Mind-Body Problem

The Easy and the Hard Mind-Body Problem

David Chalmers – one of the philosophers participating in the interdisciplinary field of “cognitive science” - argues that one aspect of the mind-body problem is “easy” and the other “hard.” (Chalmers, 1995). In this way, he divides the issue into two separate problems.

The easy problem is the one that mots neuroscientists are concerned with, and it is the one discussed by crick in his Scientific Search for the Soul. Crick attempts to solve the problem by neuroscientific means. His research strategy is to try to find the specific neural processes that are the correlates of our conscious awareness (he calls them the “neural correlates of consciousness,” or NCC for short). Finding the neural correlates of consciousness is a problem of the same general type as finding the neural correlates of anything – language or memory, for instance. Neuroscience has made great progress in solving such problems in the past. Finding the brain regions and processes that correlate with consciousness is simply a matter of directing an existing research strategy from areas of previous success (language, memory) onto a different aspect of mental functioning (consciousness).

We should not underestimate the difficulty of finding the neural correlates of consciousness, but Crick is only looking for which brain regions or processes correlate with consciousness and describing where they reside. He does not attempt to explain how that particular pattern of physiological events makes us conscious. This is the hard problem. The hard problem is a conundrum of a different magnitude – it raises the question of how consciousness (“you, your joys and your sorrow, your memories and your ambitions...”) actually emerges from matter. Modern neuroscience is well equipped to solve the easy problem, but it is less clear whether it is capable of solving the hard problem. Science has few precedents for solving a problem philosophers have deemed insoluble in principle.

A “thought experiment” is an imaginary experiment; the experiment is not really conducted. Photo by Elena. 

John Searle, another contemporary philosopher with a great interest in this problem, suggests the following thought experiment. Pinch yourself (hard) on your left hand. What happens? You feel pain, of course – it is sore. This is an expression of the mind-body problem : something physical happened to your hand, and yet you felt a pain in your mind. Let us see, in terms of the easy problem, how we fare in explaining this phenomenon.

We know exactly what the pain receptors embedded in your skin look like, and how they work. When pressure is applied yo these receptors, a very specific physical process excites the neurons connected with them. This sends a message down these neurons (causes them to fire), which in turn causes a chemical to cross the synaptic spaces at the ends of the axons – using the chemical-dependent neurotransmitter systems. The axons in question travel through a nerve coursing up the arm into the spinal cord and the brainstem, these axons terminate on a second set of neurons in the thalamus. From there the physiological message is relayed again, to a specific part of the primary sensory cortex of the right hemisphere. The pain receptors in the left hand are represented in a specific region of the somatosensory cortex in the parietal lobe, and that is where the nerve fibers we have been tracing terminate. (Pain receptors from other parts of the body map to different regions in the somatosensory cortex, as suggested by the dashed lines). Excitation of the cortical cells in this area causes you to feel pain. This solves (this particular instance of) the easy problem – these are the physiological processes that cause you to feel pain in your hand.

But it is not difficult to see that the hard problem remains entirely unsolved. What turned the physiology, anatomy, and chemistry just described into a feeling of pain? How did that happen?  We have just outlined a purely physiological process (and traced the anatomical pathways it traversed); we have not explained how the process started as something physical but somehow ended up as something mental. Searle used a memorable phrase to describe the hard problem we are left with: “How does the brain get over the hump from electrochemistry to feeling?”

This sort of question was traditionally considered to be a philosophical problem, but it is now being treated as a scientific one – one that might be addressed experimentally.

The Brain and the Inner World, Introduction to Basic Concepts. Mark Solms, Oliver Turnbull.

Do the trees have their own brains? Photo by Elena.

Autism

Autism and Case of Autism

Redesigning the brain

The mystery of autism – a human mind that cannot conceive of other minds – is one of the most baffling and poignant in psychiatry, and one of the most severe developmental disorders of childhood. It is called a “pervasive developmental disorder,” because so many aspects of development are disturbed: intelligence, perception, socializing skills, language, and emotion.

Most autistic children have an IQ of less than 70. They have major problems connecting socially to others and may, in severe cases, treat people like inanimate objects, neither greeting them nor acknowledging them as human beings. At times it seems that autistics don't have a sense that “other minds” exist in the world. They also have perceptual processing difficulties and are thus often hypersensitive to sound and touch, easily overloaded by stimulation. (That may be one reason autistic children often avoid eye contact: the stimulation from people, especially when coming from many senses at once, is too intense). Their neural networks appear to be overactive, and many of these children have epilepsy.

