Another Parnia interview

https://evolutionnews.org/2024/10/soul-survives-death-er-doc-faces-skepticism/

"Parnia, based on his ER experience, believes that consciousness survives clinical death.

"Parnia starts by clarifying what he means by “soul.”

"I think any rational being would not deny that there is a soul, in the sense that you wouldn’t deny that you are a conscious thinking being. That’s really what the soul is. There’s nothing more to it. If other people have different definitions of soul, that’s not my definition, that’s not what I’m talking about. The soul is the self.

***

"...the evidence, certainly from research that is being done in cardiac arrest patients — people who have gone beyond the threshold of death — suggests that consciousness, psyche, or soul does not become annihilated when people have gone beyond the threshold of death, at least not in the early stages of death.

***

"...it’s a separate undiscovered entity to the brain. It’s most likely a very subtle type of nature. It’s not immaterial, it’s not weird and magical; it has some materiality but it’s very subtle. This is what Professor Baram Malahi has proposed and that it is who we are and that it should be studied with the objectivity of science rather than the sort of vague or, you know, ways that people discuss it today.

***

"And what have his studies found?

"Parnia: All I can simply say is that we’ve made enormous inroads through objective science in determining the relationship between… consciousness, psyche, or soul and the brain. And that it appears that consciousness, there’s at least growing evidence to at least raise the question that it’s possible, contrary to many people’s beliefs, that actually consciousness, the psyche, or the soul may continue and may exist independent of brain function.

"Kuhn seems irritated by the underlying implication of the clinical evidence that Parnia insists on sticking to: The human soul is a fact, not an illusion. What sort of fact is very much under discussion, of course. For example, souls could survive the body’s death only to fade away shortly afterward. We have accounts of near-death experiences only from those who were revived in this frame of reality.

"But any such evidence at all is breaking a pattern that many assumed was inviolable. Science was only supposed to explain away traditional beliefs like the existence of, or survival of, the soul. It was not supposed to confirm any element of them. That may be what is bothering Kuhn. Parnia, to his credit, sticks narrowly to the results of his own research, resisting the pressure to deny them."

Comment: Parnia cannot deny his research. Consciousness can survive cardiac arrest with a non-functional brain for short intervals in some people. Parnia is unwilling to call soul/consciousness immaterial. If not immaterial, what is it? In the past all we had were singular questionable anecdotes. Parnia is solidifying what we knew. Consciousness definitely does separate.

https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/a45632815/brain-activity-after-death/?s...

"Using an experiment design they began developing in 2015—five years before the final, full version of the study was finally completed—the scientists rigged up people who experienced cardiac arrest. This carefully performed study is part of an area of medicine and research focused on resuscitation, using methods like CPR and defibrillation. And due to the sensitive nature of trying to study people who are experiencing cardiac arrest, something that only about 10 percent of patients survive, this kind of work has a ton of value for people who are interested in near-death experiences and other edge cases of brain activity.

***

"In the study, just 28 people of 567 total both survived cardiac arrest and were able to complete the cognitive evaluations and surveys. Altogether, 4 in 10 of those patients recalled “some degree of consciousness” following CPR. Of those 28, 11 people said they had memories or similar sensations from during their minutes of cardiac arrest. Six people, or 21.4 percent of those surveyed, experienced “transcendent recalled experience of death (RED).” Three reported something like dreams. None of the people exhibited signs that they were actually conscious, like moving around.

"One patient said they’d seen their father. One felt they were standing next to their bed and watching their body receive CPR. One heard their deceased grandmother tell them to “go back.” Some remembered the moments before they were finally revived into consciousness. The dreams were, well, dreams: “Then, I walked into a puddle… When I got out of the puddle, I was not wet and I sort of melded into the pavement…”

***

"The attempts to guide or influence memories using images or sounds were almost completely unsuccessful. One person out of 28 identified the three spoken words, and none identified the images. In a way, this reinforces that what was happening was deep inside the brain. It points to a way that some kind of consciousness may endure even when, so to speak, the lights are out in the rest of the brain."

