A New Paradigm in the Study of Consciousness
The following is a description of what I think is the most valid framework for modeling consciousness that currently exists. Tell me what you think!
In my opinion, the most viable current theory is a sort of diversely pluralistic monism explaining perception as conventional chemistry infused with distinctly quantum dynamics, most essentially the superpositions or blended wavelengths which bring about complex assortments of color and feeling within matter. Yet it sharply differs from the physicalism that has been so pervasive amongst science’s monist accounts of material structure, instead regarding the hallmarks of perception as taking effect at a very basic level, something more akin to panpsychism.
It is not, however, a panpsychism strictly speaking, because even though superpositions which give rise to the substance of qualitative experience are very close to fundamental, they are still an emergent property of numerous interacting atoms, requiring relatively large-scale, finely tuned arrangements to produce anything resembling a sentient mind. The most precise term is probably panprotopsychism, coined by philosopher Bertrand Russell, in this incarnation distinguishing consciousness from the body and offering a conceptual conduit for describing body-transcending consciousness as a material occurrence, so that the collective unconscious, soul and the spiritual in general, all kinds of frontiers which psychology and neuroscience have barely breached, may become accessible and brought into harmony with the foundations of current knowledge.
In my opinion, the most viable current theory is a sort of diversely pluralistic monism explaining perception as conventional chemistry infused with distinctly quantum dynamics, most essentially the superpositions or blended wavelengths which bring about complex assortments of color and feeling within matter. Yet it sharply differs from the physicalism that has been so pervasive amongst science’s monist accounts of material structure, instead regarding the hallmarks of perception as taking effect at a very basic level, something more akin to panpsychism.
It is not, however, a panpsychism strictly speaking, because even though superpositions which give rise to the substance of qualitative experience are very close to fundamental, they are still an emergent property of numerous interacting atoms, requiring relatively large-scale, finely tuned arrangements to produce anything resembling a sentient mind. The most precise term is probably panprotopsychism, coined by philosopher Bertrand Russell, in this incarnation distinguishing consciousness from the body and offering a conceptual conduit for describing body-transcending consciousness as a material occurrence, so that the collective unconscious, soul and the spiritual in general, all kinds of frontiers which psychology and neuroscience have barely breached, may become accessible and brought into harmony with the foundations of current knowledge.
Comments (159)
Not that there's anything wrong with panpsychism or protopanpsychism or anything similar, but I don't think it's correct to say it's a new paradigm. The idea is by now more or less known. What changes is the emphasis of in what part of the process experience emerges, not so much the basic framework.
But even if correct - and there's no way to verify these views via experimentation - I don't know how it's an explanation per se. One is stating that at bottom, experience arises, hence there can be consciousness as we understand it. I'm still puzzled by the problems associated with consciousness.
Is that like a square circle?
Another woo-of-the-gaps is "a new paradigm"?
Really? Where?
Its a particularate monism.
Quoting 180 Proof
Its not woo-of-the-gaps, once you grasp the superposition principle being considered an alternative seems impossible.
Wikipedia's panpsychism article might give you some leads.
Quoting Manuel
Seems almost self-evident to me once you comprehend it that superposition or blended waves must be the core process involved in generating not only objective but subjective color along with the fundamental fragments of feeling.
Quoting Manuel
Experiments will be found that determine the way quantum processes work in the brain. Its a matter of researching how electric fields superposition with specially adapted classes of molecule, producing extremely synthetic matter waves. The basic phenomena are probably capable of occurring independent of a fully functional brain, in tissue samples, perhaps lab grown. More advanced imaging technology can reveal the basic structure of wavelength motions.
:zip:
Perhaps they will be found. Maybe it's probable. But the subjective "side" of consciousness, I don't think that's explained even if quantum phenomena are involved somewhere in the process.
I'd rather a direct citation. IF Russell said it, where? It sounds wrong for him.
Bertrand Russell discussed something like it, I'm fairly sure of that based on what I've read, but perhaps he didn't coin the term. I'm actually glad you pointed out that possible error.
I was recently following the dispute between Strawson and Dennett concerning Qualia and panpsychism. There are philosophers I prefer to Dennett, but I do think that he is closer to the right track than Strawson in recognizing that it is not what is intrinsic that makes consciousness what it is , but what emerges out of a relational web of mutual influences. These reciprocal causes require a different account than that expressed in the language of quantum physics.
Well, it's our day to disagree on topics today, hah.
I agree with Strawson here as well as Chomsky and Russell. I think Dennett's account can't actually be formulated.
But I do agree that I doubt that quantum physics will end up playing a direct role in consciousness. Here I could be way off, but as of now, I don't see a connection.
The issue I see, is that the problem of consciousness is not hard for objective reasons, but hard because it's not an objective issue. I am tempted to ask, do you think that nobody could have understood the nature of mind, before these recent discoveries were made? That only now, mankind will come to understand its own consciousness, due to discoveries that are only now being made? When you 'explain' the nature of human consciousness, what actually has been explained? I mean, what prompted quantum theory was, originally, an anomaly in the observation of black body radiation. Further investigation lead to further anomalies, culminating in the atomic theory developed in the 1920's by Bohr and others which is still, I believe, the basis of the standard model of particle physics.
But what problem does a theory of consciousness solve? If this theory is a solution, then what is the problem it is setting out to solve? That the first-person nature of consciousness is not amenable to objective scrutiny? And what about that is a problem? Why should we want it to be?
I think that people often depend on other people's opinions as if they are fundamental truth/facts when in reality they are just guesses that are popular.
And in depending on so many other people's opinions without hesitation we become limited in are ability to understand the world we live in
when are means of measuring and understanding don't fit the thing we're measuring it leaves us perplexed as to why reality doesn't fit our measuring device that is supposed to be able to measure all of reality and not once thinking if perhaps the salesman sold us a piece of crap.
Imagine being able to draw a diagram in a textbook that represents the chemistry of qualitative perception as incisively as photosynthesis and the Kreb's cycle, probably a hybrid of quantum-active biochemical pathways in entangled superposition with radiative fields such as the brain's. Not merely some chemicals involved, but the actual substance of what has traditionally been regarded as subjectivity.
Or a diagram of an ecosystem that includes spiritual aspects in addition to material ones. The concept of evolution would no longer be based primarily around survival of the fittest, but more on purpose-driven selection. "Selection pressure" would be transmogrified into a psychological dynamic that humans can deal with more cognitively, reasonably, accurately.
Or a diagram of the contemporary collective unconscious along with its evolutionary contribution to the development of organic lineages.
Modeling perception as an objective substance has huge possible benefits in our effort to comprehend nature and ourselves. We'll probably find that brain substance is in superposition with fields we haven't even given a technical term to at this stage. So much more of life becomes introductory knowledge and common ground when we can render its components mechanistically.
Is it though? Moving from the quantum to the macroscopic world is essentially just a type of phase-transition. Quantum biology seems a solid field of study to me:
"Inspired by the surprising phenomenon interpreted as long-living quantum coherence in warm, noisy, complex and yet remarkably efficient energy transfer systems, many models of environment-assisted quantum transport have been proposed."
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsif.2018.0640
Just because we can't currently envision how living systems might create a framework for delaying quantum decoherence doesn't mean there isn't one. Quantum tunneling is an improbable event that is part of everyday technology now.
Quantum features of matter aren't even as constrained as a phase change. The way I see it, electron orbitals and electromagnetic radiation are different forms of the same electromagnetic field, with electrons within atoms being a more concentrated fluxing in complex standing wave patterns as opposed to radiative, their structure induced by the nucleus in likeness to magnetic field lines.
What we traditionally think of as a chemical bond happens to be centered on the infrared, "heat" portion of the spectrum, a radiation which atoms are so to speak bathed in, but thermodynamic properties vary continuously with visible light and the rest of the electromagnetic wavelengths, so that no fundamental disjunct or boundary between motions induced by heat, light and particularity exists. Decoherence may be an epiphenomenon in the infrared portion of the spectrum while quantum degrees of freedom remain unperturbed at alternate wavelengths, even on the macro scale.
I meant in particular that I find Dennett’s account of color perception much more exciting and useful than Strawson’s intrincality-qualia formulation. Like the phenonenologists. , he gets that the blue sky appears to each of us. it as an intrinsic bit of qualia , but as defined by its associations to a rich web of relevant experiences. Each of these associations we remove
from the experience of the blue sky reduces its meaning for us.
I also think Russell could have learned much from Wittgenstein about intrinsicality.
That's fair, interest and excitement is a matter of taste after all.
As for Russell, he might have been influenced to some degree by the early Wittgenstein, so it's possible. But he didn't much care for the latter Wittgenstein's work, which is the more popular and influential one.
:100: :up:
Wouldn't it be awesome to know how water nymphs and totem gods function? lol Quantum theory is not the final say, but it is the gateway my friend. (And superpositions can exist at body temperature for at least a second, e.g. ATP molecules).
Traditional neuron chemistry is of course a factor in consciousness, synaptic connections, neurotransmitters, ion channels etc., but seems to me that chemical composition of the soma must play a vital role via the cytoskeleton holding biochemical pathways in place, which are a sort of oscillating standing wave, such that some coordination of superposition states can occur, perhaps with accompanying wave function collapse. These superpositions would actually be subjective color and feeling, matter wave images or some such entity projected within the brain like a negative photograph in the case of sight and visualizing, a collection of quantum superpositions at the nerve ending and elsewhere in the case of tactile sensations, etc. My guess is the basic chemistry is intracellular, while the synthesis and projection phenomenon can be relatively macroscopic. Brain waves are some large scale signatures of these oscillating superpositions.
I'll start by admitting I don't really know what this means. I doubt any credible physicist, biologist, neurologist, psychologist, or any other scientist believes that a mechanism such as what you have described explains consciousness. You should provide a better description of the mechanism you're discussing and some references.