Because so many autistic children have language impairments, clinicians began to suggest  the Fast ForWord program for them. They never anticipated what might happen. Parents of autistic children who did Fast ForWord told Merzenich that their children became more connected socially. He began asking, were the children simply being trained to be more attentive listeners? And he was fascinated by the fact that with Fast ForWord both the language symptoms and the autistic symptoms seemed to be fading together. Could this mean that the language and autistic problems were different expressions of a common problem?

Two studies of autistic children confirmed what Merzenich had been hearing. One, a language study, showed that Fast ForWord quickly moved autistic children from severe language impairment to the normal range. But another pilot study of one hundred autistic children showed that Fast ForWord had a significant impact on their autistic symptoms as well. Their attention spans improved. Their sense of humor improved. They became more connected to people. They developed better eye contact, began greeting people and addressing them by name, spoke with them, and said good-bye at the end of their encounters. It seemed the children were beginning to experience the world as filled with other human minds.

The incidence of autism has been climbing at a staggering rate that can't be explained by genetics alone. Photo by Elena.

Case of Autism

Lauralee, an eight-year-old autistic girl, was diagnosed with moderate autism when she was three. Even as an eight-year-old she rarely used language. She didn't answer to her name, and to her parents, it seemed she was not hearing it. Sometimes she would speak, but when she did, “she had her own language,” says her mother, “which was often unintelligible.” If she wanted juice, she didn't ask for it.  She would make gestures and pull her parents over to the cabinets to get things for her.

She had other autistic symptoms, among them the repetitive movements that autistic children use to try to contain their sense of being overwhelmed. According to her mother, Lauralee had “the whole works – the flapping of the hands, toe-walking, a lot of energy, biting. And she couldn't tell me what she was feeling.”

She was very attached to trees. When her parents took her walking in the evening to burn off energy, she'd often stop, touch a tree, hug it, and speak to it.

Lauralee was unusually sensitive to sounds.  “She had bionic ears,” says her mother. “When she was little, she would often cover her hears. She couldn't tolerate certain music on the radio, like classical and slow music.” At her pediatrician's office she heard sounds from the floor upstairs that others didn't. At home she would go over to the sinks, fill them with water, then wrap herself around the pipes, hugging them, listening to the water drain through them.

Lauralee's father is in the navy and served in the Iraq war in 2003. When the family was transferred to California, Lauralee was enrolled in a public school with a special-ed class that used Fast ForWord. The program took her about two hours a day for eight weeks to complete.

When she finished it, “she had an explosion in language,” says her mother, “and began to speak more and use complete sentences. She could tell me about her days at school. Before I would just say, :Did you have a good day or a bad day?” Now she was able to say what she did, and she remembered details. If she got into a bad situation, she would be able to tell me, and I wouldn't have to prompt her to get it out of her. She also found it easier to remember things.” Lauralee has always loved to read, but now she is reading longer books, non-fiction and the encyclopedia. “She is listening to quieter sounds now and can tolerate different sounds from the radio,” says her mother. “It was an awakening for her. And with the better communication, there was an awakening for all of us. It was a big blessing.”

By Norman Doidge (excerpt from The Brain That Changes Itself).

Better communication can help to an awakening. Illustration by Elena.

Super Earth

Planet KOI-172.02 - Super Earth

KOI-172.02, which stands for Kepler Object of Interest, is a super Earth-size planet, meaning it has a radius 1.5-2 times the size of the Earth. While that may seem insignificant, it means that its mass is much more than that of the Earth, resulting in different properties such as a thicker gaseous atmosphere. It has been described as the most similar to our home planet yet.

The Kepler Mission, launched by NASA in March 2009, was specifically designed to survey a portion in our region of the Milky Way Galaxy to discover Earth-sized planets near the habitable zone, and to determine realistically how many of the billions of stars in our galaxy have such planets. The habitable zone is the region around a star where water might exist on the surface of a planet which provide favorable conditions for life.

The mission is designed to detect orbiting planets as they pass in front of their stars, causing a small decrease in the star’s brightness.