Comment: this artificial attempt to intrude into NDE's did not work but the studies did demonstrate deep brain activity while unconscious, indicating a way the brain could receive or develop NDE's.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/some-patients-who-died-but-survived-report-l...

"According to findings published on September 14 in Resuscitation, the flatlined brains of some cardiac arrest patients burst into a flurry of activity during CPR, even though their heart stopped beating up to an hour. A small subset of study participants who survived were able to recall the experience, and one person was able to identify an audio stimulus that was played while doctors were trying to resuscitate them.

"The researchers interpret the brain recordings they made of these patients as markers of “lucid, recalled experiences of death”—an observation that has “never been possible before,” says lead author Sam Parnia, an associate professor of medicine at NYU Langone Health and a longtime researcher of what happens to people as they die. “We’ve also been able to put forward a coherent, mechanistic explanation for why this occurs.”

***

"Between May 2017 and March 2020, 567 people suffered cardiac arrests at participating hospitals. Medical staff managed to gather usable brain oxygen and activity data from 53 of these patients, most of whom showed an electrical flatline state on electroencephalographic (EEG) brain monitors. But about 40 percent then experienced electrical activity that reemerged at some point with normal to near-normal brain waves that were consistent with consciousness. This activity was sometimes restored up to 60 minutes into CPR.

"Of the 567 total patients, just 53 survived. The researchers conducted interviews with 28 of the survivors. They also interviewed 126 people from the community who had gone through cardiac arrests because the sample size of survivors from the new study was so small. Nearly 40 percent reported some perceived awareness of the event without specific memories attached, and 20 percent seemed to have had a recalled experience of death. Many in the latter group described the event as a “moral evaluation” of “their entire life and how they’ve conducted themselves,” Parnia says.

***

"He and his colleagues have developed a working hypothesis to explain their findings. Normally, the brain has “braking systems” in place that filter most elements of brain function out of our experience of consciousness. This enables people to efficiently operate in the world, because under regular circumstances, “you couldn’t function with access to your whole brain’s activity being in the realm of consciousness,” he says.

"In the dying brain, however, the researchers hypothesize that the braking system is removed. Parts that are normally dormant become active, and the dying person gains access to their entire consciousness—“all your thoughts, all your memories, everything that’s been stored before,” Parnia says. “We don’t know the evolutionary benefit of this, but it seems to prepare people for their transition from life into death.”

"The findings also raise questions about the brain’s resiliency to oxygen deprivation. It could be, Parnia says, that some people who have conventionally been thought to be beyond the point of saving could in fact be revived. “The traditional thinking among doctors is that the brain, once deprived of oxygen for five to 10 minutes, dies,” he says. “We were able to show that the brain is quite robust in terms of its ability to resist oxygen deprivation for prolonged periods of time, which opens up new pathways for finding treatments for brain damage in the future.”

"The new study “represents a Herculean effort to understand as objectively as possible the nature of brain function as it may apply to consciousness and near-death experiences during cardiac arrest,” says Lakhmir Chawla, an intensive care unit physician at Jennifer Moreno Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center in San Diego, Calif., who was not involved in the research but has published papers on spikes of EEG activity at the time of death in some patients."

Comment: this study assumes that what the patient experiences in directly related to brain activity. This is in sharp contrast to Eben Alexander, a neurosurgeon who experienced prolonged coma with no EEG activity yet had a prolonged experience in what he recalled as 'heaven' with a guardian angel who looked exactly like his sister. Since he was adopted, he had never known her in his life. Research after his recovery revealed her.

https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2023/07/26/neurosurgeon_compares_his_near-death_e...

"More recently, Alexander’s popular account of his near-death experience attracted the attention of Pascal Michael, a PhD student in psychology at the University of Greenwich. Michael met Alexander after seeing him speak at an academic conference and was informed that Alexander had experimented with 5-MeO-DMT, a psychedelic closely related to DMT, secreted from the glands of the Colorado River toad.

***

"In the interview, Michael asked Alexander to deeply describe both experiences. Per Alexander’s recollections, both evoked feelings of transcending time and space and glimpsing the multiverse, while at the same time eliciting a sense of unity with his surroundings, as well as a profound — almost divine — love for everything and everyone.

