Tuesday 12 April 2016

Theory of Mind With No Boundries


Human can only think on anything if have knowledge; Which means human can not think on any subject if do not have any information or knowlegde. Let's start with a brief of human history. I hope this may give an understanding how believes and inheritance of knowledge has been created and affected of today's natural boundries of the minds.

First human beings have no knowledge about environment and itself. Only chance was to identify all by sense organs. Which means, they had no posibility to describe the things in cognitive way. Let's try to develop empathy. You see a mysterious a big sphere above yourself in every night, shining, shape changing and disapearing every morning. Even a bigger and shiny one in the morning. You can not look at it because of the pain in your eyes. What are you going to think? What is it? Is it good? or Is it bad? Enviroment is wild. Big animals eat each other. A food war is on place. You feel hungry. It is not good and nice feeling. You feel anxiety to be eaten suddenly. If the weather is warm than it is ok but if it is not than you feel pain again all around your body because it is cold. Food war is much more difficult.

I am using the words, moon, sun etc today. May be they were using different words or even some kind of sounds to describe these objects. May be animal was "anyy", moon was "mooo", sun was "ssss", pain was "paii" etc. So may be they were speaking to each other with only primitive sounds, and dramatically not so different than today in terms of sounds; if you try just to hear just the music/sound of the words. Who knows?

Now let's ask one more question. What are you going to teach to your children? The answer shouldn't be so complicated. Fight to survive paradox, find food. Pain and cold is bad. Eating is good. Love is fun. Feeding children is hard. And don't look at the sun, moon is good etc. Just survive. If you keep continue to predict learning and teaching methodlogy than we can reach to a simple human theory.

Generations after generations this knowledge will be significantly dominant belief and meaning of life. It does not matter whether human beings would have been subdivided to kingdoms or regions. The main source of the knowledge will be spread out to whole humanity (diffused to all minds). If we eliminate the scientific researches and knowledge the rest of the whole human culture stands on that simple human theory. If this is the case than how can we think and describe all from the begining with no boundries. Or nothing has changed from the begining for human ?

What is consciousness if all human progress stands on simple human theory? If we remember (MSR) mirror self recognition test (rouge test - Gordon Gallup) than we can say just for human that we can not recognize ourselves before 20-24 months years old. Which means we don't have consciousness before 2 years old but we can not compare Neanderthals or even Bronze Age homo sapiens with today world's human with around 100billion neuron cells in our brains.

So the main question is that "Can anyone cognitively perceieve the world without stands on simple human theory and instead only with scientific knowledge even in our daily lifes ?" We will start to perceive the life and think with no boundries when it is possible to teach our brains to think only with the scientific evidences and knowledge.Otherwise we will comtinıe living with beliefs and habita only.

How the brain produces consciousness in 'time slices'

Date:
April 12, 2016
Source:
Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
Summary:
Scientists propose a new way of understanding of how the brain processes unconscious information into our consciousness. According to the model, consciousness arises only in time intervals of up to 400 milliseconds, with gaps of unconsciousness in between.

EPFL scientists propose a new way of understanding of how the brain processes unconscious information into our consciousness. According to the model, consciousness arises only in time intervals of up to 400 milliseconds, with gaps of unconsciousness in between.

The driver ahead suddenly stops, and you find yourself stomping on your breaks before you even realize what is going on. We would call this a reflex, but the underlying reality is much more complex, forming a debate that goes back centuries: Is consciousness a constant, uninterrupted stream or a series of discrete bits -- like the 24 frames-per-second of a movie reel? Scientists from EPFL and the universities of Ulm and Zurich, now put forward a new model of how the brain processes unconscious information, suggesting that consciousness arises only in intervals up to 400 milliseconds, with no consciousness in between. The work is published in PLOS Biology.

Continuous or discrete?

Consciousness seems to work as continuous stream: one image or sound or smell or touch smoothly follows the other, providing us with a continuous image of the world around us. As far as we are concerned, it seems that sensory information is continuously translated into conscious perception: we see objects move smoothly, we hear sounds continuously, and we smell and feel without interruption. However, another school of thought argues that our brain collects sensory information only at discrete time-points, like a camera taking snapshots. Even though there is a growing body of evidence against "continuous" consciousness, it also looks like that the "discrete" theory of snapshots is too simple to be true.

A two-stage model

Michael Herzog at EPFL, working with Frank Scharnowski at the University of Zurich, have now developed a new paradigm, or "conceptual framework," of how consciousness might actually work. They did this by reviewing data from previously published psychological and behavioral experiments that aim to determine if consciousness is continuous or discrete. Such experiments can involve showing a person two images in rapid succession and asking them to distinguish between them while monitoring their brain activity.

The new model proposes a two-stage processing of information. First comes the unconscious stage: The brain processes specific features of objects, e.g. color or shape, and analyzes them quasi-continuously and unconsciously with a very high time-resolution. However, the model suggests that there is no perception of time during this unconscious processing. Even time features, such as duration or color change, are not perceived during this period. Instead, the brain represents its duration as a kind of "number," just as it does for color and shape.

Then comes the conscious stage: Unconscious processing is completed, and the brain simultaneously renders all the features conscious. This produces the final "picture," which the brain finally presents to our consciousness, making us aware of the stimulus.

The whole process, from stimulus to conscious perception, can last up to 400 milliseconds, which is a considerable delay from a physiological point of view. "The reason is that the brain wants to give you the best, clearest information it can, and this demands a substantial amount of time," explains Michael Herzog. "There is no advantage in making you aware of its unconscious processing, because that would be immensely confusing." This model focuses on visual perception, but the time delay might be different for other sensory information, e.g. auditory or olfactory.

This is the first two-stage model of how consciousness arises, and it provides a more complete picture of how the brain manages consciousness than the "continuous versus discrete" debate envisages. But it especially provides useful insights about the way the brain processes time and relates it to our perception of the world.

Story Source:

The above post is reprinted from materialsprovided by Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. The original item was written by Nik Papageorgiou. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.


Journal Reference:

  1. Michael H. Herzog, Thomas Kammer, Frank Scharnowski. Time Slices: What Is the Duration of a Percept? PLOS Biology, 2016; 14 (4): e1002433 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1002433

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