
Why the central problem in neuroscience is mirrored in physics - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/82/panpsychism/is-matter-conscious-rp
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carapace
Excellent article.

You can't study consciousness directly in a lab but it's pretty easy to
"merge" with others under the right conditions.

For example, here's an old experiment with "mutual hypnosis": two people
hypnotizing each other at the same time.

"Psychedelic experiences associated with a novel hypnotic procedure, mutual
hypnosis." Am J Clin Hypn. 1967 Oct;10(2):65-78.
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6080106](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6080106)

Anything which causes entrainment between two dynamic systems is essentially
combining them into one dynamic system. E.g. something as simple as
deliberately breathing in sync with each other can begin to develop
consciousness merging.

~~~
smt88
> _" Psychedelic experiences associated with a novel hypnotic procedure,
> mutual hypnosis." Am J Clin Hypn. 1967 Oct;10(2):65-78.
> [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6080106*](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6080106*)

Like much of Tart's other work "studying" the paranormal[1], this is
pseudoscience. There is no good evidence for hypnosis.

1\. [http://skepdic.com/tart.html](http://skepdic.com/tart.html)

~~~
carapace
Capital-S Skeptics are a strongly biased source, eh?

> There is no good evidence for hypnosis.

That's just ridiculous.

~~~
ci5er
> That's just ridiculous.

Depends on your definition of 'hypnosis'. There are some pretty prosaic
definitions that are clearly and repeatably demonstrable. There are also, at
the other end of the spectrum, some pretty extraordinary claims for "what it
is" and "what it can do". The former is riduculous, and for the latter,
skepticism seems to be prudent, pending further articulation.

~~~
carapace
> Depends on your definition of 'hypnosis'.

Well, yeah.

The best book on hypnosis I know of opens with one of the co-authors stating
that "there's no such thing as hypnosis" and the other stating "everything is
hypnosis".

> The former is ridiculous ...

The "clearly and repeatably demonstrable" definitions are ridiculous?

~~~
ci5er
Sounds like Bandler channeling Heller.

~~~
carapace
"Ah, I see you're a man of culture as well." :-)

Yes, that's from "TRANCE-formations" by Bandler and Grinder.

And, yeah, for my money, Heller's "Monsters and Magical Sticks: There's No
Such Thing as Hypnosis?" is the _other_ best book on the subject. Well met.

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russdill
This seems to fall a bit under the Dyson's "lumpers and splitters"
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumpers_and_splitters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumpers_and_splitters)

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cairo_x
Another difficulty of consciousness is it may not be transient. It may pop in
and out of existence, and the only thing giving each instance the illusion of
transience are the memories each previous instance have generated. The problem
now is the fuzzy definition of a memory and the many different ways the human
body may store it (in genetics, neural pathways, in brain chemistry, muscle
memory, etc). In order to locate the present consciousness you have to be able
to track all of these memory systems to get a lock on to which active brain
network shape may be the current instance of consciousness, which may at any
time vanish and pop up in another network.

Consciousness not being transient is kind of terrifying. It's like a mental
version of 'The Prestige'. Every night when you lose consciousness, or maybe
every time you lose or change a train of thought, 'you' essentially dies, and
is cloned/re-imaged by your memories at some other location in the brain.

~~~
cairo_x
DOH! Replace the word transient with continuous.

------
evunveot
The article talks about a philosophical concept called "dual-aspect monism"
which, in the author's interpretation, basically means that everything we
think of as physical/material has some kind of consciousness, and that our own
consciousness emerges somehow from the interactions of the elementary
consciousnesses of the particles in our brains. So consciousness is the
hardware of reality and physical phenomena are the software, an inversion of
the typical materialist view. (As a programmer, I'm not sure that metaphor
really works, but I'll allow it.)

The author presents this as an avenue for confronting the likelihood that even
a perfect understanding/modeling of the physical characteristics of a brain is
unlikely to reveal anything about consciousness or subjective experience
itself.

Seems plausible to me. Reality tends to make sense, so if it's most likely
impossible to make sense of consciousness by studying the brain, there's
probably some other way to look at it.

The idea that fundamental particles like electrons have some kind of
subjective experience was hard to swallow at first, but then I thought about
my cat. It's safe to say that a cat's consciousness is more primitive than a
typical human's. You can also say that cats (at least once you get to know
them) are a lot more predictable than people and have a smaller set of
possible behaviors and reactions. If my cat sees a bug on the wall, she's
going to do her weird hiss-snarl thing at it just about 100% of the time, and
there's 0% chance she's going to roll up a newspaper and swat it.

If the consciousness of a particular entity can be ranked in comparison to
that of other entities — like I would rank my consciousness as "higher" than
my cat's — and if entities with "lower consciousnesses" have fewer possible
behaviors or reactions to stimuli (like my cat compared to me, or a broccoli
plant in my garden compared to my cat), then it's easy to imagine that
something as elementary as an electron could be conscious in some way and
still obey what appear to be totally deterministic rules. (Electron may have
been a bad example since we can't really observe them like we can cats, but
the point stands.) Another way to state it would be that as consciousness
rises, so does free will (or, at least, scope of behavior).

I'm also reminded of:

John 1:1-3 (NKJV) — "In the beginning was the Word[0], and the Word was with
God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were
made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made."

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logos](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logos)

Of course, consciousness potentially being "the hardware of reality" doesn't
necessarily mean God exists. But it fits.

