gib65

Well, okay! That's why I was confused. I knew the brain had many interconnections, and so the latter diagram was more accurate, but I thought the binding problem had to do with the expectation that all signals converged somewhere in the brain. If the latter diagram is more accurate, why is the binding problem still considered a real problem? Or is it?

I'm putting this here in General discussion because I don't know where else it would go. It's a question about the "binding problem", the problem in psychology and neuroscience that questions how it is that the brain "binds" all the input it gets into one unified perception of reality. No one has discovered a central node - or "CPU" if you will - in the brain where all incoming signals converge, and so it's puzzling how the brain knows that all the disparate information it receives is coming from the same thing: reality. Here's my question: why couldn't the binding problem be resolved by assuming that where ever these separate signals get processed in the brain - even if they are sporadic - they can intercommunicate with each other? Here's some diagrams to illustrate what I mean: This figure shows the conventional assumption that all signals need to converge in a central point in order to be integrated. But this diagram shows what I'm saying - all signals get processed by their own specialized centers, but then enter a general network of centers (where cognitive processing occurs) that intercommunicate, and therefore can inform one another of each all the information coming in from those channels.

Thanks Cthulhu. Now I have a follow up question. I don't know if it has a scientific answer (might be more philosophical), but here's the background for it: I'm writing a paper on the evolution of thought, and one of the ideas I'm trying to push is that there have been two major leaps in human thought. The first step was gaining the ability to visualize - that is, withdrawing from the immediate environment and going into the imagination. The second step was gaining the ability to understand abstract concepts - that is, being able to understand things that require transcending simple visual features. I'm thinking that my best bet is to mark the advent of visualization with the advent of tool invention, which would place it around the emergence of homo habilis since the link you provided says tool invention appeared with this species. My thinking is that in order to come up with ideas for new tool designs, it requires withdrawing into the imagination in order to mentally simulate the manipulation of matter (like carving a spear head out of a rock). I argue that this could have happened without the ability to visualize but it would have to rely on accidental discoveries, like accidentally chipping a rock to make it sharp and then noticing how this makes it for effective in cutting. I also think abstract concepts emerged with the advent of homo sapiens. My reason is that abstract concepts should result in the appearance of religious worldviews and rituals, and no other species except homo sapients have participated in this kind of activity. So here's my question: among anthropologists, is there any support for this view? Or would anthropologist say things against it? If the latter, what things would they say? Or is nothing much said about it at all? PS - I realize nothing really "scientific" can be said about this since it requires a lot of speculation, but I'm just wondering if I'm going with or against the commonly accepted view within the anthropological community. I very much appreciate your feedback.

Does anybody have a link to a good time graph depicting human evolution? Thanks.

Ah, that makes more sense to me now. Thanks.

I'm just wondering how physicists conceptualize the "point particle" - that is, the model of the fundamental particles that describes them as geometric points (or the size of geometric points). Are we supposed to imagine them literally as tiny points that couldn't logically be any smaller? I have a bit of trouble with this because I can't imagine anything physically existing unless it had some extention to it. If it didn't extend in a certain dimension, it would be infinitely thin in the other two, and therefore could only exist as a geometric concept, not a tangible thing in the world. Maybe that's just me though. I know this topic is somewhat philosophical, but I figured it had at least one foot in physics, so I put it in this section. If the mods feel differently, feel free to move it to the appropriate section.

That's very interesting. I've got a follow-up question now, so I'm going to change the topic just slightly. What kind of implications do Bose-Einstein condensates have for the "heat death" scenario of the universe's long-term fate? That is, from what I understand, the universe is eventually going to cool down and all matter is going become cold rocks floating apart into distant space forever. If this is the fate of the universe, and if it cools down to the critical point where Bose-Einstein condensates start forming, what kind of picture does this paint of the universe? Could the entire universe merge, in principle, into one "super atom" as DV8 puts it?

I just wanted to know if I have the right understanding of what Bose-Einstein condensates are. Are they a state of matter that you get at extremely low temperatures where the atoms that compose it become "smeared out" in a quantum mechanical sense (excuse my crude terminology )? What exactly is happening to the atoms at this low temperature?

I know I'm probably misusing the term "quantum event", so here's what I understand it to mean: A physical event that defies the laws of classical mechanics but is perfectly consistent with, and explainable by, the "laws" of quantum mechanics. I also understand that quantum events are more likely to occur the smaller the frame of reference is - that is, as one considers phenomena at lower and lower scales, one needs more and more to take quantum mechanics into consideration in order to make accurate (or close to accurate) predictions. So, then, here's my question: Was the Big Bang a quantum event? I've heard from sources I forget where that it was. If the Big Bang started as all matter and energy condensed into a singularity, then you can't get any lower in scale than that, and therefore quantum events would be rampant. If it did not start from a singularity, could it be that the scale at which quantum events occur with a critical probability was higher up back then? Could that critical level have been decreasing since then, and will it continue to decrease indefinitely? Also (last question, I promise ), if the Big Bang started as a quantum event, is there really any need to question "what caused it" as so many do? That is, my thinking is that the conventional notion of "causation" only makes sense in a classical mechanics framework. In quantum mechanics, however, that term either takes on a different meaning, or has none at all.

