This one isn’t as difficult to answer as you might ‘think’ (snort), so which was first? Brain or mind?
The definite thought
Definition of the brain gives us: a : the portion of the vertebrate central nervous system enclosed in the skull and continuous with the spinal cord through the foramen magnum that is composed of neurons and supporting and nutritive structures (such as glia) and that integrates sensory information from inside and outside the body in controlling autonomic function (such as heartbeat and respiration), in coordinating and directing correlated motor responses, and in the process of learning — compare forebrain, hindbrain, midbrain
b : a nervous center in invertebrates comparable in position and function to the vertebrate brain
Mind the gap
Well…that wasn’t hard. Now about the mind: 1. The element of a person that enables them to be aware of the world and their experiences, to think, and to feel; the faculty of consciousness and thought.
1.1 A person’s mental processes contrasted with physical action.
2. A person’s ability to think and reason; the intellect.
Though I don’t agree with the first one entirely, because the mind is not causing us to feel, it only is the aggregated functioning that makes us aware of what we feel as individual, this is the definition that pops up.
Emerging winner
Now, which of those two come first have actually little to do with the definition of both. Rather:
The mind is the aggregated functioning of processes in the brain that cause it to be selfaware and able to experience and act. While the brain has multiple functions for parts of the body and actions of the organism, the mind is dependent on the speed of these processes. Now you might want to argue about speed in neurons and all, but the fact remains that the mind is an emerging property of the brain’s functions. Thus the brain has to exist for the mind to arise.
So, as all mammals have a brain, but not a mind, it should be both logically (from the above) and biologically clear that the brain was and is present before a mind can form.
Infancy History is over. We have seen it, we can make our review on it. Human awareness has grown since its ‘conception’ (or emerging from the grey goo called our brain). We have stumbled and have fallen. Have risen and fought for our sanity. We have (well, not you and I mind you) dragged ourselves through an initial hardship of infancy, where we had to learn how to operate our conscious with only nature as our parent. It went so-so. We made some invisible friends, and with no adult guidance, we kept to those ideas, like children do when not corrected.
Adolescence But like everything that evolves, even the automated effects in the mind caused the social and psychological constructs of it to recognize that keeping to non-existing things would kill the species faster. Well, that and the fact that curiosity causes humanity to thrive for answers. So, even through figuring that someone believed in a deity, they wanted to ‘prove’ its existence and in that process actually came to conclusion it doesn’t (that is what good science can do). Basically the scientific method emerged from the need to either figure out how this (arbitrary) deity worked, or how the rest of the world worked, so humanity could ‘tool’ it.
Flick of the two sided blade Humanity is at a threshold, like it is every day of its existence. Because of its diversity, there are still two things on its evolution agenda. 1. The ever receding superstition (fear of the unknown. Thus when known, less fear, less gods). 2. The issue that science was a step, but when conducted by humans, it is still influenced by emotions and instinctive behavior that caused superstition. See, while much of the non-scientific world fights a war on the sanity of the mind, the scientific world finds itself on the brink of ‘escaping’ its own superstition level. Like Alchemy was a half brew between religious rituals and methodology, the standard model seems to be a construct that has led to quantum physics, but now a problem arises. The standard model is all the observed. Science can only measure the observed. Math can make models of concepts, based on a piece of information from the observed, but eventually the brick wall of progress will be hit (or the pit of infinity depth). See, there isn’t so much a limit to what we can calculate, because frankly there isn’t. But there is a limit to usefulness, without the proper tools.
Blunt force trauma In my opinion, humanity hit a wall. It has to first finalize the understanding of self and how its ‘self’ resides in this reality. If you have read my previous #AoS post, you will understand what I am aiming at. In the non-scientific community, we are in a predicament, where individuality of humanity is both the strength and the weakness. The fact that each individual can be influence (and always is) by other individuals and group dynamics, and the psychology of indoctrination at young age causes individuals that are simply unable to remove all instinctive behavior from their system without severe emotional and cognitive trauma. This results in a worldwide shift of paradigm where those that are religiously ‘bound’ out of fear lash out at those that have evolved beyond that superstition (and to protect their ‘own group’, will lash out at anything a thread, so other groups with different superstitious ideas just the same). But what about the science world? Is the science world free from such conflicts? NO. Simply because in science, again, we are talking about individuals with their own indoctrination (or lack of it), dogmas, preferences, emotions and character traits. But also about groups that have ventured into specific fields of investigation, hoping (emotion) to find that one thing nobody else did yet. But also trying to prove their own findings, often forgetting that (like Stephen Hawking) you should also try to disprove your own findings. Now they arrived at a point, where they have to take a next step. Remove the emotion, not only from the method, but from the interpretation too.
But the problem is, how to go about that. Can they go beyond the fear and hopes? Can they remove the human element from science? The pure scientific method, or the something new?
