I’m going through notes left on my white-board over the last week and clearing them off my plate. This one has been staring me in the face for a while now. I was thinking originally about the Human Genome Project, in which scientists sat down with the intention of completely mapping the genetic code sequences of the human race and what they do.
Reader Poll: Has a similar project of such massive scope ever been applied to the human mind? That is, is there any concerted effort on the part of scientists to sit down and map out what every part of the human mind does?
More interesting to me is taking that a step farther and documenting - in as many modalities as possible - every single facet of human experience: every possible thing you can feel, think or do. Maybe such a project would be total folly, or some kind of hubristic affront to God. But I’m thinking it might also be a cool way to unite humanity on one massive project: what does it mean to be a human? How does it feel? How can we share and compare experiences and draw some kind of usefulness out of such an activity?
A website launched Friday with the backing of technology industry and Hollywood elite urges people worldwide to help craft a framework for harmony between all religions.
The Charter for Compassion project on the Internet at www.charterforcompassion.org springs from a “wish” granted this year to religious scholar Karen Armstrong at a premier Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED) conference in California.
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2 Comments
Well, there’s certainly widespread effort to map the functional relationships between the various parts of the human brain, but whether you consider mind as reducible to brain is another issue, and a hotly contested one.
As for mapping the “mind” as separate from it’s organic substrate, theories abound - everything from computational models to psychodynamic (hydraulic) models.
But it sounds like you aren’t just talking about the functional arrangement of the parts, but what those parts are capable of generating as output, which raises another question: is the mind deterministic? Could we, at least in theory, predict with certainty the behavior of the mind/brain? Does free-will come into the picture anywhere? It seems to me that the mind/brain is a good example of a stochastic system - that is, we can make statements about what it probably will do, but not predict that precisely. But, is that due to not knowing all the variables involved, or is there something random at play?
I think you are on the right track with this question.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about dogs. Which sounds kind of funny, but I think what it was is that I was using dogs as a model for people. I think you hit on the same kind of thing with your posts about wolf packs.
But anyway, certian breeds like German shepherds, the ones used by police (which are special bloodlines) and dogs like border collies are bred and trained to do complicated jobs.
So what I am getting at, is that trainers have worked out specific drives. Like with police dogs there is “prey drive” “ball drive” some have pinpointed a few other things called “fight drive” “rank drive”
Then there are different types of temperaments aside from drive called either “hard or soft” plus there is a general terms like “high drive.” There is also a thing called “sharpness” which involves a certian amount of fear on the part of the dog. A sharp dog is a little fearful, which makes him more vigilant, wheras some really hard dogs are totally fearless and so that makes them to confident and not as good as guarding because nothing alarms them.
But anyway the point in nailing this all down is to be able to control the dogs, predict what they will do. This is also tied into breeding. Breeding for the right drives.
That’s what the whole domestication process is about, removing genetic diversity through line breeding and inbreeding to get an animal that is more and more predictable in appearance and behavior.
So anyway I like German shepherds but my favorite dog is the Akita. Superficially they may seem similar but really they are not. Nobody ever nailed down all the akita traits. There is some mystery about what is going on behind those mysterious oblique eyes. This is also why they are kind of dangerous. You can’t predict their behavior. Same with a wolf or any wild animal. Biologists aren’t quite telling the truth when they make very general statements on animal behavior. wild animals do all kinds of unpredictable things.
So I see this mind mapping thing in a similar vein.