I didn't intro that very aptly, its a paragraph from near the end of an essay, but if you read the rest of this thread, you'll get the idea I think.
But biology tells us that every enzyme or other basic biological mechanism is both quantum and informational.
So sure, biology is quantum in the sense that life employs artful mechanical structure to decohere quantum potentials in a controlled way. A photosynthetic pigment complex can delay the thermal decoherence of a photon-induced exciton long enough for it to "explore all available paths" in superposition and thus get conducted a considerable distance with 100 percent efficiency to the reaction centre.
Biology is classically organised in a way that employs the quantum zeno effect and so creates a momentary channelling in a warm thermal setting.
But this is classical control over quantum "weirdness". It is a harnessing of decoherence rather than letting the decoherence happen in the usual thermally random fashion. The coherence ain't the output driving the show. It is being able to monkey with the timing and place of the collapse which makes life special in being a classical system that is unlike other classical systems in having this kind of situated control over something that would otherwise just be random.
The ability to do all this then comes from the frankly informational or semiotic aspect of biology - the vast empire of regulatory and feedback signalling that starts with the genetic code.
The structure of an enzyme or photosynthetic complex is determined by a DNA sequence and its machine like protein manufacturing process. The millisecond to millisecond running of those structures is determined by a local regulatory flow of information - the web of molecular signals that tell the enzyme to switch its quantum-harvesting powers on or off.
So right down where biology and neurobiology starts - the nanoscale where both quantum effects and informational effects loom large in the life of the classical molecular component – you have a complex causality going on. You have at least three kinds of account. The quantum, the classical and the informational.
Decoherence then unites the quantum and the classical description as "dissipative structure" - the story of how thermodynamics organises molecular structure. And then semiotics unites information theory with classical dynamics - the story of how a modelling relation can be used to constrain physical systems.
This is how the science of life and mind is actually going.
You are peddling a lot of muddled woo I'm afraid. What is a brain wave when it's at home? What is a quantum superposition?
One is a collective measurement that humans make - a roar of electrochemical activity heard from outside the neural stadium. The other is a map of quantum probabilities, not some kind of physical thing.
To call either of them a wave, or a field, or anything else that smacks of literal material being, is merely an analogy. And even to call a classical wave or field a literal material is a folk physics fallacy.
So the science of life and mind is in fact spectacularly interesting. And it is quite true that life has its informational roots into the physical world so deeply that it can regulate not just its classical behaviour but tap into its further quantum potential.
To then turn around and conflate the three levels - semiosis, classical mechanical, and quantum mechanical as "all some kind of global substantial field phenomenon", is an insult to the freely available science.
Upvote because I have no idea what you've written, but believe it completely.
:clap: :100: :fire:
Hah! I’m deep in the weeds on this stuff as I’m catching up on the vast amount of the new biology that has emerged this past decade.
But the simple idea is that life needs some kind of foundation to justify its causal tricks, Life is all about top down information regulating bottom up physics. Genes and other kinds of signalling turn chemical and physical processes to their own selfish advantage by being able to control their rate and direction.
The surprising realisation is that life can only do this if that physics and chemistry is critical or unstable - poised on a knife edge.
So the usual physicalist presumption is that life - like any machinery - would want to be made out of stable, solid, stuff. You can’t build complicated structure from unstable material.
But the opposite is the case. For information to be able to impact on the physical realm, it must be working with a material that is right on the edge of being tipped. The material must be fundamentally uncertain - in the way that BOTH the randomness of classical thermodynamics and quantum mechanics suggests - so that life’s informational records and memories can make a specific difference and give some action its chosen direction.
Mr Quantum. I know you could decohere into a definite energy state at some random moment and place. But why not decohere over here in a few seconds in a way that feeds all that potential into this little game I’ve got going where I feed hot electrons through a chloroplast reaction centre and fix some carbon.
So the big woo story is about how quantum weirdness subverts classical physics so badly that maybe even consciousness might be - hands wave furiously - a kind of coherent state.
But life and mind are the products of a properly complex causality - one where management of instability is the general core principle. So life thrives on the edge of chaos. The more tippable the physics, the more profit there is for the information that can tip it.
:up:
First of all, information is merely relations between physical entities viewed from our modeling perspective, a distinctly human formal causality. "Information" is a reifying of all the observed causal interactions between a given set of existents, and lacks independence from matter. The information a gene, quantum process etc. contains is not ontologically distinguishable from the structure of its components, so any realist account of biological occurrences must involve a substance, not a probability.
I'm not familiar with the mathematical deep structure of contemporary quantum mechanics, the complex calculations that would be performed by a computer for instance to figure quantum probabilities, though I comprehend the basic variables and their correlations from a lot of reading, but I've gathered that superpositions are modeled as a synthesis of infinite possible states called Eigenstates (perhaps you know more about this than me). Infinitude must be allowing these calculations to output the probabilities of a future moment from initial conditions with negligible error.
But in the real world, superpositions are not a combination of infinite states. Instead, they are the synthesis of a finite range of wavelengths. The simplest example is the visible spectrum: wavelengths of light hybridize in innumerable but constrained combinations to give the full complement of colors as detectable by the human eye. This hybridization is essentially waves blending to form new compound wavelengths.
My hypothesis is that the same process happens on a profound scale throughout Earth environments because all matter has entangled wavelength. In particular, electrons are in pervasive superposition or wave blending everywhere around us, both within and between molecules. From a realist perspective, the concept of a molecule may be convenient illusion: a metal post is about as entangled as matter can get.
My thinking is that while superposition is common, even perhaps intrinsic, due to various causes such as temperature, chemical structure etc. theses superpositions dissolve as quickly as they materialize in many cases. But in some situations, superpositions can be sustained for longer periods. This is particularly true of the brain and many biological systems which have been evolutionarily adapted for sustaining or generating superpositions. With enough emergent organization this gives rise to the substance of qualitative perception, obviously the core of functional experience.
Brain waves are emergent from the flow of electrical potential in billions of synchronized neurons, and biochemical superpositions in the soma and most likely elsewhere blend into this macroscopic wave field to create organwide coherence (superpositioned entanglement) states with many trillions of pockets of quantum activity. These microscale quantum pockets blended into the brain's EM field are qualia. It has not been discovered which classes of molecule participate in this neurological process, but it will be.
I also hypothesize that entangled superpositions amongst matter may extend beyond electrons, perhaps in fields which haven't been observed directly at this point (think dark matter, or neutrino interactions with the nucleus), and these nonelectromagnetic entanglements might be largely responsible for nonlocal causation. Reality is comprised of a more essential substrate than what has been detected so far, and this will be the key to comprehending nonlocality.
Much of that is speculative, but not at all farfetched Mr. Muddled Woo lol
'If you look at something mutable, you cannot grasp it either with the bodily senses or the consideration of the mind, unless it possesses some form…If this form is removed, the mutable dissolves into nothing… Through eternal Form every temporal thing can receive its form and, in accordance with its kind, can manifest and embody number in space and time…Everything that is changeable must also be formable…Nothing can give itself form, since nothing can give itself what it does not have.' ~ Augustine.
It’s just quantum nonsense, an abuse of terminology rather than a concrete conjecture. Nothing to see here.
This is the statement of a priest.
I've never really understood it, but I haven't tried to study it in earnest. Whatever its merits, I don't think it can be a 'paradigm'. The field of consciousness studies is too fractured and divergent to have any paradigms as yet. A paradigm is a kind of wide reaching set of assumptions that is nearly universally accepted. We're nowhere near that with consciousness. Although many people seem to be convinced that biology is relevant.
I read Pattee's Cell Phenomenology: The First Experience
It was interesting. Have you looked at that one?
I solves the problem of TPF being cluttered up with conversations about the nature of consciousness. :razz:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/russellian-monism/
search ' the page for panprotopsychism
From other sources it might be a name of a position inspired by Russell's position.
What, you can't admit defeat? j/k Its actually almost excessively concrete, not nonsense at all. You may not have the same conceptual background to my verbiage, but if not I suggest reading Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology by Johnjoe McFadden and Einstein's Unfinished Revolution: The Search for What Lies Beyond the Quantum by Lee Smolin. They're fairly easy reads and will stimulate a lot of productive thought about quantum mechanics.
Edit: And I forgot to ask if you are proposing non-DNA based consciousness.
Second edit: Forgot to address it to Enrique and other quantum theorists.
EDIT: sorry, microtubules. I'm getting the wrong jargon.
So I contrast the two. The abuse and use of quantum physics. It is very easy to tell the difference.
If you've read Smolin's book I'm surprised you don't assign more weight to the phenomenon of wave and wavicle blending. As he says, "that is what waves do". Superposition seems fundamental to matter and should be expected as a primary dynamic in many situations. Of course I'm referring to the physical occurrence, not the mathematical techniques for modeling it.
It doesn't seem to me that my view much differs from your perspective, it is merely proposing one more type of semiotic/energetic mechanism which happens to explain the qualia of consciousness. Perhaps certain forms of contact between waves and wavicles are an additional tipping point where the classical gives way to the quantumlike.
ga ga goo goo lol
Correct, but this also means your QM stuff has to ultimately resolve to physical structure - so has to interact and integrate with physical structure. How does it do that? How does a wavicle create biological structure and why?
Your theory lacks a definition of consciousness, and an overall plot. Simply stating QM is at the heart of consciousness in the brain is not enough. Are you describing a dualism? It seems to me you would need a monism / panpschism for your theory to be coherent?
Quoting Enrique
I would say all matter "is" entangled wavelengths. But I would emphasize that it is informational structure that is evolving and becoming more complex, not necessarily the wave structure, in this I'm bearing in mind that consciousness is still receiving its information from the frequencies and vibrations that caused structure fundamentally.
