A quick thought on consciousness and where research might go

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Something I was chewing on tonight was in reference to a Royal Institute talk about the fundamental particles. In particular they spent a bit of time talking about Higgs Boson and the idea that it's field that essentially massless particles 'dip into' or, better put partake in, which gives them their respective mass. In this sense it seems like the intrinsic properties of particles can be thought of to some degree as venn diagrams of field interaction.

The talk I'm thinking of:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRwRNMgOGL0

To consider consciousness for a second I think it's safe to say that a holographic model of it probably isn't too controversial regardless of what one believes - ie. whether it's eliminative materialism, strong emergence, etc., whatever is happening with it seems to stay in the same general shape for the most part in various degrees of resolution where if a hypothetical generalized brain injury were to occur (not tweaking one specific area) you'd have a brain with the same general personality traits but in lower resolution. To try to reify that with a more common place example a rainbow is a prismatic light effect of sunlight hitting rain (you can see a ring of that as well through clouds when the sun is overhead if you have the right sunglasses).

What I think might hurt some people's feelings a bit, I'm not writing this for that purpose but really perhaps to maybe point out that they'll want to be ready for it, that approach to field interaction with matter (ie. venn diagrams of generalized activity) is probably going to be a model that gets more attention and it may well be, at least for a decade or so later in this century, that we'll pass through a model where scientists consider the likelihood more plausible that we're looking for a field of some type that gives matter the sort of panpsychic dip. That's not to say they'd make any claims about life after death or anything like that, if the topic is science that would be a private opinion rather than anything that would be officially appropriate, but I think that idea likely will be put to the test. We may find out that it's the case, or we may find out that it's some kind of resonance between several fields.

Whatever the case is I think the 'hard problem' does a good job of underscoring that it's not something best understood by a contact mechanics of neurotransmitters type of approach. I think back to a friend of mine from several years back, she's since left WP but she was a graduate student in neurology and she mentioned a particularly young and plucky neurologist was hoping to break the riddle of consciousness by mapping all of the neural connections in the brain and being able to describe traits by connections. I watched a video of him discussing that with other neurologists and the older guys were laughing at him a bit, and what that came down to was that they'd already mapped the nervous system of a flat worm, maybe something like 310 - 320 neurons, and they were never the same twice, ie. you couldn't nail down their behavioral attributes to neurological connections. Things like that clearly point back away from contact mechanics type approaches and more to the possibility of such contact and neurotransmitter activity being supportive or secondary and established by a more primary driver.

I get that a post like this is likely to get a strong reaction from some, I'd just say that I'm probably not going to pay a whole lot of attention to the resulting criticisms unless they're of an objective variety - for example engaging each or at least most of the points above and critiquing them in a substantial way (such as 'we know x not to be true because' and that because is an observed effect that directly counters the proposition). With criticism of my thoughts I actually want to learn something, ie. it's a net win when someone can actually correct me and tell me something I didn't already know, and there's nothing more disappointing than getting brow-beaten half to death and realizing that brow-beating was all braggadocio and no content. Other than that - I think people are entitled to their religious and political beliefs, ranging the whole spectrum from full dualist theism to naive materialism, and I have no interest in accounting for people's feelings, beliefs, or needs - they can feel free to either pass on this thread or comment with the understanding that I'll likely pass on replying.

I think that the brain creates consciousness. It is like a state change. Water becomes ice when its maintained at a certain temperature. Information becomes conscious information when it reaches a certain density. Want to talk?

We'd have to figure out what to talk about.

A couple nested points of interest in your idea though: first is you don't give your position on substrate dependence/independence, second is that you don't describe how information (being maintained in an ice-like state of density) becomes aware of itself. If it's just about density of information the substrate dependence wouldn't make sense. Also I'd have to ask if such a lattice-work of information is to be spread out over a really large area what's to stop that from being self-aware?

I believe that consciousness is substrate independent. If you gave a deep Markhov neural net a training set consisting of all of the electrical signaling from body sensors to the sensory cortex and the electrical signaling from the motor cortex to the body, you could recreate that person's consciousness on a computer. This would, in effect, recreate the person's memory on the neural net. Then, new environmental stimuli would be understood and reacted to, in the same way as the person from whom the training set recording was originally made.



