- Consciousness: why a leading theory has been branded ‘pseudoscience’ The Conversation Indonesia
- The Science of Consciousness Is Having a Rumble The Atlantic
- Even if a Leading Theory of Consciousness Known as Integrated Information Theory is Wrong, That Doesn’t Mean it’s Pseudoscience, Argues Anil Seth. Nautilus Magazine
- Attack on Top Consciousness Theory Springs From Abortion Politics Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence
- Nobody knows how consciousness works – but top researchers are fighting over which theories are really science The Conversation Indonesia
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Tag Archives: consciousness
Even if a Leading Theory of Consciousness Known as Integrated Information Theory is Wrong, That Doesn’t Mean it’s Pseudoscience, Argues Anil Seth. – Nautilus Magazine
- Even if a Leading Theory of Consciousness Known as Integrated Information Theory is Wrong, That Doesn’t Mean it’s Pseudoscience, Argues Anil Seth. Nautilus Magazine
- Nobody knows how consciousness works – but top researchers are fighting over which theories are really science Deccan Herald
- Attack on Top Consciousness Theory Springs From Abortion Politics Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence
- Nobody knows how consciousness works — but top researchers are fighting over which theories are really science Down To Earth Magazine
- Is Consciousness Part of the Fabric of the Universe? Scientific American
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Exposing Brain Tissue to Psilocybin Provides Insights Into Consciousness, Depression and Anxiety
Summary: Investigating how psychedelics such as psilocybin act on serotonin receptors, researchers shed new light on how the drugs affect consciousness and assist in treating a range of mental health disorders.
Source: Allen Institute
If an epilepsy patient needs brain surgery, their brain surgeon often extracts a piece of tissue the size of a sugar cube from the outermost layer to access the regions responsible for the seizures. This excised lump is typically discarded as medical waste since it is far from the diseased site.
But to neuroscientists like Jonathan Ting, Ph.D., this brain nugget is “the most precious piece of matter in the universe.”
Ting, Associate Investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, a division of the Allen Institute, and his team receive brain tissue removed during surgery and willingly donated by patients to uncover the workings of living human brain cells. Ting and others at the Allen Institute for Brain Science aim to build a “periodic table” of brain cell types to categorize the brain by its cellular building blocks.
Understanding what happens at the cellular level can help scientists better understand the larger experiences in the mind, including learning, consciousness, and even psychedelic experiences.
For the past two years, Ting and his colleagues have been sending brain samples on trips with magic mushrooms.
By dosing the excised pieces of brain with psilocybin, the psychoactive ingredient in hallucinogenic shrooms, the team wants to understand how individual neurons respond to the drug.
There is growing evidence and ongoing trials that show psilocybin as a potential therapeutic for depression, anxiety, PTSD and other psychiatric conditions, Ting said. However, little is known about how psilocybin works in the human brain, either its hallucinatory actions or its ability to ameliorate psychiatric disorders.
“It’s striking that all of this work is ongoing in the clinic on human patients without a deep understanding of what the drug does at the mechanistic level,” Ting said. “Our idea is to study them at the single-cell level and try to see what these drugs are doing in specific brain cell types and regions.”
Psilocybin mimics serotonin, a neurochemical messenger that cells release to regulate mood, and binds to certain kinds of serotonin receptors on various brain cells, said Meanhwan Kim, Ph.D., Ting’s colleague and a neuroscientist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science.
To look at what happens to cells exposed to the drug, the team used a technique called Patch-seq to capture electrical activity, 3D shape and gene expression of individual neurons bathed in psilocybin.
They hypothesized that the psychedelic drug would hyperactivate all the cells carrying the specific serotonin receptor, but instead, some of these cells activated, some deactivated and, notably, most did not respond.
These receptors are present in multiple parts of the brain so the scientists are now broadening their search to sample cells from different regions, as well as studying the same neurons in mice, where they’re also developing new tools to home in on these specific cell types.
The team is presenting their findings Saturday Nov. 12 at the Society for Neuroscience 2022 conference in San Diego. Although they don’t have an explanation for these findings yet, bringing awareness to the peculiar cellular mechanisms of psilocybin might lead to further research on how the drug works and what it can be used for.
Can we separate the trip from the medicine?
Psilocybin is a Schedule I substance, deemed by the United States Drug Enforcement Administration as highly addictive and difficult to obtain for medical use and research purposes under the Controlled Substances Act. It took the researchers almost a year to gain the licensing to use the drug, and the team is required to keep it in a passcode-protected safe in the lab.
But changing perceptions about psilocybin and other psychedelics are driving “a renaissance in psychedelic research,” said Christof Koch, Ph.D., chief scientist of the Allen Institute’s MindScope Program, who is also part of the team studying the drug’s action.
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With the help of psychotherapists, patients using the drug report a dissolution of their sense of self and feel connected with the universe, gaining a positive outlook on life, said Koch. Such actions could underlie psychedelics’ ability to treat conditions like depression and anxiety.
“Having these mystical experiences, the patient is able to overcome their depression or reframe that depression and return to a more baseline mental being,” Koch said. “It really seems to restore sort of the wellness and balance in the life of the patient. It’s quite magical”
Ting wonders if scientists can separate the trip from the medicine. If so, would the stigma against psychedelics resolve? But to Koch, the two features may be inseparable.
“We don’t know yet, but I strongly suspect that you cannot separate the two. Hallucinating is an essential part of the way these drugs work,” Koch said.
It’s not clear yet how long these therapeutic effects last. Many studies only looked up to six months after treatment, Koch said, adding that more research is needed to measure psilocybin’s long-term effectiveness and safety. Psychedelics cause profound experiences and even with their growing scientific interest and social acceptance, they must be approached with caution, he said.
