Tractatus Analogico-Mythologicus
I was asked this question on Quora:
Here’s how I responded:
Here’s a question: in a system composed of clockwork, is there a “code”?
I ask this because I find that the “code” metaphor is often misleading when thinking about biology. Codes are composed of symbols. But it is not clear that neurons communicate using symbols.
“In our world,” said Eustace, “a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.”
“Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of…”
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, CS Lewis
I really like the quote above, which is from the Chronicles of Narnia. It raises a neat little metaphysical question:
Why do we assume that what a thing is made up of is what a thing is?
Dopamine is not the feel good molecule or the basis of pleasure. The idea that any molecule considered in isolation could be the basis of a subjective experience is basically nonsense.
For people who can’t really reason through this idea, there is plenty of experimental evidence showing the complexity of each and every “celebrity” neurochemical — dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and so on.
I was asked this question on Quora.
We don’t really know. But as one of my professors once said half-jokingly, “the brain is a bag of tricks”. There is no reason to assume that all brain regions use the same coding scheme.
Here are some basic concepts that guide how neuroscientists think about information in the brain:
I was asked the following question on Quora.
Short answer: No.
Modern science has shown that every thing is an arrangement of atoms: neurons, apples, tables, rockets, asteroids, aardvarks… they are all made up of atoms.
The question now is this: is a memory a thing?