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foreign over 40 years my empirical work was in near a sense of learning and memory in the beginning of 80s
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we identified genes that are involved in establishment of long-term memory they became known as immediate religions we found that they are necessary for formation of
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long-term memory and since they are ubiquitously expressed during various forms of learning we designed different approaches to use
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these genes to map the engram circuits memory circuits in the brain using a molecular biology tools Optical Imaging whole brain mapping
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brain atlases Etc but with all these approaches uh you finally approach the question
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and what is me in the brain and actually what is me and focusing on this question
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I started developing a theory which is called the neural hyper Network Theory cognito I started doing this about 10 years ago
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Gerald Edelman once told me that in his experience to shape a theory like that takes 15 years so there is still five years in in the
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future but I will briefly present an outline oversimplified outline of the of this
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framework approach in this I will build on three yesterday talks of Anil Seth of Stewart hamerov and Nicholas Humphrey
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taking the message of anal Seth which is also the question of being you I will propose that the theory which we
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are developing makes a shift from focus on consciousness to focus on mind which is shift from process to structure
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I will explain it in a few moments the second shift which I would like to take is to pick up the message of Steward that Neuroscience
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need a revolution but while Stuart goes deeper at the bottom for this revolution
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I'm using this phrase of Richard feyman to tell that there is plenty of room at the top and going up so the second shift from the current
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Neuroscience thinking is shift from micro to macro and finally Nicholas talk on evolving sentence which I think is very important point for
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understanding of consciousness I will modify it saying that what is important and what the theory of Cognito addresses
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it focuses not on philosony but more on antigeny that is shift from evolutionary to developmental emergence of mind and consciousness
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so summing up these three premises the theory proposes that Consciousness is not the right entering point for the science of Consciousness mind is a
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proper one the addressing the question of mind has to be first comparable to addressing directly the question of consciousness second
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that the brain at its maximal existence that is cause effect potential uh should be understood not as physiological neural network connectome
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but cognitive neural hyper Network cognito and the third one that mind and Consciousness originate not through Evolution per se but through rather
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evolution of individual development and learning and this is the place where these structures and processes originate
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so I will explain in more details all these three premises the first one is that consciousness according to the theory is a specific process
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while mind is a specific structure and if there is no such structure there is no such process in this structure I
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will use a metaphor to explain this idea we can identify mind with Organic structure like for example the Sun
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and then Consciousness is a process in this structure so we need this structure for this process to take place and viewing the Mind as a structure has
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a number of advantages for example we can start asking questions what is the nature of the structure how is it built and how did it originate
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furthermore we can start asking the question how can we map this kind of structure and finally we can start studying
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processes that are specific only to this structure like mental processes including consciousness shift number one from mikra to macro
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to understand the structure we have to move from studying the brain at its physiological level to studying it at its cognitive level of
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organization which is according to the theory not a neural network but a neural hyper Network so in these
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diagram we have the brain composed of Cox but what exactly are these cogs and how can we formalize and understand
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this complex structure comparable to known approaches in the network neuroscience Theory suggests that each Cognito neural hyper Network
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consists of two type of elements vertices and edges vertices are called cogs or cognitive groups the term cork has a
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double meaning in the theory in English it is a subordinate but integral part of the whole system and in the theory it is also a unit of qualitatively specific experience
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carried by these groups of elements of neurons so it is a separate element in the mental system uh these Cooperative groups of neurons
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which are distributed and sparse in the nervous system and formed during development and learning are starting to go encode the relations
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of the organism with its outer and later on inner environment so they become cognitively specialized in terms of cause effect power that
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means that activation of this group of elements means that at the previous moment the distribution of probabilities in the environment was not uniform but was
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corresponding to particular aspect of the relation of organism to in the environment and activity of this group of elements means that the future of the relations
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of organisms with the environment will be also not uniform in probability but will change according to the effect power of this group of elements in this
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sense it is information in and information out or since it is stored as a group of elements in memory it is a knowledge of our organism the element of