“They’re powerful substances. They’re powerful medicine, so one has to handle them with a great deal of care,” Koch said.
About this psychedelics and psychopharmacology research news
Author: Leila Okahata
Source: Allen Institute
Contact: Leila Okahata – Allen Institute
Image: The image is in the public domain
Original Research: The findings were presented at Neuroscience 2022
A New Explanation for Consciousness
Summary: A new theory of consciousness suggests decisions are made unconsciously, then about half a second later, they become conscious.
Source: Boston University
Consciousness is your awareness of yourself and the world around you. This awareness is subjective and unique to you.
A Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine researcher has developed a new theory of consciousness, explaining why it developed, what it is good for, which disorders affect it, and why dieting (and resisting other urges) is so difficult.
“In a nutshell, our theory is that consciousness developed as a memory system that is used by our unconscious brain to help us flexibly and creatively imagine the future and plan accordingly,” explained corresponding author Andrew Budson, MD, professor of neurology.
“What is completely new about this theory is that it suggests we don’t perceive the world, make decisions, or perform actions directly. Instead, we do all these things unconsciously and then—about half a second later—consciously remember doing them.”
Budson explained that he developed this theory along with his co-authors, philosopher Kenneth Richman PhD, at Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences and psychologist Elizabeth Kensinger, PhD from Boston College, to explain a series of phenomena that could not be easily understood with prior theories of consciousness.
“We knew that conscious processes were simply too slow to be actively involved in music, sports, and other activities where split-second reflexes are required. But if consciousness is not involved in such processes, then a better explanation of what consciousness does was needed,” said Budson, who also is Chief of Cognitive & Behavioral Neurology, Associate Chief of Staff for Education, and Director of the Center for Translational Cognitive Neuroscience at the Veterans Affairs (VA) Boston Healthcare System.
According to the researchers, this theory is important because it explains that all our decisions and actions are actually made unconsciously, although we fool ourselves into believing that we consciously made them.
So, we can say to ourselves, we’re just going to have one spoonful of ice cream and, the next thing we know, the container is empty—because our conscious mind is not controlling our actions.
“Even our thoughts are not generally under our conscious control. This lack of control is why we may have difficulty stopping a stream of thoughts running through our head as we’re trying to go to sleep, and also why mindfulness is hard,” adds Budson.
Budson and his coauthors consider a number of neurologic, psychiatric, and developmental disorders to be disorders of consciousness including Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias, delirium, migraine, schizophrenia, dissociative identity disorder, certain types of autism and more.
Lastly, their paper provides a roadmap as to how clinicians, educators and individuals can best improve behavior and gain knowledge, by using clinical and teaching methods that can be effective in shaping both the conscious mind and the unconscious brain.
With further exploration, this work may allow patients to improve problem behaviors such as overeating, help us understand the ways in which brain structures support memory, and even provide insight into philosophical issues around free will and moral responsibility.
These findings appear online in the journal of Cognitive and Behavioral Neurology.
Funding: This work was supported by NSF grant BCS-1823795 to EAK and NIH grant P30-AG072978 to AEB.
About this consciousness research news
Author: Gina DiGravio
Source: Boston University
Contact: Gina DiGravio – Boston University
Image: The image is in the public domain
Original Research: Open access.
“Consciousness as a Memory System” by Andrew Budson et al. Cognitive and Behavioral Neurology
Abstract
See also
Consciousness as a Memory System
We suggest that there is confusion between why consciousness developed and what additional functions, through continued evolution, it has co-opted. Consider episodic memory. If we believe that episodic memory evolved solely to accurately represent past events, it seems like a terrible system—prone to forgetting and false memories.
However, if we believe that episodic memory developed to flexibly and creatively combine and rearrange memories of prior events in order to plan for the future, then it is quite a good system.
We argue that consciousness originally developed as part of the episodic memory system—quite likely the part needed to accomplish that flexible recombining of information.
We posit further that consciousness was subsequently co-opted to produce other functions that are not directly relevant to memory per se, such as problem-solving, abstract thinking, and language.
We suggest that this theory is compatible with many phenomena, such as the slow speed and the after-the-fact order of consciousness, that cannot be explained well by other theories.
We believe that our theory may have profound implications for understanding intentional action and consciousness in general.
Moreover, we suggest that episodic memory and its associated memory systems of sensory, working, and semantic memory as a whole ought to be considered together as the conscious memory system in that they, together, give rise to the phenomenon of consciousness.
Lastly, we suggest that the cerebral cortex is the part of the brain that makes consciousness possible, and that every cortical region contributes to this conscious memory system.
Is the body key to understanding consciousness? | Consciousness
In 2018, billionaire Silicon Valley entrepreneur Sam Altman paid a startup called Nectome $10,000 to preserve his brain after he dies and, when the technology to do so becomes available, to upload his memories and consciousness to the cloud.
This prospect, which was recently popularised in Amazon Prime’s sci-fi comedy series Upload, has long been entertained by transhumanists. Although theoretically possible, it is rooted in the flawed idea that the brain is separate from the body, and can function without it.
The idea that the mind and brain are separate from each other is usually attributed to the 17th-century mathematician and philosopher René Descartes, who believed that the body is made of matter, and the mind of some other, non-physical substance.
Modern brain research rejects the distinction between the physical and the mental. Most neuroscientists agree that what we call “the mind” is made of matter. The mind is hard to define, but the consensus now is that it emerges from the complex networks of cells in the brain.
But most people still view the mind and brain as being distinct from the body. In 2016, four prominent brain researchers published an article summarising what we know about consciousness. It begins: “Being conscious means that one is having an experience … to see an image, hear a sound, think a thought or feel an emotion.”
