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This is going to sound a bit out there, but what if your brain is simply an antenna for your consciousness to come through from wherever. Has anyone actually t

This is going to sound a bit out there, but what if your brain is simply an antenna for your consciousness to come through from wherever. Has anyone actually tried to boot up an artificial brain derived from a real organism? I'd like to see a proof of concept that your brain IS indeed the seat of your consciousness, and not just a fancy quantum antenna.

serans 9y ago
That's pretty much what Descartes proposed! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactionism_(philosophy_of_mind) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactionism_(philosophy_of_.... My favourite argument against this idea is that it would violate the law of conservation of energy. In any case it looks to me that all these dualist theories of mind are non-falsifiable
- chronolitus 9y ago
  It's irrelevant anyways, I would argue that what makes you you is not the emergent/transferred via antenna/magic consciousness - a.k.a. sensation of being a aware of your brain's processes. Rather, the brain's processes themselves are probably what makes you you. Regardless of whether they generate consciousness, the biochemical sensory-processing, storage-and-modelling, and decision-making algorithms (which we can detect by looking at synapses) are where you lie. If your brain was somehow modified to take completely different decisions and make different statements ('dumb' magic-less rewiring), with the magic/antenna/emergent/quantum/whatever consciousness part kept intact, I am pretty sure that I would not consider the resulting being 'me'. Of course everyone is free to believe otherwise.
  - imtringued 9y ago
    Your "me" is going to disappear. How do you convince your "me" that it is necessary to disappear? One possible explanation is that you will get another "me".
mozumder 9y ago
This is what I've always thought. I think the structure of DNA or proteins themselves is that antenna that interacts with a fifth fundamental force of nature - which is that life spirit.
saputeweobo 9y ago
What a fascinating idea. Did you take it from somewhere or did you conceive it by yourself? I would love to read about it.
- Analemma_ 9y ago
  It's "substance dualism" or "Cartesian dualism", if you're assuming that the "elsewhere" is somewhere non-physical. If you're assuming the elsewhere is somewhere in the material world, I don't know if there's a word for that, but its been discussed a couple times -- most memorably in Anathem, the Neal Stephenson book where I stole my username from :)
- encoderer 9y ago
  The brain has a fascination with itself.
- gloriousduke 9y ago
  This idea's been passed around the psychedelic community, even so far as to suggest a drug like LSD or DMT changes your brain chemistry enough that you receive a different form of consciousness, endowing one with everything from the ability to commune with "machine elves" to providing a priori insight into the unitary nature of existence. Unfortunately these ideas get weaved within New Age-type thinking and I tend to lend them no credence. [1] Similarly, if consciousness is a fundamental component of the Universe/reality, it may not supervene (a technical term in philosophy) on the physical structures of the brain. [2] [1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1340425/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1340425/ [2] See the arguments of the philosopher David Chalmers.
  - resource0x 9y ago
    I got interested in the notion of plant intelligence lately; my conjecture is: mushrooms produce psilocybin for themselves, to improve their own creativity and/or life experience :)
ada1981 9y ago
Yes, this is an idea one discussed and heard discussed before. Of course, everything we perceive the material world to be is merely a concept we are holding in our mind. DNA is an idea.
thg 9y ago
> Has anyone actually tried to boot up an artificial brain derived from a real organism? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenWorm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenWorm
- noetic_techy 9y ago
  I've heard of this and have been eagerly anticipating some results. I'd like to see it trained to do something unique, uploaded, and that some behavior arise in the uploaded version. I'm not totally against consciousness arising from sufficient complexity, but I've yet to see it proven. And then there are the normal people walking around with almost NO brain... http://bigthink.com/paul-ratner/the-medical-mystery-of-a-man-living-with-90-of-his-brain-missing http://bigthink.com/paul-ratner/the-medical-mystery-of-a-man...
  - taneq 9y ago
    OpenWorm isn't a process for uploading a specific biological worm. It's a connectome for a generic C. elegans worm. Apparently they're all (more or less) the same.
CalRobert 9y ago
Thanks for sharing this. Funny thing is, I've been thinking more and more that this seems like at least as plausible an explanation of consciousness as any, but hesitated to share the thought since, if it's not falsifiable, it's not really science (and we can't use the tools of science to verify it). Still, I find it at least as likely as the "consciousness just sort of happens when information processing gets complex enough" explanation. You might find this interesting https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-spin-on-the-quantum-brain-20161102/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-spin-on-the-quantum-bra...
- noetic_techy 9y ago
  Thanks. I have exact same thought. Don't get me wrong, I think consciousness arising from sufficient complexity is also very much a possible answer, and I don't discount it. I'm just not totally convinced that there isn't more too it. Until a general AI arises, I don't think I will be convinced, and even if it did, who's to say it inst still just an approximation? Multiple AI intelligence domains slapped together with some approximation of a pre-frontal cortex. Even then, biology may still be something entirely different. Sure, you start venturing into the supernatural realm talking about this, but who's to say that given sufficient time and study of this phenomena, the supposed "consciousness is everywhere" becomes the new natural science, and gives rise to new technologies we couldn't even conceive. It would be like discovering Electromagnetism all over again.
