https://www.sciencemagazinedigital.org/sciencemagazine/library/item/15_march_2024/41803...

"Since the early 2000s, the world of plant science has been ruffled by a spirited debate about whether plants are sentient. For proponents of “plant neurobiology,” plant behaviors such as learning, habituation, and responsiveness to touch or wounding are evidence of a conscious mind. For the naysayers, these are mere stimulus-response phenomena lacking mental mediation. ( my bold)

"It is not a new idea. Evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis wrote an article titled “The conscious cell” in 2001, and philosopher Evan Thompson has been a prominent advocate of this “biopsychist” position. In some ways, the putative universality of mind can be traced back to the German Naturphilosophie of the late 18th century.

***

"If that argument sometimes seemed tendentious, The Sentient Cell may provoke much more. In it, cognitive psychologist Arthur Reber, plant biologist František Baluška, and medical scientist William Miller claim that consciousness is everywhere in life, even down to the level of single cells. “Life and mind are co-terminous,” they say.

***

"To debate that proposition, should we first clarify what we mean by sentience, consciousness, and mind? Reber and colleagues decline to offer definitions beyond saying that they use the terms more or less synonymously and “in a folk psychology fashion.” Given the lack, and perhaps impossibility, of precise formal definitions, their approach is understandable but makes it harder to see what is at stake.

"It is a measure of the permissiveness of the authors’ view that they are willing to entertain a flicker of sentience even in individual proteins, such as the kinase mTOR (mammalian target of rapamycin). This protein has so many different roles in the cell—in motility, cell division, protein synthesis, transcription, and more—that Reber and colleagues want to ascribe to it a kind of agency. “Is mTOR independently alive? Does it have ‘mind’?” they ask. Only, I think, if one is willing to risk making those words so vague as to be useless.

***

"The Sentient Cell comes perilously close to making its proposal of consciousness in all living things axiomatic rather than a hypothesis to be demonstrated. What starts as a postulate morphs into a statement of fact (“we securely know…all cells are conscious”) without having demonstrably earned that status.

"Reber and colleagues might reasonably respond that the position of “mindless until proved mindful” has proved not only flawed but also damaging in the study of animal behavior. Human exceptionalism might seem to be the sensible null hypothesis, but there comes a point where it is simply a more economical explanation to attribute mind than to suppose that some complex behavior is the result of an intricate stimulus-response mechanism that just so happens to closely resemble what we humans do. ( my bold)

"That is all very well for a chimpanzee or a bird—but really, is anything a bacterium does so smart as to warrant the benefit of the doubt? Reber and colleagues make a compelling case that prokaryotes and even individual cells of our own body regularly display behaviors that we should call, at the very least, intelligent. Nominally identical cells can show different responses to identical stimuli, in part because their internal states differ: They have memories of a kind, and so history matters.

***

"What is more, it is useful to talk about such behavior using those quasi-taboo words in biology: purpose, goals, meaning. In such ways, The Sentient Cell adds to the growing argument that the proper language for discussing the properties of living systems is not that of machines or computers but of cognition. (my bold)

"Yet cognition is not consciousness. Feeling pain, say, is a very different matter to possessing an electrical system for signaling stress and damage, as plants do. For humans, pain is constructed in neural circuits. Where in the plant are the equivalent? For this reviewer, the authors’ “Cellular Basis of Consciousness” theory seems mostly to reflect the fact that we lack appropriate words to talk about the complex competencies and agency of living things without anthropomorphizing.

"But if its thesis fails to persuade, The Sentient Cell might nonetheless provoke a long-overdue conversation. To understand life, we need to find alternative models besides “automata” at one pole and “sentient beings” at the other. We need more-sophisticated views of mindedness and intelligence, in which consciousness does not feature as a sauce with a single flavor that spices life with awareness and experience." (my bold)

Comment: my bolds simply reflect my position. Just because they act 'intelligently' doesn't mean they are intelligent, since it can all be explained by coding in their genome from the designer. Thus, all actions are automatic. Or alternately, the designer's mind is actively running the processes. 'Purpose, goals and meaning' are so obvious in biology, they cannot be ignored. Every action, every reaction has obvious purpose.

https://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/free-will-is-real/

"If we keep our analysis in the scale where the individual agent exists,...then the primary and ultimate cause of my actions is me. The will emerges from the complex interactions of many small parts. It’s literally not true to say that it’s caused by any particular small part. It is caused by many small parts, but only when taken together all at once. And that’s the same thing as the whole person. So my thoughts and actions are deterministically caused by me. The molecules of which my brain is made are simply irrelevant to this fact. So I am the true source of my own actions, and there are no other “ultimate” causes. My mind does not exist as a molecule nor as a historical epoch, nor as a socioeconomic class. Yet my mind does exist. René Descartes’ “I think therefore I am” convinces me of this. In order to claim that my choices are really caused by a molecule or a historical epoch, one must refer to the dynamics of a scale where I (that is, my mind) cannot be found. Eliminating the mind from the analysis is not a valid way to answer a question about the mind.

***

"The question must ask whether or not I can do something other than what I’m expected to do, not other than what I will do.

"Human choice is temporally asymmetric and must be analyzed as such. This point could be missed without properly situating our analysis at the correct scale.

***

"In analyzing the ability to do otherwise, we should consider only a forward-looking ability because choices, by their nature, are forward-looking. We don’t deliberate or make choices about the past. Choices are always about something, and those objects of choice always lie in the future, thus choices are always forward-looking...If my choices are in principle not predictable, given total knowledge of the present world, then I do have the ability to do otherwise in a forward-looking sense, which is the only sense that makes any sense. Given the different dynamics found at different scales, the ability to do otherwise needs to be understood as temporally asymmetric; that is, as always forward-looking; as the ability to do something which is in principle not predictable. We do have that ability, and it derives from our self-referential nature.