It is, however, becoming increasingly clear that the mind/brain and body are intimately linked, and that the body influences our thoughts and emotions. Being conscious does not just mean having awareness of the outside world. It means being aware of one’s self within one’s surroundings. The way we experience our body is central to how we perceive our self.
Phantom limbs are a striking demonstration of the importance of the body for self-consciousness. They were described in the mid-16th century by the barber-surgeon Ambroise Paré, who reportedly amputated several hundred limbs a day during the Italian war of 1542-46.
“Verily it is a thing wondrous, strange and prodigious,” he wrote. “The patients who have many months after the cutting away of the leg grievously complained that they yet felt exceeding great pain of that leg cut off.” At that time, however, few survived the operation, so the phenomenon was seen only rarely, and dismissed as a delusion.
Advances in medicine and military technology changed this. The invention of a bullet called the Minié ball with its greater accuracy, range, and muzzle velocity, increased the number of amputations, while the introduction of anaesthetics and antiseptics improved the survival rates of soldiers who went under the knife.
And so it was that the neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell, who amputated countless arms and legs on the battlefields of the American civil war, came to see that phantom limbs are the rule rather than an exception, experienced by the vast majority of amputees.
The medical community was still sceptical of the phenomenon, however, so Mitchell initially described his observations as a short story, The Case of George Dedlow, published in the Atlantic Monthly in July 1866. The fictional titular character was a composite of the hundreds of thousands of soldiers who were maimed and mutilated during the conflict. He lost all four limbs, one by one, to become “a useless torso, more like some strange larval creature than anything of human shape”, reduced to “[a] fraction of a man”.
Mitchell’s story was so vivid that readers took it as factual, and believed that he was a real patient being treated at Philadelphia’s South Street “Stump” hospital. Many wrote him letters of support, some tried to visit him, and some even raised money for his care. But the story played a large part in bringing the phenomenon into the realms of medical science, and Mitchell went on to become the first elected president of the American Neurological Association.
Mitchell recognised phantom limbs as a disturbance of bodily self-consciousness, in which the amputee retains awareness of the missing limb, and feels as if it is still attached to their body. In some amputees, the phantom disappears within weeks or months of amputation. In others, it persists for decades.
Phantoms do not appear only in the form of missing limbs. Women may experience phantom breasts after mastectomy; men can experience phantom erections after amputation of a cancerous penis; and there are reports of phantom eyes, noses, teeth, and even phantom haemorrhoids, bowel movements and gas after surgical removal of the rectum.
Phantom sensations occur because the brain creates a dynamic model of the body by integrating tactile and visual information with limb position signals from the muscles and tendons. This model, variously called the “body schema” or “body image”, is crucial for both the perception and control of the body. But when a limb or other body part is removed, the schema is not properly updated, and so it retains an imprint of the missing part. As a result, the individual remains conscious of the missing part – often, even more so than of their existing body parts.
Most of us could imagine few things worse than having a limb amputated. But some people want nothing more.
Take Australian Robert Vickers. “Before I was 10 years old I knew my left leg somehow didn’t belong,” Vickers told ABC Radio National in 2009, “and that my body would not be as I felt it should be until I had the leg amputated precisely halfway up the thigh.”
Vickers harboured this strange desire, and suffered in silence, for more than 30 years. It made him severely depressed, and he received psychotherapy. He was prescribed antidepressants, tranquillisers, and antipsychotics, and received electroconvulsive therapy, but to no avail. He tried, without success, to damage his leg in various ways, in order to force an amputation.
Then, at 41, he submerged the unwanted limb in dry ice until the pain became unbearable. His wife drove him to hospital, where he received the amputation he had wanted for so long. “I left hospital two weeks later with my desired stump, and life changed for the better from that day. In the 24 years since, I only regret not doing it sooner.”
Vickers is perhaps the best documented case of body integrity identity disorder (BIID), an extremely rare condition, of which fewer than 500 other cases have been reported to date. For most of his life, Vickers believed his experience to be unique, but others suffering from the condition describe it in similar terms.
All report a fascination with amputees, and a desire to amputate, from an early age. The desire usually becomes obsessive, to the extent that they will try self-amputation. Use of dry ice appears to be the most common method, and some have used homemade guillotines or shotguns. In another well-documented case, a 79-year-old New Yorker travelled to Mexico and paid an unqualified doctor $10,000 to amputate his leg. He died of gangrene a week later.
BIID first appeared in medical literature in a 1977 study published in the Journal of Sex Research. The authors of this study – including Greg Furth, himself a “wannabe” amputee – described the condition as a paraphilia, or an abnormal sexual behaviour, in which the stump is fetishised because it resembles a phallus, and named it “apotemnophilia”, meaning “amputation love”.
Some BIID sufferers do indeed report a sexual aspect to their desire to amputate. But they invariably describe their experience in terms of self-identity. One participant in Melody Gilbert’s 2003 documentary Whole says that he “finally became a person late in life” after blowing his own leg off with a shotgun. Another participant told the film-makers that “by taking the leg away, I’m actually more of a person than I was before… I’ve corrected the body that was wrong.” Vickers has stated that he felt incomplete with his left leg, and that he only became “whole” after its removal.
The condition was renamed body integrity identity disorder to reflect this. BIID is a disturbance of bodily self-consciousness with a neurological basis, as are phantom limbs. There is evidence to suggest that it occurs because the affected limb is not incorporated into the body schema as it develops in early childhood. Amputation is not offered as a treatment for BIID sufferers, but it could be argued that making it available to them would minimise their risk of self-harm.
Research into bodily awareness is leading us to rethink the nature of consciousness. Our understanding of how the brain works will progress only when we stop observing the brain in isolation, and start thinking of it as one part of a system that includes the body and its environment.