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the low ratio of organisms cogs have different size they are of different forms there is a whole zoo of such cognitive groups
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in details I I cannot go into the into details of this classification but in important part of the hyper network is that these groups are linked by
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relations and the relations are not the same like in networks like in neural networks the link between two cognitive elements is not the connection of
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accents of one group of neurons to another group of neurons the link is the neural elements themselves overlapping Elements which
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belong to the first cognitive group and the second cognitive group which means that this element becomes neurons specialized in the Cog number one
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and if it is being activated it can potentiate the retrieval from memory of number 203 depending on the number of other groups to which this common
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unit with a superposition belongs so and locks and briefly the theory says that such
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cognitive system consists therefore of cognitive specialized elements elements which within the organism being a part of
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organism in court the knowledge of the whole organism the particular aspect of knowledge of the whole organism about the environment first outside and second with an
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internalization of inner environment these elements are concentrated in the central nervous system and they form a cognitive organ of the body it's cognito
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it has specific structure and cause effect power which can be mathematically and I cannot go into details here approximated by the mathematical concept
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of hyper Networks so the Mind according to theory in most useful understanding of its term is organic structure which
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is identical to this higher order hyper network of the brain and its specific causal properties whenever the brain or nervous system
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develops such hyper Network it considers the maximal level of existence of the brain and the organism so simplifying it into Thick questions
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we can say that to the question what is the brain it can be said that it can be described as is done today by the network Theory as a neural network
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but the mind at the level n plus one can be also described as a network cognitive Network and the mind-body relation a relation of n to n plus one according to
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the theory can be described as a cognitive hyper network of the physiological brain Network I would stress once more
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that according to this approach mind is a neural network organized into hyper Network so it is not a virtual system it is organic
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structure being built by development and experience and learning we were not able in Neuroscience to visualize and study these type of structures because they
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consist of clouds of neurons which are distributed and active only during performance of particular behaviors so there were no sufficient tools until recently
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to identify these groups of neurons to study how they appear during experience and how they shape the behavior of the organism but these tools are appearing now
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the theory in its development consists of three stages or three parts conceptual model which I described a little bit formal model which is
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mathematical description of neural hyper networks and neurobiological model which brings these principles to neural mechanisms of formation of this hyper Network
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now I move to the third shift from a field journey to onto Jenny or from evolutionary emergence to developmental emergence where mind and
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Consciousness originate during individual development in a sense this is the way to approach the vital question what is me or who are
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we genetic time scale this is the famous painting of gogen which addresses the questions where do we come from what are we and
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where are we going and goggin explained that to read this painting it is necessary to look from right to left from the group of women giving birth
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whether to a child to various functional activities of adult people and finally to that old gray woman
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sitting with a deep thoughts where we are going so the neural hyper Network Theory
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addresses this question also in this line of uh of Dynamics it asks what is necessary minimal and sufficient
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for the darwinian organism to develop mind in onto genetic development we know that this type of development
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reproducibly occurs to all the organisms which bear mind and comparable to evolutionary approach or evolutionary question it is much easier also to study this
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emergence experimentally in the development Behavior learning and memory so the theory suggests that three simple
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basic biological principles are necessary and sufficient to for the system to build the mind why biologically because none of these
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principles involves any cognitive or mental terms that means that these are ground principles of biological system which does not possess at the moment
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any cognitive properties these principles are generative functional systems deep integrative Network and cellular associative memory
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to explain a little bit the first and the major principle of generative functional systems and also to go back to the higher order mind brain identity
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thesis which was proposed by the theory I have to return to some of the historical development which is the background for this Theory
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the approaches which were taken in the Russian Neuroscience so the last century and a half in the search of the neural basis of the Mind
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uh Ivan paulov was of course with his conditioned reflexes looking for the physiological basis of mental
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activity the question he posed at the beginning of his study of conditioned reflexes how does the matter of the brain give rise to subjective phenomena his solution to this