The Kepler Spacecraft and photometer, used to observe the stars, orbits the sun each year trailing behind the Earth. This spacecraft has found over 2,500 planets.

Kepler found planets by looking at just one large region of the Milky Way in the constellations Lyra and Cygnus. This region of space was picked due to certain limiting constraints; an environment rich in stars as well as one that can be continuously viewed and monitored throughout the mission “without obstruction of the Sun to the regions at any point of the spacecraft’s orbit”, say Dr. Howell, Deputy Project Scientist of the Kepler Mission at Ames.

Over the course of the mission, the Kepler spacecraft measures the variations in brightness, using the photometer, of 150.000 stars every 30 minutes, searching for tiny dips in the light output that occurs whenever a potential planet passes or “transits” in front of its star. Depending on the planet’s orbit and the type of star it orbits, this effect can last anywhere between an hour to about half a day.

Transits are only seen when a star’s planetary system is perfectly aligned with our line of sight, so if all the orbits are randomly distributed, as it should be, then Kepler – even if every star had a planet – would only see 1% of those stars having transits.

This is called “transit method” and is Kepler’s principal method in finding planets.

Regardless, the data received from the spacecraft is extensive in its own merit. Dozens of thousands of transit-like signals were analyzed and potential new planets were identified. Since not all variations in brightness necessarily represent a transit of a potential planet, there exist false positives. For example, there exist stars much like our Sun which can vary in brightness themselves. Such temporary phenomenon include “Sunspots” which create visible dark spots caused by intense magnetic activity. For that reason, the discovery of a planet is confirmed by observing a minimum of three transits.

Why three transits constitute a candidate planet? According to Dr. Alan Gould, co-investigator of the Kepler mission, the need for three transits explains as follows: Three transits are required for planet discovery by the transit method mainly because that is the minimum to assure that there is in fact a planet. One transit gives only the barest indication that a planet exists and an extremely rough idea at best of what the period of the planet might be. Two transits would pinpoint the period of the planet pretty pretty precisely, by virtue of the time between transits and allow accurate prediction of when the next transit is expected to occur. Actual observation of the third transit confirms the prediction and hence helps confirm the planet discovery”.

This would mean planets that are Earth-like and orbit around a star like our sun (every year) would take at least 3 years to get the three transits needed to be confirmed by Kepler to be a candidate planet. Once the planet candidate has been observed, it is then given the designation of KOI – Kepler Object of Interest). In terms of this new Super-Earth candidate KOI-172.02, it was the 172nd candidate in their running list of candidates to see if it really is a planet and has the right kind of star.

For the KOI-172.02 in particular, the 4 transit signals acquired by Kepler indicate that the planet orbits its star around every 243 days. We also know a lot about the star which KOI-172.02 orbits, which is very similar to our sum, but slightly smaller and colder.

The nominal mission of Kepler was 3.5 years, ending October 2012. Then it was in what NASA calls the extended mission. The next couple of years, Kepler started providing many more planets around stars like the sun that are much more like the Earth.

We have begun to contemplate our origins. Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth. Image : © Megan Jorgensen.

Another Space-Time

Another Space-Time? - Pulsars

Ticking and blinking like a cosmic metronome, pulsars keep far better time than the most accurate ordinary clock, and anyone can see the beam of this cosmic lighthouse flash once each rotation of any planet (astronomers wonder how the sky would look from the surface of a planet rotating around a pulsar).

Long-term timing or the radio pulse rate of some pulsars suggests that these objects may have one or more small planetary companions. It is conceivable thus that a planet could survive the evolution of a star into a pulsar. Or a pulsar may have captured a planet at a later time.

If you could somehow survive the gravitational tides and radiation flux trying to land on a pulsar, it is just possible that you might emerge in another part of space-time – somewhere else in space, somewhen else in time. Might gravity tunnels provide a kind of interstellar or intergalactic subway, permitting us to travel to inaccessible places much more rapidly than we could in the ordinary way? Can pulsars serve as time machines, carrying us to the remote past or the distant future? The fact that such ideas are being discussed even semi-seriously shows how surreal the universe may be.

Such worm holes in space, a little like those in an apple, have been suggested by physicists and astronomers, although these phenomena have by no means been proved to exist.

