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>So many mental issues are cognitive. It’s not always happening at the chemical level. As a biochemist with a passion for neuroscience, I entirely 100% do not

>So many mental issues are cognitive. It’s not always happening at the chemical level. As a biochemist with a passion for neuroscience, I entirely 100% do not agree The statement doesn't even make sense to me. All cognition is based on the dynamics happening at the biochemical level. All of it is chemical All of our thoughts and behaviors are the product of chemical reactions and interactions which determine the behavior of individual neurons and their networks. You literally cannot separate those things.

pharrington 5y ago
The comment you're replying to simply describes emergence.
- netizen-936824 5y ago
  Emergence still depends on the underlying mechanisms
SnowHill9902 5y ago
So theoretically you could know what your wife wants for dinner by solving the Schrödinger equation?
- netizen-936824 5y ago
  Essentially, yes. Although we don't fully understand the system so we can't model it just yet
travisjungroth 5y ago
Yes it all happens as chemistry. I mean the cause of the problem isn’t always what we would normally call “chemical”. That’s what I meant by “happening at the chemical level”. I’m just drawing a distinction between something like depression caused by a B12 deficiency and depression caused by the loss of your spouse. Thinking can’t fix B12, but sometimes it helps with loss. If I try to word it better, would you agree that sometimes mental health issues are caused by biological problems and sometimes by events in our lives and how we think about them?
- netizen-936824 5y ago
  I'm not sure I could agree with that. What I could agree with is a statement that live events can alter our epigenetic regulation mechanisms which impacts our neuronal chemistry which can alter our thought processes and behaviors. At the end of the day its still chemistry, and at the end of the day chemistry is still physics, and as far as I've learn physics is deterministic. We can't separate our conscious experience from these underlying mechanisms because our entire existence is based on their rules. The brain is not a construct on which the software of the mind runs, it is the mind.
  - travisjungroth 5y ago
    I’m not claiming that consciousness is separate from chemistry or the mind is separate from the brain. You could call every problem you run across a physics problem, since our world operates under the laws of physics. That’s just not a particularly useful way to go about things. If I got fired from my job for a reason I thought was unjust, I’d be angry. And if someone saw me being angry and asked a third person why I’m angry they might say “he got fired for a bullshit reason”. This is all totally normal stuff. They wouldn’t say “his sympathetic nervous system is elevated”. That really doesn’t help the other person understand what’s going on. Now if I have a tumor that’s smashing my amygdala, then expressing the problem in terms of chemistry/biology is helpful. I brought this split up at all because it can be useful in figuring out how to treat illness. I think we get it wrong often. There are people in talk therapy who should get on meds to lower their heart rate, and there are people on depression meds who need to switch jobs. (And all of this vice versa). You seem to be latched onto a specific claim I don’t even think I’m making. Could you engage with the heart of what I’m saying (the usefulness of cognitive changes in treating mental illness and how psychedelics help) and iron man my argument?
    - netizen-936824 5y ago
      I went back and reread your original comment, and I may be a bit confused. You state that issues are cognitive but then go on to discuss how psychedelics break down barriers. Psychedelics are drugs, one of the best ways of showing that out cognitive processes are determined by our neuronal chemistry. Considering a traditional psychedelic like 4-HO-DMT or LSD, these compounds have activity at a few different serotonin receptors (and some other side interactions). This pharmacological activity (interaction of an external compound with our internal biomolecules) is how psychedelics alter our cognitive processes. From my perspective, this shows how our cognitive processes are biochemical and using a drug can change it easily whereas other means are more difficult such as external sensory inputs (therapy, talking to people, reading, aromatherapy, massage?) I entirely agree with the usefulness of psychedelics, they are massively powerful tools. They're great at helping catalyze significantly alterations in our thought processes, but these changes that they help induces are chemical and structural (structural such as changes in synaptic connectivity) Structural changes between neurons are directed by chemical signaling as well. If the changes that fix the problem are biochemical, the problem was biochemical. We alter the biochemistry and they induce changes in the emergent properties of the overall system: behavior and thought processes Our thought processes and behaviors are the product of our brains (and some signaling from other organs, mostly the brain though) and even minor changes in certain areas or with certain regulatory mechanisms can have profound impacts on mental health.
saltcured 5y ago
Even though we know our computers are "all electrical" in nature, don't we admit that there are software/state problems which can exhibit themselves even if every part of the computer is functioning correctly as an individual electrical component? You cannot find the broken part to fix which will resolve the problem that emerges from an unfortunate set of values stored in the circuits. I think that is the metaphorical mapping intended by the earlier poster, that a problem can be cognitive rather than chemical.
- netizen-936824 5y ago