  - caf 9y ago
    What if there's less to it? What if consciousness is just an illusion, "you" only really exist in the moment, and the feeling of a connection to the "you" of a moment ago and the "you" to come in the next moment doesn't reflect an actual continuing independent existence?
    - drcode 9y ago
      Yeah, this seems likely to be true, and also arguably really sad, since it means your consciousness essentially is "dying" every second. Fun times!
dfischer 9y ago
In my fantasy world, I personally always thought of it as a gateway to a higher realm where our consciousness exists.
Erlangolem 9y ago
It’s called dualism, and you’re basically proposing a soul in 21st century language. Like a soul, it’s not testable, and lacks any evidence in favor of it, while requiring a new set of assumptions which cannot be tested. You’re also proposing some kind of new physics, which again, is somehow complementary to and yet hidden from current current theories.
- sombremesa 9y ago
  Yep. The fact that this kind of drivel is upvoted to the TOP, and has commenters seriously interested in it, makes me despair for the state of - not only cognitive science - but science in general. Although on second thought, popular science has always been like this, and the ivory tower built by the PhD tradition still stands - so maybe it's too early to despair even with the anti-intellectual vibe of the modern world.
- mozumder 9y ago
  You haven't proven that it's not testable.
  - sombremesa 9y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot
    - cgore 9y ago
      That's kind of missing his point. "Russell's Teapot" is a mental exercise that states the person making the claim that is nonstandard of current thought needs to provide proof. He's suggesting that there IS some way to provide proof perhaps, one way or the other.
    - mozumder 9y ago
      Doesn't work here, since Erlangolem made the statement that it's not testable. Erlangolem made that explicit assertion, and now has to back up that statement up.
acjohnson55 9y ago
How then do you explain how physical injuries and external stimulation to the brain affect the brain's operation in ways that we increasingly understand? Not saying we're anywhere close to having it all figured out. But this is the sort of question you have to address to accept dualism. I'd certainly like to believe there's something more to my conscious existence than this perishable gray matter. I prefer to believe instead that I'm a character in an MMORPG. But if that's true, my consciousness still resides within the simulation. At best, the entity controlling me has some superset of my consciousness. At worst, my consciousness is still totally disposable, and my player is just interested in a fun ride.
- andrewflnr 9y ago
  Well of course you start getting worse reception if the antenna breaks.
- noetic_techy 9y ago
  How do you explain being normal and having almost no brain at all: http://bigthink.com/paul-ratner/the-medical-mystery-of-a-man-living-with-90-of-his-brain-missing http://bigthink.com/paul-ratner/the-medical-mystery-of-a-man...
  - AgentME 9y ago
    This looks like a good example of the 80/20 rule: 80% of our brain matter is dedicated to the hardest last 20% of IQ points. (Only being slightly tongue-in-cheek here.) Also, there's probably usually a lot of brain matter dedicated to redundancy, memories, and enabling connections between ideas to foster creativity, and this person may be lacking in these areas in hard-to-measure ways. If most of our brain truly had no purpose, evolution would have selected against it forever ago. (Instead, evolution went through large lengths to keep our heads so big.)
    - noetic_techy 9y ago
      I agree this could be the other side of the coin. I'm not totally one sided on this. Its possible that consciousness and sentience arises from sheer complexity, I'm just not totally convinced, and there appear to be outliers and unaccounted for anomalies. In this case, 10% = IQ of 80 and totally functional within society. Pretty astonishing still.
simplify 9y ago
Even as a Christian, I think the idea of a human being more than the dust they're made of is only wishful thinking. If consciousness is not sourced from the brain, then why is memory so dependent on the brain?
- devgutt 9y ago
  Maybe memory is overrated in the great scheme of things.
  - chronolitus 9y ago
    sure, remove memory. and decision making, that's biochemical too. And personality? probably. Remove some impulses and reflexes and primordial pathways. Now that's the real you! What's left, though?
    - devgutt 9y ago
      My comment was related to the OP comment. When you were born, you didn't have any reminiscent memory, because memory is intrinsically related to your physical brain. If you damage your brain, you could lose memory or change completely what you call "self". If you are a Christian and believe in after-life, a good way to reconcile this is downplaying the importance of memory itself (overrated). But this is related the OP's point of view (Christians believe in after-life). I, personally, don't believe in after-life, so everything you are is in your brain and memory is crucial.
      - simplify 9y ago
        FYI, I still believe in an afterlife. The bible talks about a resurrection where all will be raised from the dead for judgement. It's common misconception to think we float off to heaven or hell as disembodied souls. The difference is we will again have physical bodies, and thus have the capacity for consciousness and memory again.
        9y ago
Nazare 9y ago
