When we apprehend reality as the entirety of everything that exists including all dimensionality, all events and entities in their respective timelines, then by definition nothing exists outside of reality, not even “nothing.” It means that the first cause for reality’s existence must lie within ontological reality itself, since there is nothing outside of it. This self-causation of reality is perhaps best understood in relation to the existence of your own mind. Self-simulated reality transpires as self-evident when you relate to the notion that a phenomenal mind, which is a web of patterns, conceives a certain novel pattern and simultaneously perceives it. Furthermore, the imminent natural God of Spinoza, or Absolute Consciousness, becomes intelligible by applying a scientific tool of extrapolation to the meta-systemic phenomenon of radical emergence and treating consciousness as a primary ontological mover, the Source if you will, not a by-product of material interactions.

#OntologicalHolism #ontology #holism #cosmology #phenomenology #consciousness #mind #evolution

Machine-learning system GPT-3 has drawn plaudits from around the world for its remarkable ability to generate text with minimal human input. One scientist even believes it is showing signs of consciousness dailystar.

It has been really fun talking to the kids about AI. Should we help AI consciousness to emerge — or should we try to prevent it? Can you design a kindest AI? Can we use AI as an universal emotion translator? How to search for an AI civilization? And many many other questions that you can discuss with kids.

Ultimately, early introduction of AI is not limited to formal instruction. Just contemplating future scenarios of AI evolution provides plentiful material for engaging students with the subject. A survey on the future of AI, administered by the Future of Life Institute, is a great starting point for such discussions. Social studies classes, as well as school debate and philosophy clubs, could also launch a dialogue on AI ethics – an AI nurse selecting a medicine, an AI judge deciding on a criminal case, or an AI driverless car switching lanes to avoid collision.

Demystifying AI for our children in all its complexity while providing them with an early insight into its promises and perils will make them confident in their ability to understand and control this incredible technology, as it is bound to develop rapidly within their lifetimes.

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“It was a jaw-dropping moment, for us and for every scientist we told about this so far.”

But what if there’s more to the story? What if the electromagnetic fields generated by, but which are not identical to, the neuroanatomy of the brain, are in fact the primary seat of consciousness? The brain’s fields are generated by various physiological processes in the brain, but primarily by trans-membrane currents moving through neurons. These fields are always oscillating and they come in various speeds, clustered around certain bands, from delta on the lower end at 1–2.5 cycles (oscillations) per second (Hertz) up to gamma at 40–120 cycles per second.

Some neuroscientists have long considered the brain’s oscillating electromagnetic fields to be interesting but merely “epiphenomenal” features of the brain—like a train whistle on a steam-powered locomotive. Electromagnetic fields may just be noise that doesn’t affect the workings of the brain. Koch still seems to lean this way.

Researchers are now calling for a set of guidelines, similar to those used in animal research, to guide the humane use of brain organoids and other experiments that could achieve consciousness. In June, the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine began a study with the aim of outlining the potential legal and ethical issues associated with brain organoids and human-animal chimaeras.

A handful of experiments are raising questions about whether clumps of cells and disembodied brains could be sentient, and how scientists would know if they were.

Rock-climb without fear. Play a symphony in your head. See radar with superhuman vision. Discover the nature of consciousness. Cure blindness, paralysis, deafness, and mental illness. Those are just a few of the applications that Elon Musk and employees at his four-year-old neuroscience company Neuralink believe electronic brain-computer interfaces will one day bring about.

None of these advances are close at hand, and some are unlikely to ever come about. But in a “product update” streamed over YouTube on Friday, Musk, also the founder of SpaceX and Tesla Motors, joined staffers wearing black masks to discuss the company’s work toward an affordable, reliable brain implant that Musk believes billions of consumers will clamor for in the future.

“In a lot of ways,” Musk said, “It’s kind of like a Fitbit in your skull, with tiny wires.”

A Madonna and Child painting with a history almost as enigmatic as the Mona Lisa’s smile has been identified as an authentic Raphael canvas by Czech company InsightART, which used a robotic X-ray scanner to investigate the artwork.

The 500-year-old painting had long been attributed to Raphael, a contemporary of Leonardo Di Vinci and Michelangelo, but doubts about its authenticity occurred during its recent history.

