Brain Physiology, Cognition and Consciousness: notice board entry
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A Decade of the Mind?
- Posted by:
- Alfredo Pereira Jr (group admin)
- Date:
- 10 September 2007
- Comments:
- 14 comments
In the current issue of Science (7 September 2007; Vol. 317, No. 5843), a group of scientists published a letter proposing a Decade of the Mind:
“A Proposal for a Decade of the Mind Initiative
A deep scientific understanding of how the mind perceives, thinks, and acts is within our grasp. Such an understanding will have a revolutionary impact on national interests in science, medicine, economic growth, security, and well-being. It is our belief that paradigm-shifting progress can be made now by establishing a major national research initiative called “The Decade of the Mind.”
A Decade of the Mind initiative would build on progress of the recent Decade of the Brain (1990-99), which dramatically increased the visibility of neuroscience. Unlike the Decade of the Brain, which focused on neuroscience and clinical applications, the Decade of the Mind initiative, by necessity, should be transdisciplinary and multi-agency in its approach. Success will require research that reaches across disparate fields such as cognitive science, medicine, neuroscience, psychology, mathematics, engineering, and computer science. Additional important insights will need to come from areas as diverse as systems biology, cultural anthropology, social science, robotics, and automation technology.”
Full Text: Science
Unlike the Decade of the Brain, which focused on neuroscience and clinical applications, the Decade of the Mind initiative, by necessity, should be transdisciplinary and multi-agency in its approach. Success will require research that reaches across disparate fields such as cognitive science, medicine, neuroscience, psychology, mathematics, engineering, and computer science.
Gosh, I wonder why they left physics of the list? Last I heard, the mind was thought to be hooked up to the brain somehow, which is generally regarded as a physical thing.
I guess the herd, in its wisdom, has already plumbed the depths of that issue.
I wish them luck shifting the paradigm, sitting snug’n’smug in their conceptual playpen.
Quanta & Consciousness
Dear Brian:
It is interesting that physics is not in the list. Maybe the authors assumed that all relevant physics is already included in current neuroscience. However, it is possible that neuronal activity only establishes boundary conditions for the emergence of mental processes. The physics of ions (or, maybe, water) may be essential for the understanding of conscious states.
Best Regards,
Alfredo
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Dear Alfredo,
Sorry to be so late getting back to you with my revisions—one thing and another, lately.
I have exciting news, however. Last time, I wrote about the AAAI’s Quantum Interaction 2008 symposium, to be held in Oxford. As with last year’s gathering in Stanford, I expect the forthcoming show will have more political impact than intellectual interest. I.e., the simple fact that the event is associated with Oxford lends an air of credibility to a field once dismissed as the province of crackpots and “quantum mystics.”
Well, the truly exciting news also comes from the UK, by way of the British Computer Society which really does appear to be getting it.
Consider the following:
This is “Can quantum information processing explain how brains work?” For, as Perus, for example, has shown, the neural net and the quantum systems formalisms are epistemologically identical, except they concern mathematically real and complex quantities respectively. These formalisms therefore differ only in the fact that quantum theory explicitly concerns complex amplitudes defining a wave mechanics capable, in principle, of describing the holographic physical informational encoding/decoding of the dimensional geometry of real objects.
Compare this with an earlier publication in Information & Cognition:
If Paul Churchland is correct about the neural implementation of matrix-valued operators, then that is rather interesting, since that is precisely the sort of mathematics we find at work at the quantum level of neural function. Which would seem to make a kind of sense, if, as we suggest, the form of neural networks follows the underlying function of those quantum processes, which mediate neural activity.
Here is another excerpt from the BCS:
It is therefore on this biological frontier of information processing, that the Group is now concentrating its investigations and programme, the success of which is regularly reported in its homepages.