> I'd like to see a proof of concept that your brain IS indeed the seat of your consciousness. The concept of "multiple realizability" says that a brain/consciousness/mental state can arise from non-biological matter, like digital computers. Modern proponents of this view do not view the brain as a seat of consciousness. To them, the view of a singular consciousness that houses in the brain like a theatre, is like a Descartesian illusion. Consciousness is distributed and all parts of "you" and your environment contribute. As for "out there": I am always a bit worried when archeologists unearth some treasures with our current state of technology. Likely, in a 100 years they will have much better methods to research and preserve unearthed treasure, and so we may be spoiling their more effective methods by digging it up and putting it on display. What if, after the 8th great AI hype, another YC company claims it has found successful methods to upload your consciousness, which is 100% fatal to your preserved brain in the process? You'll be stuck in the MVP FORTRAN digital world of uploaded consciousnesses. Or maybe they take our current infatuation with AGI to mean permission to create a huge ensemble of preserved brains, filling an entire room like did our 1960s computers, because it turned out that consciousness is only transferable to biological "organisms", and the only way to superhuman intelligence is to combine 20 human intelligences. The AI hype bubble will become a literal fulfilling prophecy. I personally would either jail these consciousnesses (honor their will, but put them in a boring digital world with Archive.org access to the internet) or put them on display, much like we do with preserved Egyptian Pharaoh's. I'd call it Earth, and make Trump a president.
- noetic_techy 9y ago
  This was quite hilarious to envision. Thank you. I myself worry that even if somehow we combine all these domain specific AI's with some approximation of a neo-cortex, and then every AI researcher says "See, there it is! Behold the AGI, told you there was nothing to it!", all we're REALLY going to get is an approximation of the real thing. Then we'll be too busy playing with our new AGI's to realize we missed the mark long ago. The new treasure preservation technology never even arises because victory was declared prematurely. We hit another mark instead of the real thing. Constant refinement of the bizarro superman version of real consciousness. I hypothesize the REAL mark being that somewhere in the brain, quantum effects, maybe in microtubules, couple with some yet to be conceived discoveries or epithanies, act as a conduit to your real consciousness software existing somewhere "out there" in the simulation ether lets suppose. Extrapolate the AI hype and one day the super intelligent Matrioshka planet size brain emerges (YC backed of course), pours over ancient abandoned research and points out "Hey, you dumb monkeys missed something Yuge here eons ago..."
matte_black 9y ago
If you've ever suffered from Depersonalization/Derealization disorder, it will become very clear that your mind and your consciousness are not the same thing at all. DP/DR is quite possibly the worst mental disorder you can ever fall into. It is the feeling where you are convinced everything around you is not real, you see people you know, you know they are significant, but they just feel like actors in a show and you don't care. You look in the mirror, and you don't recognize yourself as you, you just see a body. Worse, your body just moves around the world and accomplish things on autopilot, while you watch everything unfold on what feels like a screen, completely detached. If you died, you wouldn't care much, because you wouldn't feel it's you dying, in fact you want to die, because you are trapped in a hell from which there is no escape. I've never suffered from this disorder, but I investigated it for some time and am convinced it reveals something we do not yet understand about our existence in this world. The source of our existence may not be where we think it is.
- DoreenMichele 9y ago
  Eh, easily attributed to brain chemistry and not necessarily anything woo.
  - matte_black 9y ago
    There is no known cause. Or cure for that matter.
    - DoreenMichele 9y ago
      That's not really a rebuttal of my point. I have a serious medical condition. I frequently suffer somatopsychic side effects. It's incredible what chemistry can make you feel. I happen to also believe in a lot of woo stuff. But the reality is that no known cause is not proof that there is a spiritual explanation or cause.
      - SherlockeHolmes 9y ago
        this isn’t an explanation. this is a very poor woman’s hypothesis. If you were to provide verifiable relationships between chemical imbalances and whatever relevant physical abnormalities in a brain and a person’s mental state, you’d be up for a nobel prize. to achieve this relationship, you’d first need to develop a quantifiable way to represent a person’s mental state. for which, you’d be up for another nobel prize.
resource0x 9y ago
And this antenna does not necessarily reside in your brain. Fascinating TED lecture: E.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBGt5OeAQFk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBGt5OeAQFk
cgio 9y ago
Even assuming that it is an antenna, then if your antenna is the only one receiving your consciousness then it is the seat of your consciousness or equivalent, i.e. its reasonable to assume that if you restore the antenna you will restore the consciousness in place (I am leveraging the fact that you called it a seat). On the other side of the coin, with embodied consciousness you could raise other potential issues with preservation of the brain alone. Connection between gut bacteria and mental conditions are being researched with some results confirming hypotheses there.
- noetic_techy 9y ago
  I completely agree that leaving out the gut-brain connection may be a huge error in our quest for General AI simulation. I'm not sure that I agree that simulating neurons in silicon form is equivalent to restoring the antenna though. There may be a quantum link that only neurons have functionally. They are already finding quantum effects in plants: https://horizon-magazine.eu/article/vibrating-molecules-help-plants-make-use-quantum-effects_en.html https://horizon-magazine.eu/article/vibrating-molecules-help... And that our brain contains micro-tubules that exhibit quantum effects: https://phys.org/news/2014-01-discovery-quantum-vibrations-microtubules-corroborates.html https://phys.org/news/2014-01-discovery-quantum-vibrations-m... Maybe they ARE the antenna.
- earenndil 9y ago
  Well, maybe if that theory is true, then if the connection is "severed," so to speak, there's no way to restore it?
tbabb 9y ago
