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Technology / Re: Do we have the tech to erase a human memory, with the INUMAC MRI machine, and

« on: 12/07/2016 15:18:01 »

I think you'd have better results using chemical means to prevent memory reconsolidation.

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Physiology & Medicine / Re: Does consciousness exist after death?

« on: 07/07/2016 00:09:53 »

... And you have returned like a dog to its ? with your persistent insults of "Dude" etc now not just confined to me.

Wait, what? since when did 'dude' change from being cool to being an insult? did I miss that meeting?

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General Science / Re: Is introspection a reliable scientific method?

« on: 06/07/2016 13:36:52 »

Is it possible to enhance pharmacological introspection by using THC to increase conscious access to subjective experiences?

We already have access to subjective experiences; by most assessments, consciousness is subjective experience (e.g. Thomas Nagel - an organism has conscious mental states, "if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism").

It is certainly possible to potentiate - and distort - subjective experience by pharmacological means (psychotropics). This can provide a limited degree of insight into the construction of perceptual reality (via perceptual distortions), and the construction of the self (through distortions of self-image, perspective, location, ownership, boundaries/extent, agency, feelings, etc).

But there is a potential catch with explicit introspection and that is the mapping of the conscious self. It appears that, just as our experiential reality is an internal model corrected by sensory feedback, the conscious self is a construct based on a simplified (and inaccurate) internal self-model (probably generated by the same processes that provide theory of mind); so conscious introspection is likely to elaborate or, worse, confabulate, on this partial model, the person we think we are, rather than the hidden bulk below conscious awareness that produces the 'real' person. I doubt much work has been done in this respect as it is so difficult to study, but it seems likely that in the absence of a deliberative route (Kahneman's 'System 2') to the subconscious, System 1's accessibility heuristic will play a part.

However, at a conference on consciousness I attended last weekend, a new study was described, that suggests that if you want to become closer to, or more conscious of, subconscious mental processes, meditation or mindfulness is the way to go; in a study of the chronometry of voluntary action (timing the build up of the readiness potential, and the subjective sense of decision, prior to volitional physical action, as per Benjamin Libet) subjects who practiced meditation or mindfulness showed a reduced gap between the onset of the readiness potential and conscious awareness of volition, compared to non-meditators. This suggests a reduced threshold of awareness for preconscious activity; a small step, but an interesting one.

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Physiology & Medicine / Re: German Scientist says he has proven life after DEATH

« on: 05/07/2016 23:20:42 »

"You are absolutely right", it is impossible to prove a nonphysical ethereal event by scientific method, because they exist in different realms of alternate realities, and are therefore mutually exclusive from one another.

Such things, by definition, are not supportable in our universe, so not only does your hypothesis have the interaction problem (i.e. how can the non-physical interact with the physical), but an 'alternate reality' problem (if it is a different reality, it can have no interaction with this reality by definition). Without evidence or proposed mechanism, and with a variety of indirect empirical evidence against it, it's an hypothesis at the very bottom of the heap keeping company with fantasy and wishful thinking (no offence). 

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Physiology & Medicine / Re: German Scientist says he has proven life after DEATH

« on: 05/07/2016 14:11:49 »

During profound near death experiences it could be said that they were from a medical point view clinically dead , no heart beat or brain activity ...

Clinical death is a moveable feast, the criteria for which vary between countries (e.g. it's different in US and UK), and over time. Colloquially, it is the cessation of heartbeat & breathing.

The lack of detectable brain activity doesn't mean there is no brain activity, and neurons may be alive even if they're not 'firing'. If an individual recovers any level of function, they were not dead, regardless of medical diagnosis []

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Physiology & Medicine / Re: Does consciousness exist after death?

« on: 05/07/2016 12:51:36 »

What evidence, please?

The evidence that all the conscious beings we know of are products of evolution and are constructed out of materials common in the universe. So, to the extent that conscious beings are the result of processes governed by the laws of the universe, we are creations of the universe. This is not to imply any purpose or intent, simply the effects of the 'unwinding' of a very low entropy starting state to (eventually) a high-entropy end state.

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Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology / Re: How many Big Bangs have occurred?

« on: 23/06/2016 13:35:30 »

... I prefer the idea of  there being more than one universe, I struggle with the notion that there is only one.

That's as may be, but it isn't science. What you prefer and can cope with may bear no relation to reality. People once preferred the idea that the Earth was the centre of the universe and everything revolved around it; people once preferred to think of atoms as little planetary systems, and particles as tiny billiard balls. They were wrong.

... what happens when the universe runs out of what fuels it, everything will eventually be consumed and what then ??

Then, just a heat-death of darkness and evanescent virtual particles - assuming the accelerating expansion doesn't result in a 'big rip' in which spacetime itself is destroyed and the universe undergoes a phase change to something else (no idea what that might be).

I did once see an interesting hypothesis that suggested that, at some point in the expanding heat-death, scale would become meaningless and the vast emptiness would become equivalent (mathematically & physically) to a hot, dense system with minimal entropy (i.e. another big bang)... unfortunately I don't recall the details of how it was supposed to work.

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Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology / Re: Is consciousness a metaphysical experience of reality?