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was a direct mind brain identity he believed and stressed many times that Association
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as known in psychology is a fundamental case which can be identified with the principle of
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so that fire together wire together which was popularized later by HEB by temporal connections between different parts of the central nervous system
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representing a conditioned stimulus and unconditioned stimulus so that was the idea of uh direct mind brain identity it was held also by a
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number of other Russian neuroscientists who started this commission at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century but something interesting and important
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happened in 1920s when Marxism came to Russia in a form of historical and electrical materialism in the middle of 1920s to
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scientists two young scientists in Russia took this idea of emergence in historical and dialectical sense to the study of the mind brain problem
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and understanding of the social nature of the mind that were left vergotsky with his work the historical meaning of psychological crisis and Peter anarchin
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with his work dialectical materialism and the problem of mind so what was uh developed then as a functional System
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Theory in the work of school of pkn working can be described in a nutshell avoiding the terms of materialism as a
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deep macro realism which I suggest as a coin size principle of functional systems theory it suggests that the macro level is
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different from micro level because it has different specific structural and organizational properties which can be studied scientifically and understood
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experimentally macro level is real because it has its own cause effect powers different from micro level and its cause effect power
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the third point is most important it is not present in the classical British emerged emergent in them for example but was present in the electrical
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materialism approach that macro level is deep because micro level in macro systems is transformed and Carries these macro properties that means that the macron properties are not
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overlaid over the existing maker properties but the whole system from top to down is being transformed according to the new structural level of
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organization what it means for a neurobiological mechanisms that leibnizmil argument which was suggested him as a
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criticism of mechanical materialism the famous idea that if we will imagine the brain as a large meal and enter into it we will see different moving Parts in
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this mean but by examining its interior we find only such mechanical parts and never anything in which by which to explain a perception or any mental
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properties started in the School of functional systems in 1970s 80s
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showed that experimentally in animals which learn new tasks in a complex environment the activity of neurons in the waking
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brain is become specialized in relation to certain functional systems behavioral functional systems that they performed that means the elements of subjective
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experience of experience which they acquire in the experimental situation neurons of many brain structures was shown are simultaneously involved in
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such functional systems being synchronized and in the waking brain neurons exhibit anticipator activity determined not by stimuli but by goals
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and intentions which are retrieved from memory so as an example for example here the neuron showed with uh
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in a rabbit which learned to either to pull the trigger or to press the pedal to obtain food different neurons in the brain can be
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specialized either to Performance of this behavior on the left and right side with the two levels or two rings or only by doing
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pressing the pedal or pulling the ring or any combination of this so these are elements of new experience Rings pedals which will never existed in the
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experience of animals and the neurons are being specialized in a sessions of learning to this we are studying this
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specialization Now using different Optical recording methods and find for example that uh this specialization occurs very rapidly upon the entrance of
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the animal into the new conditions from nearly the first trial being stabilized later on so what is suggested in the theory
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of neural hyper networks is that if we will take the rules of natural selection working in the organism without nervous system they can be viewed as algorithm
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where combination of independent principles of one two and three being present together and extended by the cumulative effects of
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genetic memory though being very simple in hundreds of millions of years can give a
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surprising structural complexity and diversity to append it with the rules of learning and memory in the
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developing organism which are simple enough and each of them is not containing any cognitive principle can give the similar algorithm which
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works on the genetically and due to the long-term memory in the nervous system can build a neural hyper network over
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the existing neural network supplying the organism with the individual and complex cognitive properties so addressing both the
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equation of the complex design of the mind and diversity of individual minds or minds of individual species depending on the experience
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they have in the nature so final question what is consciousness in this framework
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Theory suggests that it is a global percolation the process of penetration of activity over cognitive group through the cognitive reaching access to
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the rest of the cognitive groups or Cognito as a whole or me or self this is a work in progress and thank you for attention
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foreign
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