An understanding of how brain and body interact is critical for understanding the phenomena of phantom limbs and BIID. Such interactions also play a key role in mental health conditions such as anxiety and depression, and in eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa. All of these conditions cause symptoms in the body that may be accompanied by disturbances in how the brain interprets those symptoms.
Yet the links between the brain and body are still under-appreciated. Only by taking the body into consideration will we gain a better understanding of these conditions and, it is to be hoped, develop effective treatments for them.
The new understanding of bodily self-consciousness leads us to some surprising conclusions. If bodily awareness is the basis of self-consciousness, then it follows that bumblebees, and even robots, may possess basic consciousness.
A study published in 2020 by researchers in Germany showed that bees can accurately judge gaps between obstacles relative to their wingspan, and reorient their bodies accordingly to avoid inflight collisions. Researchers at Columbia University’s Creative Machines Lab have developed a starfish-shaped robot with an in-built body schema, which can adjust its gait after having a limb removed. The latest version of this robot creates its own body schema from experience.
If self-consciousness is based in bodily awareness, then it is unlikely that a lab-grown “mini-brain” could ever become conscious, as some ethicists have claimed. By the same token, transhumanists’ claim that we will one day gain immortality by uploading our brains to supercomputers will probably always be science fiction.
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Body Am I: The New Science of Self-Consciousness by Moheb Costandi is published by MIT Press (£22.50). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
Exploring the Mechanisms Underlying Disorders of Consciousness
Summary: Study reveals altered brain dynamics in those with unresponsive arousal syndrome, previously known as “vegetative state”, and in those with minimally conscious state.
Source: University of Liege
A study by the Human Brain Project (HBP), led by scientists from the University of Liège (Belgium), has explored new techniques that may help distinguish between two different neurological conditions in patients with severe brain damage and or in a coma. The results of this study have just been published in open access in the journal eLife.
One of the greatest challenges in the field of neurology and critical care medicine is to correctly diagnose the level of consciousness of a patient in a coma due to a severe brain injury.
Scientists at the Human Brain Project (HBP) – an international project involving more than 500 researchers that aims to gain a deeper understanding of the complex structure and function of the human brain through a unique interdisciplinary approach at the interface of neuroscience and technology – have been exploring new techniques that could help distinguish between two different neurological conditions.
The results of this new study, just published in the journal eLife, reveal important information about the mechanisms of consciousness disorders. The team of researchers from the University of Liège (GIGA Consciousness Research Unit, Coma Science Group, Faculty of Medicine) and the University Hospital of Liège (Belgium), the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Spain), the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (Netherlands), among others, assessed the states of functional brain networks as a marker of consciousness in order to potentially distinguish between patients in unresponsive wakefulness syndromes (UWS) and the state of minimal consciousness (MCS).
“Previously known as the ‘vegetative state’, unresponsive arousal syndrome is the state of a patient who wakes up from coma, i.e. opens his or her eyes, but does not respond to the environment and verbal commands, showing only reflex movements,” explains Rajanikant Panda, first author of the paper and researcher at the GIGA Consciousness and Coma Science Group at ULiège.
“In contrast, patients in a minimally conscious state show minimal signs of awareness such as following movements with their eyes or moving a finger when asked.”
The differentiation of these states is essential for proper diagnosis, prognosis and rehabilitation treatment and is linked to important quality of life and even end-of-life decisions.
The study included 34 healthy controls, 30 minimally conscious patients and 14 unresponsive awake patients. These patients were sent from all over Europe to the Coma Science Group – led by neurologist Steven Laureys – and the University Hospital of Liege for a second opinion.
Data sharing and analysis benefited from the EBRAINS infrastructure of the HBP and the collaboration of the study teams led by Jitka Annen (Coma Science Group/ ULiège Faculty of Medicine) and Prejaas Tewarie (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam).
We used state-of-the-art techniques to assess different aspects of brain structure and its relationship to network dynamics,” says Jitka Annen, “and demonstrated that these techniques were sensitive in detecting clinically relevant differences in the diagnosis of patients with the minimally conscious state and unresponsive wakefulness syndrome”.
Specifically, the researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data to analyse dynamic functional connectivity, or how brain regions interact with each other, between neuronal populations and its association with structural white matter connections.
“We observed that, compared to the minimally conscious state, patients with unresponsive wakefulness syndrome showed less activity in functional networks, reduced metastability (a state of stable functional connectivity different from the natural steady state) and increased coupling of functional connectivity to the structural framework,” explains Aurore Thibaut, FNRS researcher at GIGA Consciousness and Coma Science Group.
“This new approach also revealed a brain network that most differentiates between unconscious and conscious states – a network encompassing subcortical regions and frontotemporoparietal cortical areas.”
These findings support previous ideas about the mechanisms underlying the loss and recovery of consciousness, such as the global neural workspace theory and the mesocircuit hypothesis, which suggest that the failure to recover consciousness is related to a loss of connectivity between subcortical and frontoparietal brain areas, as well as a loss of the range of functional network states.
“The study, funded in part by the HBP, the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research (FNRS) and the Generet Prize of the King Baudouin Foundation, is a good example of how current theories of consciousness are challenged by real clinical neuroimaging data and how the knowledge generated translates into better patient care after severe brain injury,” concludes Jitka Annen, senior co-author of the paper and scientist at the GIGA Consciousness research unit.
About this neurology research news
Author: Press Office
Source: University of Liege
Contact: Press Office – University of Liege
Image: The image is credited to University of Liege
See also
Original Research: Open access.
