Brain Physiology, Cognition and Consciousness group: topic
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Reflection & Resonance
Philip Benjamin
Wednesday, 24 June 2009 15:00 UTC
Suppose the mirror image of ‘me’ recognizes me, or is conscious!
Suppose? It does everything I do! Why reckon that it doesn’t think?
In a pan-psychic universe mirror images do think! If not, why not?
This reflection resonates ‘me’ warts, moles and all; incredulous?
More real is a bio dark-matter axion-like ‘Invisible Homo sapiens’
Of three different spin-axions akin to the ordinary fermions
With differential taxonomic distributions in plants, animals, humans
Dark Chemistries and differential taxonomic emission of bio-photons
Philip Benjamin
medinuclear@hotmail.com
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Phillip asks “If force, gravity, magnetism is not physical, what category of existence will you assign them?”
Force, Gravity, and Magnetism are not physical entities in the sense that they do not have a physical structure made out of particles. I would class them as immaterial in that sense. In fact the “Physical” structure of the universe does not deal well with the immaterial. Which is part of the reason that we have questions about the nature of the universe that are not well answered by today’s science.
We have the same sort of problem with consciousness, in that it is immaterial
(So is sentience by the way) In fact what we are trying to do with consciousness research is pick apart sentience, into components that are easier to define. One of those elements is intelligence, but we can have some relatively intelligent machines, that are not sentient, so we attribute the missing pieces to consciousness. -
Dear Graeme,
if I may go quite off topic: I think though that energy, magnetism etc. are entirely physical. Maybe this point could be used to reduce some false antagonisms that hinder a fruitful discussion.
What poses stronger challenges to physicalism are: ideas, information, natural laws and possibly conscious experience. We have pointed to properties of conscious experience that are “flüchtig”. I tried to look up this word and found many English translations like: transient. Transient though does not entirely seem to catch the speed of that phenomenon. Obviously if we could relate a conscious experience exactly to a transient brain or body state, that would help, but I do not think that is possible.
Yours friendly
Hans -
Hans,
Would “fleeting” be a good translation of “flüchtig”?
If I remember correctly, together with the illusory motion of the phi phenomenon we can measure, via fMRI, a fleeting biophysical analog in the activity of the brain’s visual system.
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[Hans Ricke]
If I may go quite off topic: I think though that energy, magnetism etc. are entirely physical. Maybe this point could be used to reduce some false antagonisms that hinder a fruitful discussion.
What poses stronger challenges to physicalism are: ideas, information, natural laws and possibly conscious experience. We have pointed to properties of conscious experience that are “flüchtig”.[Philip Benjamin]
This view is the general and most prevalent view of what is physical. Objective Physicalism need not be “antagonistic”, falsely or otherwise, to SUBJECTIVE mystical or Constructivistic world views. The confusion arises when objectivity and subjectivity are interchangeably used. Immateriality and mysticism have always gone hand in hand, but I have not come across physical scientists treating those terms as compatible. Photon is immaterial, but not mystic.It always will remain mysterious, though.
[Graeme Smith]
Force, Gravity, and Magnetism are not physical entities in the sense that they do not have a physical structure made out of particles. I would class them as immaterial in that sense. In fact the “Physical” structure of the universe does not deal well with the immaterial. Which is part of the reason that we have questions about the nature of the universe that are not well answered by today’s science.
[Philip Benjamin]
As long as the terms are defined and understood, there is no problem in accepting “immaterial” as something unique or “mystic” or not ordinarily physical. In other words, “immaterial” stuff is extraordinarily physical. You may differ on that.
Now, immateriality and invisibility go together. Photons (EM) are exceptions? However invisibility (non-EM) does not necessarily mean immateriality.
[Graeme Smith]
We have the same sort of problem with consciousness, in that it is immaterial (So is sentience by the way) In fact what we are trying to do with consciousness research is pick apart sentience, into components that are easier to define. One of those elements is intelligence, but we can have some relatively intelligent machines, that are not sentient, so we attribute the missing pieces to consciousness.
