On February 17, The New York Times touched off an anxious debate in the neuroscience community with a front-page article revealing that:
The Obama administration is planning a decade-long scientific effort to examine the workings of the human brain and build a comprehensive map of its activity, seeking to do for the brain what the Human Genome Project did for genetics.
The article was short on specifics. The White House “has been looking to unveil [the project] as early as March,” John Markoff reported, and details, including how much federal funding it would receive, are not final. Obama had hinted at the plan in his State of the Union address a few days earlier, and prominent researchers confirmed that he was talking about a new initiative. But it was unclear whether the individuals Markoff quoted were among the “four scientists and representatives of research institutions,” mentioned at the beginning of his piece, who “said they had participated in planning for what is being called the Brain Activity Map project.”
The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) is organizing the effort, according to Markoff reported. “The National Institutes of Health, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Science Foundation will also participate in the project,” he wrote, “as will private foundations like the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, Md., and the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle.”
The article suggested that the project would involve developing non-invasive technologies to record activity in the brain’s “roughly 100 billion neurons that each electrically ‘spike’ in response to outside stimuli.” Right now, scientists can only track a small number of neurons at once.
The vagueness of the plan sent some neuroscientists into a tizzy, however, though one that produced a fascinating discussion about the right and wrong ways to go about mapping brain activity. A roundup of reactions on Twitter at The Atlantic Wire revealed that most commentators were concerned that funding would go to one, monolithic research program, rather than an array of smaller experiments. Christopher Chabris, a psychology professor at Union College in New York, wrote a particularly insightful post about the promises and pitfalls of “big science,” reflecting on the highly (perhaps overly) touted Human Genome Project.
Gary Marcus, a cognitive psychologist at New York University, also wants to see the money dispersed and, in a blog post for The New Yorker, offered the most detailed plan for how it should be done. Arguing that the US should not merely seek to map the brain, as a European project currently underway intends to do, but rather try to understand how the brain connects to behavior, Marcus proposed that:
Rather than putting a huge amount of money into a single project, as the Europeans have, and as the Obama Administration apparently intends, we should endow five separate projects, at a billion dollars each, addressing five of the most fundamental unsolved questions in neuroscience. One project, for example, should focus on deciphering the basic language of the brain. What is the basic element of neural computation? What is the basic scheme by which symbolic information (like sentences) are stored? A second should focus on understanding the rules governing how neurons organize into circuits; a third on neural plasticity and neural development, and understanding how the brain communicates information from one region to another, and determines which circuits to use in a given situation; a fourth on the relation between brain circuits, genes, and behavior; a fifth on developing new techniques for analyzing and observing brain function.
The general media declined to follow-up on the Times’s scoop, but thankfully, with so many people craving specifics, science-news outlets dug in and provided more details in the days that followed.
On February 20, ScienceInsider’s Emily Underwood and Jocelyn Kaiser posted the most thorough account to date of who’s involved in the Brain Activity Map and how the proposal arose. Their piece charts the growth of the idea from a proposal at a meeting in the UK in 2011, to a paper published in Neuron last June, to OSTP’s call in July for proposals for “Grand Challenges” in science and technology similar to the Humane Genome Project.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, also known as DARPA, will get a lot of the money and take charge of the rest. DARPA already knows all the answers to questions about brains. DARPA has known the answers for 50 years. The answer is computers. I'm a robot and you're a robot.
I have an alternative view that will not be funded through DARPA. My view is based on muscular movements and bodily feelings of actual life. My view includes technology but the technology is not computers.
How to solve free-will puzzles and overcome limitations of platonic science
"Free will" puzzles are failed attempts to make freedom fit into forms of science. The failures seem puzzling because of widespread beliefs that forms of science describe and control everything. Errors in such beliefs are shown by reconstruction of forms of "platonic science" that were invented in ancient Greece and that have developed into modern physics. Like platonic Ideas, modern Laws of Physics are said to exercise hegemonic control through eternal, universal principles. Symmetries, rigidity and continuity are imposed through linear forms that have been abstracted from geometry and indifference. Static and quasi-static forms presume placid equilibrium conditions and relaxation processes. Such forms, based on empty space, fail to describe actual material transformations that occur during the making of steel or the generation of snowflakes. They also fail to describe muscular movements and related bodily feelings of persons and animals that have actual life. Limitations of platonic science are overcome by means of new forms with the character of time, such as "beats" and saccadic, jumpy forms. New technologies of action and freedom generate and control temporal forms in proposed device models of brains and muscles. Some temporal forms have critical moments of transformation, resembling moments when persons exercise freedom, e.g., a moment of overtaking during a footrace or a moment of decision by a jury during a civil trial.
www.quadnets.com/puzzle.html
#1 Posted by Bob Kovsky, CJR on Thu 28 Feb 2013 at 08:10 PM