Controversies of the Mind

Ahnimus wrote:

More importantly watch this 2005 Skeptics Society presentation
Brain, Mind, Consciousness
http://www.tsntv.org/Events/2005%20Skeptics%20Society%20Annual%20Conference/

When your information is coming from the "Skeptics Society"..is there really any chance they come to findings that prove....their skeptisism is ever wrong?

I'm assuming not...

I'm not saying it is not true...but...they have a great pre-disposition to find...things that back up their skeptisism

and NO...i didn't watch it. Cause....i'm in the "Believers Society". I believe all findings that point towards a soul, interconnectedness, and things we can not see. I side w/ any research that backs this up...and dis-regard any research that disproves this. And when I run MY Studies...they Always...seem to prove ME right... (wink wink)

So, none of you have a clue, or are even going to get a clue. You just read tiny articles in favor of your opinion instead of delving into the hard science.

alright, it's the Dec. 19th issue, and unfortunately you have to be a subscriber to read it. however, if you are really interested, i could send you my login info and you could read it. just send me a pm or something.

Ok, forgive me for posting the same thing twice, but I copied and pasted this out of the big bang thread. It seemed more appropriate here. Ahnimus, this is the theory that they are talking about in what the bleep.


QUANTUM CONSCIOUSNESS
Basically consciousness is attributed to proteins called microtubes, that are found in the brains neurons.(*1) These microtubes behave like a quantum computer, and contain 'subunits' that are affected by quantum processes.

One such quantum process is known as superposition. Superposition occurs when an object has two alternate states simultaneously (this is related to wave functions and probability). These states are only detectable in the quantum world.

So microtubule superpositions evolve during subconscious processing (ie- automatic processes of the brain). The superpositions are seperated causing them to become unstable and they collapse. (*2) Their collapse is influenced by hidden propensities embedded in space time. It is this non random, yet non determined process that is being proposed to result in our 'free will' actions. To quote the author:

"our 'free will'actions could be the net results of deterministic processes acted on by hidden quantum logic"

There is no doubt that quantum consciousness is a very speculative theory, but certainly something to be further researched, especially as it makes testable predictions.

*1- An interesting note is that these microtubules may explain how a unicellular protozoa appears to do things like find food and avoid predators without a single synapse, as the microtubules are found in the cells cytoskeleton.
*2- One of the reasons this theory is not widely accepted is because this wave collapse is related to quantum gravity an entirely theoretical concept and entirely unproven.



Whilst QC is not very widely accepted, I do wonder if consciousness and free will are closely linked to quantum prcesses in the brain. It does appear to be the only hope for free will- unless you invoke a metaphysical brain.

ClimberInOz wrote:

Ok, forgive me for posting the same thing twice, but I copied and pasted this out of the big bang thread. It seemed more appropriate here. Ahnimus, this is the theory that they are talking about in what the bleep.


QUANTUM CONSCIOUSNESS
Basically consciousness is attributed to proteins called microtubes, that are found in the brains neurons.(*1) These microtubes behave like a quantum computer, and contain 'subunits' that are affected by quantum processes.

One such quantum process is known as superposition. Superposition occurs when an object has two alternate states simultaneously (this is related to wave functions and probability). These states are only detectable in the quantum world.

So microtubule superpositions evolve during subconscious processing (ie- automatic processes of the brain). The superpositions are seperated causing them to become unstable and they collapse. (*2) Their collapse is influenced by hidden propensities embedded in space time. It is this non random, yet non determined process that is being proposed to result in our 'free will' actions. To quote the author:

"our 'free will'actions could be the net results of deterministic processes acted on by hidden quantum logic"

There is no doubt that quantum consciousness is a very speculative theory, but certainly something to be further researched, especially as it makes testable predictions.

*1- An interesting note is that these microtubules may explain how a unicellular protozoa appears to do things like find food and avoid predators without a single synapse, as the microtubules are found in the cells cytoskeleton.
*2- One of the reasons this theory is not widely accepted is because this wave collapse is related to quantum gravity an entirely theoretical concept and entirely unproven.



Whilst QC is not very widely accepted, I do wonder if consciousness and free will are closely linked to quantum prcesses in the brain. It does appear to be the only hope for free will- unless you invoke a metaphysical brain.

