The Brain: The Beginning of the permanent Journey.

I've wanted to jump into this for quite a while, but i never knew where to start. Up until this point I've been describing how I feel about certain topics but not delving much into what they are supporting. Really I have been searching for a good entry point, and it seems ill never really find the perfect one. To solve my dilemma I have decided to just dive in with no restraints(my difficulty with this seems to be my cripplingly scientific mindset). Ive logged many of my ideas to date but they are mostly consisting of muddled chicken-scratch, and self-referencing drawings. The general plan for this blog has always been to sort out, translate, and (potentially) publicize some of my ideas in a neat, understandable way. Now, until a good basing to my liking has been discussed, I will weekly write an article going page-by-page through my notes. This is the first of many articles in this fashion.


The beginning came from my distaste for all the current forms of psychology and neuroscience (with the partial exception of cognitive psychology). I saw 10 different approaches each barely scratching the surface of the deep questions about the brain. Each perspective scratched futilely at a wall not even knowing if the others were even working on the same wall. The biology themed theories only work with the timeless nuts and bolts without figuring out how they are ordered together, and the more subjective theories pull out a few common tendencies of the brain without knowing why or how. They lack the consideration of the necessary nuts and bolts: neurons. Only cognitive theories attempt to build a bridge between the two, but up until this point a core theory has not really been created. The only real conclusions drawn are the obvious "the means create the ends".

The best way in my opinion to solve this problem is to find the center and work both directions. But what is the center? If one end is the biological basing, and the other end is the final decision that is taken out by the human, then the center must be the mental process itself. As it stands we do not know what that process is, or how it works, but thats alright. I have come to utilize the term, Mneme, coined by Richard Semon, and have expanded its definition to any conceivable mental process in the brain be it a small mental calculation or a full blown perspective (Note there is a difference between Semon's Mneme and Dawkin's later created Meme, which applies to any conceivable unit of cultural memory). Now it may seem rather out there to consider all mental processes the same type because some processes work on such a different scale than others. However it must be noted that the brain is build in a hierarchical style just so it can work with different scales of information. It may also appear that mnemes work too differently for them all to be of the same (hypothetical) structure, but it must be known that they evolve over time. A mneme at its first creation acts much differently than it does a day, or a week or a few years later(assuming it still exists).

Now we know there are mnemes in the brain, and there are a lot. Assuming there is a limited amount of something in the brain, be it space, energy, or even an abstract concept of plausibility, there is a competition for survival among mnemes. This causes a requirement that the medium of the brain be very mutable. The plasticity of the brain is very well known. When the cortex is compared to either a programming or an electronics problem(both approaches to AI), the plasticity and semi-permanence of memory makes the solution not one or the other but a combination of the two. The cortex is a medium where enough force in the code will cause a change in the circuit.

The last point I want to make in this entry is the issue of how the brain is studied. I said earlier that the cognitive field was the only one that was almost acceptable. The reason the brain is most difficult to study is because (much to the dismay of the scientific community) it has a taint of subjectivity. Purely empirical study of an abstract object is nearly impossible. The only truly empirical aspect of the psychology is the cognitive field. However in order to be accepted by the scientific community they have stripped all subjectivity from their field. In doing this they can only observe a faint shadow of the brain's structure. It is true that the shadow may be shaped like what they are studying, but they are still looking at a shadow and not the object. To understand the brain it cannot be purely subjective or empirical. The subjective is necessary to gather the detailed understanding of the brain, and the empirical is necessary to keep the subjective on track and to strip away any falsehoods it has stumbled on.