In a sense, it is a situation of informational structure ( us ) integrating more informational structure ( wavicle ), so it is a like with like interaction, and a process of evolving and accumulating information.
The things you're writing about pinged my memory, so I went back looking through the archives. There were two previous threads I really enjoyed. One, "What is life?", started by @Samuel Lacrampe about four years ago, included your discussion of information's role in biology. The other, "Networks, Evolution, and the Question of Life," started by @StreetlightX, also about four years ago, included a back and forth among SLX, @fdrake, and you about gene networks. I think I'm going to go back and reread them.
Are you referring to the "fine tuning" of the universe - that forces all systems in ordered pockets of the universe to self organize by integrating information?
Probably what I'm in the process of trying to figure out. In general, I think various types of motion exist in physics - linear, oscillating, interactive, perhaps you can think of more - and the properties of these motions vary, most foundationally as a function of differentials in the concentration of a single substance, so my view is a form of monism.
The wavelength/frequency properties of matter are of course a type of oscillating motion, with these oscillations combining (interactive) and flowing (linear) as well.
I guess my pet theory is that waves and wavicles throughout nature combine as readily as a body of water whether we directly witness this or not, and these hybrids comprise both image qualia (dimensional) and nonimage qualia (feeling). But this matter is also extremely quantized, at least on the microscopic scale, which significantly disassociates it, so only specific, very complex and hyperorganized arrangements can give rise to complex qualitative experience, yet the possibilities are vast and far exceed the bounds of biological taxonomy as we currently define it. So that is why my view is a version of panprotopsychism: the actual substance of perception is present at the nano and micro scale, much more fundamental to matter than the level of organization that gives rise to either biological form or humanlike sentience. I regard human sentience as the somewhat arbitrary standard for what is conscious, just as the visible spectrum is our standard for what light is, corresponding to the brain and eye respectively.
That's my rough and ready idea of how to define physical structure's relationship to consciousness. Interesting to ponder how nonlocal causation might fit with this.
So in what way is a brain wave the same thing as a quantum wave? And what way is either like a ripple on a pond?
A brain wave is a general way to talk about patterns of excitation~inhibition in neural circuitry. The circuitry is presumed to be doing the functional task of the integration and differentiation of information so as to meaningfully model a self in a pragmatic relation with its world. And so a global measure of changes in voltages at the scalp says something about the general statistical degree of coordination versus isolation in relation to types of brain task.
In other words, the brain is being modelled as some kind of computer. Waves - as various degrees of EEG signal choppiness - are an attempt to glean some kind of insight about the nature of the software routines from the crackling sounds the hardware happens to be making. And even then, waves - as a measure of coherent dynamical simplicity – don't tell the story. A sine wave makes a clean theoretical baseline for measuring an EEG recording's departures from such a state of ultimate mathematical simplicity. At the other end of the spectrum is the chaos of 1/f white noise - a mathematical model of incoherence of wavelet fluctuations occurring over all spatiotemporal scales.
So - unlike the way you are using the term - neurobiology has some maths in mind. The kind of maths that can ground experimental measurements. It is saying that if the system in question is extracting meaningful work from patterns of neural excitation and inhibition – a hypothesis amply supported by the structural anatomy - then we can use the opposing extremes of noise, monotonous sine wave vs 1/f chaos, as the contrasting bookends for a global statistical measure of the brain's activity at some sampling window in time.
EEG recordings were great back in the 1950s when there wasn't anything better. But the popular understanding got stuck at the alpha/beta/theta brainwave level of classification. The hippy dippy shit. It wasn't interested enough to follow along to the P300s and N400s that could be used to impute something about the real dynamics of the brain's information integration.
Classical waves are a similar story. In this case, the mathematical bookends were the mechanics of classical waves vs the mechanics of classical particles. If you had some classical phenomenon like a ripple on a pond, you could imagine it as an atomistic collection of points that was to some extent or other glued together by a pattern of attractive-repulsive forces. There was enough viscosity in the system to produce a collective behaviour that again varied somewhere between the Platonic ideals of the simplest symmetry of a sine wave and the maximum complexity of chaotic turbulent disorder.
So the world at a classical level of observation and modelling became measurable because the wave concept was reciprocal to the particle concept. You could place physical systems like ocean surfaces or even desert sand dunes somewhere on a spectrum between collective coherence and individual independence in terms of classical measures of mass and force.
Then you have talk about waves - and their lack - in yet another setting. Quantum mechanics. Discrete particles also seemed to act like continuous waves, and vice versa. An electron was like a wave. A photon was also like a particle.
This observational surprise was formalised by quantum field theory where the 'waviness' of a wave function was built into a calculus of evolving probabilities. This created its own mess about how the following of "every possible path" then actually got collapsed or decohered to result in a classically defined state.
So the wave function description of fundamental nature ended up being both fantastically successful and radically incomplete in a way science wasn't exactly used to. I could go on. But my essential point is that we talk about waves for a particular reason, just as we talk about atomic points. They are meaningful to the degree they are Platonic mathematical objects we can drop into our theoretical frameworks and start making bookended measurements.
So we have a sine wave in mind as the simplest combination of a translation and rotation - the cannonical symmetries (or energetic symmetry breakings) of classically-imagined spacetime. The generator of a sine wave - as a continuous trajectory - is a point marked on the edge of a rolling wheel.
Then from this useful model of greatest vibrational or resonant simplicity, we can look to the "other" that anchors the other end of the business of scientific measurement.
That is all there is to the "magic" of a wave. It is a shape so simple that nature can't help but start from that geometric motif, just as the notion of a zero-D point is also the conception of an ultimate state of discreteness or incoherent discontinuity. The idealised fluctuation.
And this is why EEG studies and quantum theory can both be talking about waves without thinking of those waves as some kind of concrete material substance. They are just one end of a useful modelling dichotomy. A logical foundation from which to mount the experimental assault.
So you say you are referring to the physical phenomenon here. Brain waves = quantum waves = somehow or bloody other, consciousness. And that is why I say you just freely abuse these concepts to create a hand-waving charade of explanation.
I don't know exactly what you mean by that. But criticality and spontaneous symmetry breaking are concepts used to show that fine tuning is not such a big deal. If the direction of symmetry breaking is essentially random, then the appearance of being a particular choice is explained away by it being a meaningless accident.
Self organisation as a result of entropic force is another related thing - dissipative structure theory.
My point is that life is certainly founded in dissipative structure. Biology pays for its negentropic existence by constructing channels for accelerating the entropification of the universe.
And then to be able to do that construction using information, the flows it directs must already be on the point of physically tipping.
It would take too much energy as a farmer to move a herd of dead cows from one paddock to another. But very little energy to stand at the gate and shut it behind a herd of live cows as they eventually wander through.
So the contrast is between a world of static objects that somehow gets organised by the stored information of genes, neurons and words, and a world that is already in random motion and so all that is required is the intelligence of a Maxwell demon slamming the door shut on any fluctuations in the right direction.
Life is going to set up its informational camp where the living is easiest. And that is why physical criticality - chemistry just itching to happen in some random direction - is a natural foundation for biology. Any reaction that is poised and tippable is obviously in want of a good tipping. And that is what tossing an enzyme into the mix does.
You would then also be saying that information integrates on its own? This is a significant obstacle, as what we most deeply identify with is that which integrates the information.
In fact, pockets of the universe are fine tuned to integrate information, imo.
Quoting Enrique
Good, so when you develop a theory of consciousness you also develop a theory of everything.
In monism, consciousness is the accumulation and evolution of a body of information. In Dualism, consciousness emerges coincidentally with the emergence of a self concept ( self awareness ), so is a psychological entity dependent on a self concept. Hence can logically be all sorts of weird stuff. Monism is more of an attempt to try to describe everything with a single concept, so less room for weird stuff.
This is what makes consciousness research so interesting. It is only possible to construct a coherent framework of understanding for a monist. It is impossible for a dualist, as understanding would entail a destruction of their emergent self concept.
Consciousness is a state of integrated information - is the most coherent definition that I have come across. QM at some stage created physical structure through a process of information integration. When one wavicle interacts with another wavicle, they integrate their information in the form of a resultant wavicle. This is the foundation of consciousness, imo. This being fundamental is present in everything subsequent to it, as it's only basis. Eventually the information density increases to form physical structure ( a fundamental particle ), and continues from there.
How a wavicle is turned into a symbol by neurobiology may be explained by simple neural networks. Have you considered this?
There is so much misinformation and as a result confusion about entropy, when all natural systems are dissipative systems: dissipation is a necessary element of their self organization.
The rate of space creation in the universe is greater than the rate of entropy creation, so as a percentage of the total space, entropy is decreasing. This permits "order", where order is created by self organization, which relies on information integration.
https://www.informationphilosopher.com/introduction/information/entropy-expansion.gif
Yes. The argument is that open and “far from equilibrium” thermodynamics is the generic case, a closed and gone to equilibrium system is the particular case. The Cosmos itself is a dissipative structure.
But then life adds something further in being able harness dissipative flows to its own advantage. The physicochemical realm self organises to produce entropy. But that flow is often blocked. Sunlight falling on bare rock reflects back into space cooled considerably, but still about 50 degrees C. Life can add itself to that gradient and cool the radiation to 20 degrees on average.
So it makes a small contribution to cosmic dissipation. Yet the slight edge still supports the Gaian splendour of life as we know it.
Quoting Pop
The adibiatic account fell out of equilbrium with the electroweak symmetry breaking and left some catching up to do. But Lineweaver paints a nice picture of the balance being restored by the Heat Death when all matter is swept up in evaporating black holes and returned to radiation. The final state is a de Sitter universe composed of its holographic boundaries radiating virtual photons with a temperature within Planck distance of absolute zero.
So all levels of this dissipative structure story can be aligned. The bit I am focused on is how life inserts itself into the story as self interested information as opposed to the disinterested information that is holographically organising the whole show.