Consciousness is an iterative process where each new sensory experience is understood in terms of previous sensory experience. Information becomes aware of itself via the re-entrant process of analogizing current sensory experience to previous, remembered sensory experience.

Information increases its density by categorization. There is no physical 'dog'. There is only Joe the Beagle and Birdy the German Shepherd. Dog is a conscious concept formed by analogizing a group of animals experienced, via their common characteristics. 'Dog' is formed by experiencing a bunch of animals with a common set of characteristics. Dog is thus the condensed information of many re-entrant viewings of different animals.



I believe that consciousness resides only in material brains. Obviously, the recipe for human consciousness resides in the 3 billion base pairs in human DNA. Consciousness is not found where there is no DNA. DNA is the magic, although it is just chemicals. DNA is your entry point for God, or advanced civilization, or transpermia. How did the 3 billion pairs arrange themselves just right? Universal infinities have to be involved.

I would agree with all of the above.


Right, in a way dog is something of a symbolic category.



I think the last part, if looked at from a random chance perspective, would probably have to require the conception of multiverse. The idea isn't particularly outlandish albeit the multiple big bangs over infinite time is a bit easier to relate to than the infinite parallels concept. At the same time though it does seem like RNA has some proto life-like kick to it in terms of where its chemical bonds lead it and what kinds of behavior it can partake in.

Would you agree, then, that information becomes conscious via its analogical association to memories? Douglas Hofstadter wrote an interesting book "I am a strange loop" that talks extensively about analogy making. I like Eric Kandel's Aplysia studies regarding how memory forms. Do you think that there are any parallels between Chaos theory and its re-entrant loops and consciousness, where the understanding of anything is totally dependent on what is already known and remembered at the time when the new thing, to be understood, is encountered? What can Chaos Theory teach us about consciousness?



In consciousness, this analogical way of thinking becomes deeply embedded. Analogies are formed between analogies. I.E. we experience things in the world. Some things have characteristics which cause us to call them 'living' while others are classified as 'non living'. Then we break out both living and non living into different classes using different sets of criteria. Living becomes categories like fish mammals birds etc. Then these are further broken out by a different set of analogical criteria. Orange breasted birds are "Robins". Robins can be further classified by age or health or anything that a human brain has determined to be a useful classification. I visualize embedded analogies like this as a tree diagram. So, each time we have a new experience, we understand it in terms of all the analogies back towards the main trunk of the tree.






The multiverse forms a tree diagram each time a decision is encountered, so it is similar to the idea of embedded analogy.

Yes RNAs were likely involved in forming the current configuration of human DNA, just as current virus RNAs can incorporate themselves into the genome of the life form which they affect.

For 3 billion base pairs to arrange themselves into DNA must have taken a longer time that what the current universe has existed, if the big bang theory has any merit. But if intelligent design were involved, we would have to look for the origin of that intelligent designer. It looks like all life that we know is related in its DNA (a banana's DNA is 50% the same as a human's). I think along the lines that a single seed DNA rode to earth on a meteorite. DNA's magic lies in its uncanny ability to adapt itself to any environment, so that is where differentiation of life on earth comes from. I wonder how similar the DNA for a life form originating outside out solar system might be. Could the DNA magic of adaptation arisen with much fewer base pairs? Could that little adaption formula have built more complex DNA around itself? I just think that the seed earthly life came from elsewhere, and studies of the origin of life on earth won't ever be successful, because life did not originate here. What do you think?

I'd think of memory as something that makes consciousness robust. In essence though it's something like a fusion between memory and awareness. Memory itself seems like it's the more accessible of the two concepts considering that many of us have had electronic storage for much of our lives, relatively easy access to books for maybe 400 years, and there were other ways of storing data before that. Awareness seems to be where we have a difficult time teasing out what it is exactly.

I don't think integrated information is a particularly bad analogy for what awareness is doing as it acts itself out as consciousness but the core substance of it is so foreign that we have a really difficult time trying to draw anything else in that's properly analogous to it. I'm forced as well to reach back into some of the lessons psychedelics taught me about the spectrum of consciousness from animal to human, ie. when to an extent you can see it getting split into its building blocks and in a lot of ways it becomes rather cold, mechanical, even a bit alien in its flavor. As far as I can tell awareness seems like it's defined by a sort of hum of activity but how that activity becomes aware, or maybe even more controversially that it ever crossed a line from truly unaware to aware, is probably one of the most challenging contemplations we're up against.


