[AIM9X]

It was Einstein who united Space and time as one Space-Time.

I believe the Hard Problem of Consciousness can only be solved
by using a Nonreductive explanation. We need to take conciousness as a fundamental aspect of reality, just like space and time.

http://www.imprint.co.uk/chalmers.html

http://www.swcp.com/~hswift/swc/Fall98/close9802.html


In space-time when a material is sufficently DENSE it 'leaks' to another realm and alters/effects TIME, so in Consciousness-Space-Time, a sufficently dense objective collective CONCIOUSNESS can alter space-time!


Therefore could we use GLOBAL CONCIOUSNESS PROJECT to predict the WWIII or PEAKOIL (timing) or ALL OUT NUKES???

http://noosphere.princeton.edu/

What do ya think? Possible?

[Fergus]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('AIM9X', 'I')t was Einstein who united Space and time as one Space-Time.

I believe the Hard Problem of Consciousness can only be solved
by using a Nonreductive explanation. We need to take conciousness as a fundamental aspect of reality, just like space and time.

http://www.imprint.co.uk/chalmers.html

http://www.swcp.com/~hswift/swc/Fall98/close9802.html


In space-time when a material is sufficently DENSE it 'leaks' to another realm and alters/effects TIME, so in Consciousness-Space-Time, a sufficently dense objective collective CONCIOUSNESS can alter space-time!


Therefore could we use GLOBAL CONCIOUSNESS PROJECT to predict the WWIII or PEAKOIL (timing) or ALL OUT NUKES???

http://noosphere.princeton.edu/

What do ya think? Possible?

[JPL]

Just another sign of impending PO, I guess. Total nutters trying to lay claim to some sort of spiritual/scientific high-ground.

Keep digging, guys...

JPL

[rogerhb]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('AIM9X', 'W')e need to take conciousness as a fundamental aspect of reality, just like space and time.

[Aimrehtopyh]

There might very well be a "unit" of consciousness. I'm not sure about non-living processes but lower forms of life can exhibit "low frequency" consciousness.

http://www.quantumconsciousness.org/pub ... ml#penrose

http://www.quantumconsciousness.org/pen ... ation.html

Yeah, your brain might be a quantum computer. Stay tuned.

[Lighthouse]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Aimrehtopyh', '.')..

Yeah, your brain might be a quantum computer. Stay tuned.

[rogerhb]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Aimrehtopyh', 'Y')eah, your brain might be a quantum computer. Stay tuned.

[robski]

AIM9X,

Have you researched the work of Stanislav Grof? Here are some of his thoughts on consciousness:

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', ' ')DR. STANISLAV GROF: From the NDE video, Life After Death (Episode 8, Wellspring Media), Dr. Stanislav Grof had this to say about consciousness:

I had my training as a psychiatrist, a physician and then as a Freudian analyst. When I became interested in non-ordinary states and started serving powerful mystical experiences, also having some myself, my first idea was that it (consciousness) has to be hard-wired in the brain. I spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out how something like that is possible.

Today, I came to the conclusion that it is not coming from the brain. In that sense, it supports what Aldous Huxley believed after he had some powerful psychedelic experiences and was trying to link them to the brain. He came to the conclusion that maybe the brain acts as a kind of reducing valve that actually protects us from too much cosmic input. So, I don't see, for example, that experiences of archetypal realms, heavens, paradises, experiences of archetypal beings, such as deities, demons from different cultures, that people typically have in these states that they can be somehow explained as something that comes from the brain. I don't think you can locate the source of consciousness. I am quite sure it is not in the brain – not inside of the skull.

It actually, according to my experience, would lie beyond time and space, so it is not localizable. You actually come to the source of consciousness when you dissolve any categories that imply separation, individuality, time, space and so on. You just experience it as a presence.

People who have these experiences can either perceive that source or they can actually become the source, completely dissolved and experience that source. But such categories as time and space, localization coordinates, are not relevant for that experience. You actually have a sense that the concepts of time and space come from that place. They are generated by that place; but, the cosmic source itself, the cosmic consciousness cannot be located – certainly not in the material world."