  I think the distinction in this case is that software is not an emergent property that directly arose from the mechanisms of circuits. Neurons are different than circuits, as their chemistry and physiology does change with various inputs. That's actually how a decent portion of the computation happens. My disagreement is with the fundamental assumption that the brain is just hardware on which the software of the mind runs. This is not accurate at all, the chemistry and physiology of the brain is everything
  - saltcured 5y ago
    You and I might agree on the nature of the mind, in a metaphysical sense. But, the nature of mind is mostly immaterial (ha!) for this topic. The original poster was arguing that a new depressive state as a result of a traumatic diagnosis is evidence that it is a learned or acquired state, rather than something congenital and fixed in physiology. They further argue that this means the sufferer might be guided to unlearn or re-learn to a more desirable state. It may be an optimistic perspective, but I don't think physical reductionism invalidates it. The computer metaphor is of course shallow or simplistic. It's not meant as an all-explaining allegory. The relevant part, which you even allude to yourself, is that state changes in the brain can be effected through "inputs". The only thing we need to consider is whether further sensory inputs and thought processes can continue to affect the state. Unless you are arguing that the brain reaches some terminal and irreversible state, I don't see that there is any real conflict here. As an aside, as a computer scientist, I will tell you that software is exactly an emergent property of the circuits. Put another way, software is an abstraction we place on it, as observers. It is not really there as the machine operates. The physics and structure of the machine are likewise everything, with physically real states changing as a result of microscopic mechanisms integrating local state and some signals carried in from topologically neighboring mechanisms.
thirdwhrldPzz 5y ago
Humans have longed relied on metaphor and analogy to provide context. Chemistry is a contextualized generalization of certain physical phenomena. Neurons are just temporal spatial events of various mathematical parameters; gradients and ranges of heat, light, etc. Everything is some form of “how matter happened to coalesce relative to light during $arbitrary_date_time_range” Or it’s all the specialized language of chemistry and biology. Six to one, half dozen to another. Normalizing the descriptions isn’t proof of correctness, it’s a specific normalized set of glyphs to simplify communication.
- jaminal 5y ago
  so well said. there’s absolutely no reason, for example, as to why unitive consciousness as described in some Hindu philosophies would be in contradiction with our experience of cognition originating entirely within a chemical framework of understanding reality.
- netizen-936824 5y ago
  My issue simply stems from how people try to disconnect our conscious experiences from the physical phenomena that underlies it. Perhaps its my own perception on how I read into statements that make these assertions, but humans have quite a long history of invoking magic "souls" and such to explain thought processes and behaviors. My insistence on referencing the underlying phenomena is an attempt to counter this.
jaminal 5y ago
please share sources that definitively prove that all cognition is the product of chemical reactions?
- netizen-936824 5y ago
  Its rather surprising to me that you're asking this in a thread about the strongest evidence we have for cognition being biochemical. The evidence is that action of psychoactive drugs, especially psychedelics and anaesthetics. We have compounds that we have studied that actions of and they act on neurons and their networks to alter or eliminate cognition.
  - jaminal 5y ago
    I hear that you are surprised. I understand there is data that supports this theory; I wasn’t aware that it is definitive nor how easily it could be reproduced. Before it was edited, your original statement framed certainty about cognition originating in chemistry as a personal belief. Which isn’t a scientific statement.
    - netizen-936824 5y ago
      I don't believe I edited the comment that you're replying to. Edit: as a side note, general anesthesia is used hundreds or thousands of times daily and it always eliminates or reduces cognition. That's literally the whole purpose of using it
      - jaminal 5y ago
        My apologies, I thought there was an edit where you said you firmly believed this. Interesting point re: GA.
      - jaminal 5y ago
        I just came across this - https://neurosciencenews.com/psychedelics-consciousness-20283/ https://neurosciencenews.com/psychedelics-consciousness-2028... kinda fascinating…
stadium 5y ago
What I took away from GP was that this medicine helps a person learn and integrate truths that their current neuropathways may be blocking or inhibiting at a subconscious level. It's a neuroplasticity aid of sorts and less of something to be taken as a long term maintenance medication. The change in perspective in a therapeutic setting can be a catalyst to permanent changes in thought patterns.
- netizen-936824 5y ago
  Neuroplasticity is controlled with chemical signaling. Thought patterns are determined by synaptic connections and biochemical regulation
cf141q5325 5y ago
Have you read up on cognitive behavioral therapy? A short summary would be that a lot of it is caused by entrenched thought patterns and toxic routines. So a question of what input you process how. Its often not caused by chemical imbalances but what falsehoods you belief and what conclusions you draw from it.
- netizen-936824 5y ago
  "Chemical imbalances" is a terrible way of describing what causes some mental health issues. Its an issue with regulation and sometimes it can be changed with something like CBT.
  - cf141q5325 5y ago
    Thanks for the correction, i am obviously not familiar with the field. This was meant as an example of non-chemical cognition problems.