[Philip Benjamin]
This is extremely interesting, especially coming from some one who admits of having a mystic (i.e. sensitivity toward immateriality, I suppose) bend of ‘mind’ (or consciousness as you prefer to identify).
1. “Sentience is immaterial”. Is it really? Should it be?
2. “Consciousness is immaterial”. Is it really? Should it be?
3. “Immaterial sentience can be picked apart from immaterial consciousness”. Is that necessary? Just for argument’s sake, suppose they are the same. Then you cannot pick them apart. Have you made any provision for that contingency? If not, why not?
4. “Sentience has components”. Of necessity these components must be “immaterial”. However, since even the ‘immaterial’ photons can be “particulate” (corpuscle theory), is there even a remote possibility that sentience also can be “corpuscular”?
5. “Intelligence is a component of sentience”. Is there a gradation of intelligence? How will you ‘grade’ plant intelligence to human intelligence? [All my plants were ‘intelligent’ and sensitive to “care”, my pets were of a different ‘grade’ up and humans are of still different ‘grade’, qualitatively and quantitatively]. Biosphere is empirically pan-sentient, with a common denominator at the Stimulus-Response Level. There is no such empirical evidence for pan-psychism].
6. ‘Artificial Intelligence has no sentience”. Does that mean AI is ‘material’, not ‘immaterial’ or physical all the way?
7. “The missing piece in AI, is consciousness”. Does that mean if you can put “consciousness” into AI, it will be sentient? The question in item # 3 applies here. [You have made a distinction without difference between sentience and consciousness].
When I look at the picture you present, I am drawn to “intelligence” as “a component of sentience”. I also see a ‘gradation’ of sentience and ‘perhaps’ in a related manner a ‘gradation’ of intelligence also across the taxa. Gradation means “granularity” which is the unique characteristic of the universe. Granularity means “particles”. The immateriality of ‘sentience’ (“intelligence”) is suggestive of “invisibility” of these particles.
Invisibility points to non-EM particles. Moreover, EM-non-EM interactions can yield ELF photons. The loosening of the binding of EM-Non-EM bonds under the influence of varying low energy magnetic fields may even explain induced paranormal phenomena (associated with intelligence).
There is much more. May be, later.Best regards,
Philip Benjamin
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Hans, A magnet is physical, magnetic flux is not. It is however explained using the EM laws which are part of Physics. So if you use Physical in the sense of Physics, then it’s immateriality doesn’t matter. But like I say, it cannot be explained by theories involving particles, because flux is not corpuscular.
On the other hand if you accept non-material things as physical, then you also accept the Quantum which is thought to be a packet of energy, as physical without requiring it to be part of a Boson. If you don’t require the quantum to be part of a boson, then it doesn’t have mass, and try to find mathematical treatments for packets of energy that don’t have mass. What does momentum for instance mean to a particle that doesn’t have mass?
People talk about photons, and there are experiments that only make sense if light is a photon but what if it is not the photon that has mass, but a shockwave left behind when a non massive packet of energy reaches light speed? An optical explosion similar to the sonic boom aircraft produce when they pass the speed of sound?
This is too broad a digression to get into here.
As for Fleeting impressions or perceptions, I think you are right that we cannot yet measure them, there is a resolution problem with the MRI and MEG that simply eliminates that option. However the MMNn signal suggests that there is a relationship between the fleeting impressions of the first 80 millisecond epoch, and the increase in activity of the second, that has been linked to eventual conscious perception. The main problem I see between our different viewpoints lies in the inability to see fleeting changes after a lag, as being perceived as fleeting changes in real time. In other words the signals are fleeting in our perception, they are just not perceived until about 500 milliseconds after the signal was received by our senses. By lagging that much, there is a large opportunity to process the signals between the time they are received at the senses, and the time they are experienced consciously. I think the problem here, is a lack of acceptance of parallelism, that allows multiple signals to be progressing through different stages of attention, simultaneously and thus different zones in the brain, in parallel before it gets to the point where we can recognize that we experience them.
