Zone1 Science Can NOT Explain True Consciousness

[BreezeWood]

lmao

Please show me a spirit without a CNS.

I'll wait

already made available ....

transformed the physiology from one being into another - all of it, including the cns.

 

[ViewFromAbove]

So if it doesn't come from God, then where does it come from?

Consciousness comes from the brain.​

True consciousness comes from scientific brains.

 

[scruffy]

already made available ....

View attachment 878742

transformed the physiology from one being into another - all of it, including the cns.

Oh please. Now you're into African voodoo? Would you like fava beans with your liver?

 

[scruffy]

Consciousness comes from the brain.​

True consciousness comes from scientific brains.

Okay, let's start there.

You are expressing the most common current scientific view.

My view is more precise, and it says something substantially different.

Consciousness is a physical process, a property of the universe itself. The brain is merely a substrate that allows organism to tap into the underlying physical process.

Consciousness is an unfolding of physical time, and as such can only be accomplished by a physical process.

The brain makes this possible, by embedding the physical process into a synthetic timeline (synthesized in and by the brain).

If you'd like to talk about the evidence for this view, I can lay it out in detail, pages and pages of it. We can start from a very simple place - your experience of time.

Two things are apparent right out of the starting gate:

1. Your view of time is egocentric, you think in terms of past, present, and future. Time seems to flow "through" you, and even English vocabulary reflects this mapping, like when you "pull a memory from the back of your head".

2. Your perception of physical time speeds up and slows down. It is NOT time locked to physical time. It is something entirely synthetic, except for a few hundred msec around "now" which is hard wired. But since "now" is a singularity, the surrounding timeline generates "anchor points" into which you perception is embedded, that way your perception is always ordered correctly even if it's not at speed.

To understand how the brain encodes information in a time independent manner, check into phase coding - not in the hippocampus which is simple and intuitive, but in the FRONTAL LOBES which is anything but. To find out how the brain regenerates sequences from the encoded timeless information, you'll need to understand the difference between the medial and lateral entorhinal cortex, which is right near the hippocampus in the temporal lobe.

One of the big clues is, when the brain memorizes a sequence, it does so forwards AND backwards. Both representations are stored.

 

[scruffy]

Consider it this way also - what if there were a "fifth dimension" so we could move freely backwards and forwards in time?

But wait... isn't this exactly what our brains do? Allow us to move freely backwards and forwards in time? Of course, it is an "imaginary" time, nevertheless it is mapped to physical time in an ordered way.

 

[scruffy]

So if it doesn't come from God, then where does it come from?

Of course it comes from God. "Everything" comes from God. Duh.

But we're scientists, we want to ask the intelligent questions and find out how God operates.

One of the interesting things about consciousness is this: you know what dyslexia is, yes? Have you ever heard of a dyslexia-like condition in OTHER senses? Like, say, auditory, where the order of words seems scrambled when you're talking with someone?

Or how about, dyslexia of TIME perception, where the order of events seems scrambled?

The short answer is: it doesn't happen.

Instead, something else happens. It's called dyschronometria, and simply put it is "unawareness of the passage of time". People stay in the shower for two hours, that kind of thing.

This condition, unlike dyslexia which is cerebral, is cerebellar, and from it we learn that the cerebellum plays the frontal lobes just like it plays a piano. The fast rhythmic movements are called "taxis", and the loss of them is called ataxia, so, dyschronometria is one of many forms of cerebellar ataxia.

The point being, these physiological changes alter consciousness itself, both the actual occurrence of it and the precision and sequencing of it.

Another simple observation is, you can turn off consciousness by injecting a small amount of barbiturate into the brainstem, and you can also turn it off by sprutzing a glutamate antagonist onto the cerebral cortex. Consciousness requires the "whole brain", it's a complex and sophisticated process.

Can it be measured?

Not directly. Only indirectly. Gustav Fechner was the pioneer of modern measurement techniques (he did them by hand, nowadays we use computers, same method though). Fechner came up with the JND ("just noticeable difference"). We can find out lots of very interesting and revealing things about consciousness using Fechner's methods.