We know all the matter that the brain is made out of, and we know what interactions are possible with that matter, because we've done extensive experiments with particle accelerators. If there were something that affected baryonic matter besides the four fundamental forces, we would know about it. In other words, we know with certainty that there is no physical mechanism by which some "external consciousness" could influence the brain. So the answer to that hypothesis is a definitive "nope, that's not how it works." CalTech quantum physicist Sean Carrol explains: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x26a-ztpQs8&t=836 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x26a-ztpQs8&t=836
- noetic_techy 9y ago
  Maybe you don't need to make as grand a leap outside of mainstream physics as you think: https://phys.org/news/2014-01-discovery-quantum-vibrations-microtubules-corroborates.html https://phys.org/news/2014-01-discovery-quantum-vibrations-m...
taneq 9y ago
The range of different effects that a brain injury can have on your mind is too great, IMO, for this to be true. Consider cases where people forget very specific classes of things, or gain or lose specific faculties, in response to neural trauma. Damage to the brain affects the functionality of the mind itself, not just how clearly the mind can see its inputs and convey its outputs.
- tbabb 9y ago
  See also: When you are drunk, it is not like you are fully lucid but unable to control your body or your mouth. Your mind/personality itself actually changes. And of course you cannot will yourself to become drunk. It is pretty trivial that the matter affects the mind, not vice versa.
- AgentME 9y ago
  Especially when you think about the studies on split-brain patients. That's hard to square away with the idea of our mind being somewhere else transmitting to us ... unless you hypothesize that for every person, there's two minds out there, each transmitting to half of your brain, and then your brain meshes their thoughts together ... but if your brain is capable of integrating the thoughts together, then the argument is weakening as clearly the brain has some thinking ability.
  - taneq 9y ago
    Yeah, for every experiment / example / specimen we know of that changes some function F of the mind, it rules out the possibility of F being performed 'elsewhere' and the results simply being received. We're at the point now where your 'receiver' is doing basically all the work and, if it's connected to anything else, that thing just supplies formless 'mojo' that has no identifiable effect on the working of the mind.
- projektir 9y ago
  I'm not sure what that person's version of the antenna idea is, but mine generally implies the brain is still in charge of the actual effects themselves, but needs somewhere to send it all to. The "somewhere" isn't chemical, and is just a receiver, and can't do anything if the sender (the brain) is damaged. The "somewhere" is distinguished due to the fact that a given person is a specific person and not another person (if you deny this, this makes ethics and emphatic transfer unworkable, which doesn't seem right).
Veedrac 9y ago
The trivial dismissal of most of these problems is to realize that whatever features we have must have evolved, and it would be a statistical miracle for the substrate that evolution discovered to just happen to be uniquely capable of dualism.
- AgentME 9y ago
  Also, does every animal with a brain have a dualist mind out there too? What's the limit? Does a worm with a few hundred neurons have a non-physical mind connection? Does your digestive system with its millions of neurons have its own non-physical mind out there too?
khazhoux 9y ago
This idea has zero basis. It's a mind-brain version of Russell's Teapot: I claim there is a teapot floating between Earth and Mars, and I challenge you to prove otherwise! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot
- yters 9y ago
  It's what the majority of the world believes, and science has no idea what consciousness is. So, there is zero basis parent is wrong. Plus, there are all kinds of problems and contradictions if the mind reduces to matter.
  - istjohn 9y ago
    If only reality conformed to democratic norms...
    - yters 9y ago
      It usually does, hence why they are democratic.
  - dqpb 9y ago
    >It's what the majority of the world believes This has never been a good proxy for truth. It is also completely irrelevant given that the majority of the world has never studied neuroscience. >science has no idea what consciousness is Not true. Neuroscience has discovered a lot about consciousness. I recommend Principles of Neural Science if you're interested: https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Neural-Science-Fifth-Kandel/dp/0071390111 https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Neural-Science-Fifth-Kande... >Plus, there are all kinds of problems and contradictions if the mind reduces to matter. Such as?
    - yters 9y ago
      Most of our life is lived off of beliefs the majority of the world believes. It is only an extremely small subset that we've reduced to science and technology. Perhaps you can explain what science has discovered about consciousness. As far as I know, the closest is a network analysis metric used to signify whether something is conscious. But that does not tell us what consciousness is, only some of the necessary conditions, if that. Here is a list of problems off the top of my head regarding material minds: - Math is inherently immaterial. I cannot destroy the number 1. Infinity cannot physically exist. Negative numbers, zero, imaginary numbers, the real number line do not correspond to physical objects. - If our mind is material, there is no way we can know any kind of truth. Truth doesn't really have meaning. Yet we do know some degree of truth. - If consciousness is a particular configuration, then the same configuration is the same consciousness, which would imply instantaneous awareness of two completely distinct parts of the universe by the same consciousness with two copies of the configuration. - Free will and qualia have no meaning in a materialistic worldview, yet are essential to just about everything we do everyday.
csomar 9y ago
The burden of proof is on you to prove that there is a "quantum antenna". This is like the guys who says "prove to me god doesn't exist". Well, it doesn't work that way. You came to me with the "god exists" or "there is an antenna that connects my brain to some magic world". You prove that it is there and show me how it works.