Yea, but that's junk science. There is no quantum superposition. It's quantum theory that has been distorted.

jlew24asu wrote:

when are you going to get it? you arent better then anyone else here. saying shit like this is getting all too typical for you.

Dude, don't start this again. I was responding to those that won't actually get into the science, they just pick articles that support what they currently believe. I've spent months researching consciousness, I think I have a better handle on it. You want to talk about quantum phsyics, cosmology, neuroscience, psychology, bring it, I've covered them all. But none of you are versed in any of that, so you just talk headlines.

Once, someone came on here with a background in physics, and they agreed with my interpretation of Heissenberg's uncertainty principle. Maybe I do have a better understanding of this subject than you do. You probably know more about Israel than me, but that doesn't mean shit on this thread.

ClimberInOz wrote:

I don't know if I would call QC junk science, although it may not be far off it. My main reason for skepticism is related to the fact that they invoke a lot of speculation into their ideas.

However superposition is not the idea that I would refer to as speculation. It is a well accepted component of the quantum theory, developedby Erwin Schrodinger and demonstrated in Thomas Young's Double Slit Experiment.

No man, the double slit experiment only shows that attempting to detect a particle affects it's behavior. No evidence of superposition. It was speculated that the particles "can be whatever they want" or some shit, like they are every possibility until they collapse. Garbage. They are a wave because the particles interact with each other on a quantum scale, but when you add a quantitative detector it affects the behavior of the particles by overpowering the quantum level determinents.

Ahnimus wrote:

Can you copy & paste the article?

upon request, here is the leading article. keep in mind that the survey goes more into depth, and that would be too much to paste into this site.




IN A building that looks, from the outside, like the villain's lair in an early James Bond film, a robot moves around. Called Darwin XI, it is the brainchild of Gerald Edelman. The building is the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, California, and Dr Edelman is one of an eclectic group of researchers—some of them neurologists and some philosophers—who are trying to explain what is, perhaps, the biggest mystery of the human brain: the nature of consciousness. His approach is to build machines run by computer programs that work the way he thinks that brains work, and then see what happens.

Consciousness is the core of an individual's sense of self, yet, paradoxically, it is the most elusive concept in biology. Even framing the questions is difficult. Broadly, though, researchers have taken three approaches. One is the experimental method embraced by Dr Edelman. A second is to look for consciousness directly in the brain. The third is merely to sit and think about the question. Though empirical scientists sometimes scoff at it, this third method is not to be despised. After all, it was by sitting and thinking about some paradoxical results in physics that Albert Einstein was able to break out of the mental mould of classical physics and invent the non-commonsensical but scientifically successful theory of relativity.

Dr Edelman refers to his theory of consciousness as neural Darwinism. It combines two ideas. The first, as he charmingly puts it, is that “neurons which fire together, wire together.” This process of mutual reinforcement provides the selective pressure that is the prerequisite for any Darwinian-based theory: to those neuronal networks that have shall be given, from those that have not, even what little they have shall be taken away. The resulting changes are the physical basis of learning.

The second part of Dr Edelman's theory is an idea he calls re-entrant mapping. The process of learning can be viewed as one by which reality (as perceived by the senses) is transformed into a representation of reality. Mathematically, this transformation is described as mapping. In Dr Edelman's model of the brain, however, there is a second process: the maps themselves are mapped by other groups of neurons. It is this phenomenon of different groups of neurons watching each other that he refers to as re-entrant mapping.

Whether neural Darwinism is truly a theory of consciousness is moot. It may not, for example, fully account for the feeling of actually experiencing things such as emotions that most people would think central to conscious experience. (Philosophers refer to such consciously experienced feelings as qualia.) As a theory of how brains work, though, it seems to have a lot going for it, for Dr Edelman has used it to construct a series of ever more complex robots that behave, in many ways, like animals. The latest, Darwin XI, has a range of senses: vision, hearing, touch and what Dr Edelman refers to as taste (but which is actually sensitivity to the electrical conductivity of what its “taste” organs are in contact with). It also has whiskers.

Darwin XI can do a lot. It can, for example, learn to navigate mazes in search of rewards, in the way that a laboratory rat does. It can develop preferences, thanks to a pleasure centre that generates what Dr Edelmann calls good taste in response to those rewards. And it can forget those preferences if they are no longer rewarding.

