Other Titles > Neuropath
Read This Book
What Came Before:
--- Quote from: Madness ---I think, Jorge, if you have some time for some more dense pleasure reading, that you'd enjoy The Mind & the Brain by Jeffrey Schwartz.
So you take exception to your conscious agency.
Let's bring it back to a couple threads of topic.
Firstly, sadly, I see Bakker's BBT as a kind of idealized scenario. There are - I keep feeling the need to say hundreds or innumerable - many different ways in which your sensual perceptions are feeding "you" information that you do not possibly perceive, as Bakker highlights. In many cases, the research is pointing towards even more complex multisensory perception, along with its own biases.
Bakker presents certain absolute thresholds without actually quantifying them. We're nowhere near his problem of recursion because we can still mediate the Blind Brain Effect to a certain extent. We can all train ourselves to be more aware of more of our senses - too an imaginably obscene degree - developing the recursive brain structures for a long time before actually hitting the limitations imposed by the BBT.
Secondly, I'm curious as to your opinion on nootropics and neurocosmetic surgery, especially within your perspectival framework. I know many academics who currently synthesize what are called "stacks" for themselves - essentially, eating tens of pills each day in order to achieve certain enhanced cognitive states. They're like the garage inventors of Bakker's Semantic Apocalypse. For my part, I've tried to isolate certain actionable neuropractices in lieu of nootropics or neurocosmetic surgery.
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What Came Before:
--- Quote from: Madness ---Apologies, by the way, Jorge.
I had meant to return to this thread and offer an explanation of The Mind & the Brain. Ever since Kalbear called me on just throwing titles out there, I've tried to be more conscious of when I use examples in discussions like this.
In the Mind & the Brain, Schwartz chronicles his formulation of talking therapies to treat severe forms of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. His research is in many ways responsible for part of the flood in neuroscientific research during the past decade.
Essentially, he showed, repeatedly, that it was possible to treat OCD - something we've formerly treated with chemicals, surgery, or shock therapy, depending on how far you follow the literature back - with nothing but abstraction and volition on the part of the patient.
Now he also constrains any conscious volition, what he calls Directed Mental Force, to about 200 msec between when the deterministic brain decides to do something and when "you" do something, where you have the momentary ability to veto.
Still interesting thoughts.
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What Came Before:
--- Quote from: Jorge ---
--- Quote from: Madness ---to about 200 msec between when the deterministic brain decides to do something and when "you" do something, where you have the momentary ability to veto.
--- End quote ---
Here's my problem with this.
There's no difference between "deterministic brain" and "you".
Nothing can exist outside the rule of causality, as Scott's 14-year-old self could have told you. I don't doubt there's a 200 msec window during which the prefrontal cortex can act to veto the impulses coming from lower structures in the brain. That's why we have a prefrontal cortex! The problem is that the conscious experience of the prefrontal cortex making that veto has to come AFTER the impulses at the cellular level in the prefrontal cortex occur. Here we get to Nietzsche again. I will grant that it's possible I'm wrong about that: maybe the conscious feeling of volition occur's simultaneously, but one thing I'm pretty damn sure of is that the feeling of volition cannot come BEFORE the cellular impulses that encode it. (At least not unless you believe something supernatural is happening.)
Nonetheless, the fact that OCD can be treated via non-pharmacological means is intriguing. I will definitely read this book when I get the chance.
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What Came Before:
--- Quote from: Madness ---I hear you. All I can say at this point is that the clear difference between deterministic brain and "subjective you," let's call ourselves, is about 700 msec, if I remember the research correctly. A computer records instances of PET and fMRI scanners while the subject is told to lift a finger at anytime and mark when they "felt" they willed their finger to move.
This is what makes chronometric studies so interesting in psychology, especially with the advent of brain imaging - though many pioneers in psychology found ways of reliably making distinctions before this - is that it's a tool for measuring cognition grounded in biological time.
There are just so many avenues of research, new and old, in which to provide more context for these results. Obviously, we're well into the theoretical weeds here.
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Aural:
Can anyone tell me what the connection between Neuropath--specifically this cover--and this book is? Those are the same pictures of the hair and hands on the covers.
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