Binary Brain

This should be and could be such a long post. It won’t be.

Wisdom requires age. Why? Because at 16, you don’t know anything about anything. You don’t have the flow of time and experience to understand that knowledge – true knowledge – does not come from an academic, nor demand. It is not authoritative. Well, most knowledge isn’t authoritative because it can be wrong. It may be wrong. At 16, you don’t know this because all of those things which you know and are sure are true haven’t had the time to be proven false.

We live in an age that rejects religion and replaces it with authoritative knowledge. Inductive knowledge about how the future will turn out.

Rarely is this true. And only time teaches this.

Too bad evolution didn’t grant us the ability to take the wisdom of the elders and transfer it to the newborn.

The last authoritative epoch of western civilization happened in the 1930s and ’40s. I hope we don’t have to live through one of those epochs again.

One issue I’m struggling with is, whence thought when our brains (and thus, the mind) are hybrid structures of parallel computing and sensory devices?

As I was brushing my teeth, a few significant thoughts poured into my head that overshadowed all of the other minor quibbles attempting to take front and center space in my consciousness.  In a computer, you can assume that anything going on is a reaction to some input.  In this case, the input was varied and chaotic; the vibration of the toothbrush against my teeth, the glare of the light off the mirror and the smudge in my glasses from my dog licking my face a few minutes beforehand.  Which one of those inputs, though, triggered the question of whence random thought?

I really don’t get it.  Dennett makes very strong arguments in favor of losing the puppeteer of our mind and accept a consciousness that is really a type of survival versioning system – i.e. where many trains of random thoughts occur throughout the day and it is always the strongest one that takes hold at the forefront of our consciousness.  I agree with him because all of the neuroscience of today (2010) seems to point in that direction.  But, I still don’t get the logic of the randomness that is my mind and my consciousness.  If my brain were truly nothing more than a complex machine, then the logic of my thought would either be rarely consistent or always consistent.  And I know from introspection that neither is the case for me.  My consciousness is somewhere in the middle.  In the right environment, it is extremely singular and focused and in another, completely chaotic.  How does chaotic complexity that is the neural network of our brain make for semi-logical, semi-consistency?

I find this whole issue troubling.