Other robots are able to perform similar tricks, but they have to be trained specifically to do so. The computer that runs Darwin XI can work things out for itself. It is loaded with virtual neurons, the initial strength of whose synapses with one another is allocated by a random number generator, and left to get on with things. It does have a bit of pre-ordained neuro-anatomy (in particular, it has been fitted with the equivalent of a hippocampus) but, like the local specialisation in a real cortex observed by people like Dr Kanwisher, most of the specialisation in Darwin XI simply emerges. This happens through the formation of specialised groups of neurons that resemble the specialised locations seen in real brains. The researchers know this because they can track changes in the way the virtual neurons connect to each other.

So is Darwin XI conscious? Well, it cannot speak, so no one can ask it. But the answer probably depends on whether you think a rat is conscious. That illustrates a big part of the problem of consciousness: no one can agree on who has it, let alone what it is. In fact, the questions are linked. There is a general feeling that what is special about humans is to do not with their being clever, but their being conscious in a different way from most other animals.

The inward eye
One feature of human consciousness that students of the field suggest might be unique is an awareness of self. The idea that self-awareness might be specific to humans and a few close relatives resulted from an experiment done three decades ago by Gordon Gallup, who now works at the University of Albany in New York state. This showed that chimpanzees (and, as subsequently emerged, other great apes) share with humans the ability to recognise themselves in a mirror, whereas monkeys and various other reasonably intelligent species, such as dogs, do not. A few species that are not apes have also passed the mirror test, including elephants and dolphins. But most animals fail it.

All the species that have passed have something in common: abnormally large cerebral cortices relative to the rest of their brains. Whether self-awareness simply emerges from a large cortex or whether selection for it necessarily results in one is unclear. Perhaps it is both. What is interesting about Dr Edelman's theory is that awareness of self is built into it. That, in essence, is what re-entrant mapping is.

Such self-awareness is not, however, indivisible. One treatment for serious epilepsy is to cut the corpus callosum and the other nervous connections between the two hemispheres of the brain, which stops the fit passing from one hemisphere to the other. This does not usually affect a person's everyday behaviour, but sometimes the two hemispheres have completely different personalities, and where that happens the individual's behaviour does change—indeed, he ceases to be an individual as the hemispheres fight for control of the body. The conflict often manifests itself in the person's hands, each controlled by a different hemisphere, trying to do opposing things. One hand may try to put on a piece of clothing, for example, while the other tries to remove it.

Tales of mystery and imagination
At first sight such cases seem extraordinary. But they are merely striking illustrations of a broader point: that in the brain nothing is ever quite what it seems, and experience and common sense are little use when formulating theories about the self. Two of the lesion studies mentioned in the introduction to this survey, dealing with the inability to perceive motion and recognise faces, arise from the fact that visual experience, which for those who can see is the dominant form of conscious experience, is a complete fabrication. What is consciously perceived is not a simple mapping of the images that fall on the retina. Instead, the signals from the optic nerves are deconstructed and re-formed in a process so demanding that it involves about a third of the cerebral cortex.

Even those with healthy brains get a hint of this in the form of optical illusions. These are patterns that the image-reconstruction process finds it confusing to deal with. An even more obvious discord between reality and perception is colour. The world is not really coloured, it just looks that way because it is tremendously useful that it should, so the retina has cells that are particularly sensitive to three different wavelengths of light, and the brain weaves the signals from them together to create the phenomenon called colour.

Colours are good examples of qualia—the things that people feel that they are experiencing. Much of the philosophical side of the study of consciousness seeks either to explain qualia or to explain them away. They are, for example, at the heart of the question of dualism. For it is hard to ask what is generating them and what is perceiving them without concluding that the processes are separate.

Daniel Dennett, a doyen among philosophers of consciousness, disparagingly refers to the putative “observing self” in this scenario as a homunculus. He calls the mental stage on which the qualia supposedly act out their play the Cartesian theatre, after Descartes, the philosopher who thought the soul resided in the pineal gland. And he points out that exactly the same problem applies to how the homunculus would perceive its own qualia. Turn the theatre into a cinema, though, and Antonio Damasio quite likes the analogy. His twist is to place the observing self in the film itself, rather than in the audience. That is not a particularly easy idea to grasp, but it does seem to bear some relationship to Dr Edelman's idea of re-entrant mapping.