"Self organization" inserts life into the scene. Due to the fine tuning of the universe, in select pockets, order arises due to every point in such universal pockets, undertaking a process of self organization.
Hence everything that exists, exists as a self organizing system. And, ultimately we are a self organizing system. We posses a consciousness who's sole function is to integrate information for the purpose of our self organization.
Information integration ( consciousness ), both creates our physical structure, and mental structure ( how we think ). We are not able to perform a function outside the purpose of self organization.
Self organization entails self interest.
Not so. Life is something extra in being able to apply the logic of machinery to the entropic world. Nature has no machines. Life began by being able to apply the mechanical trick of a Maxwellian demon. Life can build the gate and operate the switch that directs random dissipation towards its own existential goals.
We call it self organisation when it is physics being organised by its own boundary constraints, but there is no local selfhood involved. There is only local randomness and accident. Life adds mechanical order and that is another further trick which is quite novel.
Self organization entails self interest because a "self" is itself a body of information, trying to maintain its integrity in the face of a constant onslaught of disintegrative information.
I think you focus too much on entropy, when what is obvious is that self organization is progressing.
"It is now generally recognized that in many important fields of research a state of true thermodynamic equilibrium is only attained in exceptional conditions. Experiments with radioactive tracers, for example, have shown that the nucleic acids contained in living cells continuously exchange matter with their surroundings. It is also well known that the steady flow of energy which originates in the sun and the stars prevents the atmosphere of the earth or stars from reaching a state of thermodynamic equilibrium.
Obviously then, the majority of the phenomena studied in biology, meteorology, astrophysics and other subjects are irreversible processes which take place outside the equilibrium state.
These few examples may serve to illustrate the urgent need for an extension of the methods of thermodynamics so as to include irreversible processes."
Ilya Prigogine (Introduction to Thermodynamics of Irreversible Processes, 1955, p.v)
Everything that exists, exists as an evolving self organizing system - a self in the process of accumulating / integrating information. This is the machine.
This is the sort of cheap shot I would expect from somebody who does not have the wit to partake in the discussion.
For a theory to be possible it needs to not violate any of the laws of physics, and if it is also supported by some , then it is a valid possibility. ( David Deutsch). What is your criteria for a theory to be possible?
Do you even posses such a thing?
This is your criteria for dismissing a theory? Consider yourself well and truly dismissed then. :cool:
Well you can’t even be listening to what I’m saying then. I’m arguing the biosemiotic position that is now constructed on the basis of dissipative structure thinking.
Quoting Pop
Life requires an epistemic cut between rate independent information and rate dependent dynamics (Pattee). Life is thus a modelling relation (Rosen).
Thus there are formal reasons for rejecting these assertions.
[quote=Howard Pattee, last quotation on page; https://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/scientists/pattee/ ]A description requires a symbol system or a language. Functionally, description and construction correspond to the biologists’ distinction between the genotype and phenotype. My biosemiotic view is that self-replication is also the origin of semiosis.
I have made the case over many years (e.g., Pattee, 1969,1982, 2001, 2015) that self-replication provides the threshold level of complication where the clear existence of a self or a subject gives functional concepts such as symbol, interpreter, autonomous agent, memory, control, teleology, and intentionality empirically decidable meanings. The conceptual problem for physics is that none of these concepts enter into physical theories of inanimate nature.
Self-replication requires an epistemic cut between self and non-self, and between subject and object.
Self-replication requires a distinction between the self that is replicated and the non-self that is not replicated. The self is an individual subject that lives in an environment that is often called objective, but which is more accurately viewed biosemiotically as the subject’s Umwelt or world image. This epistemic cut is also required by the semiotic distinction between the interpreter and what is interpreted, like a sign or a symbol. In physics this is the distinction between the result of a measurement – a symbol – and what is being measured – a material object.
I call this the symbol-matter problem, but this is just a narrower case of the classic 2500-year-old epistemic problem of what our world image actually tells us about what we call the real world.[/quote]
I don't see how this is not a form of dualism. How I would put it is that living things represent 'the intentional domain', or the domain where intentional action transcend physical laws (precisely because 'none of these concepts enter into physical theories of inanimate nature'.) In human form, that organic process then reaches the further stage of self-reflection, namely, the ability of life to reflect on and understand itself.
It does not require a cut, if the information flows from one system to another.
"Information always travels over a substrate" - Shannon.
Information in the form of vibrations and frequency flows from matter to human consciousness via the substance between them. There is no need for a cut, as there is a substance connecting matter and human consciousness, over which information can flow. If I am understanding you correctly.
Systems evolve interrelationally. It makes no sense to think an organism could survive without the system it evolved in. A system's self organization is entirely relative to its environment. A system and it's environment evolve together.
If the person is conceived as an energetic body and the matter is also, then information flows from like to like. No cut necessary.
An entirely science-free response,
Listening =/= comprehending. The former is our responsibility. That latter is mostly yours.
Quoting Enrique
This is is the closest you've come in this thread to giving a theory, as far as I can tell. It's far too unclear for me to engage with. I originally thought you were talking about the Penrose-Hameroff stuff about microtubules, which I don't understand, as that's the only well-known theory of consciousness involving quantum stuff I know of. But that's not what you are talking about is it? And even that can hardly be called a paradigm, it's just one theory among many.
In very general terms I'm always somewhat sympathetic to field theries of consciousness as these intuitively feel faithful to the phenomenology of consciousness and attention. Our attention seems stretchy, and spread over and through many things at once, like a field. And I think that's important evidence.
I'll ask you the same question I ask any reductive theorist: why can't all the stuff you talk about happen in the dark? Why does that necessitate consciousness?
Is any of what Apo said relevant to your theory? I am in no position to judge that at all (as I understand neither of you), but you may be able to tell.
Quoting Pop
That's really not a definition. Definitions are about what people mean and how words are used. People don't mean "I'm in a state of integrated information about this rose" when they say "I'm conscious of this rose". (Not that normal people would even say that to be fair.) The IIT is a theory, NOT a definition!
E=mc2, QM, Rutherford's experiments. String Theory.
That consciousness is a state of integrated information is an idea that precedes IIT. It is the most coherent definition that I have encountered, as it brings home the idea that all the information in one's possession, body and mind and environment, is integrated to create any moment of consciousness.
All of one's historical information, all bodily sensations, and all environmental information, converges to a point in any moment of consciousness, thus creating it.
Quoting Pop
Quoting bert1
I concede that the readout on an EEG machine isn't of course what brain waves actually look like, but the readout is representing a real wave oscillation generated in the brain by neurons which synapse in unison on the order of billions. The actual brain wave is a flux in matter caused by periodic flow of electrical potential, a current like a battery's that courses through the organ. This flow within neurons creates an oscillating field extending throughout the entire brain.
As in magnetoreception, pockets of quantum behavior in the soma and perhaps elsewhere have probably adapted for very specific sensitivity to the brain's EM field, and these wavicle assemblies superposition or blend into the global current as the particularate yet integrated substance of qualitative perception.
So neural networks produce the integrated field that is consciousness, and quantum biochemical pathways produce the particulars of sensation. Consciousness is exacted as a steady state holism because of the integrating EM field, but we partially sense and feel the world as dispersed in space due to the quantum processes.
Does that make sense yet to you guys?
Neuroplasticity tells us that established information is memorized in physical structure somehow. This is consistent with Constructivism, which suggests information accumulation is how knowledge is built. The way we thought about things yesterday, determines how we think about them today, which determines how we think about them tomorrow, more or less. So there is a construction going on - a building onto established knowledge, which is memorized in physical structure - this past knowledge is also integrated in a moment of consciousness. See my reply to Bert1 above. Any idea how this might occur from your perspective?
I think memory is an at least partially separate mechanism from the stream of consciousness I was talking about. Memory basically consists of a record of perceptual experiences etched into brain chemistry and neuronal connections, much like a hard drive, which then participates in projecting or organizing stream of consciousness by virtue of the stored information's structure. So for instance axons and dendrites might, because of the way they are linked in a network, generate a specific collective response in the quantum biochemistry of adjacent soma, perturbing the brain's electromagnetic field and prompting it to self-directedly change its behavior (current flow) at the more generalized level (this process is not deterministic in a single direction, from holism to particularity or vice versa).
So its like a feedback between EM field perceptual holism, the perceptual particularity of quantum wavicle assemblages, and whatever mechanisms sustain a representation of previous states which are then built upon and modified by further experience. Different parts of the mind can proceed in contrasting directions at a given moment, from holism to particularity, from particularity to holism, or between representational memory and either. Perhaps the quantum wavicle assemblages are a mediator between memory and the EM field. I'm not sure what the mechanisms of representational memory are exactly, but neural networking surely plays a major role.
I'm actually publishing a paper in a scientific journal next month that explains perception in a much more organized and thorough way, looking forward to finally getting my ideas some serious exposure!
It is still the case that you are talking about the noise made by the process. So the material aspect of neural firing - the dissipation involved in moving ions across membranes by ATP powered pumps - does produce measurable voltage fluctuations. And given coordinated spike timing is one aspect of neural coding, the same synchrony will appear in terms of the material dissipation - like the heat and noise coming off a lot of cars all revving up to take off from the same traffic light signal.
But your argument is that the causal element of this dissipative story is the material waste produced rather than the informational work done. You are mistaking the material index of the informational activity for the meaningful activity itself.
There just is no evidence that the brain does anything with all the local voltage potentials or magnetic field fluctuations which happen to be generated in doing neural work. There is no global integration (or differentiation) that organises all that noise into some usefully coherent pattern that thus might explain something about consciousness, or rather, how neural networks stand as running models of a self in meaningful interaction with a world.