[willjones4]

What a dimwit. All "consciousness" is our "perception" of our environment since all our brains are made from the same material and function with (for the most part) the same chemicals, we perceive "reality" pretty much the same and are "conscious". Insert any different chemical and you get a different "perception" because your brain is now working differently (albeit almost the same across a range of brains ingesting the same chemical and having similar experiences) and "consciousness" can be "perceived" differently-period. Nothing special here, move along folks...

[robski]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'W')hat a dimwit. All "consciousness" is our "perception" of our environment since all our brains are made from the same material and function with (for the most part) the same chemicals, we perceive "reality" pretty much the same and are "conscious". Insert any different chemical and you get a different "perception" because your brain is now working differently (albeit almost the same across a range of brains ingesting the same chemical and having similar experiences) and "consciousness" can be "perceived" differently-period. Nothing special here, move along folks...

[rogerhb]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('robski', 'G')rof is anything but a dimwit:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Grof

[Atlantean_Relic]

Maybe , We are Universe Prime and everything we think of become their own universes. So, we are the gametes of the universe.

[gg3]

Impressive that some of the folks here have read Chalmers, and Hameroff & Penrose. These three represent the cutting edge of current efforts to address the "hard problem."

And for y'all cynics in the crowd, one of Hameroff's hypotheses (concerning the role of glial cells in information processing in the brain) has already been confirmed via experimental and clinical findings in neurophysiology. So here's a clue: Don't walk into a discussion of a subject you know nothing about and make sarcastic remarks, it only makes you look like an idiot. As in, "I never read the book but I think the author has poopy-pants." Uh-huh.

AIM9X, I'm not sure how you derive your interpretation from what Chalmers wrote. Essentially he makes a strong case against both mind/body dualism and against materialist monism, and concludes that an interactionist model is the most complete and accurate, both theoretically and from empirical data.

I wouldn't say that consciousness per se is a fundamental quantity. Rather, information is a fundamental quantity, and can be self-organizing in the manner of other dissipative structures; and consciousness (more accurately, mind) arises from the interaction of information with borderline-quantum neural substructures as described by Hameroff. This picture is not at odds with mundane empirical observations about the impact of physiological interventions e.g. psychoactive drugs, or the correlation between emotion and neurochemistry e.g. neuropeptides, or the correlation between mental events and observable brain functions e.g. REM sleep.

So in this view, the fundamental quantities are matter, energy, space, time, and information; and mind/consciousness is an emergent phenomenon rather than a fundamental quantity in its own right.

The Princeton project only demonstrates that the human brain is capable of participating in two-way nonlocal information flows. It is still not clear whether the effect of conscious intention on random targets works from the physical target forward to the information derived from the affected distribution of outcome, or works backward from the derived information to the physical process. The former interpretation is more "common sense" since it does not appear to violate normal causality; but the latter interpretation can't be ruled out, and findings on retrocausality are robust enough that it must be considered.

However, none of the above demonstrate that these processes can be scaled up to provide "actionable" information about specific events. One of the characteristics of nonlocal information flows, in both nonliving systems such as photon entanglement experiments, and in living systems such as psi events in humans, is that the validity of nonlocal information can only be demonstrated via a local information flow: e.g. you don't know the starting state of an entangled photon until that information has been conveyed locally.

Here the human brain may have an advantage, in that it is optimized for pattern recognition, and for extrapolation. Based on the history of psi research, we can reasonably assume that nonlocal information is of low bandwidth and small quantity: a trickle of bits, as it were. But this small trickle can be extrapolated into a "big picture" and thereby yield results that can affect behavior. Over evolutionary time this would have conferred a slight but cumulative advantage, and would have remained as a trait in the species.

Nonlocal information (or nonlocally-derived extrapolation, if you will) is primarily of advantage where local information is absent. For example, the hunter-gatherer who, based on nonlocal perception of a mountain lion along one trail, takes the other trail, lives to reproduce and tell the story to his children. But that hunter-gatherer didn't have access to local information about the mountain lion.

Thus we might reasonably conclude that nonlocal information does not confer a large advantage where local information is available. For example we know well that we are depleting vital resources and harming the climate. Thus we can make viable predictions of outcomes and choose appropriate behavioral responses, just as a hunter-gatherer who sees mountain lion tracks can choose to avoid that area and go elsewhere.

