- 3305 - BRAIN - ideas to ponder? Life may be a guide to the evolution of the universe. Could humans create new universes when we are intelligent enough? Does humanity exist to serve some ultimate, transcendent purpose?
--------------------- 3305 - BRAIN - ideas to ponder?
- Does humanity exist to serve some ultimate, transcendent purpose? Conventional scientific wisdom says no. Our evolution on this planet is just a “cosmic accident”. However, a possible mechanism by which life could, in fact, be endowed with a natural purpose is worth considering.
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- In biological natural selection the genes’ ability to replicate themselves depends on how well they can encode traits that permit organisms to out-reproduce other members of their own species.
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- Camouflage has evolved to avoid predators or eyes evolved to enable vision. These are adaptations to the environment, as opposed to traits that are just byproducts of adaptations or random genetic noise. Clearly, the purpose of these adaptations is to solve difficult problems like seeing, digesting, thinking, or writing Reviews.
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- Because organisms are bundles of complex adaptations, they are the most improbably complex things in the universe. And improbable complexity is, in fact, the hallmark of natural selection, the fundamental way in which we recognize that a trait actually is an adaptation.
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- This makes them improbably low in “entropy”, which is the “degree of disorder” in a physical system. A basic law of physics is that entropy tends to always be increasing so that systems become more disordered. This is the “second law of thermodynamics”.
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- It is because of this law of thermodynamics that you can crack an egg and mix it all together to make an omelet (making it more disordered), but you can’t turn the omelet neatly back into an egg with shell, white and yolk (making it more ordered like you started with.)
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- Improbably complex is how light-sensitive cells became eyes. Because natural selection is the process that “designs” organisms, incrementally organizing random, disordered matter into complex, functional organs, it is the most powerful anti-entropic process that we know of.
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- Without the incremental changes that natural selection allows, the only way a complex adaptation like a mammalian eye could come into existence would be as the result of random chance. And the likelihood of that is extremely low.
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- Biological natural selection explains how adaptations have purpose to facilitate survival and reproduction, and this is why organisms behave purposefully. It does not explain how life in general could have any transcendent purpose. To figure out the point of our existence we require a higher-order explanation.
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- “Cosmological evolution” is a higher-order explanation is based on cosmologist Lee Smolin’s theory of cosmological natural selection. Smolin founded his theory on the increasingly popular view that our universe exists in an innumerably vast population of replicating universes, a multiverse.
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- Many physicists put stock in the idea of there being a multiverse, because its existence is predicted by eternal inflation, our most promising model of universe origins.
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- Smolin reasoned that in a multiverse, universes that were better at reproducing would become more common. He proposed that they could be created from existing blackholes. And if blackholes are how universes reproduce, then cosmological natural selection would favor universes that contained more blackholes. In this theory, life is simply the accidental byproduct of processes “designed” by selection to produce blackholes.
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- Smolin’s theory has considerable intuitive appeal. It seems analogous to Darwin’s selection theory. And blackholes do seem to be likely candidates to give birth to new universes.
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- A blackhole is an infinitely small concentration of spacetime, matter and energy, called a “singularity“. It is this type of phenomenon we believe the Big Bang started from.
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- In one glaring aspect, however, Smolin’s theory falls short of being analogous to Darwin’s. It does not predict that the most improbably complex feature of our universe will be the one most likely to be an adaptation produced by cosmological natural selection. Because that least entropic feature is life rather than blackholes.
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- Smolin does identify life as the least entropic known thing. His theory does not make the connection between entropy and selection. It does not acknowledge that just as improbably low entropy is the hallmark of selection operating at the biological level, this is likely to be true at the cosmological level as well.
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- What is the future of life? If life is the universe’s reproductive system, the implication is that sufficiently evolved intelligence could acquire the ability to create new cosmic environments.
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- In order to be habitable, these baby universes would need to replicate the physical laws of the lifeform’s native universe. Cosmologists expect that in billions of years, our universe will cease being habitable. By that point life could conceivably have become intelligent enough to produce new life-supporting universes, perhaps by civilizations “building” something similar to blackholes.
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- However, scientists currently lack the methods to test the idea conclusively. A start would be to discover that there are indeed other universes, something that astronomers are currently looking for.
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- A basic prediction it does make is that human technological progress is likely to continue into the vastly distant future. If cosmological selection “designed” life to use its technology for universe reproduction, then it seems reasonable to expect that life will succeed in this regard just as you’d expect an eye produced by biological selection to actually succeed in seeing.
