HNY 2016 | What Is Consciousness?

YouTube via The Economist

Tom The Dancing Bug | Human Morality Made Simple

Ruben Bolling

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Perceptronium | A New Way To Look At Consciousness

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... MIT’s Max Tegmark is championing a new way of explaining [consciousness]: he believes that [it] is a state of matter.

By “matter,” he doesn’t mean that somewhere in the deep recesses of your brain is a small bundle of liquid, sloshing around and powering your sense of self and your awareness of the world. Instead, Tegmark suggests that consciousness arises out of a particular set of mathematical conditions, and there are varying degrees of consciousness—just as certain conditions are required to create varying states of vapor, water, and ice. In turn, understanding how consciousness functions as a separate state of matter could help us come to a more thorough understanding of why we perceive the world the way we do.

Most neuroscientists agonize over consciousness because it’s so difficult to explain. In recent years, though, they’ve tended to agree that a conscious entity must be able to store information, retrieve it efficiently, process it, and exist as a unified whole—that is, you can’t break consciousness down into smaller parts. These traits are calculable, Tegmark says. A case in point? We put labels on the strength of our current computer processing power. While they’re not human, some of our computers can operate independently, and we can use our knowledge of artificial intelligence to push these machines to new limits.

Tegmark calls his new state of matter “perceptronium.” From the Physics arXiv Blog:

Tegmark discusses perceptronium, defined as the most general substance that feels subjectively self-aware. This substance should not only be able to store and process information but in a way that forms a unified, indivisible whole. That also requires a certain amount of independence in which the information dynamics is determined from within rather than externally.

So if consciousness is a state of matter, he concludes, we might be able to apply what we know about consciousness to what we actually see.

[...] the problem is why we perceive the universe as the semi-classical, three dimensional world that is so familiar. When we look at a glass of iced water, we perceive the liquid and the solid ice cubes as independent things even though they are intimately linked as part of the same system. How does this happen? Out of all possible outcomes, why do we perceive this solution?

In other words, quantum mechanics dictates that the world we see is just one of an infinite number of possibilities. But why? Tegmark doesn’t have an answer, but his ideas demonstrate that there might be a more dynamic relationship between consciousness and other states of matter—that our ability to perceive the world is both a means to an end and also an end (an “object”) in itself.

Read more here. | Abstract

Killer Coaster

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“Euthanasia Coaster” is a hypothetical euthanasia machine in the form of a roller coaster, engineered to humanely – with elegance and euphoria – take the life of a human being. Riding the coaster’s track, the rider is subjected to a series of intensive motion elements that induce various unique experiences: from euphoria to thrill, and from tunnel vision to loss of consciousness, and, eventually, death. Thanks to the marriage of the advanced cross-disciplinary research in space medicine, mechanical engineering, material technologies and, of course, gravity, the fatal journey is made pleasant, elegant and ritualistic. Celebrating the limits of the human body but also the liberation from the horizontal life, this ‘kinetic sculpture’ is in fact the ultimate roller coaster: John Allen, former president of the famed Philadelphia Toboggan Company, once sad that “the ultimate roller coaster is built when you send out twenty-four people and they all come back dead. This could be done, you know.”

Julijonas Urbonas via Neatorama

Monkey Monday | Meditating Marmosets

Goeldi's Marmoset

At the Dutch Biomedical Primate Research Center, marmosets are participating in an experiment in neurofeedback. This is a technique that shows people their brain activity on a monitor and allows them to see what kind of thoughts and techniques get them the desired brainwaves. Once they understand the "trick" to achieving this state, they practice the same way a person would practice a physical activity. Amazingly, this can be done with marmosets as well. The marmosets see the monitors and eventually learn the tricks to meditation, if they are given a food reward after each time they succeed. The researchers however cannot explain the reason and goals of this trance-like state.

This creates an opportunity to filter out some bad data. People with ADHD know that the meditation is meant to help them concentrate, and people with depression know that it is meant to help them feel better. If they succeed, are they feeling better because of the brain waves, or just the attention, encouragement, and expectation of improvement? Since ADHD monkeys don't know why they're meditating, the placebo effect is neutralized, and scientists may be able to study if the actual techniques, or just the hope and attention, are helping people.

Neuroreport | io9

io9 | 25 Great Books By Legendary Scientists

#1. The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin

Alasdair Wilkins writes:

... here are twenty-five amazing books written by world-famous scientists. These are legendary texts, popular science explainers, personal memoirs, and controversial new theories, and they're all enduring monuments to the power of science.

The list includes books by James Watson, Jonas Salk, Richard Feynman, Margaret Mead, Jane Goodall, Richard Dawkins, Mary Leakey, and Primo Levi. The only nits I have to pick are the inclusion of The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud [I would nominate the two-volume Principles of Psychology by William James instead] and the absence of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Read the article and see the complete list at io9.