Where nonlocal information could be of value, is in detecting events that can't be inferred from local information. These types of events include actions taken by small numbers of individuals that can affect larger numbers, events that result from random or psuedo-random processes that can't be directly observed, and so on. For example, Nancy Reagan persuaded Ronald Reagan to reach out to Soviet leader Gorbachev, which in turn led to a marked reduction in tensions between the US and the USSR. This change of course could not have been predicted from information available locally to anyone outside of the Reagan family.

So with that, the key question is: In the present and anticipated crises arising from resource depletion and climate impact, to what degree can nonlocal information make a difference in outcomes for individuals and for the mass of humanity as a whole?

[rogerhb]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('gg3', 'S')o here's a clue: Don't walk into a discussion of a subject you know nothing about and make sarcastic remarks, it only makes you look like an idiot. As in, "I never read the book but I think the author has poopy-pants." Uh-huh.

I wouldn't say that consciousness per se is a fundamental quantity. Rather, information is a fundamental quantity

[AIM9X]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Lighthouse', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Aimrehtopyh', '.')..

Yeah, your brain might be a quantum computer. Stay tuned.

[sicophiliac]

Is AIM9X basically trying to imply that we have a soul and that our mind or consciousness must be over origin outside of our biological brain? Something as expansive and indestructable as time or space itself?

This whole subject which I am admittedly ignorant of seems to be the modern equivelent of religion and an attemp to if you will, grab at straws in hopes of the existence of an afterlife. In light of all of modern sciences advances in the last century regarding biology and neurology these types of claims need to be ever more suffisticated. You hear alot about people speculating about string theory and quantem mechanics and how they could potentially tie into the existence of a soul or heaven (higher dimension). Part of me would like to believe in that type of thing but part of me says those are just the last scientific refuges of hope for people due to the fact we have alot of unknowns to deal with in those areas.

One thing I should throw out here.... It was a program on the discovery channel about 5-6 years back and it was an experiment to see if the human mind could alter random events. To sum it up they had a "coin toss" program on a computer and it ran through millions of cycles. Theoretically the results should have been essentially 50/50 as the odds of going one way or another for the results statistically were 50/50. When a person was brought in and concentrated on altering the results one way or another the system was thrown off. They didnt throw it off by that much.. more like 49/51 but mathematically the odds of that occuring with out some sort of invervention were rediculously small.
Same TV program, this time volunteers were shown randomly generated images on a computer screen.. some were serine like a beach or a farm cottage.. others were graphic images of war or crimes ect. They had various sensors on them to monitor vital signs and I beleive brainwave activity. The human body does react to the disturbing images differently with regards to heart rate, brain waves ect ect... Interestingly enough they found the volunteers mind and body began to react to the disturbing images slightly BEFORE the image was actually shown.

Could these experiments have been fixed to get funding or publicity? Certianly.

Might the later experiment have been in error when it came to timing the volunteers reactions in relation to the images? You bet.

But what if they were not ? That throws conventional wisdom out the window and we now must admit we indeed understand alot less about physics and the universe then we once thought.

[rogerhb]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('sicophiliac', 'I')nterestingly enough they found the volunteers mind and body began to react to the disturbing images slightly BEFORE the image was actually shown.

[EnergyUnlimited]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('AIM9X', 'I')t was Einstein who united Space and time as one Space-Time.

I believe the Hard Problem of Consciousness can only be solved
by using a Nonreductive explanation. We need to take conciousness as a fundamental aspect of reality, just like space and time.

http://www.imprint.co.uk/chalmers.html

http://www.swcp.com/~hswift/swc/Fall98/close9802.html


In space-time when a material is sufficently DENSE it 'leaks' to another realm and alters/effects TIME, so in Consciousness-Space-Time, a sufficently dense objective collective CONCIOUSNESS can alter space-time!


Therefore could we use GLOBAL CONCIOUSNESS PROJECT to predict the WWIII or PEAKOIL (timing) or ALL OUT NUKES???

http://noosphere.princeton.edu/

What do ya think? Possible?

[Fergus]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('sicophiliac', 'I')s AIM9X basically trying to imply that we have a soul and that our mind or consciousness must be over origin outside of our biological brain? Something as expansive and indestructable as time or space itself?

