New stuff in neuroscience

To be fair, we don't know steve's background or history.

He may have had an incredibly frightening paranormal experience in his past, and the only way to function day-to-day is to constantly reinforce the idea that the frightening event DID NOT HAPPEN. He clings to his belief as his life raft, always one step away from being forced to face his fears and falling into an existential crisis.

Or maybe he just enjoys taking the path of least resistance. In any culture, the path of least resistance is to join the crowd. To be a follower. Authority will be happy to tell you how the world works - the easiest thing to do is just to go with it. In the present day western world, the easiest trend to follow is to learn and accept the materialist mythology.

He may even be a rare form of long-term troll who elicits reactions by acting as a caricature of a materialist. He gets a lot of attention by being the perfect example of the condescending, uninformed, science-worshipping materialist that many proponents imagine. He IS the embodiment of the materialist straw man. Like any straw man, It's hard to resist the temptation to knock him down. But if he's a troll, that's what he wants.

Any or none of these may be true, but we just don't know. But I do know that I have never seen him contribute to any discussion in a meaningful way, and after years of being here, he has never demonstrated that he has any deep understanding of the topics we discuss on this board. I am sure the new members and lurkers that he posts for are smart enough to determine this as well. I was a lurker for quite a while, and even then I could easily see that he contributed nothing here. That is why I eventually decided to just him on ignore. I suggest other members do the same.

However much I disagree with them at times, every other regular skeptic that posts here has at least attempted to engage with the material on some level beyond grade school comments like "this man is a fool". Maybe that is steve's true purpose on this board - to make the other skeptics look better by comparison.

Or he could just be old and borderline senile.
 
Raymond Tallis: The Religion of Neuroscience’s Greatest Blasphemer

There’s something deeply satisfying about the field of neuroscience taking a roundhouse to the face from a professor of geriatric medicine who hails from the same town as Morrissey.

The aforementioned Raymond Tallis has been on a rampage lately. Most recently he’s pointed out in an article in New Scientist the fallacious nature of applying something as calculating as science to explain something as subjective as human consciousness. Tallis sides with a small and much bullied group that don’t believe that consciousness is necessarily generated within the brain. As such, neuroscience isn’t equipped to investigate what it is that accounts for the human sense of self...

...What Tallis points out (and what I find I agree with) is that science itself is a faulty tool for such an investigation. As he puts it, “There is nothing in physical science that can explain why a physical object such as a brain should ascribe appearances/qualia to material objects that do not intrinsically have them.” He uses the example of a table: You say it’s a small table, I say it’s large, science says it’s 0.66 metres square. Small, large, love, hate, red, orange, good, evil. These concepts and each of their nuances that constitute subjectivity don’t belong to the realm of science, but they are what constitute human consciousness.

The pro-neuroscience side’s position is pretty simple: Where else would consciousness exist but in the brain? And since we can now see inside the human brain as it functions and watch it react to stimulus, we will in due course determine what system of these functions is responsible for creating our consciousness.

Where else but the brain would consciousness exist, indeed. I think that’s an even more interesting question than whether neuroscience can capably investigate consciousness.

=-=-=

Tallis: Think brain scans can reveal our innermost thoughts? Think again

"Increasing claims for neuroscience – that it can locate jealousy or Muslim fundamentalism – are ludicrous"

...The jewel in the neuroscientific crown is functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), justly described by Matt Crawford as "a fast-acting solvent of the critical faculties". It seems that pretty well any assertion placed next to an fMRI scan will attract credulous attention. Behind this is something that goes deeper than uncritical technophilia. It is the belief that you are your brain, and brain activity is identical with your consciousness, so that peering into the intracranial darkness is the best way of advancing our knowledge of humankind.

Alas, this is based on a simple error. As someone who worked for many years, as a clinician and scientist, with people who had had strokes or suffered from epilepsy, I was acutely aware of the extent to which living an ordinary life was dependent on having a brain in some kind of working order. It did not follow from this that everyday living is being a brain in some kind of working order. The brain is a necessary condition for ordinary consciousness, but not a sufficient condition.