Philip says “In fact immaterial stuff is extraordinarily physical” Well, that is where Dark Energy and Dark Matter differ. Dark Energy suggests that there might be a positive force that is weaker than the weak force that throws off our gravity calculations on the Galactic Scale. Dark Matter suggests some Physical but exotic matter (exotic to us, not to the universe)
that is somehow invisible, and tries to explain everything that is immaterial by invoking this exotic physical stuff.Entropy might be explained by a positive force that acts at the energy level and is associated with Quanta, so I think that dark energy simply falls affoul of the assumption of negative force as being the norm. there is no reason that stronger forces couldn’t be caused by the activity of smaller forces working enmasse, and there is the implication that Entropy might be an expression of the positive force acting to spread energy packets evenly across the Universe. If so, we might want to consider that both self-organization and disorder come from the same force. But I am getting into my religion here, so I will stop at that point.
Philip says “Sentience is immaterial” quoting me, “is it, should it be?”
Well look at the mechanisms that we can detect the regaining of consciousness and thus sentience in humans, symptoms such as a glint in the eye where the unconscious person has dull eyes. This isn’t mystical it just means that the blinking reflex comes back into play, moistening the eye ball and thus reflecting more light off of it. An increase in Awareness of the environment. This probably has to do with the return of the Attention Systems operation moving data through the brain so that it can be experienced and thus reacted to. These are symptoms of systems of physical structure, working again, but there is no appreciable physical change except in the EM band where brain waves become more active. (Assuming that EM is considered to be physical). So the return of sentience is experienced but except for an increase in signal traffic, there is little physical to attach it to, and there are those that will say that the signal traffic is not sentience, and I think they are right. If we can’t point to a physical change that occurred other than the signal traffic, why do we cavail at the idea that sentience is immaterial? Now having said that, immaterial does not mean unexplainable or that we need an exotic explanation.
Philip goes on to say “Immaterial Sentience is picked apart to form Immaterial Consciousness” then goes on to ask the necessity and the relative wisdom of picking apart sentience, and whether we have considered that it might not be valid, or necessary.
Now we are getting into the philosophical realm of reductionism, and the objections that many philosophers have to it. Not being a philosopher I will not attempt to capture all the arguments pro and conn reductionism, however I will say that the philosophical tool of reductionism has been useful for science, and while many theories based on reductionism have been proven false, it was not considered the tools fault, merely the misapplication of the tool to an element that did not break apart into smaller parts as expected. The word Atom when applied to the elements of the periodic table is an obvious misapplication, since we have “Split” the atom into electrons protons and neutrons. However this does not mean that the reduction of everything into corpuscles was not incorrect also.
Science does not guarantee that every experiment will work the first time, or that every theory is correct without repetition of experiments, what it does is give us a framework within which people who make mistakes can build together a better framework of less error prone knowledge. So should we try to separate sentience into Intelligence and Consciousness? Who knows? that is what we are trying now, in 10 years we might have given that attempt up and by trying something else. Or as some of us believe, we may already know enough to be able to design a machine that is conscious, and thus be able to see if being conscious and intelligent at the same time is enough to explain sentience. Should we do it… Hey, that is another kettle of fish as they say. By the way we have the “It can’t be done” option already covered by the philosophers who are sure that Phenomenal Experience can’t be modelled.
IQ tests were devised as an attempt by scientists to answer the question of whether there was a graduation of intelligence, The answer seems to be yes, although the application of any particular test across species is sometimes controversial. For instance it would be difficult for a plant to push a button on a computer fast enough to compete with a human for timed intelligence tests, so there is a question of whether rigidity should be a limiting factor for intelligence.
Is there a graduation of Consciousness?
Perhaps there is, for instance we know that humans are conscious in a more sentient way than animals, and that some animals are conscious in a more sentient way than other animals, and that most animals are more sentient than plants. It gets a little difficult to tell when the animals look like plants, and the plants move like animals, but in general this seems to be the case.
Right now, my theory has 3 levels of graduation that some scientist or other has called consciousness.
