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Quote from: cheryl j on 03/01/2014 01:41:18There's probably a lot of problems with the theory. But I don't see how it is any more vague or abstract than a physicist saying (as in Don's James Jeans quote) that information, and not physical matter or energy, is the true basis of everything in the universe, and hence explains consciousness.Here is one instance where I can partially agree with Don, but that agreement only refers to the administration of information. Where he comes up short is, he fails to recognize that like anything else, information has to be stored somewhere. The storage of information is processed in the brain and the application of that information is applied there as well. Mysticism only complicates the natural process we call mental activity.
There's probably a lot of problems with the theory. But I don't see how it is any more vague or abstract than a physicist saying (as in Don's James Jeans quote) that information, and not physical matter or energy, is the true basis of everything in the universe, and hence explains consciousness.
Quote from: DonQuichotte on 04/01/2014 17:13:03 However, the boundary betweenour empirically described selves and the physically described systemwe are studying is somewhat arbitrary. The empirically described measuringdevices can become very tiny, and physically described systemscan become very large, This ambiguity was examined by von Neumann(1932) who showed that we can consistently describe the entire physicalworld, including the brains of the experimenters, as the physically describedworld, with the actions instigated by an experimenter’s streamof consciousness acting directly upon that experimenter’s brain. The dividing line in process one might be arbitrary, but I don't see how it is meaningless or not arguable. In fact, this is what I don't get - von Neumann incorporated consciousness into his model, and therefore it's no longer a big issue, but then Stapp seems to turn around and exempt the conscious agency from all physical laws, in a sense taking it back out of the whole system, but at the same time using Von Neumann's position as proof that consciousness matters.I may be hopelessly confused, but at least I make some attempt to understand this stuff myself, instead of just letting my physicist beat up your physicist.
However, the boundary betweenour empirically described selves and the physically described systemwe are studying is somewhat arbitrary. The empirically described measuringdevices can become very tiny, and physically described systemscan become very large, This ambiguity was examined by von Neumann(1932) who showed that we can consistently describe the entire physicalworld, including the brains of the experimenters, as the physically describedworld, with the actions instigated by an experimenter’s streamof consciousness acting directly upon that experimenter’s brain.
Quote from: dlorde on 03/01/2014 00:16:25Quote from: cheryl j on 02/01/2014 21:33:14To be honest, I see nothing less reasonable in the above than Stapp's proposal. But I suspect it would not appeal to someone looking for a bridge to a mystical realm or hoping to incorporate their religious views into science. The integrated information hypothesis is a good start - consciousness clearly involves the integration of information, and but it's debatable precisely what information must be integrated, and how. Unless you're careful, it can end up being a circular argument - the information required by consciousness must be integrated in a way that results in consciousness... but the information theory approach using connectedness & synergy looks promising and does at least give some crude quantifiability.There's probably a lot of problems with the theory. But I don't see how it is any more vague or abstract than a physicist saying (as in Don's James Jeans quote) that information, and not physical matter or energy, is the true basis of everything in the universe, and hence explains consciousness.
Quote from: cheryl j on 02/01/2014 21:33:14To be honest, I see nothing less reasonable in the above than Stapp's proposal. But I suspect it would not appeal to someone looking for a bridge to a mystical realm or hoping to incorporate their religious views into science. The integrated information hypothesis is a good start - consciousness clearly involves the integration of information, and but it's debatable precisely what information must be integrated, and how. Unless you're careful, it can end up being a circular argument - the information required by consciousness must be integrated in a way that results in consciousness... but the information theory approach using connectedness & synergy looks promising and does at least give some crude quantifiability.
To be honest, I see nothing less reasonable in the above than Stapp's proposal. But I suspect it would not appeal to someone looking for a bridge to a mystical realm or hoping to incorporate their religious views into science.