For instance, we can do the pinprick experiment with and without a distracting task, and we find of course that the pinprick must be more intense to be noticed, if the subject is engaged in some other task that requires concentration. Carefully designed, Fechner's methods can be used to tease out the effects of attention from the effects of consciousness itself.

 

[Nobody911]

Consciousness comes from the brain.​

True consciousness comes from scientific brains.

In Buddhism, consciousness is seen as a complex and multifaceted aspect of human experience that is not solely dependent on the brain. According to Buddhist teachings, consciousness is a result of the interaction between the mind, body, and environment, and is influenced by a variety of factors including mental and emotional states, perceptions, and past experiences.

While the brain is certainly involved in the processing and interpretation of sensory information, Buddhist philosophy emphasizes the interconnected nature of consciousness and the idea that it is not solely dependent on the physical brain.

The existence of consciousness is not something that needs to be proven in a traditional sense. Instead, it is understood as an inherent aspect of human experience. The concept of consciousness is central to Buddhist teachings, and it is recognized as the awareness that arises from the interaction of the six sense faculties (sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, and mind) with their respective objects.

Buddhism teaches that consciousness is not a fixed, unchanging entity, but rather a dynamic and impermanent phenomenon that is constantly in flux. This understanding is derived from the Buddhist concept of impermanence (anicca), which states that all phenomena are transient and subject to change.

The proof of consciousness in Buddhism comes from personal experience and introspection. Practitioners are encouraged to observe their own consciousness and its fluctuations through meditation and mindfulness practices.

By doing so, they can come to understand the true nature of consciousness and its relationship to the rest of their experience.Ultimately, the existence of consciousness in Buddhism is not a matter of proving its existence through external means, but of directly experiencing and understanding it through personal practice and insight.

 

[scruffy]

Excellent!

Consider also, the quantum view.

The human brain is a quantum computer. All those biomolecules in there (including water) operate at a quantum level. There is quantum tunneling along the cytoskeleton of every cell, and the brain even has its own built in Josephson junctions that work at room temperature.

Not "very" much attention has yet been paid to criticality in quantum computing, but expect an explosion of research in the next five years. We're already investigating the solutions of the Kuramoto model (which is like the Lindblad model in physics, it describes "everything"). The Nobel Prize will go to the first person who shows single cell criticality affecting population criticality and vice versa. In chemistry this was accomplished in the early 70's by Prigogine and colleagues, and as close as we've come so far is the Marmarelis rats at USC, and no one knows why that works (not even Marmarelis himself).

Okay - so - if you know how a quantum computer works, you'll understand why adding 2 and 2 is "really hard" and requires hundreds of training repetitions. Whereas, navigating your way through the grocery store is a lot easier, even though technically it's orders of magnitude more complex.

 

[scruffy]

I'm entirely surprised the Christians didn't pick up on this.

The Buddhist guy had it right. Consciousness is an open system.

Christians - you better put on your thinking caps and figure out what I told you in this thread.

Because it is the ONLY scientifically valid hypothesis (with evidence) that meets your Christian standards.

Think about what I told you. Think real hard.

Think real hard about what God meant when He said "I am". What is the "I" there, what was He talking about?

What is the SCOPE of His "I' ?

 

[ViewFromAbove]

Okay, let's start there.

You are expressing the most common current scientific view.

My view is more precise, and it says something substantially different.

Consciousness is a physical process, a property of the universe itself. The brain is merely a substrate that allows organism to tap into the underlying physical process.

Consciousness is an unfolding of physical time, and as such can only be accomplished by a physical process.

The brain makes this possible, by embedding the physical process into a synthetic timeline (synthesized in and by the brain).

If you'd like to talk about the evidence for this view, I can lay it out in detail, pages and pages of it. We can start from a very simple place - your experience of time.

Two things are apparent right out of the starting gate:

1. Your view of time is egocentric, you think in terms of past, present, and future. Time seems to flow "through" you, and even English vocabulary reflects this mapping, like when you "pull a memory from the back of your head".

