<div dir="ltr"><div dir="auto"><div><br><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 4:57 PM Stathis Papaioannou via extropy-chat <<a href="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org" target="_blank">extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div><br></div><div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Sat, 18 Jun 2022 at 06:36, Jason Resch via extropy-chat <<a href="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="auto"><div><br><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 3:22 PM Stathis Papaioannou via extropy-chat <<a href="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div><br></div><div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Sat, 18 Jun 2022 at 00:39, Jason Resch via extropy-chat <<a href="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org" rel="noreferrer noreferrer" target="_blank">extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-style:solid;padding-left:1ex;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204)"><div dir="auto"><div>If epiphenomenalism were true we wouldn't have access to reliably talk about our inner states of consciousness, our feelings, our awareness, etc.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">The author of "epiphenomenal qualia", Frank Jackson, which introduced the thought experiment of Mary the color scientist, later had this epiphany leading him to reject his original conclusion that qualia were epiphenomenal:</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">FJ: “Epiphenomenalism was unbelievable, and indeed that was a consideration that eventually made me change my mind.”</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Interviewer: “So why did you change your mind?”</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">FJ: “Well, the biggest factor was the picture of myself writing ‘epiphenomenal qualia’, but not being caused to write ‘epiphenomenal qualia’ by qualia. I said in ‘epiphenomenal qualia’ that you had to be an epiphenomenalist about qualia, and what that meant was that qualia didn’t change the words that came out of my mouth or the movements of my pen on pieces of paper, so that meant that when I gave the talk defending ‘epiphenomenal qualia’, when I wrote the paper defending ‘epiphenomenal qualia’, the qualia weren’t causing the talk and they weren’t causing the writing, and I just decided this was sort of unbelievable.”</div><div dir="auto">[...]</div><div dir="auto">“It was the picture of myself writing the paper, uncaused by the qualia.. I said that I can’t believe this. And I came to think that was the triumph of philosophical cleverness over common sense.”</div></div></blockquote><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Qualia are epiphenomenal if the physical world is causally closed. So when Jackson writes his paper, the movement of his hand is entirely explained by the observable physical forces on the hand. If he has qualia, they cannot have any separate causal efficacy of their own, because if they did to an observer it would look like the hand was moving contrary to the laws of physics, due to some magical force.</div></div></div></blockquote></div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">I disagree that the causal closure of physics necessarily means qualia are epiphenomenal. Consider the multiple levels involved, as Roger Sperry explains in his 1966 paper "Mind, Brain, and Humanist Values" where he asks "who pushes whom around inside the cranium":</div><div dir="auto"><h4 dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:14pt;margin-bottom:4pt"><a href="https://sci-hub.hkvisa.net/10.1080/00963402.1966.11454956" style="text-decoration-line:none" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:arial;color:rgb(17,85,204);font-weight:400;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;text-decoration-line:underline;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">https://sci-hub.hkvisa.net/10.1080/00963402.1966.11454956</span></a></h4><br><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:arial;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">“I am going to align myself in a counterstand, along with that approximately 0.1 per cent mentalist minority, in support of a hypothetical brain model in which consciousness and mental forces generally are given their due representation as important features in the chain of control. These appear as active operational forces and dynamic properties that interact with and upon the physiological machinery. Any model or description that leaves out conscious forces, according to this view, is bound to be pretty sadly incomplete and unsatisfactory. The conscious mind in this scheme, far from being put aside and dispensed with as an "inconsequential byproduct," "epiphenomenon," or "inner aspect," as is the customary treatment these days, gets located, instead, front and center, directly in the midst of the causal interplay of cerebral mechanisms. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:arial;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">Mental forces in this particular scheme are put in the driver's seat, as it were. They give the orders and they push and haul around the physiology and physicochemical processes as much as or more than the latter control them. This is a scheme that puts mind back in its old post, over matter, in a sense-not under, outside, or beside it. It's a scheme that idealizes ideas and ideals o</span><span style="font-family:arial;font-size:11pt;white-space:pre-wrap">ver physico-chemical interactions, nerve impulse traffic-or DNA. It's a brain model in which conscious, mental, psychic forces are recognized to be the crowning achievement of some five hundred million years or more of evolution.”