Thinking with your brain

[MargeB]

Is thinking made up of the activity of neurons in your head and nothing more?

[MargeB]

Stevie, your statement is illogical, which is why I questioned it. Because we know relatively little about how the brain works (whatever that means-we know a lot more than people would normally think), it does not follow that we cannot observe the behaviour of a small group of neurons and know that the information output of their circuit is greater than the sum of the information inherent in the network itself.

[MargeB]

Peter Pedant, plenty of people who have fulfilled the 'Brain Death' criteria have come back to talk about it. And many of their experiences have proven similar.

[MargeB]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4071192.stm

[MargeB]

And here it is, for Peter Pedant and anyone else that's interested. Fascinating stuff (although you do need to read the science, of course):

http://www.soton.ac.uk/~pubaffrs/0128.htm

[stevie21]

OK, all I'm saying is that we can know a fair bit about what one tiny group of neurons are (or one individual neuron is) for, e.g. they fire when we see a vertical line move from left to right ("What the frog's eye tells the frog's brain") but to claim that we have an overarching and compelling theory of the mind-brain relationship is (no offence) ludicrous.
We can say vague things about overally function:
the frontal lobe is involved in inhibition
the cerebellum is responsible for physical movements that are so well practised that we're not too conscious of them.
We can say more specific and more impressive things but it's late and I can't be bothered to think of them

Anything that links brain to wooly issues like intelligence or personality is a bit of a non starter unless it's incredibly narrow in focus.
While not disagreeing overtly with "we know a lot more than people think", what do we know that your average Cedric on the street wouldn't be aware of?

Finally and to meander slightly, if we observe the output of a small circuit then we would seem to ignore the fact that each neuron has connections with hundreds or thousands (or more) of other neurons. There's no such thing as a small observable self contained circuit which doesn't have one million other neurons heavily influencing it.
I think you'd be hard pushed to make any argument about the output or sum of information inherent in a "network" as you can't realistically define any network and limit it in this way.
Should we just agree to disagree?
Also have I just contradicted my first sentence in this post?

[stevie21]

Instead of the above thesis, all I needed to have said was "just because you don't understand how the brain supports thinking, you don't need to then introduce some mystical phenomenon into the equation. Just accept the limits of your understanding, even though it dents your ego a little".

On reading that back, it sounds rather rude and cheeky and I promise it's not supposed to but I'm off to bed and don't have the energy to change it. Being tactful was never my strong point.

It's for the above reason that people think that crossing their fingers will actually affect the outcome of a football game 3000 miles away. It makes it easier to digest if we make the world more predictable and understandable.

[tazzmin]

probably nothing more the phisycal nusenses are so stupid