« on: 28/12/2015 00:53:02 »

With current (or near future) technology a likely outcome  is that the ‘volunteer’ will start developing dementia-like syndromes progressing as the replacement of neurons occurs.

This is a thought experiment, the assumption is that the technology will exactly mimic the original.
 

If we get a zombie then we lost some physics, likely at quantum level. Quantum mechanics (QM) is working in anything by e.g. holding atoms together, without QM atoms e- will fall into nucleus, but the question is: is QM directly involved in consciousness? As QM demonstrably play a direct direct role in biology (photosynthesis and taste), I find it hard to believe it is not involved directly in such a special and important process such the aware-ing/conscious-ing of the reality.

Why? Do all 'special and important' processes have to directly involve QM? Is it more than just a case of consciousness is mysterious and QM is mysterious, so maybe they're connected? I'm happy to accept that there may be particular neural processes where QM effects could play an optimizing role, as in other biological systems, but I don't see the rationale behind claiming it is somehow the key to consciousness.

Speculations aside and based on what we know, direct involvement of QM can provide inside our brains two things: i) a more efficient energy transfer from point to point (due to electronic or vibrational states extended over many atoms)

What 'electronic or vibrational states' in particular? How does that help cellular communication? The timescales of the neural membrane depolarisation and synaptic transmission are consistent with the overall activity that's observed, e.g. sensory input takes about 300ms of processing to reach the threshold for the wide-scale activation of the cortex and other areas, that is consistent with the start of conscious awareness - which takes a further 300-400 ms to activate areas associated with generating a response. Where does QM help?
   

ii) faster Turning Machine computations if the results of those computations somehow survive from picoseconds to tens of miliseconds in order to be interfaced with the timescales of NN classical processes – the missmatch of decoherece timescales  is a loooong shot but maybe nature found a way.

I thought the claim was that a Turing Machine couldn't emulate the non-computable functions of the brain, which was what QM was being invoked to explain? having QM speed up Turing Machine computations wouldn't help with non-computability...

..if the QM is directly involved in the process of consciousness (via e.g. space-extended electronic states or quantum vibrational states on certain parts of neurons) then it dramatically restrict the molecular substrate that can be used, and the artificial neuron may have to be very similar to natural one in order to reproduce the quantum states directly involved in conscious -ness (-ing).

That's a big, unsupported 'IF' - but the thought experiment assumes that any QM involvement can accounted for in the emulation - we know how QM behaves, so we could, in principle, duplicate its influence on our artificial system.
 

It is conceivable to end up with a artificial NN that imitates perfectly at the classically describable level of interneuronal connections the original natural NN but it completely misses to generate some quantum states of the natural NN because the ANN does not have the right physical configuration. If those missed quantum states are essential to consciousness then ANN is a mindless machine even if at classical and interneuronal connection level imitates perfectly the natural NN

But if we do generate all the relevant QM states, as the thought experiment assumes?

It seems to me that either you know of some QM effect that can't, in principle, be emulated in an artificial system, or your QM argument is not a valid objection to AI consciousness. I don't know any compelling evidence that QM effects are involved or are necessary, and all the neuroscience evidence I've seen suggests that the brain functions just as one would expect if special QM effects weren't involved.

The EU funded Human Brain Project is aiming to create a neuron emulation faithful to molecular scales, where any required QM effects could be incorporated. So far, their very limited emulations of parts of biological brains (of rats), have behaved just like their biological counterparts; they may be nowhere near complex enough to be more than proof-of-principle models, but no evidence of, or need for, QM effects has been seen.

We can't yet define precisely what we mean by consciousness, so it's not really surprising that we don't yet know how it works.

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Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology / Re: Is consciousness a metaphysical experience of reality?

« on: 24/12/2015 18:07:52 »

I believe John Searle said something like:

One will never get wet from a simulation of rain.
To get wet you still need real rain.

He was quite right. A simulated tornado won't blow your house down.

However, you can calculate with a simulated (or, more precisely, emulated) calculator (I have one on my phone), and you can run real Windows programs on an emulated Windows operating system (e.g. on a Mac). The point being that computation (information processing) is substrate-neutral; you can do it with analogue computers, digital computers, neural networks - any capable real-world information processor (a Universal Turing Machine equivalent) can - in principle - compute what any other can (though some are impractical).

If the biological neural networks in brain are computational in function (and the evidence is very strongly in favour of this) - although not conventionally algorithmic - then their computational functions can be emulated by non-biological information processors, such as digital microprocessors programmed to emulate those networks (assuming all relevant aspects are emulated).

Whether this means that an artificial consciousness is possible depends on whether you think consciousness is a computational process of the brain or not.

my belief is that:
1. A Turning Machine will never generate consciousnesses, because it is an insufficient physical state/structure for such task. Similar with "China Nation" experiment.

Can you explain this? It seems to me that the 'China Nation' thought experiment simply describes a human brain on a large scale, so would have all it's relevant properties (we assume the people behave like neurons in all relevant respects, are organised and inter-connected in the same way, and all other relevant influences are suitably accounted for, e.g. blood dynamics, neurotransmitters, hormones, etc).