1. Reactive Consciousness Which I call awareness
2. Reflective Consciousness Which is what I call the animal model of consciousness
3. Higher order (Thinking) Consciousness (Human Model of Consciousness)There might be more graduations but this is all that I have seen evidence for yet.
I think that I can clear up the distinction between sentience and consciousness.
Essentially I would state it this way, Intelligence is necessary but not sufficent to explain sentience.
Consciousness is necessary but not sufficient to explain sentience because it does not explain intelligence. To support this I say that While intelligence is needed for consciousness, and consciousness enhances intelligence, it is possible to have conscious animals with little intelligence, and it is possible to have intelligent systems with no consciousness. Neither of these is as sentient as a human, and so neither alone is sufficient to meet the requirements of human sentience, if they combined can reach a similar level of sentience is not possible to test yet, if only because we cant test for consciousness and therefore can’t prove that any particular machine is truly conscious.
Research into consciousness is needed to get to the point where we can test machines that seem conscious to determine where they lie on some graduation of consciousness, so we can determine whether a machine that is sufficiently intelligent and also sufficiently conscious, is also sufficiently sentient to compare to humans. Turing’s test, is the only test that has been created that tests both intelligence and consciousness, and it is really unsuitable for testing sentience because of the tendency of humans to anthropomorphise.
The idea that graduation leads to granularity is not new, the idea that sentience might be Quantum in nature is not new, however you still are stuck on ELFs and BioPhotons. There is no reason to assume that quantums imply particles. Quantums of energy might be packets, but they do not necessarily imply particles, for one thing the sub-atomic particles become immaterial at about the size of the electron, and the Quantum Constant is many orders of magnitude smaller than the smallest particle.
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Graeme wrote an excellent message, stating among other thingts that:
“Well look at the mechanisms that we can detect the regaining of consciousness and thus sentience in humans, symptoms such as a glint in the eye where the unconscious person has dull eyes. …
These are symptoms of systems of physical structure, working again, but there is no appreciable physical change except in the EM band where brain waves become more active. (Assuming that EM is considered to be physical). So the return of sentience is experienced but except for an increase in signal traffic, there is little physical to attach it to, and there are those that will say that the signal traffic is not sentience, and I think they are right. If we can’t point to a physical change that occurred other than the signal traffic,…”Alfredo´s comment: Some of the most important questions of the contemporary debate on consciousness and the physical world were well stated by Graeme. I would like to indicate that – according to my published hypotheses – the conscious state is related to the existence of amplitude-modulated quantum-like coherent calcium waves in astrocytes, which are no doubt physical.
The details are complex. Brain signals are mostly directed to control ligand-gated neuron membrane ion channels that operate like biological Maxwell Demons, reducing the entropy of the system and allowing the creation of the abovementioned quantum-like coherent multiscale calcium waves. Therefore the signals are not sentience, but they determine (by means of exerting control on the activity of entropy-reducing mechanisms) the patterns of sentience. Some details of this kind of process are described in my paper with Furlan, “Biomolecular Information, Brain Activity and Cognitive Functions” that is linked in my Nature Network profile and in this groups’ publications.
A further remark: if information is physical (as argued by J. Beckenstein among others) then the operation of the biological Demon (i.e. the protein, as proposed by J. Monod) is also physical, since it makes use of information and energy drawn from the environment (it does not violate the Second law like the “original” Demon imagind by Maxwell). A big question for me is if Dark Matter is involved in quantum entanglement, which plays a central role in the formation of such quantum-like coherent states that I assume to be possible in the brain.Best
Alfredo
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[Graeme Smith]:
“This is too broad a diagression to get into here”
[Philip Benjamin]
Agreed.
However, I have gone through your very interesting post. These issues have been deliberated many times over, both from the philosophic and scientific perspectives, though incompletely and unsatisfactorily to all. The issues you raised need reasonable answers, more leisurely.
