Self-evidently, only the “you” choosing keys to press is a “you” that can present itself here on the BBS. There is no other “you” that we can address or communicate with.
I’m not sure I follow the point that you are trying to make. There may be no “you” or “I” at all, fundamentally.
The article is discussing something about the fundamental nature of human consciousness and free will. Other studies have found similar evidence, going back a few decades. It is in the popular neuroscience literature, though not universally accepted as being well understood.
Sure, we all walk around thinking their is an “I” that is “me” making my decisions, thinking “my” thoughts, interacting with the world. It turns out it might be a lot more complex than this and this “I” is a superficial construct generated by our brains through the result of all of the other processes the brain is running to navigate and interact with the world. Therefore, if true, our idea that “I” exist and have the free will to make conscious decisions may largely be an illusion though, subjectively since we think we are this “I,” hard to wrap our heads around.
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I’m tipping the Gaia idea would have a pretty high rate of acceptance amongst those who’ve done DMT… I’m not sure such things will ever be in the purview of the scientific community; it’s philosophy, innit?
I’m pretty sure the concept of universal consciousness has some currency with a lot of open and inquiring minds; it has some resonance, whatever that’s worth.
I’m told it is “reality.”
Sure but then we have to define what “consciousness” means in that context, don’t we?
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Yeah, well - ‘reality’ as expressed by anyone is somebody’s guess at it; that just about goes without saying.
Good luck with that - any such definition would almost be a fully-fledged theory of ‘God’, whatever that means. It’d take a much clearer mind than mine.
I’ve seen an article that even posited a not-manifestly-impossible-at-first glance mechanism that could allow quantum coherence to exist in a physical environment like the brain, and it got through peer-review, which means I’m not the only person who considered it not-manifestly-impossible-at-first glance, but I still agree that it’s extremely unlikely.
Exactly this. There is no evidence for it whatsoever. If the best you can say about your theory is that it’s not manifestly impossible from first principles, well, that puts it a step above a lot of bullshit out there, but it doesn’t mean it’s not bullshit.
Were I to idly speculate on the subject, I would say that it seems to me that if we wanted to root around trying to find explanations for consciousness in physics, we would be a lot more likely to find them in statistical thermodynamics, eg macro-scale quantum statistics, than in quantum scale entanglement or computation, but that’s just speculation until someone figures out a way to test it.
What I see in the quantum consciousness movement is generally geared a lot more towards wish-fulfillment than towards trying to figure out a way to test it.
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Given that once upon a time, the whole universe apparently occupied a singularity, I suppose that would allow for a lot of possibilities based on entanglement, no?
It is sad how much… if not the entirety, of the “movement” is currently made up of people who would rather work to make the science fit their beliefs instead of recognize that IF quantum mind theory does hold any water we are not going to find out for a lonnnng time, if ever. It’s definitely better to recognize it as that, just a far flung theory, and leave it there until maybe someday future humans have the know how to figure out what really makes “consciousness” tick, if anything at all.
¯\ _ (ツ) _ /¯
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Possibilities for what, specifically?
I dunno, maybe quantum entanglement in the universe is analogous to nerve signals in the brain. You can pull pretty much anything out of your arse and say that’s a possible mechanism.
(post withdrawn by free will, will be automatically deleted in 24 hours unless someone else’s free will interferes)
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So I’m interested in this phenomenon of consciousness ‘after the fact’ and that, of course, all of our decisions and actions and even thoughts have all taken place up to two seconds before we become conscious of them. But I’m also aware of having gotten closer to the coal face during deep meditation, or strong psychedelic experiences, and even a few times felt like I was inhabiting that process without any extra echo of re-experience bound up in a sense of self.
And that’s what I consider my most common experience of everyday consciousness to be, a kind of echo of what has already taken place, of thought-prime, if you will. But it occurs to me that this means that the experience of consciousness is also emerging from the function of the mind in a similar way, it is bound up, emerging along with the thoughts themselves, the thoughts that we later become conscious of.