May be, it’s for better, because we must be the most backward technical society in the Galaxy. Any society still more backward would not have radio astronomy at all. If the doleful experiences of cultural conflict on Earth were the galactic standard, it seems we would already have been destroyed, perhaps with some passing admiration expressed for Shakespeare, Bach and Vermeer.

But this has not happened. Perhaps alien intentions are uncompromisingly benign. Or might it be, despite all the pretensions about UFOs and ancient astronauts, that our civilization has not yet been discovered?

On one hand, if even a small fraction of technical civilizations learn to live with themselves and with weapons of mass destruction, there should now be an enormous number of advanced civilizations in the Galaxy. We already have slow interstellar flight, and think fast interstellar flight a possible goal for the human species. On the other hand, there is no credible evidence for the Earth being visited, now or ever. Is this not a contradiction? Pulsars, what role do they play in this? Will we ever know the answer?

Why are they not here, on Earth? May another space-time dimension play a role in this enigma? Image: © Megan Jorgensen.

The Function of Consciousness

The Function of Consciousness: Integrating the Two Worlds

How, without consciousness, would you know how you feel& That is the function consciousness. It is not only intrinsically introspective, it is also evaluative. It imparts value. It tells us whether something is “good” or “bad”; and it does that by making things feel good or bad (or somewhere in between). That is what consciousness, feeling, is for. (And that is why psychiatrists are interested in modifying the chemical outputs of these core brainstem nuclei.)

The evaluative function of our conscious “state” has its roots in the visceral monitoring structures of the core brain. This function of consciousness is therefore intrinsically biological. Its evolutionary survival vale is obvious: How long would we survive if we did not have a way of monitoring the delicate economy of the internal milieu of our bodies? The organ systems of our bodies can only function effectively within a very narrow range of set-points – with respect to temperature, blood-sugar level, and so forth. The most basic function of consciousness, then, is to monitor the state of these homeostatic systems and to report whether they are “contented” or not.

But bodily self-monitoring is only the most basic function consciousness. All our vital inner needs can only be met in the external world. The inner state of consciousness (which tells us, above all, what our current needs are) therefore has to be brought into connection with the current state of the world around us. Although, as we have seen, it is not necessary to be conscious of the external environment in order to perceive it, it is nevertheless useful. It is useful to able to say things like, “I feel like this (hungry), so I want to eat that thing over there,” or, “I feel like this (upset), because thing over there bit me.” In this way, consciousness – that is, value – is imparted to objects, and objects come to be known as “good” or “bad”. Consciousness is not only what you feel, it is what you feel about something.

The similarity between Freud's model and Damasio's is very striking. Photo by Elena.

Thus, even if the evolutionary “dawn of consciousness” was purely introspective, in a rudimentary biological sense, it probably quickly generalized, and our external perceptual modalities, too, became imbued with feeling (with consciousness). In this way, our external perception was transformed from being a set of (unconscious) information-processing channels into being the generator of the rich texture of perceptual qualities (conscious sights, sounds, smells, etc.) that we are now able to experience. This is consistent with the anatomical fact that the output of the core brain nuclei in question is broadcast very widely to the forebrain, and with the psychological fat that such “bottom-up” activation is necessary before higher cortical processes can become conscious.

Damasio therefore concluded that consciousness consists of more than mere awareness of our inner states; rather, it consists of fluctuating couplings of the current state of the object world. Each unit of consciousness forges a link between the self and objects. These momentary “units” of conscious time are probably generated by the rhythmical oscillations (the 40-hertz oscillations that characterize visual awareness). The oscillations are generated by pulses of activation of cortex, emanating from deep “reticulate” thalamic nuclei, thereby coupling the two varieties (or sources) of consciousness with one another many times per second. This is how we generate “the feeling of what happens” that provided the title of Damasio's book. Consciousness thus consists of feelings (evaluations) projected onto what is happening around us. Or, to put it the other way round, consciousness consists of awareness of what is happening around us, grounded in a background medium of self-awareness. Note especially that this explanation of consciousness solves both the binding problem and the homuncular problem. The various “channels” of consciousness are bound together by the grounding “state” of consciousness, which is itself the homunculus; the little person in your head is literally a projection of your bodily self.

Damasio calls this coupling mechanism “core consciousness.” Some further complications of consciousness exist.

There are many points of contact between Damasio's neuroscientific theory and those of other psychoanalytic theorists. Photo by Elena.