"The fact that I am the relevant cause of my own actions comes with another important implication: I am a causally self-referencing entity. If a molecule were the relevant cause of my action, this would not be true in the same way. The molecule has no capacity for self-reflection, but I do. I can ask myself, “What will I do? What could I do? What should I do? What do I want to do? What would I do if I wanted to do X and should do Y?” Self-referential questions like these affect the choices that I make; and those choices change the self-referential questions that I ask.

***

"I am an output of and an input for my own processing. Framing the human self-referential nature in this way brings us to the concept of undecidability.

***

"If humans can exhibit undecidability, then we meet the second main criterion for free will: the forward-looking ability to do otherwise.

***

"Mikhail Prokopenko and his colleagues conducted a comparative formal analysis of recursive mathematical systems, Turing machines, and cellular automata. They come to a clear conclusion:

"As we have shown, the capacity to generate undecidable dynamics is based upon three underlying factors: (1) the program-data duality; (2) the potential to access an infinite computational medium; and (3) the ability to implement negation.19

"If humans do have these three properties, then we meet the criteria for undecidable dynamics, which means we can take actions that are fundamentally unpredictable, which means we have the ability to do otherwise in a forward-looking sense, which means we have free will.

***

"The last element required for undecidability is the ability to implement negation. Negation in this context refers to the ability of a logical system to produce an output which is exactly contrary to the processing which led to the output...If humans can implement this paradoxical logic into their thinking, then humans meet this requirement for producing undecidability. The fact that humans came up with the liar paradox thousands of years ago is evidence that humans can perform the logical operation of negation.

"All three factors underlying the capacity to generate undecidable dynamics are present in humans

***

"The resulting total picture is that we (humans) meet two criteria for real free will: the forward-looking ability to do otherwise and being the source of one’s own actions.

"Viewing human agents as whole humans instead of as molecules makes it clear that humans are the cause of their own actions, and also leads to a focus on the human features such as self-reference, that generate undecidable dynamics. The Stoic philosopher Epictetus was right. Neither Zeus, Bertrand Russell, nor the scientists recapitulating the latter’s argument 77 years later can diminish our free wills."

Comment: Egnor and I agree. we have free will.

https://phys.org/news/2022-06-collapsing-theory-quantum-consciousness.html

"The origin of consciousness is one of the greatest mysteries of science. One proposed solution, first suggested by Nobel Laureate and Oxford mathematician Roger Penrose and anesthesiologist Stuart Hammeroff, at Arizona State University, in Tucson, attributes consciousness to quantum computations in the brain. This in turn hinges on the notion that gravity could play a role in how quantum effects disappear, or "collapse." But a series of experiments in a lab deep under the Gran Sasso mountains, in Italy, has failed to find evidence in support of a gravity-related quantum collapse model, undermining the feasibility of this explanation for consciousness.

***

"'What I loved about this theory was that it is in principle testable and I decided to search for evidence that might help confirm or falsify it."

"At the heart of the theory is the idea that gravity is related to quantum wavefunction collapse and that this collapse is faster in systems with more mass. This concept was developed in a number of models by various physicists in the 1980s. One of those was Lajos Diósi, at the Wigner Research Center for Physics and at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary, who has co-authored the new paper with Curceanu, Maaneli Derakhshani of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, Matthias Laubenstein also at INFN, and Kristian Piscicchia of CREF and INFN. Penrose independently approached this idea a few years later and it became the core of his consciousness theory with Hammeroff.

"The two theories are often referred to by the umbrella term, the "Diósi-Penrose theory." But behind the joint name there is an important difference, notes Curceanu. Diósi's approach predicts that collapse would be accompanied by the spontaneous emission of a small amount of radiation, just large enough to be detected by cutting edge experiments.

***

"After running the experiment for two months the team did not measure spontaneous radiation signals, constraining the feasibility of gravity-related collapse. In 2020, the team reported in Nature Physics that their negative result had helped them rule out the simplest version of the Diósi-Penrose model.

"In their new paper they have explicitly examined the repercussions of their finding for Penrose and Hammeroff's Orch OR theory of consciousness. After reanalyzing the most plausible scenarios set out by Hammeroff and Penrose, in light of their recent experimental constraints on quantum collapse, they were led to conclude that almost none of the scenarios are plausible. "This is the first experimental investigation of the gravity-related quantum collapse pillar of the Orch OR consciousness model, which we hope will be followed by many others," says Curceanu. "I am very proud of our achievement.'"

Comment: this paper rules out a theory, which is what studies like this do. However, findings like the 410,000-year Cambrian/Ediacaran will stand until/or if another study refutes their method. The method they used is well-established. dhw hopes in vain.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/feeling-knowing-book-consciousness-origin-evolution

"Consciousness is what gives an individual a sense of self; it helps one stay in the present, remember the past and plan for the future. Many scientists have argued that consciousness is created by vast networks of nerve cells, or neurons, in the brain. While it’s clear that the brain plays a major role in conscious experiences, it doesn’t act alone, argues Damasio, director of the University of Southern California’s Brain and Creativity Institute.

"Instead, he argues, consciousness is generated by a variety of structures within an organism, some neural, some not. What’s more, feelings — mental experiences of body states — help connect the brain to the rest of the body. “The feelings that we have of, say, hunger or thirst, or pain, or well-being, or desire, etc. — these are the foundation of our mind,” Damasio says. In his view, feelings have played a central role in the life-regulating processes of animals throughout the history of life.

