
The Hippies Were Right: It's All about Vibrations, Man - ston3r
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/the-hippies-were-right-its-all-about-vibrations-man/
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flossball
What did I just read??? I can't help but feel stupider for reading it.

This is complete garbage. Some relationship to the internal frequencies of the
brain, ie. its various analog clock tree mechanisms means that because all
matter is based on subatomic vibrations rocks and atoms have a degree of
consciousness too?

Wow, my laptop running at 2.2GHz(and various other frequencies) must be a
supreme being.

Yes, obviously a clock tree is important to sync various neurons together
efficiently and where ever there are conflicts, ticks will be lost or
(whatever the thought real equivalent is). The more sync'ed the more complex
the brain obviously, but whether that is 'consciousness' or just efficiency...
or anything else? This writer obviously has no clue. At least they didn't say
the brain is a quantum computer because of vibrations.

~~~
csomar
The hypothesis is worthy of pursuit, in my opinion. The article is not well
written, however. If you say matter can't have consciousness then how does
your brain have one? Your brain in made of matter.

There are definitively varying degrees of consciousness and self-awareness. I
don't think that someone who is an 1. atheist 2. knows that consciousness is
made by the brain neurons or some processes; has the same self-awareness as
someone who is 1. religious and 2. thinks he has a soul.

Look at living creature. Look at a cell. It is a living thing but it is made
by much fewer atoms and molecules than the human body. It is interesting to
watch what we consider "dead matter" being alive. They are both matter and
atoms at the end of day.

Is a cell trying to survive its environment inside the human body conscious?
Is a human trying to survive its environment inside the country/system
conscious? Is a country trying to survive its environment inside planet earth
conscious?

~~~
_Schizotypy
Your brain has consciousness because of the networking of the neurons that
make it up

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
How many neurons does it take to make a consciousness?

The thing about consciousness is that you can't really define it. You know you
have it because you experience it. You assume that other humans have it
because they are like you. You might further assume that certain other beings
have it because they are also like you in many ways (though you'd likely
disagree with the idea that theirs is as meaningful as yours).

But you can't prove any of it. You can only say that certain things react to
certain stimuli in certain ways, which describes everything in the universe.
Is it really that much of a stretch, then, to suggest that perhaps everything
in the universe has some form of awareness, some experience of things, albeit
probably too different from our own to comprehend?

~~~
jnurmine
Perhaps consciousness is not a crisp yes/no choice but a gradient... Dolphins
are conscious but to a degree less than humans, likewise mice less than
dolphins and so on.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
Perhaps, and perhaps a person with Down's Syndrome has a lesser consciousness
as well, but we have no way of knowing that. Personally I think it is pretty
arrogant and shot-sighted of us to think that our experience of the universe
is somehow better and more real than anything else's.

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fabatka
> we have developed a “resonance theory of consciousness” that suggests that
> resonance—another word for synchronized vibrations—is at the heart of not
> only human consciousness but of physical reality more generally.

Riiiight. How delusional must one be to actually take the time to publish
something with this as a core idea?

~~~
saalweachter
> Tam Hunt is a practicing lawyer (renewable energy law and policy) by day and
> by night a scholar (affiliated with the University of California Santa
> Barbara's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences) in the philosophy of
> mind, the philosophy of biology and the philosophy of physics.

~~~
_Schizotypy
Too bad philosophy isn't actual science

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dmingod666
Not only is the theory seeming a bit too large fitting but the article tries
to stuff some cool 'vibe' nonsense.. if the original problem is Hard and you
have some insight into a solution you have a ton of value already. But then
maybe you dont have that insight and want to sell some snake oil level
article.

for something so important it just ends up looking like bad satire or onion
type material.

what are you trying to convey? sand is concious.. okay, thankyou. that was
very helpful.

the original paper probably has more sense in it.

~~~
saalweachter
I wouldn't be so sure.

There are a _ton_ of people who get taken seriously who really, really don't
like the "consciousness is what the brain does" consensus of modern
neuroscience, and they say a lot of stupid things trying to come up with an
alternative.

~~~
whatshisface
That's not a concensus of modern neroscience, that's a philosophical consensus
that perhaps neuroscientists have. Consciousness is not eligible for science
because it can't be observed. For example you might think someone under deep
anethesia is not conscious, but how do you know that they aren't completely
conscious while not experiencing anything, doing anything or forming memories?

~~~
goldenkey
You can't observe consciousness in even living beings. Consciousness can't
actually be verified for anyone but yourself. And that is actually a point of
contention. Some people believe that their consciousness is an illusion too...