And this is even before we get into the way you slide from a classical description of a brain wave (an EEG trace with a temporal resolution of milliseconds and spatial resolution of centimetres) and the wild claim that this statistical binning of decohered voltage fluctuations had some kind of magical hidden quantum coherence that is also - hands waving still more furiously - a panpsychic conscious glow to it.
Your story has no support in evidence or theory. Brain-wide quantum superposition would be the most fragile of states. Every ion moving through a membrane channel is a decoherent measurement, let alone the gross measurement of tapping a bunch of EEG electrodes to the scalp.
You are pinning all your hopes on some kind of coherent electromagnetic flux but what brain waves measure is the incoherent entropy of the dissipative physics of neurons - the incoherence production that pays for the useful thing of their informational signalling. And again, that is like saying a bunch of cars all moved off from the lights at the same moment because all their heat and noise suddenly became correlated in a state of quantum superposition. They all began to throb and vibrate in a magical synchrony that resulted in a sudden collective quantum leap down the street.
So thermodynamics is against you as much as the rest of physics. For the brain to do the work of constructing states of integrated-differentiated information, it must create even more entropic waste. There is a reason why the brain is 2% of our body weight but consumes 20% of our energy.
The electrical energy of brain waves is not dissipative like heat, it is in large measure contained within neural networks to produce an ultracoordinated pattern. The readout of an EEG varies in a nuanced way as you move the sensitivity around to different portions of the brain, so much so that a neurologist can deduce the patient's cognitive profile, indicating that brain waves, unlike light and heat, are intimately correlated with specific behavior of the matter in that location.
A certain synchrony characterizes healthy conscious states, an emergent property of relatively macroscale current flows. When the mind encounters a novel or startling stimulus, this synchrony temporarily breaks down some, indicating that portions of the brain are processing more independently on a smaller scale, then resumes once the stimulus has been integrated. In mental illness, the brain's default condition is to be in a less synchronous state. This is the principle behind neurofeedback treatment: the patient looks at a screen while wearing an EEG style headset during multiple sessions, and using their mind to win the video game, visual feedback recalibrates brain waves to synchrony, commonly curing the ailment.
Brain waves are closely related to states of awareness, reducible to increasingly local behaviors of brain matter which produce unique signatures that blend into the emergent patterns current EEG technology observes. Brain waves are not chaotic noise, they are a functional component of consciousness that varies in a systematic way depending on degree of emergence, but we don't at this point have a model of exactly how they interact with brain matter to generate percepts. That is a research angle my theory is motivated to pursue.
In humans, no doubt. But not in rocks, because rocks don't have brains.
That's actually a somewhat complicated issue from the perspective of panprotopsychism lol
:up:
That is the problem I see with this:
Quoting Enrique
Quoting Pop
Bearing in mind that Shannon was an electrical engineer, and that his work was specifically about transmission of data across a medium.
I think you're making a good point that perhaps relates to higher levels of intentionality, but could you be more specific? Don't mean to put you on the spot necessarily, be as concise as you like, or just ignore me lol
Shannon's information theory is vey focused to that end, however that information always travels over a substrate is obvious. Information is the perturbations of a substrate. The patterns in materials. The arrangement of these words and letters.
Nevertheless, they posses a state of integrated information!
That would be why nothing is leaking through the scalp to disturb the EEG coils then.
In a dissipative structure, you can tell which half is the entropy of waste matter, which half is the negentropy of conserved structure, by what gets exported to the environmental heat sink.
And what we can say is the brain is very concerned about shuttling ions to build up local mechanical gradients across membranes regulated by pores. And it shows no concern for the (very weak) electrical and magnetic fields that might be generated by that tightly orchestrated activity. The fields are just random noise - fluctuations in a general equilbrium balance - that is part of the necessary second law contribution to the greater entropification of the world.
It is neither contained nor correlated. More unsupported bunkum.
:fire: :100: :strong:
I don't know if I agree. Consider that the same sentence can be conveyed in any kind of media whatever. It doesn't matter with it's written, engraved in metal, or converted into binary code. The media is different in every case while the information remains the same.
Quoting Enrique
Well, when you say:
Quoting Enrique
The problem I see is you're conflating two very different kinds of [s]things[/s] perspectives. Objective description is third-person, by definition (or inter-subjective if you like). But the qualitative nature of consciousness, 'what it is like to feel something', is what makes the hard problem a problem. And the reason it's a hard problem is because it can't be represented in the third person, only experienced or felt or lived in the first person. You can't extract it and present it as any kind of object or thing. When you write something, and I understand it, then you're relying on the fact that we have a shared 'experience of being', if you like. (The ability to do that is what makes novelists and screenwriters successful.) But if you tried to communicate an experience to a non-human being or to a computer, then it would require something radically different, even if it were possible, which I doubt. (I think that is why Wittgenstein said 'if a lion could speak, we wouldn't understand what it said'.)
So the 'chemistry of qualitative perception' is, I'm afraid, an iredeemably materialist perspective, because it's based on the 'principle of objectification'. That gets into deep epistemological territory but I'll try and explain it. I've been reading a bit from the later philosophical writings of Erwin Schrödinger. He said that objectification is:
[quote= Schrödinger, Mind and Matter;http://mechanics.wikidot.com/objectification]"… a certain simplification which we adopt in order to master the infinitely intricate problem of nature. Without being aware of it and without being rigorously systematic about it we exclude the Subject of Cognizance from the domain of nature that we endeavour to understand. We step with our own person back into the part of an onlooker who does not belong to the world, which by this very procedure becomes an objective world.[/quote]
And I think here that you are doing that, namely, forgetting that the very subject of your analysis is not objectively existent. Experience doesn't exist without a subject, but as Schrödinger pointed out, science by design excludes the subject from its reckonings. It was precisely the 'observer problem' encountered in quantum physics that forced Schrodinger and others to recognise the philosophical implications of 'exclusion of the subject'. Recognising that, is the cardinal distinction between classical and quantum physics (although I don't see how it says anything directly about the constitution of the observing mind, to me, it is simply a statement about the inevitable limitations of objectivity.)
That's why I asked you the question of what problem you're trying to solve. I think that if your theory was to have any applicability - still not sure about that, I'm afraid - then it would be in cognitive science, not philosophy. You're trying to account for the physiological or neurological bases of cognition, not 'the nature of consciousness', as such.
//ps// found an interesting-looking paper on pan-proto-psychism.//
Not merely mechanical, but quantum mechanical, meaning that principles of tunneling, entanglement, superposition and nonlocality are at work. This must be especially true of the leakage of electrical waves through the synaptic cleft into the soma where delicate and diverse biochemical pathways as standing wave structures are more sustainable than in axons or dendrites.
If brain waves are measurable on a macroscopic scale, you can't tell me that almost every cell body isn't saturated with electric charge, the main mechanism of emergent organization from quantum nonlocality amongst all electromagnetic matter. Brain waves and their effects as mediated by electric charge, exacted on various scales of emergence, must engage in not just vertical causality but lateral causality, so that top-down effects on tissue are produced.
So if you want a general mechanism that applies to near instantaneous entanglement, superposition and tunneling, a coordinating phenomenon that effectuates simultaneity and integration, it is probably charge distribution. Perhaps it is not matter waves analogous to a liquid, but rather pulsing charge fluctuations that result in brain waves, and this would most certainly have nondissipative effects.
Rather, consider a **substance that has no information - has no edges, shape, perturbations, surface, texture - nothing.
How will you know about it?
Your precious EEG rhythms are an artefact of a measuring method that offers 1ms temporal resolution but 1cm spatial resolution. So all that alpha, beta, theta, type traces tell you is that the brain is quite busy and contrasty, or relatively quiescent and trance-like. Acting or waiting.
As I’ve already said - and you tellingly ignored - EEG was able to give a certain kind of valuable data in evoked potential work. The 1ms temporal resolution meant you could see that the brain does process information over a characteristic time. The P300 and N400 related to important steps in cognition.
But you build your story on the early brain wave stuff which had none of this later experimental refinement. You get excited by the 1ms scale crackles in a 1cm smear of outer cortex - the noise of the slow dendritic potentials and not even the sharp snap of the axonal spikes. You pretend this is like some kind of peak in the temporal evolution of a quantum wave function. As a spatial pattern, you presume what was recorded from the small region under an electrode is in fact a global brain-wide quantum superposition - that somehow stops at the brain even if it leaks past the scalp and isn’t collapsed by a recording device.
It is nonsense stacked on nonsense.
And what do you make of functional MRI? Again, you can stand outside and probe the brain in terms of the material energy expenditure that underwrite the information processing. fMRI tells us the same story of integration and differentiation - patterns of coherent incoherence, or incoherent coherence, whichever way you want to look at it. :lol:
But now the EM field signal is changes in cerebral blood flow. Do you want to claim that blood flow is the generator of a conscious quantum waveform? You still have the same kind of correlations of busy and quiet blood flow changes with a busy and quiet mind. It all seems very mysterious that blood flow somehow has this globally coordinated pattern such as the same mental states show the same fMRI pattern. And where there is global coherence in terms of local events, surely only “quantum superposition” can be the mechanism?
Quoting Enrique
The word is equilibrated, not saturated. Like biochemistry in general. Every positive charge is balanced by a negative charge to the level where charge fluctuations don’t make a difference and every charge is under the cell’s regulatory thumb.
Augustine of Hippo 430AD, describing information! Wonders will never cease!
I probably should make a thread - what is information?
The information philosopher has quite good info, but again he diverges to a dualistic understanding, whereas my understanding is monistic.
I am very impressed with neuroscience and the progress that is being made is just astounding.