"In Feeling & Knowing, Damasio suggests that consciousness evolved as a way to keep essential bodily systems steady. This concept is also known as homeostasis, a self-regulating process that maintains stability amid ever-changing conditions. Consciousness emerged as an extension of homeostasis, Damasio argues, allowing for flexibility and planning in complex and unpredictable environments.

***

"SN: You argue that consciousness is unlikely to be exclusive to humans.

"Damasio: Right. We have different lineages in evolution, but it doesn’t mean that other creatures don’t have the possibility of getting to consciousness. Take, for example, the octopus. They have extremely complex behaviors. I would be flabbergasted if someone said they are not conscious. They have all the hallmarks of creatures that were able to develop a mind and have a sense of who they are and an awareness of how to protect themselves."

Comment: So the octopus can do calculus? Yes animals are aware of bodily functions, but that doesn't mean they have the degree of consciousness we have. Our degree is very special, and Damasio's atheistic guesswork is just that.

https://www.science.org/content/article/nonsense-words-make-people-around-world-think-s...

"Now, the most extensive study of this finding yet—testing 917 speakers of 25 languages that use 10 different writing systems—has found that 72% of participants across languages associate the word “bouba” with a blobby shape and “kiki” with a sharp one.

"Such “cross-sensory” links—here, between speech and vision—show people can use nonsense words and other vocal noises to evoke concepts without using actual language. That could help explain how language evolved in the first place, says Aleksandra Ćwiek, a linguistics doctoral researcher at the Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics who led the new study.

***

"Past research has pointed to the spikiness of the letter K, and roundness of the letter B, as the primary reason for the effect of “kiki” and “bouba” on English speakers. But other work has found that children who haven’t yet learned to read also make the association, as do Himba people in Namibia, who have limited contact with Westerners and don’t use written language.

***

"The volunteers overwhelmingly matched “bouba” with the round shape and “kiki” with the spiky one, the authors report today in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. The finding suggests people make a genuine link between the sounds and the shape. It also adds to a growing pile of evidence that challenges an old linguistic dogma: the belief that the sounds that make up a word have no relationship to its meaning.

"But there were important differences across languages. Whereas 75% of speakers whose languages use the Roman alphabet—including English and other European languages—made the link, only 63% of speakers of other languages such as Georgian and Japanese did. And three languages—Romanian, Turkish, and Mandarin Chinese—didn’t show the effect at all.

***

"Some evolutionary linguists have suggested language may have started not with speech, but with gesture, because it’s so much easier to illustrate an idea with hands—like miming the shape of a tree, Ćwiek says. But that explanation just raises a new question: Why did speech emerge at all? The growing evidence that vocal noises can also evoke ideas like shape or size helps close that gap, she says, hinting that both gesture and speech “have played a significant role at the very core of language.”

Comment: An interesting approach as how language began.

https://bigthink.com/13-8/physics-neuroscience-free-will/

"Are we free to make choices or are we automatons in a giant and invisible cosmic machinery, cogs and wheels turning about, not knowing why we make the choices we make? This is a thorny question that has important consequences, and not just for law enforcement.

***

"...the point is that choices come with consequences. If there is no free will, if we are indeed automatons of sorts, then to what extent are we really choosing when we think we are? And if we are not choosing, what or who is? And if we are not choosing, why do we have this notion or feeling that we are?

***

"Fortunately, the mind is not a solar system with strict deterministic laws. We have no clue what kinds of laws it follows, apart from very simplistic empirical laws about nerve impulses and their propagation, which already reveal complex nonlinear dynamics. Still, work in neuroscience has prompted a reconsideration of free will, even to the point of questioning our freedom to choose. Many neuroscientists and some philosophers consider free will to be an illusion. Sam Harris, for example, wrote a short book arguing the case.

"This shocking conclusion comes from a series of experiments that revealed something quite remarkable: Our brains decide a course of action before we know it. Benjamin Libet’s pioneering experiments in the 1980s using EEG and more recent ones using fMRI or implants directly into neurons found that the motor region responsible for making a motion in response to a question fired up seven seconds before the subject was aware of it. The brain seems to be deciding before the mind knows about it. But is it really?

"The experiment has been debunked, which actually is far from surprising. But what was surprising was the huge amount of noise that the claims against free will emerging from this type of experiment generated. To base the hefty issue of free will on experiments that measure neuronal activity when people move fingers to push a button should hardly count as decisive. Most of the choices we make in life are complex, multi-layered decisions that often take a long time."

Comment: All I can say is I agree. Libet was refuted long ago. Marcelo Gleiser is a professor of natural philosophy, physics, and astronomy at Dartmouth College.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/anil-seth-finds-consciousness-in-lifes-push-against-entr...

"Anil Seth wants to understand how minds work. As a neuroscientist at the University of Sussex in England, Seth has seen firsthand how neurons do what they do — but he knows that the puzzle of consciousness spills over from neuroscience into other branches of science, and even into philosophy.

"As he puts it near the start of his new book, Being You: A New Science of Consciousness (available October 19): “Somehow, within each of our brains, the combined activity of billions of neurons, each one a tiny biological machine, is giving rise to a conscious experience. And not just any conscious experience, your conscious experience, right here, right now. How does this happen? Why do we experience life in the first person?”

***

"When we think about consciousness or experience, it just doesn’t seem to us to be the sort of thing that admits an explanation in terms of physics and chemistry and biology. There’s a suspicion that scientific explanation — by which I mean broadly materialist, reductive explanations, which have been so successful in other branches of physics and chemistry — just might not be up to the job, because consciousness is intrinsically private.

