Brain Evolution and Charles Darwin's Theory
Christina Sponias
Saturday, 12 September 2009 14:17 UTC
According to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, some species manage to survive and prevail in their environment, while other species tend to disappear because they are not strong enough. The selective process decides which species lives and which will become extinct, depending on their resistance.
This concept is accepted by many people until today and they refuse to understand that Darwin was wrong.
He was right when he discovered that the human being is an animal, but the evolution of the species doesn’t occur based on the resistance of each species, as many biologists after Darwin proved to the world with their research.
They concluded that if the organism didn’t have the basis to evolve until certain point, it would never go further. There is a program that allows each organism to know how to behave in its environment and how to solve its survival problems, including how to find food and be protected from enemies.
There is also an evolutionary program in each organism’s cognitive mechanism.
A monkey will never be as intelligent as a human being, no matter how many years it may live, because it doesn’t have a proper brain. It was not programmed to be as intelligent as man. So, there is no natural selection: there are only many programs for each species. These programs define the animals’ behaviour, the route of their lives and evolution. The same happens in case of human beings.
Darwin’s conclusions by observing the selective process were based on the knowledge of his time. He couldn’t suppose that there are several programs behind the selective process that prepares each species to resist natural selection, which means that this selection doesn’t happen by chance.
When we try to understand the formation of the human brain and the appearance of the conscience, we realize that this is a formation that took an incredibly long time. It cannot be something that could have evolved in our planet, because our planet is too young and the components of the human brain and their functionalisms are too complex.
The formation of the first brain and conscience occurred by chance at a time so distant that we cannot calculate it. It didn’t take place on our own planet, in the same way that the formula for the formation of the first live cell didn’t appear by chance in our planet because the planet’s age (about 4.6 billion years old) is not sufficient to allow all the necessary combinations required by probability for the formation of the first live cell, since the permutations and combinations for this event would have been too many and they would take more time than the planet’s age itself.
Therefore, we can conclude that the human being didn’t appear on Earth by chance. The human brain and the formula for the appearance of the animal life are ancient and could not have been developed in our young planet, but all the animals, including man, have behavioral programs in the mechanism through which they acquire knowledge. These programs permit their perfect functionalism and survival in a hostile environment. Programs that might have being prepared by a superior brain for sure, since they could not have appeared by chance.
Thus, the human being inherits an ancient brain that can think and feel and is aware of its existence, but one has to pass through the same evolutionary process through which all animals pass in this planet, because probably, one has to be tamed like them…
Christina Sponias continued Carl Jung’s research into the human psyche, discovering the cure for all mental illnesses, and simplifying the scientific method of dream interpretation that teaches you how to exactly translate the meaning of your dreams, so that you can find health, wisdom and happiness.
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Dear Chris,
You wrote on the other hand the form of human consciousness as we know it is intimately related to the form of the human brain and this is a clearly product of genetic evolution, so Serge’s claim that all forms are equal has to be incorrect and a kind of classical conceptual error.
[1. Do you mean that the form of human consciousness is different and that there are different forms of consciousness?
[2. If the consciousness form of human brain is a product of genetic evolution then other forms of consciousness that are also products of genetic evolution must be inter related and at genetic level must be same or at least similar, is it not?
Thanks,
DMR Sekhar -
Dear Christina,
Sorry to note the sad news.
Sekhar. -
Cases of feral children (which are based on the very same kinds of e-zine articles you so like to quote, dear Christina) illustrate that human behavioural development is as much dependent on the environment as anything else (such feral children imitated dogs and cats et cetera, and were unable to learn human faculties such as language) which would seem to imply that the behavioural programs you have been talking about are very much fundamentally grounded in genomes and neurons.
Also, there was a recent experiment with rat neuron arrays that “learned” to fly a flight simulator based on external data input, in other words, proof that consciousness needs nothing more than neuronal basis, and using Occam’s razor, your theory may be superfluous.
The recent news about a computer that can recreate images of what people are seeing/thinking using fMRI alone also implies objectivity to the thinking process.
Cheers.
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Hi Sekhar, Christina and all,
Yes all animals and certainly all mammals are similar in an important sense, in that they all use coupled coordinated neuronal excitation at the edge of chaos and thus evoke butterfly effect instabilities that may lead to complex forms of quantum entanglement.
In fact these similarities seem to go very deep into the nature of cosmological quantum physics, so in a sense subjective consciousness is a manifestation of the most complex coordinated quantum reverberations, the forces of nature are capable of producing. This is the ‘neural crest’ of cosmology, as pivotal as the big bang and heat death in the cosmological scheme.
On the other hand, the actual state of consciousness is both a product of our genes and our environment, right down to the actual context we are dealing with.
In particular genes are pivotal in establishing the developmental organization of the brain in each species, which gives the consciousness of each species unique ways of bringing their experiences together for their own survival and discovery process.
In this respect the evolution of Homo sapiens has brought about a cultural implosion, in which, through language and science, we are able to formulate questions, and make discoveries, about nature and existence which have never before been put on this planet before.
Nevertheless subjective consciousness remains the ultimate scientific mystery which even with EEG and fMRI investigations of the brain remains absolutely enigmatic.
Although a computer can form an image of cortical mapping of a perceived scene pictured in a brain scan, the computer is in no way conscious (indeed it has no room for consciousness in its digital functioning) and the brain’s own map of the scene is a necessary but not sufficient condition for biological consciousness, so we can’t equate consciousness with any purely functional attribute of the brain either.
This is the as-yet unsolved hard problem in consciousness research.
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What of the ability of rat neurons in culture to “learn” based on input, Chris?
The original article is here http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/10/041022104658.htmMore fun here
http://www.fishandchips.uwa.edu.au/project.htmlThoughts?