"The most vital similarity between Alexander’s near-death experience and his 5-MeO-DMT trip was “ego death,” the dissolution of his sense of self. “The annihilation, though temporary, of the sense of one’s individuated self and all of its concomitant autobiographical memories often gives rise to an experience of being a ‘cosmic being,'” Michael explained. This, he noted, is key to the psychedelic-induced mystical experience and any potential benefits extracted from it.

"Alexander also described many differences between the two events, avowing that during his near-death experience he came across both menacing and divine beings, and even briefly ventured to another world. At one point, he also passed through an “abyssal emptiness and yet suffused with nurturing light” and came upon a “threshold” which a feminine entity prevented him from crossing.

"Due to these dissimilarities, and the fact that, at least for him, the near-death experience vastly surpassed that of the psychedelic, Alexander does not ascribe to the theory that DMT causes near-death experiences, preferring a transcendental explanation – that he briefly glimpsed some form of afterlife.

“'[The 5MeO was] like looking through a little peephole, as opposed to being full-bore swimming and being immersed in the Pacific ocean of being completely into that oneness experience [of the NDE],” he told Michael.

"Michael notes, however, that all the contrasting moments in Alexander’s near-death experience are broadly characteristic of DMT psychedelic trips. So Alexander’s episode by no means disproves the broader theory that near-death experiences could be caused by the body’s internally produced psychedelic compounds. Nor does it confirm it."

Comment: having read Alexander's book I can understand why he discredits the psychedelic drug. Especially with later conformation of what Alesander learned about himself.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/surges-of-activity-in-the-dying-human-brain-...

"In their last minutes of life, some people's brains generate a surge of surprisingly organized-looking electrical activity that may reflect consciousness — although scientists aren't entirely sure.

"According to new research, published Monday (May 1) in the journal PNAS, this surge can sometimes occur after a person's breathing stops but before the brain stops functioning. The activity pattern is somewhat similar to what is seen when people are awake or in dreamlike states, leading to speculation that perhaps these electrical surges reflect the otherworldly experiences reported by people who've had close brushes with death: A sense of looking at the body from the outside; a tunnel and white light; or a sense of reliving important memories.

"However, since all the patients in the new study ultimately died, it's impossible to know if they had such experiences.

***

"Some people who are brought back from the brink of death report seeing or hearing unexplained things during resuscitation or when they seem to be unconscious. The reason for these near-death experiences is unknown, and it's not clear if they're even specific to death.

"International surveys suggest that only about half of what people call "near-death experiences" actually occur in life-threatening situations, said Daniel Kondziella, a neurologist at the University of Copenhagen who was not involved in the new research. The other half occur during meditation or in scary situations that don't endanger one's health or impact the brain's metabolism, Kondiziella told Live Science.

***

"Because the people who survive to report a near-death experience are inherently different from the people who die — their brains don't permanently lose function, for one thing — it's hard to determine whether those who actually die also have these subjective experiences.

"In 2013, Borjigin and her colleagues measured electrical activity in the brains of rats that they euthanized via cardiac arrest. They found that for about 30 seconds after the heart stopped, the brain showed a surge in what are called gamma waves, which are the highest-frequency electrical oscillations in the brain. Gamma waves are correlated with conscious experience, but don't necessarily prove that someone is conscious; they're just one of many indicators that someone might be aware and alert.

"In 2022, a separate group of doctors happened to be monitoring the brain of an 87-year-old man with an electroencephalogram (EEG), which detects electrical activity on the surface of the brain, when the man unexpectedly died. Similar to Borjigin's rats, the man's brain showed a surge in gamma activity in the 30 seconds before and after his heart stopped.

***

"The researchers got permission to monitor dying patients in intensive care whose breathing support had been removed after treatment proved futile. The study included four patients total, all of whom were comatose after cardiac arrest.

"In the 30 seconds to two minutes after their ventilators were removed, two of the four patients' brains showed surges in gamma waves. Interestingly, this gamma activity seemed organized, in that the gamma waves in one portion of the brain were associated with predictable activity patterns in other regions.