serans 9y ago

That's pretty much what Descartes proposed! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactionism_(philosophy_of_mind) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactionism_(philosophy_of_.... My favourite argument against this idea is that it would violate the law of conservation of energy. In any case it looks to me that all these dualist theories of mind are non-falsifiable

chronolitus 9y ago
It's irrelevant anyways, I would argue that what makes you you is not the emergent/transferred via antenna/magic consciousness - a.k.a. sensation of being a aware of your brain's processes. Rather, the brain's processes themselves are probably what makes you you. Regardless of whether they generate consciousness, the biochemical sensory-processing, storage-and-modelling, and decision-making algorithms (which we can detect by looking at synapses) are where you lie. If your brain was somehow modified to take completely different decisions and make different statements ('dumb' magic-less rewiring), with the magic/antenna/emergent/quantum/whatever consciousness part kept intact, I am pretty sure that I would not consider the resulting being 'me'. Of course everyone is free to believe otherwise.
- imtringued 9y ago
  Your "me" is going to disappear. How do you convince your "me" that it is necessary to disappear? One possible explanation is that you will get another "me".

mozumder 9y ago

This is what I've always thought. I think the structure of DNA or proteins themselves is that antenna that interacts with a fifth fundamental force of nature - which is that life spirit.

saputeweobo 9y ago

What a fascinating idea. Did you take it from somewhere or did you conceive it by yourself? I would love to read about it.

Analemma_ 9y ago
It's "substance dualism" or "Cartesian dualism", if you're assuming that the "elsewhere" is somewhere non-physical. If you're assuming the elsewhere is somewhere in the material world, I don't know if there's a word for that, but its been discussed a couple times -- most memorably in Anathem, the Neal Stephenson book where I stole my username from :)
encoderer 9y ago
The brain has a fascination with itself.
gloriousduke 9y ago
This idea's been passed around the psychedelic community, even so far as to suggest a drug like LSD or DMT changes your brain chemistry enough that you receive a different form of consciousness, endowing one with everything from the ability to commune with "machine elves" to providing a priori insight into the unitary nature of existence. Unfortunately these ideas get weaved within New Age-type thinking and I tend to lend them no credence. [1] Similarly, if consciousness is a fundamental component of the Universe/reality, it may not supervene (a technical term in philosophy) on the physical structures of the brain. [2] [1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1340425/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1340425/ [2] See the arguments of the philosopher David Chalmers.
- resource0x 9y ago
  I got interested in the notion of plant intelligence lately; my conjecture is: mushrooms produce psilocybin for themselves, to improve their own creativity and/or life experience :)

ada1981 9y ago

Yes, this is an idea one discussed and heard discussed before. Of course, everything we perceive the material world to be is merely a concept we are holding in our mind. DNA is an idea.

thg 9y ago

> Has anyone actually tried to boot up an artificial brain derived from a real organism? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenWorm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenWorm

noetic_techy 9y ago
I've heard of this and have been eagerly anticipating some results. I'd like to see it trained to do something unique, uploaded, and that some behavior arise in the uploaded version. I'm not totally against consciousness arising from sufficient complexity, but I've yet to see it proven. And then there are the normal people walking around with almost NO brain... http://bigthink.com/paul-ratner/the-medical-mystery-of-a-man-living-with-90-of-his-brain-missing http://bigthink.com/paul-ratner/the-medical-mystery-of-a-man...
- taneq 9y ago
  OpenWorm isn't a process for uploading a specific biological worm. It's a connectome for a generic C. elegans worm. Apparently they're all (more or less) the same.

CalRobert 9y ago

Thanks for sharing this. Funny thing is, I've been thinking more and more that this seems like at least as plausible an explanation of consciousness as any, but hesitated to share the thought since, if it's not falsifiable, it's not really science (and we can't use the tools of science to verify it). Still, I find it at least as likely as the "consciousness just sort of happens when information processing gets complex enough" explanation. You might find this interesting https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-spin-on-the-quantum-brain-20161102/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-spin-on-the-quantum-bra...

noetic_techy 9y ago
Thanks. I have exact same thought. Don't get me wrong, I think consciousness arising from sufficient complexity is also very much a possible answer, and I don't discount it. I'm just not totally convinced that there isn't more too it. Until a general AI arises, I don't think I will be convinced, and even if it did, who's to say it inst still just an approximation? Multiple AI intelligence domains slapped together with some approximation of a pre-frontal cortex. Even then, biology may still be something entirely different. Sure, you start venturing into the supernatural realm talking about this, but who's to say that given sufficient time and study of this phenomena, the supposed "consciousness is everywhere" becomes the new natural science, and gives rise to new technologies we couldn't even conceive. It would be like discovering Electromagnetism all over again.
- caf 9y ago
  What if there's less to it? What if consciousness is just an illusion, "you" only really exist in the moment, and the feeling of a connection to the "you" of a moment ago and the "you" to come in the next moment doesn't reflect an actual continuing independent existence?
  - drcode 9y ago
    Yeah, this seems likely to be true, and also arguably really sad, since it means your consciousness essentially is "dying" every second. Fun times!

dfischer 9y ago

In my fantasy world, I personally always thought of it as a gateway to a higher realm where our consciousness exists.