pharrington 5y ago

The comment you're replying to simply describes emergence.

netizen-936824 5y ago
Emergence still depends on the underlying mechanisms

SnowHill9902 5y ago

So theoretically you could know what your wife wants for dinner by solving the Schrödinger equation?

netizen-936824 5y ago
Essentially, yes. Although we don't fully understand the system so we can't model it just yet

travisjungroth 5y ago

Yes it all happens as chemistry. I mean the cause of the problem isn’t always what we would normally call “chemical”. That’s what I meant by “happening at the chemical level”. I’m just drawing a distinction between something like depression caused by a B12 deficiency and depression caused by the loss of your spouse. Thinking can’t fix B12, but sometimes it helps with loss. If I try to word it better, would you agree that sometimes mental health issues are caused by biological problems and sometimes by events in our lives and how we think about them?

netizen-936824 5y ago
I'm not sure I could agree with that. What I could agree with is a statement that live events can alter our epigenetic regulation mechanisms which impacts our neuronal chemistry which can alter our thought processes and behaviors. At the end of the day its still chemistry, and at the end of the day chemistry is still physics, and as far as I've learn physics is deterministic. We can't separate our conscious experience from these underlying mechanisms because our entire existence is based on their rules. The brain is not a construct on which the software of the mind runs, it is the mind.
- travisjungroth 5y ago
  I’m not claiming that consciousness is separate from chemistry or the mind is separate from the brain. You could call every problem you run across a physics problem, since our world operates under the laws of physics. That’s just not a particularly useful way to go about things. If I got fired from my job for a reason I thought was unjust, I’d be angry. And if someone saw me being angry and asked a third person why I’m angry they might say “he got fired for a bullshit reason”. This is all totally normal stuff. They wouldn’t say “his sympathetic nervous system is elevated”. That really doesn’t help the other person understand what’s going on. Now if I have a tumor that’s smashing my amygdala, then expressing the problem in terms of chemistry/biology is helpful. I brought this split up at all because it can be useful in figuring out how to treat illness. I think we get it wrong often. There are people in talk therapy who should get on meds to lower their heart rate, and there are people on depression meds who need to switch jobs. (And all of this vice versa). You seem to be latched onto a specific claim I don’t even think I’m making. Could you engage with the heart of what I’m saying (the usefulness of cognitive changes in treating mental illness and how psychedelics help) and iron man my argument?
  - netizen-936824 5y ago
    I went back and reread your original comment, and I may be a bit confused. You state that issues are cognitive but then go on to discuss how psychedelics break down barriers. Psychedelics are drugs, one of the best ways of showing that out cognitive processes are determined by our neuronal chemistry. Considering a traditional psychedelic like 4-HO-DMT or LSD, these compounds have activity at a few different serotonin receptors (and some other side interactions). This pharmacological activity (interaction of an external compound with our internal biomolecules) is how psychedelics alter our cognitive processes. From my perspective, this shows how our cognitive processes are biochemical and using a drug can change it easily whereas other means are more difficult such as external sensory inputs (therapy, talking to people, reading, aromatherapy, massage?) I entirely agree with the usefulness of psychedelics, they are massively powerful tools. They're great at helping catalyze significantly alterations in our thought processes, but these changes that they help induces are chemical and structural (structural such as changes in synaptic connectivity) Structural changes between neurons are directed by chemical signaling as well. If the changes that fix the problem are biochemical, the problem was biochemical. We alter the biochemistry and they induce changes in the emergent properties of the overall system: behavior and thought processes Our thought processes and behaviors are the product of our brains (and some signaling from other organs, mostly the brain though) and even minor changes in certain areas or with certain regulatory mechanisms can have profound impacts on mental health.

saltcured 5y ago

Even though we know our computers are "all electrical" in nature, don't we admit that there are software/state problems which can exhibit themselves even if every part of the computer is functioning correctly as an individual electrical component? You cannot find the broken part to fix which will resolve the problem that emerges from an unfortunate set of values stored in the circuits. I think that is the metaphorical mapping intended by the earlier poster, that a problem can be cognitive rather than chemical.

