Archive 2

27/03/09: Albert Bandura's chapter in 'Are We Free? Psychology of Freewill' attacks the methodology of classic studies that form the basis of the mainstream confidence that free will does not exist. Nisbett & Wilson (1977)are criticised for not studying their subjects thoughts prior to their actions. Libet is criticised for failing to look at the basis of longer term decisions as opposed to flexing of fingers. Wegner's idea of an 'interpretative module' with no connection to the production of action is seen as an energy extravagence that evolution would not of selected for.

23/03/09: I have added a short review of 'Are We Free? Psychology and Freewill' several chapters of which have already been mentioned below. The book contains chapters both by well-known mainstream determinists putting forward the familiar theme that freewill is an illusion and by various dissident voices. It is useful for providing a forum for such voices, which are very much a minority in academic circles at the moment.

16/03/09: A chapter by Carol Dweck and Daniel Molden in 'Are We Free? Psychology and Free Will' reports a study comparing students who thought their intelligence and personalities were fixed and determined with those who thought they could influence them through the exercise of their will. Starting with the same standards at the beginning of an academic course, there was a constantly widening gap in favour of those who thought they could influence their performance. Studies also suggested that students thinking they could influence their performance were more resilient in the face of obstacles and challenges and less prone to becoming depressed about their performance.

10/03/09: In their chapter in 'Are We Free? Psychology and Free Will' Shariff Azim, Jonathan Schooler and Kathleen Vohs criticise the methodology of studies by Bargh and other mainstream investigators with respect to freewill. They claim that some studies contain a significant element of experimenter suggestion. They also argue that because an impression of freewill is sometimes (often in very artificial circumstances) illusory does not mean that it is always illusory, any more than the fact of visual illusions should be taken to mean that all vision is illusory.

03/03/09: Our latest 'Key Article' highlights a chapter by Michael Denton pointing out that protein and large elements in living tissue are designed in a way that is quite unlike human machinery. Denton ephasises the holistic nature of proteins, the basic building-blocs of organic life, in which most of a thousand atoms can all influence one another via quantum van der Waal forces and other interactions. This has obvious implications for the mainstream concept of brain/consciousness as a computer or machine.

27/02/09:  In 'Are We Free? Psychology and Free Will' David Myers discusses studies of people whose well being is better if they have more control over their daily lives. The stress created by over-regulated lives is supportive of the idea that humans have evolved a conscious freewill that is meant to be used.

25/02/09: In 'Are We Free? Psychology and Free Will' Roy Baumeister describes experiments that suggest that both deliberate control of impulses and rational deliberation between options are energy consuming processes in the brain. The fact that they are energy consuming undercuts the mainstream argument that conscious freewill can have no impact on the physical world because it is somehow non-physical.

17/02/09: George Ellis of the Mathematics Dept. at Cape Town University is sceptical of cosmology theories,
including the currently fashionable inflation theory. He argues that these theories tend to assume that aspects of quantum field theory pre-exist the universe, which begs the question of how such laws themselves came into existence. I see this as supportive of arguments for a mind-like and non-computable origin to the universe.

09/02/09: The Financial Melt-Down and the Practise of Consciousness Theory: At first glance there might not seem to be much connection between the recent financial catastrophe and consciousness theory. However, it may be possible to detect many similarities between financial and academic consciousness practise. In the first place, both involved the gathering of a large number of highly trained minds without achieving anything like the results that might have been hoped for. Beyond this, there has in both cases been a dismissive attitude towards evidence and related logical argument, and deference to a small number of gurus whose arguments were never closely examined, but accorded to what most people wanted to hear, resulting in a rigid orthodoxy. This can be further related to the fact that in both cases, all or nearly all those involved in the debate were financially dependent on the system, and would be removed or sidelined if they dissented.

