This will be an uncharacteristically short post.
When I am looking at electrical signals recorded from neurons, how do I really know that those signals are not out-of-context snapshots?
What comes to mind is is the gibberish generator.
Look what it did to this sentence:
To be, or not to be: that is the question: whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them?
It turned it into this:
To bear to troud make arms againsolence dread of? Thus rathe that patience to greath, the dreath thus for in the rub; fortune, the resolution is and name of ther respect the quietural shocks thus…
Looks like a sentance to me, even has some statistical and punctuation regularities and even psuedo-words.
Without knowing the “language”, we are sure to find mulititudes of statistical patterns in the brain, but do they mean anything?
I noticed that the author of this page asks the same question (unfortunately I already wrote this post so I am not erasing it).
But the question remains-without the context (or homeostatic understanding of the baseline electrical activity of the brain) am I just studying statistical gibberish?
Dear Brian:
Below I paste the Abstract of the excellent and often neglected E. Roy John´s paper about a field theory of consciousness. Plese note that he wrote that this field is “quantum-like”.
Best
Alfredo Pereira Jr.
Conscious Cogn. 2001 Jun;10(2):184-213.
A field theory of consciousness.
John ER.
Department of Psychiatry, Brain Research Laboratories, New York University School
of Medicine, 550 First Avenue, New York, New York 10016, USA.
This article summarizes a variety of current as well as previous research in
support of a new theory of consciousness. Evidence has been steadily accumulating
that information about a stimulus complex is distributed to many neuronal
populations dispersed throughout the brain and is represented by the departure
from randomness of the temporal pattern of neural discharges within these large
ensembles. Zero phase lag synchronization occurs between discharges of neurons in
different brain regions and is enhanced by presentation of stimuli. This evidence
further suggests that spatiotemporal patterns of coherence, which have been
identified by spatial principal component analysis, may encode a multidimensional
representation of a present or past event. How such distributed information is
integrated into a holistic precept constitutes the binding problem. How a precept
defined by a spatial distribution of nonrandomness can be subjectively
experienced constitutes the problem of consciousness. Explanations based on a
discrete connectionistic network cannot be reconciled with the relevant facts.
Evidence is presented herein of invariant features of brain electrical activity
found to change reversibly with loss and return of consciousness in a study of
176 patients anesthetized during surgical procedures. A review of relevant
research areas, as well as the anesthesia data, leads to a postulation that
consciousness is a property of quantum-like processes, within a brain field
resonating within a core of structures, which may be the neural substrate of
consciousness. This core includes regions of the prefrontal cortex, the frontal
cortex, the pre- and paracentral cortex, thalamus, limbic system, and basal
ganglia. Copyright 2001 Academic Press.
PMID: 11414714 [PubMed – indexed for MEDLINE]
Dear Alfredo,
Thanks for reminding me of this work. It seems as though he has not yet quite understood the idea that the universe is quantum, through and through.
Saunders presents a philosophically sound account of this view where he writes: “Our basic ontology is that all systems, macroscopic structures included, are quantum fields…” (1)
I am fully in accord with John in re: the importance of phase relations, however. Indeed, as I have argued elsewhere, the symmetries and phase relations of the secondary qualities lead us by a direct path into the heart of gauge theory. (2)
But that is to get ahead of myself. Here, I would simply reiterate my belief that coherence is essential to building up sensory images from incident waves/vectors. This is most easily “seen” in the case of vision, where camera & telescope lenses, e.g., must correctly superpose light waves in order to produce a clear picture.
Returning now to the main thread of my spiel:
Truth is ever to be found in the simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things. (Newton)
How are we to incorporate such things as colors and sounds into the body of science? I have already hinted at what I take to be the solution in referring to color as an “element of reality,” helping myself to a phrase from EPR:
In attempting to judge the success of a physical theory, we may ask ourselves two questions: (1) “Is the theory correct?” and (2) “Is the description given by the theory complete?” It is only in the case in which positive answers may be given to both of these questions, that the concepts of the theory may be said to be satisfactory. The correctness of the theory is judged by the degree of agreement between the conclusions of the theory and human experience […] Whatever the meaning assigned to the term complete, the following requirement for a complete theory seems to be a necessary one: every element of the physical reality must have a counterpart in the physical theory.
The secondary qualities of color and sound are so simple, we might well regard them as elements of a complete quantum theory. Maxwell, Russell, Whitehead and Wittgenstein all back us up on this point. Toward the beginning of PM, e.g., Russell & Whitehead assert:
Thus “this is red,” “this is earlier than that,” are atomic propositions.
For those impatient to get on with it, note that temporal relations are encoded in the metric of general relativity (GR).
Consider also that Kaluza-Klein (KK) theory, hidden variables (HV) theory, gauge theory and string/M-theory all posit additional variables and so share a family resemblance. See, e.g., Witten’s essay, “Toward a realistic Kaluza-Klein theory.” (3)
What I am basically arguing, then, is that the secondary qualities are the natural candidates to fill those variables.