netizen-936824 5y ago
I think the distinction in this case is that software is not an emergent property that directly arose from the mechanisms of circuits. Neurons are different than circuits, as their chemistry and physiology does change with various inputs. That's actually how a decent portion of the computation happens. My disagreement is with the fundamental assumption that the brain is just hardware on which the software of the mind runs. This is not accurate at all, the chemistry and physiology of the brain is everything
- saltcured 5y ago
  You and I might agree on the nature of the mind, in a metaphysical sense. But, the nature of mind is mostly immaterial (ha!) for this topic. The original poster was arguing that a new depressive state as a result of a traumatic diagnosis is evidence that it is a learned or acquired state, rather than something congenital and fixed in physiology. They further argue that this means the sufferer might be guided to unlearn or re-learn to a more desirable state. It may be an optimistic perspective, but I don't think physical reductionism invalidates it. The computer metaphor is of course shallow or simplistic. It's not meant as an all-explaining allegory. The relevant part, which you even allude to yourself, is that state changes in the brain can be effected through "inputs". The only thing we need to consider is whether further sensory inputs and thought processes can continue to affect the state. Unless you are arguing that the brain reaches some terminal and irreversible state, I don't see that there is any real conflict here. As an aside, as a computer scientist, I will tell you that software is exactly an emergent property of the circuits. Put another way, software is an abstraction we place on it, as observers. It is not really there as the machine operates. The physics and structure of the machine are likewise everything, with physically real states changing as a result of microscopic mechanisms integrating local state and some signals carried in from topologically neighboring mechanisms.

thirdwhrldPzz 5y ago

Humans have longed relied on metaphor and analogy to provide context. Chemistry is a contextualized generalization of certain physical phenomena. Neurons are just temporal spatial events of various mathematical parameters; gradients and ranges of heat, light, etc. Everything is some form of “how matter happened to coalesce relative to light during $arbitrary_date_time_range” Or it’s all the specialized language of chemistry and biology. Six to one, half dozen to another. Normalizing the descriptions isn’t proof of correctness, it’s a specific normalized set of glyphs to simplify communication.

jaminal 5y ago
so well said. there’s absolutely no reason, for example, as to why unitive consciousness as described in some Hindu philosophies would be in contradiction with our experience of cognition originating entirely within a chemical framework of understanding reality.
netizen-936824 5y ago
My issue simply stems from how people try to disconnect our conscious experiences from the physical phenomena that underlies it. Perhaps its my own perception on how I read into statements that make these assertions, but humans have quite a long history of invoking magic "souls" and such to explain thought processes and behaviors. My insistence on referencing the underlying phenomena is an attempt to counter this.

jaminal 5y ago

please share sources that definitively prove that all cognition is the product of chemical reactions?

netizen-936824 5y ago
Its rather surprising to me that you're asking this in a thread about the strongest evidence we have for cognition being biochemical. The evidence is that action of psychoactive drugs, especially psychedelics and anaesthetics. We have compounds that we have studied that actions of and they act on neurons and their networks to alter or eliminate cognition.
- jaminal 5y ago
  I hear that you are surprised. I understand there is data that supports this theory; I wasn’t aware that it is definitive nor how easily it could be reproduced. Before it was edited, your original statement framed certainty about cognition originating in chemistry as a personal belief. Which isn’t a scientific statement.
  - netizen-936824 5y ago
    I don't believe I edited the comment that you're replying to. Edit: as a side note, general anesthesia is used hundreds or thousands of times daily and it always eliminates or reduces cognition. That's literally the whole purpose of using it
    - jaminal 5y ago
      My apologies, I thought there was an edit where you said you firmly believed this. Interesting point re: GA.
    - jaminal 5y ago
      I just came across this - https://neurosciencenews.com/psychedelics-consciousness-20283/ https://neurosciencenews.com/psychedelics-consciousness-2028... kinda fascinating…

stadium 5y ago

What I took away from GP was that this medicine helps a person learn and integrate truths that their current neuropathways may be blocking or inhibiting at a subconscious level. It's a neuroplasticity aid of sorts and less of something to be taken as a long term maintenance medication. The change in perspective in a therapeutic setting can be a catalyst to permanent changes in thought patterns.

netizen-936824 5y ago
Neuroplasticity is controlled with chemical signaling. Thought patterns are determined by synaptic connections and biochemical regulation

cf141q5325 5y ago

Have you read up on cognitive behavioral therapy? A short summary would be that a lot of it is caused by entrenched thought patterns and toxic routines. So a question of what input you process how. Its often not caused by chemical imbalances but what falsehoods you belief and what conclusions you draw from it.

netizen-936824 5y ago
"Chemical imbalances" is a terrible way of describing what causes some mental health issues. Its an issue with regulation and sometimes it can be changed with something like CBT.
- cf141q5325 5y ago
  Thanks for the correction, i am obviously not familiar with the field. This was meant as an example of non-chemical cognition problems.