Here's some reading for you, Don. "Is Consciousness Universal?Panpsychism, the ancient doctrine that consciousness is universal, offers some lessons in how to think about subjective experience today"By Christof Koch http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=is-consciousness-universal&page=3Although, I should warn you, he is not using panpsychism in the groovy, Deepak Chopra sense of the word. Here are some passages from the link above. “Panpsychism is the belief that everything is “enminded.” All of it. Whether it is a brain, a tree, a rock or an electron. Everything that is physical also possesses an interior mental aspect. One is objective—accessible to everybody—and the other phenomenal—accessible only to the subject. That is the sense of the quotation by British-born Buddhist scholar Alan Watts with which I began this essay.I will defend a narrowed, more nuanced view: namely that any complex system, as defined below, has the basic attributes of mind and has a minimal amount of consciousness in the sense that it feels like something to be that system. If the system falls apart, consciousness ceases to be; it doesn't feel like anything to be a broken system. And the more complex the system, the larger the repertoire of conscious states it can experience.”His theory of consciousness has to do with integrated information."These ideas can be precisely expressed in the language of mathematics using notions from information theory such as entropy. Given a particular brain, with its neurons in a particular state—these neurons are firing while those ones are quiet—one can precisely compute the extent to which this network is integrated. From this calculation, the theory derives a single number, &PHgr; (pronounced “fi”) [see “A Theory of Consciousness,” Consciousness Redux; Scientific American Mind, July/August 2009]. Measured in bits, &PHgr; denotes the size of the conscious repertoire associated with the network of causally interacting parts being in one particular state. Think of &PHgr; as the synergy of the system. The more integrated the system is, the more synergy it has and the more conscious it is. If individual brain regions are too isolated from one another or are interconnected at random, &PHgr; will be low. If the organism has many neurons and is richly endowed with synaptic connections, &PHgr; will be high. Basically, &PHgr; captures the quantity of consciousness. The quality of any one experience—the way in which red feels different from blue and a color is perceived differently from a tone—is conveyed by the informational geometry associated with &PHgr;. The theory assigns to any one brain state a shape, a crystal, in a fantastically high-dimensional qualia space. This crystal is the system viewed from within. It is the voice in the head, the light inside the skull. It is everything you will ever know of the world. It is your only reality. It is the quiddity of experience. The dream of the lotus eater, the mindfulness of the meditating monk and the agony of the cancer patient all feel the way they do because of the shape of the distinct crystals in a space of a trillion dimensions—truly a beatific vision. The water of integrated information is turned into the wine of experience.Integrated information makes very specific predictions about which brain circuits are involved in consciousness and which ones are peripheral players (even though they might contain many more neurons, their anatomical wiring differs). The theory has most recently been used to build a consciousness meter to assess, in a quantitative manner, the extent to which anesthetized subjects or severely brain-injured patients, such as Terri Schiavo, who died in Florida in 2005, are truly not conscious or do have some conscious experiences but are unable to signal their pain and discomfort to their loved ones [see “A Consciousness Meter,” Consciousness Redux; Scientific American Mind, March/April 2013].IIT addresses the problem of aggregates by postulating that only “local maxima” of integrated information exist (over elements and spatial and temporal scales): my consciousness, your consciousness, but nothing in between. That is, every person living in the U.S. is, self by self, conscious, but there is no superordinate consciousness of the U.S. population as a whole."Unlike classical panpsychism, not all physical objects have a &PHgr; that is different from zero. Only integrated systems do. A bunch of disconnected neurons in a dish, a heap of sand, a galaxy of stars or a black hole—none of them are integrated. They have no consciousness. They do not have mental properties.Last, IIT does not discriminate between squishy brains inside skulls and silicon circuits encased in titanium. Provided that the causal relations among the circuit elements, transistors and other logic gates give rise to integrated information, the system will feel like somethingTo be honest, I see nothing less reasonable in the above than Stapp's proposal. But I suspect it would not appeal to someone looking for a bridge to a mystical realm or hoping to incorporate their religious views into science.
