Neuroscience

How do Brains work? And how for example are “thoughts formed” out of the firings of lots of individual neurons? Maybe there’s an analog to how the coherent physical world we perceive is formed from the interactions of lots of individual atoms of space. And to explore this we might consider a multicomputational model of brains in which the tokens are individual neurons in particular states and events are possible interactions between them. There’s a strange bit of circularity though. As I’ve argued elsewhere, what’s key to deriving the perceived laws of physics is our particular way of parsing the world (which we may view as core to our notion of consciousness)—in particular our concept that we have a single thread of experience, and thus “sequentialize time”. When applied to a multicomputational model of brains our core “brain-related” way of parsing the world suggests reference frames that again sequentialize time and turn all those parallel neuron firings into a sequence of coherent “thoughts”. Just like in physics one can expect that there are many possible reference frames—and one might imagine that ultimate equivalence between them (which leads to relativity in physics) might lead to the ability of different brains to “think comparable thoughts”. Are there analogs of other physical phenomena? One might imagine that in addition to a main “thread of conscious thought” there might be alternate multiway paths whose presence would lead to “quantum-like effects” that would manifest as “influence of the unconscious” (making an analog of Planck’s constant a “measure of the importance of the unconscious”).