A mild polemic
Now, this move is guaranteed to instill horror into the great unwashed of professional scientists and send them into fits wherein they alternately shriek in terror and repeat nonsense syllables while cupping their hands over their ears. Although this can be great fun, it seldom results in enlightenment.
What is the reason behind their comical panic? It’s really quite simple. Secondary qualities really don’t fit into their tidy conceptions of the universe and so they don’t want to think about them and would rather you didn’t, either.
The far cooler Whitehead helps us along, here:
*What we see depends on light entering the eye. Furthermore we do not even perceive what enters the eye. The things transmitted are waves or—as Newton thought—minute particles, and the things seen are colors. Locke met this difficulty by a theory of primary and secondary qualities. Namely, there are some attributes of the matter which we do perceive. These are the primary qualities, and there are other things which we perceive, such as colors, which are not attributes of matter, but are perceived by us as if they were such attributes. These are the secondary qualities of matter.
Why should we perceive secondary qualities? It seems an unfortunate arrangement that we should perceive a lot of things that are not there. Yet this is what the theory of secondary qualities in fact comes to. There is now reigning in philosophy and in science an apathetic acquiescence in the conclusion that no coherent account can be given of nature as it is disclosed to us in sense-awareness, without dragging in its relation to mind.* (4)
The mind?! But isn’t that, by definition, a mental sort of thing, and therefore, by definition, not physical? Well, to be sure, but the question is really whether nature respects our definitions. If some sort of mind/body duality actually obtains, however, we are left with all the usual problems raised thereby.
Far more satisfactory, in every respect, is an identity theory of mind and brain, as Mach relates:
Thus the great gulf between physical and psychological research persists only when we acquiesce in our habitual stereotyped conceptions. A color is a physical object as soon as we consider its dependence, for instance, upon its luminous source, upon other colors, upon temperatures, upon spaces, and so forth. When we consider, however, its dependence upon the retina …, it is a psychological object, a sensation. Not the subject matter, but the direction of our investigation, is different in the two domains. (5)
Note that this is not a materialist identity theory such as we find in the Churchlands, but rather a neutral monism, where “mind” and “brain” are complementary ways of talking about a deeper unity, somewhat like “wave” and “particle.”
Ahem
Getting back to colors and such, the great mass of professionals really need not bother their heads too much about whether it’s OK to think about such things because all their heroes did so before them, viz., Galileo, Newton, Young, Helmholtz, Riemann, Maxwell, Schrödinger, Weyl, Einstein and Feynman, among others. Which they would know, were they a tad better educated.
As suggested earlier, the symmetries and phase relations of colors (and sounds!) indicate a path leading directly to gauge theory. There, the “internal spaces” would seem quite inviting when shopping around for a nice home for the secondary qualities.
After all:
(i) gauge theory is all about symmetries and phase relations; and
(ii) colors and sounds exhibit symmetries and phase relations — relations observed to vary in step with their associated waves/vectors; and
(iii) the symmetries of gauge theory are thought to manifest themselves in the symmetries of the additional spatial variables of string/M-theory; and
(iv) the symmetries of the secondary qualities would then help to determine the QM action and so help guide our own behavior; and
(v) gauge theory is all very respectable, unlike hidden variables and M-theory, which remain somewhat suspect; and
(vi) we hereby solve two big problems at one stroke, finding a comfortable home for the secondaries while also paying off the mortgages on all those empty places in contemporary physical theory — again, K-K, HV, gauge and string/M-theory.
Finally, the foregoing considerations allow us to recover all manner of data, including a basic aspect of the visual field, as related by Wittgenstein:
A speck in the visual field, though it need not be red must have some color; it is, so to speak, surrounded by color-space. Notes must have some pitch, objects of the sense of touch some degree of hardness, and so on.
Now, it just so happens that fiber-bundle theory is the natural mathematical language of modern particle theory, expanding on the familiar notion of a tangent to a curve, so that we have all sorts of tangent spaces which “fiber over” some other space — or, in the usual physical setting, space-time.
So, considering the visual field in the light of Wittgenstein, it’s quite as though color space fibers over the (projective) space of the visual field — just as it should if, in fact, the visual field is one and the same thing as a photon field.
Well, that’s probably quite enough for today.
Next time, we look at colors as vectors, Hilbert space, Weyl on color & projective geometry and Calabi-Yau spaces.
(1) Brown, H and Harre, R. Philosophical Foundations of Quantum Field Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.
(2) Flanagan, On the Unification of Mind and Matter (PDF)
(3) Applequist, Thomas. Ed., Modern Kaluza-Klein Theories, Addison-Wesley, 1987.
(4) Whitehead, AN. The Concept of Nature, Cosimo, 1920.
(5) Mach, Ernst. The Analysis of Sensations, Dover, 1959.