Peter Tse - How Brain Makes Mind?

What must the brain do to generate the mind? The mind consists of sensations, thoughts, cogitations, intentions, feelings—the felt inner experiences that constitute what we are. How are these capacities or mental qualities produced by the three pounds of warm wet tissues in our skulls? This is science's toughest problem.



Peter Ulric Tse is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience in the department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth College. He holds a BA from Dartmouth (1984; majored in Mathematics and Physics), and a PhD in Experimental Psychology from Harvard University (1998).


Closer to Truth presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.

[georgegrubbs]

Robert: “Peter, how does the mind come from the brain?”
Peter: “I have no idea, but I’ll talk about other crap to fill up the time.”

[philochristos]

He needs to explain what he means by information. Because if he means "structure" or "specified complexity, " that still doesn't capture the "aboutness" or "intentionality" of thoughts about Jennifer Aniston. He seems to be equivocating because I don't see how you can give a physical description of a proposition, and that's the difficulty with semantic epiphenomenalism.

[amityaffliction]

Peter Ulric seems very down to Earth. Information as a system of constraint is a fascinating idea. Great vid. 👍🏻

[kd]

Great discussion. I think the conjectural idea of mind being equivalent to a highly malleable and self-rewriting neural wetware is not new, but it is simply now called integrated information. However, even everything he said is true, it still doesn’t logically exclude the possibility of philosophical zombies where they lack the feeling of life itself or self-awareness.

[enfomy]

I think this “information as cause” idea stems from the mind’s linguistic understanding of the word. All causes appear physical, and nature mostly constructs itself in a mathematical form. The brain is storing and analyzing sense data. It attends to various objects depending on their relation to its total knowledge of the world. These mental actions are brain, i.e. neurons, physiology, chemistry, etc. motions. Since we can’t grasp the world in a purely coordinate and calculus framework, we have an information problem where things are mapped to words by individual brains. But I also don’t feel confident I fully understand what was said here though.

[Mike-wjkg]

He is not talking about how the brain gives rise to sensations, only about how the mind can have free will - and actually only about how information could possibly have causal effects. He is saying that the universe is not deterministic, it is random (quantum mechanics), however that random-ness is highly constrained, and the only way to explain in what way it is constrained is by using the concept of information. So although the mind does not directly alter any physical particles, the physical state of the brain can evolve in a very large number of different ways, and we know that way in which it actually does evolve is always consistent with the flow of information. As in the example, the Jennifer Aniston neuron fires when some picture of her is seen, and we cannot actually trace back the exact physical chain of events which caused it to fire since the laws of physics are not deterministic - there are multiple pathways that could arrive at the same thing. The only way to explain what has happened is by reference to the concept of Jennifer Aniston, and in this way information is what caused the neuron to fire.

[waerlogauk]

This top-down informational causality is just a different level of abstraction. The difference exists only in the describers mind. The information still enters and affects the system via the conventional forces and particles.

[Urix]

At 0:55 information places constraints on possible outcomes of system interaction. This implies that the mass, velocity, and direction of a Snooker ball will determine the outcome of a collision with a targeted bally. How can Richard question what information is like this at 6:30? Bottom line: can information be developed by a system that is causal like physical system is? I guess information that has been developed by the brain in the past affects the physical systems over time if a concept of Jennifer Anistin has been developed and stored.

[johnstifter]

Reason has downward causation, we learn from the past to increase our luck in situations in the future, we can even take drugs to alter our thinking in ways we can understand and be suprized by... information and the process of its translation and the growth of knowledge opens up possibility space. We may be able to formalize the dynamics of possibility space .

[abohnad]

Basically he is saying what ancient philosophers used to say. That for a human to " know " is to have the " form " - Jeniffer Anistoness - to hit the filter in our brain. That is mind. Form is almost equated with " soul ". This is Aristotle. Do you guys agree ? what do you think ?

[jamesruscheinski]

According to Godel incompleteness theorem, mathematics can be used for language and logic statements (even though logic not support mathematics)? So if there is mathematics in particles of brain (maybe from quantum probabilities being measured into particle), can be used to bring about language and logic of mind (although not know how would look physically in brain)? Once language and logic are physically represented in brain, might be able to perform top-down causation through thought / cognition, and maybe other?

[deadman]

Tse makes my cognitive-sceince-type brain happy, or at least happier.

Nietzsche once wrote that the soul is a name for something of the body. This is a bit more impressive when you consider _Seele_ can mean _mind_ or _psyche._ English has a lot of words. Things get *really* impressive if you read his "On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense."

[derterdum]

But who is the "I" that is focused on the Jennifer Aniston nueron ??

[frank]

Did I miss the definition of " Mind" ? was that reviewed?

[ricklanders]

How would this notion explain creativity, though - i.e., the conceptualization (from neuronal activity) of things that have never been information?

[bajajones]

the phrase, "barking up the wrong tree" seems so appropriate here. what a bunch of malarkey. this guy is just filling in as he goes.

[jamesruscheinski]

Can there be mathematical information in the particle that constrains its path into future?

[jamesruscheinski]

If particles in brain have mathematical information, which can be used for language and logic, then the physical neurons in brain could operate as a regular computer (below the neuron level possibility for quantum computer like operation)?

[ScientificReview]

Constrained randomness is nothing but wide-ranged determinism; thus it's not randomness as the public had been understanding but rather probabilistic reasoning. In another word, 'possibly invisible' little changes in the inputs could massively changes the outputs...

[jamesruscheinski]

Do the neuron firings have any mathematical input?