09/02/09: The recent 'New Scientist' article entitled 'Where in the World is the Mind' does not bring very much that's new to the consciousness party. However, it does shine a welcome ray of light into one area of confusion, in making a distinction between the function of cognition or information processing and actual consciousness, albeit that a part of cognition is conscious. The article explores the idea that cognition relies not just on the brain processes but also inputs from the body and the external world. It is suggested that it is much more difficult such a case of 'extended mind' for consciousness.

27/01/09: Seth Lloyd of MIT has detected evidence suggesting that the effects of entanglement could survive after decoherence. More accurate equiment being developed might allow this to be tested later in 2009. Whilst this has no direct relevance to quantum coherence in living matter, it does suggest that the issues of entanglement and decoherence may be more compex than than the simplistic approach of Tegmark (2000) and those who have relied on his paper suggests.

19/01/09: Our latest summary/review looks at 'Emotion Explained' by Edmund Rolls of the Dept. of Experimental Psychology at Oxford University. This book is useful in respect of the processing of emotion in the brain especially as regards the orbitofrontal and the amygdala. As so often with this type of book, Rolls runs into problems, when he tackles consciousness and freewill. In sometimes feels that he would have done better to rely on his own knowledge and instincts. Instead, as is the common but often unsuccessful course, he relies on the crutch of a philosopher, who probably sees it as his role to prop up the Newtonian world picture, thus creating a circularity with the existing prejudices of conventional neuroscience. We are treated to the higher-order thoughts looking at lower-order thoughts idea, which essentially boils down to the idea that if one video camera looks at another one (or both?) will become conscious. Rolls himself doesn't seem that convinced. He admits that he hasn't really provided an explanation of consciousness. Why should higher-order processing feel like something, he asks. It just does he says.

His attempt on freewill is even less convincing. His description of emotional processing appears to give a causal role to conscious emotions, which conflicts with the deterministic orthodoxy of neuroscience. He tries to sidestep this one by pointing out that a lot of actions are based on unconscious processing. But this still doesn't get round the many action that he has himself linked to the conscious processing of emotions. At this point, he makes the surprising assertion that the question of determinism and freewill is not important, but we should just concentrate on which brain processes are involved with which decisions.

12/09/01: Jim Al-Khalili and Johnjoe McFadden look at the question of the first replicator in the origin of life on Earth in our latest/summary review. They conclude that for the first replicator to arise by chance from the primordial soup, one would need to expect the primordial soup to have a volume greater than that of the observable universe.

29/12/08: Mershin (2004a) is an experiment that demonstrates the involvement of the cytoskeleton in memory. This was one of the earlier predictions of Hameroff. While it does not amount to evidence for quantum involvement in either memory or consciousness, it does extend of functions of the cytoskeleton and point to its involvement in the wider functions of the brain.

22/12/08: Studies by Ouyang, M. & Awschalom, D. at the Center for Spintronics and Quantum Computing, University of California, Santa Barbara demonstrate the instantaneous transrer of spin coherence through molecular bridges. These structures are artificial and aimed at the development of quantum computers, but Hameroff has speculated that this type of quantum feature could be the basis for quantum computing in microtubules.

19/12/08: Again on the theme of free enquiry and independent thinking, it was interesting to read this morning's Financial Times. Although this refers to lack of independent as opposed to herd thinking in the financial sector and the consequent current financial disasters, it might be thought just as applicable to the difficulty in achieving independent thinking in controversial academic areas such as consciousness studies. In the FT, Aline van Duyn harks back to the dawn of feminism and Virginia Woolf's book 'A Room of One's Own', in which she states that a woman must have money and a room of her own in order to right. In the context of the 21st century, van Duyn says that anyone needs some space and money if they are to be creative.She points to the lack of independent or critical thinking in the financial world, and the readiness to uncritically accept some authoritative seal of approval. The hallmark of much the same approach can be seen all too often in consciousness studies, with reliance on particular papers or experiments that are glibly claimed to prove positions which they fail to do, or the even more glib statements that 'most whatevers agree', when one has the strong suspicion that this refers to unthought out knee jerk reactions.