These investigations show
(a) that while qubit computing research concentrates on the discrete/particle observable properties of quantum mechanical systems, usually taken to concern the eigenvalues of quantum mechanical operators, (b) that(i) quantum (rather than thermodynamically) optimally controlled chemistry [...] likely appropriate to the brain/organism’s chemically based computation, and (ii) quantum mechanical neural information processing in brains are both much more likely to involve observable gauge invariant phases of the quantum state vector.
Now compare this with the text from Information & Cognition:
So why have the secondary properties not been put forward heretofore to occupy these “hidden” variables and extra dimensions? Part of the answer must lie in the fact that colors and sounds have historically been excluded from the physical world, even though they demonstrably co-vary with other physical parameters. Another part of the answer is contained in an observation from Wittgenstein, where he writes that “the things that are most important for us are hidden from us by their simplicity and familiarity.” And then, of course, the dimensions of color and sound and so forth are different from the dimensions of traditional spacetime; they are more like the “internal” dimensions of gauge theory or the compactified (very small) dimensions of string/M-theory — and like these more traditional physical dimensions, the dimensions of color and sound are tangent to the points of spacetime, suggesting that colors and sounds might be amenable to the mathematics of fiber bundles.
Or the following:
Such questions raise many another in their wake — just what is color space, e.g.? Note that we can make a natural mapping from the spectral colors to a color sphere, where Newton’s color wheel runs around the circumference, with black and white at the poles. Or such a mapping could be made with red, green and blue for the axes of a unit sphere in Hilbert space. We could then easily map those color vectors to the photonic vectors with which they are associated, remembering that these “physical” vectors recapitulate the mathematics of colors under vector addition and multiplication. Then, any operation upon the photonic vector would naturally correspond to a rotation of the color vector, in a direct analogy with the mathematics of gauge theory and quantum theory generally.
Further on, the BCS article brings up the De Broglie wave as a plausible hypothesis. This is quite exciting, since it’s a short, logical hop from there to Bohm’s work on hidden variables (HVs), which, as is also argued in the Information & Cognition piece, are just what we need to incorporate secondary qualities into the formalism of quantum theory.
So it seems to me that we are now finally beginning to get somewhere. (Though it’s possible I may be biased.)
Best regards,
Brian Flanagan
I take for my text a previously quoted excerpt from the BCS
quantum mechanical neural information processing in brains are both much more likely to involve observable gauge invariant phases of the quantum state vector.
This passage exhibits a certain sophistication, as do the remarks concerning Berry’s phase later on in the piece. The kinds of invariants (or symmetries) related by gauge theory are quite fundamental to our current scientific understanding, as Weinberg relates:
Increasingly, many of us have come to think that the missing element that has to be added to quantum mechanics is a principle, or several principles, of symmetry. A symmetry is a statement that there are various ways that you can change the way you look at nature, which actually change the direction the state vector is pointing, but which do not change the rules that govern how the state vector rotates with time. The set of all these changes in point of view is called the symmetry group of nature. It is increasingly clear that the symmetry group of nature is the deepest thing that we understand about nature today.
Well, one thing I find fascinating, and altogether suggestive, is that color vectors are also invariant or symmetric under important physical operations, viz., translation, rotation and reflection, e.g.
Another suggestive item arises from several of Weyl’s prescient remarks:
Mathematics has introduced the name isomorphic representation for the relation which according to Helmholtz exists between objects and their signs. I should like to carry out the precise explanation of this notion between the points of the projective plane and the color qualities [...] the projective plane and the color continuum are isomorphic with one another.
And:
Thus the colors with their various qualities and intensities fulfill the axioms of vector geometry if addition is interpreted as mixing; consequently, projective geometry applies to the color qualities.
Well, a few notes:
1) Vectors automatically observe the desired symmetries—that’s a major reason as to why they were “invented.” (See Levi-Civita, e.g.)