“Disruption in structural–functional network repertoire and time-resolved subcortical fronto-temporoparietal connectivity in disorders of consciousness” by Rajanikant Panda et al. eLife
Abstract
Disruption in structural–functional network repertoire and time-resolved subcortical fronto-temporoparietal connectivity in disorders of consciousness
Understanding recovery of consciousness and elucidating its underlying mechanism is believed to be crucial in the field of basic neuroscience and medicine. Ideas such as the global neuronal workspace (GNW) and the mesocircuit theory hypothesize that failure of recovery in conscious states coincide with loss of connectivity between subcortical and frontoparietal areas, a loss of the repertoire of functional networks states and metastable brain activation.
We adopted a time-resolved functional connectivity framework to explore these ideas and assessed the repertoire of functional network states as a potential marker of consciousness and its potential ability to tell apart patients in the unresponsive wakefulness syndrome (UWS) and minimally conscious state (MCS). In addition, the prediction of these functional network states by underlying hidden spatial patterns in the anatomical network, that is so-called eigenmodes, was supplemented as potential markers.
By analysing time-resolved functional connectivity from functional MRI data, we demonstrated a reduction of metastability and functional network repertoire in UWS compared to MCS patients. This was expressed in terms of diminished dwell times and loss of nonstationarity in the default mode network and subcortical fronto-temporoparietal network in UWS compared to MCS patients.
We further demonstrated that these findings co-occurred with a loss of dynamic interplay between structural eigenmodes and emerging time-resolved functional connectivity in UWS.
These results are, amongst others, in support of the GNW theory and the mesocircuit hypothesis, underpinning the role of time-resolved thalamo-cortical connections and metastability in the recovery of consciousness.
Physicist Claims To Have Solved the Mystery of Consciousness
Scientists have developed a new conceptual and mathematical framework to understand consciousness from a relativistic point of view.
According to the theory, all that’s needed to solve the hard problem of consciousness is to change our assumptions about it. When we realize that consciousness is a physical, relativistic phenomenon, the mystery of consciousness naturally dissolves.
How do 3 pounds of brain tissue create thoughts, feelings, mental images, and a detailed inner world?
The ability of the brain to create consciousness has baffled people for millennia. The mystery of consciousness lies in the fact that each of us has subjectivity, with the ability to sense, feel, and think. In contrast to being under anesthesia or in a dreamless deep sleep, while we’re awake we don’t “live in the dark” — we experience the world and ourselves. However, it remains a mystery how the brain creates the conscious experience and what area of the brain is responsible.
According to Dr. Nir Lahav, a physicist from Bar-Ilan University in Israel, “This is quite a mystery since it seems that our conscious experience cannot arise from the brain, and in fact, cannot arise from any physical process.” As bizarre as it sounds, the conscious experience in our brain, cannot be found or reduced to some neural activity.
“Think about it this way,” says Dr. Zakaria Neemeh, a philosopher from the University of Memphis, “when I feel happiness, my brain will create a distinctive pattern of complex neural activity. This neural pattern will perfectly correlate with my conscious feeling of happiness, but it is not my actual feeling. It is just a neural pattern that represents my happiness. That’s why a scientist looking at my brain and seeing this pattern should ask me what I feel, because the pattern is not the feeling itself, just a representation of it.” Because of this, we can’t reduce the conscious experience of what we sense, feel, and think to any brain activity. We can only find correlations to these experiences.
After more than 100 years of neuroscience, we have very strong evidence that the brain is responsible for the creation of our conscious abilities. So how is it possible that these conscious experiences can’t be found anywhere in the brain (or in the body) and can’t be reduced to any neural complex activity?
This mystery is known as the hard problem of consciousness. It is such a difficult problem that until a couple of decades ago only philosophers discussed it. Even today, although we have made huge progress in our understanding of the neuroscientific basis of consciousness, still there is no satisfactory theory that explains what consciousness is and how to solve this hard problem.
In the journal Frontiers in Psychology, Dr. Lahav and Dr. Neemeh recently published a new physical theory that claims to solve the hard problem of consciousness in a purely physical way. According to the researchers, when we change our assumption about consciousness and assume that it is a relativistic phenomenon, the mystery of consciousness naturally dissolves. In the paper, the authors developed a conceptual and mathematical framework to understand consciousness from a relativistic point of view. According to Dr. Lahav, the lead author of the paper, “consciousness should be investigated with the same mathematical tools that physicists use for other known relativistic phenomena.”
In order to understand how relativity dissolves the hard problem, think about a different relativistic phenomenon, constant velocity. First, let’s choose two observers, Alice and Bob. Bob is on a train that moves with constant velocity and Alice watches him from the platform. There is no absolute physical answer to the question “what is the velocity of Bob?” The answer is dependent on the frame of reference of the observer. From Bob’s frame of reference, he will measure that he is stationary and Alice, with the rest of the world, is moving backward. But from Alice’s frame of reference, Bob is the one that’s moving and she is stationary. They have opposite measurements, yet both of them are correct, just from different frames of reference.
We find the same situation in the case of consciousness because, according to the theory, consciousness is a relativistic phenomenon. Now Alice and Bob are in different cognitive frames of reference. Bob will measure that he has conscious experience, but Alice just has brain activity with no sign of the actual conscious experience. On the other hand, Alice will measure that she is the one that has consciousness and Bob has just neural activity with no clue of its conscious experience.
Just as in the case of velocity, although they have opposite measurements, both of them are correct, but from different cognitive frames of reference. As a result, because of the relativistic point of view, there is no problem with the fact that we measure different properties from different frames of reference. The fact that we cannot find the actual conscious experience while measuring brain activity is because we’re measuring from the wrong cognitive frame of reference.
According to the new theory, the brain doesn’t create our conscious experience, at least not through computations. The reason that we have conscious experience is because of the process of physical measurement. In a nutshell, different physical measurements in different frames of reference manifest different physical properties in these frames of reference, although these frames measure the same phenomenon.
