By A.G. Cairns-Smith
How will we reconcile Shakespeare's account of human habit and that of recent mind technological know-how? that is the important query addressed by way of the famous Glasgow chemist A.G. Cairns-Smith during this provocative, witty, and hugely obtainable dialogue of unsleeping information, unfastened will, and technological know-how. Written in a conversational variety, Secrets of the Mind is not just a best advent for the overall reader to the important questions of realization and mind technological know-how, yet a contribution to answering a few of them. within the author's view, our emotions and sensations should not easily substitute descriptions of neural occasions yet have themselves advanced and feature actual results within the mind in addition to actual reasons. In Secrets of the Mind we arrive at a imaginative and prescient of the area because it might turn out to be obvious by means of a destiny technology. Sand, sea water, air, and the atoms from which such fabrics are made at the moment are good understood via technology. those components of our global, physicists and chemists let us know, are diverse varieties of quantum strength. yet what of our own emotions, our sensations and feelings? technology tells us that those too needs to be varieties of quantum strength in the event that they developed. yet technological know-how is just starting to clarify how.
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Extra info for Secrets of the Mind: A Tale of Discovery and Mistaken Identity
Sample text
It seems reasonable. Can you imagine yourself awake with no feelings, no sensations at all? Try closing your eyes to cut out all visual sensations. Did it work? You would find that the blackness still had a quality, and anyway wasn't total: There would be residual colours and lights and darks. But keep trying. Relax. Stop paying attention to any of these things. Difficult isn't it? Indeed techniques of relaxation depend on diversion, concentrating on things you are normally not conscious of, such as your breathing or the weight of your limbs.
So you are not actually emptying your mind of all feelings and sensa~ tions. But it is possible to lose all feelings and sensations naturally, to become qualia free, even to lose the pleasant sensation of being relaxed. There is a technical term for the commonest technique of this kind: It is called falling fast asleep. " My portrait of an Evanescent Self would generally consist of exceedingly complex and changing arrangements of qualia, orchestrated no doubt by our other half: the Greater Self.
But the typical neuron has one par~ ticularly long, smooth extension. This is the cell's output cable, its 26 Open Secrets "axon" or"nerve fibre" (really, it too is a tube). It is analogous in its function to a telegraph wire allowing signals to be sent a long way off to a particular destination: to another nerve cell perhaps, or a muscle cell, or often to many other cells since these fibres are usu~ ally well branched themselves. The analogy with telegraphy is par~ ticularly apt for axons outside the brain: What we call nerves are more or less just hefty bundles ofaxons, bundles that may be as long as an arm or a leg.