Neuronal “Superhub” Might Generate Consciousness
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
Nevertheless, it's interesting research even if the findings are (as they inevitably are) somewhat overstated.
I personally don't find anything in here that validates the ideas of chakras.
I've been recently probing the nature of awareness (and the experience of awareness) in my meditation practice. One of the things you can find out through meditation is that what you think of as your "consciousness" is not. What meditators and psychonauts consider "consciousness" is very different than the ordinary conception of "consciousness."
I agree though, this is an interesting finding.
Consciousness is ill defined scientifically (and even among the many concepts that practitioners of what people equate to meditation have been arguing about for thousands of years) and if you asked the layman what they equated to what consciousness is, one would probably take away the same amount of information as to what it is compared to asking neuroscientists.
People throughout the times have had many ideas that were seen as rational and seem to be based on insights supported by evidence, until later on people learned that such beliefs/ideas were irrational and the supported evidence was dubious. The people who lived and died when such ideas/beliefs were not irrational will never know it, same with those who died thinking it helped them/such things were in their personal interests no matter how "true" such things may have been for x period of time.
Maybe if we seek didn't limit ourselves to what things can and can't be, "receiver of consciousness" wouldn't seem so irrational any more than what people now equate to popular science that at some time was equally as irrational but is no longer questioned to the same degree which could be equally as irrational at some point in the future.
But yeah, some sr. research scientist phd who studied ap physics and helped build quantum computers and now trying to apply the some methods they learned in a field to psychology/neuroscience where the current "kings of the hill" use surveys and more surveys with the occasional cutting some people/animals open, is probably not going to want to entertain ideas that relate qed systems and qm theories to meditation with meditation instructors not versed in such to any conversational degree, when they have a hard enough time trying to explore such things with neuroscientists they work with who just got some big funding from politicking that in the scheme of things probably wont advance the field any more than next dubious publication that gets plastered over social media and perceived as fact.
That idea that "the brain is a receiver of consciousness" is held in a number of different teachings. I wasn't necessarily trying to establish equivalence. I'm speaking of a very different view of the world.
I've sometimes have that experience during meditation, though, that's often in a controlled, formal setting. Though the idea with meditation is to attain clarity and awareness and not generate more confusion. Not that that always happen in my practice :-D
Also, split streams tend to be individually dumber.
In the version you have, the times when I usually have something like that arises is when I'm playing Go or when I'm making architectural decisions. I don't necessarily try to give voice to all of the threads, but rather, keep them in varying states of potentiality, while examining a single thread to check it's validity. It's not always necessary to render a thought stream into a voice until you need it. Kinda like lazy eval, I suppose.
I've met people who are significantly more intelligent than I am, and I can usually tell, they are doing something similar with greater clarity. And I'm just barely hanging on to the ride, trying to keep up with them.
We can hear, see and feel at the same time even though we can at other times be hyper-focused on any one of those experiences individually. We can observe a single fish in a swarm closely, but we can also track the entire swarm and all the fish in it -- albeit with a much higher error rate at the level of the individual fish (e.g. because of "change blindness").
Unless I missed some serious research on the topic, it's not possible to be intensely aware of every single particle (be it a particular sensation or an individual entity that is being observed) in a complex system while observing the system as a whole.
You have to consider that there are many layers of emergence in play. A mass of neurons doesn't make a brain. A pile of neural networks doesn't make symbolic thinking. Everything needs to be linked together at a higher abstraction level to produce useful results.
http://www.radiolab.org/story/91503-the-unconscious-toscanin...
\tangent I increasingly incline to Dennet's view, even though it seems simplistic, that we have models of the world, of other people, and of ourselves. And that self-model is self-awareness.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind
It would be interesting to see if there are any strange quantum effects at work in the claustrum.
Of course there isn't really any evidence towards quantum consciousness, so it's just a highly speculative theory at the moment (albeit a very compelling one).
Penrose has a lot of ideas, apparently trying different things when others were invalidated or not promising. He really wants there to be some essential quantum involvement, but his arguments that there must be are not great. It leaves me with the impression he's seeking the vital essence, and naming QM. He could be right since there is a lot we do not understand, but he lacks the evidence to be anything but misguided in my opinion.
No doubt a lot of quantum phenomena are at work in the brain in various ways, but we have no evidence that it has any essential relationship with consciousness beyond the chemical and electrical properties needed for the biological foundation.
> I have a gut feeling that there needs to be more to consciousness than a bunch of neurons connected to other neurons.
I can appreciate that feeling, but I wonder what difference it would really make to have quantum consciousness.
Well, considering the brain is just that, and consciousness exists in the brain, then at a physical level that's exactly what consciousness is. But like a computer, it requires more than the simple presence of the hardware. That hardware has to be in an active state executing instructions, the mass of neurons has to be firing in a specific pattern, which seems to me self-booting given how we start out. We know consciousness is just a bunch of neurons, the question is how do they work. Just like we know a given chip is capable of various functions, the question is how.
Knowing the building is made of steel does not make one capable of recreating a skyscraper.
If that is the case then some other physics must come into play, and the other other possible physics is quantum mechanics.
Anyway, it's obviously very speculative, but I find it interesting thinking about consciousness - it's one of the few things we don't understand.
Regarding downvotes: what's the obsession on HN with people downvoting opinions you don't happen to agree with, but are nevertheless logical and coherent?
As cor consciousness, I'm not convinced we're presently smart enough to understand consciousness. I think there's still new science to be discovered before we understand it.
I think that is a far better less click-baity title.
When faced with such a headline, please use the negation of the one you originally thought of, then ask yourself if it makes a terrible headline. If it does, don't use either. If there is no headline that describes the story without such weasel words, consider spiking the story. It contains no interesting information.