scholarly journals A Neuroscience Levels of Explanation Approach to the Mind and the Brain

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edmund T. Rolls
Keyword(s):  
Mental States ◽  
Levels Of Explanation ◽  
Processing Level ◽  
Reductive Physicalism ◽  
Brain States ◽  
High Level ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Mental Events ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Different Levels

The relation between mental states and brain states is important in computational neuroscience, and in psychiatry in which interventions with medication are made on brain states to alter mental states. The relation between the brain and the mind has puzzled philosophers for centuries. Here a neuroscience approach is proposed in which events at the sub-neuronal, neuronal, and neuronal network levels take place simultaneously to perform a computation that can be described at a high level as a mental state, with content about the world. It is argued that as the processes at the different levels of explanation take place at the same time, they are linked by a non-causal supervenient relationship: causality can best be described in brains as operating within but not between levels. This allows the supervenient (e.g., mental) properties to be emergent, though once understood at the mechanistic levels they may seem less emergent, and expected. This mind-brain theory allows mental events to be different in kind from the mechanistic events that underlie them; but does not lead one to argue that mental events cause brain events, or vice versa: they are different levels of explanation of the operation of the computational system. This approach may provide a way of thinking about brains and minds that is different from dualism and from reductive physicalism, and which is rooted in the computational processes that are fundamental to understanding brain and mental events, and that mean that the mental and mechanistic levels are linked by the computational process being performed. Explanations at the different levels of operation may be useful in different ways. For example, if we wish to understand how arithmetic is performed in the brain, description at the mental level of the algorithm being computed will be useful. But if the brain operates to result in mental disorders, then understanding the mechanism at the neural processing level may be more useful, in for example, the treatment of psychiatric disorders.

scholarly journals Mind Causality: A Computational Neuroscience Approach

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edmund T. Rolls
Keyword(s):  
Computational Neuroscience ◽  
Quantum Physics ◽  
Causal Account ◽  
Levels Of Explanation ◽  
Brain Level ◽  
High Level ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Mental Events ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Different Levels

A neuroscience-based approach has recently been proposed for the relation between the mind and the brain. The proposal is that events at the sub-neuronal, neuronal, and neuronal network levels take place simultaneously to perform a computation that can be described at a high level as a mental state, with content about the world. It is argued that as the processes at the different levels of explanation take place at the same time, they are linked by a non-causal supervenient relationship: causality can best be described in brains as operating within but not between levels. This mind-brain theory allows mental events to be different in kind from the mechanistic events that underlie them; but does not lead one to argue that mental events cause brain events, or vice versa: they are different levels of explanation of the operation of the computational system. Here, some implications are developed. It is proposed that causality, at least as it applies to the brain, should satisfy three conditions. First, interventionist tests for causality must be satisfied. Second, the causally related events should be at the same level of explanation. Third, a temporal order condition must be satisfied, with a suitable time scale in the order of 10 ms (to exclude application to quantum physics; and a cause cannot follow an effect). Next, although it may be useful for different purposes to describe causality involving the mind and brain at the mental level, or at the brain level, it is argued that the brain level may sometimes be more accurate, for sometimes causal accounts at the mental level may arise from confabulation by the mentalee, whereas understanding exactly what computations have occurred in the brain that result in a choice or action will provide the correct causal account for why a choice or action was made. Next, it is argued that possible cases of “downward causation” can be accounted for by a within-levels-of-explanation account of causality. This computational neuroscience approach provides an opportunity to proceed beyond Cartesian dualism and physical reductionism in considering the relations between the mind and the brain.

scholarly journals The dialog between psychoanalysis and neuroscience: what does philosophy of mind say?

2014 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 186-192 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elie Cheniaux ◽  
Carlos Eduardo de Sousa Lyra
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Body Problem ◽  
Current Knowledge ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Subjective Experiences ◽  
Eliminative Materialism ◽  
Brain States ◽  
Mind Body Problem ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Brain

Objective: To briefly review how the main monist and dualist currents of philosophy of mind approach the mind-body problem and to describe their association with arguments for and against a closer dialog between psychoanalysis and neuroscience.Methods: The literature was reviewed for studies in the fields of psychology, psychoanalysis, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind.Results: Some currents are incompatible with a closer dialog between psychoanalysis and neurosciences: interactionism and psychophysical parallelism, because they do not account for current knowledge about the brain; epiphenomenalism, which claims that the mind is a mere byproduct of the brain; and analytical behaviorism, eliminative materialism, reductive materialism and functionalism, because they ignore subjective experiences. In contrast, emergentism claims that mental states are dependent on brain states, but have properties that go beyond the field of neurobiology.Conclusions: Only emergentism is compatible with a closer dialog between psychoanalysis and neuroscience.

