  Today's NYT has a great article on Dr. Gerald Edelman, a neuroscientiest and Nobel Laureate. His views on the nature of science funding alone are ground breaking, but wait until you read about what he sees as the true nature of brain organization. I love it for its non-linear focus. I've often thought if most cultures of the world are not linear thinkers, surely the brain and/or body doesn't behave by the linear logic western medicine assumes. urlLink The Brain? It's a Jungle in There : "But Dr. Edelman sees the Darwinian idea and its biological working out as essential aspects of his theory and necessarily difficult. The brain will always have more going on than seems necessary, more randomness and variation than any humanly designed system. There is enormous redundancy (which Dr. Edelman refers to as "degeneracy") in the brain's functioning, giving it remarkable resilience and evolutionary possibilities. No brain event happens the same way twice. Even memory is always a variant, he says — a re-creation, never a repetition.
Using such ideas, Dr. Edelman and his colleagues have been creating primitive Darwinian neural universes: robots that "learn" to avoid objects and pick up others, not because of a preset program of rules, but because of how various "neuronal groups and paths" are strengthened by experience — mirroring, perhaps, the way an infant might gradually learn to grasp objects or distinguish among them. Of course, it's a long way between this and even simple consciousness, but in Dr. Edelman's view, similar principles are at work. What, for example, does it take to recognize an object? Stimulations spurred by the color red and others by the shape sphere must be coordinated before a red ball is recognized. But such coordination doesn't require a manager. These first stimulations may trigger other stimulations that associate the earlier ones with one another; in turn, these groups of neurons become elements in ever more intricate mappings.
Patterns evolve and interact in a dizzying dynamic. The brain is not a logically structured organ; these processes of connection resemble the processes of metaphor more than those of logic. Eventually, consciousness is a consequence of these neural mappings.... "These theories are part of what Dr. Edelman hopes will become "sciences of recognition," studying how biological processes recognize other biological processes. It is an enterprise, he argues, that spurs amazement, because if it succeeds, it will show that out of accident and diversity, something as miraculous as human consciousness can be born. But this vision can also spur discomfort, because it implies that there is no supervising soul or self — nobody is standing behind the curtain. This, for Dr. Edelman, is Darwin's final burden.
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