2) If we map the projective plane to the 2-sphere, we need to identify the antipodal points on the sphere. Taking R, G, and B for our axes, we can then superpose these vectors to obtain all other colors—if we weight them suitably. (It was this point I was unsure of, prior to delving into topology. Happily, topology affords us another bridge between gauge theory and M-theory, by way of Chern-Simons theory—but that must await another day.)
3) We require a weighted, projective vector manifold which fibers over the (projective) 4D of the visual field.
The analogies to both the internal spaces of gauge theory and the Calabi-Yau spaces of M-theory are, I would argue, too close to be a coincidence. Especially so when one identifies the antipodal points of the color sphere, which would then appear identical (as they ought).
If we now consider the antipodal points as 180 degrees out of phase, we recover the simple observation that a light of any pure spectral hue, when superposed with an identical photon 180 degrees out of phase, cancels and gives us a natural ‘zero,’ namely ‘no light’ or ‘darkness,’ which would then get mapped to the origin of a 3-sphere—another natural choice.
With a natural inverse for addition of color vectors in hand, we have all the ingredients necessary for a group-theoretic treatment of the spectral hues, the other requirements of closure and so forth being obviously met.
We therefore seem to recapitulate the observed facts of color superposition in a manner that is once again reminiscent of gauge (phase) theory while also drawing a direct line between the invariants of color with the symmetries of that theory—symmetries also thought to inform the additional dimensions of string/M-theory.
In sum, we seem to have a direct path leading from everyday observations of color directly into the heart of contemporary physical theory.
Dear Brian:
Many thanks for the news and explanatory commentary.
It is really hard to distinguish the BCS text from your previous work. Possibly it is a convergence of ideas, much like Darwin and Wallace (or Sheldrake’s morphogenetic fields, who knows?).
Is there a way for you to contact these researchers and discuss with them?
Best Wishes,
Alfredo
Dear Brian:
Three questions:
a) Was Perus the creator of the “quantum-like” approach to macroscopic systems?
b) I have heard that De Broglie’s waves were conceived in the context of classical mechanics. How could them lead to Bohm’s hidden variables?
c) If we are talking about “quantum-like” systems, would gauge theory apply to this kind of system?
Best Regards,
Alfredo
It is really hard to distinguish the BCS text from your previous work. Possibly it is a convergence of ideas, much like Darwin and Wallace[...]
Yes, it’s possible, as this kind of thing often happens, of course. Lockwood and I arrived at many of the same essential points entirely independently of one another, e.g. (private communication).
The BCS invites others to join—and I am delighted to see that Sutherland of AND Corp. seems to have allied with them.
As for me, I’m talking to my people and have more exciting news to share, though it’s perhaps best to send that to you under separate cover.
a) Was Perus the creator of the “quantum-like” approach to macroscopic systems?
I have only just now learned of his work by way of the BCS.
b) I have heard that De Broglie’s waves were conceived in the context of classical mechanics. How could they lead to Bohm’s hidden variables?
Here’s a fine introduction, courtesy of the scholars at Stanford
Bohmian mechanics, which is also called the de Broglie-Bohm theory, the pilot-wave model, and the causal interpretation of quantum mechanics, is a version of quantum theory discovered by Louis de Broglie in 1927 and rediscovered by David Bohm in 1952. It is the simplest example of what is often called a hidden variables interpretation of quantum mechanics. In Bohmian mechanics a system of particles is described in part by its wave function, evolving, as usual, according to Schrödinger’s equation. However, the wave function provides only a partial description of the system. This description is completed by the specification of the actual positions of the particles. The latter evolve according to the “guiding equation,” which expresses the velocities of the particles in terms of the wave function. Thus, in Bohmian mechanics the configuration of a system of particles evolves via a deterministic motion choreographed by the wave function. In particular, when a particle is sent into a two-slit apparatus, the slit through which it passes and where it arrives on the photographic plate are completely determined by its initial position and wave function.
c) If we are talking about “quantum-like” systems, would gauge theory apply to this kind of system?
