Looking Forward in Reverse

Learning, the concept of assimilation of knowledge into ones memory, be it long or short term. Theories are abound with ideas of how the human brain "processes" information and "stores" the "data" it assimilates. Does it tie it to already acquired knowledge does it learn through cognition through behavior or stimuli response. How does the brain allocate what goes where and how chemically does the brain store said information and know exactly where to look index wise to find this information. These are all very pointed questions that for years have plagued man in trying to discern what makes knowledge possible. Socartes believed that the only knowledge is that we know nothing, which I find interesting since the more we learn how little we actually know, an interesting paradox to be stuck in for sure. 

So how do we proceed with the knowledge that we know little to nothing about how we gather, store and access information we assimilate? FMRI is an interesting way to go, you get a fun Technicolor show and you get to see how they brain interacts with itself. Yet as scientists state it may be a good way to learn how our brain functions.  Why is that you ask? Well I have an idea, because nature likes to shake things up. Just about the time we think we have an answer an anomaly appears that turns out not to be an anomaly after all but an unforeseen reality. I find that the world likes to keep you guessing. You think a person with head trauma will be a vegetable, the human body finds a way to compensate and overcome the faulty parts. Many times it has been seen through medicine that the human mind unparticular is unpredictable and resourceful. This is seen in cases of blind people with adaptive hearing and smell and touch to compensate for the lack of vision, deaf people being able to compensate by feeling even minute vibrations.

So now that we know what the brain can do, the question is how does it do what it does. Many of the theories that we cling to or learn about have many concepts and ideas that are based on observation and research. My question is we can observer externally all we want and draw conclusions based on behavior only. Even though many of the studies and theories are not technically behaviorist in nature, they still have the same observational challenge, only what we can measure on the external front. There are newer concepts which start to make use of technological advances in digital biology and FMRI. These may be able to give us a better more well rounded idea of exactly what does the brain do and how.

Isomophism looks at the relation of or mapping of relationship to properties or operations.   it is based off of the mind is like a computer concept. Then you have the connectivism which focuses on network learning.  So the brain, as we look at it, is electrochemical by nature, adaptive and plastic.  So why do people have issues believing that the human mind is not like a computer. Perhaps the better question is why are computers designed like a brain.  Let’s think about this for a second. 

Our brains are the  central processing units. It evaluates many things that goes on with the body as well as contains the storage, networking, firmware and programming. Be it biological in nature or knowledge gained from stimuli, the brain deciphers and uses the encoded instructions that were programmed in either from nature or genetics and what we learn day by day, situation by situation and stimulus response. Our firmware tells us how to use our eyes , ear lungs, legs and arms. It tells our heart to beat and our lungs to inhale, although we have to learn how to control our extremities, this is not so different from adding peripherals onto a computer. Wit the instructions from our neural network we learn how to move and control them through experience or connectionism/ isomorphism. The ideas that we learn by connecting events together.  

All of these things I believe show more and more that perhaps we do not learn the way computers do, but that computers learn like we do. They are accelerated due to the strictness of the instructional programing that they are given and they are also limited by the parameters we set for them, but is that not what our parents do to us as children. Stop at red, go at green, what is green how do you define green, etc. This learning is no more or less than programming. Walk, run, jump, this is what this is, as we mature and age, we learn more and more through our own interaction with the world. Much like the networks of today learn from the interaction of the computers on a network, the usage of each user, the software integration, we are literally building a digital biosphere.Here is an interesting PDF on adaptive networks  May sound out there but it's just a though.