2. Your perception of physical time speeds up and slows down. It is NOT time locked to physical time. It is something entirely synthetic, except for a few hundred msec around "now" which is hard wired. But since "now" is a singularity, the surrounding timeline generates "anchor points" into which you perception is embedded, that way your perception is always ordered correctly even if it's not at speed.

To understand how the brain encodes information in a time independent manner, check into phase coding - not in the hippocampus which is simple and intuitive, but in the FRONTAL LOBES which is anything but. To find out how the brain regenerates sequences from the encoded timeless information, you'll need to understand the difference between the medial and lateral entorhinal cortex, which is right near the hippocampus in the temporal lobe.

One of the big clues is, when the brain memorizes a sequence, it does so forwards AND backwards. Both representations are stored.

You are expressing terminology & ideas about some physics & neuroscience that you believe relates to consciousness, but do you have any specific hypotheses about how consciousness arises from the brain's functioning? You mentioned in a later post Quantum processing, but the Quantum Mind lacks validated hypotheses.

You seem to be preoccupied with TIME. Yes, time is a perception within or part of our consciousness, but time only goes forward, as far as cause-effect is concerned. Our memories represent our past experiences, encoded in neural structures.

 

[ViewFromAbove]

In Buddhism, consciousness is seen as a complex and multifaceted aspect of human experience that is not solely dependent on the brain. According to Buddhist teachings, consciousness is a result of the interaction between the mind, body, and environment, and is influenced by a variety of factors including mental and emotional states, perceptions, and past experiences.

While the brain is certainly involved in the processing and interpretation of sensory information, Buddhist philosophy emphasizes the interconnected nature of consciousness and the idea that it is not solely dependent on the physical brain.

The existence of consciousness is not something that needs to be proven in a traditional sense. Instead, it is understood as an inherent aspect of human experience. The concept of consciousness is central to Buddhist teachings, and it is recognized as the awareness that arises from the interaction of the six sense faculties (sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, and mind) with their respective objects.

Buddhism teaches that consciousness is not a fixed, unchanging entity, but rather a dynamic and impermanent phenomenon that is constantly in flux. This understanding is derived from the Buddhist concept of impermanence (anicca), which states that all phenomena are transient and subject to change.

The proof of consciousness in Buddhism comes from personal experience and introspection. Practitioners are encouraged to observe their own consciousness and its fluctuations through meditation and mindfulness practices.

By doing so, they can come to understand the true nature of consciousness and its relationship to the rest of their experience.Ultimately, the existence of consciousness in Buddhism is not a matter of proving its existence through external means, but of directly experiencing and understanding it through personal practice and insight.

Buddhism is a philosophy ("comes from personal experience and introspection"), not a science that validates any specific theories or hypotheses about consciousness.

 

[dblack]

It must suck for you that your ancestors were pond scum, Bubba.

As for myself, I'm directly descended from God. He created me in His own image.

A sad commentary on God.

 

[JGalt]

A sad commentary on God.

An even worse reflection on pond scum. I'm sure they didn't appreciate the insult of being likened to liberals.

 

[scruffy]

You are expressing terminology & ideas about some physics & neuroscience that you believe relates to consciousness, but do you have any specific hypotheses about how consciousness arises from the brain's functioning? You mentioned in a later post Quantum processing, but the Quantum Mind lacks validated hypotheses.

You seem to be preoccupied with TIME. Yes, time is a perception within or part of our consciousness, but time only goes forward, as far as cause-effect is concerned. Our memories represent our past experiences, encoded in neural structures.

You're almost there.

I've bolded the relevant statement.

Time is not merely a perception. It works in strange ways with human beings and their consciousness(es).

Yes, "physical" time is unidirectional (most people would claim and argue so). But psychological time is exactly the opposite, it is bidirectional and can be translated at will.

The important question is, how do you get from point A to point B - or to put it a different way, how does a unidirectional point process create and support a bidirectional distributed process?

