Your Soul is a Distributed Property of the Brains of Yourself and Others, Michael A. Arbib

COPERNICUS FESTIVAL, May 6-11, 2014, Kraków
www.copernicusf...
The talk was started with an useful analogy referring to Copernicus. Our daily reality (person-reality) is that we stand on solid ground, each day the sun rises and sets, and In the night we see the stars and some of those are planets. At time went by people began to give us a deeper view of that reality, seeking to chart the patterns that underlie our person reality by the gathering of meticulous data that go deeper than that reality. And then using, perhaps, mathematics to seek a deeper reality which may seem strange to common sense. Then to embrace the new scientific reality in an enriched understanding of our daily lives. The counterpoint of observation and theory may extend across the centuries . It takes time to develop an ever better web of explanations and the facts to test it and to be explained by it.
Similarly, according to our person-reality, there is a "me" and I talk of my body as if it belonged to me. There is a "you" and a "you" and a "you." We wake during the day, we sleep at night, we awake the next morning and we observe and talk about similar patterns in others. And so we may seek to understand that "something other", that soul entwined with the body yet not of the body that vanishes at night or escapes in dreams but returns with the dawn... and some of us even view death itself as a sleep from which the soul may eventually awaken.
The strategy of the talk is to see what aspects of the "soul" as experienced during our lifetimes begin to be understood within neuroscience. And then assess whether we are seeing another "Copernican re-centering" of our understanding of person-reality. So it is a conversation between the reality of persons in society and the reality of neurons in brains.
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Michael A. Arbib is the Fletcher Jones Professor of Computer Science, as well as a Professor of Biological Sciences, Biomedical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of Southern California. As both a theoretical neuroscientist and a computer scientist, Arbib argues that by deducing the brain's operating principles from a computational standpoint we can both learn more about how brains function and also gain tools for building learning machines. Arbib is a prolific author and has written or edited over 30 books and many scientific research articles. His work has been extremely influential in shaping the field of computational neuroscience.

[@benschulz9140]

A student of Warren McCulloch and Norbert Wiener. Cybernetics was just sleeping.

[@petermay1219]

Change that, more boring than a month of wet weekends in Oslo.

[@doczak69]

WHAT A BORING SOULLESS TALK ..:( :(

[@andykurian5678]

this guy is not talking about the soul.. he's talking about brain function.