Consciousness - Phenomenon or Reality?

from newindianexpress.com

By Sri Aurobindo

Published: 29th May 2014 10:24 AM

Last Updated: 29th May 2014 10:30 AM

CHENNAI: But what is consciousness and what its relation to existence? How and why did it come into being in an inconscient universe, a universe which even if it originated by an inexplicable chance, has assumed the proportions of a huge and complex inexorable mechanism repeating the same processes through the aeons without respite or cessation? By what spiritual or mechanical necessity? By what mechanical chance or accidental process of energy? To what end of purpose, if any purpose there can be in an inconscient mechanism of brute necessity or inexplicably organised chance or any end in a movement which never had any reason for beginning?  Does consciousness exist or is it a fortuitous illusion?  Who or what is it that becomes conscious in the animal and in the body of the human being?

Three possible solutions. Consciousness has not come into being but was and is always there, a fundamental power of existence, latent or involved or concealed from our mind and sense even in what we call inanimate and unconscious things.  It has not come into existence but has emerged from existence; involved it has evolved in the general evolutionary process. Or consciousness is only a phenomenon, a surprising result of certain inconscient processes of nature, unintentional but actual, unnecessary and accidental or else somehow inevitable as an output of chemical and other physical energies which could not help imposing itself at certain point of their activity in the natural course of things.  It did not exist before that point was reached; when another point has been reached it may go out of existence. Or again the world is a creation of an extra-cosmic or immanent conscious being personal or impersonal who has either put his consciousness or a consciousness resembling his into his mechanical creation to be an element there or else has infused it from within into the mechanical self-expression in which he has chosen to dwell as it upholder, inspirer, inhabitant.

What is meant by consciousness? What is this phenomenon which seems to have so small a part in the vast inconscient mass of things and is yet the sole element here that can give any value to the universe?

And to come to the heart of the difficulty — is it indeed only a phenomenon, an appearance that has emerged in the course of the workings of an energy which was, is and will always remain inconscient? Or is it something fundamental, an inherent reality or a latent character or power of that energy and bound to emerge at some time once it had begun its workings? It is to a mass of ill-connected and ill-understood phenomena that we give this name of consciousness; when these are at work we say that a man or animal is conscious, when they are suspended we say that he or it is unconscious; where they are absent, as in a tree, we suppose the object, even if it has life, to be inconscient by its very nature, incapable of sensation no less than empty of thought and will.  Where life is not, inconscience seems to us a still more self-evident character of the thing or being.

Man alone is fully conscious, for he alone is aware of himself, reflective on things, in full possession of mental capacities and their aware and observant use. 

All things are inhabited by this consciousness, even the things that seem to us inconscient and the consciousness in one form can communicate with or contact the consciousness in another or else penetrate or contain or identify with it.  This in one form or another is the true process of all knowledge; the rest is ignorant appearance. All things are one itself; it is the one knower who knows himself everywhere, from one centre or another in the multiplicity of his play. Otherwise no knowledge would be possible.

Excerpt from the book Essays Divine and Human by Sri Aurobindo

Quantum and Consciousness Often Mean Nonsense

from slate  

Lots of things are mysterious. That doesn't mean they’re connected.

By Matthew R. Francis

Cartoon courtesy of SMBC

Possibly no subject in science has inspired more nonsense than quantum mechanics. Sure, it’s a complicated field of study, with a few truly mysterious facets that are not settled to everyone’s satisfaction after nearly a century of work. At the same time, though, using quantum to mean “we just don’t know” is ridiculous—and simply wrong. Quantum mechanics is the basis for pretty much all our modern technology, from smartphones to fluorescent lights, digital cameras to fiber-optic communications.  

If I had to pick a runner-up in the nonsense sweepstakes, it would be human consciousness, another subject with a lot of mysterious aspects. We are made of ordinary matter yet are self-aware, capable of abstractly thinking about ourselves and of recognizing others (including nonhumans) as separate entities with their own needs. As a physicist, I’m fascinated by the notion that our consciousness can imagine realities other than our own: The universe is one way, but we are perfectly happy to think of how it might be otherwise.

