Brain Cells and the Universe

[FallentoReason]

Look pretty similar.



I'm guessing most of you would have already seen this comparison, but it just gets me every time hock:

EDIT: wow, and I just realised this is actually a really good counter against the observation that protein looks like a miniature cross ergo the Judeo-Christian god. Our brain cells look like the universe ergo the universe "made" us

[KichigaiNeko]

It is pretty wow eh??

[Kayenneh]

Seen that picture before, but I like it

[Zone]

Microcosm of the macrocosm? As above so below? Eh? Or to put it another way.





And that's how God works.

[Angrboda]

Many of our current notions about nerve tissue, consciousness, matter and 'the ultimate principles of the world' were intimated by the Presocratic philosophers — recall Anaximander's monism, Empedocles's and Anaxagoras's pluralism, Leucippus's, Democritus's and Epicurus's atomism. We still hear the echo of Heraclitus saying, in the sixth century BC, "All is flux", while adhering to the conjectures of Pythagoras who believed that the brain is the organ of the mind and of Herophilus who reasoned that nerves are essential to sensation and movement. Similarly, both the orthodox systems of Indian philosophy such as the Vaisesika, Nyaya and Samkhya schools of thought and the unorthodox systems such as Buddhism and Jainism have expounded on the body-mind-self-universe relation for millennia. With this precedent I say that the neural principles and cosmological concepts of today are seedlings grown in part from the artful speculations of the ancients, in the same way as the seeds of modern algebraic geometry were sown by the Arabs, Hindus, Chinese and Greeks sometime around 1100 AD.

In presenting my concept of neuro-cosmology, my thoughts follow in the wake of the ancients like a bicyclist pulled by the wind of a fast-moving truck. What I have borrowed from classical antiquity is the freedom of inquiry and not the details of thoughts … What impresses me instead is the magnitude of the ancient's imagination in the service of their curiosity. Neurocosmology is as much concerned with understanding the dynamics of imagination as it is with cross-pollinating the products of creativity. For example, it may examine and juxtapose ideas drawn from the biological and physical sciences such as the histological observations of Ramon y Cajal concerning the neural labyrinth and individuality of nerve cells and Heinrich Olber's astronomical paradox concerning the distribution of stars. Moreover, it may juxtapose the physiologist C.S. Sherrington's demonstration of the central nervous system's different 'levels' of integrated organization with the astronomer C.V.L. Charlier's theory of a "hierarchy Universe". Through these examinations and juxtapositions it tries to impart new meanings that may be relevant to both astronomy and biology. What is germane to neurocosmology is the practice of connecting these disparate fields, first questioning what is known about the workings of the brain and the physical universe. Art is thus used to relate these two realms of knowledge in a meaningful way — and science to explain this 'relation' once it has been established by art. I can imagine, for instance, someone responding to Olber's puzzlement regarding the problem of finite starlight in infinite space by looking to the human brain with its finite number of neurons and virtually infinite number of mental architectures. You can be sure this is not how Charlier solved Olber's paradox!

…Since the ground work for neurocosmology requires an inordinate amount of reading (scientific texts), observing (technologist experiments), listening (to polemics in art and science), and thinking (about these texts, experiments, and arguments), each day I face the problems of communication. For me, reading the Abstracts of the journals of neurophysiology, neurochemistry and neuropsychology alone is like riding the rapids from converging estuaries of information. There is research on practically every type of animate matter — from voltage-clamp analysis of rat hippocampal neurons to tachistoscopic experiments on human memory-recognition systems. About 90% of this research is so sophisticated and specialized that the thought of grafting any of it to material outside the specializations is dizzying. How, for instance, can we discuss the relationship between the neuronal connections or pathways of the central amygdaloid nucleus (CAm) in a human brain and the 'connections' in a star's radiation or convection zone? Never mind the mismatch of terminology; these two things are not even homeomorphs! It seems pointless to call the energy transport mechanism in stars the 'CAm pathway' unless one intends poetic-artistic pleasure from this anthropomorphism. Clearly, stars don't have nerves; they're not responsive and sensitive like mammalian sympathetic ganglia. And brains don't have solar flares and winds streaming particulate matter into deep space at hundreds of kilometers/second. Why, then, do I see the brain as a star? Why implicitly compare the human gene cycle and the hydrogen-helium burning cycle that sustains starlife — as if the stars of a galaxy undergo mitosis like somatic cells? DNA replication and protein synthesis are not even remotely similar to element and radiation synthesis, at least not in the way science knows these two systems. What are the advantages and purposes of these analogies in neurocosmology?

My reasons for drawing these analogies are two-fold: first, I feel it is imperative that we understand the origin and evolution of the brain in the context of the birth and growth of the universe, lest we repeat the mistakes of Ptolemy and Aristotle's anthropocentric (man-centered) perspective. The brain neither evolved out of a void nor functions independently of the cosmos on which it depends. It is, so to speak, a product of the producer. And as such it bears the marks of its production. The work of neurocosmology is to discover and discern these 'marks' and their meanings and to apply the resulting insights. This process of discovery relies on both inductive and deductive strategies which I explore using a variety of media ... And second, I felt compelled to picture my initial intuition: the universe is what the universe creates; the brain is what the brain creates. Only by exploring the 'universe of the brain' can we come to know the inverse. To know the 'brain of the universe', however, may ultimately be impossible if we heed the words of the physicist and philosopher, Karl Popper: one cannot completely understand or model a system of which oneself is part. Perhaps we will learn that our 'definitive' descriptions of both entities fall light years short of their true properties and behavioral characteristics.

(Leonardo, Vol. 18, No. 1, 1985.)

Somewhere, probably in the notes that I lost last fall, I had a reference to the idea that as the universe evolves, because of the effect of expansion combined with the nature of gravity and the distribution of matter, travel between clusters of intelligence (presumably intelligent civilizations) will come to be constrained along filaments like the axons and dendrites in neoronal substrates, leaving vast expanses of space completely dead, save for a constant river of information traveling two and from the clusters on these filaments.

[fr0d0]

"Scientists find picture of universe inside brain" - The Daily Mirror

[Confused Ape]

Maybe that's the real answer to whether we're living in a computer simulation. The universe itself is the computer.

[Zone]

And the consciousness of that computer is the living God who programed himself into his own simulation as his own son who died for the sins of humanity? It makes sense now, I'll see you in church.

[Confused Ape]

And the consciousness of that computer is the living God who programed himself into his own simulation as his own son who died for the sins of humanity? It makes sense now, I'll see you in church.

I don't think there's a Christian denomination which covers that. We'll have to start our own if Martin Savage and his team find any proof for the simulation idea.

Is The Universe Just A Computer Simulation?

Physicists are trying to find out the answer by designing a new experiment to test if the universe itself is a computer,

"The theory basically goes that any civilization which could evolve to a 'post-human' stage would almost certainly learn to run simulations on the scale of a universe. And that given the size of reality - billions of worlds, around billions of suns - it is fairly likely that if this is possible, it has already happened,"

If, however, the universe is really a giant brain it wouldn't need an advanced civilisation to create the simulation we're living in.

[pocaracas]

meh, it's jut a fractal....