This website, Mental Construction, focuses on specific items.
- The maintenance of a stable internal reality in the face of an ever-changing world.
- Abstraction, categories, and association: prime sources of creativity.
- The mechanism by which logic arises from neural properties.
- The integration of associative and logical thoughts.
- The mechanism by which two sensible people can disagree yet both be logical.
The site makes use of insights revealed by medical discoveries, but the theories aim at explaining non-medically compromised cognition.
Assumptions
The human body is immensely complex—billions of cells are organized into highly interdependent organs and systems. Restricting the focus to the human brain allows me to settle on the predominant form of the neurons that reside in the cortex and particularly the prefrontal cortex, where thinking and consciousness that define humans occur.
The brain sub-structures (brainstem, limbic system, corpus callosum, olfactory bulb) are discussed functionally in this website. Their unique neural structures are not discussed in depth, but their observed actions are used to form the basis from which higher thought starts. The cortical hemispheres, where human conscious thought resides, has the regularities in its neural structure used to explain association and progress of thoughts. The cerebellum is only casually discussed.
Using a combination of artificial neural networks and neuroscience discoveries, learning and memory formation is prominently featured.
The relation of biological imperatives to needs, desires, and fears is developed. The complete line to emotions is obvious, but not developed. Although a theory of morality is implicit in decision-making, it is not developed further than needed to carry the argument from associations and logic to thought and behavior.
Posts
Many interesting ideas arise in the discussion of neural functioning and the phenomena of thought. These points aren’t essential to the integrity of the Mental Construction ideas, but deal with consequences of its point of view.
Start with Table of Contents and click on the topic that interests you.