***

"How is consciousness related to our nature as living machines, in a way that’s continuous between humans and other animals? In my work — and in the book — I eventually get to the point that consciousness is not there in spite of our nature as flesh-and-blood machines, as Descartes might have said; rather, it’s because of this nature. It is because we are flesh-and-blood living machines that our experiences of the world and of “self” arise.

***

"The promising bit comes from what Gerald Edelman and Tononi together observed, in the late ’90s, which is that conscious experiences are highly “informative” and always “integrated.”

"They meant information in a technical, formal sense — not the informal sense in which reading a newspaper is informative. Rather, conscious experiences are informative because every conscious experience is different from every other experience you ever have had, ever could have, or ever will have. Each one rules out the occurrence of a very, very large repertoire of alternative possible conscious experiences. When I look out of the window right now, I have never experienced this precise visual scene. It’s an experience even more distinctive when combined with all my thoughts, background emotions and so on. And this is what information, in information theory, measures: It’s the reduction of uncertainty among a repertoire of alternative possibilities.

"As well as being informative, every conscious experience is also integrated. It’s experienced “all of a piece”: Every conscious scene appears as a unified whole. We don’t experience the colors of objects separately from their shapes, nor do we experience objects independently of whatever else is going on. The many different elements of my conscious experience right now all seem tied together in a fundamental and inescapable way.

"So at the level of experience, at the level of phenomenology, consciousness has these two properties that coexist. Well, if that’s the case, then what Tononi and Edelman argued was that the mechanisms that underlie conscious experiences in the brain or in the body should also co-express these properties of information and integration.

***

"One thing that immediately follows from this is that you have a nice post hoc explanation for certain things we know about consciousness. For instance, that the cerebellum — the “little brain” in the back of our head — doesn’t seem to have much to do with consciousness. That’s just a matter of empirical fact; the cerebellum doesn’t seem much involved. Yet it has three-quarters of all the neurons in the brain. Why isn’t the cerebellum involved? You can make up many reasons. But the IIT reason is a very convincing one: The cerebellum’s wiring is not the right sort of wiring to generate co-expressed information and integration, whereas the cortex is, and the cortex is intimately related to consciousness.

***

"The key to unlocking life was to recognize that it is not just one thing. Life is a constellation concept — a cluster of related properties that come together in different ways in different organisms. There’s homeostasis, there’s reproduction, there’s metabolism, and so on. With life there are also gray areas, things that from some perspectives we would describe as being alive, and from others not — like viruses and oil droplets, and now synthetic organisms. But by accounting for its diverse properties, the suspicion that we still needed an élan vital, a spark of life — some sort of vitalistic resonance — to explain it went away. The problem of life wasn’t solved; it was “dissolved.”

***

"I don’t go all the way to what in philosophy you might call some version of idealism — that everything is a property of the mental. Some people do. This is where I diverge a little bit from people like [the cognitive scientist] Donald Hoffman....But he goes further, ending up in a kind of panpsychist idealism that some degree of consciousness inheres in everything. I just don’t buy it, frankly, and I don’t think you need to go there."

Comment: he has no answer, but interesting concepts., especially explaining cerebellar and cerebral wiring differences.

https://mindmatters.ai/2020/08/bernardo-kastrup-argues-for-a-universal-mind-as-a-reason...

"Bernardo Kastrup: Panpsychism, well, to be more accurately called constitutive panpsychism, it’s the notion that at least some of the elementary particles that constitutes the universe, at least some of them, are fundamentally conscious. In other words, they have experiential states, fundamental experiential states, next to having fundamental physical properties, like mass, charge, spin, momentum, spacetime position, and so on. So, next to all of those physical properties, there is a fundamental experiential property to at least some of the elementary building blocks of the physical universe.

***

"Bernardo Kastrup: I would say, elementary subatomic particles don’t exist. They are an epistemic tool, and physicists know this. An elementary subatomic particle is a particular pattern of excitation of a quantum field. That quantum field, that thing, although it’s entirely abstract, it exists. And to use an analogy to explain this, if you see a ripple moving on the surface of an otherwise very calm lake, you can point to the ripple and say, “It’s here. Now it’s here. And now it’s there.” Presumably, you can measure it. You can say it’s this high, it’s this long, it’s this large, it’s moving with that speed. You can characterize that ripple with all kinds of physical constants, or not constants, but physical quantities that characterize the ripple as a physical entity. Yet, there is nothing to the ripple but the water of the lake. The ripple is just a pattern of excitation of the water. The water isn’t even moving from left to right, it’s moving only up and down. But the ripple moves from left to right.

"So, a subatomic particle is just like the ripple. It is a ripple in the quantum field and as such, it doesn’t really exist. It’s just a way of talking about the pattern of excitation of the quantum field. But if the panpsychists bite this bullet, then you would have to concede that the consciousness that they want to put in at that level of nature, as a fundamental aspect of nature, would be spatially unbound, because the quantum field is spatially unbound. You cannot say that the ripple is conscious because the ripple doesn’t exist. There is only the quantum field. So, you have to say the quantum field is conscious.

"But now, you end up with universal consciousness because the quantum field, this is spatially unbound. It exists everywhere at the same time. And that makes it impossible for panpsychists to explain why you and I seem to have separate conscious in their lives. I can’t read your thoughts. Presumably, you can’t read mine. I do not know what’s happening in the galaxy of Andromeda. So, I think that’s a very strong argument against panpsychism.

"But the problem that separate consciousnesses creates for panpsychism (even elementary particles are conscious) does not, he says, exist in the same way for cosmopsychism (there is one universal consciousness), the view he holds:

"So, to avoid this combination problem, some philosophers have moved to the exact opposite end of the scale. They say, “Well, you know what? There is only one universal consciousness.” And by the way, that’s much more consistent with physics as we know. It’s much more consistent with quantum field theory, quantum electrodynamics and… Well, quantum field theory is the broader theory. But then, that’s called cosmopsychism. There is only one universal consciousness.

