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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

#101

Post by Something1234 »

jodrellblank wrote: post #84
netsharc wrote: post #7

It's a weird feeling to realize how we're all just hardware, and it might be possible to wake up someone who's "brain dead"/vegetative by LSD (the paper mentions how psychedelics affect this cortical electrodynamics, and as this old article[1] mentions the LSD). Imagine someone flipping a switch (in the future where tech to control the electrodynamics exists) and you're awake and aware of your surroundings again. [1]…

> “ The first report of a zolpidem awakening came from South Africa, in 1999. A patient named Louis Viljoen, who, three years before, was declared vegetative after he was hit by a truck, had taken to clawing at his mattress during the night. Thinking he was suffering from insomnia, his family doctor suggested zolpidem to help him sleep. But 20 minutes after his mother ground the tablet up and fed it to him through a…

Is this what the house coma guy story was based on?

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

#102

Post by p_j_w »

robbedpeter wrote: post #60
p_j_w wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Consciousness is an emergent phenomenon entirely dependent on and contained within the brain. How would one falsify this?

At some point, through mathematics or a sufficient resolution of simulation, we will be able to run software that achieves consciousness. Through rigorous proof, the first method will provide the basis for falsifiable conjecture and exploration of the phenomena of consciousness and subjective experience. The second path will require laborious, tedious, and methodical experimentation with the model to tease out the un…

You haven't said how it can be falsified here, though. How sound a scientific footing is any of that really on then if we can't actually experiment?

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

#103

Post by hungryforcodes »

jquery wrote: post #76
civilized wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I think this research is super interesting, and it's disappointing such a blaze, dismissive comment is at the top. Cosmologists: we literally took a picture of a black hole! Someone: So? I already knew they existed. Besides, it's not a picture of a black hole, it's just the ring around the black hole. yawn Cosmologists: oh... sorry for wasting your time.

It was pretty funny though -- and quite true, if you know CS people:)

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

#104

Post by kylebyproxy »

csee wrote: post #98
kylebyproxy wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate the good faith engagement (cue side glare sigstoat), and I'm in agreement with everything but the use of "never" in the your closing sentence. > There was never room for any non-deterministic thing to magic itself into the system Depending what you mean by "into the system," existence itself is a glaring counterexample. How did any of it get here in the first place? Was there an uncaused cause? Is entrop…

I wonder if it's possible to prove that you can't end up with a non-deterministic system if that system is constituted only by deterministic parts? I get the sense that such a proof is possible, but I am not sure. We can trivially prove it for deterministic systems that we can model mathematically, but what about a generic proof for those systems that are beyond our modelling capabilities? Regarding existence itself,…

I've been thinking about it like we're located in some pocket of reality whose local conditions generate the nature we know and love, but outside of which might be unrecognizable.

Whatever the Big Bang event was, I'm assuming it was a result of some exterior nature.

What I worry about is whether or not its even possible to connect the dots between the two.

Gödel's second theorem may just straight up make this whole exercise pointless.

Just imagining that outcome gives me the urge to primal scream.

All I know for certain is I've got a lot of questions.

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

#105

Post by bjornsing »

bloqs wrote: post #52
bjornsing wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the same reaction. I wouldn’t be surprised if you could even formalize it and say that all information processing takes place on this edge between stability and chaos. That’s where all interesting/useful Turing machines live, for example.

Im fairly uneducated in CS, but this fascinates me, could you expand more? I can see why the brain's randomly firing neurons leads to novel thought and exploratory behavior but other than generating random numbers for various purposes, what good is chaos? What turing machines for example? Thanks

One example that doesn’t require any CS to appreciate is Rule 110[1], arguably the simplest Turing complete system. It clearly shows this pattern graphically. Wikipedia describes it this way:

“Rule 110, like the Game of Life, exhibits what Wolfram calls "Class 4 behavior", which is neither completely stable nor completely chaotic. Localized structures appear and interact in complex ways.”

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_110

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

#106

Post by PeterisP »

bidaewnl wrote: post #58

Materialism died out over a 100 years ago and has been repeatedly proven through hundreds of experiments from labs throughout the world to be total junk science. Why do people feel the need to continuously push this fake science?

> has been repeatedly proven through hundreds of experiments from labs throughout the world to be total junk science.

Point to one, please.

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

#107

Post by antonvs »

unsui wrote: post #50
robbedpeter wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no magic, nor room for it for any person that believes in the scientific method. There are a sufficient number of real mysteries and wonders not to waste time with pseudoscience. The brain is not a consciousness antennae, and there are no good reasons to think so. Consciousness is an emergent phenomenon entirely dependent on and contained within the brain.

agreed. brain-as-a-radio-antenna is a common trope amongst those who would believe that meatspace isn't capable of generating consciousness alone (always looking for some sort of elan vital, to equate with another pursuit for the magic stuff of life). From a purposely scientific perspective, we have to begin with the working assumption that materialism is true, until such point that it is conclusively proven false. T…

> Thus, the brain-as-antenna thinking necessarily pre-supposes an other-worldly explanation; it assumes what it's trying to prove.

Materialism does the same thing though, as you observed:

> we have to begin with the working assumption that materialism is true

To be clear, I'm a materialist, but that's precisely why I dislike poor arguments.

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

#108

Post by antonvs »

colechristensen wrote: post #6
inpdx wrote: post #4

Can anyone ELI5 this?

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

It really doesn't, because free will implies control over one's choices. Randomness, non-determinism, etc. doesn't provide that, and I bet you can't describe a way in which it could.

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

#109

Post by unsui »

bidaewnl wrote: post #59
unsui wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

agreed. brain-as-a-radio-antenna is a common trope amongst those who would believe that meatspace isn't capable of generating consciousness alone (always looking for some sort of elan vital, to equate with another pursuit for the magic stuff of life). From a purposely scientific perspective, we have to begin with the working assumption that materialism is true, until such point that it is conclusively proven false. T…

Except materialism has been proven false for the past 100 years thanks to quantum mechanics. There is mountains of evidence against it and none for it.

This is laughably false.

Materialism, aka "physicalism", simply posits that all phenomena have an underlying physical basis, i.e., no "spooky" or magic stuff.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physicalism/

Quantum mechanics follows from physicalism by demonstrating that the physical nature of reality is incredibly complex and counterintuitive, particularly at quantum scales.

But that in no way implies that quantum mechanics leads to non-materialism or opens the door for materialism to be false. It simply becomes subsumed into materialism itself:

materialism requires that all phenomena be ultimately explainable via physical explanations, and those explanations must account for quantum-mechanical phenomena.

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