The Human Consciousness Project | Near Death Experiences

At 18 hospitals in the U.S. and U.K., researchers have suspended pictures, face up, from the ceilings in emergency-care areas. The reason: to test whether patients brought back to life after cardiac arrest can recall seeing the images during an out-of-body experience. People who have these near-death experiences often describe leaving their bodies and watching themselves being resuscitated from above, but verifying such accounts is difficult. The images would be visible only to people who had done that.

"We've added these images as objective markers," says Sam Parnia, a critical-care physician and lead investigator of the study, which hopes to include 1,500 resuscitated patients. Dr. Parnia declined to say whether any have accurately described the images so far, but says he hopes to report preliminary results next year. The study, coordinated by Southampton University's School of Medicine in England, is one of the latest and largest scientific efforts to understand the mystery of near-death experiences.

At least 15 million American adults say they have had a near-death experience, according to a 1997 survey—and the number is thought to be rising with increasingly sophisticated resuscitation techniques. In addition to floating above their bodies, people often describe moving down a dark tunnel toward a bright light, feeling intense peace and joy, reviewing life events and seeing long-deceased relatives—only to be told that it's not time yet and land abruptly back in an ailing body.

... Some investigators say the most remarkable thing about near-death reports is that the core elements are the same, among people of all cultures, races, religions and age groups, including children as young as 3 years old. In his new book, "Evidence of the Afterlife," Jeffrey Long, a radiation oncologist in Louisiana, analyzes 613 cases reported on the website of his Near Death Research Foundation and concludes there is only one plausible explanation: "that people have survived death and traveled to another dimension."

Much more at the Wall Street Journal

Via The Anomalist

Dr. Parnia's study is part of the Human Consciousness Project at the University of Southampton

How Pleasure Works

Yale University psychologist Paul Bloom is fascinated by how human beings make sense of the world around them—physical and social environs alike. Working with kids, he has explored seemingly simple questions like, What makes a dog a dog? What makes a fork a fork? Over and over, he says, their answers suggest that even for very young children, what something is cannot easily be reduced to how it looks. A child can understand, for instance, that something might look like a tiger but actually be a lion. Something might look like a picture of one person, but actually be another. Children, says Bloom, give us a clear glimpse into “essentialism”—a belief that there’s a deeper nature to things that makes them what they are.

Intrigued by the notion that essentialism might affect more than the cold-blooded activities of naming and categorization, Bloom set out to determine if it might apply more generally to how we respond to things, to what moves us—in other words, to pleasure. In his newly published book, How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like, Bloom delves into pleasures both sophisticated and gauche, universal and unique, real and imaginary. Drawing on his own research as well as studies in neuroscience, behavioral economics, and philosophy, he makes a powerful argument for essentialism at the crux of human pleasure… And why understanding pleasurable activities, from art to science to religion, is so critical to comprehending the human mind. Recently, Seed caught up with Bloom to learn more.

Yay for gauche pleasure!

Read more at Seed

Research Study On Anomalous Experiences

Jane Mackay | Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto

from "Sounding Art"

The Study of Human Experiences Project is a research website set up by Dr. Carlos S. Alvarado, Assistant Professor of Research in Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at the Division of Perceptual Studies of the University of Virginia. The project involves a random survey of the population of Richmond, Virginia, and an on-line survey ... Dr. Alvarado and his wife and co-investigator Dr. Nancy L. Zingrone are very interested in a wide variety of experiences that people live with every day from fantasy and dreams to life satisfaction and daily habits and beliefs to experiences that many people consider to be paranormal.

The questionnaire only takes a few minutes, and if you provide an email address, you will receive a report on the completed study.

Former New Hampshire Representative Makes Statement About The "Continued Presence Of Extraterrestrial Beings Here In The United States Of America"

Read a transcript at Gateway to Freedom.

YouTube via The Anomalist

"We Are All Connected"

I Am We | James Sebor

The Global Consciousness Project, also called the EGG Project, is an international, multidisciplinary collaboration of scientists, engineers, artists and others. We collect data continuously from a global network of physical random number generators located in 65 host sites around the world. The archive contains more than 10 years of random data in parallel sequences of synchronized 200-bit trials every second.

Our purpose is to examine subtle correlations that may reflect the presence and activity of consciousness in the world. We predict structure in what should be random data, associated with major global events. When millions of us share intentions and emotions the GCP/EGG network data show meaningful departures from expectation. This is a powerful finding based in solid science.

Subtle but real effects of consciousness are important scientifically, but their real power is more direct. They encourage us to help make essential, healthy changes in the great systems that dominate our world. Large scale group consciousness has effects in the physical world. Knowing this, we can use our full capacities for creative movement toward a conscious future.

Alex Tsakiris of Skeptiko interviews Tamas Borbely of Goldsmiths College and Dr. Peter Bancel of the Global Consciousness Project.