## Phantoms in the Brain ### Phantoms in the Brain  #### Metadata * Author: [[V S Ramachandran]] * Full Title: Phantoms in the Brain * Category: #books #### Highlights * most skilled among them can reverse (Location 3808) * result (Location 3809) * The search for enlightenment, I was told, consists of lifting this veil and realizing that you are really "One with the cosmos." (Location 4046) * that the notion of a single unified self "inhabiting" the brain may indeed be an illusion. (Location 4048) * Nevertheless, many people find it disturbing that all the richness of our mental life—all our thoughts, feelings, emotions, even what we regard as our intimate selves—arises entirely from the activity of little wisps of protoplasm in the brain. How is this possible? How could something as deeply mysterious as consciousness emerge from a chunk of meat inside the skull? The problem of mind and matter, substance and spirit, illusion and reality, has been a major preoccupation of both Eastern and Western philosophy for millennia, but very little of lasting value has emerged. As the British psychologist Stuart Sutherland has said, "Consciousness is a fascinating but elusive phenomenon: it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it evolved. (Location 4054) * These examples will show that the circuitry that embodies the vivid subjective quality of consciousness resides mainly in parts of the temporal lobes (such as the amygdala, septum, hypothalamus and insular cortex) and a single projection zone in the frontal lobes—the cingulate gyrus. (Location 4067) * activity of these structures must fulfill three important criteria, which I call (with apologies to Isaac Newton, who described the three basic laws of physics) the "three laws of qualia" ("qualia" simply means the raw feel of sensations such as the subjective quality of "pain" or "red" or "gnocchi with truffles"). (Location 4069) * that was good for you, dear, but was it good for me?" This need to reconcile the first−person and third−person accounts of the universe (the "I" view versus the "he" or "it" view) is the single most important unsolved problem in science. Dissolve this barrier, say the Indian mystics and sages, and you will see that the separation between self and nonself is an illusion—that you are really One with the cosmos. (Location 4079) * You don't have any cone receptors (the structures in your retina that allow your eyes to discriminate the different colors), but you do have rods (for seeing black and white), and you also have the correct machinery for processing colors higher up inside your brain. If your eyes could distinguish colors, so could your brain. Now suppose that you, the superscientist, study my brain. I am a normal color perceiver—I can see that the sky is blue, the grass is green and a banana is yellow—and you want to know what I mean by these color terms. When I look at objects and describe them as turquoise, chartreuse or vermilion, you don't have any idea 156 what I'm talking about. To you, they all look like shades of gray. (Location 4089) * But you are intensely curious about the phenomenon, so you point a spectrometer at the surface of a ripe red apple. It indicates that light with a wavelength of six hundred nanometers is emanating from the fruit. But you still have no idea what color this might correspond to because you can't experience it. Intrigued, you study the light−sensitive pigments of my eye and the color pathways in my brain until you eventually come up with a complete description of the laws of wavelength processing. (Location 4095) * Your theory allows you to trace the entire sequence of color perception, starting from the receptors in my eye and passing all the way into my brain, where you monitor the neural activity that generates the word "red." In short, you completely understand the laws of color vision (or more strictly, the laws of wavelength processing), and you can tell me in advance which word I will use to describe the color of an apple, orange or lemon. As a superscientist, you have no reason to doubt the completeness of your account. (Location 4098) * Like the superscientist in the previous example, you can study the neurophysiology of this fish and figure out how the electrical organs on the sides of its body transduce electrical current, how this information is conveyed to the brain, what part of the brain analyzes this information and how the fish uses this information to dodge predators, find prey and so on. If the fish could talk, however, it would say, "Fine, but you'll never know what it feels like to sense electricity." (Location 4109) * These examples clearly state the problem of why qualia are thought to be essentially private. They also illustrate why the problem of qualia is not necessarily a scientific problem. Recall that your scientific description is complete. It's just that the your account is incomplete episte−mologically because the actual experience of electric fields or redness is something you never will know. For you, it will forever remain a "third−person" account. (Location 4112) * Indeed, I believe that this barrier is only apparent and that it arises as a result of language. This sort of obstacle emerges when there is any translation from one language to another.2 (Location 4119) * How does this idea apply to the brain and the study of consciousness? I submit that we are dealing here with two mutually unintelligible languages. One is the language of nerve impulses—the spatial and temporal 157 patterns of neuronal activity that allow us to see red, for example. The second language, the one that allows us to communicate what we are seeing to others, is a natural spoken tongue like English or German or Japanese—rarefied, compressed waves of air traveling between you and the listener. Both are languages in the strict technical sense, that is, they are information−rich messages that are intended to convey meaning, across synapses between different brain parts in one case and across the air between two people in the