Sensations, Experiences and Brain Processes

Philosophy ◽  
1970 ◽  
Vol 45 (173) ◽  
pp. 221-226
Author(s):  
John Heil
Keyword(s):  
Identity Theory ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Physical Processes ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Eyes Open ◽  
Fundamental Objection ◽  
Brain States ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Yellowish Orange

In his defence of the identity theory, Professor Smart has attempted to show that reports of mental states (for example, sensation reports) are strictly topic-neutral. If this were the case then it would follow that there is nothing logically wrong with the claim that the mind is the brain (and nothing more) or that mental states are really nothing but brain states. Some phillosophers have argued that a fundamental objection to any form of materialism is that the latter makes an obvious logical blunder in identifying the mental with the physical. This is the view that dualism is enshrined in our language. If this is true then of course statements such as ‘the mind is actually nothing but the brain’ and ‘mental states are really nothing but physical processes’ would be quite unacceptable on strictly logical grounds. Smart's claim that talk about mental states is topic-neutral, however, appears to exempt materialism from such objections. The question is, does it? That is to say, are sensation reports and the like topic-neutral in the required sense? Are they analogous in principle to statements of the form ‘someone is in the room’? Smart's point is that expressions such as ‘someone phoned: it was the doctor’ are logically similar to those of the form ‘I am having a red after-image: it is a brain process.’ ‘Someone’ is not logically equivalent to ‘the doctor’ (and it even sounds strange to say ‘someone is the doctor’), but it may, of course, be true that the doctor is the someone who phoned. Does this analogy hold and is it correct to say that sensation reports and mentalistic expressions in general are topic-neutral, that they refer only to experienced ‘somethings’? Smart's claim runs as follows:When a person says, ‘I see a yellowish-orange after-image’, he is saying something like this: ‘There is something going on which is like what is going on when I have my eyes open, am awake, and there is an orange illuminated in good light in front of me, that is, when I really see an orange’. (And there is no reason why a person should not say the same thing when he is having a veridical sense-datum, so long as we construe the ‘like’ in the last sentence in such a sense that something can be like itself.) Notice that the italicised words, namely ‘there is something going on which is like what is going on when’, are all quasi logical or topic neutral words. This explains why the ancient Greek peasant's reports about his sensations can be neutral between dualistic metaphysics and my materialistic metaphysics. It explains how sensations can be brain processes and yet how a man who reports them need know nothing about brain processes. For he reports them only very abstractly as ‘something going on which is like what is going on when…’ Similarly, a person may say ‘someone is in the room’, thus reporting truly that the doctor is in the room, even though he has never heard of doctors.

A unitary hypothesis of mind-brain interaction in the cerebral cortex

1990 ◽  
Vol 240 (1299) ◽  
pp. 433-451 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cerebral Cortex ◽  
Pyramidal Cells ◽  
Neuronal Structure ◽  
Mental Experience ◽  
Effective Selection ◽  
Global Nature ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Mental Events ◽  
Apical Dendrites ◽  
The Brain

A brief introduction to the brain-mind problem leads on to a survey of the neuronal structure of the cerebral cortex. It is proposed that the basic receptive units are the bundles or clusters of apical dendrites of the pyramidal cells of laminae V and III-II as described by Fleischhauer and Peters and their associates. There are up to 100 apical dendrites in these receptive units, named dendrons. Each dendron would have an input of up to 100000 spine synapses. There are about 40 million dendrons in the human cerebral cortex. A study of the influence of mental events on the brain leads to the hypothesis that all mental events, the whole of the World 2 of Popper, are composed of mental units, each carrying its own characteristic mental experience. It is further proposed that each mental unit, named psychon, is uniquely linked to a dendron. So the mind-brain problem reduces to the interaction between a dendron and its psychon for all the 40 million linked units. In my 1986 paper ( Proc. R. Soc. Lond . B 227, 411-428) on the mind-brain problem, there was developed the concept that the operation of the synaptic microsites involved displacement of particles so small that they were within range of the uncertainty principle of Heisenberg. The psychon-dendron interaction provides a much improved basis for effective selection by a process analogous to a quantal probability field. In the fully developed hypothesis psychons act on dendrons in the whole world of conscious experiences and dendrons act on psychons in all perceptions and memories. It is shown how these interactions involve no violation of the conservation laws. There are great potentialities of these unitary concepts, for example as an explanation of the global nature of a visual experience from moment to moment. It would seem that there can be psychons not linked to dendrons, but only to other psychons, creating what we may call a psychon world.