Now of course, there are layers to the self consciousness that we habitually associate with our model or our construct of ourselves, associations with memory, with the commonly employed structures of interplaying archetypes, with our memories of ourselves. This is what I mean by the echoes, fixedly repeated decelerations of reality that employ the toy model we’ve meticulously built up over our lives. But basically a story, a convenient and addictive collection of analyses we are so used to obsessively repeating over and over to ourselves, sometimes comforting, sometimes maddening, always ancillary.
And it is these echoes of consciousness which are the most easily stripped away when one sits down to meditate, or eats mushrooms or another strong psychedelic, but that still leaves us with the integrated, emergent sensation of there being consciousness, and I don’t really see a problem with that layer in and of itself. If it truly is emerging along with the thoughts and actions, memories and associations then it is really just some kind of unity of disparate process, amongst a number of other processes unifying shards of perception and memory in larger chunks of gestalt process.
And in getting down, closer to the coal face, in becoming the coal face, the process, where all the action is happening, without anything extra - not annihilated, not nothing, just the process, there is still a kind of consciousness which is just conscious, which seems, for want of a better word, emergent.
If free will exists then it is just the process of mind doing it’s own thing without anything extra. All this bullshit about imagining that our naive optimism in some way contributes to the way we make decisions is just a side show. Sure, your neuroses can still feed back into the structure of your brain/mind and contribute to the emergence of novel, and potentially destructive, behaviour. But it is still emerging ‘down at the coal face’ in the same way, only to be played over and over through the later neurotic structures that apprehend consciousness, that we sometimes mistakenly think we have experienced as what we really are, when it’s just a seconds old replay, after the fact.
The free will is still in there, down there, it’s just that sometimes what emerges is an affect of our own bad habit of associating our self with the neurotic bullshit of our toy model of consciousness.
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Mechanism for what, specifically?
If you mean “mechanism for overriding classical effects at a scale as large as an electrical impulse in a nerve” then no, you really can’t.
Unless you’re willing to be, again, specific about what kind of mechanism you’re proposing, that statement is nigh unto meaningless.
As a non-scientist, I’ve always thought that if quantum mechanics does affect how the brain works, it’s similar to how cosmic rays affect a computer working.
That is: for any given computer operation, the chances of a cosmic ray coming along and striking the exact place it would need to strike to foul up the calculation is bordering on infinitesimal. However, there are so many cosmic rays, so many computers, and so many calculations occurring every nanosecond of every day that if you’re Google or the government, it’s worth it to put enough material above your servers to shield from cosmic rays, and to invest in error-checking RAM.
Similarly, there’s so much stuff going on in the brain at such a low-voltage and such a microscopic level that even though the brain would work exactly the same in a world without quantum mechanics, there are enough humans, with enough electrical signals zipping across their brains, that I would think it more likely than not that some zeroes are being flipped to ones (so to speak) or vice versa.
I was referring to a possible mechanism for a universal consciousness, which itself might be the source of our own consciousness. Don’t ask me for anything more specific than that, I just have this half-arsed vague notion I’m throwing out there. I’m not going to argue for it.
I’m just proposing that since the whole universe once occupied one spot, and that quantum entanglement is a thing, maybe that’s God.
I think it’s important to be clear about what “modelling” means. Very simple things model themselves (see concurrent thread on insects having consciousness) but I think by “model” here we are talking “able to absolutely predict” which is another way of saying, “contains all the information plus some more.” Everything contains exact the amount of information it contains and can’t possibly contain more. [This is to say that I agree with you that all of the “usual” problems seem to apply]
This is why I think “determinism” in the absolute sense just doesn’t pass muster. If determinism means that the information needed to determine all future states of the universe is completely contained with the present state of the universe then I say that’s nonsense, you can’t losslessly compress all future information into present information unless we believe there are fixed rules existing outside of the universe that say how one state moves to the next. That sounds like crossing in to the supernatural.
The only other way I can see around this is to argue that there simply is no past and future. If the universe is essentially mathematical, then isomorphic states can be treated as identical. Therefore there is no past and future, and the entire universe is equivalent to the state at the big bang - that is, the entire universe is exactly the same as no space, no time, maximum entropy. For every present theory we have, this is just nihilism.