"The temporoparietal junction, a brain region where the temporal and parietal lobes meet, toward the back of the brain behind the ear, was particularly active with gamma waves. This region is known to be activated when people have out-of-body experiences or dreams, Borjigin said.

"The new findings echo what was seen in the 87-year-old patient who unexpectedly died, said Raul Vicente, a neuroscientist and data scientist at the University of Tartu who co-authored the 2022 study but was not involved in Borjigin's work. "It's very nice to see a confirmation," he told Live Science.

"'The more consistent findings we have, the more evidence it is that this likely is a mechanism happening at the time of death and if we can pinpoint this down to one location, even better," said Ajmal Zemmar, a neurosurgeon at the University of Louisville Health who also co-authored the 2022 study.

"Zemmar and Vicente are optimistic that these signals could be signs of conscious experience at the moment of death. But reflecting the debate in the field, Kondziella is more skeptical.

"'We know when you die a cardiac death as opposed to a brain death, that takes time," he said. Minutes pass between the heart stopping and brain cells dying, he said. "It shouldn't be a big surprise during those minutes, you will see aberrant electrophysiological activity in the brain.'"

Comment: great studies but no answers. We are faced with living testimony of vast near-to-death experiences, with no good physical evidence. No one has had an EEG running during a true NDE episode. Would be nice to have one. If only the 87-year-old lived.

An article in The Guardian last week described how doctors in Belgium have communicated with a man believed to have been in a vegetative state for seven years, since suffering a traumatic brain injury in a car accident. Using a hi-tech scanner, they were able to ask him questions and monitor his brain activity. 
> > However, such discoveries once more highlight the question of what constitutes consciousness and identity. Here is a man whose brain is so badly damaged that he cannot move or actively communicate anything. And yet he has memory, he can respond to questions, and at will he can summon up specific images which spark off chemical reactions that can be monitored. It may be argued that the relevant sections of the brain must have remained undamaged, but what is this "will"? And what constitutes the identity of the person that directs the will that directs the mind to form such images, if the will, memory and mind exist only as material cells?-I cannot answer your questions, but before scanners, eye movements identified patients in a so-called 'locked-in' state. Blink once for 'yes' and twice for 'no' sort of games. It appears to me the whole personage of his consciousness is inside, locked-in, but functional. Moving physically is in the 'motor strip' on both sides. That is not where personality hides or thoughts are processed or memory recovered.

An article in The Guardian last week described how doctors in Belgium have communicated with a man believed to have been in a vegetative state for seven years, since suffering a traumatic brain injury in a car accident. Using a hi-tech scanner, they were able to ask him questions and monitor his brain activity. In order to answer yes, he had to imagine playing tennis, and to answer no he was told to think of wandering through his house. "We were astonished when we saw the results of the patient's scan and that he was able to correctly answer the questions that were asked by simply changing his thoughts," said Dr Adrian Owen, assistant director of the Medical Research Council's cognition and brain sciences unit at Cambridge University.
> 
> One's imagination can hardly take in the horror of lying in a bed for seven years, aware of what's going on, trapped inside your own head, unable to show people that you are still there. I think I'd rather be dead.
> 
> However, such discoveries once more highlight the question of what constitutes consciousness and identity. Here is a man whose brain is so badly damaged that he cannot move or actively communicate anything. And yet he has memory, he can respond to questions, and at will he can summon up specific images which spark off chemical reactions that can be monitored. It may be argued that the relevant sections of the brain must have remained undamaged, but what is this "will"? And what constitutes the identity of the person that directs the will that directs the mind to form such images, if the will, memory and mind exist only as material cells?

Modeling a human brain would essentially mean that we have several billion blocks of memory connected in various paths to each other. The biochemistry COULD be modeled, but to me that would be unnecessary complexity at this point. We need a 'best case' working model before we can start worrying about the finer chemical complexities... that we don't understand yet. We need both UNO's and Yale's systems to collect a ton of data before we can really do that part of it justice. 
> 
> The basic ideas are there, the computer languages we have available are in my opinion, sophisticated enough to allow us to give this a real try. While I mute my optimism, there can be no better way to understand something except from trying to build it. Of course, this is the humble opinion of an engineer, so take that as my own brand of perspectivism.-Thanks for the explanation. The biochemistry simply arranges for the ions to travel, and modifications of the neuron's output. Mimic that and the biochemistry is not important.