~~~
mrec
> _Reality tends to make sense, so if it 's most likely impossible to make
> sense of consciousness by studying the brain, there's probably some other
> way to look at it._

Reality tends to make sense on scales and in environments where making sense
of reality conferred an evolutionary advantage on the brain-haver. Absent
that, not so much. We're great at intuiting about ballistics in a
gravitational field and atmosphere, less so about WTF is happening in
wavefunction collapse.

> _The idea that fundamental particles like electrons have some kind of
> subjective experience_

What would it be an experience _of_? Without sense-organs and brains or
equivalents thereof, what could anything be conscious _of_? If sense-organs
and brains are somehow hard-epiphenomenal, not really required to experience
the universe, why did organisms bother to evolve them?

~~~
slowmovintarget
> ...about WTF is happening in wavefunction collapse

That's in large part because that particular term is a hand-wave assertion
firmly in the realm of the Copenhagen interpretation. i.e. "It just happens,
and we'll call it this." The term presupposes there is a differences between a
quantum realm and a classical realm, rather than quantum rules pertaining
continuously (like the Many Worlds interpretation supplies).

I think the notions expressed in the article don't really resolve anything
except to emphasize there is much we don't understand.

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whatshisface
The had problem of consciousness is related to neither neuroscience or
physics, far from being a central problem in either. It's a central problem in
_philosophy_.

~~~
erikerikson
As the philosophers have it, all fields are subfields of philosophy. If this
is so, the problem in neuroscience and physics is by definition the same
problem (perhaps with different scopes) and included in philosophy. However,
I'm not left feeling like I've gained any knowledge from recognizing this. It
is so that it has been an important problem in philosophy but do you expect
anyone to be surprised by that knowledge?

~~~
oarabbus_
>As the philosophers have it, all fields are subfields of philosophy.

Seems a bit self-serving. Surely the physicists could make a claim that all
fields (including philosophy) are subfields of physics.

~~~
naasking
No, because philosophy deals with any question, like "what is mathematics?",
or "is there an objective standard for beauty?" which is completely outside
the scope of physics. Physics is necessarily more limited as it's bound by the
scientific process.

In fact, the soundness of the scientific method itself is a philosophical
argument, as it cannot be scientifically demonstrable without assuming the
conclusion.

~~~
oarabbus_
I've heard the challenge to that claim - a true GUT would explain all of those
things, including any philosophical thought. Hence philosophy is a subset of
physics.

~~~
naasking
No, a GUT cannot explain why we should believe the mathematics of a GUT.

~~~
oarabbus_
Sure it can - emergent property of some type of quantum behavior. Mathematics
is discovered, not created by humans.

~~~
naasking
> Mathematics is discovered, not created by humans.

That's conjecture. Some philosophies of mathematics in fact disagrees with
this claim, which is exactly my point. This debate we're having cannot be
settled by any sort of scientific or mathematical argument, it's a purely
philosophical debate about the _meaning_ of scientific and mathematical
arguments and what should or should not qualify.

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fennecfoxen
The problem of consciousness is about understanding systems which feed back
into themselves, build a model of themselves, and reason about themselves. The
structure underneath is well known, if not perfectly understood.

The problem of physics is that it’s not clear what the structure of reality
is. It is not known in the slightest but it seems unlikely it has a connection
to metacognition.

Article connects these with a lame “software running on unknown hardware”
analogy and works to suggest the universe could run on consciousness, or
something incoherent like that.

tldr article looks like it’s pretty much trash popsci; why is it even here?
Kill it with fire ;)

~~~
jfengel
Worse: popphil.

~~~
fennecfoxen
"These two phenomenon have an important, fundamental connection: As laypeople,
we don't understand anything about how either of them work." — works for
either of them

------
umvi
Interestingly, solving the hard problem of consciousness could effectively
prove whether or not God exists.

Most Abrahamic religious teach that everybody has a "spirit" inside their
body, and these spirits are somehow responsible for the experience of
consciousness and controlling the body like a hand inside a glove. This is
further reinforced by heavenly visitors in religious texts (i.e. Jesus talking
to prophets before 0 B.C. in the Bible would indicate that a body-less spirit
is indeed conscious).

Proving that consciousness is a totally explainable phenomenon given our
current understanding of physics would essentially prove that (at least the
Abrahamic) God doesn't exist (i.e. if we could create conscious machines on-
demand).

On the other hand, proving that consciousness is the result of some previously
undiscovered form/interaction of matter could provide evidence of the
existence of "spirits" (i.e. if said "ethereal" matter exists in brain before,
but not after, death)

~~~
piokoch
No, in "Abrahamic" religions we don't have a "spirit". According to those
religions people have immortal soul, which is definitely not a "spirit". The
"spirit" thing inside people that might "be freed" and haunt some secluded
house is something coming from the domain of cheap horror movies and pseudo
science TV shows. By definition souls is not something measurable, it does not
belong to physical world so no amount of physics or neurology can "explain
it", prove it existence or nonexistence. (I am theoretical physics PhD and
Roman Catholic).

~~~
umvi
Not looking to argue here, but suffice to say, the Catholic view is not
representative of all Abrahamic religions (or even just Christianity); I was
trying to give as generic as possible an explanation that covers the jist of
most Abrahamic faiths without diving into semantics of "spirit" vs. "soul"
(which apparently can vary).