I take the view that all of nature is quantum and therefore governed by the kinds of symmetries expressed in gauge theory. To speak of systems that are “quantum-like” suggests that one has not made this shift of Gestalt.
Dyson stated the case with the simplicity of genius:
There is nothing else except these [quantum] fields: the whole of the material universe is built of them.
And so did Saunders
Our basic ontology is that all systems, macroscopic structures included, are quantum fields [...]
Apropos the above, I would like to reiterate my view that the Heisenberg matrix formalism provides us a natural region of confluence between QM, the operator fields of QFT and the ‘tensor network theory’ of Pellionisz and Llinas.
Thus, neural nets are naturally modeled by matrices just because the nets embody QM matrix mechanics.
Moreover, tensor operators embody the desirable symmetries in re: color. In relation to the equivalence principle, we ought not to be able to tell, in a closed system, whether a given red-shift is caused by a gravitational field or by the acceleration of our spaceship. In either case, the relevant operator ought to rotate the state vector and the associated color vector in precisely the same way—giving us a direct (and testable) route between the observed symmetries of color and those at the foundation of general relativity (as well as the mathematics of invariant theory).
Finally, we have a natural bridge to Riemannian geometry insofar as, when we need to compare color vectors, we are compelled to use the same sorts of mathematics of parallel transport & etc. in order to compensate for the effects of curved space-time in the gravitational Doppler effect.
It is curious that Riemann seems to have made a prescient remark in this connection:
So few and far between are the occasions for forming notions whose specialisations make up a continuous manifold, that the only simple notions whose specialisations form a multiply extended manifoldn are the positions of perceived objects and colors.
[...]
Definite portions of a manifold, distinguished by a mark or a boundary, are called Quanta…
Dear Brian:
I wished I had more knowledge of physics to express my ontological beliefs more rigorously. In summary I think reality is half-quantum and half-classical; it is not deterministic or random, but semi-deterministic; it is not all mindfull (panpsychism) neither all mindless (mechanicism).
The term “quantum-like” is an artifice used for the application of rules originally developed for microscopic particles/waves to macroscopic systems. If these rules apply directly then the artifice is not necessary.
However, some physicists think the rules do not apply directly to complex systems as the brain or human society. E.g. economists are using the expression “quantum-like” to refer to the behavior of the market.
As an anti-reductionist, I agree that the rules do not apply directly; there are levels of organization in complex systems, each one with its own rules. There are self-similarities across levels (fractality) but these similarities do not allow the reduction of properties of the macroscopic system to properties of the elements.
I could agree with you that reality is composed of quantum fields, while holding that at different organizational levels these fields have different properties. Complex systems are composed of second-order fields, e.g. a vibratory pattern in a population of ions is composed of movements of elementary photonic fields.
Following this reasoning, mental content (even the most elementary ones, such as ‘qualia’) are not identical to first-order photonic fields, but relate to higher-order fields composed of structured ensembles of photonic fields.
These higher-order fields present both properties of elementary fields (described by the wave function) and properties of complex fields (described by supplementary rules specific to the organization of the macroscopic system, and closely related to its proper stable – i.e. attractor – states).
Best Regards
Alfredo
Dear Alfredo,
Thanks for your thoughtful reply. I will try to address your points in order:
In summary I think reality is half-quantum and half-classical; it is not deterministic or random, but semi-deterministic; it is not all mindful (panpsychism) neither all mindless [physicalism].