I hold degrees in physics and have spent a lot of time learning and teaching quantum mechanics. Nonphysicists seem to have the impression that quantum physics is really esoteric, with those who study it spending their time debating the nature of reality. In truth, most of a quantum mechanics class is lots and lots of math, in the service of using a particle’s quantum state—the bundle of physical properties such as position, energy, spin, and the like—to describe the outcomes of experiments. Sure, there’s some weird stuff and it’s fun to talk about, but quantum mechanics is aimed at being practical (ideally, at least).

Yet the mysterious aspects of quantum physics and consciousness have inspired many people to speculate freely. The worst offenders will even say that because we don’t fully understand either field, they must be related problems. It sounds good at first: We don’t know exactly how some things in quantum physics work, we don’t know exactly how to go from the brain to consciousness, so maybe consciousness is quantum.

The problem with this idea? It’s almost certainly wrong.

Oh, sure: In a sense the brain is quantum, simply because all matter is described by quantum mechanics. However, what people usually mean by quantum isn’t ordinary stuff such as molecules that let brain cells communicate. Instead, the term is usually reserved for the deeper processes that rely on the quantum state. The quantum state is where fun stuff like entanglement lives: the coupling of two widely separated particles that act like parts of a single system. But that level of analysis is not generally helpful for describing the motion of molecules across the gap between cells in the brain.

That’s not to say that quantum effects are entirely ruled out in biology. Some researchers are investigating how photosynthesis or even the human senses of sight and smell might work in part by manipulating quantum states. The retina in the eye is sensitive to small numbers of photons—particles of light—and the quantum state of the photon interacts with the quantum state of the retinal cell. But once those signals are translated into something the brain can process, the original quantum state seems to be irrelevant.

The overwhelming success of modern physics does not give physicists the ability to pronounce judgment on other sciences.

I’ll hedge my bets: Maybe there’s room for some small quantum effects in the brain, but I sincerely doubt those will be directly relevant for consciousness. That’s because almost anything involving individual quantum states requires isolation from environmental interference for the weirdness to show up. For example, most particles aren’t entangled in any meaningful way, because interactions with other particles change their quantum state. That process is known as decoherence. (If someone wants to propose a theory of the mind based on decoherence, I might listen, especially on days when I’m distracted.)

However, other people go much further. In his bestselling 1989 book The Emperor’s New Mind, mathematical physicist Roger Penrose proposed that the problems of interpreting quantum states implies that the conscious mind will need a new kind of physics to describe it. Penrose is no crackpot in his area of expertise (the mathematics of general relativity, which also happens to be my area), but his foray into the mind and consciousness is a cautionary tale.

Just because you’re a world expert in one branch of science doesn’t qualify you in any other discipline. As Zach Weinersmith’s painfully funny comic points out, this is a particularly bad habit among physicists.

Cartoon courtesy of SMBC

Some of them think that the overwhelming success of modern physics gives them the ability to pronounce judgment on other sciences, from linguistics to paleontology. Celebrity physicist Michio Kaku is a particularly egregious example,getting evolution completely wrong (see this critique) and telling infamous crackpot Deepak Chopra that our actions can have effects in distant galaxies. Then there are the physicists—including Freeman Dyson, one of the architects of the quantum theory describing interactions between light and matter—who contradict climate scientists in their own area of expertise.

Physicists aren’t the only culprits, though. A new book by neuroscientist W. R. Klemm implies that the edges of physics could provide answers about human consciousness. Ironically, he writes, “I just hate it when physicists write about biology. They sometimes say uninformed and silly things. But I hate it just as much when I write about physics, for I too am liable to say uninformed and silly things—as I may well do here.” Nearly everything that follows in the book excerpt is either wrong or misleading. I could write a point-by-point response, but suffice to say: The problems and incompleteness he cites about quantum physics are overblown and frankly incorrect.