</span></p><br><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:arial;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">“To put it very simply, it becomes a question largely of who pushes whom around in the population of causal forces that occupy the cranium. There exists within the human cranium a whole world of diverse causal forces; what is more, there are forces within forces within forces, as in no other cubic half-foot of universe that we know. At the lowermost levels in this system are those local aggregates of subnuclear particles confined within the neutrons and protons of their respective atomic nuclei. These individuals, of course, don't have very much to say about what goes on in the affairs of the brain. Like the atomic nucleus and its associated electrons, the</span><span style="font-family:arial;font-size:11pt;white-space:pre-wrap">s</span> <span style="font-family:arial;font-size:11pt;white-space:pre-wrap">ubnuclear and other atomic elements are "moleculebound" for the most part, and get hauled and pushed around by the larger spatial and configurational forces of the whole molecule.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:arial;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">Similarly the molecular elements in the brain are themselves pretty well bound up, moved, and ordered about by the enveloping properties of the cells within which they are located. Along with their internal atomic and subnuclear parts, the brain molecules are obliged to</span><span style="font-family:arial;font-size:11pt;white-space:pre-wrap">s</span> <span style="font-family:arial;font-size:11pt;white-space:pre-wrap">ubmit to a course of activity in time and space that is determined very largely by the overall dynamic and spatial properties of the whole brain cell as an entity. Even the brain cells, however, with their long fibers and impulse conducting elements, do not have very much to s</span><span style="font-family:arial;font-size:11pt;white-space:pre-wrap">ay either about when or in what time pattern, for example, they are going to fire their messages. The firing orders come from a higher command.”</span></p><br><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:arial;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">“In short, if one climbs upward through the chain of command within the brain, one finds at the very top those overall organizational forces and dynamic properties of the large patterns of cerebral excitation that constitute the mental or psychic phenomena.”</span></p><br><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:arial;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">“Near the apex of this compound command system in the brain we find ideas. In the brain model proposed here, the causal potency of an idea, or an ideal, becomes just as real as that of a molecule, a cell, or a nerve impulse. Ideas cause ideas and help evolve new ideas. They in</span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:arial;white-space:pre-wrap">teract with each other and with other mental forces in the same brain, in neighboring brains, and in distant, foreign brains. And they also interact with real consequence upon the external surroundings to produce in toto an explosive advance in evolution on this globe far beyond anything known before, including the emergence of the living cell.”</span></p></div></div></blockquote><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">It is certainly useful to think of higher level phenomena affecting behaviour, but that does not mean they are not epiphenomenal. It is useful to consider a computer’s behaviour in terms of the program, but the program cannot do anything that is not fully explained by low level phenomena in the circuitry.</div></div></div></blockquote></div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">I agree that the computer analogy is useful in this case. I think the computer analogy shows the physical rules can be abstracted away entirely to the point computer programmers need not consider or know anything about the underlying physics of the computer's parts. In a sense programmers are playing with their own higher level casual rules, which are entirely shielded from the lower level implementation. This is why the causal order of a Java program can be understood entirely without reference to whatever physical computer it may be run on.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Might the same be true of our high level thought patterns? Max Tegmark seems to think so:</div><div dir="auto"><br></div></div><blockquote style="margin:0 0 0 40px;border:none;padding:0px"><div><div><span id="gmail-docs-internal-guid-e87d6b1c-7fff-54e5-baeb-32d32b00f863"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">“How can something as complicated as consciousness possibly be explained by something as simple as particles? I think it’s because consciousness is a phenomenon that has properties above and beyond the properties of its particles. We physicists call phenomena that have properties above and beyond those over their parts: emergent phenomena.”</span></p></span></div></div></blockquote><div dir="auto"><div><br class="gmail-Apple-interchange-newline"></div></div><blockquote style="margin:0 0 0 40px;border:none;padding:0px"><div dir="auto"><div><span id="gmail-docs-internal-guid-fc5b667f-7fff-9af3-d37b-5db81dbb4442"><p style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">“How can something as physical as a bunch of moving particles possibly feel as </span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;font-style:italic;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">non-physical</span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap"> as our consciousness? Well, I think it’s because our consciousness is a phenomenon that doesn’t only have properties above and beyond those of its parts, but also has properties that are rather independent of its parts, independent of its substrate, independent of the stuff that it’s made of.