2min chapter

Better Known cover image

David Robson

Better Known

CHAPTER

The Effects of Pain on the Brain

If you believe you're receiving pain relief, the brain can start to make its own endogenous opioids. Even if you take a placebo pill, sometimes that can be around half as effective as actually having a dose of morphine. But the flip side is that it puts the brain and body into this kind of state of high alert. That might have worked well in nature but we don't want our pain signals to be amplified today.

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Speaker 1
But if they're not, if they're just flashing on and off, it's very hard for me, as an external observer, to know whether there's anything interestingly weakly emergent in their global patterns. And that's the problem of identification of an emergent property. So what with lionel we were interested in was, can we develop methods that allow us to, in a data driven way, identify candidate weekly emergenc microscopic properties? Andother word for that would be coarse grainings, higher level abstractions of the them that have this kind of property. And we did it in a slightly different way. So for lionel, the key idea was that a a candidate weekly emergent variable must be whatr we calld, dynamically independent from its a microscopic under pinning, which just, again, this just means that knowing what's going on at the microscopic level does not help you predict what's going on at the microscopic level. So that's why we use that word diamical independence doesn't necessarily mean, in this case, that you that the microscopic level level has to predict itself in any interesting way. It just, however much you can do that, it just has to be independent of what's going on in the bottom which is why i say there's this whole variety of different ctions. Now, how to think about what an emergent property might be. And what we're doing in my group at the moment is trying to flash out many of these different directions and figure out how they how they relate. There's not going to be one single answer.

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