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limbicsystem
I wonder... Professor Schooler is a pretty high-profile scientist
([https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=3UEI9NIAAAAJ&hl=...](https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=3UEI9NIAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao)).
But I don't see any publications with Tam Hunt (who seems a little...
eccentric? ([https://www.collective-evolution.com/2018/03/21/carl-
jungs-s...](https://www.collective-evolution.com/2018/03/21/carl-jungs-
synchronicities-is-there-meaning-to-this-experience-that-makes-us-question-
the-universe/)). I wonder if this is just some guy who has managed to get
'visitor status' at UCSB and is taking an unwitting scientist's work out of
context? In what sense is he a 'colleague'?

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starbeast
Stephen Collins satirised this kind of 'science reporting' pretty well -
[https://www.wired.com/images_blogs/beyond_the_beyond/2009/07...](https://www.wired.com/images_blogs/beyond_the_beyond/2009/07/020709.jpg)

On a long enough timeline, all popular science magazines eventually decay into
motheaten old copies of BBC Focus.

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whatshisface
I'm not sure if it should be called a theory, given that it's completely
unfalsifiable. It is totally impossible to determine through observation
whether or not anything beyond yourself is conscious, unless by conscious you
mean physically awake.

~~~
amelius
I suppose it can be called a theory, just not a _scientific_ theory.

Otherwise, it would not be possible to find _any_ theory for consciousness,
but in fact people are still trying to find one.

~~~
saalweachter
You have to be very careful when deciding what can and can't be a scientific
theory.

Not being able to directly observe something isn't actually a problem. We
can't directly observe black holes. We can't directly observe the center of
the sun, in the foreseeable future. We can't directly observe the evolution of
life on Earth.

But we can use our theories to explain these things to also make predictions
that can be observed, tested, and used to discard incorrect hypotheses.

Where science ends is when there are no observations you could make which
would disprove your hypothesis. For instance, intelligent design basically
says, an intelligent designer could have done things in whatever weird way
they are, so any observations are just how it happened.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
Right, and therefore consciousness is unexplainable by science, because as far
as science is concerned it doesn't even exist. There is no measurement that
can be made to determine, for instance, if AlphaGo is a thinking, conscious
mind, or merely an advanced algorithm. In scientific terms, there is no
meaningful distinction.

~~~
saalweachter
Ehhhhhh.

I was trying to say the opposite. Or rather, I was actually trying to say that
_phenomenon_ are rarely unscientific, only the _explanations_. You can have
scientific and unscientific explanations of the origin of life on Earth.

You really only declare a phenomenon unscientific if we've spent a long time
not being able to come up with any good scientific explanations. For instance,
we commonly regard the question, "What happened before the Big Bang?" as
outside the reach of science. But that's just provisional -- if someone came
up with a really great theory that explained the nature of the universe before
the Big Bang, and it produced testable predictions, then suddenly the question
would in fact be inside the reach of science.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
The difference is that we can conceive of such testable predictions, even if
we don't have any currently. That's because they'd be objectively observable.

I challenge you to even conceive of what a "test for consciousness" would look
like. Let's imagine you have one. How confident in it will you be when the
first person who fails it says "but I am conscious!"?

~~~
saalweachter
You are confusing "a scientific test for consciousness" with "a scientific
theory of consciousness".

False positive and negative rates are not particularly new to science or
medicine. When we run blood tests to determine if a person has a particular
disease, some percent of people with the disease will be tested as not having
it, and some percentage of people without the disease will be tested as having
it. Just because we fail to detect something accurately 100% of the time
doesn't mean we don't understand it.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
You're missing the point, which is this: How do you know your scientific test
is accurate? With a disease, we know by looking at the results of people who
were inoculated or treated vs those who weren't. This is possible because data
is objective.

When you are making your magic consciousness detector, how will you know when
it is working?

~~~
saalweachter
Why do you need a consciousness detector/test at all to study the nature of
consciousness and develop a falsifiable theory that explains its origins,
properties, and the conditions under which it can exist?

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
If you have a theory about the conditions under which consciousness can exist,
you will need to test it. How will you test that theory if you cannot tell
what is and isn't conscious in the first place?

Let's say my theory says that rocks are conscious and hippos are not. Without
some means of detecting consciousness this theory is untestable.

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mathattack
The Mindscape podcast touches on a lot of these issues. More recently [0] they
had David Chalmers who was quoted in the OP.

[0] [https://overcast.fm/+Nvq_vr69w](https://overcast.fm/+Nvq_vr69w)