Erlangolem 9y ago

It’s called dualism, and you’re basically proposing a soul in 21st century language. Like a soul, it’s not testable, and lacks any evidence in favor of it, while requiring a new set of assumptions which cannot be tested. You’re also proposing some kind of new physics, which again, is somehow complementary to and yet hidden from current current theories.

sombremesa 9y ago
Yep. The fact that this kind of drivel is upvoted to the TOP, and has commenters seriously interested in it, makes me despair for the state of - not only cognitive science - but science in general. Although on second thought, popular science has always been like this, and the ivory tower built by the PhD tradition still stands - so maybe it's too early to despair even with the anti-intellectual vibe of the modern world.
mozumder 9y ago
You haven't proven that it's not testable.
- sombremesa 9y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot
  - cgore 9y ago
    That's kind of missing his point. "Russell's Teapot" is a mental exercise that states the person making the claim that is nonstandard of current thought needs to provide proof. He's suggesting that there IS some way to provide proof perhaps, one way or the other.
  - mozumder 9y ago
    Doesn't work here, since Erlangolem made the statement that it's not testable. Erlangolem made that explicit assertion, and now has to back up that statement up.

acjohnson55 9y ago

How then do you explain how physical injuries and external stimulation to the brain affect the brain's operation in ways that we increasingly understand? Not saying we're anywhere close to having it all figured out. But this is the sort of question you have to address to accept dualism. I'd certainly like to believe there's something more to my conscious existence than this perishable gray matter. I prefer to believe instead that I'm a character in an MMORPG. But if that's true, my consciousness still resides within the simulation. At best, the entity controlling me has some superset of my consciousness. At worst, my consciousness is still totally disposable, and my player is just interested in a fun ride.

andrewflnr 9y ago
Well of course you start getting worse reception if the antenna breaks.
noetic_techy 9y ago
How do you explain being normal and having almost no brain at all: http://bigthink.com/paul-ratner/the-medical-mystery-of-a-man-living-with-90-of-his-brain-missing http://bigthink.com/paul-ratner/the-medical-mystery-of-a-man...
- AgentME 9y ago
  This looks like a good example of the 80/20 rule: 80% of our brain matter is dedicated to the hardest last 20% of IQ points. (Only being slightly tongue-in-cheek here.) Also, there's probably usually a lot of brain matter dedicated to redundancy, memories, and enabling connections between ideas to foster creativity, and this person may be lacking in these areas in hard-to-measure ways. If most of our brain truly had no purpose, evolution would have selected against it forever ago. (Instead, evolution went through large lengths to keep our heads so big.)
  - noetic_techy 9y ago
    I agree this could be the other side of the coin. I'm not totally one sided on this. Its possible that consciousness and sentience arises from sheer complexity, I'm just not totally convinced, and there appear to be outliers and unaccounted for anomalies. In this case, 10% = IQ of 80 and totally functional within society. Pretty astonishing still.

simplify 9y ago

Even as a Christian, I think the idea of a human being more than the dust they're made of is only wishful thinking. If consciousness is not sourced from the brain, then why is memory so dependent on the brain?

devgutt 9y ago
Maybe memory is overrated in the great scheme of things.
- chronolitus 9y ago
  sure, remove memory. and decision making, that's biochemical too. And personality? probably. Remove some impulses and reflexes and primordial pathways. Now that's the real you! What's left, though?
  - devgutt 9y ago
    My comment was related to the OP comment. When you were born, you didn't have any reminiscent memory, because memory is intrinsically related to your physical brain. If you damage your brain, you could lose memory or change completely what you call "self". If you are a Christian and believe in after-life, a good way to reconcile this is downplaying the importance of memory itself (overrated). But this is related the OP's point of view (Christians believe in after-life). I, personally, don't believe in after-life, so everything you are is in your brain and memory is crucial.
    - simplify 9y ago
      FYI, I still believe in an afterlife. The bible talks about a resurrection where all will be raised from the dead for judgement. It's common misconception to think we float off to heaven or hell as disembodied souls. The difference is we will again have physical bodies, and thus have the capacity for consciousness and memory again.
      - 9y ago