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Anonymous
Dear Christina,
You are too off. Response of organisms to a stimuli depend on early exposure or the level of cognition (which depend on the neuronal makeup and finally the genome) intellect. If you give the same stimulus to different types of organisms, say a worm, a mouse, a cat, a dog, a chimp and a human, the responses would be different. And the quality of responses also would vary. If god created all organisms with the same “program” there should not be any differences in responses. This is actually in line with theory of evolution. Your arguments defy all logic. Peace
science lover -
Hi Ankur,
Neurons have to have the ability to learn in culture if they can learn in tissue and biological nerve nets, as I suggested, could have a form of integrated consciousness if the property arises from the chaotic excitation of individual cells.
In my paper “The Central Enigma of Consciousness” http://www.dhushara.com/enigma/enigma.htm, which will also be in the Transcience volume, there is a figure of the 12 distinct integrated modes of motion of hydra, which has no brain but a simple nerve net. This shows ‘intuitive’ earning without a ‘brain’.
However neurons are exceedingly sophisticated units. A pyramidal neuron has up to 10^4 synapses using 4 or 5 different neurotransmitters to wich t can respond in diverse dynamic ways. Chandelier cells are potentially capable of amplifying fluctuations of single ion channels into neurosystems fluctuations. Individual human cells, such as neutrophils, also display behavior consistent with consciousness.
But this doesn’t mean that an artificial neural net made only of additive neurons with simple sigmoidal activation functions displays either dynamical excitation at the quantum-chaotic interface, or subjective consciousness, even when it can solve computationally intractable problems like the traveling salesman problem.
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Chris King on 02 November 2009 wrote:
At one extreme I partially share with others like Serge the idea that perhaps consciousness is something shared by all uncertain systems, from the individual quantum, through the chaotic weather, to excitable cells, and eventually to the dynamical human brain.[S.P.] Where have you taken this from, Chris? In my post I talked nothing about the “uncertain systems”. I grant consciousness nor to stone, nor to computer, nor to “chaotic weather”. I grant consciousness only to self-organizing systems — the systems which maintain their low entropy state by processing the incoming physical signals and transforming them into the elements of subjective experience.
[Chris King]
On the other hand the form of human consciousness as we know it is intimately related to the form of the human brain and this is a clearly product of genetic evolution, so Serge’s claim that all forms are equal has to be incorrect and a kind of classical conceptual error.[S.P.] I talk nothing about the “forms of consciousness”!!! Please, read my post more attentively. From the fact that one believes that “the form of human consciousness” (as he knows it) “is intimately related to the form of the human brain” does not follow that my approach that all exemplars of consciousness do not differ in kind is wrong. If one is an anthropocentrist, from this does not follow that the person who is not an anthropocentrist is wrong. The correctness of any meta-theoretical assertion depends on whether we can or cannot explain the facts within the explanatory framework constructed using the given meta-theoretical assertion. Simply speaking, we have to see which explanatory framework is more appropriate when explaining the behavior of living organisms — the one based on the doctrine of anthropocentrism, or the one based on the law of conservation of consciousness*. The verity of my approach depends not on somebody’s subjective opinion, but on the objective possibility of explaining the natural facts.
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Note: the Law of Conservation of Consciousness has the following formulation:
Assertion 1: one self-organizing system (either a natural living organism or an artificial structure) possesses only one exemplar of consciousness.
Assertion 2: all such systems possess the exemplars of consciousness which are equal as to their mechanisms, so their potentialities.
Assertion 3: the total number of all exemplars of consciousness in the Universe is limited and conserves.- – - – - – - – - – - – - – -
Kindly,
Serge Patlavskiy -
Serge,
This is a discovery process. You can’t seriously expect another forum member to discuss only your ideas. I’m not just responding to your points but presenting my own theories. I said I ‘partially’ share certain ideas about consciousness with you. This means I can see a similarity, but on a different basis, for example uncertainty, or unpredictability, rather than self-organizing.
Self-organizing the way you put it is an ambiguous criterion that doesn’t relate directly to consciousness or complexity. Robustly stable dynamical systems could be considered self-organizing but they are anything but conscious. Far-from equilibrium systems are also self-organizing as are some strange attractors. One could also say some digital automata and heuristic computer programs are self-organizing, but again they are not conscious.
There is no basis to claim all conscious, or self-organizing systems, are conserved or equivalent. I don’t see how you can defend your three conservation laws of consciousness. They seem to defy natural adaptability in a number of ways.
Where does your citing Seth on your web page come into this model of consciousness? I could declare to you that I am an avatar of the cosmic source. That I have always been here and shall be for everlasting, incarnate or disincarnate. Would that help the scientific process? It might at a pinch!
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Dear Shekhar,
Thank you for your feelings, but my father was already 92 years old and he was suffering, so his death was a blessing. His funeral was yesterday, finally. I couldn’t leave Greece as soon as I learned about his death, so he was waiting for me in a freezer for two weeks… He was buried in Nova Odessa near his best friend, according to his will.
Dear Ankur,
There are primates that can imitate the behavior they observe, like chimpanzees and human beings, because Imitation is a behavioral program. It is helpful because it increases the learning process, but the example you have mentioned is a very sad distortion of its function.
Language skills are not part of behavioral programs.
Learning consciously is a process that needs the proper basis. If an animal learns something for some reason, this doesn’t mean that it has the consciousness of what it is doing.
Dear Anonymous,
Who told you that all organisms follow the same behavioral programs? Each one follows a collection of behavioral programs specific to their species.
Dear Chris and Serge,
I’m sorry but I won’t participate in the discussion about the neurons because I don’t have enough time for that. I’m back to Sao Paulo and I have a lot to do in order to solve many problems concerning my father’s properties, besides having too many people to visit here in Brazil where I am.
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