomes active now and then at random and kills the host cell if the anti-viral defenses of the latter have become weak due to some somatic mutation. The red team-blue team strategy seems to be too good a trick for nature to miss.

Evolution of the trickster

Modern human populations may have two independent axes of political polarization: oppressor-oppressed and trickster-control freak. The first may subserve dispersal by generating refugee groups and the second may subserve building. Any built thing must serve in a complex world in which many constraints must be simultaneously observed. Thus, after the initial build, a long period of tweaking must typically follow. The role of the tricksters is to powerfully motivate this tweaking, for example, by cleverly making someone’s shelter fall down, before the complacency of the control-freak builders leads to disaster. This may have been how engineering was done by an archaic version of Homo sapiens. Tricksterism may have evolved out of a previously evolved capacity for military strategy, which involves essentially putting one over on the enemy. The tricksters can also make mistakes, causing damage that cannot have a silver lining in any possible world, and moving to correct this is a natural role of the builders. If you are a builder, ask this: “What is the best use of my indignation?” It is to keep to a strict harm-reduction approach. Tricksterism can intensify into sadism, in which the protagonist takes pleasure in the victim’s torment and wants to make it last. Well, boy, if you make it last, you are giving the victim plenty of time and motivation to figure out solutions, like a patient old instructor giving his pupil his lessons one at a time, as he is ready for them, and this is how the wise victim will construct the situation. Such a victim will end up with information and know-how others will pay for. Selection for building skill and thus tricksterism may have occurred in multiple successive episodes over the course of the Pleistocene due to periodic continental glaciations.

Before the trickster

Our evolutionary forebears may have been champion dispersers for a long time before the ice age forced some of them to become champion builders, initially, of shelters and warm clothing. (Champion environment modifiers may be closer to the mark.) It is an interesting fact that physically, humans exceed all other animals only in long-distance running, which can be read as dispersal ability. Our carelessness with preserving the local environments and our propensity for overpopulation can be read as typical r-selected disperser behavior. The r-selecting niche was big game hunting. H. erectus sites indicate consumption of medium and large meat animals. Overhunting would have occurred routinely, due to the slow reproduction rates of large animals and the high hunting efficiency of H. erectus due to tool use, so that dispersal of the hunters to new habitats would likewise have been routine.

#61. Stress and Schizophrenia [neuroscience]

NE

Red, theory; black, fact.

Introduction

The main positive symptoms of schizophrenia, namely hallucinations, word salad, and loosening of associations, all seem to be variations of the latter, so loosening of associations will here be taken as the primary disorder. Stress and the brain's dopaminergic system are strongly implicated in the causation of schizophrenia. In connection with stress, psychologists speak of "the affective [emotional] pathway to schizophrenia." 

Organismal responses to stress

Stress is known to increase genetic variability in bacteria, a process known as transformation. Stress is likewise known to increase the meiotic recombination rate in sexually reproducing organisms such as fruit flies. (Stress-induced recombination and the mechanism of evolvability. Zhong W, Priest NK. Behavioral ecology and sociobiology. 2011;65:493-502.) It seems that when an organism is in trouble, it begins casting about ever more widely for solutions. If evolution is the only mode of adaptation available, this casting about will take the form of an increase in the size and frequency of mutations. In conscious humans, however, this casting about in search of solutions in the face of stress may well take the form of a loosening of associations during thought. Should the person find the solution he or she needs, then presumably the stress levels go down and the thought process tightens up again, so we have a negative feedback operating that eventually renormalizes the thought process and all is well. In optimization theory, this process is called "simulated annealing."

Disorder of a cognitive stress response

But what if the person does not find the solution they need? Then, presumably the loosening of associations gets more and more pronounced ("reverse annealing") until it begins to interfere with the activities of daily living and thus begins to contribute net stress, thus making matters worse, not better. Now we have a pernicious positive feedback operating, and it rapidly worsens the state of the sufferer in what is known as a psychotic break, resulting in hospitalization. That these psychotic breaks are associated with tremendous stress is made clear by the fact that post-traumatic stress disorder is a common sequel of a psychotic episode.