I take it back: I will rant briefly about two of his points. First, Klemm writes, “But is mass really identical to energy? True, mass can be converted to energy, as atom bombs prove, and energy can even be turned into mass. Still, they are not the same things.” That’s an unnecessary obfuscation: Einstein’s equation E = mc2 does connect mass and energy in a fundamental and entirely unmysterious way. Probably no other single equation has inspired as many popular explanations, so it’s safe to say we get it: Mass is a form of energy. To be precise, it’s the energy a particle has when it’s at rest. Sure, there are complications in particle physics collisions at high speeds, but the basic concept is really simple.

Second, dark energy—which I have written about for Slate—does not impart energy to galaxies or anything smaller. If it turns out to be “vacuum energy,” which looks probable, then the only way dark energy could have anything to do with human consciousness would be if our heads were empty.

The problem with Klemm’s assertions, as well as those of many others who misuse the word quantum, is that their speculation is based on a superficial understanding of one or both fields. Physics may or may not have anything informative to say about consciousness, but you won’t make any progress in that direction without knowing a lot about both quantum physics and how brains work. Skimping on either of those will lead to nonsense.

Your Ant Farm Is Smarter Than Google

from time

• Bryan Walsh @bryanrwalsh

12:46 PM ET

Ant colonies are surprisingly efficient at forming intelligent networks that can rapidly spread information, according to a new study

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Ants may have the largest brains of any insect, but that doesn’t mean a single ant on its own is all that smart. As individual ants leave their nest in search of food, they walk in what appear to be random paths, hoping to come across something to eat. The behavior of hundreds of scout ants circling their nests on a hunt for sustenance can be chaotic as it looks, like drunks stumbling about the house in search of their keys. The ants will search for food until they’re exhausted, then return to the nest to briefly eat and rest before heading back out again.

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But as a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences makes clear, something amazing happens when an individual ant finds a food source. The ant will take a bit of the food back to the nest, leaving a trail of pheromones behind them to mark the path. A wave of ants will then attempt to follow the path back to the food source, but because pheromones evaporate quickly, their behavior will still look chaotic as they attempt to home in on the food.

Over time, though, the ants will organize their search, optimizing the best and shortest path between the food and the nest. As more ants follow the optimal path back and forth, they leave more and more pheromones, which in turn attracts more and more ants, creating a self-reinforcing efficiency effect. The chaotic, seemingly random foraging of individual ants is replaced with organized precision. Working as one, the ants create the sort of distribution networks a traffic engineer could only dream of.

“While the single ant is certainly not smart, the collective acts in a way that I’m tempted to call intelligent,” said study co-author Jurgen Kurths of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Reseaerch, in a statement. “The ants collectively form a highly efficient complex network.”

That’s not all the study found. The researchers also discovered that individual ants differ in their ability to find food. Over time older ants gather more experience about the environment surrounding their nests, which makes it easier for them to forage effectively, even though their age means they tire faster than young ants. The young ants are more like interns—their lack of experience means they can’t contribute much to foraging, but they are effectively learning on the job. (No word on whether they get course credit.)

Even though individual ants can get smarter over time as they learn more about their surrounding environment, the real ant intelligence is in the collective. Just how advanced are their search capabilities? Good enough to rival our best technology, at least. Google’s search engine forages for information on the Web in much the same way an ant colony looks for food. Google’s webcrawlers scour the Internet, bringing data about individual pages back to Google’s servers, where that information is indexed, sharpening the company’s picture of the ever-evolving Internet as it is—just as ants learn more and more about their environment over time. Google’s searchalgorithms use hundreds of signals to find the most efficient and accurate answer to any search query—just as the ant colony quickly organizes itself to find the most efficient path to a food source once it has been discovered by scouts.

But Kurths believes that ants are actually much more efficient at organizing data than a collective of human beings using the Internet could ever be, as he told the Independent:

I’d go so far as to say that the learning strategy involved in that, is more accurate and complex than a Google search. These insects are, without doubt, more efficient than Google in processing information about their surroundings.