It does seem to me that most of the mental functioning and processes of the brain are not conscious and are not available for conscious introspection. Human consciousness, human mind and human experience do seem to be inextricably linked to human brains. No fan of free floating consciousness or universal mind, here. I do think that experience and mind come in various degrees and forms and that both are more ubiquitous in nature than we acknowledge and that most discussions give inadequate consideration for non- human varieties of mental activity and inner experience. Consciousness seems like a special unified and integrated form of experience but I doubt it comprises more than 10% of the activity and processes of the brain. Our brains keep doing a lot of work when we are sleeping or when we are unconscious or when we are incapacitated by drugs or disease. We solve problems in our sleep we retrieve memories after we consciously stop trying. We all have first hand experience of these phenomena. Mind and consciousness must have evolved in nature and thus must be present in some precursor form or forms throughout nature. I think experience (in non conscious forms) precedes mind and mind precedes consciousness.
Somehow, I doubt, however, that there is any entirely complete objective material empirical or scientific description which is forthcoming. This is probably a philosophical inclination that studying things from the outside never gives one a complete view of the inner nature of any actuality or existent. I view science as a tool, not a philosophy. Science has been unparalleled in giving us useful information about nature and reality. Science itself does not entail “scientism” the notion that science will ultimately answer every and all questions worth asking. Nor does science itself entail metaphysical commitments to materialism, determinism or reductionism as is too often asserted.
Science especially neuroscience will undoubtedly give us much interesting, elegant and useful information about our brains and the nature of mind, experience and consciousness but certain aspects of the subjective inner nature of experience may forever remain beyond empirical inquiry and we may have to be content with metaphysical speculation for those aspects of our experience in and of the world. This is after all a philosophy forum and thus speculative metaphysics about ontology does not seem entirely out of place.
It's a more a comment on Aristotelian 'form and substance'. However, the meaning of 'form', 'substance' and 'matter' has changed completely in the intervening centuries.
Quoting Pop
Before you do, have a browse of this one.
Sure electric charge in the brain is relatively balanced on a global scale, but obviously ion flow induces charge fluctuations that pervasively disequilibrate pockets of brain tissue and which must be producing brain "waves" or periodic oscillations if you like (exactly how the combinatorial process unfolds is admittedly still uncertain). Soma are billions of pockets, replete with trillions of pockets of quantum machinery, and electric charge is the binding agent that integrates the brain's electromagnetic field with this quantum machinery's tunnelings, superpositions and entanglements. So perhaps what we lacked was a binding mechanism more technical than the liquid analogy. The mechanism might be electric charge! What say you?
But there is no evidence of this,nor can there ever be - given we are dependent on form to provide the information encoded in it. There is no other way for information to exist other than in the form of a substance. Except for dualists, where it can exist formless as an immaterial mind? :chin:
Of course you are free to think as you like, but it would help my understanding if you could provide a reason?
Mathematics, in general, is primarily concerned with real abstractions. But let's not get into that here.
My theory is that we are not free to think as we like. That we are a body of information ( as a self ). So in order to be self consistent we have to continue our historical narrative. What we thought yesterday causes our thoughts today, as todays thoughts cause tomorrows. In this way the body of information evolves. It can not tolerate a sudden change in thinking - there is no facility for this, such a thing could be traumatic , so only happens very rarely. Rather a change of thinking evolves slowly over time.
Would you roughly agree?
In a sense, we do not do the thinking, what we do actually is: we connect new information to existing informational structure.
The reason I think a quantum theory of consciousness could be a leap beyond current neuroscience in solving the hard problem is because, if we consider visualizing an image in our minds or feeling a sensation, the image or sensation is no longer merely produced by action potentials or neurotransmitters as some mysterious supervenient substance, it is the quantum superposition, precisely. The resonant color of the superposition is the subjective color of the mental image, and the quantum resonance of the sensation is the feeling. We will have identity rather than correlation, no gap between matter and percepts, and the basic mind/body problem is resolved. Of course it will turn out to be more complex than only that, but research in principle might be able to model percepts as if they are objects.
This does not diminish the fact that a subjective aspect of experience exists which in its stark immediacy proves ineffable or personal from a certain perspective, but we would be able to perform feats such as creating elements of humanlike subjectivity in electronic devices or repairing, treating and enhancing the physiology and biochemistry of subjectivity in organisms because this subjectivity will at that point be modeled as a material substance with physical structure.
Much more sensitive EEG devices capable of reading periodic oscillations or "waves" as you're so loathe to think of them from the brain's deep structure are being developed as we speak. Very influential and moneyed organizations such as governments have recognized that brain wave analysis is key to comprehending consciousness. EEG is going to be extremely useful in modeling brain function as this technology advances. This isn't your 70's EEG!
Have you ever used a contour gauge? They are made of flat, parallel strips in a frame and when applied to a curved surface the shape of the curve is reproduced. Maybe something like that is happening when our brains/neurons encounter a physical object. And if a brain has this ability then modeling percepts works on the same principle.
I would identify this as the brains ability to instantiate mental content. For example:
BRAIN(mental content) as a universal form.
and specifically for physical objects,
BRAIN(a rock)
BRAIN(a tree)
BRAIN(a mountain)
and specifically for non-physical objects,
BRAIN(information)
BRAIN(thoughts)
BRAIN(beliefs)
BRAIN(percepts)
and some others
BRAIN(time perception)
BRAIN(language)
BRAIN(mathematics)
and so on.
So my point is the physical brain (either classical or quantum) has the ability to contain mental content. I think you are mistaking mental content for quantum states. As here:
Quoting Enrique
But the point was that you still employ a 1970s bastardisation of 1950s EEG tech. Brainwaves were already pseudoscience half a century ago.
Brain function isn't only neural memory, though representations etched in biochemical and physiological structure are of course important. That kind of process is certainly a component, but the brain projects as much if not more than it absorbs from the environment. So all those classifications you listed are significantly generated from within the brain itself, as a spontaneous outcome of its internal composition.
It's been a mystery how percepts are projected and combined at all within the brain when matter has thus far been regarded as trillions of separate, quantized atoms. At this point, I'm suggesting that the binding agent is electric charge interactions which sustain coherences (entangled superpositions) between the brain's electromagnetic field and multimolecular quantum fields in biochemical pathways, binding trillions of particles into a fairly integrated stream of consciousness that appears to us as an array of simultaneous percepts (images, thoughts, feelings, etc.) within the medium of awareness.
So what I'm explaining is consciousness' contribution to appearances as opposed to what impinges on it from the environment, which is a nebulous distinction at this stage of neuroscience.
This suggests a singular dynamic network since (Item A) can always interact with (Item B) and again it's useful to consider change of mental content as a change in the supporting biology. It appears supported mental content has input and output capabilities.
Consciousness itself may be partially understood as Brain(mental content) form as a component. But the entire biological organism and environment should also be studied.
Roger Penrose wrote "The Emperors New Mind" published Nov. 9, 1989. Some things on consciousness. It ended up in my 'bad books' shelf. I didn't throw it out just in case.
[i]Anatomic pathologies associated with vegetative state, minimally conscious state, and severe to moderate cognitive disability following severe injuries have several common features. Autopsy studies of both traumatic and non-traumatic injuries resulting in permanent VS (vegetative state((a prognostic assessment rather than diagnosis, see [10]) identify widespread neuronal death throughout the thalamus in patients [11]. Importantly, the evident severe bilateral thalamic damage after either trauma or anoxia in permanent VS is not invariably associated with diffuse neocortical neuronal cell death. Moreover, the observation indicates the key functional role for the thalamus for integrative function of the forebrain corticothalamic systems.
Recent studies have shown that specific subnuclei of the thalamus demonstrate greater neuronal cell loss as a result of such global and multi-focal cerebral injuries [12]. The nuclei within the central thalamus (the intralaminar nuclei and related paralaminar nuclei) are most involved typically and the degree of neuronal loss observed within these neuronal aggregates grades with outcome [12]. In patients with only moderate disability following severe traumatic brain injury, neuronal loss is primarily identified within the anterior intralaminar nuclei (central lateral nucleus, central medial, paracentralis). Patients with progressively severe disabilities demonstrate neuronal loss involving more ventral and lateral nuclei of the central thalamus (posterior intralaminar group) as diagrammed in Figure 2A. These observations are likely a consequence of the unique geometry of connections of the central thalamus. Neurons in these subnuclei have wide point to point connectivity across the cerebral hemisphere and are thus likely to integrate neuronal cell death across these large territories [13,14].[/i]
One can learn a great deal about the function and importance of various brain structures and areas through studying brain injuries and pathology and highly specific mental functions are located in very specific brain structures and areas. One can stimulate memories (complete with experienced, smells, sounds and visions) by stimulation of very small areas of the temporal cortex. Every stimulation will result in experience replay.
Permanent or Prolonged or Temporary Loss of Consciousness can result from injury to rather small areas of the thalamus (where neuronal pathways connecting large areas of the frontal cortex coverage and cross). Destruction of these small areas by stroke or other injury will result in permanent coma or persistent vegetative state, whereas more minor injury (anoxia, drugs, anesthesia). will result in temporary loss of global consciousness.
What should be clear is you will not find consciousness in an EEG or in Quantum states, or any specific structure or neurotransmitter. Consciousness requires an intact, functional, unified integrated neural network other mental functions require the intactness of different brain networks and structures. Consciousness is only one of many brain functions. Most of what your brain does (laying down memories, processing sense data, etc. is not done by the neural networks required for consciousness.
Before even first base can be reached, a definition of consciousness is required. Consciousness is something different for a monist, dualist, idealist, realist, etc. One's intuition is not a definition.
One's intuition is something unique, that absolutely nobody else posses in exactly the same way.
I'm not saying everything the brain does is consciously aware, and that's why my view is panprotopsychism. But I do regard consciousness as relatively fundamental. How frequently during the day are you unconscious yet functional? Probably only while in certain sleep stages, and it is a very constrained functionality.
If my quantum theory is accurate, it might be possible to experience percepts without being aware of it, in bacteria for instance, or to be aware without much sense of self and no concept of identity, as is probably the case in an organism such as a caterpillar.