We do, and we also have a knack for mistaking maps for terrain. My guess, as our culture matures and starts picking at the higher-hanging fruit on the tree of advancement/progress, we'll be getting into finer and finer details and some of what we skip over now as mere puddles will comparatively look like seas.


I have a feeling that the DNA across the universe, is probably a small handful, maybe even just a couple, possibilities when thinking about it in the molecular sense. Much higher or lower pressures, hotter or colder temperatures, might make some variations possible but the architecture and how it ends up assembling is probably pretty standard.

I agree. And I think that awareness is driven by need or want. We learn to become aware of things that are useful to us and unaware of things that we don't find useful to us. What is useful is determined by trial and error, but once something is determined useful, we tend to notice it when it appears in our environment.



Yes consciousness is a spectrum. Douglas Hofstadter says as much when he claims that consciousnesses or 'souls' come in different sizes. Certainly a dog is more conscious than a mosquito, and most men are smarter than dogs.
How did psychedelics lead you to discover this? I've read that mushrooms can cause a much diminished sense of 'self' and one sees oneself as part of a much greater whole. I don't know how psychedelics do that but I do have a theory. 'Self' is biographical memory. When current experience is analogized to various memories, we exercise 'self' and we have a concept of 'self'. I think that psychedelics must sever the connection between current experience and memory. So what you have is an overexcited sensory system. More and more is sensed in the environment but it is not connected to previous experience. So one loses one's sense of self. But can you say any more about how your experience of psychedelics caused you to consider lower consciousnesses. It is this same disconnect between current experience and memory which we exercise in meditation. Meditation turns our intention towards sensory experience and attempts to sever any connection with previous experience. Do you think that psychedelics are conducive to meditation?



I think that the real miracle in DNA lies in that core mechanism, which allows it to adapt to new environments. Adaptation happens as cells from a zygote move to different areas of the forming body, to become neurons, muscle cells, chemical secreting cells etc. Adaption happens in Darwin's evolution of species. Adaptation is present from the beginning to the end of life. Once you create the adaption machine, you have the capability to seed any new environment with the magic of life and consciousness.

Yes, a lot gets filtered out - perhaps the overwhelming majority and from what I understand it's a bandwidth issue, ie. we'd be paralyzed if the full scale of information hit us.


There's an argument there as well that needs and ways of procuring food, reproducing, etc. all leverage the 'size' of the soul.


Someone I ran into gave me what he said was the equivalent of three doses (I'd assume 300mcg), I might have gotten a fair amount more. I did some things that caused me to lean into it harder and when I was fully up I had an experince that I could best describe as a 'blow-out', ie. where my conscious awarness, perhaps through some welded boiler-plate connection with memory, could look back at itself and see selfhood as something like a powder spread out on a sheet of glass, ie. it was me but fragmented and maybe 60-70% of me was hanging together - barely - and the rest had broken off into tiny fragments. It was looking at those fragments where I saw something that was distinctly human in conscious signature but closer to a beetle in terms of resolution level.

There were other experiences I had that night, as often when I have historically tripped, that would fall under the umbrella of occult activity (although I've had such experiences without substances) but I have to sort of leave those to one side because if what I described above was within my reach the occult phenomena are probably three or four times as distant in terms of tracing the tread between the two. Like a lot of people though I'm still somewhat stuck in a position where I've had enough run-ins with occult phenomena, in very observant and lucid states, to demand that I treat them as a real an autonomous thing but the linkage again is one it may take still take me decades to properly flesh out.


In my early 20's my friends and I actually really enjoyed the opposite - ie. how they can equally inflame self, ie. even just driving somewhere to do something you can feel like you're on an epic/archetypal adventure. I remembered riding in a friend's car on sugar cubes back in 2000 or so, going out to someone's place, he was placing an acid techno mix and I started likening our drive to something like the opening scene of Belly but on hard EDM rather than hip hop.

I think it's true that it can loosen 'self' in terms of the mask you put on for the world but again this is probably paradoxical - certain aspects of self are diminished, certain aspects (perhaps what most people would consider the emotional, spiritual, and deep meaning circuits) get tuned up.