> By electronic representations, I mean symbolic variables that link neuron a through dendrite v to neuron b, and etc. In terms of building this model, work such as what is going on here at UNO will be foundational, as what they are trying to do is map all of the biochemical reactions into logical a->b->c->... structures. > 
> We won't know how the brain does all of those things until we sit down and try to build this model. First we need known biochemical mappings, then we need to integrate them into a large model. Neuroscientists can't do that. 
> 
> Other research is quite helpful, such as those scientists working to make computers out of biological components:
> 
> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/358822.stm
> 
> By approaching the problem from both ends (in the practical manner of building computers and building models) we'll understand more about the brain than biochemistry alone can possibly provide. 
> 
> In terms of analysis, techniques to analyze cognition are already in place by my AI friends; -The link is very interesting, but basically I don't have the background to follow what you are describing in the computer and model building.

I contend that we will never "understand the brain's design principles" without a trial-and-error process of literally trying to build a brain.
> > > 
> > > It will be trial and error, with 100 billion neurons, self-controlled, with million of miles of axons and dendrites and who knows how many synapses. I admire your optimism but I'm still with Penrose.
> > > 
> > 
> > Nonsense here, digital logic requires none of those silly dendrites, axons and synapses. Electronic representations are more than sufficient. 
> 
> 
> Yeah, but you will still have to analyze exactly what the brain is doing in each region, how it is modulating each neuron, and how it is growing new connections as it continues to learn from experience. Until all that is understood, you cannot model electronics. And I'm not sure we will ever fully understand all those functions and changes. If we do then you will be right.-By electronic representations, I mean symbolic variables that link neuron a through dendrite v to neuron b, and etc. In terms of building this model, work such as what is going on here at UNO will be foundational, as what they are trying to do is map all of the biochemical reactions into logical a->b->c->... structures. The work is complex, but the work they did on that paper I posted creates a wealth of information that didn't exist before, and the open-source model is only going to improve data collection. -We won't know how the brain does all of those things until we sit down and try to build this model. First we need known biochemical mappings, then we need to integrate them into a large model. Neuroscientists can't do that. -Other research is quite helpful, such as those scientists working to make computers out of biological components:-http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/358822.stm-By approaching the problem from both ends (in the practical manner of building computers and building models) we'll understand more about the brain than biochemistry alone can possibly provide. -In terms of analysis, techniques to analyze cognition are already in place by my AI friends; AI has been a much greater driver of cognitive research than any other method the last 30 years. We won't improve those models by studying petri dishes!!

I contend that we will never "understand the brain's design principles" without a trial-and-error process of literally trying to build a brain.
> > 
> > It will be trial and error, with 100 billion neurons, self-controlled, with million of miles of axons and dendrites and who knows how many synapses. I admire your optimism but I'm still with Penrose.
> > 
> 
> Nonsense here, digital logic requires none of those silly dendrites, axons and synapses. Electronic representations are more than sufficient. -
Yeah, but you will still have to analyze exactly what the brain is doing in each region, how it is modulating each neuron, and how it is growing new connections as it continues to learn from experience. Until all that is understood, you cannot model electronics. And I'm not sure we will ever fully understand all those functions and changes. If we do then you will be right.