Which doesn’t mean you should ask the closest ant colony, rather than Google, when you want to find out what time the Super Bowl is on. But in a digitally connected world where the network is quickly becoming smarter and more efficient than any individual, ants are apparently ahead of the game.

Seeking Roots of Consciousness, Scientists Make Dreamers Self-Aware

from nationalgeographics

Method to create lucid dreaming may help researchers learn more about the brain.

A teenage boy sleeps in Missouri.

PHOTOGRAPH BY MAGGIE STEBER, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

Virginia Hughes

for National Geographic

PUBLISHED MAY 11, 2014

Researchers have figured out how to make people aware of themselves during a dream: by zapping their sleeping brains with a weak electric current.

The sensation of "Hey, this is a dream!" is known as lucid dreaming. Those who naturally become lucid while dreaming, probably a small segment of the population, also report adventures that are impossible in the real world, such as flying, that feel completely real. Some can even change a dream's narrative twists and turns to make it less scary—or even more exhilarating. (Related: "Why Do We Dream? To Ease Painful Memories, Study Hints.")

Lucid dreaming is exciting not only for dreamers but also for neuroscientists, who consider it a window into the study of consciousness. But until now, researchers have been hampered by how hard it is to provoke lucid dreaming in people who don't do it naturally. A new method published today in Nature Neuroscience might get around this difficulty, making it easier to stimulate lucid dreaming at will.

"We can really quite easily change conscious awareness in dreams," said lead investigator Ursula Voss, a clinical psychologist at Frankfurt University in Germany. She does this, she said, by delivering mild electrical stimulation to the sleeping person's brain. (Related: "Electric Jolt to Brain Boosts Math Skills.")

Zapping While Napping

In this study, Voss and her team recruited 27 healthy young adults who had never experienced lucid dreaming. Each participant slept overnight in the lab on several occasions. Two minutes after reaching the REM (rapid eye movement) stage of sleep, which is when dreaming happens, the subjects received a weak electrical current (2 to 100 Hertz) to the frontal lobe for 30 seconds, or a sham current with no electricity.

The sweet spot was 40 Hertz. Zapping sleeping volunteers at this frequency, part of the so-called gamma wave band, led their brains to produce brain waves of the same frequency, the researchers found, which triggered lucidity 77 percent of the time, as determined by self-reports from the dreamers after they were awoken. (Related: "Dreams Make You Smarter, More Creative, Studies Suggest.")

Stimulations of 25 Hertz, at the low end of the gamma wave band, also sparked lucidity 58 percent of the time. In contrast, subjects who received sham or low-frequency stimulations never became lucid.

Voss had previously identified the 40-Hertz currents as the possible key to lucidity. In a 2009 study, she and her colleagues studied six individuals who were trained lucid dreamers, and found that during episodes of lucidity they produced brain waves in the brain's frontal area of around 30 to 40 Hertz—much higher than is found in typical REM sleep. But the scientists did not know if the gamma waves were a cause of the lucidity or a consequence of it. The new study suggests the former.

Gamma Wave of the Future?

"I'm really impressed, particularly since the effects are so specific for these frequencies," said Martin Dresler, a neuroscientist at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, who was not involved in the new work.

Gamma frequencies are especially intriguing, he added, because other studies have linked them to consciousness during wakefulness.

The study might have clinical implications for treating conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder and nightmares, said Tore Nielsen, a dream and nightmare researcher at the University of Montreal. Once a nightmare has begun, for instance, the dreamer could be zapped with gamma waves, become lucid, and potentially change the circumstances of the dream to make it less frightening. "That would be remarkable," Nielsen said. (Related: "Can Phobias Be Cured in Our Sleep?")

Nielsen also envisions a coming bonanza of brain-stimulation gizmos that allow people to become lucid-dreaming adventurers. "People are going to be scrambling to put together home lucid dreaming induction devices based on this 40-Hertz stimulation procedure," he said. "I wouldn't be surprised if we see products fairly quickly."