15/12/08: For someone well known as a popular writer, Paul C. W. Davies could be seen to be comig out of the closet, in terms of giving support to the idea of quantum activity in biological matter. As an editor and contributor to the reently published 'Quantum Aspects of Life' he discusses the possibility that the origin of life on Earth required a form of quantum search engine to discover the very improbable arrangement of biomolecules that give rise to a replicator.

23/10/08: The scientific community has long held to the 'cognitive deficits hypothesis' according to which those with transcendental beliefs were irrational or just plain stupid. However a recent study published in the latest copy of the Journal of Consciousness Studies suggests that those with transcendal beliefs are more interested in rational understanding of the world, have greater appreciation of sensory impressions and have higher IQs than materialists. A study in 1983 did purport to show the opposite, but this focused on what might be regarded as superstitions, such as belief that 13 was unlucky, which unfortunately might be seen as another example of a tendency to both sleight of hand and focus on the trivial in this area.

17/10/08: Writing in Cosmos in early 2007, Steven Pinker surprises by adopting Colin McGinn's 'new mysterian' approach to consciousness. This argues that our brains that are evolved from those of apes are just not sophisticated enough to grasp the nature of subjective consciousness. This has some intuitive appeal, because of the ineffable nature of consciousness, when considered relative to the physical world. However, the idea sits more easily with a dualist/'spirit stuff' approach or with a quantum approach, where we are up against the counter intuitive qualities of quantum theory. However, Pinker is dismissive of quantum consciousness, only pausing to claim that Penrose's core argument is that quantum theory is weird, consciousness is weird, and perhaps the two are linked. This was actually the mocking response of Penrose's critics, but is here suggested to be Penrose's own main argument. The new mysterian approach is left to sit uneasily with Pinker's mainstream materialism since if consciounsess arises from the conventional mechanics of a brain that is fully described by classical physics, it is hard to conceive of it producing something that we could not understand.

15/10/08: Martin Plenio of Imperial Colleges lecture to the Royal Society on 14th October came as interesting footnote to the Engels et al paper on wave-like transfer of energy in photosynthetic systems, which to date is the best evidence for quantum activity in organic matter. The Engels paper was published in Nature in April 2007. Plenio suggested that there was likely to be some dephasing within photosynthetic systems, but that this could actually enhance rather decreasing the efficiency of transport of energy within the system.

13/10/08: Artificial Intelligence: The recent piece on artificial intelligence in the Financial Times (Digital Business: October 2nd) signifies the long retreat of the artificial intelligence sector from confidence in the near arrival of autonomous robots with the same/superior abilities to humans. As recently as the late 1990s, we were assured of the threat/promise of intelligent machines taking over control of the planet during the early years of this decade. Even 'expert systems' that originally seemed to be viewed as one step back from a full blown autonomous robot are now viewed as too complex. The idea here was that expert knowledge in one particular area would be loaded into a computer and used to solve problems. The knowledge in the heads of experts was to be expressed in algorithms. This appears to have involved major projects in the 1990s, but in practise there proved to be too much complexity to allow implementation of more than a small part of the programme. Nowadays, the artificial intelligence project appears to have scaled back still further to the search for patterns in nature and in masses of computer data. These concentrate on a 'bottom-up' approach in examining a great mass of detailed data. However, studies here suggest that in respect of human/animal perception the bottom up approach does not give the unique solutions that are needed, while the top down approach represents a non-polynomial problem, with so many possible options that no classical computer can reach solutions within a reasonable time. The relative failure of the artificial intelligence project, thus points towards the need for some form of quantum computing in the brain.

