FAQ for the Dark Gift
FAQ for the Dark Gift
Frequently Asked Questions about Dr. Ogi Ogas and his articles.
If you’re a new visitor to the Dark Gift, this FAQ is a good place to start. It contains answers to general questions about autism, mindscience, the Dark Gift website, and me. It also serves as a glossary of terms you’ll encounter here on the Dark Gift. I update the FAQ regularly. Latest edits: July 9, 2024.
Q: What is Mind? Why is it often capitalized on the Dark Gift?
Biologists boast a ready term to refer to all species that ever were: “life.” Neuroscientists lack a corresponding term for all minds that ever were, so this website will employ “Mind” for the task.
Biologists study life. Mindscientists study Mind.
Q: I’m an academic and I don’t see any references or citations on the Dark Gift! What is the source of all your material about neuroscience, consciousness, and autism? Can't you please cite the publications you're drawing your articles and arguments from?
Though my PhD is in mathematical neuroscience, I am not an academic and am not motivated by the incentives and drives that motivate working professors. In particular, my central interest is explaining the science of Mind to the general public, especially how autism is made in the brain.
Most of the underlying science and math here on the Dark Gift is derived from the extensive research of mathematical neuroscientists Stephen Grossberg and Gail Carpenter. As I’ve written elsewhere [and will soon post in an article here], I believe Dr. Grossberg is the second greatest scientist in human history, after Isaac Newton who earned the top stop by inventing human science single-handedly (though Newton tied all his science to his private deity, Ancient of Days).
Briefly, Grossberg is the second greatest scientist because, at first single-handedly and then with the help and support of Gail Carpenter, he became the first scientist to comprehensively and accurately mathematize the neural dynamics of most major functions of the human brain. In terms of his mathematical and conceptual contributions, they are greater than Einstein’s theory of relativity and the modern account of quantum physics combined.
How can I say this? The dynamics of aimlessness (physics) is characterized by a mathematics easier to compute and more intuitive for humans to think about than the dynamics of purpose (mindscience). Amply demonstrated by the fact that physicists raced through their understanding of the physical sciences during the Renaissance and Victorian ages—classical mechanics, classical electromagnetism, statistical physics, atomic theory, and so on and so forth, while mindscience didn’t meaningfully get started until the late 1950s when Grossberg, at the age of 17, devised the first mathematical model of the neural dynamics of a high-level function of the human brain—and indeed, one of the most sophisticated and inscrutable brain modules on Earth, the When module which stores and retrieves lists of items of indeterminate length. (The When module is crucial for toolmaking, music, and language.)
His contribution established, at long last, the correct mathematical framework for modeling thought, feeling, and consciousness. But because the math was unlike the math familiar to physical scientists, Grossberg’s contributions were ignored for decades. All of the mathematical and physical intuitions scientists had built up over the centuries were mostly useless when contemplating the operation of purpose—the operation of thought and consciousness.
Another reason Grossberg’s contribution to science is so weighty is because his discoveries address issues of tremendous interest to most human beings, not just ivory tower academics: consciousness, language, feeling, free will, purpose, art, memory, morality, meaning, social connection, mental illness. We’ve become used to thinking of these topics as squishy humanities subjects, eluding scientific specificity. Yet like Newton before him, Grossberg wrestled such numinous-seeming phenomena down from the mental heavens and rendered them in cold, hard, beautiful math.
Though Newton’s breakthroughs were quickly built upon by his peers, Grossberg’s breakthroughs were almost completely ignored by the mindscience community in the 1960s, 70s, and 1980s, even after he correctly identified the neural dynamics that embody consciousness in the early 1980s (a full decade before Daniel Dennett’s willfully misguided Consciousness Explained and David Chalmer’s absurdist claim that consciousness could never be explained by science.) This ignorance was due to a simple and unflattering reason: working mindscientists simply did not possess the mathematical chops to comprehend Grossberg’s work. Which, again, is based upon mathematics more challenging than what physicists wrestle with, both in its raw complexity and because it’s different math than what physical scientists are familiar with, and so nobody has any background or training or intuition in the mathematics of Mind.
The only way to get exposed to the math is to get exposed to Grossberg’s work. Or read the Dark Gift, where we explain it in plainspoken everyday language! Or study the mind yourself and wrestle with how it works, for then you’ll converge onto Grossberg’s math independently, just as anybody who studies electricity independently and deeply will converge onto James Maxwell’s math.
And today, in 2024, the universal ignorance of the math of neural dynamics hasn’t really changed. Now there’s maybe a few dozen folks across the planet who fully fathom Grossberg’s mathematical account of the brain, which encompasses detailed evidence-based models of vision, hearing, motor control, planning, navigation, emotion, social cognition, targeting, creating, all sorts of memory, language, decision-making, free will, and consciousness.
The bulk of the science you will find here on the Dark Gift is derived from Grossberg’s daunting magnum opus, Conscious Mind, Resonant Brain.