You don't have to be a Cartesian dualist to accept that we are more than our brains. It's enough to acknowledge that our consciousness is not tucked away in a particular space, but is irreducibly relational. What is more, our moment-to-moment consciousness – unlike nerve impulses – is steeped in a personal and historical past and a personal and collective future, in cultures that extend beyond our individual selves. We belong to a community of minds, developed over hundreds of thousands of years, to which our brains give us access but which is not confined to the stand-alone brain. Studies that locate irreducibly social phenomena – such as "love", the aesthetic sense, "wisdom" or "Muslim fundamentalism" – in the function or dysfunction of bits of our brains are conceptually misconceived...
 
Consciousness without a cerebral cortex: a challenge for neuroscience and medicine.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17475053

"Abstract
A broad range of evidence regarding the functional organization of the vertebrate brain - spanning from comparative neurology to experimental psychology and neurophysiology to clinical data - is reviewed for its bearing on conceptions of the neural organization of consciousness. A novel principle relating target selection, action selection, and motivation to one another, as a means to optimize integration for action in real time, is introduced. With its help, the principal macrosystems of the vertebrate brain can be seen to form a centralized functional design in which an upper brain stem system organized for conscious function performs a penultimate step in action control. This upper brain stem system retained a key role throughout the evolutionary process by which an expanding forebrain - culminating in the cerebral cortex of mammals - came to serve as a medium for the elaboration of conscious contents. This highly conserved upper brainstem system, which extends from the roof of the midbrain to the basal diencephalon, integrates the massively parallel and distributed information capacity of the cerebral hemispheres into the limited-capacity, sequential mode of operation required for coherent behavior. It maintains special connective relations with cortical territories implicated in attentional and conscious functions, but is not rendered nonfunctional in the absence of cortical input. This helps explain the purposive, goal-directed behavior exhibited by mammals after experimental decortication, as well as the evidence that children born without a cortex are conscious. Taken together these circumstances suggest that brainstem mechanisms are integral to the constitution of the conscious state, and that an adequate account of neural mechanisms of conscious function cannot be confined to the thalamocortical complex alone."
 
Assuming you're referring to Pribram's work, Braude's critiques of holonomic mind theory is worth a read. I think there's a more specific criticism I need to find, but you get some of it in his criticism of Holographic Analysis of NDEs.

Not very worthwhile in the modern day. The Holographic Principle is stronger than ever in Physics. While there is little progress on the first blush of how holographic based ideas may help with an understanding of mind, there is no evident falsification of their potential to do so. There is only defintion and furthering research, such as Braude suggests would not have developed.

Braude best stab at it is:
"Regrettably, Ring speaks very loosely of thought-structures (247), and interacting thought-structures forming interference patterns. He never explains, however, what such structures are, or even what they could be."

G. Tononi, Balduzzi and others have developed decent working definitions for Integrated Information and are working hard on measuring when these structures may have casual output.
 
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2014-10-trio-nobel-medicine-prize-brain.html

British-American researcher John O'Keefe on Monday won the Nobel Medicine Prize with a Norwegian couple, May-Britt and Edvard Moser, for discovering an "inner GPS" that helps the brain navigate.
They earned the coveted prize for identifying brain cells enabling people to orient themselves in space, with implications for diseases such as Alzheimer's, the jury said.

"The discoveries of John O'Keefe, May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser have solved a problem that has occupied philosophers and scientists for centuries," it said.

"How does the brain create a map of the space surrounding us and how can we navigate our way through a complex environment?"

In 1971, O'Keefe discovered the first component of the system, finding that in lab rats, specific cells in the hippocampus were triggered when the animal was at a certain location in a room.

Other nerve cells were activated when the rat was at different places, leading O'Keefe to conclude these "place cells" formed a map of the room.

More than three decades later, in 2005, May-Britt and Edvard Moser discovered another piece of the invisible positioning system.

They identified "grid cells"—nerve cells which generate a coordinate system, rather like longitude and latitude, and allow the brain to make precise positioning and pathfinding.

Research into grid cells may give insights into how memories are created—and explain why when we recall events, we so often have to picture the location in our minds.
The jury noted that sufferers of Alzheimer's disease often lose their way and cannot recognise the environment.