13/10/08: The Self: Ruth Millikans' book 'Varities of Meaning' that deals with meaning in respect of both purpose and representation takes an unexpected sideswipe at the convention that only animals that can recognise themselves in the mirror have a sense of self or self-consciousness. The list of these is short including mainly apes and dolphins, with elephants apparently a recent edition. Millikan herself describes how a kitten will investigate its image in a mirror and then the back of the mirror, but subsequently loose interest. However, Millikan does not regard the argument that the ability to interpret what is a mirror is an indication of the boundary between having and not having self consciousness as being coherent. She does not see why there should be such a distinction in terms of self in being able to attend to part of the body in a mirror and being able to attend to it in the normal way. Presumably, she thinks that the ability to interpret a mirror merely reflects the increased brain power of a minority of animals such as apes.

07/10/08: With relation to the previous blog about Laura Weed's very interesting work, it is interesting to read A.C. Graylings comment on consciousness in the October 4th copy of the New Scientist. He mentions the view that what we know when we understand a concept has to involve a link between a brain event and something in the world. This comes very close to Weed's idea that consciousness has to be based on direct first person/subjective experience of the world or qualia rather than computer-type problem solving.

05/09/08: The Structure of Thinking by Laura Weed is an important book for anybody who is disatisfied with mainstream consciousness studies. The author challenges conventional 20th century philosophy in respect of its attitude to the functioning of the mind. She argues that first person experience was squeezed out of the system, and its place taken by computer/logic type systems. She argues that contemporary neuroscience points to a larger role for direct experience, and further to this that the computer/logic based sorting, quantifying and abstract concept forming that happens in the brain cannot function without reference to the experiental input. This book represents an attack on the very foundations of the Dennett/Churchland orthodoxy.

23/07/08: This week I had a look at Edelman's recent book, prefaced by Emily Dickinson's thoughtful poem. The book has useful material relative to criticism of the brain/computer analogy, the binding problem and the self, but when it comes to consciousness there is a sizeable explanatory gap. Consciousness or the stangely named 'phenomenal transform' arises from signals in the thalamocortical area of the brain, but no explanation is offered as to how this is might happen, it's just stated to be so. In the end, Dickinson's poem may have more to tell us about consciousness.

21/07/08: Last week, I took a look at Paul Davies's recent book, the Goldilocks enigma. As a conventional book, it is mainly remarkable for opening the door just a chink to the involvement of mind in the development of the universe. Davies certainly feels that both life and consciousness have been sidelined too much in looking at the history of the universe. However, I find it hard to get on with his idea of quantum backward causation by existing life forms, a zany idea derived from the physicist, John Wheeler. It is not clear how the first lot of life forms emerged to start off the backward causation process. Apart from this the book queries the currently fashionable Inflation/Multiverse theory, and has a good detailed account of many of the examples of fine tuning in the universe, notably the fine tuned nature of the process for the creation of plentiful carbon in stars.

15/07/08: In today's review, I revisit 'The Astonishing Hypothesis', a much hailed book on consciousness by Francis Crick published in 1994. After a somewhat over the top start to the book, with the famous phrase claiming that 'we were nothing but a bunch of neurons', consciousness is hardly mentioned for the next 200 pages. When Crick does eventually get around to it, the most interesting part of the discussion is his promotion of the idea of the gamma synchrony, as a correlate of consciousness. Unfortunately, this interesting aspect appears to have been abandoned later, when it was discovered that the synchrony was with dendritic rather than axonal activity. Crick concludes with an attempt to dismiss freewill, which boils down to the fact that much brain processing is unconscious. He seems to think that decisions are issued like a slip of paper with an order, ignoring both the conscious effort involved in thought, and even the mainstream work of Damasion on the importance of emotion and bodily feelings to decision taking. In the end, the main significance of the book is probably its role in making consciousness studies respectable.

11/07/08: David Black's paper in the July issue of Journal of Consciousness Studies examines the relationship between the concept of spirituality and modern studies of consciousness/subjectivity. I noticed one or two points that appeared interesting. Black criticises Richard Dawkin's attitude to genes. Dawkins refers to genes having reproductive success, but Black argues that the concept of success is projected onto the gene by subjective consciousness. Values such as success are argued to be a property of the emergence of subjectivity, and are meaningless in terms of the gene itself.

