20100626

Spinoza just taught me how the brain works?

I have based my religion, Religious Humanism, a Pantheism, on Spinoza's idea of God or Nature. There is only one substance. This was a development from the little earlier appearing Descartes who claimed there are two substances. One thinking and one material.

What Spinoza did already in the 1650s was to say that thoughts must emanate from one substance. They must be material. But thoughts do not come from a substance but rather from the behavior of a substance. It occurred to me that since the brain generates a frequency function, nerves fire all over the place, it would be possible to continuously generate images or words from this frequency function that would give us consciousness. Two aspects of the same phenomenon.

Such a mathematical transformation process exists and is called Fourier transformation. It is used for molecular structural determination in chemistry where a sample containing a substance is magnetically shocked, to excitate it, and the resulting relaxation generates a frequency function that can be transformed into an nuclear magnetic resonance spectrum. Frequency to image.

Now, the frequency function generated by the brain is much more complicated but it is conceivable that the brain actually generates a continuous transformation that in essence is a movie formed by images transformed. This is then what happened in evolution of consciousness. The brain started a similar process like Fourier transformation. Words must be formed in the same manner. The evolution of language being when this started to happen separate from images.

It is interesting to note that Benjamin Libet discovered that there is a delay in the appearance of consciousness of a stimulus. This would be the time necessary for the brain to perform the transformation and consciousness would be a monitoring process taking place after events. We might not then think with the images but rather by the nerve reactions. Our motivation somehow drives the brain.

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