I think it is becoming outdated to think of the mind as built primarily out of neural connections. That stratum of functionality has an important role, but so much of what we experience cannot be explained by action potentials or synapses. Percepts such as feelings, images and thoughts must in large measure be caused by something more that we haven't discovered yet. Finding the mechanisms of percepts, the classes of molecule involved in new kinds of biochemical pathways, can in my opinion help transition neuroscience from correlation to direct causation.
But great post nonetheless, doing research into the details of neurology is helpful for this topic.
Do you distinguish between experience, mind, awareness and consciousness? How do you define consciousness, because definitions become important and these terms are bandied about like synonyms. Human consciousness must have its evolutionary antecedents and thus there are varying degrees of mind and experience throughout nature. All may have the same ontologic or metaphysical source which is where speculative metaphysics may come in. However,, any speculative metaphysics which ignores or contradicts the recent findings in evolutionary biology and corresponding interspecies neuroscience is I suspect heading in entirely the wrong direction.
Is x conscious if x is capable of experience?
I think neurowhatsits have a lot to say on what we experience, but nothing at all to say on how experience came to be. I just haven't heard anything remotely convincing.
I come from the perspective that all definitions are going to be anthrocentric, so I accept a somewhat biased perspective as a valid starting point for determining what consciousness is instead of seeking an absolute definition.
From an earlier post: "I regard human sentience as the somewhat arbitrary standard for what is conscious, just as the visible spectrum is our standard for what light is, corresponding to the brain and eye respectively." So if it has percepts of feeling, sensation, thought, etc., it is indisputably conscious to some degree, kind of like an expanded Turing test including objective factors. If it has the same or similar brain physiology and chemistry to the kind that produces consciousness in humans, it is especially certain that it is conscious, so all of kingdom animalia for instance is obviously conscious in my opinion. (We know this intuitively anyways, but it is possible to strongly prove it scientifically).
We don't have a good standard yet for determining what the chemistry of percepts is, but if a quantum theory of perception supplies that, it will be possible to classify exactly how conscious many much simpler species or divergent structural forms are by comparison with humans, just as we use the presence of metabolism, membranes, reproduction etc. to decide whether a creature is living, and of course borderline cases occur.
It might be necessary to modify this outlook somewhat as it relates to computers, but exactly how is not certain yet, and hopefully we can prevent the conundrum for some time by avoiding generalized AI (a sentient, independently evolving virtual organism) in favor of specialized AI (algorithms designed to work with specific analytical problems or tasks) until human society is ethically prepared, if ever.
This definition is entirely epistemological, not metaphysical at all.
As one variety of panpsychist to another:
Terminology and use of terminology are an area of both confusion and disagreement.
In general I think overly broad use of the term “consciousness” engenders strong resistance to considering the ideas or metaphysical theory underlying panpsychism.
Most people think of the kind of self- awareness, self-reflection and internal dialogue that we as humans possess when they read, hear or use the term “consciousness”. So panpsychists who go around asserting that “electrons” are conscious engender immediate resistance to their theory and speculative philosophy. Nagel’s “What is it like to be a Bat” introduces the “something it is like to be a bat”, something presumably not captured by any materialist, reductionist scientific explanation, description or investigation. I agree that there are aspects of “being a bat” which will never be captured by external investigation or descriptive language. I am not sure those aspects should be classified as “consciousness” given the way we typically understand or use the term. I do think bats have “experience” and given the presence of a CNS ( a system for unifying and integrating the experience of the organism or system as a whole), bats could be said to have mind.
So for me, primitive (non-conscious) experience is the basis on which all higher forms of mind including consciousness are constructed. These are variations in form and degree but not in metaphysical kind.
It roughly goes experience, then minds , then consciousness in the evolutionary history of mind in nature.
Are electrons conscious? I would say no but they have a primitive form of experience (Whitehead’s prehension) which ties them to the future (possibilities), to the past (continuity) and to the external world around them (observers or interactions). Thus I am a panexperientialist (a particular form of panpsychist). The scientific explanation of an electron no more captures its inner realities or aspects than does the scientific description of a bat capture the inner reality of "being a bat"
Are rocks conscious or do they have minds? No, rocks are simple aggregates or composites which do not have structures to unify or integrate the experience of their more primitive elements or units. It should be remembered the most primitive elements or units of reality are quantum events which are fluctuations in the quantum field of space time. I could go on but there is no point because we probably became separated somewhere long ago in our use of language and our metaphysical assumptions about the nature of reality.
I think experience and consciousness can only be found in the systems and processes where they occur. Sufficiently complex computer neural networks may become indistinguishable from conscious organisms especially if they can alter their own hardware configuration as well. Although reductionist approaches will yield much interesting and useful information, consciousness will not be found at the quantum, atomic, physical, or chemical level, it is found are the level of sufficiently complex organism or systems and the processes which they produce.
Consciousness is a process not an material object..
:up: Yes. "A process of integrating information for the purpose of self organization". I think this would capture everything in the same act. Can you think of an exception?
In this paragraph only I found the following rather exotic philosophical.scientific terms/concepts: pluralistic monism, quantum dynamics, superpositions or blended wavelengths, panpsychism. And then you pretend all this is your opinion and ask from people to tell you what they think!
So, here is what I think: All this is exhibitionistic gibberish.
(This is a honest answer.)
Is that what you think an experience is?
The OP is a paragraph drawn from the end of an essay, not really designed to justify everything. Its a conversation starter that doesn't stand alone, you've got to read the entire thread! I'm not being exhibitionistic, merely trying to refine my ideas by eliciting some constructive feedback from a few dudes, and you'll see that my theory did improve because of this discussion.
It's possible for one's own opinion to overlap with that of others. I don't think Enrique is claiming he came up will all this completely by himself. Not that I understand it particularly.
My thoughts are probably influenced the most by Johnjoe McFadden's book Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology, plus a lot of additional reading about quantum physics.
This forum format is not ideal for conveying everything that one would like. I try to keep things brief and to the point, and no doubt some clarity, and humanity, is lost in the process.
In my understanding, every moment of consciousness has its feeling. It is the feeling that is responsible for causing us to resolve a moment of consciousness. I agree with Capra's assertion: " cognition is a disturbance in a state". And we are biased to resolve the disturbance, "due to the feeling", by reintegrating the state.
It is important to note, That a self is identical to a body of information, and in the process of cognition, it is disturbed, but we are intimately, and inextricably biased to reintegrate the information, in order to maintain the status quo of the system, as much as possible, and thus maintain self consistency.
It is not always possible to achieve this absolutely, and so potentially every moment of consciousness results in an incremental shift in the state of the system, and thus the self. In this way a self evolves in line with experience, as the result of experience. This is consistent with neuroplasticity.
Hopefully this conveys the gist of my thinking. Does it make sense?
Yes, we have direct access to it, which is better than any possible definition or theory. Would it be empirical verses a priori or some terms like that?
What this feeling is precisely is very difficult to resolve. My thinking, very roughly, is that all systems self organize due to this feeling. That all systems self organize suggests they do so for a common reason. This reason might be the integration of the laws of the universe ( anthropic principle ). The laws of the universe in ordered pockets of the universe converge to cause self organization. I believe we may be feeling these converged forces.
I am very much a phenomenologist, but this is very tricky. What we can examine is a self concept. But, as a monist, what I try to describe is how all these unconscious processes create a body that eventually evolves a self concept.
Our self concept is an emergent quality, thought to occur after language. So, one needs to be vey careful here that one does not mistake ones self concept for the process that actually created it.
When we introspect initially, we introspect upon a self concept. However, central to the self concept is the same mechanism driving all self organization, imo.
This comment and intuition brings to mind the following passages from Steven Shaviro (after Whitehead) and his conception of "prehension" and "lure for feeling". You may find the below interesting or not but I will post the link and some passages from the longer article for you.
http://www.shaviro.com/Othertexts/Pulse.pdf
According to Alfred North Whitehead, “the basis of experience is emotional”
Every experience of perception involves an “affective tone” (176), and this
tone precedes, and both determines and exceeds, cognition. We do not first per-ceive what is before us, and then respond emotionally to these perceptions. Whitehead
says that the order is rather the reverse. For “the direct information to be derived
from sense-perception wholly concerns the functionings of the animal body”
(215). Perception is first a matter of being-affected bodily. Contact with the outside
world strengthens or weakens the body, stimulates it or inhibits it, furthers or
impairs its various functions. Every perception or prehension thus provokes the
body into “adversion or aversion” – and this is already the “subjective form” of
the prehension (1929/1978, 184). It is only later that (in “high-grade” organisms
such as ourselves, at least) “the qualitative characters of affective tones inherent
in the bodily functionings are transmuted into the characters of regions” in space
(1933/1967, 215), so that sensa can be taken to qualify (or to give us information
about) objects of knowledge in the external world. [b]We respond to things in the
first place by feeling them; it is only afterwards that we identify, and cognize,
what it is we feel.[/b]
Whitehead’s account of perception as feeling is a refinement, and an extension, of
William James’ (1983) theory of the emotions. James claims “that we feel sorry
because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not that
we cry, strike, or tremble, because we are sorry, angry, or fearful, as the case may
be” (1065-1066). Emotions do not cause bodily states; rather, the bodily states
come first, and the emotions arise out of them. Strictly speaking, this is more an
argument about expression than about causality. Our “perception” of an “exciting
fact” takes the form of “bodily changes”; and “our feeling of the same changes as
they occur IS the emotion” (1065). James’ real point is not to reverse the order of
causality, so that (contrary to what we usually think) the bodily state would be the
cause and the metal state the effect. Rather, he asserts the identity of these conditions,
in a radical monism of affect: “whatever moods, affections, and passions I
have are in very truth constituted by, and made up of, those bodily changes which
we ordinarily call their expression or consequence” (1068). There is no separating
body from mind, or the (bodily) expression from what it (mentally) expresses.