Nazare 9y ago

> I'd like to see a proof of concept that your brain IS indeed the seat of your consciousness. The concept of "multiple realizability" says that a brain/consciousness/mental state can arise from non-biological matter, like digital computers. Modern proponents of this view do not view the brain as a seat of consciousness. To them, the view of a singular consciousness that houses in the brain like a theatre, is like a Descartesian illusion. Consciousness is distributed and all parts of "you" and your environment contribute. As for "out there": I am always a bit worried when archeologists unearth some treasures with our current state of technology. Likely, in a 100 years they will have much better methods to research and preserve unearthed treasure, and so we may be spoiling their more effective methods by digging it up and putting it on display. What if, after the 8th great AI hype, another YC company claims it has found successful methods to upload your consciousness, which is 100% fatal to your preserved brain in the process? You'll be stuck in the MVP FORTRAN digital world of uploaded consciousnesses. Or maybe they take our current infatuation with AGI to mean permission to create a huge ensemble of preserved brains, filling an entire room like did our 1960s computers, because it turned out that consciousness is only transferable to biological "organisms", and the only way to superhuman intelligence is to combine 20 human intelligences. The AI hype bubble will become a literal fulfilling prophecy. I personally would either jail these consciousnesses (honor their will, but put them in a boring digital world with Archive.org access to the internet) or put them on display, much like we do with preserved Egyptian Pharaoh's. I'd call it Earth, and make Trump a president.

noetic_techy 9y ago
This was quite hilarious to envision. Thank you. I myself worry that even if somehow we combine all these domain specific AI's with some approximation of a neo-cortex, and then every AI researcher says "See, there it is! Behold the AGI, told you there was nothing to it!", all we're REALLY going to get is an approximation of the real thing. Then we'll be too busy playing with our new AGI's to realize we missed the mark long ago. The new treasure preservation technology never even arises because victory was declared prematurely. We hit another mark instead of the real thing. Constant refinement of the bizarro superman version of real consciousness. I hypothesize the REAL mark being that somewhere in the brain, quantum effects, maybe in microtubules, couple with some yet to be conceived discoveries or epithanies, act as a conduit to your real consciousness software existing somewhere "out there" in the simulation ether lets suppose. Extrapolate the AI hype and one day the super intelligent Matrioshka planet size brain emerges (YC backed of course), pours over ancient abandoned research and points out "Hey, you dumb monkeys missed something Yuge here eons ago..."

matte_black 9y ago

If you've ever suffered from Depersonalization/Derealization disorder, it will become very clear that your mind and your consciousness are not the same thing at all. DP/DR is quite possibly the worst mental disorder you can ever fall into. It is the feeling where you are convinced everything around you is not real, you see people you know, you know they are significant, but they just feel like actors in a show and you don't care. You look in the mirror, and you don't recognize yourself as you, you just see a body. Worse, your body just moves around the world and accomplish things on autopilot, while you watch everything unfold on what feels like a screen, completely detached. If you died, you wouldn't care much, because you wouldn't feel it's you dying, in fact you want to die, because you are trapped in a hell from which there is no escape. I've never suffered from this disorder, but I investigated it for some time and am convinced it reveals something we do not yet understand about our existence in this world. The source of our existence may not be where we think it is.

DoreenMichele 9y ago
Eh, easily attributed to brain chemistry and not necessarily anything woo.
- matte_black 9y ago
  There is no known cause. Or cure for that matter.
  - DoreenMichele 9y ago
    That's not really a rebuttal of my point. I have a serious medical condition. I frequently suffer somatopsychic side effects. It's incredible what chemistry can make you feel. I happen to also believe in a lot of woo stuff. But the reality is that no known cause is not proof that there is a spiritual explanation or cause.
    - SherlockeHolmes 9y ago
      this isn’t an explanation. this is a very poor woman’s hypothesis. If you were to provide verifiable relationships between chemical imbalances and whatever relevant physical abnormalities in a brain and a person’s mental state, you’d be up for a nobel prize. to achieve this relationship, you’d first need to develop a quantifiable way to represent a person’s mental state. for which, you’d be up for another nobel prize.

resource0x 9y ago

And this antenna does not necessarily reside in your brain. Fascinating TED lecture: E.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBGt5OeAQFk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBGt5OeAQFk

cgio 9y ago

Even assuming that it is an antenna, then if your antenna is the only one receiving your consciousness then it is the seat of your consciousness or equivalent, i.e. its reasonable to assume that if you restore the antenna you will restore the consciousness in place (I am leveraging the fact that you called it a seat). On the other side of the coin, with embodied consciousness you could raise other potential issues with preservation of the brain alone. Connection between gut bacteria and mental conditions are being researched with some results confirming hypotheses there.

noetic_techy 9y ago
I completely agree that leaving out the gut-brain connection may be a huge error in our quest for General AI simulation. I'm not sure that I agree that simulating neurons in silicon form is equivalent to restoring the antenna though. There may be a quantum link that only neurons have functionally. They are already finding quantum effects in plants: https://horizon-magazine.eu/article/vibrating-molecules-help-plants-make-use-quantum-effects_en.html https://horizon-magazine.eu/article/vibrating-molecules-help... And that our brain contains micro-tubules that exhibit quantum effects: https://phys.org/news/2014-01-discovery-quantum-vibrations-microtubules-corroborates.html https://phys.org/news/2014-01-discovery-quantum-vibrations-m... Maybe they ARE the antenna.
earenndil 9y ago
Well, maybe if that theory is true, then if the connection is "severed," so to speak, there's no way to restore it?