Mind, identity theory of

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank Jackson
Keyword(s):  
Central Nervous System ◽  
Nervous System ◽  
Identity Theory ◽  
Brain Activity ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Ontological Categories ◽  
Great Merit ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Brain

We know that the brain is intimately connected with mental activity. Indeed, doctors now define death in terms of the cessation of the relevant brain activity. The identity theory of mind holds that the intimate connection is identity: the mind is the brain, or, more precisely, mental states are states of the brain. The theory goes directly against a long tradition according to which mental and material belong to quite distinct ontological categories – the mental being essentially conscious, the material essentially unconscious. This tradition has been bedevilled by the problem of how essentially immaterial states could be caused by the material world, as would happen when we see a tree, and how they could cause material states, as would happen when we decide to make an omelette. A great merit of the identity theory is that it avoids this problem: interaction between mental and material becomes simply interaction between one subset of material states, namely certain states of a sophisticated central nervous system, and other material states. The theory also brings the mind within the scope of modern science. More and more phenomena are turning out to be explicable in the physical terms of modern science: phenomena once explained in terms of spells, possession by devils, Thor’s thunderbolts, and so on, are now explained in more mundane, physical terms. If the identity theory is right, the same goes for the mind. Neuroscience will in time reveal the secrets of the mind in the same general way that the theory of electricity reveals the secrets of lightning. This possibility has received enormous support from advances in computing. We now have at least the glimmerings of an idea of how a purely material or physical system could do some of the things minds can do. Nevertheless, there are many questions to be asked of the identity theory. How could states that seem so different turn out to be one and the same? Would neurophysiologists actually see my thoughts and feelings if they looked at my brain? When we report on our mental states what are we reporting on – our brains?

scholarly journals Music Composition from the Brain Signal: Representing the Mental State by Music

2010 ◽  
Vol 2010 ◽  
pp. 1-6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dan Wu ◽  
Chaoyi Li ◽  
Yu Yin ◽  
Changzheng Zhou ◽  
Dezhong Yao
Keyword(s):  
Mental State ◽  
Music Composition ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Arousal Level ◽  
Sleep Stages ◽  
Biofeedback Therapy ◽  
Significant Difference ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Potential Tool

This paper proposes a method to translate human EEG into music, so as to represent mental state by music. The arousal levels of the brain mental state and music emotion are implicitly used as the bridge between the mind world and the music. The arousal level of the brain is based on the EEG features extracted mainly by wavelet analysis, and the music arousal level is related to the musical parameters such as pitch, tempo, rhythm, and tonality. While composing, some music principles (harmonics and structure) were taken into consideration. With EEGs during various sleep stages as an example, the music generated from them had different patterns of pitch, rhythm, and tonality. 35 volunteers listened to the music pieces, and significant difference in music arousal levels was found. It implied that different mental states may be identified by the corresponding music, and so the music from EEG may be a potential tool for EEG monitoring, biofeedback therapy, and so forth.

scholarly journals The Perception, &c., of Time as a feature in Mental Disease

1874 ◽  
Vol 19 (88) ◽  
pp. 519-532 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. A. F. Browne
Keyword(s):  
Mental Disease ◽  
Cerebral Arteries ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Regular Sequence ◽  
Anterior Lobe ◽  
Mental Condition ◽  
Subjective Element ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Directing Attention ◽  
The Brain

The power or process by means of which Time is mentally recognised and estimated independently of, or before, its external and artificial measurement, has not received a clear or comprehensive solution at the hands of those who have dealt with the subject. Certain metaphysicians connect the idea of duration with that of extension, and conceive that the child, or the savage, may have acquired a notion of intervals, or interrupted extension, from seeing and feeling through the muscular sense the alternate extension and flexion of his limbs; all comparison of such events with the successive changes in objective phenomena, as in days and nights, being the result of subsequent experience. Certain others conceive that our notion of Time originates in our consciousness and observation of succession in our thoughts, feelings, and mental states, a succession which necessarily involves a series of changes separated in time, and order, and nature. Sir W. Hamilton, apparently aware of the difficulty of the problem, says that “Time is a form of thought,” and “if we attempt to comprehend Time, either in whole or in part, we find that thought is hedged in between two incomprehensibles.” Other philosophers, belonging to a more practical school, who may be claimed as psychologists, contend that the subjective element of Time is imparted by the communication of impressions upon the external senses to the sensorium, coming as these must always do in succession with intervals of different length, and, as they often do, of regular length and intensity. It will be observed that in all these hypotheses it is taken for granted that the mind is capable of directing attention to its own conditions, and, to a certain extent, of analysing these, of marking their course, their swiftness, or slowness, their regularity, or irregularity. On the other hand, the phrenologists contend that there is a primitive and special faculty connected with a portion of the anterior lobe of the brain, by which Time, or the succession of events and intervals, is perceived or becomes known to us. My own speculations formerly led me to the theory that the perception of rhythm, or regular sequence, in sensorial impressions was conveyed by the pulsations of the cerebral arteries, either to the whole brain, or to such portion of it as may take cognisance of internal movements or changes. Sir H. Holland, that noble veteran, that learned and travelled and philosophic physician, who has just passed from amongst us, dedicated a chapter in his “Medical Notes and Reflections,” p. 499, to the exposition of “Time as an element in Mental Functions,” in which his chief object is to show that ideas or different modes of mentalisation arise and are propagated in different degrees of velocity and intensity in Time in different temperaments, and in the same individual at different periods, in accordance with the predominant physical or mental condition.

