Global Workspace perspective on mental disorders--论文代写范文精选

社会或文化环境中,可以将发展问题将变得更有侵入性，随着时间的推移,最明显的是在一些累积模型,但可能更微妙,计划类似于肿瘤发生。关键的干预,在人口层面,显然是限制这种风险,适当的环境卫生的问题。下面的essay代写范文进行详述。

Abstract 
Recent developments in Global Workspace theory suggest that human consciousness can suffer interpenetrating dysfunctions of mutual and reciprocal interaction with embedding environments which will have early onset and often insidious staged developmental progression, possibly according to a cancer model. A simple rate distortion argument implies that, if an external information source is pathogenic, then sufficient exposure to it is sure to write a sufficiently accurate image of it on mind and body in a punctuated manner so as to initiate or promote similarly progressively punctuated developmental disorder. There can, thus, be no simple, reductionist brain chemical ‘bug in the program’ whose ‘fix’ can fully correct the problem. On the contrary, the growth of an individual over the life course, and the inevitable contact with a toxic physical, social, or cultural environment, can be expected to initiate developmental problems which will become more intrusive over time, most obviously following some damage accumulation model, but likely according to far more subtle, highly punctuated, schemes analogous to tumorigenesis. The key intervention, at the population level, is clearly to limit such exposures, a question of proper environmental sanitation, in a large sense, a matter of social justice which has long been understood to be determined almost entirely by the interactions of cultural trajectory, group power relations, and economic structure, with public policy. Intervention at the individual level appears limited to triggering or extending periods of remission, as is the case with most cancers. 
Key words: cancer, cognition, consciousness, culture, economic structure, information theory, mental disorder, power relations, public policy

Introduction 
Mental disorders in humans are not well understood. Indeed, such classifications as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders - fourth edition, (DSM-IV, 1994), the standard descriptive nosology in the US, have been characterized as ‘prescientific’ by Gilbert (2001) and others. Arguments from genetic determinism fail, in part because of an apparently draconian population bottleneck which, early in our species’ history, resulted in an overall genetic diversity less than that observed within and between contemporary chimpanzee subgroups. Arguments from psychosocial stress fare better, but are affected by the apparently complex and contingent developmental paths determining the onset of schizophrenia – one of the most prevalent serious mental disorders – dementias, psychoses, and so forth, some of which may be triggered in utero by exposure to infection, low birthweight, or other stressors. Gilbert suggests an evolutionary perspective, in which evolved mechanisms like the ‘flight-or- fight’ response are inappropriately excited or suppressed, resulting in such conditions as anxiety or post traumatic stress disorders. 

Our own work suggests that many sleep disorders may also be broadly developmental (Wallace, 2005b). Serious mental disorders in humans are often comorbid among themselves – depression and anxiety, compulsive behaviors, psychotic ideation, etc. – and with serious chronic physical conditions such as coronary heart disease, atherosclerosis, diabetes, hypertension, dyslipidemia, and so on. These too are increasingly recognized as developmental in nature (see Wallace, 2004, 2005a for references), and are frequently compounded by behavioral problems like violence or substance use and abuse. Indeed, smoking, alcohol and drug addiction, compulsive eating, and the like, are often done as selfmedication for the impacts of psychosocial and other stressors, constituting socially-induced ‘risk behaviors’ which synergistically accelerate a broad spectrum of mental and physical problems. 

A central failure of current theory surrounding mental disorders has been the exclusion, for powerful ideological reasons, of virtually all scientific discussion of consciousness in humans, a circumstance more completely discussed by Baars (1988). Mental disorders are, quintessentially, disorders of consciousness, and the collapse of the scientific exploration of consciousness in the early part of the 20th Century clearly accounts for much of the current unsatisfactory state of the epidemiology of mental disorders.

This paper will review some recent advances in the theory of consciousness in humans, and apply the results toward a 1 better understanding of mental disorders, using an information theory formalism which draws a parallel between punctuated evolutionary and cognitive/learning forms of information transmission (Wallace, 2002). The comparison of punctuated evolutionary adaptation with cognitive learning plateaus is counterintuitive: evolution is not a cognitive process. 

Cognition involves an active selection of one out of a complex repertory of possible responses to a sensory input, based on comparison with a learned representation of the outer world (e.g. Cohen, 2000; Atlan and Cohen, 1998). Although genes, or in the case of human biology, a composite of genes-and-culture (e.g. Richerson and Boyd, 2004), do indeed constitute a kind of ‘memory’ of past interaction with the world, response to selection pressure is not through direct comparison with that ‘memory’, but rather through the reproductive success of a random variation constrained by the path of evolutionary history. This is not cognition, and there can be no ‘intelligent purpose’ to adaptive or evolutionary process. Nonetheless, selection pressures represent systematic patterns of interaction with an embedding and highly structured ecosystem in which each species is itself manifest. We will, below, use this perspective to infer a rough analog between developmental onset and progression of a broad class of mental disorders and the onset and progression of a certain class of cancers.

Discussion and conclusions 
These examples, particularly the cancer model, suggest that consciousness in higher animals, the quintessence of information processing, is necessarily accompanied by elaborate regulatory and corrective processes, both internal and external. Only a few are well known: Sleep enables the consolidation and fixation in memory and semiautomatic mechanism of what has been consciously learned, and proper social interaction enhances mental fitness in humans. Other long-evolved, but currently poorly understood, mechanisms probably act as correctives to keep Gilbert’s evolutionary structures from going off the rails, e.g. attempting to limit flight-or-fight HPA responses to ‘real’ threats, and so on. 

Animal consciousness has thus had the benefit of several hundred million years of evolution to develop the corrective and compensatory structures for its stability and efficiency over the life course. These are currently not well characterized. The explicit inference, then, is that human consciousness can suffer interpenetrating dysfunctions of mutual and reciprocal interaction with embedding environments which will have early onset and often insidious staged developmental progression, possibly according to a cancer model. There will be no simple, reductionist brain chemical ‘bug in the program’ whose ‘fix’ can fully correct the problem. On the contrary, the growth of an individual over the life course, and contact with toxic features of the outside world, can be expected to initiate developmental disorders which will become more intrusive over time, most obviously following some damage accumulation model, but likely according to far more subtle, indeed punctuated, schemes. 

The obvious rate distortion argument suggests that, if an external information source is pathogenic, then sufficient exposure to it is sure to write a sufficiently accurate image of it on mind and body in a punctuated manner so as to initiate or promote similarly progressively punctuated developmental dysfunction. The key intervention, at the population level, is clearly to limit such exposures, a matter of proper environmental sanitation, in a broad sense, largely a question of social justice which has long been understood to be primarily determined by the interactions of cultural trajectory, group power relations, and economic structure with public policy (e.g. Fullilove, 2004; Wallace and Wallace, 1998; Gandy and Zumla, 2003; Farmer, 2003).（essay代写)

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