For example, suppose that Bob measures Alice’s brain in the lab while she’s feeling happiness. Although they observe different properties, they actually measure the same phenomenon from different points of view. Because of their different kinds of measurements, different kinds of properties have been manifested in their cognitive frames of reference.
For Bob to observe brain activity in the lab, he needs to use measurements of his sensory organs like his eyes. This kind of sensory measurement manifests the substrate that causes brain activity – the neurons. Consequently, in his cognitive frame Alice has only neural activity that represents her consciousness, but no sign of her actual conscious experience itself.
However, for Alice to measure her own neural activity as happiness, she uses different kinds of measurements. She doesn’t use sensory organs, she measures her neural representations directly by interaction between one part of her brain with other parts. She measures her neural representations according to their relations to other neural representations.
This is a completely different measurement than what our sensory system does and, as a result, this kind of direct measurement manifests a different kind of physical property. We call this property conscious experience. As a result, from her cognitive frame of reference, Alice measures her neural activity as conscious experience.
Using the mathematical tools that describe relativistic phenomena in physics, the theory shows that if the dynamics of Bob’s neural activity could be changed to be like the dynamics of Alice’s neural activity, then both will be in the same cognitive frame of reference and would have the exact same conscious experience as the other.
Now Dr. Lahav and Dr. Neemeh want to continue to examine the exact minimal measurements that any cognitive system needs in order to create consciousness. The implications of such a theory are huge. It can be applied to determine which animal was the first animal in the evolutionary process to have consciousness, which patients with consciousness disorders are conscious, when a fetus or baby begins to be conscious, and which AI systems already today have a low degree (if any) of consciousness.
Reference: “A Relativistic Theory of Consciousness” by Nir Lahav and Zachariah A. Neemeh, 12 May 2022, Frontiers in Psychology.
DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.704270
Physicist Claims To Have Solved the Mystery of Consciousness
Scientists have developed a new conceptual and mathematical framework to understand consciousness from a relativistic point of view.
According to the theory, all that’s needed to solve the hard problem of consciousness is to change our assumptions about it. When we realize that consciousness is a physical, relativistic phenomenon, the mystery of consciousness naturally dissolves.
How do 3 pounds of brain tissue create thoughts, feelings, mental images, and a detailed inner world?
The ability of the brain to create consciousness has baffled people for millennia. The mystery of consciousness lies in the fact that each of us has subjectivity, with the ability to sense, feel, and think. In contrast to being under anesthesia or in a dreamless deep sleep, while we’re awake we don’t “live in the dark” — we experience the world and ourselves. However, it remains a mystery how the brain creates the conscious experience and what area of the brain is responsible.
According to Dr. Nir Lahav, a physicist from Bar-Ilan University in Israel, “This is quite a mystery since it seems that our conscious experience cannot arise from the brain, and in fact, cannot arise from any physical process.” As bizarre as it sounds, the conscious experience in our brain, cannot be found or reduced to some neural activity.
“Think about it this way,” says Dr. Zakaria Neemeh, a philosopher from the University of Memphis, “when I feel happiness, my brain will create a distinctive pattern of complex neural activity. This neural pattern will perfectly correlate with my conscious feeling of happiness, but it is not my actual feeling. It is just a neural pattern that represents my happiness. That’s why a scientist looking at my brain and seeing this pattern should ask me what I feel, because the pattern is not the feeling itself, just a representation of it.” Because of this, we can’t reduce the conscious experience of what we sense, feel, and think to any brain activity. We can only find correlations to these experiences.
After more than 100 years of neuroscience, we have very strong evidence that the brain is responsible for the creation of our conscious abilities. So how is it possible that these conscious experiences can’t be found anywhere in the brain (or in the body) and can’t be reduced to any neural complex activity?
This mystery is known as the hard problem of consciousness. It is such a difficult problem that until a couple of decades ago only philosophers discussed it. Even today, although we have made huge progress in our understanding of the neuroscientific basis of consciousness, still there is no satisfactory theory that explains what consciousness is and how to solve this hard problem.
In the journal Frontiers in Psychology, Dr. Lahav and Dr. Neemeh recently published a new physical theory that claims to solve the hard problem of consciousness in a purely physical way. According to the researchers, when we change our assumption about consciousness and assume that it is a relativistic phenomenon, the mystery of consciousness naturally dissolves. In the paper, the authors developed a conceptual and mathematical framework to understand consciousness from a relativistic point of view. According to Dr. Lahav, the lead author of the paper, “consciousness should be investigated with the same mathematical tools that physicists use for other known relativistic phenomena.”
In order to understand how relativity dissolves the hard problem, think about a different relativistic phenomenon, constant velocity. First, let’s choose two observers, Alice and Bob. Bob is on a train that moves with constant velocity and Alice watches him from the platform. There is no absolute physical answer to the question “what is the velocity of Bob?” The answer is dependent on the frame of reference of the observer. From Bob’s frame of reference, he will measure that he is stationary and Alice, with the rest of the world, is moving backward. But from Alice’s frame of reference, Bob is the one that’s moving and she is stationary. They have opposite measurements, yet both of them are correct, just from different frames of reference.
We find the same situation in the case of consciousness because, according to the theory, consciousness is a relativistic phenomenon. Now Alice and Bob are in different cognitive frames of reference. Bob will measure that he has conscious experience, but Alice just has brain activity with no sign of the actual conscious experience. On the other hand, Alice will measure that she is the one that has consciousness and Bob has just neural activity with no clue of its conscious experience.
Just as in the case of velocity, although they have opposite measurements, both of them are correct, but from different cognitive frames of reference. As a result, because of the relativistic point of view, there is no problem with the fact that we measure different properties from different frames of reference. The fact that we cannot find the actual conscious experience while measuring brain activity is because we’re measuring from the wrong cognitive frame of reference.