I contend that we will never "understand the brain's design principles" without a trial-and-error process of literally trying to build a brain.
> 
> It will be trial and error, with 100 billion neurons, self-controlled, with million of miles of axons and dendrites and who knows how many synapses. I admire your optimism but I'm still with Penrose.
> -Nonsense here, digital logic requires none of those silly dendrites, axons and synapses. Electronic representations are more than sufficient. -> 
> > I chuckle a bit at this line too: Religion drives science and it matters. 
> 
> I really intended for you to ignore C. Hunter. I know how nutty he is, but he is bright and does turn up interesting articles for me to review. The moral is: he supplies good stuff to study. He interprets it his way I and I go my way. 
> 
> 
> > On an interesting sidenote, you've used the Einstein quote before about science without religion being lame. Here's something pulled from an old issue of Skeptic:
> > 
> > I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one. You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being. 
> > 
> > - Albert Einstein, letter to Guy H. Raner Jr., Sept. 28, 1949, quoted by Michael R. Gilmore in Skeptic, Vol. 5, No. 2 
> 
> Great comment from Albert, and I think it means the same as my brief quote that I use. He was an agnostic, but interestingly, Israel offerd him the first presidency when that country started. He was a strong supporter of Israel but did not want to be political.-Well, you can take the God out of the Jew, but you'll never take the Jew from the Jew. Just as I wish the best for my Nordic heritage, so did he and his Jewish one. Actually, have you ever taken time to read some of the writings from the Zohar? Some excellent philosophy and theology came out of that monster. (I've only read selections.)


> > http://darwins-god.blogspot.com/
> 
> One major criticism:
> 
> we believe the problem is not computer power and ability to program parallel machines, but rather our nearly total ignorance about what computations are actually carried out by the brain. Our view is that computers will never equal our best abilities until we can understand the brain's design principles and the mathematical operations employed by neural circuits well enough to build machines that incorporate them.
> 
> I contend that we will never "understand the brain's design principles" without a trial-and-error process of literally trying to build a brain.-It will be trial and error, with 100 billion neurons, self-controlled, with million of miles of axons and dendrites and who knows how many synapses. I admire your optimism but I'm still with Penrose.- 
> I chuckle a bit at this line too: Religion drives science and it matters. -I really intended for you to ignore C. Hunter. I know how nutty he is, but he is bright and does turn up interesting articles for me to review. The moral is: he supplies good stuff to study. He interprets it his way I and I go my way. - 
> On an interesting sidenote, you've used the Einstein quote before about science without religion being lame. Here's something pulled from an old issue of Skeptic:
> 
> I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one. You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being. 
> 
> - Albert Einstein, letter to Guy H. Raner Jr., Sept. 28, 1949, quoted by Michael R. Gilmore in Skeptic, Vol. 5, No. 2 -Great comment from Albert, and I think it means the same as my brief quote that I use. He was an agnostic, but interestingly, Israel offerd him the first presidency when that country started. He was a strong supporter of Israel but did not want to be political.

Note here, as I seem to run into this: I am not making any claims concerning the origin of consciousness or about the likelihood of a creator. All I'm saying is that the complexity of even things such as the human mind, *may* not be mysteries forever.
> 
> Matt: Hold your nose and look up this site. ID people turn up the most interesting discussions. Read the paper Hunter refers to on the difficulties in understanding the brain's computing functions. It is a pdf file and I don't have the capacity to refer it to this site. Obviously Hunter has a different take than you will.)
> 
> http://darwins-god.blogspot.com/-One major criticism:-we believe the problem is not computer power and ability to program parallel machines, but rather our nearly total ignorance about what computations are actually carried out by the brain. Our view is that computers will never equal our best abilities until we can understand the brain's design principles and the mathematical operations employed by neural circuits well enough to build machines that incorporate them.-I contend that we will never "understand the brain's design principles" without a trial-and-error process of literally trying to build a brain. I said it before and I will state it again: Neuroscientists are not going to solve this problem. (I have Adler for backup on that one.) Computer Scientists will. Neuroscience (and biology at large) [EDIT] are descriptive sciences, and you can't do as much with descriptive as constructive. To me, I think he sees the complexity and gives up. -I chuckle a bit at this line too: Religion drives science and it matters. -Yes, religion matters, but the first part of the statement is an empty claim. Few atheists will say that atheism inspires them; less so for agnostics, and we can both agree that there is no greater source of atheists and agnostics than academia. Unless you loosen the term "religion" to mean "awe of nature." But that's clearly diluting the man's point; that's something we all share regardless of theistic predisposition. -On an interesting sidenote, you've used the Einstein quote before about science without religion being lame. Here's something pulled from an old issue of Skeptic:- I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one. You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being. - - Albert Einstein, letter to Guy H. Raner Jr., Sept. 28, 1949, quoted by Michael R. Gilmore in Skeptic, Vol. 5, No. 2 -EDITED

