Gerhard Stoltz's Library tagged experiment →  View Popular

Now, if you lengthen the delay a little, you see the word each time. There is even a specific delay where the subjects can see the stimulus half of the time. So now you are in business, because you have an experimental manipulation that you can reproduce in the lab, and that systematically creates a change in consciousness.

What do we see when we do these experiments? The first thing that we discovered is that, even when you cannot see a word or a picture, because it is presented in a subliminal condition, it does not mean that your cortex is not processing it.

For one fourth of a second, which is extraordinarily long for the brain, you can have identical activations, whether you are conscious or not. During this quarter of a second, the brain is not inactive and we can observe a number of instances of lexical access, semantic access and other processes (and subliminal processing can even continue after this point). But at about 270 milliseconds, 300 milliseconds in our experiments, we begin to see a huge divergence between conscious states and non-conscious states.

Our model proposes that this is really one of the main functions of consciousness: to provide an internal space where you can perform thought experiments, as it were, in an isolated way, detached from the external world.

However, if we now give you a task that involves two serial processing steps, you cannot do it. If I ask you to give me the number plus two, you can do it — but if I ask you to compute the initial number plus two, and then decide if the result of that +2 operation is larger or smaller than five, you cannot do it. It's a strange result, because the initial experiments show that you possess a lot of information about this subliminal digit. If you just named it, you would have enough information to do so correctly, much better than chance alone would predict. However when you are engaged in a chain of processing, where you have to compute x+2, and then decide if the outcome is larger or smaller than five, there are two successive steps that make performance fall back down to chance. Presumably, this is because you haven't had access to the workspace system that allows you to execute this kind of serial mental rule.

Now, after adaptation, the trick consists in presenting five identical tones: dit-dit-dit-dit-dit. This banal sequence becomes the novel situation now — the rare and unexpected one. Our claim is that only a conscious brain can take into account the context of the preceding series of tones, and can understand that five identical tones are something novel and unexpected.

These findings suggest that hypnosis induces the control of movements by means of internal representations, which can be generated because of enhanced self imagery.

For even though clever minds like ours may invent a new lifebase, finding a lifebase which can evolve itself is an entirely higher order. The synthetic lifebase we create in the lab may be robust enough to survive on its own in the wild. But an alternative synthetic life does not need to self-organize itself into existence. That after all, is the whole purpose of minds.

However the effect of evolving life via chunks of code tightly linked into webs is that these webs produce both negative constraints due to their embodiment, and positive constraints due to emergent patterns.

Epigenetics entails all the influences genes exert outside of the information they carry within DNA. Examples of this dynamic include paramutation, wherein the physical presence of an allele (counterpart gene) can influence development without changing the heritable information.

Let me summarize once again the logic that leads to the
impasse. The EPRB correlations are such that the result of the
experiment on one side immediately foretells that on the other,
whenever the analyzers happen to be parallel. If we do not accept the
intervention on one side as a causal influence on the other, we seem
obliged to admit that the results on both sides are determined in
advance anyway, independently of the intervention on the other side, by
signals from the source and by the local magnet setting. But this has
implications for non-parallel settings which conflict with those of
quantum mechanics. So we cannot dismiss intervention on one
side as a causal influence on the other. (Bell 1987, p.
149)

Suppose the larger system has wave function Ψ  = 
Ψ(q)  =  Ψ(x, y). According to
Bohmian mechanics, the larger system is then completely described by
Ψ, evolving according to Schrödinger's equation, together with
X and Y. The question then arises — and it is a
critical question — as to what should be meant by the wave
function of the subsystem.

There is a rather obvious answer for this, a natural function of
x that suitably incorporates the objective structure at hand,
namely the conditional wave function

ψ(x)  =  Ψ(x,
Y)

The situation might seem to be different in quantum mechanics, since
in quantum mechanics there are no basic observables having the property
that all other observables are functions of these.

The
Kochen-Specker Theorem,
the
earlier theorem of Gleason (Gleason 1957 and Bell 1966), as well as a
variety of other no-hidden-variables results, including Bell's
inequality (Bell 1964), show that any hidden-variables formulation of
quantum mechanics must be contextual. It must violate the
noncontextuality assumption "that measurement of an observable must
yield the same value independently of what other measurements may be
made simultaneously" (Bell 1987, p. 9). To many physicists and
philosophers of science contextuality has seemed too great a price to
pay for the rather modest benefits — largely psychological, so
they would say — provided by hidden variables.

That the guiding wave, in the general case, propagates not
in ordinary three-space but in a multidimensional-configuration space
is the origin of the notorious ‘nonlocality’ of quantum
mechanics. It is a merit of the de Broglie-Bohm version to bring this
out so explicitly that it cannot be ignored.