That can happen, I think especially so with first-time use where someone feels like they're lost in the now without much bearing but like a lot of things that doesn't last long (ie. the first time or two someone does it). I noticed that especially with dissociative psychedelics it's more like your consciousness pivots 90 degrees, as if the now takes on far more importance, time slows, and your relationship to the now becomes more pure. That could partially be broke ties with emergency and warning signals, like all the social status and dealing with predation baggage we have to take on. One thing I have heard often is that psychedelics have a way of causing neurons in the occipital lobe to fold around serotonin and hold it which tends to be the cause of a lot of the visuals people get. That's usually not dangerous unless someone does it so much that they get stuck in that mode, that's where you have your people who are stuck seeing random geometric solids floating around their visual field for years.


Sam Harris actually says a lot of useful things to this point as he's quite an accomplished meditator (met 'enlightenment' metrics by some Buddhist systems) and also has had a lot to say about his LSD experiences. It seems like they are to a degree similar in class, ie. that they can turn us toward in various degrees dream states and more fundamental sort of 'dark web' architecture of our own processing.


I'd say yes and no. The sense I get from reading what literature I have and also seeing how other pieces come into play I think they'll find our theories of evolution mostly correct in that the overtures and general consequences we have map to reality and wouldn't be overturned with new information. I do think we'll continue to find different ways in which broad-scale revolutions of species happen and it could also come to pass that we may be left at least partially cold on the question of cell differentiation, in one sense we already know that it's a process that doesn't follow the most forwardly practical logic and we may find not just a wide array of multiple use of genes and all kinds of emergent effects that are tough to trace but we may also have some degree of data farther back out of reach - somewhat along Rupert Sheldtrake's line of a secondary storage or partial template held at a layer of nature that we still haven't gotten our minds all the way around let alone our instruments.

Hmm. I'm guessing consciousness arises from the fact that the circuits logging sensory input and processing are also logging their own process - creating a history of 'thoughts'.
Is that what Hofstaedter writes about? I only read Gödel, Escher, Bach...

LSD in this scenario would create an expansion/malfunctioning of what gets logged and into what category.
I only had DMT, and afterwards it felt completely obvious that I had basically whitnessed all sorts of contrast filtering processes applied to noise, rather than regular visual stimuli.

I'm wondering though: might my illusion of self as somewhat detached from my body stem from my brain not really logging and registering my lower cerebral functions? I mean, I have little need to consciously control my digestion, but I also don't "remember" digesting. But, to some extent, I can train myself to focus and register my individual muscles and what's going on inside me through meditation and yoga and so on.
And whenever I do that, this barrier between me and my body sort of becomes more porous...

Psychologically I'd say yeah - that has a lot to do with feeling like the complexity of a running body is something incidental to our being. It's a pretty immense deep-web of sorts with all kinds of machinery working in something of a strange twilight.

Hofstadter's "I am a strange loop" uses a camera pointed at its display screen to illustrate that consciousness is always recurring back on itself. New experiences are analogically understood in terms of previous experiences. Categorization via analogy is the how meaning is compressed. According to Integrated Information Theory, when compressed information reaches a certain value phi , it becomes conscious information. Hofstadter uses some math to illustrate the compression of meaning when he counts how many symbols it takes to write an expression; so the uncompressed 7 digit 1,000,000 is more economically expressed as 10^6 .

Another way of looking at it, perhaps by its function, is something of an optioning engine that attempts to match a big ring of keys with environmental keyholes and it's always panning the environment to resolve a stack of priorities as such.

In some ways I wonder in that sense if it might leverage quantum probability functions, maybe even be a heavily recursive stack or collection of them (ie. a Venn diagram, thinking of all those keys on the key ring, stacked so tightly that you can't easily tell that it's a Venn diagram).

There's also the aspect of what our propulsion feels like, and I've considered that akin to us being the embodiments of mathematical monsters. I can't tell though whether that sense just comes from being made of such an intricate stack of pieces or whether there may be something more fundamental to that idea. There have been theories recently that life tends to occur at zones of poor heat dissipation and that life is designed to maximally dissipate heat which in some ways edifies this lens.

