(January 2025 edition)
THE DEVIL will be in the details again. Does present science and technology have the capacity to do such close monitoring of the brain’s electrochemical activities? The monitoring instrument must be quick enough to detect the changes in the electrochemical pattern of the brain’s cortex in the time interval from the decision to move a muscle by the MIND to the firing of the UMNs, and be super accurate to boot. The only things that I can think of that can approach such capability is the PET scan (Positron Emission Tomography), or perhaps some kind of supersensitive EEG (Electroencephalography). But there may be others I am not aware of.
If such an experiment is possible, then it should be done. But even if such an experiment is done, I don’t think it will fully answer the question of the nature of the MIND. What you will see is only certain areas of the somesthetic and sensory parts of the brain and certain areas of the motor cortex light up during the PET scans. But how the MIND, the subject’s self-aware conscious volitional decision making system, directs the sensory areas of the brain to trigger the motor cortex’s UMNs to fire would remain a mystery.
To confound matters, there are other questions.
Suppose we are able to answer the above. There will be a next question. Say how is the ARAS involved? And a next. Say how is the limbic system (deep neuronal cell bodies in the telencephalon and their connections, said to be the seat of subjective emotions) involved? For each question, we must be able to do experiments that require quick and accurate monitoring of those parts of the brain that are involved.
Soon we will see ourselves getting to the point of asking again: what is the nature of the MIND? Because that’s where volitional movement decision-making starts.
By the way, there is another field where the MIND seems to be involved. It is the measurement problem in quantum mechanics, especially the Copenhagen type interpretations of the collapse or reduction of the wave function. It’s a pretty long topic, and not my specialty, so the reader is encouraged to read up on Schrodinger’s cat and Wigner’s friend, which I think gives easily comprehensible ideas on how direct observation (possibly by the MIND) ‘collapses’ a smeared out dead and alive cat into a cat that is definitely dead or alive. Before the observation, the cat does not physically exist as definitely dead or alive.
A way out or loophole is to assume the Universe is superdeterministic. That would imply that the MIND is also superdeterministic. Now how in the world are we going to test for that, that the MIND is subject to superdeterminism if we do not even know what it is? As this whole essay explains, we do not even know how the MIND triggers the Upper Motor Neurons of our cerebral cortex.
(Caveat: My intuition tends to favor the notion that the MIND is NOT superdeterministic at all, and can choose freely between multitudes of options.)
Do scientists know how we move our muscles?
Yes. No. Don’t know. Not sure. Hu-o. Indi. Ambot. Ambot.
As we trek along the MIND-body problem, we meet blackholes between MIND and muscle. Into a blackhole, and on to other blackholes.(Send comments and suggestions to mabuhibisaya2017@gmail.com)/PN
