[ExI] New consciousness paper

Brent Allsop brent.allsop at canonizer.com
Thu Jun 26 04:52:14 UTC 2014


On 6/25/2014 12:17 PM, William Flynn Wallace wrote:
>
> On Wed, Jun 25, 2014 at 12:43 PM, Brent Allsop 
> <brent.allsop at canonizer.com <mailto:brent.allsop at canonizer.com>> wrote:
>
>
>
>     Hi Colin,
>
>
>     Isn't the 'hard problem' all about knowing what other minds are
>     qualitatively like?  (as in is my redness the same as yours?)
>
>     Brent
>
> Yes, do the research,

I hear you saying there are more than 20 thousand peer reviewed 
publications, and that I should attempt to read them all.  Might I ask 
how many you've read, and how many do you fully understand?  If I asked 
you what are the best (i.e. most well accepted by the expert theories in 
that 20 thousands works, might there be an easy to read, concise, state 
of the theory, summary, somewhere.  That's our goal with the 
Consciousness Survey Project. (see Canonizer.com)  So far, evidence for 
how much expert consensus there is for the leading theories is quite 
educational.  I've been working on interviewing experts for 6 years now, 
and integrating all their diverse theories into the survey, with the 
goal of fully understanding all their theories, and demonstrably 
knowing, concisely and quantitatively, and in real time, what the best, 
and most rapidly emerging consensus new theories are and which are old 
and now falsified for most.  So far we've integrated camps from Steven 
Lehar, David Chalmers, Daniel Dennet, John Smythies, Stuart Hameroff, 
and about 50 others.  It'd be great to get your theories integrated into 
the survey, even if you think this kind of stuff is not approachable via 
science.

> but I have to doubt that even if you can locate consciousness in brain 
> areas, just what kind of explanation of it does that provide?

We're working on theoretical work, at Canoniizer.com, that predicts 
scientists are about to do things like experimentally prove if there is, 
or isn't things like "inverted qualia" and how they will do this.  In 
other words, could my redness experience be more like your grenness, and 
visa versa, and how would scientifically know?  And more important than 
that, I'm a normal "tri chromat", and I desperately know what the 4 
color tetrachloride experience, which I've never experienced before in 
my life, is like, and to be able to experience all possible qualia in 
the entire universe.  Oh, yea, and I want to solve the "problem of other 
minds" experimentally, so that everyone we agree that consciousness has, 
indeed, been fully explained.

> It certainly won't answer Brent's problem above. Maybe not ever.

I hear you so saying that these type of things are not approachable via 
science or that you have no hope for such?    The survey project is 
proving there is more consensus that consciousness is approachable via 
science than any other doctrine.  Also, I hear you saying that your 
paper has nothing to do with this kind of so call 'hard problem'.  It 
looks to me like your entire paper is just about stuff David Chalmers 
would say are 'easy problems'.  The closest thing to a 'hard problem' 
has to do with the problem I am talking about above.  And even that is 
predicted to be not that 'hard'.  So I don't understand why you are 
saying your paper is about the "hard problem".   If it isn't the 'hard 
problem' I'm talking about above, what kind of 'hard problem' are you 
talking about in your paper?

> , as they will find that not all brains do identical things under 
> identical conditions, if they haven't already (likely).
>

This is a common mistaken objection people have towards stuff like this 
being approachable via science.  We are working on a paper that shows 
how this kind of faithless thinking is mistaken.  We are predicting that 
there are 'elemental' qualia that have causal properties, making them 
discoverable and 'effable' via scientific experimental demonstration.):

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1y1iReFjNmMsqtWp4itNxlDDmpqE8jK2_apW827kQumU/edit?usp=sharing

I'd be interested to know your thoughts.  Specifically, if the 
scientific experiments, like effing the ineffable, are achieved by 
scientists as the paper is predicting they are about to do, would 
something like a new qualia that you've never experienced before being 
'effed' to you, falsify your faithless beliefs that this kind of stuff 
is not approachable via science?

Oh, and you didn't answer my question about if there is a free copy of 
your paper?  But, I must admit, I'm more interested in true hard 
problems.  I find it very hard to get motivated enough to have any 
interest in easy problems.

Brent Allsop

> bill w
>
>
>
>
>
>
>     On Tue, Jun 24, 2014 at 11:28 PM, Colin Geoffrey Hales
>     <cghales at unimelb.edu.au <mailto:cghales at unimelb.edu.au>> wrote:
>
>         Dear Folk,
>
>         I thought you might be interested in the following paper,
>         which is essentially my PhD outcome packaged into a journal
>         paper (49 pages!), contextualised with respect to
>         consciousness, and now finally published in a special journal
>         issue on the 'Hard problem of Consciousness'. Online-ready
>         only at this point. Came out yesterday. There are 14
>         supplementary videos.
>
>         Hales, Colin G. 2014: 'The origins of the brain's endogenous
>         electromagnetic field and its relationship to provision of
>         consciousness'. /Journal of Integrative Neuroscience/, Vol 13
>         Issue 2, pp. 1-49.
>
>         http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S0219635214400056?queryID=%24{resultBean.queryID}
>         <http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S0219635214400056?queryID=%24%7bresultBean.queryID%7d>
>
>         *ABSTRACT*
>
>         As a potential source of consciousness, the brain's endogenous
>         electromagnetic (EM) field has much to commend it.
>         Difficulties connecting EM phenomena and consciousness have
>         been exacerbated by the lack of a specific conclusive
>         biophysically realistic mechanism originating the EM field,
>         its form and dynamics. This work explores a potential
>         mechanism: the spatial and temporal coherent action of
>         transmembrane ion channel currents which simultaneously
>         produce electric and magnetic fields that dominate all other
>         field sources. Ion channels, as tiny current filaments,
>         express, at a distance, the electric and magnetic fields akin
>         to those of a short (transmembrane) copper wire. Following
>         assembly of appropriate formalisms from EM field theory, the
>         paper computationally explores the scalar electric potential
>         produced by the current filaments responsible for an action
>         potential (AP) in a realistic hippocampus CA1 pyramidal
>         neuron. It reveals that AP signaling can impress a highly
>         structured, focused and directed "sweeping-lighthouse beam"
>         that "illuminates" neighbors at mm scales. Ion channel
>         currents thereby provide a possible explanation for both
>         EEG/MEG origins and recently confirmed functional EM coupling
>         effects. Finally, a physically plausible EM field
>         decomposition is posited. It reveals objective and subjective
>         perspectives intrinsic to the membrane-centric field dynamics.
>         Perceptual "fields" can be seen to operate as the collective
>         action of virtual EM-boson composites (called qualeons)
>         visible only by "being" the fields, yet objectively appear as
>         the familiar EM field activity. This explains the problematic
>         evidence presentation and offers a physically plausible route
>         to a solution to the "hard problem".
>
>         For those impoverished and for those without institutional
>         access I do have the preprint. Just email me.
>
>         Traction. Finally. J
>
>         Cheers
>
>         Colin Hales
>
>
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