First, I will point you towards the logic of causality. Especially the mathematical "extraction" of causality from a time series of events, much of which is covered quite nicely by Granger and Sims. Granger is the standard method used on Wall St and etc. But don't stop there, you need to understand the probabilistic causal calculus of Judea Pearl, and the associated Clifford algebras. There are simple sequences and causal sequences, how can our brains tell the difference? Causality is by any normal definition, sequential. "First" is the cause, "then" is the result. Another way to put it is, you're the engineer, and your job is to make a LED flash whenever causality is detected. How do you do it?

Next is the issue of memory. A causal sequence need not be immediate - the cause might have happened yesterday, and the effect might happen tomorrow. What information does the brain actually use, to "look for" the cause, and how is that done? Events in a sequence can be related with simple Hebbian learning, but only within a window of about 2 sd from the decay time. So how is memory searched for causes?

And then thirdly, consider the act of tracking, for instance, visually following a moving target. During normal activity, the tracking system is reset with every eye movement (and every eye blink), because even while tracking there are microsaccades and other discontinuities. We can investigate for example, contrary stimuli that cause the tracking to reverse direction. And ultimately, this entire process depends on a pre-existing definition of "objects" and their "attributes" - which is where phase coding comes in.

One can not investigate these examples of consciousness without running headlong into the dichotomous nature of time. Yes, I have physics. Lots of it. Only... time isn't exactly an open book, physicists don't agree on what it is and some say it doesn't exist at all. I claim, we can "measure" time because of its Gaussian statistics, provided to us by the Law of Large Numbers - a view that is consistent with Einstein's usage. And, if you "stipulate" that physical time is a point process, then the only place the process meets the window is exactly "now", at one point and one point only.

But that's not what happens. There is memory (for causes), and there is also prediction (of effects). Therefore, physical time "must" be mapped onto an extended timeline, for the brain to do what it does. The nexus of joining is one point and one point only ("now"), which therefore must be unfolded into the timeline if it is to have access to information from elsewhere. And, there is the converse going on too, yesterday's memory of an event can affect behavior "now".

This is also why criticality is so important.Timing in the brain is fundamental architecture, lots of things depend on it. Consciousness is tightly bound to memory and prediction, wouldn't work without it. As the linked reference points out and discusses. The LGN is the first visual processing stage after the retina. In anesthetized animals the cells there have center-surround receptive fields, however in awake alert subjects the information is phase-coded relative to the local alpha rhythm. That's what the reference is showing you. The very first visual processing stage after the retina, has memory, and is influenced by predictions. It is encoding the information in a way that is "useful to the cerebral cortex".

 

[Blues Man]

Buddhism is a philosophy ("comes from personal experience and introspection"), not a science that validates any specific theories or hypotheses about consciousness.

Science has very little to say about consciousness

 

[dblack]

Science has very little to say about consciousness

Our impulse is to assume there's something special, something "magic", about consciousness. But I suspect that that presumption will fade.

Historically, scientists and philosophers assumed that there was some special "life force" that all living things shared, some supernatural "spirit" that caused things to move independently of an obvious cause. Over time, we came to realize that life is just what happens when chemicals interact in a certain way. It's nothing mystical or supernatural, just a by-product of the laws of physics. I think we'll eventually come to understand consciousness in the same way. It's just what happens in a sufficiently complex central nervous system.

 

[ViewFromAbove]

Science has very little to say about consciousness

What do you mean by "has very little to say"?
Scientific research explores how nature "works"; sometimes with predictive models, theories with evidence, or rational hypotheses based on prior research.
Is there any other method to explore "reality" objectively other than philosophies of science?

 

[ViewFromAbove]

You're almost there.

I've bolded the relevant statement.

Time is not merely a perception. It works in strange ways with human beings and their consciousness(es).

Yes, "physical" time is unidirectional (most people would claim and argue so). But psychological time is exactly the opposite, it is bidirectional and can be translated at will.

The important question is, how do you get from point A to point B - or to put it a different way, how does a unidirectional point process create and support a bidirectional distributed process?