Perception is already, immediately,12 action in the form of “bodily changes”; and
the way that I receive a perception, or apprehend its “sensa,” is the way that my
body changes, or has changed. Perception or excitation, action or bodily changes,
and emotion or response, are all one and the same event. It is only in subsequent
reflection that we can separate them from one another (just as, for Whitehead, it isonly in subsequent reflection, and by a process of abstraction, that we can separate
the “subjective form” of a prehension from the datum being prehended, and both
of these from the “actual entity” of which the prehension is a “concrete element”).
[b]James describes emotion as a particular sort of experience. Whitehead radicalizes
this argument, and expands its scope, by describing all experience as emotional.
[b]This includes bare sense-perception; it also includes modes of “experience” that
are not conscious, and not necessarily human. Indeed, Whitehead’s philosophy
“attributes ‘feeling’ throughout the actual world” (1929/1978, 177)[/b].[/b] For Whitehead,
“feelings” are identical with “positive prehensions” in general, which are
all the ways in which entities interact with one another, or affect one another
(220).13 To feel something means to be affected by that something. And the way
that the feeling entity is affected, or changed, is the very content of what it feels.
Everything that happens in the universe is thus in some sense an episode of feeling:
even the “actual occasions in so-called ‘empty space’ ” discovered by modern
physics (177). Of course, quantum fluctuations in the void do not involve anything
like consciousness or sense-perception. But when we examine these fluctuations,
“the influx of feeling with vague qualitative and ‘vector’ definition is what we
find” (177). Overall, there is “a hierarchy of categories of feeling” (166), from
the “wave-lengths and vibrations” of subatomic physics (163) to the finest subtleties
of human subjective experience. But in every case, phenomena are felt, and
grasped as modes of feeling, before they can be cognized and categorized. In this
way, Whitehead posits feeling as a basic condition of experience, much as Kant
establishes space and time as transcendental conditions of sensibility.
12“Immediately” here means in the same undecomposable present moment. Of course, James
insists that such a “present moment of time,” or what he prefers to call the “specious present,” is
never literally instantaneous, but always possesses a certain thickness of duration (573-574).
Thanks for the link, I'll read it in detail later.
Yes. The basis of experience is emotional. I think the philosophical zombie argument really brings this home, for me at least. Without emotion, there would be no experience, and without experience, there would be no consciousness.
So the question is what is emotion / feeling ?
Like forces, feelings can not be conceptualized, they can only be felt. In mind, reason and feelings are not miscible, they exist side by side like an emulsion (oil and water), where one cannot inhabit the other. The feeling causes affect, and thus affected, we reintegrate. We are always affected to reintegrate. And this way a self evolves as a body of information. A body of information integrating more and more information onto itself, in successive moments of consciousness.
Everything can be described as a body of information accumulating more information onto itself.
That is roughly how it has come together for me, how about yourself?
This is true. But the main point of my reply was that all that is gibberish and pretentious.
How can you expect someone to read more of the topic if you start it with a whole paragraph that sounds like gibberish? This is "suicidal" (for your post). If you really want to get sensible responses, you have to start with something also sensible and undestandable. Isn't this obvious?
No doubt the nature of mind is uncertain. Is the mind physical or not? Why else the debate between physicalists and nonphysicalists?
Put simply, we aren't sure that the mind is physical but then nonphysicalists have to explain why? i.e. what (good) reasons are there that the mind could be nonphysical?
The Unicorn Problem For Nonphysicalism.
One very potent argument in favor of nonphysicalism is the mind can produce mental objects that aren't physically instantiated e.g. unicorns and that's just one example, there are numerous other objects that exist only in the mind. Is this a good reason to doubt the physicality of the mind?
Not so fast. A unicorn (physically nonexistent) = Horse (physically exists) + Horn (physically exists). In other words, a pure nonphysical object can be and is reducible to physical objects.
Is the mind a unicorn? Let's grant that the mind is nonphysical like a unicorn but just like the unicorn can be expressed in physical terms - horse & horn - the mind too can be expressed (reduced) to the physical.
There are not just two choices here, the mind being physical or non-physical. A third choice is "do brains have the ability to contain the non-physical?". So this is not a singular form but is irreducible. We deal with mental content all the time and it's never separate from our physical brain so why not acknowledge this two part form?
The Unicorn can exist physically as patterns of matter and energy ( information ) in your mind, just like all other thoughts, as neuroplasticity would suggest.
It's good to hear someone uttering these words. I say this frequently and I fully believe experience exists. But it's physical. This is not a contradiction in terms.
So as a process:
Brain state (1) --->Minding process ---> Brain state (2).
Also,
Brain state (1) is Mental content (1),
Brain state (2) is Mental content (2).
Example,
I have three dollars to spend on a used book --->Minding process --->
I own a used book.
I see but I meant to stress on the mind's ability to transcend the physical by being able to conceive of stuff (like unicorns) that don't exist in the physical world. Even if the thought of unicorns are patterns of matter & energy that still doesn't diminsh the significance of unicorns as pure thought even after conceding the fact that unicorns are horses with horns (both physically instantiated).
Quoting 180 Proof
Yes, I get where you're coming from. (Mind)ing is simply the function the brain just as physical as digestion, the function of the gut. Indeed a function isn't a thing, at least not in the sense the thing that functions is - digestion lacks the thingness of the gut.
You mean the mind can create a world beyond the world in itself? Yes indeed! And if you accept that every consciousness is unique in the absolute sense, then you might also accept that every world view is also unique in the absolute sense, which might make you wonder what the world is, given we live in slightly different ones, depending upon our consciousness. :chin: FYI
:ok: :up:
Hate to break it to you, but I think its pretty damn easy to understand lol
Can you identify anything at the quantum level that always correlates to mental activity, can be turned off and on, or is some kind of switching device that could play a role in decision making? And why would these capabilities exist only in the brains of biological organisms? Has our genetic code found some way to exploit quantum phenomenon? And what quantum phenomenon would there be at the temperature our brains function?
Of course you think. But "lol"? What are you? 12?
Giving me crap for my lol's? That is neither philosophically relevant nor intellectually sound, and is unequivocally incorrigible.
Quoting Enrique
By "12", I meant intellecutal age, not physical. And in fact your expression "giving me crap" proves it. Anyway, maybe I should also mention your hypocrisy (re: "it's pretty damn easy")
philosophy throwdown! lol
I've been informed that the phosphates of ATP (adenosine triphosphate), a primary energy storage molecule in organisms, may be able to sustain superpositions for almost a second, so human body temperature is close to being proven conducive. I assume the mechanism would be a sort of cyclical pulsing between coherence states and "wave function collapse" or decoherence.
If you have enough of these molecular superpositions in close proximity, even if they only last a second, biochemical pathways might be generated that are effectively always in an "on" state of superposition, responsible for the fact that particular percepts are sustained for long periods during certain kinds of conscious awareness.
The steady state holism of consciousness would be due to the brain's electromagnetic field creating a global substrate within which these particular percepts are lodged, blended into this field by electric charge, which is a force capable of influencing the behavior of photons and electrons by moving them about and inducing them to cohere. Of course neuronal connections play a role in producing the electromagnetic field among additional functions, but the substance of subjective particularity would be these quantum biochemical pathways within cells.
This is all still speculative, but its the only explanation I've encountered that can get past the philosophical complications of consciousness theory. Dualism doesn't technically work, physicalism also, but a panprotopsychism based on quantum theory makes mechanistic sense. It's the only option so far that has any possibility of explaining how mind and matter coexist, all of its facets are falsifiable, and it makes intuitive sense.
An aspect of this theory is that percepts are unconstrained to biological form as thus far modeled. It allows for the possibility that beings exist with a structural design not dependent on genes, membranes, carbon, or any substances that the human body is based around. So the kinds of consciousness that can potentially be accounted for expands greatly.
Some further implications have already been mentioned, such as building elements of subjectivity into electronic devices and devising medical treatments and enhancements for organic processes that have traditionally been regarded as subjective.
You might be able to think of some objections, and if so I'd like to read them.
Since you deleted the posts, I won't comment much, but superposition amongst the phosphates of ATP is pretty cutting edge research, don't know a lot about it yet, just saw brief mention in a youtube video. That molecule is not involved in the biochemical pathways of qualitative subjectivity specifically so probably is not involved in producing percepts as per panprotopsychism, but may at least demonstrate that such a mechanism is possible.
Exactly. Thanks for proving me right a second time. That's fine. I don't need another proof.
But not (consciousness)ing
Sorry I deleted that. My mistake. When I posted it showed up triple so I started deleting.
I had checked ATP on Google and Wikipedia and tried to summarize. Basically it's present in all cells and its function is to store and release energy. Breaking a phosphate group linkage provides energy and reduces the molecule to ADP. The cells mitochondria uses energy from food to convert ADP to ATP. It plays a role in muscle contraction. It is used in neurons for firing and signal propagation.
The chemistry of ATP in the neuron gets really involved with binding sites and action potentials.
The broken off phosphate group is a phosphorus atom with some oxygen bonds, a fairly simple molecule. I'm mostly just reviewing this for myself. It's helpful to get an image of the chemical structure of ATP breaking down to ADP.
I really don't think it's the best science but you might get that idea if it's all you search for.
There is also the issue of whether or not 'what is consciousness? is a legitimate question. There might be some prerequisite questions like 'is physical matter all there is?'. I would answer yes. Then I would ask 'does mental content exist?'. I would answer yes, if brain function reaches a certain threshold mental content can exist. This way gives you a solid basis for answering related questions such as what is intelligence, what is information, what are thoughts, ideas, beliefs, how higher order functions like language and mathematics work and so on. And after that, you may or may not still want to ask 'what is consciousness?'.