A bit later, Black argues that mythological objects should not be dismissed as mere delusion, but viewed relative to the importance of phantansy in modern psychoanalysis.

Evolution & Consciousness: Later in the same issue of Journal of Consciousness Studies, Joseph Corabi and Brian Earl separately argue against epiphenomenalism. Both of these seem to argue against it from the point of view of the adaptive value of consciousness. I wonder if this is the most useful approach. It has certainly always been a very open question. The main point seems to be that evolution would not have continued to select for something that had no function. The function is harder to find. However, it has been suggested that the problem of the huge odds against life emerging from a soup of organic molecules, could be solved if certain configurations of these molecules came with a quantum search engine that favoured replicators. The source of such a configuration probably needs to be looked for in the original laws of physics, much in the same way that the ability of super nova to produce carbon, oxygen and other useful (for organic life) heavier atoms is found in the same laws. Once in place in the earlist replicators, quantum systems might have been selected for because they provided algorithms for perception, something that has eluded classical computing and robotics. All rather speculative, but worth thinking about in the absence of more satisfactory answers.

08/07/08: A further note on Damasio's book, 'Descartes' Error'. On pp. 99-101, he discusses a condition known as achromatopsia. With this condition, damage to the visual cortex leads not only to a loss of the ability to perceive the colour of external objects, but even to the ability to imagine colour, even though the patient used to have colour vision. This contrasts with cases with people have gone blind, where they are apparently still able to imagine and dream in colour.

This condition might be seen as interesting relative to the thought experiment of 'Mary the colour scientist'. This unfortunate woman is confined in a black and white prison until some point well into her adult life. She uses the time to study everything that is known about colour, but without ever having seen anything coloured. Finally, she is released into the multi-coloured world. Does she experience anything new relative to colours such as red, blue etc.? Common sense would suggest what she is experiences is a revelation. However, it probably won't surprise anyone familiar with modern consciousness studies to learn that a large segment of establishment scientists and philosophers in conscious studies have a variety of ingenious arguments to the contrary. However, the existence of achromatopsia would suggest that it is possible to know about colour even to the extent of having seen colour, but subsequently not be able to experience colour, pointing to a distinction between knowledge and conscious experience.

07/07/08: The implications of Antonio Damasio's book, Descartes' Error look to have never been fully worked out either by himself or those influenced by him. The main theme of the book was that emotions and bodily feelings could influence reasoning, and that reasoning was not a computer process isolated from emotion and the body.

What was not tackled in the book was that while rational processing can often be unconscious, a good proportion of emotions and bodily feelings are experienced subjectively, and it is often just this subjective experience that gives them their power to influence decisions. Damasio suggests that emotions and feelings cut through the process of reasoning that could otherwise become so complex that decisions could not be reached within a practical period of time.

It is perhaps worth considering that Damasio's idea that emotions and feelings cut through problems that are potentially too complex to resolve, bears a resemblance to Penrose's argument that the human brain has some feature that can beyond the axioms of a formal mathematical system.

Creativity: Damasio is also interesting in relation to creativity. He suggests that creativity comes from the covert ability of the unconscious to juxtapose concepts that appear diverse, but may have an unexpected kinship. Most such juxtapositions are useless, but the prefrontal may have a facility to screen these out, leaving the conscious mind only to consider the more plausible options.


03/07/08: I have just added a number of reviews of chapters in 'Does Consciousness Cause Behaviour' Eds. Susan Pockett et al. Much of this revolves round the Libet experiments and more recent experiments by Daniel Wegner that purport to show that conscious will is illusory. The Wegner experiments as described have something of the air of trick questions aimed at gleaning evidence for a pre-established metaphysical position. Unusually for consciosness studies quite a few writers have come out of the closet to oppose or at least query Wegner.