 

Stress: molecular aspects

Messenger substances (i.e., hormones and neuromodulators) known to carry the stress signal are: CRF, ACTH, cortisol, noradrenaline, adrenaline, dopamine, NGF, and prolactin. The well-known phenomenon of stress sensitization, which may be part of the disease mechanism of schizophrenia, probably inheres in long-term changes in protein expression and will not be apparent in a simple blood test for any of the above substances without a prior standardized stress challenge. (e.g., the process of getting the needle itself. In that case, you would install a catheter through the needle to permit repeated blood sampling and collect the baseline sample long after the intervention sample, not before, as is customary in research.)

Other mental illnesses

Bipolar disorder may result from an analogous positive feedback affecting another problem solving adaptation of the brain, which would be modelled by the alternation of brainstorming sessions (mania) with sessions in which the brainstormed productions are soberly critiqued (depression).

Brain mechanisms

How does the loosening of associations of schizophrenia arise? I conjecture that one activated sensory memory represented in the posterior cortex does not activate another directly, but indirectly via an anatomically lengthy but fast relay through the prefrontal cortex, which has a well known dopaminergic input from the ventral tegmental area of the midbrain. A higher vertebrate has a free-will spectrum, with machine-like performance and high dopaminergic tone at one end, and at the other, a carefully considered performance verging on overthinking, with low dopaminergic tone. Persons with schizophrenia have pushed past the latter end of the spectrum into dysfunction. Dopamine could orchestrate movement along the free-will spectrum by a dual action on the prefrontal cortex: inhibiting associational reflexes passing back to posterior cortex while facilitating direct outputs to the motor system. Dual actions of neuromodulators are a neuroscientific commonplace (e.g., my PhD thesis) and dopamine is a neuromodulator. The NMDA receptor, which is also strongly implicated in schizophrenia, enters the picture as the source of excitation of the ventral tegmental area.

Photo by Ameer Basheer on Unsplash

#60. Gender is Pecking Order [evolutionary psychology]

EP

Red, theory; black, fact.

Gender is pecking order

Gender, social status, and testosterone are clearly interrelated, but exactly how requires clarification when the very nature of gender is in question, as now. One possibility is that the male pecking order sits directly atop the female pecking order, and there is no barrier between. Thus, a male who falls low enough in the male pecking order will undergo a reversal in gender identification from male to female (and maybe keep on going down) and a female who rises high enough in the female pecking order will likewise undergo a reversal in gender identification from female to male (and maybe keep on going up). The entire structure could be called "the" pecking order, with the statistical median of the status ranks, and possibly the ranked testosterone levels, always dividing females from males, at least in terms of gendered social signaling. This could be an example of what is called an exact theory replacing its approximate counterpart. In this case, the corresponding approximate theory would be the gender binary. ("You are either a man or a woman.") 

A limitation of this “median theory” is that no causative mechanism is provided.

Recent history of trans

Since the early sixties, we have seen a trend of increasing media exposure of trans and non-binary individuals, and this was also a period of ever-increasing human population numbers. I conjecture that the latter trend caused the former. The population trend may have produced an upward trend in the average population density at which people are living, suburban expansion notwithstanding. This may have caused an increasing incidence of aggressive one-on-one interactions among humans due to the Calhoun effect, which is much discussed in these pages. (See post #37.) Aggressive, one-on-one interactions are well known to change the social status of the combatants, the winner enjoying increased status (i.e., a higher ranking in the pecking order) and the loser suffering reduced status. Overall, population density increases can thus be expected to increase the amount of traffic on the social ladder, both upward and downward, leading to increasing numbers of individuals crossing the median and becoming trans or nonbinary. The increasing numbers of trans and nonbinary individuals in society was then faithfully reflected in the content of the news stories of the day. QED.