Physicality, immateriality, invisibility, particle/wave REALITIES, EM/non-EM materiality, QM entanglement etc must be and can be considered strictly on the “physical” (not meta-physical or mystical)premises and basis. Though nobody knows what a photon ‘really’ is, its immateriality is experimentally ‘objectivised’ and not simply experientially ‘subjectivsed’.
Indivudual ‘feel’ of a photon may be poetic, philosophic, psychic, pietistic,
mystic (in the sense of a subjective transient perception of immateriality) or even be very pathetic (as in the case of blindness). That cannot be the premise of a physical (scientific) exploration of photons. That should be left to the domain of philosophy and psychology. Some of these ‘feels’ including ‘time-honored’ traditional concepts may be abnormal also.Then, why exclude "extra-terrestrials’ from such abnormalities? If panspermia is considered ‘rational’, why not consider that the ‘entities authoring’ these ’sperms’themselves can influence and ‘chanel’ humans(as in the case of Seth/Robert). If they are hiding- usually an enemical tactic for humans- they may not even be benevolent, or not ncessarily even rational!!
Best regards,
Philip Benjamin
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[Alfredo Pereira Jr]
A big question for me is if Dark Matter is involved in quantum entanglement, which plays a central role in the formation of such quantum-like coherent states that I assume to be possible in the brain.
[Philip Benjamin]
If dark matter is made of particles such as axions why object to them being governed by quantum laws? Different kinds of axions have been proposed (fermionic and bosonic)and very expensive experimental procedures are in progress to detect axions.
If axion-like dark matter particles can be converted (disintegrated)into photons in very strong magnetic fields, their involvement in any size or shape in living matter will be problematic, because that would have been happening all the time in any MRI procedure and affect “sentience” adversely. So far all experiments in strong magnetic fields have failed to detect any photon production from axions. [Nor is there any adverse effect of MRI on ‘sentience’, though such correlation is too premature]
Best regards,
Philip Benjamin
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Alfredo Brings up an interesting question when he starts talking about Amplitude Modulated Calcium Waves in Astrocytes.
Normally Glial Cells, are not considered part of the processing machinery of the brain but more in the role of support mechanisms for the Neurons which do the actual processing. If this is true, then why would there be calcium waves in Astrocytes, that are affected by or affect the signal levels of Neurons.
The answer seems to lie in the uses in which calcium is required for the Neuron to process properly. Notably Calcium is found to be involved in Axon signal propagation, and in the attachment of Neurotransmitter Vessicles to the Axon Buds. I have for instance posited a link between the 40 hertz SSR signal and activation of the S synapse. Linking the 40 hertz SSR signal to an early form of GSO used to tag implicit functional Clusters.
The question becomes which comes first, the Calcium Waves or the SSR signal?
If the SSR signal comes first then the Calcium waves are simply the result of an increased activation of S synapse calcuim channels. If the Calcium waves come first and are not modulated at 40 hertz, another interpretation might be that they are activated by the calcium ion channels in the Axon that are transporting the signal down the axon fiber. If no link is found between these two signal sources and the AM frequency of the calcium waves, then there is still the chance that astrocytes respond to the calcium levels around the cells they are serving, and thus that the frequency is dependent on some mechanical distribution method, and its natural frequency. It is only once we have eliminated these factors that the idea that Astrocytes are somehow steering the neurons by calcium supply would be normally looked at with any favor. -
Graeme, you have great imagination but you need an update of what has been discovered in astrocyte research the last 15 years. Basically, calcium waves are controlled by the glutamate (Glu) released by (axons of) neurons. Glu binds to astrocyte metabotropic receptors and then the effect of this activation, mediated by inositol triphosphate, puts a calcium population (trapped in the endoplasmatic reticulum) in movement. The kind of effect that you imagined (putatively) occurs with potassium that is released by axons during an action potential and affect near calcium ions inside the astrocyte, by means of EM fields. IOW, the dynamics of calcium in astrocytes is relatively independent of the dynamic in neurons (which BTW has several pathways, as NMDA receptor control of inward flux in dendrites, voltage-gated calcium channels in the axon, and several intracellular processes).
Best
Alfredo
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