Yeah, obviously this discussion is just what different people think of the idea of free will and not of the experiment itself which doesn’t seem to weigh on free will at all. The experiment shows that people are capable of confusing themselves about things that happen quickly. We all knew that anyway. Personally, as far as the experiment goes, I’m interested in whether the data better supports the view that everyone does this roughly equally or that some people are pretty good at telling when they picked something from when they didn’t and others are terrible at it.
Even if the experiment is taken as fatal to a certain view of free will, the idea that free will doesn’t exist is a silly conclusion. Similar to to person concluding gravity doesn’t exist because a grape and an orange fall at the same speed. People have been talking about free will for a long time, and I’m pretty sure they mean something by it, this experiment might help narrow what that thing is but it doesn’t show that it isn’t anything.
I think the similarly points out the problem with the experiment. What you see has to be processed through your visual cortex which isn’t exactly infallible. It isn’t necessary the case that the conscious mind had to revise history, it might be the case that the conscious mind is given precisely that information (about the dot changing colours midway) from the visual cortex which is constantly trying to do its best to make sense of an utterly unprocessable amount of information it is bombarded with. Consider this experiment: you look at a lamp and see a lamp. But you had to know what a lamp was before you could see a lamp, right? Otherwise you’d just see varying patches of light and dark and differing hues. You couldn’t have literally seen a lamp.
The jump to “no free will” from the look-at-a-lamp experiment would seem pretty astounding.
We know how neurons work, but if you think about how the quantity of free-floating neurotransmitters affects our moods and decision making then it becomes obvious that the working of the whole brain depends on some extremely unpredictable interactions at a very, very small level. Like if you dropped billions of bottles with 27 different messages into them in the ocean and then made decisions based on which of the 27 the bottle you found on the beach happened to contain.
I think “You are the universe experiencing itself” is inevitably quite literally true. The question most people are really trying to answer is “Does that mean what I hope it means?” And I think the answer to that is probably, “no.”
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The entity named enso.
Found it, at any rate… and the links are already truncated and broken in the source pdf
Chapter 5 D. Dennett’s “Consciousness Explained”- Summary
“Multiple Drafts Versus the Cartesian Theater”
Part 3 Phi Experiments
Motion picture and television rely on creating apparent motion from a rapid succession of 'still" pictures, and since the dawn of the motion picture age, psychologists have studied this phenomenon. The simplest case just has two dots blinking on and off, and if the two dots are separated by as much as 4 degrees and briefly blinked, they will appear to be a single dot moving. A great applet to play with this is here (requires JAVA):
http://epsych.msstate.edu/descripti...ion/apmove.html
Try slowing the display down and increasing the distance between the dots until they appear to be just stationary and blinking as opposed to moving. Previous models trouble explaining this, especially a simple modification where two different colored blinking dots appear to be a single dot moving back and forth- but apparently changing color in mid-trajectory! See this URL for an example:
http://www.uncc.edu/colleges/arts_a...Phenomenon.html
For example, even in single shot trials, subjects would see a red dot moving, turn green while it was moving and then a fraction of a second later, a green dot stopped. But nothing actually moved, only a red dot was shown and then slightly to one side a green dot a little later. Here’s an example of random Phi motion and color change:
http://www.cs.tufts.edu/~kreisman/phi/index.html
How could the brain, if the second dot was already in our consciousness, go back and change the color of the dot, seemingly in mid-flight? If it seems to you, gentle reader, that (although you experienced red, then red turning green and then green), the conscious experience of the whole event must surely have been delayed until after the green spot was (unconsciously?) perceived. If that seems reasonable then you are still locked in the Cartesian Theater.
Two obvious solutions have been proposed to account for these experimental observations, one assumes a revision of perceptions and the other assumes a revision of our memories. Dennett calls these the Stalinesque or Orwellian explanations, but after a detailed analysis (which I will leave to those of you that are interested), he finally notes that both of these revisionist points of view depend on the subject having a single time sequenced point of view, which as we have already noted, is based on the idea that these experiences are presented to something (like a Cartesian theater).
http://pages.uoregon.edu/donovan/writings/Chapter%205%20summary.pdf
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I don’t see why you couldn’t. What’s the limiting factor?
There is one present state and many future states. Try to compress all two digit binary numbers into one digit binary numbers.