Trans not genetically determined

Consistent with this, PLOS blogger R. Lewis, who has a PhD in genetics, found remarkably little evidence of a direct genetic causation in transgenderism. Moreover, out of 58 studies on "transgender" listed on clinicaltrials.gov, nothing worth mentioning was found about genetics. This could be an instance of the filing-drawer effect (negative results not published but left to languish in the filing cabinet).

How pecking-order dynamics may lead to dispersal

I am indebted to Jordan Peterson for turning me on to the pecking-order idea. It can explain aspects of dispersalism, as follows: If people have no emotional memory of their social wins and losses, we would expect their distribution on the social ladder to be Gaussian (aka, a bell curve). However, if a win or loss leaves you with an emotional residue of optimism or pessimism (and, of course, it does), a positive feedback can set in if conflicts are coming faster than the emotional fallout from each can dissipate, so that the more you lose, the greater your pessimism, and the more likely you are to lose in the future. Moreover, the more you win, the greater your optimism, and the more likely you are to win in the future. Following Peterson, this emotional fallout effect may be due to prolonged up- and down-regulations of serotonin concentrations in the brain. See post 66 for my opinions on neuromodulators, e.g., serotonin. This dynamic then splits the population into a bi-modal social distribution of oppressors and oppressed, and the latter soon join some refugee stream, resulting in dispersal. The frequency of conflicts could be measuring population density, and the conflicts would not necessarily be over resources, but over proxies for these such as land or jobs. With the addition of these ideas, the splitting and separation of overcrowded rodent populations in the behavioral-sink phase of a Calhoun experiment is explained. To connect these ideas with my earlier idea of the sadness cycle, I conjecture that sadness and its attendant social signaling expresses anger colored by pessimism about winning, whereas contempt and its social signaling expresses anger colored by optimism about winning.

The attack on reproduction may be the field mark of the oppressor. This gets back to the beef the ancient Egyptians had with the Hebrews. It’s always, “These [fill in the blank] breed like flies.” and if you want a group to leave*, preventing them from reproducing would be very effective, as this is the most noxious intervention imaginable. In class-based oppression, the attack would often be structurally entrenched, and nobody sees the structure because they are too close to it. In this paragraph, I am conflating class-based and ethnicity-based oppression, which may or may not warrant future amendments.

A false-flag strategy?

Another idea about trans is that it is a false-flag strategy used by low-status males and females to reproduce without punishment. Pair a gay woman with a trans woman and you have a potentially fertile couple able to fool the oppressors until the deed is done. Likewise a gay man and a trans man.

That said, trans is not fundamentally political, but hedonistic. That said, “the heart [unconditioned stimuli] has its reasons that reason knoweth not.” The reason is natural selection, but we still say that trans is not genetically determined because what is selected is only the potential for it, which everyone has. Triggers from the environment  are still required for expression of this adaptation, which I think of as a long-lasting state, so the idea of an unconditioned stimulus admits some nuance: the state-gated unconditioned stimulus. An example of a trigger from the environment would be your dad losing his temper in front of you to the point where you think you are about to die. The frustration behind this would be due to his experience of oppression. The outburst therefore amounts to an involuntary report to the child on conditions prevailing outside the family home.

I suppose you are thinking, “This false-flag strategy is unnecessary because, for example, no foreman would whack a couple of  workers over the head with a pipewrench if he found them kissing in the lunch room, and they appeared to be a binary couple!” Yes, he would, if he were in evolutionary throwback mode, a terribly real mode people shift into whenever the price of bread rises relative to wages, in which behaviour follows the non-human laws of Homo erectus. Since I just wrote something potentially threatening or disempowering, I remind you that we all have this mode and entering and exiting this mode are situational, and that genes bias our behaviour but do not determine it.

*Means: have been selected in evolution to act as if you wanted them to leave.

Photo by Jonny Gios on Unsplash