13/06/08: I have just received the latest volume of the Journal of Consciousness Studies, entitled 'Consciousness and Language' and based on a theme session at last year's 'Towards a Science of Consciousness'
conference in Budapest. I do not want to disparage the careful scholarship that may have gone into parts of this volume, or the usefulness of knowing more about the links between language and consciousness, but when I thumbed through this book, I really found myself wondering if any of it was taking us any nearer to understanding the nature of consciousness. In the 90s, this journal used to introduce us to leading minds such as Chalmers and Penrose, but as in much of consciousness studies, there does not seem to be any clear way forward.

10/06/08: Two reviews added this evening. 'Inflation Deflated' discusses recent contra indications on inflationary theory, which could represent a problem for multiverse theories, and a longer review of Mary Midgleys book, 'The Myths We live By, which contains stringent criticism of main stream scientific attitudes to the mind-body problem, particularly the undue influence of 17th century physics and philosophy at the expense of modern physics, which tends to be ignored by biologists and others.

03/06/08: Mind-Like Universe: Articles recently added extend an idea of Paul Davies that mind-like qualities might be implicated in the origin of the universe, without invoking a full blown form of intelligent design.

Two important aspects need to be considered, firstly that we have to accept the idea of something uncreated if we are to avoid an infinite regress. Even a quantum fluctuation in the vacuum implies something law-like and different from nothing at all. Secondly, the abscence of mind from physics, and some would say also consciousness from neuroscience, remain a problem.

At this point, it might be worth considering both Penrose's idea of non-computable mind-like qualities embedded in spacetime, and Bohm's idea of mind emerging from the implicate order that might underly relativity and quantum theory. These concepts share a common property with the concept of the uncreated in being outside the normal cause-and-effect of an algorithm-based determinstic universe.

Perhaps, we should envisage the Big Bang as something uncreated and non-computable exploding out of the pre-existing void. It might fine tune the laws of physics to give a ordered universe, but leave the rest of its development fairly open, and certainly without the prospect of divine intervention in its onward development. This might appear simpler than the currently fashionable multiverse, which may in any case not escape a fine tuning problem, and looks suspiciously contrived to both exclude an intelligent designer and rescue string theory from its problems.

03/06/08: The 31st May 2008 copy of 'New Scientist' carries an article on the work of Karl Friston's group which conceptualises the brain as a probability machine, an idea sometimes referred to as a Bayesian brain. The brain as probability machine makes predictions, which are constantly updated on the basis of new input. In for instance assessing the distance to an object the brain might decide on a range of possible values, of which some were more likely than others. The brain’s models of possible future developments would arise and be altered in a similar manner.

Existing studies of subjects’ estimates of the speed and location of objects, and of their predictions as to what is going to be said next in a conversation give some support to the idea that the brain works in this way. Friston has more recently surmised that the brain is geared to reducing its initial prediction errors. This is suggested to underlie the processes of learning and memory, with the brain adjusting its synaptic connections in order to achieve more accurate predictions. MRI studies by Friston’s group are claimed to support these studies. Faults that may arise in brain processes for the reduction of prediction errors are suggested to be responsible for some mental disorders.

30/05/08: Lee Smolin's idea of Cosmological Natural Selection is a refreshing change from inflationary based versions of the multiverse. Smolin suggests that black holes can spawn new universes, and that our universe has evolved, as a universe capable of supporting life from a long line of universes not capable of this. However the conditions necessary for the number of black holes that would eventually allow a life bearing universe to become likely, themselves look to be fine tuned.

29/05/08: Robert Collins, a philosopher at Messiah College, PA argues that the emergence of a multiverse from the inflationary phase of the early universe requires the prior specification of the equations of general relativity, as these describe process by which random bubble universe could emerge from the inflationary phase. This would appear to increase the amount of fine tuning required for the pre-inflationary universe.