</span></p></span></div></div></blockquote><div dir="auto"><div><br class="gmail-Apple-interchange-newline"></div></div><blockquote style="margin:0 0 0 40px;border:none;padding:0px"><div><div><span id="gmail-docs-internal-guid-51b90c5b-7fff-4fa7-09c0-d249aba3587d"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">Computation is also rather substrate-independent, because Alan Turing famously proved that any computation can be performed by any substance as long as it has a certain minimum set of abilities to compute. So this means that if </span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;font-style:italic;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">you</span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap"> were a self-aware computer game character trapped in your game-world in some game in a future super-intelligent computer, you will have no way of knowing whether you are running on Windows, on macOS or on some other platform, because you would be substrate-independent.</span></p></span></div></div><div><div><span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">Now I think consciousness is the same way. I think consciousness is a physical phenomenon that </span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;font-style:italic;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">feels</span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap"> non-physical, because it’s just like waves and computations. More specifically, I think that consciousness is the way information feels when it’s been processed in certain complex ways. So this means that it’s substrate-independent, and this also means that it's only the structure of the information processing that matters, not the structure of the matter that’s doing the information processing.”</span></p></span></div></div></blockquote><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto"><br></div><div>As does Douglas Hofsteader with his notion of "Strange Loops" when higher levels of a hierarchy reach down to change something in a lower level:</div><div dir="auto"><br></div></div><blockquote style="margin:0 0 0 40px;border:none;padding:0px"><div><div><span id="gmail-docs-internal-guid-123f08f8-7fff-3814-0e58-68140f12e77d"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">“Now we can relate this to the brain, a well as to AI programs. In our thoughts, symbols activate other symbols, and all interact heterarchically. Furthermore, the symbols may cause each other to change internally, in the fashion of programs acting on other programs. [...]</span></p></span></div></div><div><div><span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">If it were possible to schematize this whole image, there would be a gigantic forest of symbols linked to each other by tangly lines like vines in a tropical jungle–this would be the top level, the Tangled Hierarchy where thoughts really flow back and forth. This is the elusive level of </span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-style:italic;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">mind</span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">: the analogue to LH and RH. Far below in the schematic picture, analogous to the invisible “prime mover” Escher, there would be a representation of the myriad of neurons–the “inviolate substrate” which lets the tangle above it come into being. Interestingly this other level is itself a tangle in a literal sense–billions of vells and hundreds of billions of axons, joining them all together.”</span></span></div></div></blockquote><blockquote style="margin:0 0 0 40px;border:none;padding:0px"><div dir="auto"><div><span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap"><br></span></span></div></div></blockquote><blockquote style="margin:0 0 0 40px;border:none;padding:0px"><div dir="auto"><div><span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">(See associated picture here: </span></span><a href="https://archive.org/details/gdelescherbach00hofs/page/690/mode/2up?q=%22Figure+136%22">https://archive.org/details/gdelescherbach00hofs/page/690/mode/2up?q=%22Figure+136%22</a> )</div></div></blockquote><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto"><span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap"><br></span></span></div><div><span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">The lower level (below the waves) might represent the neuronal or atomic levels, it is the substrate supporting the higher level structures (e.g. the drawing hands) but those could be ideas, states of a computer program, qualia, etc. which have their own causal relations and powers (at their level of description). It all comes down to this: Can an idea or a thought cause you to move a muscle?</span></span></div><div dir="auto"><span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap"><br></span></span></div><div><span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">Jason</span></span></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto"><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote" dir="auto"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 10:27 AM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat <<a href="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org" rel="noreferrer noreferrer" target="_blank">extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:"comic sans ms",sans-serif;font-size:large;color:rgb(0,0,0)">I can't say that I understand your reply fully. All behavior, intelligent or not, comes from your unconscious mind. Maybe I don't understand epiphenomenal as well as I think I do. </div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:"comic sans ms",sans-serif;font-size:large;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:"comic sans ms",sans-serif;font-size:large;color:rgb(0,0,0)">I do understand this: <span style="font-family:Roboto,arial,sans-serif;font-size:16px;color:rgb(32,33,36)">: a secondary mental phenomenon that is caused by and accompanies a physical phenomenon but has no causal influence itself.