This is the proper place for explaining the paradox which must have struck everyone in our exposition of the form of inner sense: namely how this sense presents even ourselves to consciousness, not as we are in ourselves, but only as we appear to ourselves. For, we perceive ourselves only as we are internally affected, which seems to be contradictory, in that we should thus have to be in a passive relation to ourselves; hence, in systems of psychology, people prefer to identify inner sense with the faculty of apperception (which we have been distinguishing carefully). Immanuel Kant [B152-3], Transcendental Deduction, Critique of Pure Reason. Knowing is not simply a material act, since the object that is known always conceals something beyond the empirical datum. Pope Benedikt XVI, Encyclical Caritas in Veritate, Sect. 77.Abstract Impressions, energy radiated by phenomena in the momentary environmental scene, enter sensory neurons, creating in afferent nerves a data stream. Following Kant, by our inner sense the mind perceives its own thoughts as it ties together sense data into an internalized scene. The mind, residing in the brain, logically a Language Machine, processes and stores items as coded grammatical entities. Kantian synthetic unity in the linguistic brain is able to deliver our experience of the scene as we appear to see it. Uniquely, the brain records its own history, synthesizing a Movie-in-the-Brain, called the Noumenal Cosmos. Attempting thereby to represent the actual Universe, this makes for a sovereign brain that governs itself. The brain is domicile of an Ego, with its selfhood at stake at all times. Yet, it can know itself only by its actions, in which it appears as an actor in its own movie. Phenomena enter garbled, as confused apparitions, and must be put in good form using top-down feedback control by Ego, so that each movie frame makes rational sense within the overall context of the Noumenal Cosmos. A stack of frames is processed typically in 40 Hz rhythm with 300 ms process time each, for about 12 in the stack at any time. Successive neural centers are processing the stack in the brain assembly line, based on data from increasingly global receptive fields. Ego stitches together the movie frames, but only the top frame is in consciousness for 25 ms. The top frame contains the whole scene where the Ego makes an appearance as the actor that imposes Kantian synthetic unity on the scene, merely an assembly of grammatical
Recent advances in neuroscience lead to a wider realm for philosophy to include the science of the Darwinian-evolved computational brain, our inner world producing organ, a non-recursive super-Turing machine combining 100B synapsing-neuron DNA-computers based on the genetic code. The whole system is a logos machine offering a world map for global context, essential for our intentional grasp of opportunities. We start from the observable contrast between the chaotic universe vs. our orderly inner world, the noumenal cosmos. So far, philosophy has been rehearsing our thoughts, our human-internal world, a grand painting of the outer world, how we comprehend subjectively our experience, worked up by the logos machine, but now we seek a wider horizon, how humans understand the world thanks to Darwinian evolution to adapt in response to the metaphysical gap, the chasm between the human animal and its environment, shaping the organism so it can deal with its variable world. This new horizon embraces global context coded in neural structures that support the noumenal cosmos, our inner mental world, for us as denizens of the outer environment. Kant's inner and outer senses are fundamental ingredients of scientific philosophy. Several sections devoted to Heidegger, his lizard debunked, but his version of the metaphysical gap & his doctrine of the logos praised. Rorty and others of the behaviorist school discussed also.Recent advances in neuroscience lead to a wider realm for philosophy to include the science of the Darwinianevolved computational brain, our inner world producing organ. Quite recently, the MIT team of Nobel laureate Tonegawa has proved that memory is kept inside individual nerve cells in the brain, vide infra § 1.2 for details.The ciliate protozoan Paramecium has a highly polyploid macronucleus with 80% of its genome but at about 500 times the ploidy of the proper cell nucleus, vide infra § 1.1.On the strength of these facts, we may infer that individual neurons, especially those of the giant pyramidal kind, function as DNA computers. Hence, it now appears that the entire brain system forms a non-recursive super-Turing machine consisting of 100B synapsing neurons each one functioning as a DNA-computer, based on the genetic code, of high speed & with very large memory 1 .This suggests a novel hypothesis, which we put forward here perhaps for the first time.The total system of this 100B synapsing neuron super-Turing machine apparently is capable of non-recursive computations and thus presumably exceeds the standard computing power of any individual computer that is limited by the standard benchmark of Church-Turing computability, as expressed in Church's thesis and so brings us a little closer to possessing an infinite divine spirit 2 . The recursive axiom systems reasonably could be seen as the ones that lead to comprehensible theories. Kurt Gödel proved that no recursive axiomatics exist for arithmetic. Hence, we may deduce that the brain, which appears to be a non-recursive super-Turing machine, may be capa...
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