A part of the brain where grid cells are located, called the entorhinal cortex, is closely linked to Alzheimer's, said Torkel Klingberg, a professor of cognitive neuroscience and member of the Nobel Assembly.

"That's one of the first places that are affected, so what these discoveries could lead to is the understanding of the symptoms in Alzheimer's and other diseases," he told AFP.

Prizewinner 'in shock'

May-Britt Moser told the Nobel Foundation that she was "in shock", and that her husband did not even know yet as he was on a plane to Munich.

"We have the same vision, we love to understand and we do that by talking to each other, talking to other people and then try to address the questions we are interested in, the best way we can think of," she said.

"And to be able to discuss this when you get an idea on the spot instead of (having to) plan a meeting in one or two or three weeks—that makes a huge difference."

The jury said the work had led to a "paradigm shift" in understanding how groups of specialised cells work together in the brain.

The question of place and navigation has occupied philosophers for centuries and was a central problem for German thinker Immanuel Kant, it said.

In comments, Andrew King, a professor of neurophysiology at the University of Oxford, said O'Keefe had "revolutionised our understanding" of how the brain makes sense of space.
Explore further: Norwegian brain researchers share Horwitz prize
Since the brain can do this should it not be able to create its own awareness?
 
Thanks to Radical Politik for the link:

Power failure: why small sample size undermines the reliability of neuroscience

A study with low statistical power has a reduced chance of detecting a true effect, but it is less well appreciated that low power also reduces the likelihood that a statistically significant result reflects a true effect. Here, we show that the average statistical power of studies in the neurosciences is very low. The consequences of this include overestimates of effect size and low reproducibility of results. There are also ethical dimensions to this problem, as unreliable research is inefficient and wasteful. Improving reproducibility in neuroscience is a key priority and requires attention to well-established but often ignored methodological principles.
 
Since the brain can do this should it not be able to create its own awareness?
I can follow the bits and understand the signalling, in a general way, how an internal space can be mapped to an external space. I see nothing about being aware in that particular space. Do you have a process model that delineates how bits get to be self-referential, without programmer assignment?

"Wet-ware" findings are important and lead to a deeper understanding. I have yet to read any that are outside of a cybernetic model, obeying Shannon/Weaver mathematics. They are not about the "hard problem". If you glean something that does - in published research - please post a link now!

It would be even better, if you can go to the research about the dual aspects of function discovered separately by the winners and tell us what you think it has to do with focal attention or awareness.
 
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Not very worthwhile in the modern day. The Holographic Principle is stronger than ever in Physics. While there is little progress on the first blush of how holographic based ideas may help with an understanding of mind, there is no evident falsification of their potential to do so. There is only defintion and furthering research, such as Braude suggests would not have developed.

Braude best stab at it is:

G. Tononi, Balduzzi and others have developed decent working definitions for Integrated Information and are working hard on measuring when these structures may have casual output.

Curious, why do you see the holographic concept as being stronger than ever? I see a shift among a few people in physics toward holism, but I don't know if that could be equated with the holographic ideas of Bohm? (Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of Bohm.)

I also suspect IIT is a bit confused given even Tononi seems unclear on what exactly what systems achieve consciousness. I also think Searle may be right that IIT rests on certain confusions about information as transfer of bits versus information as knowledge communicated by beings already capable of intentionality. (Admittedly the critiques I've read may have been taken into consideration by now. Haven't followed IIT's latest developments)
 
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Curious, why do you see the holographic concept as being stronger than ever? I see a shift among a few people in physics toward holism, but I don't know if that could be equated with the holographic ideas of Bohm? (Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of Bohm.)

I also suspect IIT is a bit confused given even Tononi seems unclear on what exactly what systems achieve consciousness. I also think Searle may be right that IIT rests on certain confusions about information as transfer of bits versus information as knowledge communicated by beings already capable of intentionality. (Admittedly the critiques I've read may have been taken into consideration by now. Haven't followed IIT's latest developments)
Thanks for the link, I always enjoy reading about D. Bohm's ideas.

The Holographic Principle got a boost from the "Black Hole Wars". It has nothing to do with mind, but the HP places an ontological structure into reality, that has special information properties. I think that natural evolution has exploited any "leverage" found in its reach. Because of this our bioinformatic capabilities will reflect the lay of the land.

