AJEMIAN
AJEMIAN
What follows is the semi-facetious, semi-serious introduction to my dissertation. It's facetious in the sense of being wildly bombastic and quite incongruous with the remainder of my computationally-oriented dissertation. But it's serious in the sense of touching upon some of the philosophical and epistemological issues that have attracted me and many others to the study of the mind. (It's also serious in the sense that I managed to slip it past my readers into the final archived version.)
In an eternally noble quest to comprehend the grand cosmic millieu into which it has been inseparably thrust, mankind has acquired the capacity to perceive universal phenomena at manifold spatial and temporal scales. Yet despite a divergence of specific observations, a recurrent theme ineluctably emerges: structure always arises and patterns always exist. From the gravitationally choreographed rhythms of a spawning solar system to the ironclad rules of chemical bond formation to the irrepressible non-locality of sub-atomic particles, order has always been found, if not often the anthropomorphic order that an inherently solipsistic species prefers. But of all conglomerations of matter known to exist in the universe at any level, perhaps none exceed the human brain in complexity of structure, diversity of function, and inscrutability of operation. Indeed, while the state of the universe has been traced back to the first few microseconds after its fiery birth, while cloning capacity rockets up the phylogenetic ladder to its inevitably hominid end, and while molecular biologists produce antibodies that seek out and deactivate invading micro-organisms as if they were immunological heat seeking missiles, modern neuroscience exists in a state of infancy relative to scientific disciplines such as organic chemistry or particle physics.
The source of difficulty in unravelling the mystery of how the brain gives rise to the mind is not difficult to pinpoint. Chemical neurotransmission, the signalling of one neuron via chemical transmitters released by another, depends upon biochemical processes that occur on a spatial scale on the order of 10^-7 meters. Behavior occurs at a spatial scale on the order of meters. Entailed, then, in the actualization of purposive human behavior is continuous control of a dynamical process which perpetually spans 7 orders of magnitude in spatial scale despite massive fluctuations in the embedding environment at both the macroscale (e.g., a temperature change or the approach of a predator) and the microscale (radically different blood sugar levels, for example). Given the extraordinary computational burdens of maintaining this level of order - such a life process by its very existence perpetuates an almost unimagineable oasis of minimal entropy amidst the perpetually raging winds of the Second Law of Thermodynamics - we are perhaps less surprised by the brain's indelibly intricate structure or its almost unfathomable complexity. Nevertheless mankind is nothing if not collectively dauntless, even as individual humans succumb to frailty and fear, and so has fully immersed itself in the scientific struggle to elucidate the secrets of the mind. While some time may pass before the quest arrives at a triumphant conclusion, impressive progress has already been made on numerous fronts, and herein we explore one minuscule contribution to the field of brain science.