#roger sperry

[gregorygalloway]

Roger Sperry (20 August 1913 - 17 April 1994)

[wellconstructedsentences]

Prior to the advent of the brain, there was no color and no sound in the universe, nor was there any flavor or aroma and probably little sense and no feeling or emotion. Before brains the universe was also free of pain and anxiety.

Roger Sperry

[thefearsarepapertigers]

Ideas cause ideas and help evolve new ideas. They interact with each other and with other mental forces in the same brain, in neighboring brains, and thanks to global communication, in far distant, foreign brains.

Roger Sperry

[alexandria1448]

Of two minds

"Instead of the normally unified single stream of consciousness, these [split-brain] patients behave in many ways as if they have two independent streams of conscious awareness, one in each hemisphere, each of which is cut off from and out of contact with the mental experiences of the other."

From "Hemisphere Disconnection and Unity in Conscious Awareness," address by Roger Sperry to the American Psychological Association, September 1967; quoted in The Metaphysics of Star Trek, by Richard Hanley (1997).

[memeengine]

The Wheel and the Molecule - Causation Up and Down Levels of Complexity.

So the molecules compose the wheel which in sum determines the path of the molecules it is composed of...

I heard about this great thought experiment a couple of weeks ago, but I hesitated to post about it because I forgot who the credit belongs to.  But I finally tracked it down...

Neurobiologist and Nobel laureate Roger Sperry came up with this idea as a way to show that meaningful causal relationships can move up and downs levels of complexity, and not just forward in time.  To underline that:

Regular Causation - moves forward in time, from causes to effects.

Level-Crossing Causation - moves up and down levels of causation without moving in time.

Regular causation has all kind of easy examples,.. flicking a switch causes a light to turn on, frowning at me causes me to get anxious, tipping a water glass causes the table to get wet... etc!  Level-Crossing causation happens all the time too, but it seems harder to come up with clear examples.  But Sperry hit on a good one with The Wheel and The Molecule.

It's simply this: Imagine a wagon wheel rolling down the road, and somehow pick out a single molecule on it's outer circumference (incidentally, this is a common thing to be asked to picture when learning Trigonometry in high-school, so feel free to tap into that memory of Sine and Cosine waves).

We'd like to know "What is causing the motion of the molecule along it's particular path?"  Sure, it's got some sort of electrical bonding with it's immediate neighbours.  However, that just pushes the question outward, as in "What is causing the molecule along with it's neighbours to travel in this particular path?"

The real explanation, of course, is the wheel rolling on the road.

Once one knows about the wheel, the road, and their properties, one can actually mathematically predict the path of the molecule into the future.  It's clear to me that the right answer to "What is causing the motion of the molecule?" is "The molecule is part of this wheel rolling along this road."   The higher level cause (wheel and road) is having a lower level effect (path of the molecule).

What makes this semi-profound is that the Solidity and other properties of the wheel are entirely caused by the electrical bondings of it's constituent molecules!  This is causation moving *up* - the lower level cause (the molecules and their electrical bonds) is having a higher level effect (the solidity of the wheel).

So the molecules compose the wheel which in sum determines the path of the molecules it is composed of...

...and causation flows up and down levels of complexity.

[the-grapevine-fires]

Before brains there was no color or sound in the universe, nor was there any flavor or aroma and probably little sense and no feeling or emotion.

Roger Sperry

[praxis-of-ennui]

Prior to the advent of brain, there was no color and no sound in the universe, nor was there any flavor or aroma and probably rather little sense and no feeling or emotions. Before brains the universe was also free of pain and anxiety.

Roger Sperry (1913-1994)

[wwwif1-blog]

in class today we were studying famous psychologists and i was looking at roger sperry and my friend turned to me and said, "wow, thats sperry special" and i almost cried