Do Brains Operate at a Tipping Point? New Clues and Complications | Hacker News Reader

Do Brains Operate at a Tipping Point? New Clues and Complications

quantamagazine.org

91 pointsjonbaer17 comments

Gerald Edelman wrote on this back in the 80s and 90s. To massively oversimplify The books Neural Darwinism and The Remembered Present posited a) how neural action sequences originally for e.g. ballistic throwing, could be repurposed for linear language production and b) How consciousness needed to be a semi-stable chaotic attractor so that different avenues of thought could be pursued but that there was still coherency. Exciting that some of this may have been on the right track

> How consciousness needed to be a semi-stable chaotic attractor so that different avenues of thought could be pursued but that there was still coherency

Loose metaphors like this kind of make sense on a verbal/visual level - but then "attractor" has a well defined mathematical meaning, and "consciousness" absolutely doesn't. So the onus is on the person making the comparison to demonstrate why a certain mathematical formalism is called for; otherwise you just end up with "consciousness is quantum!" pseudoscientific statements that might make sense in some fuzzy emotional way, but entirely fail to provide any insight of scientific value.

Would you recommend the books on that basis?

As you point out, the books don't solve consciousness in a formal way (or they would be more famous), and they have a significant amount of analogy. They are more 'grounded' than say Daniel Dennett. I liked the attractor analogy because a) at some level it addresses why we don't ( normally) get stuck in a conscious rut - e.g. we are not like the sphex wasp discussed by Hofstadter who always repeats the same loop b) It resonates with the idea that your conscious mind wanders, but its experience seems linear. However to get insight of scientific value one would have to follow up on the ideas in Edelman's work and see if they were actually neurologically correct. I haven't read either for a while, and I do maths/computer stuff not neurology so have no expert view. I think there's no harm in reading the Remembered Present quickly, it's fairly easy. Edelman worked with Tononi - I haven't followed his work, but the Wikipedia page on Integrated information theory doesn't appeal to me.

Not the OP, but have a look at this: https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/thanissaro/reson...

> "consciousness is quantum!"

Amused by this particular choice as an example of ["fuzzily emotional pseudoscience"], given Roger Penrose (Hawking's peer in Nobel-winning black hole astrophysics) wrote a book -- The Emperor's New Mind -- detailing his theory of how consciousness relates to quantum mechanics. Wondering if you had that book in mind, w/ your comment a critique thereof.

I'm not sure about the names involved but "quantum consciousness" is not a very good theory or really a theory even.

The theory makes little sense, see also Max Tegmark article on it.

Oh please.

Heres a quote from Steven Stogratz - "Mathematics is usually portrayed as exact and impeccably rational. It is rational but not always initially. Creation is intuitive. Reason comes later"

Maxwell would not have come up with his equations of electromagnetism if he said what you are saying to Faraday.

Faraday did not understand differential equations or vector calculus. Leave alone know, how to express anything in that language. But it was his book that inspired Maxwell. It was filled with "verbal and visual" intuition expressed in non mathematical language.

Mathematician of the age did not take it seriously using exactly the kind of arguments you are using.

You cannot force/shame people to be more disciplined with their metaphors. It made Faraday hesitant to even to express his findings publicly for many years.

Faraday was first and foremost an experimentalist, and everything else followed from there. That alone is perhaps a significant difference with the kind of reasoning we were initially talking about.

Additionally, like you point out, others were able to build upon his work and use it to generate new hypotheses and draw new conclusions. That is a fundamental aspect of any good research; that it enables new activity and insights, often in ways not envisioned by the original researchers.

So if you want to say “consciousness can be described as a chaotic attractor”, then you need to say it in a way that lets others make novel predictions, invalidate previous conclusions and establish new ones, about the behavior of consciousness using the established and well understood toolbox of chaotic attractors.

My question was about whether the books had subsequently enabled such inquiries.

Freud somewhere remarked that neurosis gives clues on mental functioning, which is certainly very clear in neurology (his first field). So lack of cognitive coherency in some disorders could be revealing.

The story gives me associations with the superregenerative receiver (https://www.electronics-notes.com/articles/radio/radio-recei...)

I just noticed this on my 1.5 yr old son, when I am drawing a rectangle there’s a certain length of it that it will become a train at all other shorte lengths its a bus

It would be really awesome if we figured out exactly how the brain works before we are able to simulate it. But at current rates of new discovery I think we might be able to simulate it before we understand it

But we're currently on a different path, since backpropagation is not how nature does it (as far as I know).

What does backpropagation has to do with this research?

The problem is you cannot figure out just how brain works, because it is not kind of system where you can detach something and make it work in separation. For some limited understanding you can get as far as 'limphatic system' does that, 'digestive system' does other stuff. But in simulating it you have to take into account all chemical and physical interactions.

Are articles talking about the brain being poised towards criticality poised towards criticality? Interaction lengths do seem to be diverging.

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