This whole subject which I am admittedly ignorant of seems to be the modern equivelent of religion and an attemp to if you will, grab at straws in hopes of the existence of an afterlife. In light of all of modern sciences advances in the last century regarding biology and neurology these types of claims need to be ever more suffisticated. You hear alot about people speculating about string theory and quantem mechanics and how they could potentially tie into the existence of a soul or heaven (higher dimension). Part of me would like to believe in that type of thing but part of me says those are just the last scientific refuges of hope for people due to the fact we have alot of unknowns to deal with in those areas.

One thing I should throw out here.... It was a program on the discovery channel about 5-6 years back and it was an experiment to see if the human mind could alter random events. To sum it up they had a "coin toss" program on a computer and it ran through millions of cycles. Theoretically the results should have been essentially 50/50 as the odds of going one way or another for the results statistically were 50/50. When a person was brought in and concentrated on altering the results one way or another the system was thrown off. They didnt throw it off by that much.. more like 49/51 but mathematically the odds of that occuring with out some sort of invervention were rediculously small.
Same TV program, this time volunteers were shown randomly generated images on a computer screen.. some were serine like a beach or a farm cottage.. others were graphic images of war or crimes ect. They had various sensors on them to monitor vital signs and I beleive brainwave activity. The human body does react to the disturbing images differently with regards to heart rate, brain waves ect ect... Interestingly enough they found the volunteers mind and body began to react to the disturbing images slightly BEFORE the image was actually shown.

Could these experiments have been fixed to get funding or publicity? Certianly.

Might the later experiment have been in error when it came to timing the volunteers reactions in relation to the images? You bet.

But what if they were not ? That throws conventional wisdom out the window and we now must admit we indeed understand alot less about physics and the universe then we once thought.

[AIM9X]

"Consciousness" is an ambiguous term, referring to many different phenomena.
Consciousness can be divided into "easy" and "hard" problems. For the
easy problems there are no real issue about whether these phenomena can be explained scientifically. All of them are straightforwardly vulnerable to explanation in terms of computational or neural mechanisms.If these phenomena were all there was to consciousness, then consciousness would not be much of a problem.

The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. There is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience that runs parallel and in addition to the computational or neural mechanisms of our physical mind. If any problem qualifies as the problem of consciousness, it is this one. In this central sense of "consciousness", an organism is conscious if there is something it is like to be that organism, and a mental state is conscious if there is something it is like to be in that state. This 'something it is like to be' is often called "qualia" or "Epiphenomenal" or "phenomenal consciousness". Whatever the name, each of us no doubt intimately experience this first hand every day and moment of our lives. Why is it that when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information-processing, we have visual or auditory experience: the quality of deep blue or the color of bright red? Why doesn't all this information-processing go on "in the dark", free of any inner feel? Why is it that when electromagnetic waveforms impinge on a retina and are discriminated and categorized by a visual system, this discrimination and categorization is experienced as a sensation of vivid red?

I suggest that a theory of consciousness should take 'experience/quilia/awareness' as fundamental.A nonreductive theory of experience will add new principles to the furniture of the basic laws of nature.

Of course, by taking experience as fundamental, there is a sense in which this approach does not tell us why there is experience in the first place. But this is the same for any fundamental theory. Nothing in physics tells us why there is matter in the first place, but we do not count this against theories of matter. Certain features of the world need to be taken as fundamental by any scientific theory. A theory of matter can still explain all sorts of facts about matter, by showing how they are consequences of the basic laws. The same goes for a theory of experience and quilia.


http://www.goertzel.org/dynapsyc/2004/HardProblem.htm

Like I said, "Consciousness" is an ambiguous term, perhaps "quilia" is truly no more than just 'information'? Language is always 'ambiguous' to some degree, but I think we are all talking about the 'same thing' here. The entire universe may have a low level "Consciousness". A rock would be on a much lower level of "Consciousness" than say a chicken, and the chicken would be on a lower level of "Consciousness" than say George Bush. (although I'm not certain about that one..)
Information itself may be "Consciousness" and 'quilia'. Perhaps patterns are self-sustained conciousness!
When a new pattern appears in the universe, a quilia is associated with it. So 'BLUE' the abstract and platonic objective 'BLUE' that is OUT THERE is itself associated with a unique singular and distinct quilia for 'Blue', and 'Red' for 'Red', a certain sensation of pain for that specific pain. etc.