***

"Bernardo Kastrup: And the challenge that you have to face then, as a cosmopsychist, is to say, how does this one mind seemingly break up or decomposes into a number of individual subjectivities? Like you, me, my cats, the bacteria swimming on the lake. How does the one ground the many? This is called then the decomposition problem.

"In Kastrup’s view, we all have separate consciousnesses because we are dissociated from the universal consciousness, in a way that a person with multiple personality disorder might have separate consciousnesses all in one mind:

"Bernardo Kastrup: My claim is, at least on empirical grounds, disassociation provides us a very good analogy, a very good metaphor for what might be happening at a universal level. Leading this one universal consciousness that we hypothesize to becoming many, to becoming you, me, and my girlfriend downstairs, and my cats, and so on."

Comment: And my approach is we receive the mechanism of consciousness from the universal consciousness for our brains to use. There is an article that the brain does this as a transducer, an interesting comment.

https://bigthink.com/surprising-science/thukdam-study

"The bodies of some Tibetan monks remain "fresh" after what appears to be their death.
Their fellow monks say they're not dead yet but in a deep, final meditative state called "thukdam."

"Science has not found any evidence of lingering EEG activity after death in thukdam monks.
It's definitely happening, and it's definitely weird. After the apparent death of some monks, their bodies remain in a meditating position without decaying for an extraordinary length of time, often as long as two or three weeks.

"Tibetan Buddhists, who view death as a process rather than an event, might assert that the spirit has not yet finished with the physical body. For them, thukdam begins with a "clear light" meditation that allows the mind to gradually unspool, eventually dissipating into a state of universal consciousness no longer attached to the body. Only at that time is the body free to die.

***

"There have been a handful of other unexplained instances of delayed decomposition elsewhere in the world.

***

"The most serious study of the phenomenon so far is being undertaken by The Thukdam Project of the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Center for Healthy Minds. Neuroscientist Richard Davidson is one of the founders of the center and has published hundreds of articles about mindfulness.

"Davidson first encountered thukdam after his Tibetan monk friend Geshe Lhundub Sopa died, officially on August 28, 2014. Davidson last saw him five days later: "There was absolutely no change. It was really quite remarkable."

"The Thukdam Project published its first annual report this winter. It discussed a recent study in which electroencephalograms failed to detect any brain activity in 13 monks who had practiced thukdam and had been dead for at least 26 hours. Davidson was senior author of the study.

"While some might be inclined to say, well, that's that, Davidson sees the research as just a first step on a longer road. Philosopher Evan Thompson, who is not involved in The Thukdam Project, tells Tricycle, "If the thinking was that thukdam is something we can measure in the brain, this study suggests that's not the right place to look."

"In any event, the question remains: why are these apparently deceased monks so slow to begin decomposition? While environmental factors can slow or speed up the process a bit, usually decomposition begins about four minutes after death and becomes quite obvious over the course of the next day or so.

"As the Dalai Lama said:

"'What science finds to be nonexistent we should all accept as nonexistent, but what science merely does not find is a completely different matter. An example is consciousness itself. Although sentient beings, including humans, have experienced consciousness for centuries, we still do not know what consciousness actually is: its complete nature and how it functions."

***

"As thukdam researchers continue to seek a signal of post-mortem consciousness of some sort, it's fair to ask what — and where — consciousness is in the first place. It is a question with which Big Think readers are familiar. We write about new theories all the time: consciousness happens on a quantum level; consciousness is everywhere."

Comment: It seems the body maintains some control over bacteria that can decompose, while the brain has ceased activity. The decomposing bugs are in the gut, and generally once the heart stops pumping, immunity defense disappears. A real puzzle.

https://aeon.co/essays/does-consciousness-come-from-the-brains-electromagnetic-field?ut...

"Whether neurons are firing synchronously should make no difference to their information-processing operations. Synchrony makes no sense for a consciousness located in neurons – but if we place consciousness in the brain’s EM field, then its association with synchrony becomes inevitable...when those same neurons fire synchronously, then their waves will line up to cause constructive interference to project a strong EM signal into my brain’s EM field, what I now call the conscious electromagnetic information (cemi) field.

***

"...experiments by David McCormick at Yale University School of Medicine in 2010 and Christof Koch at Caltech in 2011 have demonstrated that neurons can indeed be perturbed by weak, brain-strength, EM fields. At the very least, their experiments suggest the plausibility of a wifi component of neuronal information processing, which I claim is experienced as ‘free will’.

"The cemi field theory also accounts for why our non-conscious and conscious minds operate differently. One of the most striking differences between the two is that our non-conscious mind can do many things at once, but we are able to engage in only one conscious task at a time. For example, Katumuwa [historical figure wo imagined a soul] wouldn’t have had any problem chatting to a friend while chewing on his roast duck, but he wouldn’t have been able to divide a number such as 1,357 by seven while concentrating on a game of chess. Our non-conscious mind appears to be a parallel processor, whereas our conscious mind is a serial processor that can operate only one task at a time.

***

"Different ideas dropped into the brain’s cemi field similarly interfere with one another. Our conscious cemi-field mind inevitably became a serial computer that can do only one thing at a time. (my bold)

***

"The cemi field theory predicts that conventional computers will never gain general intelligence, because it’s a skill enabled by the cemi field’s ability to compute with cbits, ideas, rather than binary digits. Conventional AI lacks this capability because computer engineers take great pains to prevent EM fields interfering with their computations. Without EM field interactions, AI will remain forever dumb and non-conscious.

