We are still struggling to account for consciousness. A new hypothesis by psychologist Nicholas Humphrey challenges the basis of the discussion and argues sentience isn’t what we think.
Using the EBRAINS research infrastructure, scientists of the Human Brain Project have developed multi-scale simulations of the human brain that mimic hallmarks of activity during wake and deep sleep states. Such simulations can lead to a better understanding of biological mechanisms that regulate human consciousness and its disorders, which span from single neurons to whole brain scales.
“Machine learning provides a way of providing almost human-like intuition to huge data sets. One valuable application is for tasks where it’s difficult to write a specific algorithm to search for something—human faces, for instance, or perhaps ” something strange,” wrote astrophysicist and Director of the Penn State University Extraterrestrial Intelligence Center, Jason Wright in an email to The Daily Galaxy. ” In this case, you can train a machine-learning algorithm to recognize certain things you expect to see in a data set,” Wright explains, ” and ask it for things that don’t fit those expectations, or perhaps that match your expectations of a technosignature.
How does something as immaterial as consciousness arise from something as unconscious as matter? This is known as the Hard Problem and this theory gets around this problem by explaining consciousness as electrical activity that is aware of its own electrical potential. This is possible because the light photon is the carrier of the electromagnetic force. Because light has momentum and momentum is frame dependent electrical activity in the brain is always in the centre of its own reference frame in ‘the moment of now’ with a potential future that is always uncertain and a past that has gone forever. It is because consciousness is always in the centre of its own reference frame that we have the concept of ‘mind’ with each one of us having our own personal view of the Universe. This is within a process formed by the spontaneous absorption and emission of light a process of continuous energy exchange forming the ever changing world of our everyday life. If our eyes where more sensitive to light we would be able to see that everything is radiating EMR or light continuously because the Universe is never at absolute zero. In this theory consciousness is the most advanced part of a universal process that can be explained by physics. There are no paradoxes in this theory! We are in the centre of our own reference frame being able to look back in time in every direction at the beauty of the stars. We can also look down into individual reference frames seeing the future unfold photon by photon relative to that frame of reference. The greatest affect this process of continuous energy exchange has on us is the aging process with photon energy from the Sun cascading down forming greater degrees of freedom for the continuous increase in entropy or disorganization. But above all this is a creative process with the future coming into existence relative to the energy and momentum or actions of each individual life form. The wave-particle duality of light is acting like the bits or zeros and ones of a computer. This forms a blank canvas for life to form its own future relative to its position and the energy and momentum of its own actions. The Universe is a continuum with spacetime as an emergent property with an Arrow of Time for each object or life form with a future coming into existence relative to their energy & momentum with each new photon electron coupling or dipole moment. I believe this is what we are seeing when we see an artist at work we are seeing the future unfolding relative to the energy and momentum of the artist! In this theory creation is truly in the eye and hand of the beholder! Thanks for watching please share and subscribe on YouTube and be part of the promotion of this theory!
In The Analysis of Matter (1927) Bertrand Russell defended a couple of theses that amounted to a novel approach to the mind-body problem. Similar claims were defended by Eddington in his Gifford lectures of the same year. This approach was forgotten about in the latter half of the twentieth century, perhaps because it didn’t fit with the physicalist predilections of the period. However, it has recently been rediscovered, leading to a view – or better a school of views – known as ‘Russellian monism.’ Russellian monism is increasingly seen as a promising middle way between dualism and physicalism, avoiding the problems associated with either of these extremes. In this lecture, I explain the basic idea.
A new theory of consciousness (that is, how we perceive ourselves and the world around us) has been proposed, in which our brains aren’t actually actively…