</span> Like seeing tuba notes in color. bill w</div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Fri, Jun 17, 2022 at 8:48 AM Stathis Papaioannou via extropy-chat <<a href="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org" rel="noreferrer noreferrer noreferrer" target="_blank">extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div><br></div><div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Fri, 17 Jun 2022 at 23:01, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat <<a href="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org" rel="noreferrer noreferrer noreferrer" target="_blank">extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:"comic sans ms",sans-serif;font-size:large;color:rgb(0,0,0)">OTOH - it could be that our conscious mind is like God looking down on us and observing our behavior - meaning that the conscious has no role in our behavior at all - it is superfluous - epiphenomenal. So if that is true, trying to make robots conscious is a waste of time. No advantage to it. It has programs that monitor all output like our conscious mind . All is done by our unconscious and the conscious is just an observer. No free will, but we don't need it - our unconscious (which is really conscious of all inputs) does all the work.</div></div></blockquote><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">If consciousness is epiphenomenal, it isn’t an optional extra. It is a side-effect of intelligent behaviour.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:"comic sans ms",sans-serif;font-size:large;color:rgb(0,0,0)" dir="auto"></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:"comic sans ms",sans-serif;font-size:large;color:rgb(0,0,0)">bill w</div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Fri, Jun 17, 2022 at 2:13 AM Colin Hales via extropy-chat <<a href="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org" rel="noreferrer noreferrer noreferrer" target="_blank">extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">Hi,<br></div><div dir="ltr"><div>This is to let you know of the arrival of this publication:</div><div><br></div><div>Hales, C.G., and Ericson, M.L. (2022). Electromagnetism’s Bridge Across the Explanatory Gap: How a Neuroscience/Physics Collaboration delivers Explanation into all Theories of Consciousness. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 16.<br></div><div><a href="https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2022.836046/full" rel="noreferrer noreferrer noreferrer" target="_blank">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2022.836046/full</a> <br><a href="https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2022.836046/full#supplementary-material" rel="noreferrer noreferrer noreferrer" target="_blank">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2022.836046/full#supplementary-material</a> <br></div><div><br></div><div>This is the full and final argument.</div><div><br></div><div>Note that on page 9 there is a brief discussion of a new kind of chip. That is the one I am building at unimelb. AGI because it can't be anything else. Actual artificial neurons (no general-purpose computing, no software, no models, no programming). Bottom line line: put the signalling physics of the brain in in natural form, naturally interacting, naturally adapting on the chips, NOT the physics of a general purpose computer.</div><div><br></div><div>The abstract is below. Overall:</div><div>1) all theories of consciousness are actually EM field theories.</div><div>2) bringing explanation of the 1st person perspective requires an epistemic upgrade to the standard model of particle physics.</div><div><br></div><div>Turns out that to properly cover all the bases needed 22 pages and an 8 page supplementary. Sorry about that.</div><div><br></div><div>Interesting times.</div><div><br></div><div>cheers,</div><div>Colin</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>==========================================</div><div><span style="font-family:Georgia,"Times New Roman",Times,serif;font-size:20px;color:rgb(62,61,64)">A productive, informative three decades of correlates of phenomenal consciousness (P-Consciousness) have delivered valuable knowledge while simultaneously locating us in a unique and unprecedented explanatory cul-de-sac. Observational correlates are demonstrated to be intrinsically very unlikely to explain or lead to a fundamental principle underlying the strongly emergent 1st-person-perspective (1PP) invisibly stowed away inside them. That lack is now solidly evidenced in practice. To escape our explanatory impasse, this article focuses on fundamental physics (the standard model of particle physics), which brings to light a foundational argument for how the brain is an essentially electromagnetic (EM) field object from the atomic level up. That is, our multitude of correlates of P-Consciousness are actually descriptions of specific EM field behaviors that are posed (hypothesized) as “the right” correlate by a particular theory of consciousness. Because of this, our 30 years of empirical progress can be reinterpreted as, in effect, the delivery of a large body of evidence that the standard model’s EM quadrant can deliver a 1PP. That is, all theories of consciousness are, in the end, merely recipes that select a particular subset of the totality of EM field expression that is brain tissue. With a universal convergence on EM, the science of P-Consciousness becomes a collaborative effort between neuroscience and physics. The collaboration acts in pursuit of a unified explanation applicable to all theories of consciousness while remaining mindful that the process still contains no real explanation as to why or how EM fields deliver a 1PP. The apparent continued lack of explanation is, however, different: this time, the way forward is opened through its direct connection to fundamental physics. This is the first result (Part I). Part II posits, in general terms, a structural (epistemic) add-on/upgrade to the standard model that has the potential to deliver the missing route to an explanation of how subjectivity is delivered through EM fields. The revised standard model, under the neuroscience/physics collaboration, intimately integrates with the existing “correlates of-” paradigm, which acts as its source of empirical evidence. No existing theory of consciousness is lost or invalidated.</span><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div></div>
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</blockquote></div></div>-- <br><div dir="ltr">Stathis Papaioannou</div>
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