Note here, as I seem to run into this: I am not making any claims concerning the origin of consciousness or about the likelihood of a creator. All I'm saying is that the complexity of even things such as the human mind, *may* not be mysteries forever.-Matt: Hold your nose and look up this site. ID people turn up the most interesting discussions. Read the paper Hunter refers to on the difficulties in understanding the brain's computing functions. It is a pdf file and I don't have the capacity to refer it to this site. Obviously Hunter has a different take than you will.)-http://darwins-god.blogspot.com/

Matt believes that a man-made machine with consciousness will show that "the difference between us and everything else (in terms of consciousness) is only in degree. It means that consciousness should be relatively common in the universe."
> 
> 
> My position has been as a doubter. With the brain's 100 billion cells and innumerable connecting dendrites, axons, and synapses now it is found that individual neurons have two levels of decision-making.
> 
> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090914172650.htm-Again, no problems with doubting.-Important criticisms on this article: It isn't offered as a definitive finding, only another potential model. -From the computational side of things, it wouldn't add much complexity to the programming; only the power of the machines we'd need to have to model it. Axons would be a special subclass of cell that would run a quorum algorithm using fuzzy logic. (Quorum as in "quorum sensing" in bacteria and fuzzy logic as in "makes decisions based on statistical inference.") -From what I've been reading on neural net programming, this "electoral college" phenomenon might be an emergent property and not necessary to specifically model for. It will be interesting to hear their take on this.

Matt believes that a man-made machine with consciousness will show that "the difference between us and everything else (in terms of consciousness) is only in degree. It means that consciousness should be relatively common in the universe."-
My position has been as a doubter. With the brain's 100 billion cells and innumerable connecting dendrites, axons, and synapses now it is found that individual neurons have two levels of decision-making.-http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090914172650.htm

Apropos of my comment that recognizing a brain area that lights up for a given stimulus doesn't really tell you how it is working 'inside': 
> 
> The study shown below identifies an area of the hippocampus that may be a schizophrenia trigger:
> 
> http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2009/908/1
> 
> 
> 
Awesome, this study. -> > Computing (as I mentioned when I first joined) takes an entirely different approach to such a question. It asks us to literally build a model of what it is we're trying to study, because at least in computer science, it can't be said you understand something without being able to build a working model of it. 
> > 
> >> For the first time--through the "magic" of model-building we're figuring out the complexities of biochemistry. 
> 
> I doubt that we can ever model any area of the brain. Do you do a proxy model or an exact replication of each synaptic connection, with their innate ability to modify. Computers do not live and self-modify.-It might not be a requirement [EDIT] to "live" in the biological sense of the word in order to have consciousness. -Machines most certainly DO self-modify. Anytime you run Java code on your machine the compiler sitting in the virtual machine does this frequently.-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-modifying_code-AI is self-modifying in all but its most rudimentary forms. Pattern-recognition allows a machine to solve unknown problems using only the solutions it "knows." When it learns in the first place it is "tabula rasa" and the learning algorithms alter behavior (often using genetic algorithms) and it codes its own solutions. So here, you are incorrect: Computers DO self-modify. You're thinking in the mindset of traditional programming and not AI programming: Completely different skill sets and paradigms. -To my counterparts that study biology, cells are actually quite easily modeled as finite automata. The problem of complexity is that you need a powerful enough network of processor cores (like the conficker network) to adequately model a complex system. The first paper I showed you was the model of a single cell. The processing power required for that one sim is immense. Assuming Moore's law hasn't died yet, in about 20yrs (opposed to the 10 on the original science daily "make a brain from scratch" article, we should have the baseline technology to be able to run our first *true* brain models. -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite_automata-Note here, as I seem to run into this: I am not making any claims concerning the origin of consciousness or about the likelihood of a creator. All I'm saying is that the complexity of even things such as the human mind, *may* not be mysteries forever.-EDITED