Whether or not DIY lucidity becomes a reality, Voss said what's great about lucid dreams is that they help illuminate the human condition. "Being able to reflect upon yourself, to think about your past and plan your future—this is something that only we humans can do."

Follow Virginia Hughes on Twitter.

Defending the Young a DNA imperative

from gary ozenne



I can't get over the cat vs dog video.  





Richard Alpert former Harvard professor, who became Baba Ram Dass, after leaving Harvard wrote a book "How can I help" which described a scuba diver in distress who was saved by nearby dolphins 

The DNA's strategy, simply put, is to fuck. To advance the gene pool, knocking out life at the rate of about 10.6 million humans each month.   

But, at a higher level of behavior, the DNA implores us to protect the young. This short video demonstrates this.  Notice how the cat, after giving the dog a fierce body blow, chases him off, but not too far, it stops, and goes back to the boy he was protecting to see if there were any more threats he had to handle.

We've Been Looking at Ant Intelligence the Wrong Way

from scientificamerica.com







Editor's note: The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research.

By Antoine Wystrach, University of Sussex

How intelligent are animals? Despite centuries of effort by philosophers, psychologists and biologists, the question remains unanswered. We are inclined to tackle this question using a top-down approach. It seems intuitive to start with our own assumptions about human intelligence, and design experiments that ask whether animals possess similar anthropomorphic abilities.

Do animals have a language, or a personality? Do they feel empathy or achieve abstract reasoning? This approach does suit the study of animals closely related to us, like apes. But is it relevant when studying animals such as insects?

Insects certainly display complex and apparently intelligent behavior. They navigate over long distances, find food, avoid predators, communicate, display courtship, care for their young, and so on. The complexity of their behavioral repertoire is comparable to any mammal.

However, they have a tiny brain, and probably because of assumptions about the limitations of tiny brains, researchers generally avoid seeking human abilities in insects. In his 1969 book, The Sciences of the Artificial, Herbert Simon contemplates an ant wandering on the beach:

Viewed as a geometric figure, the ant’s path is irregular, complex, and hard to describe. But its complexity is really a complexity in the surface of the beach, not the complexity in the ant.

Simon explains that the complexity observed in the behavior is not necessarily in the ant, but in the interaction between the ant and the surrounding complex environment. This idea has allowed scientists to avoid any idea of an anthropomorphic intelligence, by looking instead for the simplest solutions to explain complex behavior.

Assume an animal is the simplest it can be, whilst looking for proof of a higher level of intelligence. With such an approach, research in insect intelligence is working bottom-up, with simple (and boring) initial explanations being steadily replaced by increasingly complex (and exciting) explanations.

Decades of bottom-up research have passed since Simon looked at his ant on the beach, and Simon himself would be surprised at how complex, and intelligent, insects are. The change of perspective that allowed him to profess the ant’s simplicity has, in fact, revealed an alien complexity, one not driven by anthropomorphic considerations.

We now know that the path produced by a navigating ant is based on sophisticated mechanisms.

Ants use a variety of cues to navigate, such as sun position, polarized light patterns, visual panoramas, gradient of odors, wind direction, slope, ground texture, step-counting … and more. Indeed, the list of cues ants can utilise for navigation is probably greater than for humans.

Counter-intuitively, years of bottom-up research has revealed that ants do not integrate all this information into a unified representation of the world, a so-called cognitive map. Instead they possess different and distinct modules dedicated to different navigational tasks. These combine to allow navigation.

One module keeps track of distance and direction travelled, and continually updates an estimate of the best “bee-line” home. A second module, dedicated to the learning of visual scenery, allows ants to recognise and navigate rapidly along important routes as defined by familiar visual cues. Finally, ants possess an emergency plan for when both of these systems fail to indicate what to do: in other words, when the ant is lost. In this case, they display a systematic search pattern.

In our recent work, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society, we have discovered a fourth strategy: backtracking. We showed that ants keep track of the direction they have just been travelling, allowing them to backtrack if they unexpectedly move from familiar to unfamiliar surroundings.