scholarly journals The Effect of the Glossary on the Reliability and Performance of the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET)

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
José Toloza-Muñoz ◽  
Jean González-Mendoza ◽  
Ramón D. Castillo ◽  
Diego Morales-Bader
Keyword(s):  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Secondary Task ◽  
Temporal Stability ◽  
Mental States ◽  
The Self ◽  
Validity And Reliability ◽  
Before And After ◽  
And Performance ◽  
High Level ◽  
The Mind

AbstractThe Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET) is used to measure high-level Theory of Mind. RMET consists of images of the regions surrounding the eyes and a glossary of terms that defines words associated with the gazes depicted in the images. People must identify the meaning associated with each gaze and can consult the glossary as they respond. The results indicate that typically developed adults perform better than adults with neurodevelopmental disorders. However, the evidence regarding the validity and reliability of the test is contradictory. This study evaluated the effect of the glossary on the performance, internal consistency, and temporal stability of the test. A total of 89 undergraduate students were randomly assigned to three conditions. The first group used the original glossary (Ori-G). The second group developed a self-generated glossary of gazes (Self-G). Finally, the third group developed a glossary that did not define gazes, but unrelated words instead (No-G). The test was administered before and after participants drew a randomly assigned image as a secondary task. The findings show that the number of correct answers was similar among the three conditions before and after the secondary task. However, the Self-G and No-G groups took less time to finish the test. The type of glossary affected the consistency and stability of the test. In our case, the Self-G condition made the responses faster, more consistent, and more stable. The results are discussed in terms of levels of processing and the detection of mental states based on gazes.

The Process of Inference

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Mole
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Belief Revision ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Philosophical Theory ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Belief States ◽  
Mental Events

The set of entities that serves as the domain for our discourse about the mind is metaphysically heterogenous. It includes processes, events, properties, modes, and states. In the latter part of the twentieth century, philosophers started to suppose that a philosophical theory of the mind should be primarily concerned with the explanation of mental states. Those states could be mentioned in the explanations that would need to be given for mental entities of other sorts. If, for example, we had a prior explanation of belief states, then those states could figure in our subsequent explanation of inferences: inferences, on this approach, are to be identified with certain processes of belief revision. This states-first approach was not favoured by earlier theorists of the mind, who tended to suppose that mental events and processes are explanatorily more basic than mental states. The current states-first approach faces insuperable difficulties, which the earlier approach avoids.

Assumptions

The Age of Em ◽  
2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robin Hanson
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Degrees Of Freedom ◽  
Internal State ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Short Delay ◽  
Input Signals ◽  
State Changes ◽  
Physical Variables ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Brain

The concept of whole brain emulation has been widely discussed in futurism ( Martin 1971 ; Moravec 1988 ; Hanson 1994b , 2008b ; Shulman 2010 ; Alstott 2013 ; Eth et al. 2013 ; Bostrom 2014 ) and in science fiction ( Clarke 1956 ; Egan 1994 ; Brin 2002 ; Vinge 2003 ; Stross 2006 ) for many decades. Sometimes emulations are called “uploads.” Let me now try to be clearer about the technological assumptions whose consequences I seek to explore. When I refer to a “brain” here, I refer not just to neurons in a head, but also to other supporting cells in the head, and to neurons and key closely connected systems elsewhere in the human body, such as the systems that manage hormones. Using that terminology, I assume, following a wellestablished consensus in the cognitive and brain sciences, that “the mind is just the brain” ( Bermúdez 2010 ). That is, what the brain fundamentally does is to take input signals from eyes, ears, skin, etc., and after a short delay produces both internal state changes and output signals to control muscles, hormone levels, and other body changes. The brain does not just happen to transform input signals into state changes and output signals; this transformation is the primary function of the brain, both to us and to the evolutionary processes that designed brains. The brain is designed to make this signal processing robust and efficient. Because of this, we expect the physical variables (technically, “degrees of freedom”) within the brain that encode signals and signal-relevant states, which transform these signals and states, and which transmit them elsewhere, to be overall rather physically isolated and disconnected from the other far more numerous unrelated physical degrees of freedom and processes in the brain. That is, changes in other aspects of the brain only rarely influence key brain parts that encode mental states and signals. We have seen this disconnection in ears and eyes, and it has allowed us to create useful artificial ears and eyes, which allow the once-deaf to hear and the once-blind to see. We expect the same to apply to artificial brains more generally. In addition, it appears that most brain signals are of the form of neuron spikes, which are especially identifiable and disconnected from other physical variables.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document