Would you see the purpose of this "option engine" to be involved in the retrieval of memories? The "environmental keyholes" are aspects of current experience. The "keys" are memories of past experience which fit these keyholes. That way, past experience imparts meaning to current experience via formulation of analogies between past and current experience. The forming of an analogy can be analogized to going through your remembered keys to find the ones which fit the current experience keyhole.

Neurologically speaking, the "keyholes" of current experience, consist of the set of sensory cortex neurons activated by all body sensors involved in the current experience. The "keys" are memories which activated a similar set of sensory cortex neurons in the past. This is the physical basis of mental analogy; the point at which physical morphs into mental; the point where the physical Joe the Beagle is analogized to Birdy the German Shepherd to produce the mental category "dog", which compresses all of the ways in which the two animals are similar into one 3 letter noun. And compressed meaning tends towards conscious meaning as it approaches Integrated Information Theory's phi value.



Have you read Roger Penrose's "Emperor's new Mind" and "Shadows of the Mind"? In "Shadows of the Mind" Penrose works with anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff to formulate a theory that the probabilities concerning what an individual does next, is determined by the quantum gravity induced collapse of quantum wave functions isolated withing cytoskeletal microtubules. This is not one of my favorite theories though. Hofstadter speaks to me. Perhaps someone with a greater grounding in quantum physics might prefer Penrose's Orchestrated Objective Reduction (microtubule walking motor proteins like kinesin modulate the development of the wave function within microtubules to orchestrate the collapse of the wave function).






Anything can be described mathematically. But what do the mathematical monsters represent in the physical world? I believe that the "What it feels like" question is best answered the same way as analogies are formulated. So that the ultimate source of our emotions are our body sensors. Not only do we remember the facts of an experience, but we remember the feelings too. These feelings have their origin in the host of body sensors which were activated in each experience. When we match memories to current experience, echoes of the remembered feelings are mixed and matched to produce all types of 'feelings' or emotions. Evidence for this is that, by practicing meditation, you can control your emotions by mindfully controlling your thoughts. I think that you produce unpleasant emotions by dwelling on unpleasant experience.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85Y52woyh4g

The Neo-Cortex and Our Words We Use Now to Now to Now
Are Servant And Or Slave to Our Feeling Sensing Limbic Systems.

Odd That Folks Would/Will Attempt to Control the Limbic System
With Words When Emotions Precipitate Rational Decisions Second
in 'The Name' of Words. Sitting Still Without Words, is one Way to Feel
And Sense the Origin of Where Words Come From; And sure, 'Mantras'
Will Become 'Mindless' Enough Out of Neo-Cortical Mechanical Cognition
Control to Open up the Social Empathic Artistic Conscious Awareness From
Head to Toe in Mind and Body Balancing Where Words are only Dressing on
the Salad of What Is All Core to Human and other Animal Life; Simply Put; Feeling
And Sensing And Interacting with the Environment At Hand Within, Inside, Outside,
Above, So Below, and All Around in the Environment We Sense And Feel Once Again At Hand.

Funny How Folks Who Meditate Will Center their Attention on 7 Parts of the Body From Head to
Toe They Name A Label of Chakras to Correspond With A Material Human Reduction to Glands from
Bottom to Top; Sure that's Better than Nothing; but There is the Rest of the 'Dancing' Experience of Life
Away from the 'Songs' that Come Next; In other Words, More Than Words; An Art of Moving as Physical
Intelligence is Emotional Intelligence Same as Emotions are a Synergy of Our Senses From Head to toe.

So, What Do Folks Do About That; Sure, there are Moving Meditation Arts like Tai Chi and Other So-Called
Martial Arts That Do Regulate Emotions and Integrate Senses as Physical Intelligence Growing Does the
Same with Emotional Intelligence too; But here's a Thing; Restricting Any Movement by Guidelines or
Instructions is Inherently Mechanical Cognition that Removes Us and Restricts Us from Social
Empathic Artistic Intelligence; So, in this Way, Tai-Chi and Martial Arts Starts Out as Science
As Lessons of Restricting Moving That someone else has done; Instead of 'A River' We
Come to Be When Moving is Truly Art Without the Control and The Restrictions
of the Science of Movement Less. In So Many Ways, We Are Fed a Diet of Robot
From Birth in the Feel and Sense that is Mechanical Cognition First of what
Has been Done Before to Be Repeated Again in ways of Crystalized
Mechanical Cognition that loses the Exploration of Fluid Social
Empathic Artistic Intelligence That Explores Instead
of Sitting Still in Class and Work in Data
DownLoad Mind of Word
Think Spoon-Fed
Not Only
From Birth but through
The Last 'TV Show' of someone
Else's Reality Where the Closest thing
We come to in an Exploration of Life is
The Science of What Someone has Repeated Before
Now When Life Becomes More Virtual than Real. Funny
How Folks 'Think' Words are So Smart when Feelings and
Senses Rule Our Worlds Unless We Become Those Feelings and
Senses First in Focus In An Art of Life that is Dance Before the Words come next.