"Yet the cemi field theory also provides the exciting and potentially world-changing prospect of building artificial conscious minds. It will require a different kind of computer architecture that, like our own brain, computes with fields as well as conventional logic gates that encode only bits. The architecture of our own EM field-sensitive brains provides lots of clues as to how these revolutionary artificial brains of the future could be built. Transforming those clues into a new form of computing could finally deliver the dream of conscious, general intelligence-enabled AI."

Comment: Note my bold. This researcher is using his knowledge that our frontal lobe's cortex have five layers of neurons wired in series. It is a highly complex arrangement that somehow arranges for us to have consciousness and do abstract thinking. Perhaps the EM field is part of it. After all I think God's consciousness pervades this universe. As for the brain's unconscious activity just think of any sports player in action, hitting a tennis ball coming at him at over 100 miles an hour, instantly calculating his swing accurately.

DAVID: This fits my view of soul body dualism as two interacting aspects of 'me', one material and one immaterial.

dhw: No it doesn’t. The article could hardly be more emphatic: there is NO interaction between soul and body, because a human being is ONE THING, not two! See the bolds above. This is the compromise that I have been suggesting, though I go one step further: my version is that the material brain produces immaterial thought, emotion etc. (materialism) but the product itself may be (I would emphasize “may”) a form of energy that can exist independently of its original source. Hence NDEs and other psychic experiences.

DAVID: Your interpretation is exactly what my statement says. Material body, immaterial thought which represents my soul, an energy which can become independent after death.

dhw: [...] I didn’t think your own version envisaged the “soul” as the product of the brain, but if it does, then we have agreed on this compromise.

DAVID: In my version the immaterial soul uses the material brain for thought capacity while alive. So of course there is continuous interaction.

Yes, I thought so. Exactly the opposite of the proposal put forward by the article and by my compromise.

QUOTE: “This problem does not arise for the Scholastic conception of soul and body, because, again, it does not regard them as distinct substances in the first place. A human being is one thing, not two, albeit a thing with both corporeal and incorporeal activities. And since it is one thing, the question of interaction does not arise." (dhw’s bold)

DAVID: This fits my view of soul body dualism as two interacting aspects of 'me', one material and one immaterial.

dhw: No it doesn’t. The article could hardly be more emphatic: there is NO interaction between soul and body, because a human being is ONE THING, not two! See the bolds above. This is the compromise that I have been suggesting, though I go one step further: my version is that the material brain produces immaterial thought, emotion etc. (materialism) but the product itself may be (I would emphasize “may”) a form of energy that can exist independently of its original source. Hence NDEs and other psychic experiences.

DAVID: Your interpretation is exactly what my statement says. Material body, immaterial thought which represents my soul, an energy which can become independent after death.

dhw: The article contradicts your view of “two interacting aspects” – body and soul. Hence the points I have bolded. My compromise is that the brain produces immaterial thought etc. – there is no interaction between two distinct entities – but it is possible that the immaterial product may take on its own independent existence in the form of psychic experiences and ultimately life after death, as suggested by NDEs. I didn’t think your own version envisaged the “soul” as the product of the brain, but if it does, then we have agreed on this compromise.

In my version the immaterial soul uses the material brain for thought capacity while alive. So of course there is continuous interaction.

DAVID: This fits my view of soul body dualism as two interacting aspects of 'me', one material and one immaterial.

dhw: No it doesn’t. The article could hardly be more emphatic: there is NO interaction between soul and body, because a human being is ONE THING, not two! See the bolds above. This is the compromise that I have been suggesting, though I go one step further: my version is that the material brain produces immaterial thought, emotion etc. (materialism) but the product itself may be (I would emphasize “may”) a form of energy that can exist independently of its original source. Hence NDEs and other psychic experiences.

DAVID: Your interpretation is exactly what my statement says. Material body, immaterial thought which represents my soul, an energy which can become independent after death.

The article contradicts your view of “two interacting aspects” – body and soul. Hence the points I have bolded. My compromise is that the brain produces immaterial thought etc. – there is no interaction between two distinct entities – but it is possible that the immaterial product may take on its own independent existence in the form of psychic experiences and ultimately life after death, as suggested by NDEs. I didn’t think your own version envisaged the “soul” as the product of the brain, but if it does, then we have agreed on this compromise.

Egnor:
"This is not just linguistic nitpicking. The concept of “consciousness” is much worse than useless.”

“'Consciousness” is a concept derived from a deeply mistaken view of man’s soul and mind — the view that man is a machine that can be switched on and off. This misunderstanding serves to conceal, not reveal, the true nature of man. We are not machines. We are never switched off — we are never unconscious — not in sleep, not under anesthesia, not in coma and not even after death. (dhw's bold)

"Millions of people have had near death experiences (NDE’s), in which awareness (usually heightened awareness) persists after complete cessation of brain function."

"While our mental powers can change — our vision, alertness, or memory can fail — we have no “off switch.” Most egregiously, the concept of “consciousness” perpetuates the lie that we are extinguished at death. There is every reason — philosophical and scientific — to infer that man has an immortal soul."

DAVID: NDE's, as reported, fit Egnor's comments. I do not find fault with this approach.

dhw: I’m sorry, but I find this sort of thing intensely irritating. Apparently “consciousness” is a useless concept because there are different levels of consciousness, and because when people are said to be unconscious (e.g. asleep, in a coma, during NDEs) in actual fact they are or may be conscious. How does this make the concept of “consciousness” worse than useless? […] This is not even “linguistic nitpicking” – it’s simply muddled thinking.