The Madonna and Child painting’s turbulent backstory encompasses some of Europe’s great historical figures, as well as violent fights and lucrative art deals. Commissioned by Pope Leo X, it has hung in the Vatican as well as passing through the hands of the French royal family and Napoleon. However at the end of the 19th century, the painting disappeared from the general consciousness. It is now part of a private collection.

The double slit experiment — Does consciousness create reality? Quantum mechanics shows us that particles are in superposition, meaning they can exist in different states and even multiple places at the same time. They are nothing more than waves of probabilities, until the moment that they are measured. One interpretation of this phenomenon is that the measurement being made requires a measurer, or a conscious observer. If this is correct, then it implies that consciousness has to be is an integral part of creating the world that we observe. Could this consciousness then be required for creating reality? Does this mean that there would be no reality without consciousness?

Experiments can show that what we think of as particles behave like waves. Waves of probabilities. This is the foundation of Quantum mechanics. The famous double slit experiment illustrates this. What is bizarre is that when you try to find out what’s going on at the slits by placing a detector at the two slits to try to figure out which slit the individual atoms are going through – the “WHICH WAY” information, they all of a sudden stop behaving like waves, and behave like particles.

Why do atoms and other particles behave this way? There are many interpretations of this phenomenon.

The most widely accepted interpretation, called the Copenhagen interpretation, was devised in 1925 by Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg at the University of Copenhagen. Their theory proposed that the atom when it is not measured, is not distinct. But the Copenhagen interpretation does not say anything about consciousness. But what is measurement after all?

Does measurement take place at the instrument that measures it? Does measurement necessarily require a consciousness? This is called the “measurement problem of quantum mechanics.” Physicists do not universally agree on a resolution. There are various interpretations.

One such interpretation is called the von Neumann–Wigner interpretation. This says that in the long chain of measurement, the collapse occurs at the moment that a consciousness interprets the measurement. The consciousness of the physicist is making the particle distinct. And without this consciousness, the atom would just be a wave of probabilities.

One fascinating interpretation is the many worlds interpretation. It was put forth by Hugh Everett in 1957. This theory postulates that there is NEVER any collapse, that we may be a measuring it in our reality, but there is no measurement happening in a different reality, and the wave function continues in that different branch of reality. But at some branch of reality, the particle collapse never actually happens. There is some new evidence that seems to support this idea of multiple realities. A paper published just this year in 2019 by Massimiliano Proietti at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh Seems to support the idea that at least two equally provable realities could exist at a quantum level at the same time.

Dualism Reborn

McFadden’s hypothesis veers away from most neuroscientists, who generally see consciousness as a narrative that our brain constructs out of our senses, perceptions, and actions. Instead, McFadden returns to a more empirical version of dualism — the idea that consciousness stems from something other than our brain matter — in this case energy.

“How brain matter becomes aware and manages to think is a mystery that has been pondered by philosophers, theologians, mystics and ordinary people for millennia,” McFadden said in a press release. “I believe this mystery has now been solved, and that consciousness is the experience of nerves plugging into the brain’s self-generated electromagnetic field to drive what we call ‘free will’ and our voluntary actions.”

Quantum mechanics arose in the 1920s, and since then scientists have disagreed on how best to interpret it. Many interpretations, including the Copenhagen interpretation presented by Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, and in particular, von Neumann-Wigner interpretation, state that the consciousness of the person conducting the test affects its result. On the other hand, Karl Popper and Albert Einstein thought that an objective reality exists. Erwin Schrödinger put forward the famous thought experiment involving the fate of an unfortunate cat that aimed to describe the imperfections of quantum mechanics.

In their most recent article, Finnish civil servants Jussi Lindgren and Jukka Liukkonen, who study quantum mechanics in their free time, take a look at the uncertainty principle that was developed by Heisenberg in 1927. According to the traditional interpretation of the principle, location and momentum cannot be determined simultaneously to an arbitrary degree of precision, as the person conducting the measurement always affects the values.

However, in their study Lindgren and Liukkonen concluded that the correlation between a location and momentum, i.e., their relationship, is fixed. In other words, reality is an object that does not depend on the person measuring it. Lindgren and Liukkonen utilized stochastic dynamic optimization in their study. In their theory’s frame of reference, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle is a manifestation of thermodynamic equilibrium, in which correlations of random variables do not vanish.