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> They will engage skeptics in a debate on the nature of consciousness, and Bandyopadhyay and his team will couple microtubule vibrations from active neurons to
by thirdtruck 13y ago
> They will engage skeptics in a debate on the nature of consciousness, and Bandyopadhyay and his team will couple microtubule vibrations from active neurons to play Indian musical instruments. “Consciousness depends on anharmonic vibrations of microtubules inside neurons, similar to certain kinds of Indian music, but unlike Western music, which is harmonic,” Hameroff explains.
Did they really posit a connection between quantum and sonic vibrations (a huge and "woo-woo-y" leap) in the context of consciousness?
> “The origin of consciousness reflects our place in the universe, the nature of our existence. Did consciousness evolve from complex computations among brain neurons, as most scientists assert? Or has consciousness, in some sense, been here all along, as spiritual approaches maintain?” ask Hameroff and Penrose in the current review.
And they're suggesting that consciousness is intrinsic to quantum systems? I think I missed some of the connections between the two.
For that matter, I'm still of a position that the very idea of "consciousness" is an artifact of the brain's anthropocentric and self-image-preserving post ergo hoc systems, as opposed to anything concrete. Compare it to software: we "see" operating systems, drivers, apps, and the like, but those are all labels of our invention. It's ultimately nothing but ones and zeros.
- omarchowdhury 13y agoWay to conflate the qualitative into the quantitative, the mark of materialism.
- jessaustin 13y agoMore details, please.
- omarchowdhury 13y agohttp://www.academia.edu/882409/The_Reign_of_Quantity_and_Signs_of_the_Times_Rene_Guenon http://www.academia.edu/882409/The_Reign_of_Quantity_and_Sig...
- thirdtruck 13y agoI don't always cite "tl;dr". But when I do, it's in regards to over 300 pages of half-century-old metaphysical text. But on a more serious note, is a more concise counter-argument available, one that takes the latest discoveries of neuroscience into account? And if I see any appeals to consequences in the explanation, I won't bother reading more of it.
- thirdtruck 13y agoYou have correctly identified my position. Congratulations? I assume there's a larger discussion about the challenge of disambiguating quora et al from neurological heuristics embedded in that observation.
- selimthegrim 13y agoReally, raags as molecular vibrations? Now I've heard it all. Which wavelength is thumri? At the risk of a terrible pun, as they say in Hindi, "Whose raag are they chanting to (alaapna)"? Anharmonic in this sense does not mean "pentatonic scale" (or 6 or 12 tones). Anharmonic means I add a perturbation term to the harmonic oscillator and my sums over oscillator strengths end up evaluating differently. It is a common beginning exercise in QM and QFT to calculate anharmonic corrections for simple cases like phi^4 [1][2] [1] http://www.kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~kyodo/kokyuroku/contents/pdf/0968-4.pdf http://www.kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~kyodo/kokyuroku/contents/pd... [2] http://books.google.com/books?id=AeOaij02QcwC&pg=PA57&lpg=PA57&dq=C.M.Bender+and+T.T.Wu&source=bl&ots=I5IWTzPUNZ&sig=N_mTXQbtLsiNZsuKq3dXHvTnW9M&hl=en&sa=X&ei=du_ZUsy6EcaxoQTR2IHQDg&ved=0CFkQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&q=C.M.Bender%20and%20T.T.Wu&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=AeOaij02QcwC&pg=PA57&lpg=PA...