Most of the rest is from Dr. Sai Gaddam and I’s extension of Grossberg & Carpenter’s mathematical framework, Journey of the Mind: How Thinking Emerged from Chaos, which contains plentiful citations for the reference-hungry.
Q: What books should I read to help me understand Stephen Grossberg's work?
Though the great compendium of Grossberg’s work is his own Conscious Mind, Resonant Brain, I can’t really recommend that anyone jump right into it, not even mindscience PhDs. First of all, the math and concepts are extremely challenging, and the book doesn’t contain any tutorials or introductions to the math or concepts. And because the math and concepts are unlike those in the physical sciences, whatever background you bring to it will likely lead you astray. Second of all, Grossberg’s greatest weakness as humankind’s second greatest scientist has been his inability to communicate effectively with others. He has always struggled to explain his work to other scientists, while his capacity for illuminating his work to the public is nearly non-existent. CMRB is not a well-written book and makes no accomodations for the reader’s inevitable confusion.
If you have a background in dynamic systems and are comfortable thinking, like Norbert Wiener, “not on the mass, energy, and force concepts of physics, but rather on the concepts of feedback, control, information, communication, and purpose” then perhaps you could give it a shot.
The only attempt at explaining Grossberg’s work in serious detail to the general public is Journey of the Mind: How Thinking Emerged from Chaos, which I co-authored with mathematical neuroscientist Sai Gaddam. We deploy accessible, non-technical prose, abundant lucid graphics, and stories to illustrate Grossberg’s approach to understanding thought and purpose. It contains a plainspoken explanation of Grossberg’s theory of consciousness.
I’m writing an even more accessible account of how consciousness works, according to Grossberg’s research, in Consciousness: How It’s Made. It’s still a work in progress, incomplete, as of July 7, 2024.
Let me be perfectly clear, however: Grossberg did not derive an explanation of autism. Though he published a few papers on autism, those are not the source of the articles on autism here on the Dark Gift. One of two interrelated reasons I set out to master Grossberg and Carpenter’s Dynamic Mind perspective was to unriddle autism, which I suspected would fall out of their mathematical model of consciousness and attention. Which it did.
Q: What is the Dynamic Mind?
The Dynamic Mind is a scientific perspective on thinking in general, and the human brain in particular. It is the perspective embodied in the work of Stephen Grossberg and Gail Carpenter.
It holds that thinking consists of activity and that the way to understand (and model) all forms of thought in the universe, including feeling, comprehending, free will, and consciousness, is in terms of purposeful activity.
The Dynamic Mind is in stark contrast to the three other leading frameworks for understanding minds and thought.
One might appropriately be termed Statistical Mind: applying the mathematics of statistics to thought. This is the basis for digital AI, but does not apply to biological thought.
Another might be called Digital Mind: applying the mathematics of information theory and algorithms to thought. Though this approach is quite powerful when applied to digital computation, it is ultimately a mathematics of bits and integers. A mathematics of things, rather than activity.
The rest is a mathless grab bag of interesting (and often relevant) physical factoids: genetics, brain imaging, enzymes, receptors, without any organizing principles.
The Dynamic Mind perspective organizes this grab bag into a coherent framework.
Q: What is a supermind?
Superminds are groups of individual minds that merged together to form a single collective mind capable of thought and purposeful activity. The most sophisticated mind on planet Earth is the human supermind.
The human supermind boasts collective dynamics built out of mind-to-mind mental dynamics, primarily spoken language, though also encompassing gestures, body language, art, writing, music, games, and various forms of culture. Superminds are capable of consciousness, just as the individual brains in a human supermind are capable of consciousness. (Consciousness is embodied in a particular form of physical dynamics that can be produced at the supermind level as well as within an individual human brain.)
The supermind is the fourth rung of the ladder of purpose.
Q: What is Super-learning?
[article forthcoming]
Superlearning refers to an autistic brain’s potential to assimilate large quantities of new information rapidly, especially compared to non-autistic brains. Superlearning is a consequence of the exact same neural dynamics responsible for our social difficulties. In other words, just as autism makes it harder for us to connect with other people and function in tribes, it simultaneously opens up possibilities for knowledge and skill acquisition notably more efficient and effective than what is available to healthy sapien brains.
Q: What is Super-focus?
[article forthcoming]
Superfocus refers to an autistic brain’s ability to pay deep, unwavering attention to a subject or task for a long period of time—notably deeper and longer than non-autistic brains are capable of.
As with Superlearning, the autistic capacity for Superfocus arises out of the exact same neural dynamics responsible for our social shortcomings. There’s a straightforward trade-off: more social capacity, less non-social learning and non-social focus. Less social capacity, more non-social learning and non-social focus.
In brief, instad of autistic brains paying attention to people and tribes the way the Homo sapiens brain is designed, our own brains pay attention to other things, ideas, and events instead, with the same depth and attentiveness that non-autistic humans bring to socializing.