From a human perspective, this seems sensible, and is probably what we would do if unexpectedly encountered an unfamiliar street while walking through town. What is most interesting, with regard to the cognitive sophistication or intelligence of the ant, is that ants display this backtracking behavior only if they had seen their nest’s surroundings immediately prior to getting lost. This ensures that backtracking happens only when the ant is likely to be beyond the nest, rather than short of it.

Thus we have evidence that ants can also take into account what they have recently experienced in order to modulate their behavior. What’s more, we have shown that the ant’s navigational modules are not purely isolated. In the case of backtracking for instance, the experience of familiar visual scenery modulates the use of sky compass information.

Evolution has equipped ants with a distributed system of specialised modules interacting together. These results demonstrate that the navigational intelligence of ants is not in an ability to build a unified representation of the world, but in the way different strategies cleverly interact to produce robust navigation.

We need to keep in mind that this is only our current level of understanding. Even insect brains are far too complex to be fully understood in the near future. Perhaps we will have misjudged the intelligence of ants just as much as we think Simon did. However, we know that continued bottom-up research is the principled way to pull back the veil on insect intelligence, without the spectre of anthropomorphism.

Antoine Wystrach does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

This article was originally published at The Conversation. Read the original article.

Mind the mind: research on our consciousness is evolving

from bowdoinorient.com/

May 2, 2014

Read Later:    

Anna Hall

On Monday morning, throngs of students slowly made their way back to their weekly routines, their thoughts filled with a sense of nostalgia for the past weekend and anxieties for the upcoming last few days of classes. These thoughts, and others like them, are the daily norm. We accept them for what they are and rarely question where they come from. 

Our daily consciousness is the sole force that gives rise to what makes up everything we see and feel and think, but where does it come from? We all share the daily experience of “reality” and we accept it, yet neuroscientists today have very little idea of how it happens.

How does something inanimate and material such as the human brain give rise to subjective reality and emotions such as anxiety and nostalgia? For a while this question was strictly in the realm of philosophy, where there was a divide based on whether or not the mind is something entirely separate from the body. This mind-body dualism was most notably proposed by the French philosopher René Descartes.

Descartes posited that the mind—and thus subjective conscious experience—actually originates from an immaterial substance he called “res cogitans,” Latin for thinking thing. This substance allows for conscious thoughts and decision making, and exists somewhere outside the physical world we are so familiar with and on which all observational science is based.  

This view, however, is opposed today by many neuroscientists who identify as physicalists, believing that consciousness comes from highly organized normal matter.

This different approach turns out to be exceedingly difficult.  Explaining how subjective experience arises from normal matter is so difficult, in fact, that philosophers have dubbed it the “hard” problem. In the past decade, however, the science of consciousness is quickly gaining a legitimate scientific grounding.

This past week, hundreds of the world’s leading experts in consciousness studies gathered in Arizona for the largest conference on the subject. It is here where many scientists and philosophers hope for a significant lead in tackling the “hard” problem. That lead may finally have come to fruition.

Acclaimed MIT physicist, Max Tegmark, is widely known for his work on cosmology, but he recently released a paper that takes a completely different look at what consciousness might be. He supposes that consciousness can be modeled as a state of matter. Although this sounds quite fanciful at first, he gives an interesting and rigorous argument for his novel approach.

Tegmark contends that states of consciousness must obey a set of mathematical rules similar to the rules that govern varying states of matter. Just as ice turns to water under certain conditions, different levels of consciousness vary from one state to another. Approaching the problem in this way allows physicists and neuroscientists to start making progress towards a quantitative approach to consciousness.

For years, neuroscientists have agreed that consciousness must arise from certain parameters such as the processing of information in an integrated way. Now, Tegmark believes that this information processing can be categorized more specifically and will soon be able to be treated in a mathematically rigorous way.

Tegmark’s model, as with all models of consciousness, is still very speculative. Will there ever be a practical physical model for the nature of consciousness, or is this question outside the realm of the observational science that we know today?  

Regardless, understanding how the human brain functions is at the frontier of modern science and will push developments in neuroscience through the next century.