Quote from: DonQuichotte on 02/01/2014 19:51:211 more thing , just concerning the collapse of the wave function : are the observing or measuring device + the observer human not made of atoms ,sub-atoms .....themselves ? So, how can't they not have effects on the observed ? In the case of the human observer scientist , how can his mind or consciousness not have causal effects on the observed as well ?In short :Well, I'm glad you asked that. It brings up another question Donald had: "Stapp has not explained how he supposes such changes arelimited. Why should they be restricted to changes within a brain? If mental forces can effectively decide the trajectories of atoms or molecules inside a brain, why can they not decide the trajectories of electrons in a laboratory or of prey in the ocean? What determined the point in evolutionary history when brains are supposed to have started to be able to make choices?"In other words, if my conscious agency can choose which brain state I will experience, why cannot I choose yours as well? Why can I not use the Zeno effect to change the outcome of anything in the macro world that might be have some non-deterministic, quantum element? There would certainly be a huge evolutionary pay off if I could. And speaking of evolution, which animals get to have a conscious agency and why?
1 more thing , just concerning the collapse of the wave function : are the observing or measuring device + the observer human not made of atoms ,sub-atoms .....themselves ? So, how can't they not have effects on the observed ? In the case of the human observer scientist , how can his mind or consciousness not have causal effects on the observed as well ?In short :
Try to read the above , dlorde : highly interesting fascinating stuff really : you can't argue with that , that might change your classical views
Quote from: DonQuichotte on 04/01/2014 17:58:28Try to read the above , dlorde : highly interesting fascinating stuff really : you can't argue with that , that might change your classical viewsThere's nothing new there. None of it addresses the criticisms of Stapp's consciousness hypothesis already posted here.
dlorde , Ethos :As some scientist or thinker said : " matter is not made of matter ",so to speak : see the revolutionary non-classical and anti-classical conception of matter and that of the physical reality which have been provided by ...QM :We might be thus not made of any physical or other substance : the universe , including ourselves , might be just a "matter" of probability distribution in the 'forms " of actions , potentialities , possibilities, events ....as some scientists modern physicists such as Stapp, Walker and others think the universe is .Who knows ? So, try to be up to date by realising the revolutionary character of QM in that and in other regards ,instead of sticking to your own absurd outdated false and superseded 19th century materialism that was built on the approximately valid and fundamentally incorrect classical physics ....Good luck .
Come on, be serious : have you read all those excerpts already , i just posted ? Impossible ,unless you do possess some sort of a sophisticated scanner of some sort haha implanted in your brain or rather mind .
Stapp talked about the history genesis and developement of mind-dependent quantum theory ,through Von Neumann and beyond , and much more ...from the original Copenhagen interpretation , before after and beyond through Dennett's classical conservation of energy "argument " ....and much more ....All that is addressed by Stapp's excerpts i just posted , and more .
P.S.: Biology, neurobiology microbiology has been becoming more and more mechanical and materialist , unlike QM that have been moving in the opposite and totally different direction, no wonder thus that you , dlorde ,as a biologist , have been becoming more and more materialist mechanical, as if QM do not exist .Way to go, scientist .
So, you need to grasp and incorporate QT into your materialist classical mechanical world view ,just to find out that they are ...incompatible , the former has been superseding and refuting the latter : congratulations and condolences .
Quote from: alancalverd on 04/01/2014 15:09:50 Thus a true Zeno effect requires the system to "know" that you are waiting for it to do something, without you having "told" it in any way. Therefore either the entire universe is predestined down to the last photon, or there is no Zeno effect. Well. That's a bit troublesome, isn't it?
Thus a true Zeno effect requires the system to "know" that you are waiting for it to do something, without you having "told" it in any way. Therefore either the entire universe is predestined down to the last photon, or there is no Zeno effect.
So, try to be up to date by realising the revolutionary character of QM in that and in other regards ,instead of sticking to your own absurd outdated false and superseded 19th century materialism that was built on the approximately valid and fundamentally incorrect classical physics ....
All that happened was scientists around the world said "that makes sense, thank you, and it's worth a Nobel Prize".Which is why science is good, philosophy bad.