The Hippies Were Right: It's All about Vibrations, Man
blogs.scientificamerican.com
blogs.scientificamerican.com
This is complete garbage. Some relationship to the internal frequencies of the brain, ie. its various analog clock tree mechanisms means that because all matter is based on subatomic vibrations rocks and atoms have a degree of consciousness too?
Wow, my laptop running at 2.2GHz(and various other frequencies) must be a supreme being.
Yes, obviously a clock tree is important to sync various neurons together efficiently and where ever there are conflicts, ticks will be lost or (whatever the thought real equivalent is). The more sync'ed the more complex the brain obviously, but whether that is 'consciousness' or just efficiency... or anything else? This writer obviously has no clue. At least they didn't say the brain is a quantum computer because of vibrations.
There are definitively varying degrees of consciousness and self-awareness. I don't think that someone who is an 1. atheist 2. knows that consciousness is made by the brain neurons or some processes; has the same self-awareness as someone who is 1. religious and 2. thinks he has a soul.
Look at living creature. Look at a cell. It is a living thing but it is made by much fewer atoms and molecules than the human body. It is interesting to watch what we consider "dead matter" being alive. They are both matter and atoms at the end of day.
Is a cell trying to survive its environment inside the human body conscious? Is a human trying to survive its environment inside the country/system conscious? Is a country trying to survive its environment inside planet earth conscious?
The thing about consciousness is that you can't really define it. You know you have it because you experience it. You assume that other humans have it because they are like you. You might further assume that certain other beings have it because they are also like you in many ways (though you'd likely disagree with the idea that theirs is as meaningful as yours).
But you can't prove any of it. You can only say that certain things react to certain stimuli in certain ways, which describes everything in the universe. Is it really that much of a stretch, then, to suggest that perhaps everything in the universe has some form of awareness, some experience of things, albeit probably too different from our own to comprehend?
Here's my point: there is literally no measurement you can perform that will help you draw this line, because the experience of consciousness is entirely subjective.
Why would matter be magically “conscious”? What possible physical mechanism could that magic be? (beside the absurdity of vibration, I suppose?)
That may not even be true. Octupus brains are constrained to a toroidal geometry because they eat through the doughnut hole. Apparently despite their very large brain sizes and advanced problem solving skills the elements are fairly independent.
Mine is the ability to see a probabilistic future and maybe make decisions about that future. Under that defination all matter is conscience due to its quantum probalistic nature.
I think I'd call what you're describing executive functioning.
I'd imagine one could experience things w/out having any notion about the future, or even an ability to make decisions.
Riiiight. How delusional must one be to actually take the time to publish something with this as a core idea?
for something so important it just ends up looking like bad satire or onion type material.
what are you trying to convey? sand is concious.. okay, thankyou. that was very helpful.
the original paper probably has more sense in it.
But it's not even a theory. That's the problem with these types of people, they confuse the term "hypothesis" with the term "theory". One is simply a proposition - possibly a wild-ass guess about something - the other is backed up by observations and can be used to make meaningful predictions.
Rupert Sheldrake is a very interesting scientist who's re-introducing an much older model for how the universe is organized, called panpsyicism, where all matter is considered conscience. Conscience is defined as having a probabilistic future,and maybe being able to make choices about that future. He has some other interesting hypotheses that build on top of this, such as morphic resonance as which is like a memory for conscience. He doesnt expect materialist science to be able to explain the forms of plants, believing that DNA is not going to be able to account for how the plant is shaped. I find that a very interesting idea, that there we are something more then our DNA
There are a ton of people who get taken seriously who really, really don't like the "consciousness is what the brain does" consensus of modern neuroscience, and they say a lot of stupid things trying to come up with an alternative.
The overwhelming evidence against any form of dualism -- either the classical Decartes-style or the modern quantum-magic style -- and in favor of consciousness being what the brain does is how damned easy it is to produce altered states of consciousness through physical manipulations of the brain. Psychotropics, anesthetics, TMS, direct electrical stimulation of the brain, and the removal of brain tissue due to accident or as treatment for an underlying condition all paint a pretty solid picture that you can alter the mind, the subjective experience of being, by altering the brain.
Any alternate hypothesis that consciousness doesn't reside in the electrochemical behavior of neurons faces an uphill battle; you're demonstrating the identity of the brain and consciousness every time you go out drinking.
On a long enough timeline, all popular science magazines eventually decay into motheaten old copies of BBC Focus.
Otherwise, it would not be possible to find any theory for consciousness, but in fact people are still trying to find one.
Not being able to directly observe something isn't actually a problem. We can't directly observe black holes. We can't directly observe the center of the sun, in the foreseeable future. We can't directly observe the evolution of life on Earth.
But we can use our theories to explain these things to also make predictions that can be observed, tested, and used to discard incorrect hypotheses.
Where science ends is when there are no observations you could make which would disprove your hypothesis. For instance, intelligent design basically says, an intelligent designer could have done things in whatever weird way they are, so any observations are just how it happened.
I was trying to say the opposite. Or rather, I was actually trying to say that phenomenon are rarely unscientific, only the explanations. You can have scientific and unscientific explanations of the origin of life on Earth.
You really only declare a phenomenon unscientific if we've spent a long time not being able to come up with any good scientific explanations. For instance, we commonly regard the question, "What happened before the Big Bang?" as outside the reach of science. But that's just provisional -- if someone came up with a really great theory that explained the nature of the universe before the Big Bang, and it produced testable predictions, then suddenly the question would in fact be inside the reach of science.
I challenge you to even conceive of what a "test for consciousness" would look like. Let's imagine you have one. How confident in it will you be when the first person who fails it says "but I am conscious!"?
False positive and negative rates are not particularly new to science or medicine. When we run blood tests to determine if a person has a particular disease, some percent of people with the disease will be tested as not having it, and some percentage of people without the disease will be tested as having it. Just because we fail to detect something accurately 100% of the time doesn't mean we don't understand it.
When you are making your magic consciousness detector, how will you know when it is working?
Let's say my theory says that rocks are conscious and hippos are not. Without some means of detecting consciousness this theory is untestable.
That might be going to far. To an electric field an uncharged particle "doesn't exist," but that doesn't actually mean that uncharged particles don't exist. Likewise there could be particles that don't interact with any known force, or even particles that interact with nothing. The right thing to say is that the existence of those things is categorically unknowable, and that studying them may even be a waste of time, but you shouldn't say that they are known not to exist. It's a similar story for consciousness, which is at least purported to interact with things, although the interaction is one-way in the "wrong" direction.
But that isn't what I said, I said that from a scientific perspective there is no meaningful distinction, which is exactly what you're saying. Its existence or lack thereof is irrelevant because it cannot be measured.
To be a smartass with multiple definitions of consciousness we have concrete theories already. Given that xenon gas is capable of anesthetizing even plants it appears that the process is electrochemical in known life and disruption leads to unconsciousness - pain can't go anywhere. That tells us basics but building from there is difficult.