First, I will point you towards the logic of causality. Especially the mathematical "extraction" of causality from a time series of events, much of which is covered quite nicely by Granger and Sims. Granger is the standard method used on Wall St and etc. But don't stop there, you need to understand the probabilistic causal calculus of Judea Pearl, and the associated Clifford algebras. There are simple sequences and causal sequences, how can our brains tell the difference? Causality is by any normal definition, sequential. "First" is the cause, "then" is the result. Another way to put it is, you're the engineer, and your job is to make a LED flash whenever causality is detected. How do you do it?

Next is the issue of memory. A causal sequence need not be immediate - the cause might have happened yesterday, and the effect might happen tomorrow. What information does the brain actually use, to "look for" the cause, and how is that done? Events in a sequence can be related with simple Hebbian learning, but only within a window of about 2 sd from the decay time. So how is memory searched for causes?

And then thirdly, consider the act of tracking, for instance, visually following a moving target. During normal activity, the tracking system is reset with every eye movement (and every eye blink), because even while tracking there are microsaccades and other discontinuities. We can investigate for example, contrary stimuli that cause the tracking to reverse direction. And ultimately, this entire process depends on a pre-existing definition of "objects" and their "attributes" - which is where phase coding comes in.

One can not investigate these examples of consciousness without running headlong into the dichotomous nature of time. Yes, I have physics. Lots of it. Only... time isn't exactly an open book, physicists don't agree on what it is and some say it doesn't exist at all. I claim, we can "measure" time because of its Gaussian statistics, provided to us by the Law of Large Numbers - a view that is consistent with Einstein's usage. And, if you "stipulate" that physical time is a point process, then the only place the process meets the window is exactly "now", at one point and one point only.

But that's not what happens. There is memory (for causes), and there is also prediction (of effects). Therefore, physical time "must" be mapped onto an extended timeline, for the brain to do what it does. The nexus of joining is one point and one point only ("now"), which therefore must be unfolded into the timeline if it is to have access to information from elsewhere. And, there is the converse going on too, yesterday's memory of an event can affect behavior "now".

This is also why criticality is so important.Timing in the brain is fundamental architecture, lots of things depend on it. Consciousness is tightly bound to memory and prediction, wouldn't work without it. As the linked reference points out and discusses. The LGN is the first visual processing stage after the retina. In anesthetized animals the cells there have center-surround receptive fields, however in awake alert subjects the information is phase-coded relative to the local alpha rhythm. That's what the reference is showing you. The very first visual processing stage after the retina, has memory, and is influenced by predictions. It is encoding the information in a way that is "useful to the cerebral cortex".

I can see you like to meander around the general topic of "consciousness", but you initially replied to my statement "consciousness comes from the brain". How so? Again I ask: Do you have any specific hypotheses about how consciousness arises from the brain's functioning?
THAT is the mystery that will some day earn researchers the Nobel prize.

 

[dblack]

Gobs of speculation, and few answers, but this is interesting:

Consciousness, Cognition and the Neuronal Cytoskeleton – A New Paradigm Needed in Neuroscience

Viewing the brain as a complex computer of simple neurons cannot account for consciousness nor essential features of cognition. Single cell organisms with no synapses perform purposeful intelligent functions using their cytoskeletal microtubules. A new paradigm is needed to view the brain as a...

www.frontiersin.org

 

[Blues Man]

What do you mean by "has very little to say"?
Scientific research explores how nature "works"; sometimes with predictive models, theories with evidence, or rational hypotheses based on prior research.
Is there any other method to explore "reality" objectively other than philosophies of science?

And as such can maybe explain how the brain works, how nerve cells communicate which neurotransmitters are present but that's about it. We can describe the voltage potentials present and even how fast signals are sent.

There is no explanation as to how the brain manifests consciousness. Consciousness by its nature is a subjective phenomenon therefore it is difficult to get objective data as to the experience. No investigator can experience the conscious state of another person and certainly can't recreate it.