Are there centers in the brain for our perception or "feel" for left and right? I ask because I remember learning in school that there are but my current text book mentions nothing of this. I've also heard of people neglecting certain sides of the world, like one case in which the person would not eat the left half of his plate, wouldn't colm the left half of his hair, wouldn't fully put on his shirt on the left side, etc. I've also heard of an autistic girl who would avoid facing north. The care giver would spin around with her in a circle, and evertime she faced north, she'd duck her head. Of course, this is not left and right, but north, east, west and south. Still, the question is similar: Are there parts of the brain for our experiences of left and right, or just orientation in general?

Wow! Good argument.

Well, my thinking is that if you can say that you're experiencing it, it's got to have a neurological counterpart. When I look at my keyboard (which is black) I can say "I'm experiencing the sight of black." scicop, Rhodopsins is the active chemical in cone cells, right? So that makes sense that no light would mean no stimulation. But at the level of the brain, could there not be neurons that are inhibited when signals from the eyes enter the brain, and then start firing only when no signals from the eyes enter the brain? I don't doubt your knowledge on the subject, but I'm sure I remember reading that research on how the brain perceives color is still not well understood. Couldn't it be possible that there are black color centers in theory - or do you know there aren't for fact?

I'm wondering how it is that we see black when we look skyward at night? I mean, I know enough physics to understand that black is the lack of colored light and is therefore considered not to be a color, but why does the subjective experience of seeing black feel like a color? I'm guess it's because the neural centers for color perception work similarly for black as they do for other colors, but it's just, unlike other color centers that become active when actual colored light enters the eye, the black centers become active when no colored light enters they eye. That is, they are like the "default" neurons that become active when no other neurons are firing. Has there ever been studies done to support/refute this?

The question remains: to trust neither or both?

Is that so?

Thanks for the link, but the one problem I'm trying to avoid is websites that are edittable by the general public. I need a credible website that I can link to from my website, one that can't be tampered with by just anybody.

Is there an online science encyclopedia? I'm thinking something similar to the philosophy encyclopedia at http://plato.stanford.edu/contents.html.

So what I'm hearing from you guys is, even among the hardnosed believers of quantum mechanics, there is no consensus on the matter?

I ask this question solely for the purpose of testing my understanding of quantum mechanics. I want to ask, if the universe was to start all over again with the Big Bang, and assuming all conditions were exactly as they were 14 billion years ago, would we or would we not get exactly the same things we see on Earth today? Would I still be a web developer? Would I still have married the woman I'm married to? Would I still be here at my computer, typing these very words? From what I understand, the indeterminacy of the measurable properties of really small things means that the results predicted by classical mechanics are not met 100% of the time. So for example, one of the classic text book exercises ask to calculate the position of a boat traveling against the current in so much time if it started from a given position. There is one and only on answer to this question. But if you were to ask a similar question about the position of an electron, you'd have to take quantum mechanics into consideration, and thereby you would only be able to give a probabilistic answer. The electron would be in position X give or take a radius of r. Right? Of course, r is infinitesimally small relative to the everyday scale of human events, so there wouldn't be any reason to suppose that such deviations from the prediction of classical mechanics would have global consequences. So if I were to pose the above question with respect to my waking up this morning, asking "If I were to repeat waking up this morning with all conditions setup exactly as they were, would I still be doing exactly what I'm doing now?", I could reasonably say "yes, I would." But if we were to take this scenario all the way back 14 billion years ago to the Big Bang, what would be the answer then? 14 billion years is a lot of time, so even though the aberrations of quantum mechanics are extremely miniscule, given this much time, with aberration after aberration piling up upon each other, the effects might actually become noticeable. Would I still be sitting here typing these words on my keyboard?

I read an interesting article that suggests the universe is actually 1 trillion years old... or older: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,,1768191,00.html There's a paragraph near the middle that says: "Today most cosmologists believe the universe will carry on expanding until all the stars burn out, leaving nothing but their cold dead remains. But there is an inherent problem with this picture. The Cosmological Constant - a mysterious force first postulated by Albert Einstein that appears to be driving the galaxies apart - is much too small to fit the theory. Einstein later renounced it as his 'biggest blunder'." I can't say that I know much about this stuff, but it sound to me like they're refuting the law of entropy. Is this indeed what they're saying? Is the law of entropy refutable?

I'm having this debate on another forum. I'm trying to argue that the atom is the fundamental building block of matter, and therefore when you break an atom down into its particles, what you get is not necessarily matter. Take hydrogen for example: when you break hydrogen down, each atom becomes an electron and a proton. At the macroscopic level, electrons are seen as electricity, and protons are seen as proton beams (or some kind of proton plasma). In either case, what you have is not matter. However, the person I'm debating with defines matter as "that which has mass and occupies space". He goes on to say: "Matter is the substance of which a physical object is composed. In physics, it is everything that is constituted of elementary fermions. All gauge bosons (of which the photon is one), which mediate the four fundamental forces, are thus not considered matter, even though they certainly have energy and some also mass." So this sounds like the technical definition that physics gives it (but I'm not sure - he might be pulling this out of his ***). What's the consensus on this within the scientific community? Are electrons and protons examples of fermions or bosons? If a fundamental particle is considered matter by the standard definition that physics gives it, does this mean that we aught to think of it as some kind of hard, solid ball?

I remember learning years back, in one of my psyc courses, that schizophrenic symptoms arises from traumatic experiences, but that one has to have the schizophrenic gene to begin with - otherwise, the only pathology that would result from trauma is PTSD. I can't remember, though, if this was just the most widely held hypothesis or it was an established fact, backed by substantial amounts of research. What's the current concensus on this?