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aspect
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baywax said:
What evidence are you referring to? What you're doing is using words like "chemoelectromagnetic" and pretending you've explained something.
baywax said:The difference between the materialistic and the non-materialistic approach to understanding awareness is that the materialistic approach has examples and evidence in the form of working, physical systems that explain the existence of awareness.
aspect said:What evidence are you referring to? What you're doing is using words like "chemoelectromagnetic" and pretending you've explained something.
This theory was initially proposed by scientists such as Johnjoe McFadden, Susan Pockett and E. Roy John (For the recent account see Andrew and Alexander Fingelkurts). It is a tentative hypothesis as are all current hypotheses about consciousness and is an example of protoscience rather than pseudoscience.
The starting point for the theory is the fact that every time a neuron fires to generate an action potential it also generates a disturbance to the surrounding electromagnetic(EM) field. Information coded in neuron firing patterns is therefore reflected into the brain's EM field. Locating consciousness in the brain's EM field, rather than the neurons, has the advantage of neatly accounting for how information located in millions of neurons scattered throughout the brain can be unified into a single conscious experience (sometimes called the binding problem): the information is unified in the EM field. In this way EM field consciousness can be considered to be 'joined-up information'.
Consciousness Based on Wireless?
Jeffrey Benner 05.21.02 | 2:00 AM
Human consciousness is actually wireless communication between the cells of your brain, according to a professor of molecular genetics at the University of Surrey in Great Britain.
Pulling together research from neuroscience, psychology, physics and biology, Johnjoe McFadden has proposed a radical answer to questions that have vexed philosophers and scientists since Plato's time and, more recently, those on a quest for artificial intelligence: What is consciousness?
How does the brain create intelligent thoughts? Do we have free will?
If proven correct, McFadden's theory could turn philosophy on its head, revolutionize neuroscience, and bring us a step closer to creating lifelike artificial intelligence.
"It gives a physical theory of consciousness that can be tested," he said. "If we can understand it, we can improve it, change it, and even create artificial consciousness."
McFadden, author of Quantum Evolution, argues that human consciousness is actually the brain's electromagnetic field interacting with its circuitry.
Nerve cells firing simultaneously create powerful waves in the field, which in turn cause other neurons to spark. In this way, the electromagnetic field works as a sort of wireless processor, combining the most important information from the hard wiring of the brain into a wireless signal, which is then transmitted back to the brain as conscious thought.
This "field effect," he said, is the piece of the puzzle artificial intelligence experts have missed. "Some have been saying that if computers are powerful enough, they'll become conscious, but it hasn't happened," McFadden said. "It's time they realize there's something missing. You have to design an artificial brain using field effects."
King Arthur said:Baywax
Darwin states we evolved, you appear to agree with this.
Awareness started in a life when that life developed, through time and natural selection, some sort of sensor and a recptor to recognise the signal.
So first there was life without awareness, this seems to be what you suggest.
Just one question- Do living things have an identity, before they have awareness?
baywax said:You can't identify identity without awareness.
Yes. It is opinion that decides what to believe for each individual. But what is the truth? What is the "absolute" truth when it comes to awareness (or conscious awareness)?jackle said:If you believe in an afterlife, a definition of awareness beyond biology seems essential. If we declare that only biological life can be aware, we seem to be declaring that there is no afterlife. I'm not at all convinced that machines can be conscious, or that everything is conscious in some sense, but these ideas also challenge the notion that biology is essential to consciousness. Many religions of course, believe in spiritual beings that are conscious, and perhaps a God or gods. The point is that if you have a religous world view, you are likely to assume that consciousness is not limited to biology, and if you assume that religions are generally wrong, it is easy to assume that biology is essential to consciousness. You pretty well conclude whatever you assume from the beginnng.
I will now describe and illustrate how the Rife frequency instrument can destroy a virus. I will illustrate how a specific virus can be destroyed by a specific frequency of ultra sound. This ultra sound is generated by the Rife frequency instrument. Note that light carries linear momentum and that when the pulse of light from the Rife frequency instrument is absorbed by the patient's skin layer that skin layer must recoil in the direction of light flow to conserve linear momentum. When the light pulse has ended, the skin relaxes back toward its non light pulse exposure position. In other words, periodic light pulses generate periodic pressure pulses in the patient's skin layer which travel into the patient's body. The Rife frequency instrument converts the patient's entire exposed skin surface into an ultra sound transducer for the generation of ultra sound. Even though the efficiency of ultra sound production is exceedingly low by this method, it is still adequate to kill microbes. As a practical example, Rife would treat his cancer patients using his frequency instrument for three minutes of exposure once every three days. Usually his "terminally" ill cancer patients would be cancer free in about thirty such treatments or less, as was verified in the 1934, 1935, and 1937 test clinical trials carried out by the U.S.C. Medical School Special Medical Research Committee.3 That same committee then suppressed the research results.
Memory (disambiguation).
In the science of psychology, memory is an organism's ability to store, retain, and subsequently recall information. Traditional studies of memory began in the realms of philosophy, including techniques of artificially enhancing the memory. The late nineteenth and early twentieth century put memory within the paradigms of cognitive psychology. In recent decades, it has become one of the principal pillars of a new branch of science called cognitive neuroscience, a marriage between cognitive psychology and neuroscience.
There are several ways to classify memories, based on duration, nature and retrieval of information. From an information processing perspective there are three main stages in the formation and retrieval of memory:
• Encoding or registration (processing and combining of received information)
• Storage (creation of a permanent record of the encoded information)
• Retrieval or recall (calling back the stored information in response to some cue for use in a process or activity)
Spontaneous behavior of a rhesus monkey (Macaca mulatta) during memory tests suggests memory awareness
Robert R. Hampton, and Benjamin M. Hampstead1
Section on Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, Laboratory of Neuropsychology, Building 49, Room 1B-80, NIMH-NIH, Bethesda, MD 20892, USA
Received 6 December 2005; accepted 10 January 2006. Available online 7 February 2006.
Abstract
Humans can predict with some accuracy whether or not they know the correct answer to a question before responding. In some cases the capacity to make such predictions depends on memory awareness, the ability to introspectively discriminate between knowing and not knowing. In this unplanned retrospective analysis of video taped behavior we asked whether a rhesus monkey's apparent frustration predicted his accuracy in a matching-to-sample task on a trial-by-trial basis. The monkey was likely to aggressively strike the computer touchscreen when committing errors, whereas he generally touched the screen more gently when selecting the correct stimulus. This difference in behavior, which occurred before the monkey received feedback on the accuracy of his choice, suggests that he knew whether or not he remembered the correct response.