If you wanna Experience New Become Art.
If you wanna Experience Same Stay Science.

It's Sort of simple
As That From a Top Down
View of Human Innate, Instinct,
And Intuition Simply Set Free as A Five
Year-Old Child if they are Lucky Enough Not to Be
Trapped Behind a Desk in Kindergarten Next Instead of Alive.

It's Simple to Measure
A Person's Emotional
Intelligence; Just Watch the
Way They Move
or
Do Not.
Just watch
The Way They Live or Do Not.

i am No Longer A Robot; i am Happy.

It's No Wonder That Movement Therapy
Amongst Folks on the Autism Spectrum
Is A Hottest New Therapy Of All That Is Just
A Common Feel And Sense of Life; WHere A
Main Issue is Simply NDD; Nature Deficit Disorder Away From Free.

People, Overall, WiLL Be smART to: lEARN From: Canaries In A CoaL MinD Who Escape First As Last.

No I meant it much more in the context of the keys being various sorts of needs and aspirations, ie. you have thirst, hunger, need to mate, avoid predation, and the whole barrage of various things you either know you need, vaguely think you need something like, or may not know you need until you see it - all of that is in something like a set of buffers. The keyholes are factors out in one's environment that match the keys.


I still have yet to understand the sense of closure so many people have along the lines of 'mentality = neurons firing'. Current models suggest that there's something wrong if we're not philosophic zombies - ie. matter has no mind. It could be a set of events, or type of events, closely correlated, and either way it also has just as much the combination problem - perhaps in an even more forwardly obvious manner - that many would claim panpsychism has.

We know that neurotransmitters play inextricable roles in mood, in regulating everything from signals to hormones. It's less obvious that we're closer to actually pinning down anything physical that we're having an intrinsic experience of. If we do actually pin it down as something physical then we have to admit that we're physical systems having an intrinsic experience which does a fair amount of damage to the dead-matter assumption of naive materialism.


It still sounds a bit 'groovy' without doing very well at broadening its own implications. Don't get me wrong, if Anirban Bandyopadhyay or Stuart Hameroff start having gainful conversations with people like Jim Al Khalili (sort of the Michael Shermer of quantum biology) it could have interesting results but it will get a lot more positive attention when and if they're able to link this to things like more effective medical treatments. Quantum entanglement sounded weird but we don't laugh at the encryption we're able to get out of it. Similarly quantum biological medicine if it pans out could get a lot of praise and a lot more funding but with the microtubule theory of consciousness Stuart, Roger, and Anirban still have a way to go in tying out their observations with evolutionary biology and figuring out why species would evolve toward such a state and perhaps even be able to sort out the environmental determinants that factor in.


Clearly they represent complexity in its extremes. Robert Sapolsky has a lecture from 2011 (Stanford U) on Youtube titled 'Chaos and Reductionism' where he gets into how things like bifurcation routes aren't planned for at the gene level but rather they're the recursive result of things that are. Mathematical monsters are gifts that sort of keep on giving, continually folding back on themselves due to their own extreme instability, and it's one of the few things in nature that starts getting as squirrely as RNA behavior or biological life.

That I was able to have that reflection and 'feel' or process it in a profound sense was an interesting experience. I did look into it more but my biggest critique of my thought processes on this, maybe at least partially in agreement with your critique, is it at least partially has a 'chicken or egg' problem in that we don't know what it would be like to be a non-recursive or non-complex process having experiences in the same way that we don't know what it would be like for life to have not evolved on earth or the universe to have not had the right constants for life. That doesn't mean it's worthless as a hypothesis or a model to contemplate but I'd agree that it's still best taken with a grain of salt.