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Consciousness is supported by near-critical slow cortical electrodynamics

pnas.org

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Re: Consciousness is supported by near-critical slow cortical electrodynamics

#31

Post by civilized »

markhahn wrote: post #24

This strikes me as totally unsurprising. How could it be otherwise? It's basically saying that a brain normally operates in an interesting dynamical mode: not chaotic, and not very regular. Wow? If it were chaotic, we wouldn't have coherent or consistent behavior at any scale. If overly regular, we'd be incredibly dull and unable to respond to the environment. You could do this with a computer. If your signals coming…

Welcome to the world of Complex Systems research.

Complex Systems guy: we just showed a system operates in a critical state scale-free phase transition and its key statistics have a power law distribution!

Everyone: okay, so?

CS guy: I dunno? That's what our discipline does. It tells you things are in critical states with power laws. So now you know that...

Re: Consciousness is supported by near-critical slow cortical electrodynamics

#32

Post by whatshisface »

awb wrote: post #12
colechristensen wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, not really. It's hard to describe features of chaos / nonlinear dynamics simply. There are features of chaotic systems that undergo phase changes from one type of behavior to another. Think a signal on one side of the transition to look like a pure sine wave and on the other side of the transition to look like purely random white noise. What these guys are reporting is that they found a parameter, a signal they c…

> It's also the kind of thing that can open a backdoor for free will in a deterministic universe, your brain in this chaotic state might behave deterministically but the actual state would never be knowable with enough precision to predict the outcome of inputs for any amount of time (butterfly effect). I think all it would mean is that the human brain is non-deterministic. That’s different from free will though whic…

If the human mind is deterministic there's no free will. If it isn't there might be. That makes free will half of a scientific question - science can only rule it out.

Re: Consciousness is supported by near-critical slow cortical electrodynamics

#34

Post by MarcoZavala »

nefitty wrote: post #22
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me personally, when I use the term "free will", I mean something stronger than "deterministic, but not provably so". That's more of a "free will of the gaps" - claiming that free will is hiding somewhere in the holes in our knowledge.

Whatever people mean by free will, this feeling like we're driving our bodies and minds around usually, there's no mechanism by which it could exist. Either the things in our brains follow deterministic patterns or they're random. Neither one of those gives me room to decide to get a glass of orange juice. In fact, any desire I have at all for an orange is dependent on that type of plant having emerged billions of ye…

No post body was provided.

Re: Consciousness is supported by near-critical slow cortical electrodynamics

#35

Post by colechristensen »

ghostly_s wrote: post #14
mlyle wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_transition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_exponent The concept of phase transition is broader than the phases of matter.

Interesting, though the only example I see listed in that article that's not a change in the physical properties of matter is the ferromagnetic paramagnetic phases.

One that isn’t a matter it’s convection currents in a closed vessel between two plates of different temperatures.

At low differentials there’s no convection just conduction, as you raise the temperature difference you get a stable single circulation loop which is well behaved, continue further and you get a tempest of circulations coming and going in an entirely unpredictable manner.

There are distinct phase transitions between each of these states.

Another one is a forced double pendulum. With just a little periodic force they swing gently back and forth, with a lot they do constant crazy unpredictable loops around each other.

Re: Consciousness is supported by near-critical slow cortical electrodynamics

#36

Post by MarcoZavala »

bell-cot wrote: post #23
colechristensen wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, not really. It's hard to describe features of chaos / nonlinear dynamics simply. There are features of chaotic systems that undergo phase changes from one type of behavior to another. Think a signal on one side of the transition to look like a pure sine wave and on the other side of the transition to look like purely random white noise. What these guys are reporting is that they found a parameter, a signal they c…

+1...but my reaction to folks who worry much about free will in a deterministic universe, "butterfly effect quasi-free will", etc. is that they really should have gotten outside to play more when they were kids.

No post body was provided.

Re: Consciousness is supported by near-critical slow cortical electrodynamics

#37

Post by jawarner »

markhahn wrote: post #24

This strikes me as totally unsurprising. How could it be otherwise? It's basically saying that a brain normally operates in an interesting dynamical mode: not chaotic, and not very regular. Wow? If it were chaotic, we wouldn't have coherent or consistent behavior at any scale. If overly regular, we'd be incredibly dull and unable to respond to the environment. You could do this with a computer. If your signals coming…

It's interesting that we can measure, quantiatively, what the dynamical operating mode of a system is. It's interesting, to me anyway, because it's a high-level characteristic that describes most (all?) information processing systems.

Re: Consciousness is supported by near-critical slow cortical electrodynamics

#38

Post by Gravityloss »

markhahn wrote: post #24

This strikes me as totally unsurprising. How could it be otherwise? It's basically saying that a brain normally operates in an interesting dynamical mode: not chaotic, and not very regular. Wow? If it were chaotic, we wouldn't have coherent or consistent behavior at any scale. If overly regular, we'd be incredibly dull and unable to respond to the environment. You could do this with a computer. If your signals coming…

Yes, and what you said is not novel. It was widely known at least 20 years ago when I was working in the business.

From quick skimming, maybe it's some more subtle point in the publication.

Re: Consciousness is supported by near-critical slow cortical electrodynamics

#39

Post by eightysixfour »

darawk wrote: post #20
awb wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's also the kind of thing that can open a backdoor for free will in a deterministic universe, your brain in this chaotic state might behave deterministically but the actual state would never be knowable with enough precision to predict the outcome of inputs for any amount of time (butterfly effect). I think all it would mean is that the human brain is non-deterministic. That’s different from free will though whic…

> I think all it would mean is that the human brain is non-deterministic. Chaotic systems are still deterministic. They're just extremely sensitive to their initial conditions/inputs.

I always find it interesting drawing the determinism line on chaotic systems.

For example, is a chaotic system that depends on initial conditions so precise that having adequate measurement to predict the outcome would violate the uncertainty principle still deterministic?

Re: Consciousness is supported by near-critical slow cortical electrodynamics

#40

Post by Buttons840 »

awb wrote: post #12
colechristensen wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, not really. It's hard to describe features of chaos / nonlinear dynamics simply. There are features of chaotic systems that undergo phase changes from one type of behavior to another. Think a signal on one side of the transition to look like a pure sine wave and on the other side of the transition to look like purely random white noise. What these guys are reporting is that they found a parameter, a signal they c…

> It's also the kind of thing that can open a backdoor for free will in a deterministic universe, your brain in this chaotic state might behave deterministically but the actual state would never be knowable with enough precision to predict the outcome of inputs for any amount of time (butterfly effect). I think all it would mean is that the human brain is non-deterministic. That’s different from free will though whic…

Deep philosophical discussions around free will can benefit from first defining what "free will" means.
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