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- That doesn’t mean that unceasing technological progress is guaranteed, after all, we could use our technology to destroy ourselves. Nevertheless we can reasonably expect humanity to be sticking around for a long, long time.
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- It’s not a new idea to propose in general terms that life might constitute a mechanism for cosmological evolution. Exactly “why” is life, as the least entropic known thing in the universe, more likely than blackholes to be a mechanism of universe reproduction.
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- Life can be summarized as the human brain. It is a challenge for physics to explain down to the level of quantum mechanics. At the same time it gets into meta physics and deep into philosophy. Metaphysics is an abstract theory with no basis in reality. We are navigating the narrow path between solid ground and the edge of a swamp.
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- Science is supposed be the tool that describes our natural world. Things are not all black and white, not all 1’s and 0’s. The natural world lies between the digital and the analogue. We are just learning that even our brains have figured this out. Whether we realize it or not.
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- Your brain was thought to work like a digital computer with the neurons being a network of switches snapping on or off. Science knew that these dendrites were long branch-like structures attached to a round-body called a “ soma”. Together they formed the neurons which made up the switching network.
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- The dendrites were thought to be the conduits that carried a spike of electrical activity sent to the other soma of other neurons. What we are now just beginning to realize is that the dendrites are “ active”, not just conduits. They are generating their own spikes of electrical activity.
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- Dendrites make up over 90% of all the neural tissue. They are 10 times more active than we thought. This discovery changes the whole nature of our understanding of how the brain computes information. It is operating as both a digital and an analog computer.
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- Dendrites can put our longer lasting voltages that in their sum total actually are more powerful than the spikes of the somas. The brain just does not work with all or nothing signals. It also processes analog flows that affect computing.
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- Dendrites are hybrid cells doing both digital and analog computing at the same time. The are generating digital pulses and large analogue fluctuations at the same time. They are 100 times larger in volume than the somas.
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- Does that mean that our brains are 100 times more powerful than we thought. ( It is ironic to me that we are here thinking about thinking. It is a strange closed loop to be in. Like staring at our navel and thinking where did that come from?)
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- A study made on lab rats found that dendrites were 5 times more active when the rats were sleeping . And, 10 times more active when the rats were awake and moving.
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- This all tells us that learning takes place with much more “ flexibility” than we thought ( thinking about thinking again). This whole revelation is changing our understanding of how the brain’s neurons actually work.
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- This science gets us closer to how the brain works philosophically. It gets into the question of how does the brain have a conscience?
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- What is “conscientiousness“? What creates it?
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- “Materialism” is the idea that all phenomena is reducible to the behavior of matter, to physics. The mind is simply computing using meat.
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- “Ontological” is the branch of the metaphysics that studies the nature of existence.
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- “Epistemological” is the branch of philosophy that investigates the origin, nature, methods, and limits of human knowledge.
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- We now are dealing with the intersection between science and philosophy.
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- The brain might possibly be explained in terms of matter down to the weirdness of quantum mechanics. Or, it might it might explained by Newtonian physics operating in a complex information operating system. Could the mind be simply biological?
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- The relationship between the mind and matter? It is difficult to convince us that the mind is purely a biological phenomena. Maybe quantum phenomena occurring in the brain are the root of our conscious experiences?
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- Maybe only God can fill in the gaps in our argument between science and philosophy. We still like to believe that the design would not have required any supernatural intervention.
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- Our job of thinking about what science has learned about the world and what meta physical theories are telling us will wander from solid ground into the swamp.
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- Mans conscience is the oracle of God. An “oracle” is a person considered to provide wise and insightful counsel, and prophetic predictions
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- “It is far more important to preserve an unblemished conscience than to gloat in accomplishments“.
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- “There is no dungeon so dark as one’s own heart. Conscience is the voice of your soul“.
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- “There is no witness so terrible, no accuser so powerful, as the conscience that dwells within us. Conscience warns us as a friend, before it punishes us as a judge.”
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--------------------- Other reviews available:
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- 1403 - How to become an athlete?
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- 3030 - What makes your brain conscious?
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- 1024 - Brainology mindset.
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- 3081 - Understanding yourself. Seeing with ½ your brain.
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- October 13, 2021 BRAIN - ideas to ponder? 2199 3304
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--------------------- --- Friday, October 15, 2021 ---------------------------
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