other. (Location 4120) # Phantoms in the Brain  ## Metadata - Author: [[V S Ramachandran]] - Full Title: Phantoms in the Brain - Category: #books ## Highlights - most skilled among them can reverse (Location 3808) - result (Location 3809) - The search for enlightenment, I was told, consists of lifting this veil and realizing that you are really "One with the cosmos." (Location 4046) - that the notion of a single unified self "inhabiting" the brain may indeed be an illusion. (Location 4048) - Nevertheless, many people find it disturbing that all the richness of our mental life—all our thoughts, feelings, emotions, even what we regard as our intimate selves—arises entirely from the activity of little wisps of protoplasm in the brain. How is this possible? How could something as deeply mysterious as consciousness emerge from a chunk of meat inside the skull? The problem of mind and matter, substance and spirit, illusion and reality, has been a major preoccupation of both Eastern and Western philosophy for millennia, but very little of lasting value has emerged. As the British psychologist Stuart Sutherland has said, "Consciousness is a fascinating but elusive phenomenon: it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it evolved. (Location 4054) - These examples will show that the circuitry that embodies the vivid subjective quality of consciousness resides mainly in parts of the temporal lobes (such as the amygdala, septum, hypothalamus and insular cortex) and a single projection zone in the frontal lobes—the cingulate gyrus. (Location 4067) - activity of these structures must fulfill three important criteria, which I call (with apologies to Isaac Newton, who described the three basic laws of physics) the "three laws of qualia" ("qualia" simply means the raw feel of sensations such as the subjective quality of "pain" or "red" or "gnocchi with truffles"). (Location 4069) - that was good for you, dear, but was it good for me?" This need to reconcile the first−person and third−person accounts of the universe (the "I" view versus the "he" or "it" view) is the single most important unsolved problem in science. Dissolve this barrier, say the Indian mystics and sages, and you will see that the separation between self and nonself is an illusion—that you are really One with the cosmos. (Location 4079) - You don't have any cone receptors (the structures in your retina that allow your eyes to discriminate the different colors), but you do have rods (for seeing black and white), and you also have the correct machinery for processing colors higher up inside your brain. If your eyes could distinguish colors, so could your brain. Now suppose that you, the superscientist, study my brain. I am a normal color perceiver—I can see that the sky is blue, the grass is green and a banana is yellow—and you want to know what I mean by these color terms. When I look at objects and describe them as turquoise, chartreuse or vermilion, you don't have any idea 156 what I'm talking about. To you, they all look like shades of gray. (Location 4089) - But you are intensely curious about the phenomenon, so you point a spectrometer at the surface of a ripe red apple. It indicates that light with a wavelength of six hundred nanometers is emanating from the fruit. But you still have no idea what color this might correspond to because you can't experience it. Intrigued, you study the light−sensitive pigments of my eye and the color pathways in my brain until you eventually come up with a complete description of the laws of wavelength processing. (Location 4095) - Your theory allows you to trace the entire sequence of color perception, starting from the receptors in my eye and passing all the way into my brain, where you monitor the neural activity that generates the word "red." In short, you completely understand the laws of color vision (or more strictly, the laws of wavelength processing), and you can tell me in advance which word I will use to describe the color of an apple, orange or lemon. As a superscientist, you have no reason to doubt the completeness of your account. (Location 4098) - Like the superscientist in the previous example, you can study the neurophysiology of this fish and figure out how the electrical organs on the sides of its body transduce electrical current, how this information is conveyed to the brain, what part of the brain analyzes this information and how the fish uses this information to dodge predators, find prey and so on. If the fish could talk, however, it would say, "Fine, but you'll never know what it feels like to sense electricity." (Location 4109) - These examples clearly state the problem of why qualia are thought to be essentially private. They also illustrate why the problem of qualia is not necessarily a scientific problem. Recall that your scientific description is complete. It's just that the your account is incomplete episte−mologically because the actual experience of electric fields or redness is something you never will know. For you, it will forever remain a "third−person" account. (Location 4112) - Indeed, I believe that this barrier is only apparent and that it arises as a result of language. This sort of obstacle emerges when there is any translation from one language to another.2 (Location 4119) - How does this idea apply to the brain and the study of consciousness? I submit that we are dealing here with two mutually unintelligible languages. One is the language of nerve impulses—the spatial and temporal 157 patterns of neuronal activity that allow us to see red, for example. The second language, the one that allows us to communicate what we are seeing to others, is a natural spoken tongue like English or German or Japanese—rarefied, compressed waves of air traveling between you and the listener. Both are languages in the strict technical sense, that is, they are information−rich messages that are intended to convey meaning, across synapses between different brain parts in one case and across the air between two people in the other. (Location 4120)