According to the new theory, the brain doesn’t create our conscious experience, at least not through computations. The reason that we have conscious experience is because of the process of physical measurement. In a nutshell, different physical measurements in different frames of reference manifest different physical properties in these frames of reference, although these frames measure the same phenomenon.
For example, suppose that Bob measures Alice’s brain in the lab while she’s feeling happiness. Although they observe different properties, they actually measure the same phenomenon from different points of view. Because of their different kinds of measurements, different kinds of properties have been manifested in their cognitive frames of reference.
For Bob to observe brain activity in the lab, he needs to use measurements of his sensory organs like his eyes. This kind of sensory measurement manifests the substrate that causes brain activity – the neurons. Consequently, in his cognitive frame Alice has only neural activity that represents her consciousness, but no sign of her actual conscious experience itself.
However, for Alice to measure her own neural activity as happiness, she uses different kinds of measurements. She doesn’t use sensory organs, she measures her neural representations directly by interaction between one part of her brain with other parts. She measures her neural representations according to their relations to other neural representations.
This is a completely different measurement than what our sensory system does and, as a result, this kind of direct measurement manifests a different kind of physical property. We call this property conscious experience. As a result, from her cognitive frame of reference, Alice measures her neural activity as conscious experience.
Using the mathematical tools that describe relativistic phenomena in physics, the theory shows that if the dynamics of Bob’s neural activity could be changed to be like the dynamics of Alice’s neural activity, then both will be in the same cognitive frame of reference and would have the exact same conscious experience as the other.
Now Dr. Lahav and Dr. Neemeh want to continue to examine the exact minimal measurements that any cognitive system needs in order to create consciousness. The implications of such a theory are huge. It can be applied to determine which animal was the first animal in the evolutionary process to have consciousness, which patients with consciousness disorders are conscious, when a fetus or baby begins to be conscious, and which AI systems already today have a low degree (if any) of consciousness.
Reference: “A Relativistic Theory of Consciousness” by Nir Lahav and Zachariah A. Neemeh, 12 May 2022, Frontiers in Psychology.
DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.704270
A New Theory in Physics Claims to Solve the Mystery of Consciousness
Summary: Consciousness can not simply be reduced to neural activity alone, researchers say. A novel study reports the dynamics of consciousness may be understood by a newly developed conceptual and mathematical framework.
Source: Bar-Ilan University
How do 1.4 kg of brain tissue create thoughts, feelings, mental images, and an inner world?
The ability of the brain to create consciousness has baffled some for millennia. The mystery of consciousness lies in the fact that each of us has subjectivity, something that is like to sense, feel and think.
In contrast to being under anesthesia or in a dreamless deep sleep, while we’re awake we don’t “live in the dark” — we experience the world and ourselves. But how the brain creates the conscious experience and what area of the brain is responsible for this remains a mystery.
According to Dr. Nir Lahav, a physicist from Bar-Ilan University in Israel, “This is quite a mystery since it seems that our conscious experience cannot arise from the brain, and in fact, cannot arise from any physical process.”
As strange as it sounds, the conscious experience in our brain, cannot be found or reduced to some neural activity.
“Think about it this way,” says Dr. Zakaria Neemeh, a philosopher from the University of Memphis, “when I feel happiness, my brain will create a distinctive pattern of complex neural activity. This neural pattern will perfectly correlate with my conscious feeling of happiness, but it is not my actual feeling. It is just a neural pattern that represents my happiness. That’s why a scientist looking at my brain and seeing this pattern should ask me what I feel, because the pattern is not the feeling itself, just a representation of it.”
As a result, we can’t reduce the conscious experience of what we sense, feel and think to any brain activity. We can just find correlations to these experiences.
After more than 100 years of neuroscience we have very good evidence that the brain is responsible for the creation of our conscious abilities. So how could it be that these conscious experiences can’t be found anywhere in the brain (or in the body) and can’t be reduced to any neural complex activity?
This mystery is known as the hard problem of consciousness. It is such a difficult problem that until a couple of decades ago only philosophers discussed it and even today, although we have made huge progress in our understanding of the neuroscientific basis of consciousness, still there is no adequate theory that explains what consciousness is and how to solve this hard problem.
Dr. Lahav and Dr. Neemeh recently published a new physical theory in the journal Frontiers in Psychology that claims to solve the hard problem of consciousness in a purely physical way.
According to the authors, when we change our assumption about consciousness and assume that it is a relativistic phenomenon, the mystery of consciousness naturally dissolves. In the paper the researchers developed a conceptual and mathematical framework to understand consciousness from a relativistic point of view.
According to Dr. Lahav, the lead author of the paper, “consciousness should be investigated with the same mathematical tools that physicists use for other known relativistic phenomena.”
To understand how relativity dissolves the hard problem, think about a different relativistic phenomenon, constant velocity. Let’s choose two observers, Alice and Bob, where Bob is on a train that moves with constant velocity and Alice watches him from the platform. there is no absolute physical answer to the question what the velocity of Bob is.
The answer is dependent on the frame of reference of the observer.
From Bob’s frame of reference, he will measure that he is stationary and Alice, with the rest of the world, is moving backwards. But from Alice’s frame Bob is the one that’s moving and she is stationary.
Although they have opposite measurements, both of them are correct, just from different frames of reference.
Because, according to the theory, consciousness is a relativistic phenomenon, we find the same situation in the case of consciousness.
Now Alice and Bob are in different cognitive frames of reference. Bob will measure that he has conscious experience, but Alice just has brain activity with no sign of the actual conscious experience, while Alice will measure that she is the one that has consciousness and Bob has just neural activity with no clue of its conscious experience.
Just like in the case of velocity, although they have opposite measurements, both of them are correct, but from different cognitive frames of reference.