The decision tree model takes the following theoretical bases.
The three layers
The neural response system of humans exist of the following three layers. (You might recognize something of the Triune brain in this, though I can honestly say, I didn’t know about that until I was searching for an image for this article: ‘Three layers of brain’)
Instinctive behavior Either by genetic blueprint or attained through learning, any organism will adapt to recurring patterns to prevent it from danger. The genetic part is of course hard to change, but the ‘tree’ of choices (I call it the decision tree), the response mechanism of most mammals is automated. Meaning, if something gives an impulse, especially repeatedly, that causes a positive or negative reaction to the nervous system, it will become an instinctive behavior to move to or from such stimulus.
Emotional behavior Mammals and especially primates (being very recognizable to us), being differentiated in group sizes and survival mechanisms because of that, have empathic abilities to survive in social groups. But we also see emotional behavior in strong generational cohesion. Where offspring is heavily dependent on parents, we see the equivalent of our own emotions within such ‘family’. These emotional behaviors have different reasons. 1. they cause automatic bonding, dependency. 2. they cause mimicking of behavior (we have seen this behavior between species even, remember the stories of Tarzan, or Romulus and Remus?). 3. they set a path for pattern recognition within the nervous system. Certain key values which change with each generation to ensure possible survival. The emotional layer, can be seen as a ‘neural’ filter level.
Cognitive behavior With awareness comes the growth to conceptualization in communication. Because we are instinctive, emotional beings, but also self aware and sometimes differ in meaning of emotion, we need a way to explain when an emotional behavior is not meant as a threat, etc. You could call it a protocol equivocation behavior. These concepts are starting with leveling of emotional responses between the self and others (independent of species), but evolve through a process of emotional impulses to stimuli and responses within relations and our interactions with the world around us into cognitive structures of words, representations and a general worldview.
Intrinsic accumulation
The layers work accumulative, where instinctive is built up from two different influences: Genetic inheritance and developmental alteration (learning). The emotional layer is a constructed layer depending on the complexity of the organism and the amount of instinct branches. The cognitive layer depends on both underlying layers but (as we can see in different human individuals) can work independent of them.
Current, tide and flow
All processes within the organism (whether human or otherwise) are based on simple building blocks that exist in
nature. The physical economy depends on the existing concentrations of minerals within the available solution (water). This does not ends with the intestines, blood-vessels and muscle tensions of an organism, but also in more intrinsic parts and effects within the body. Even the most sophisticated patterns like our nervous system are build on these same principles.
Micro, Meso and Macro nature and culture
As well as the building blocks, the development and processes of both nature, species and culture (social extension of groups of species), are based on such equal principles. This means that taking the basic evolution of a natural process, this can be translated into a process within a species, as well as into the working of a social construction.
Fear first, eat later
All and every behavior that is correctly addressed, can be retraced to the most basic stimuli and responses of nature. All and every organism is in base principle primed to prevent harm to self. Instinct is based on the equivalent of fear, all the way to the first ancestral organism. In this progression, all instincts based on survival have the initial response to the digestion of food.
Be neutral not shallow
All processes in nature, as well as within organisms (if you have read the above correctly this is a no brainer for you), seek a neutral shift. This means that concentrations are diffused, levels are equalized.
Accepting what can be observed is something very different from accepting what can be seen. Ask a blind person..heck, even a color blind person. A deaf person, a mute person or a tactile inpaired person.
The identity is a complex combination of continuous impulses from our senses and the feedback system of our overcapacity in our brain (prefrontal cortex, temporal lobes, etc). We observe and build a reliance on the combined input from the world outside. Depending on the level of logic in cause and effect we have been taught, we are able to decide what is real and what is not. The same way a fly will move towards food with deliberation, simply because its instincts (inherited) tell it that that will give it chance on survival. Humans are little different from instinctive ancestors, we still are 80% or more instinctive. However, we do have the selfawareness that gives us the ability to question the world around us. Because at first we do not understand causality, at young age we infer our internal working on the working of the world around us. ‘Stupid chair’, ‘Yes that vase fell by itself! I didn’t push it!’. But as we learn how cause and effect works and we understand that we can logically deduct the outcome of an action, we start to recognize the ‘laws of nature’. This is how we deduct that when all senses agree with each other and what we observe doesn’t differ from the expected outcome, there is no reason to use cognitive effort to infuse different magical values. Like…wow…that door opened when I pushed it, perhaps there is a leprichaun behind it that opened it for me at exactly the same moment, even though I don’t see it and have no reason to think anyone would actually open a door without reason or corporal ability.
We accept that the world is what we see, as we know (humanity developed science to investigate beyond the physical abilities of observation) that there is more, but that which we don’t see, doesn’t differ from the working that we do see.
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