[extropy-chat] The Brain? It's A Jungle in There

[Giu1i0 Pri5c0]

>From the New York Times: The immensity of Dr. Edelman's project - explaining
the development of the human mind - overwhelms. Yet his ideas about how
consciousness arises from the firings of neurons begin to seem eminently
plausible because something similar seems to be happening in the hum and
current of your own brain, in the excited state brought on by Dr. Edelman's
voluble mixture of calculation, charisma, enterprise and brilliance.
In his new book [Wider than the Sky: The Phenomenal Gift of Consciousness],
in just 148 pages of exposition, he tries to distill his ideas for a lay
reader. This is a quixotic task, given the nature of what he has called "the
most complicated material object in the known universe." But Dr. Edelman
gives a sense of the problem's scope and some flavor of his proposals.
Located on Torrey Pines Mesa in La Jolla, California, Nobel Laureate Gerald
M. Edelman's The Neurosciences Institute is a not-for-profit research center
dedicated to "high risk - high payoff" research designed to discover the
biological basis of higher-level brain functions in humans.

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