As a result, because of the relativistic point of view, there is no problem with the fact that we measure different properties from different frames of reference.
The fact that we cannot find the actual conscious experience while measuring brain activity is because we’re measuring from the wrong cognitive frame of reference.
According to the new theory, the brain doesn’t create our conscious experience, at least not through computations. The reason that we have conscious experience is because of the process of physical measurement.
In a nutshell, different physical measurements in different frames of reference manifest different physical properties in these frames of reference although these frames measure the same phenomenon.
For example, suppose that Bob measures Alice’s brain in the lab while she’s feeling happiness. Although they observe different properties, they actually measure the same phenomenon from different points of view. Because of their different kinds of measurements, different kinds of properties have been manifested in their cognitive frames of reference.
For Bob to observe brain activity in the lab, he needs to use measurements of his sensory organs like his eyes. This kind of sensory measurement manifests the substrate that causes brain activity – the neurons.
Consequently, in his cognitive frame Alice has only neural activity that represents her consciousness, but no sign of her actual conscious experience itself. But, for Alice to measure her own neural activity as happiness, she uses different kind of measurements. She doesn’t use sensory organs, she measures her neural representations directly by interaction between one part of her brain with other parts. She measures her neural representations according to their relations to other neural representations.
This is a completely different measurement than what our sensory system does and, as a result, this kind of direct measurement manifests a different kind of physical property. We call this property conscious experience.
As a result, from her cognitive frame of reference, Alice measures her neural activity as conscious experience.
See also
Using the mathematical tools that describe relativistic phenomena in physics, the theory shows that if the dynamics of Bob’s neural activity could be changed to be like the dynamics of Alice’s neural activity, then both will be in the same cognitive frame of reference and would have the exact same conscious experience as the other.
Now the authors want to continue to examine the exact minimal measurements that any cognitive system needs in order to create consciousness.
The implications of such a theory are huge. It can be applied to determine which animal was the first animal in the evolutionary process to have consciousness, when a fetus or baby begins to be conscious, which patients with consciousness disorders are conscious, and which AI systems already today have a low degree (if any) of consciousness.
About this consciousness and physics research news
Author: Elana Oberlander
Source: Bar-Ilan University
Contact: Elana Oberlander – Bar-Ilan University
Image: The image is in the public domain
Original Research: Open access.
“A Relativistic Theory of Consciousness” by Nir Lahav et al. Frontiers in Psychology
Abstract
A Relativistic Theory of Consciousness
In recent decades, the scientific study of consciousness has significantly increased our understanding of this elusive phenomenon. Yet, despite critical development in our understanding of the functional side of consciousness, we still lack a fundamental theory regarding its phenomenal aspect.
There is an “explanatory gap” between our scientific knowledge of functional consciousness and its “subjective,” phenomenal aspects, referred to as the “hard problem” of consciousness. The phenomenal aspect of consciousness is the first-person answer to “what it’s like” question, and it has thus far proved recalcitrant to direct scientific investigation.
Naturalistic dualists argue that it is composed of a primitive, private, non-reductive element of reality that is independent from the functional and physical aspects of consciousness. Illusionists, on the other hand, argue that it is merely a cognitive illusion, and that all that exists are ultimately physical, non-phenomenal properties.
We contend that both the dualist and illusionist positions are flawed because they tacitly assume consciousness to be an absolute property that doesn’t depend on the observer.
We develop a conceptual and a mathematical argument for a relativistic theory of consciousness in which a system either has or doesn’t have phenomenal consciousness with respect to some observer.
Phenomenal consciousness is neither private nor delusional, just relativistic. In the frame of reference of the cognitive system, it will be observable (first-person perspective) and in other frame of reference it will not (third-person perspective). These two cognitive frames of reference are both correct, just as in the case of an observer that claims to be at rest while another will claim that the observer has constant velocity.
Given that consciousness is a relativistic phenomenon, neither observer position can be privileged, as they both describe the same underlying reality. Based on relativistic phenomena in physics we developed a mathematical formalization for consciousness which bridges the explanatory gap and dissolves the hard problem.
Given that the first-person cognitive frame of reference also offers legitimate observations on consciousness, we conclude by arguing that philosophers can usefully contribute to the science of consciousness by collaborating with neuroscientists to explore the neural basis of phenomenal structures.
Anne Heche is in a coma and has not regained consciousness since car crash | Anne Heche
Anne Heche has not regained consciousness since shortly after she crashed her car in Los Angeles on Friday.
Initial reports about the actor’s condition said she was “stable” and firefighters said she had spoken to rescuers as she was pulled from the wreckage.
However, on Monday a spokesperson for Heche, 53, said: “Despite previous reports that Heche was stable, shortly after the accident, [she] became unconscious, slipping into a coma and is in critical condition.”
Heche’s representatives added: “At this time Anne is in extreme critical condition. She has a significant pulmonary injury requiring mechanical ventilation and burns that require surgical intervention.
On Saturday Heche’s publicist had said that her condition was “stable” and her family asked for “thoughts and prayers”. The previous morning, reports suggested Heche had been driving at speed down a street before crashing into a house.
This caused what the Los Angeles Fire Department described as a “heavy fire”, which took a number of firefighters an hour to extinguish.
The occupant of the house escaped without injury but the building was deemed uninhabitable. A fundraising page has been set up to help the owner replace her belongings and home.
The nextdoor neighbours told Fox News that the car had ploughed right through the house. “The windows were broken, so I opened the back door of the car. She [Heche] answered and said she was not OK, so that was tough. I know they didn’t get her out of the car until the fire was pretty much put out.”
Heche, who has two sons, is best known for her roles in films such as Psycho, Donnie Brasco, Six Days Seven Nights and Cedar Rapids.