DAVID: The issues he raised were not muddled. The comatose patient may well be thinking as studies have shown. Locked in syndrome as one example. I agree it is nitpicking to some extent, but it does act to clarify our thinking about the concept of overt and hidden consciousness.

dhw: Egnor has told us that the concept of consciousness is worse than useless. Why? Because there are different degrees of consciousness, and sometimes people who are thought to be unconscious are in fact conscious. And therefore we have an immortal soul! I do wish you wouldn’t leap to the defence of such muddled non sequiturs. Egnor uses the concept of “consciousness” in exactly the same way as non-believers do, but he thinks consciousness survives the death of the brain. No problem if that’s what he thinks, but that does not make the concept of consciousness “worse than useless” or responsible for people not believing what he believes.

I'll agree he was a bit too bombastic making his points, but I felt they were valuable to our understanding of consciousness..

QUOTES: "As I have often suggested, the real problem with Descartes’ position is not that he has trouble explaining how soul and body interact. The problem is that he thinks of them as interacting in the first place. It is that he posits two substances rather than one. And the reason this is a problem is that he thereby simply fails to capture the truth about human nature.” (dhw’s bold)

“This problem does not arise for the Scholastic conception of soul and body, because, again, it does not regard them as distinct substances in the first place. A human being is one thing, not two, albeit a thing with both corporeal and incorporeal activities. And since it is one thing, the question of interaction does not arise." (dhw’s bold)

DAVID: This fits my view of soul body dualism as two interacting aspects of 'me', one material and one immaterial.

dhw: No it doesn’t. The article could hardly be more emphatic: there is NO interaction between soul and body, because a human being is ONE THING, not two! See the bolds above. This is the compromise that I have been suggesting, though I go one step further: my version is that the material brain produces immaterial thought, emotion etc. (materialism) but the product itself may be (I would emphasize “may”) a form of energy that can exist independently of its original source. Hence NDEs and other psychic experiences.

Your interpretation is exactly what my statement says. Material body, immaterial thought which represents my soul, an energy which can become independent after death.

“This problem does not arise for the Scholastic conception of soul and body, because, again, it does not regard them as distinct substances in the first place. A human being is one thing, not two, albeit a thing with both corporeal and incorporeal activities. And since it is one thing, the question of interaction does not arise." (dhw’s bold)

DAVID: This fits my view of soul body dualism as two interacting aspects of 'me', one material and one immaterial.

No it doesn’t. The article could hardly be more emphatic: there is NO interaction between soul and body, because a human being is ONE THING, not two! See the bolds above. This is the compromise that I have been suggesting, though I go one step further: my version is that the material brain produces immaterial thought, emotion etc. (materialism) but the product itself may be (I would emphasize “may”) a form of energy that can exist independently of its original source. Hence NDEs and other psychic experiences.

“'Consciousness” is a concept derived from a deeply mistaken view of man’s soul and mind — the view that man is a machine that can be switched on and off. This misunderstanding serves to conceal, not reveal, the true nature of man. We are not machines. We are never switched off — we are never unconscious — not in sleep, not under anesthesia, not in coma and not even after death. (dhw's bold)

"Millions of people have had near death experiences (NDE’s), in which awareness (usually heightened awareness) persists after complete cessation of brain function."

"While our mental powers can change — our vision, alertness, or memory can fail — we have no “off switch.” Most egregiously, the concept of “consciousness” perpetuates the lie that we are extinguished at death. There is every reason — philosophical and scientific — to infer that man has an immortal soul."

DAVID: NDE's, as reported, fit Egnor's comments. I do not find fault with this approach.

dhw: I’m sorry, but I find this sort of thing intensely irritating. Apparently “consciousness” is a useless concept because there are different levels of consciousness, and because when people are said to be unconscious (e.g. asleep, in a coma, during NDEs) in actual fact they are or may be conscious. How does this make the concept of “consciousness” worse than useless? […] This is not even “linguistic nitpicking” – it’s simply muddled thinking.

DAVID: The issues he raised were not muddled. The comatose patient may well be thinking as studies have shown. Locked in syndrome as one example. I agree it is nitpicking to some extent, but it does act to clarify our thinking about the concept of overt and hidden consciousness.

Egnor has told us that the concept of consciousness is worse than useless. Why? Because there are different degrees of consciousness, and sometimes people who are thought to be unconscious are in fact conscious. And therefore we have an immortal soul! I do wish you wouldn’t leap to the defence of such muddled non sequiturs. Egnor uses the concept of “consciousness” in exactly the same way as non-believers do, but he thinks consciousness survives the death of the brain. No problem if that’s what he thinks, but that does not make the concept of consciousness “worse than useless” or responsible for people not believing what he believes.

http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2021/01/princess-elisabeth-of-bohemia-on-soul.html#more

"The letters exchanged between Descartes and Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia – especially their 1643 exchange on the interaction problem – are among the best-known correspondences in the history of philosophy. And justly so, for they help to elucidate the true nature of that crucial problem and the inadequacy of Descartes’ response to it.

"Contemporary property dualists suggest that a material substance, the human body, can have both physical and non-physical attributes. What Elisabeth is suggesting is that an immaterial substance, the soul, might have both physical and non-physical attributes.

***

"This is an interesting proposal that amounts to a version of what is these days called property dualism, but of a very different kind than the sort usually on offer today. Contemporary property dualists suggest that a material substance, the human body, can have both physical and non-physical attributes. What Elisabeth is suggesting is that an immaterial substance, the soul, might have both physical and non-physical attributes.

