6 ms·

Particles don't create a medium, they're constructed out of perturbations in a medium, eg fields. Your paraphrase in quotes isn't anything like what I actually

Particles don't create a medium, they're constructed out of perturbations in a medium, eg fields. Your paraphrase in quotes isn't anything like what I actually said in my post -- you dropped key words from it. What I actually said, and you misunderstood: "the medium they're creating the signal in". Your paraphrase is so far from that, I have trouble even addressing the confusion. It's particularly egregious that you omitted key words when you're clearly using them to make passive aggressive comments about my understanding. The answer to how this addresses the question is that the medium is experiential -- anything that creates effects in it is 'experiencing'. Experiencing seeing blue corresponds to a particular pattern of activity in the medium. (Though, there is no default 'experience of seeing blue' -- it's possible that we experience different ones, different animals have different ones, etc. This relates back to the computational structure.) How entanglement is involved is that there's a single 'unified' experience when we know that different portions are generated in different brain regions, but don't (obviously) converge the information to a point (eg, it's always spread at least in a cluster of neurons), which suggests that we're talking about something non-localized in the medium, ie, not a point object. The source of a lot of non-locality is through entanglement, so it's reasonable to conjecture that it's involved here, as well -- though, of course, it could be a different mechanism. If the pieces of your brain which are generating the perturbation in the experiential medium(s) are entangled, it could provide a model of how it's carrying a non-localized piece of information -- your experience.

aninhumer 9y ago
>The answer to how this addresses the question is that the medium is experiential -- anything that creates effects in it is 'experiencing'. Experiencing seeing blue corresponds to a particular pattern of activity in the medium. But if your theory is that consciousness arises as a result of particular patterns in a medium, couldn't that medium equally well be "the universe"? Why do you see it as necessary for the medium to be entangled? Why couldn't consciousness just be the result of patterns in non-localised particles?
- SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
  The medium isn't entangled, particles in it are (with each other), creating a larger non-localized object out of the smaller, (more) localized particles. Entanglement is a mechanism by which a single, non-localized value can be carried by pieces (none of which themselves carry that value). And hence the materialist proposal here is precisely what you propose: that the universe is fundamentally experiential (or at least parts of it that brains interact with), and the single, non-localized experience is created and carried via entanglement of the constituent "particles", which are themselves impacted by the regional computation of the brain (eg, by knotting with the "main" knot carrying the experience, in analogy to a TQC), thus allowing the disparate regions to contribute to a single experience with characteristics picked up by regional contributions. Proposing that it's not entanglement means proposing a new phyical process by which that information can contribute to a single, non-local value, which people researching the brain haven't even taken a stab at. Which is why I find their proposal that it's not entanglement to be strange -- they seem to blithely ignore the physics/informatiom theory implications of that.
  - marcosdumay 9y ago
    > Proposing that it's not entanglement means proposing a new phyical process by which that information can contribute to a single, non-local value, which people researching the brain haven't even taken a stab at. I've never seen a brain researcher claiming to have seen any non-locality. It would be the kind of thing everybody would be talking about. Mostly, people seem happy to accept many speed-of-light delays on something that is centimeters wide and counts time in dozens of milliseconds. You want a way to keep coherence overall through the brain, but there's no reason to think that coherence is needed.
    - SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
      Except that researchers also haven't seen the information converging to a single point, which should be obvious if it's happening. I agree that the computing is done with moving charges and chemical propagation (at substantially below the speed of light), but that doesn't account for how the information gets integrated in to a single signal for experience. But we also see that kind of structure in, eg, the proposal to build a TQC, where you build a computation in to non-local structures built out of entangled particles by moving around charges at substantially lower than the speed of light. If it's not being amalgamated in to a point object (which doesn't seem to be the case -- there's no 'you' point in the brain), then it must be being amalgamated to a non-local object.
inputcoffee 9y ago
I did cut off your sentence, and it was inadvertent. I am happy to rephrase my question as what is "the medium they're creating the signal in?" You are clearly getting annoyed at this, and I don't see us making much progress. I find this "experiential medium" even more confusing, and I don't see the connection between entanglement and "unified" experience. But, hopefully others will make up their own minds based on our words.

aninhumer 9y ago

>The answer to how this addresses the question is that the medium is experiential -- anything that creates effects in it is 'experiencing'. Experiencing seeing blue corresponds to a particular pattern of activity in the medium. But if your theory is that consciousness arises as a result of particular patterns in a medium, couldn't that medium equally well be "the universe"? Why do you see it as necessary for the medium to be entangled? Why couldn't consciousness just be the result of patterns in non-localised particles?

SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
The medium isn't entangled, particles in it are (with each other), creating a larger non-localized object out of the smaller, (more) localized particles. Entanglement is a mechanism by which a single, non-localized value can be carried by pieces (none of which themselves carry that value). And hence the materialist proposal here is precisely what you propose: that the universe is fundamentally experiential (or at least parts of it that brains interact with), and the single, non-localized experience is created and carried via entanglement of the constituent "particles", which are themselves impacted by the regional computation of the brain (eg, by knotting with the "main" knot carrying the experience, in analogy to a TQC), thus allowing the disparate regions to contribute to a single experience with characteristics picked up by regional contributions. Proposing that it's not entanglement means proposing a new phyical process by which that information can contribute to a single, non-local value, which people researching the brain haven't even taken a stab at. Which is why I find their proposal that it's not entanglement to be strange -- they seem to blithely ignore the physics/informatiom theory implications of that.
- marcosdumay 9y ago
  > Proposing that it's not entanglement means proposing a new phyical process by which that information can contribute to a single, non-local value, which people researching the brain haven't even taken a stab at. I've never seen a brain researcher claiming to have seen any non-locality. It would be the kind of thing everybody would be talking about. Mostly, people seem happy to accept many speed-of-light delays on something that is centimeters wide and counts time in dozens of milliseconds. You want a way to keep coherence overall through the brain, but there's no reason to think that coherence is needed.
  - SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
    Except that researchers also haven't seen the information converging to a single point, which should be obvious if it's happening. I agree that the computing is done with moving charges and chemical propagation (at substantially below the speed of light), but that doesn't account for how the information gets integrated in to a single signal for experience. But we also see that kind of structure in, eg, the proposal to build a TQC, where you build a computation in to non-local structures built out of entangled particles by moving around charges at substantially lower than the speed of light. If it's not being amalgamated in to a point object (which doesn't seem to be the case -- there's no 'you' point in the brain), then it must be being amalgamated to a non-local object.

inputcoffee 9y ago

I did cut off your sentence, and it was inadvertent. I am happy to rephrase my question as what is "the medium they're creating the signal in?" You are clearly getting annoyed at this, and I don't see us making much progress. I find this "experiential medium" even more confusing, and I don't see the connection between entanglement and "unified" experience. But, hopefully others will make up their own minds based on our words.