tbabb 9y ago

We know all the matter that the brain is made out of, and we know what interactions are possible with that matter, because we've done extensive experiments with particle accelerators. If there were something that affected baryonic matter besides the four fundamental forces, we would know about it. In other words, we know with certainty that there is no physical mechanism by which some "external consciousness" could influence the brain. So the answer to that hypothesis is a definitive "nope, that's not how it works." CalTech quantum physicist Sean Carrol explains: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x26a-ztpQs8&t=836 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x26a-ztpQs8&t=836

noetic_techy 9y ago
Maybe you don't need to make as grand a leap outside of mainstream physics as you think: https://phys.org/news/2014-01-discovery-quantum-vibrations-microtubules-corroborates.html https://phys.org/news/2014-01-discovery-quantum-vibrations-m...

taneq 9y ago

The range of different effects that a brain injury can have on your mind is too great, IMO, for this to be true. Consider cases where people forget very specific classes of things, or gain or lose specific faculties, in response to neural trauma. Damage to the brain affects the functionality of the mind itself, not just how clearly the mind can see its inputs and convey its outputs.

tbabb 9y ago
See also: When you are drunk, it is not like you are fully lucid but unable to control your body or your mouth. Your mind/personality itself actually changes. And of course you cannot will yourself to become drunk. It is pretty trivial that the matter affects the mind, not vice versa.
AgentME 9y ago
Especially when you think about the studies on split-brain patients. That's hard to square away with the idea of our mind being somewhere else transmitting to us ... unless you hypothesize that for every person, there's two minds out there, each transmitting to half of your brain, and then your brain meshes their thoughts together ... but if your brain is capable of integrating the thoughts together, then the argument is weakening as clearly the brain has some thinking ability.
- taneq 9y ago
  Yeah, for every experiment / example / specimen we know of that changes some function F of the mind, it rules out the possibility of F being performed 'elsewhere' and the results simply being received. We're at the point now where your 'receiver' is doing basically all the work and, if it's connected to anything else, that thing just supplies formless 'mojo' that has no identifiable effect on the working of the mind.
projektir 9y ago
I'm not sure what that person's version of the antenna idea is, but mine generally implies the brain is still in charge of the actual effects themselves, but needs somewhere to send it all to. The "somewhere" isn't chemical, and is just a receiver, and can't do anything if the sender (the brain) is damaged. The "somewhere" is distinguished due to the fact that a given person is a specific person and not another person (if you deny this, this makes ethics and emphatic transfer unworkable, which doesn't seem right).

Veedrac 9y ago

The trivial dismissal of most of these problems is to realize that whatever features we have must have evolved, and it would be a statistical miracle for the substrate that evolution discovered to just happen to be uniquely capable of dualism.

AgentME 9y ago
Also, does every animal with a brain have a dualist mind out there too? What's the limit? Does a worm with a few hundred neurons have a non-physical mind connection? Does your digestive system with its millions of neurons have its own non-physical mind out there too?

khazhoux 9y ago

This idea has zero basis. It's a mind-brain version of Russell's Teapot: I claim there is a teapot floating between Earth and Mars, and I challenge you to prove otherwise! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot

yters 9y ago
It's what the majority of the world believes, and science has no idea what consciousness is. So, there is zero basis parent is wrong. Plus, there are all kinds of problems and contradictions if the mind reduces to matter.
- istjohn 9y ago
  If only reality conformed to democratic norms...
  - yters 9y ago
    It usually does, hence why they are democratic.
- dqpb 9y ago
  >It's what the majority of the world believes This has never been a good proxy for truth. It is also completely irrelevant given that the majority of the world has never studied neuroscience. >science has no idea what consciousness is Not true. Neuroscience has discovered a lot about consciousness. I recommend Principles of Neural Science if you're interested: https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Neural-Science-Fifth-Kandel/dp/0071390111 https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Neural-Science-Fifth-Kande... >Plus, there are all kinds of problems and contradictions if the mind reduces to matter. Such as?
  - yters 9y ago
    Most of our life is lived off of beliefs the majority of the world believes. It is only an extremely small subset that we've reduced to science and technology. Perhaps you can explain what science has discovered about consciousness. As far as I know, the closest is a network analysis metric used to signify whether something is conscious. But that does not tell us what consciousness is, only some of the necessary conditions, if that. Here is a list of problems off the top of my head regarding material minds: - Math is inherently immaterial. I cannot destroy the number 1. Infinity cannot physically exist. Negative numbers, zero, imaginary numbers, the real number line do not correspond to physical objects. - If our mind is material, there is no way we can know any kind of truth. Truth doesn't really have meaning. Yet we do know some degree of truth. - If consciousness is a particular configuration, then the same configuration is the same consciousness, which would imply instantaneous awareness of two completely distinct parts of the universe by the same consciousness with two copies of the configuration. - Free will and qualia have no meaning in a materialistic worldview, yet are essential to just about everything we do everyday.

csomar 9y ago

The burden of proof is on you to prove that there is a "quantum antenna". This is like the guys who says "prove to me god doesn't exist". Well, it doesn't work that way. You came to me with the "god exists" or "there is an antenna that connects my brain to some magic world". You prove that it is there and show me how it works.