I agree with the latter thesis insofar as I subscribe to neutral monism, as given by the following:
The stuff of which the world of our experience is composed is, in my belief, neither mind nor matter, but something more primitive than either. Both mind and matter seem to be composite, and the stuff of which they are compounded lies in a sense between the two, in a sense above them both, like a common ancestor. (Bertrand Russell)
Most versions of neutral monism are versions of noneliminativist reductionism. Mental and physical phenomena are real but reducible to/constructible from the underlying neutral level. It differs from other versions of reductionism — be they materialistic or mentalistic, eliminative or noneliminative — by insisting on the neutrality of the basis. And its reductionism sets it apart from certain versions of nonreductive theories — emergentism and the dual aspect theory come to mind—with which it is sometimes compared or identified. (Stubenberg)
For the invisible reality, of which we have small pieces of evidence in both quantum physics and the psychology of the unconscious, a symbolic psychophysical unitary language must ultimately be adequate, and this is the far goal which I actually aspire. I am quite confident that the final
objective is the same, independent of whether one starts from the psyche (ideas) or from physis (matter). Therefore, I consider the old distinction between materialism and idealism as obsolete. (Pauli)
However, some physicists think the rules do not apply directly to complex systems as the brain or human society. E.g. economists are using the expression “quantum-like” to refer to the behavior of the market.
To be sure, but I have yet to encounter a macro system which could not be resolved into the activity of a (possibly very large & complex) set of micro systems. It looks as though the people involved in the Quantum Interation symposia are on the same page.
As an anti-reductionist, I agree that the rules do not apply directly; there are levels of organization in complex systems, each one with its own rules. There are self-similarities across levels (fractality) but these similarities do not allow the reduction of properties of the macroscopic system to properties of the elements.
We may have to agree to disagree. I tend to side with Weinberg where he writes that we should be very suspicious of nonreductionist theories in science.
I could agree with you that reality is composed of quantum fields, while holding that at different organizational levels these fields have different properties. Complex systems are composed of second-order fields, e.g., a vibratory pattern in a population of ions is composed of movements of elementary photonic fields.
Not sure what you mean by “second-order fields.”
Following this reasoning, mental content (even the most elementary ones, such as ‘qualia’) are not identical to first-order photonic fields, but relate to higher-order fields composed of structured ensembles of photonic fields.
I see no good reason for making this move, whereas all the physics, math, neuroscience and psychophysics known to me argues for an EPR-complete photonic field, where every “element of reality” is represented.
I thought you might be interested in the following item, in regard to your book with Rocha and Massad:
Monkeys reveal brain is hard-wired for counting
You may not want a monkey to balance your chequebook, but you still have to give them credit – new research supports the idea that not only can monkeys understand written numbers, but that individual brain cells may become dedicated to specific numbers.
The small study of two rhesus monkeys reveals that cells in their brains respond selectively to specific number values – regardless of whether the amount is represented by dots on a screen or an Arabic numeral.
For example, a given brain cell in the monkey will respond to the number three, but not the number one. The results suggest that individual cells in human brains might also have a fine-tuned preference for specific numerical values.
While monkeys might not yet have mastered calculus, recent studies have shown that they can learn understand some basic aspects of arithmetic and, in a rare case, multiplication.
Best,
Brian Flanagan
Here’s a fascinating item that will surely interest those who follow Stapp’s ideas regarding q-mind and the Quantum Zeno Effect (QZE).
I have exciting news to report.
Over the years, I’ve wondered about the wisdom of choosing color to illustrate my ideas regarding secondary qualities & the foundations of quantum theory. I continue to believe that it was the best choice to start out with, given how easy it is for us to “see” the main ideas.
On the other hand, sound has a certain appeal, given that there are well-known harmonic relations, already known to Pythagoras, between what we hear and the numbers associated with those sounds.
Well, it turns out there are all sorts of wonderful relations* between harmonic analysis, operator theory, spectral theory, group theory, number theory, Calabi-Yau theory, the Langlands program, Hilbert spaces & Kac-Moody algebras—far too many for me to explore in my lifetime, in fact, so I thought it best to leave a few bread crumbs in case I get run over by a truck tomorrow:
Harmonic Analysis in Mathematics>
Harmonic Analysis & Group Representations
Group Representations & Harmonic Analysis – Euler to Langlands
Symmetry, Group Theory & So Forth