It is a key logical deduction to grasp wholes and parts, and I suspect that a holographic level of activity enables mind to copy/mirror this seemingly abstract structure. That wholes form readily in materials (grain structure in metals, cells in biology, cultural groups in society) may be due to a strong background disposition for holographic-structured information.

Whether Pribram and Bohm got it right out of the box; is not what is critical. (imho) It is that they got the ball rolling in a professional and thoughtful fashion, leading to the credibility of the subject.

I am skeptical that Tononi has it all correct, coming out of the box as well. However, he is out there measuring active information in a natural way!!! I am sure recording how both Shannon entropy and semantic information become integrated -- is really important to know. Whether it IS consciousness itself, I don't think so.
 
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Consciousness without a cerebral cortex: a challenge for neuroscience and medicine.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17475053

"Abstract
A broad range of evidence regarding the functional organization of the vertebrate brain - spanning from comparative neurology to experimental psychology and neurophysiology to clinical data - is reviewed for its bearing on conceptions of the neural organization of consciousness. A novel principle relating target selection, action selection, and motivation to one another, as a means to optimize integration for action in real time, is introduced. With its help, the principal macrosystems of the vertebrate brain can be seen to form a centralized functional design in which an upper brain stem system organized for conscious function performs a penultimate step in action control. This upper brain stem system retained a key role throughout the evolutionary process by which an expanding forebrain - culminating in the cerebral cortex of mammals - came to serve as a medium for the elaboration of conscious contents. This highly conserved upper brainstem system, which extends from the roof of the midbrain to the basal diencephalon, integrates the massively parallel and distributed information capacity of the cerebral hemispheres into the limited-capacity, sequential mode of operation required for coherent behavior. It maintains special connective relations with cortical territories implicated in attentional and conscious functions, but is not rendered nonfunctional in the absence of cortical input. This helps explain the purposive, goal-directed behavior exhibited by mammals after experimental decortication, as well as the evidence that children born without a cortex are conscious. Taken together these circumstances suggest that brainstem mechanisms are integral to the constitution of the conscious state, and that an adequate account of neural mechanisms of conscious function cannot be confined to the thalamocortical complex alone."

This confuses me (not very knowledgable when it comes to neuroscience) did bruce greyson not mention people with brains missing something they need but somehow able to function fine without it?
 
Good heavens, I've been trying to understand what any of you are saying, and I just don't have enough breadcrumbs to get back home. Where could one like me go to grasp the basics of what y'all are talking about?
 
Like anything the biggest influence will be your desire to learn about it and just start reading. But what exactly do you mean when you say, "What y'all are talking about?" can you give some specifics about which subjects you are referring to? Because there is a long list of active posters and people watching from the sidelines who have interests in differing things, obviously.

I, for example, have no interest in discussing stuff on the UFO section, or sections that cover PK and telekinetic powers. I just simply don't have an interest in that right now and, most of the time, that's not why I come to Skeptiko. I am mostly here for the philosophy of mind talks but you need to read in to a lot of already going conversations to get to the juicy stuff, and sometimes there isn't anything worth reading. If you are just interested in the general ideas being discusses here it's a varied list of "what is consciousness" talks, subjectivity vs objectivity, to psychic abilities - ranging from a list of abilities discussed in threads and interviews with people discussing these abilities (telekinesis, telepathy, foresight etc.) - straight down to talks about UFOs, the future of AI's capabilities (which ties in to consciousness talks again, a lot of the time, by the end of it lol) to just about anything. We talk about anything sometimes lol not just parapsychology, spirituality, metaphysics, baloney, etc.

So which topic did you have in mind?
 
Like anything the biggest influence will be your desire to learn about it and just start reading. But what exactly do you mean when you say, "What y'all are talking about?" can you give some specifics about which subjects you are referring to? Because there is a long list of active posters and people watching from the sidelines who have interests in differing things, obviously.

I'm sorry. For a long and unflattering moment I forgot I was asking about how to research information, on the internet. Nevermind what I asked, my mistake, haha
 
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