"But there are two problems with this idea considered as a solution to the interaction problem facing Descartes. First, it turns out that even body-to-body interaction is not as unproblematic as Elisabeth (and most other people who comment on the interaction problem) assume. For Descartes’ abstract mathematical conception of matter is so desiccated that it is hard to see how it can have any efficacy at all with respect to anything, whether physical or non-physical. Occasionalism – attributing all causality to God rather than to anything in the created order – was a natural position for Cartesians like Malebranche to take, and Descartes himself arguably took it with regard to everything except soul-body interaction.

"A second problem is that if you are going to attribute physical properties to the soul in order to explain how it interacts with the body, why not go the whole hog and make the whole body itself an attribute of the soul? That way you don’t have to posit any interaction between soul and body at all, because they will no longer be distinct substances.

"Indeed, you’d be very close to returning to precisely the Scholastic conception of soul and body that Descartes was trying to replace. You’ll be treating a human being as one substance, not two, but a substance with both incorporeal powers (thinking and willing) and corporeal ones (seeing, hearing, digesting, walking, etc.). And I would say that that is indeed the correct solution to the interaction problem: to dissolve it by giving up the Cartesian thesis that soul and body are distinct substances, so that there aren’t any longer two things that need to “interact.”

"As I have often suggested, the real problem with Descartes’ position is not that he has trouble explaining how soul and body interact. The problem is that he thinks of them as interacting in the first place. It is that he posits two substances rather than one. And the reason this is a problem is that he thereby simply fails to capture the truth about human nature.

***

“'How, if soul and body are two independent substances, can the soul affect the body in the specific way that it does (rather than in the way a ghost or an angel would)?” The problem is explaining how the body could be a true part of you rather than a mere extrinsic instrument that is no more part of you than any other physical object.

***

"This is why Elisabeth’s point about body-to-soul causation is so important. If soul and body are two distinct substances, then even if the soul could, as a substance of a higher ontological order, produce effects in the body (even if only in the way an angel might), it is nevertheless entirely mysterious how the body could produce effects in the soul (any more than a stone or a tree could have any effect on an angel or demon).

"This problem does not arise for the Scholastic conception of soul and body, because, again, it does not regard them as distinct substances in the first place. A human being is one thing, not two, albeit a thing with both corporeal and incorporeal activities. And since it is one thing, the question of interaction does not arise."

Comment: This fits my view of soul body dualism as two interacting aspects of 'me', one material and one immaterial.

Egnor:

"This is not just linguistic nitpicking. The concept of “consciousness” is much worse than useless.”

“'Consciousness” is a concept derived from a deeply mistaken view of man’s soul and mind — the view that man is a machine that can be switched on and off. This misunderstanding serves to conceal, not reveal, the true nature of man. We are not machines. We are never switched off — we are never unconscious — not in sleep, not under anesthesia, not in coma and not even after death.

"Millions of people have had near death experiences (NDE’s), in which awareness (usually heightened awareness) persists after complete cessation of brain function."

"While our mental powers can change — our vision, alertness, or memory can fail — we have no “off switch.” Most egregiously, the concept of “consciousness” perpetuates the lie that we are extinguished at death. There is every reason — philosophical and scientific — to infer that man has an immortal soul."

DAVID: NDE's, as reported, fit Egnor's comments. I do not find fault with this approach.

dhw: I’m sorry, but I find this sort of thing intensely irritating. Apparently “consciousness” is a useless concept because there are different levels of consciousness, and because when people are said to be unconscious (e.g. asleep, in a coma, during NDEs) in actual fact they are or may be conscious. How does this make the concept of “consciousness” worse than useless? Egnor uses it and thinks of it in exactly the same way as the rest of us! All his argument boils down to is the fact that he believes in an immortal soul, i.e. he does not believe that consciousness ends when the body dies (= the “machine” is switched off), and NDEs are his evidence. I agree with him and you about NDEs – they suggest that consciousness does not die when the brain dies. So how does that make “consciousness” a useless concept? This is not even “linguistic nitpicking” – it’s simply muddled thinking.

The issues he raised were not muddled. The comatose patient may well be thinking as studies have shown. Locked in syndrome as one example. I agree it is nitpicking to some extent, but it does act to clarify our thinking about the concept of overt and hidden consciousness

"This is not just linguistic nitpicking. The concept of “consciousness” is much worse than useless.”

“'Consciousness” is a concept derived from a deeply mistaken view of man’s soul and mind — the view that man is a machine that can be switched on and off. This misunderstanding serves to conceal, not reveal, the true nature of man. We are not machines. We are never switched off — we are never unconscious — not in sleep, not under anesthesia, not in coma and not even after death.

"Millions of people have had near death experiences (NDE’s), in which awareness (usually heightened awareness) persists after complete cessation of brain function."

"While our mental powers can change — our vision, alertness, or memory can fail — we have no “off switch.” Most egregiously, the concept of “consciousness” perpetuates the lie that we are extinguished at death. There is every reason — philosophical and scientific — to infer that man has an immortal soul."

DAVID: NDE's, as reported, fit Egnor's comments. I do not find fault with this approach.

I’m sorry, but I find this sort of thing intensely irritating. Apparently “consciousness” is a useless concept because there are different levels of consciousness, and because when people are said to be unconscious (e.g. asleep, in a coma, during NDEs) in actual fact they are or may be conscious. How does this make the concept of “consciousness” worse than useless? Egnor uses it and thinks of it in exactly the same way as the rest of us! All his argument boils down to is the fact that he believes in an immortal soul, i.e. he does not believe that consciousness ends when the body dies (= the “machine” is switched off), and NDEs are his evidence. I agree with him and you about NDEs – they suggest that consciousness does not die when the brain dies. So how does that make “consciousness” a useless concept? This is not even “linguistic nitpicking” – it’s simply muddled thinking.