Any serious neuroscientist should know that humans (and at a lesser level monkeys) possess "mirror neurons." Karl Pribram once told me the story of a neuroscientist recording from the brain of a monkey; he was startled when the monkey responded to the scientist reaching for nuts in the same cells which had fired when the monkey himself was reaching for them! (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19760408/).
But I was astounded when the last science fiction novel I read, https://www.davidzindell.com/the-idiot-gods/, included a thorough review of the brain of the orca, with scientific citations! (The striped dolphin may be even better, I later found.) That brain -- and SOME humans -- possesses a unique structure, a parahippocampus and paralimbic region, which may be of very fundamental importance in understanding the foundations of the highest level of empathy, which is important not only to ethics and values but to intelligence and understanding as well.
By the way, empathy and HUMAN values are discussed in an advanced way in Pribram's book:
https://openlibrary.org/books/OL7937292M/Brain_and_Values
Here is part of a recent email discussion on that (thanks to Yeshua Ben David's list);
On Thu, Oct 13, 2022 at 5:12 PM Nancy du Tertre <nancy@dutertre.com> wrote:
Paul,
“Parahippocampus and paralimbic lobes may be important to PSI!!”
Why? Spatial memory ? Emotion identification? Motivation or goals?
Just curious.
No need to apologize for such an important issue. One advantage of the word "paralimbic" is that it's a great search term, which could get you to RELATED things I have posted here before, which connect to the basic issues.
WHEN noosphere (soul) tries to connect, even in two-way connection, it depends on how good the possible connection is, for rich "conscious" thought. Noosphere can even connect strongly to just plain water, but not to exchange ideas much. Much better to mammal brains than reptile, because mammal brains have structures intended to represent certain kinds of ideas, actions and such. ALL MAMMALS possess a kind of "verb-object" memory, supporting basal ganglia, which represent "VERBS" (action schemata or "options" or "skills") AND OBJECTS.
(When a mouse open a door, the option is "open" AND "door.") With the mouse, the subject of the sentence is implicitly just "I", memory of what IT did.
A key hypothesis: some mammal brains with strong parahippocampus can encode actor-verb-object memory to a high refined degree,
allowing them to learn from memory of what OTHER actors experienced. All mammals with mirror neurons have SOME of that capability. Human language skills are rooted in having more of the required machinery than monkeys do, BUT COULD IT BE THAT ORCAS HAVE MORE, and that there is diversity even among humans? Brain machinery which strengthens the mirror neuron, empathy capability gives the noosphere a chance to expand the capability of hybrid organisms (body/soul) like us to develop capabilities like "assumption", the PSI of seeing through the eyes of others.
In fact -- in 1963-64, I focused deeply on the Upanishads in the famous Hume collection. I was totally against belief in PSI until 1967, but the abstract THEORETICAL concepts of seeing through many eyes made a deep impression on me, and might have been a major factor in preparing me for the experiences which stunned me in 1967 and 1972. (Of course, the connection between my abstract thinking and full first person experience, cultivated by "sanity", helpd make that work.) I cc a former colleague who understood that aspect of Vedas more than
anything I have seen on these discussion lists.
Best regards, Paul
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