That something in the brain really is performing the role of an observing self is suggested by the work of Benjamin Libet at the University of California, San Francisco. Dr Libet used electroencephalography to look at brain activity during the process of making simple decisions such as when to move a finger. He showed that the process which leads to the act starts about three-tenths of a second before an individual is consciously aware of it. In other words, the observer is just that: an observer, not a decider. This may explain the feeling that most people have experienced at one time or another of having deliberately done something that they had not actually wanted or intended to.

Though Dr Libet's experiment is almost laughably simple, it pokes a stick in a very deep pond. A feeling of freedom to make conscious choices is at the heart of most people's sense of themselves. Even Freud, who popularised the idea of the unconscious, believed that conscious free-willed thought could override unconscious desires. One way of interpreting Dr Libet's work, though, could be that such free will is, like colour vision, simply a powerful illusion. An actor in a film, perhaps. But an actor reading from somebody else's script.

The truth, unsatisfactory though it is, is that no one really knows. Nor does anyone know where the next breakthrough will come from. Perhaps Dr Edelman, or one of his successors, will build a robot that can describe its own qualia-like experiences. Perhaps neuroanatomy will throw up a surprising, crucial observation. Or perhaps a bored, unregarded clerk will come to the rescue with an insight that dominates 21st-century thinking in the way that relativity dominated the 20th.

Ahnimus wrote:

No man, the double slit experiment only shows that attempting to detect a particle affects it's behavior. No evidence of superposition. It was speculated that the particles "can be whatever they want" or some shit, like they are every possibility until they collapse. Garbage. They are a wave because the particles interact with each other on a quantum scale, but when you add a quantitative detector it affects the behavior of the particles by overpowering the quantum level determinents.

When done with a normal light source the light and dark patterns can be explained by wave interference.

However the experiment has been replicated so that only a single photon enters the device at a time. The single photon is fired through the double slit and makes a 'spot' on the sensor screen. This is repeated numerous times and the combined effect is recorded.

Because of quantum uncertainty, we cannot know where each single photon will strike the screen, but the combined effect is identical to the interference pattern for a normal light source.

The paradox is this- the photon behaves like a particle when it is fired and when it strikes the screen, but the overall interference pattern means that all of the particles have as a whole, still behaved like a wave.

Superposition is a possible solution. The photon has an associated wave function, and passes through both slits simulteneously (in fact it takes every possible trajectory).

This (to my knowledge) is the only current explanation for the interference pattern achieved through repeating the firing of a single photon through the double slit experiment. If you know of any other current explanation let me know, I would be very interested.

Also, John Wheeler, from the university of texas, has demonstrated the impact of observation on the quantum world through his delayed choice experiment. I will have to look it up again but I will get back to you about that one.

ClimberInOz wrote:

When done with a normal light source the light and dark patterns can be explained by wave interference.

However the experiment has been replicated so that only a single photon enters the device at a time. The single photon is fired through the double slit and makes a 'spot' on the sensor screen. This is repeated numerous times and the combined effect is recorded.

Because of quantum uncertainty, we cannot know where each single photon will strike the screen, but the combined effect is identical to the interference pattern for a normal light source.

The paradox is this- the photon behaves like a particle when it is fired and when it strikes the screen, but the overall interference pattern means that all of the particles have as a whole, still behaved like a wave.

Superposition is a possible solution. The photon has an associated wave function, and passes through both slits simulteneously (in fact it takes every possible trajectory).

This (to my knowledge) is the only current explanation for the interference pattern achieved through repeating the firing of a single photon through the double slit experiment. If you know of any other current explanation let me know, I would be very interested.

Also, John Wheeler, from the university of texas, has demonstrated the impact of observation on the quantum world through his delayed choice experiment. I will have to look it up again but I will get back to you about that one.

I have an explanation. Firstly, we know that "nothing" is not nothing. Even where no matter exists, dark matter may exist. But we know air is made up of Hyrdogen and Oxygen atoms. So the electrons or photons may create a rift in this or the ether to create an interference. Makes a lot more sense than superposition to me.