on the emergence and immersion of geniuses

R. Buckminster Fuller is an American architect who is known for patenting the geodesic dome design, and for the discovery of the carbon allotrope which is his namesake. He is - probably more accurately - known for the saying; "everyone is born a genius. Society de-geniuses them."

I think that Fuller's own history is a perfect example of his claim. I also agree strongly with this particular statement. For instance, the C60 allotrope known as the Buckyball or Buckminsterfullerene was actually discovered by Robert Kurl, Sir Harold Koto and Richard Smalley in 1985 . Their 1996 Nobel Prize gives these men their due credit, but in the limpid word of chemistry, the R. Buckminster Fuller is wrongly assumed to be a chemist, and the discoverer of Buckminsterfullerene. The point I aim to make here is that Fuller was incontestably a genius, but he is not known as such for the correct reasons.

Socioeconomic evolution has imbued the term "genius" with melange of defining characteristics with which I don't agree. Before I get in too deep with this assertion, I should clarify that I define genius as one whose unique curiosities become manifest. That's it. Psychometrics has tried admirably to find a way to assess intelligence on a relative scale, allowing the siting of geniuses and savants as they arise. In as much as these tests do have some value to designing our current educational system (with which I also have major discordance), they also serve as a societal breech to the acceptance of the creativity from which genius comes.

I am inclined toward the idea that genius emerges from reaching outside of paradigms, and happens independently of academic guidance. Fuller's genius is identifiable in his childhood endeavors into original architecture, tool design and novel propulsion methods; he was twice expelled from Harvard. Nikola Tesla invented the first paddle-less water wheel at the age of 4; he spent 1 term at the Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague. Francisco Goya; the last of the Old Masters and the first of the Modern. Mozart and Galileo... all geniuses oppressed or quelled by economic demand, marketing and immersion into societal constructs.

I supposed this is my way of letting out some steam from the pneumatic build up of my anxiety and ambivalent contention for graduate school.

I prefer to hope that I have something unique to offer the world of intellect and scientific discovery. While I was never a prodigal child, and have most definitely been the product of academia-induced ADD-promulgated study, there is still a chance that some modicum of genius might arise in the later stages of my own evolution.

In short, it is my profound hope that I am playing out Fuller's apothegm in reverse - that I have first been de-geniused by society, and am now in the midst of my journey toward emergence.

inexhaustible matter

descartes. the man. cogito ergo sum, etc... the dualist.

the nature of matter, he thought, is to expand itself to occupy space and thus be susceptible to physical examination. the nature of the mind is to think. the defining characteristics of these actualities being so isolated, he surmised, they must function entirely individually. and hence consecrated was the mind-body problem.

and if matter and mind are monistic content of the larger whole?

if matter is infinite such that on many levels it is strongly influenced by consciousness, does it not follow that matter and mind may be more highly interactive than our intellectual paradigm allows?

alright. so i blogged eons ago about what it might mean if microtubules were the carriers of consciousness, and communicated by replicative and epigenetic phenomena with DNA. this remains a feasible possibility to me, but i no longer have reason to believe that microtubules and DNA would be the only instance of this mind-matter causality.

if we one day exhume that matter is inexhaustible, then it becomes plausible that mind intervenes its manifestation and directs it. which is not to say that a cup of jello might appear in the hand of a mind that desires it, or that any massive physicality would arise instantaneously. rather, i think it stands to reason that such a relationship would suggest dialectical movement's role in evolution. of everything.

of electromagnetic fields, of life, of geological shifts, of societal constructions and destructions.

societal thought invades a level of materialism that begets a communal EM field which allows the society to move harmoniously while maintaining the presence of its individuals. like plasma.

universal thought invades a level of materialism that commands a shift in organelle function in a species that causes its evolution and simultaneously the subtle evolution of everything with which it interacts.

humanity builds itself on the "shoulders of giants", or rather, their mistakes. have we not always done so at the command of collective consciousness? do inventors not materialize thoughts in response to communal misgivings? do physicists not seek to explain the existence of the world based on the way that our societies now function (or flounder, rather)? and the problems we seek to eliminate in finding the rational answer to the biggest question of them all? if we one day understand the rational of matter, will we not also comprehend our own existence and, in so doing, realize the key to our own harmonious existence?

here is my confound. i do not believe in god, and i do not believe that the universe exists at the will of humanity or its delusioned elitism. without human directive, what is universal thought explained by if not god? where does it come from? the collective minds of every eletron in existence? the Higgs boson?

the only way i can fix this dissonance is by imagining that mind and consciousness it itself something infinite that we as of yet have no means to address. and by that i am comforted enough to sleep at night. killer.

Limitation is a creation of the mind.

Explain the meaning of the statement above. Describe a specific situation in which limitation may, in fact, be quite realistic. Discuss what you think determines when limitation is real and when it is an illusion created by ones psyche.

There is a sturdy platform bridged between the concept of motivation and the achievements it fosters. In the spirit of optimism, there is a school of thought where the only obstacles between oneself and said achievements are the illusions self-created out of doubt and fear. Painting achievement in this light, it is certain that once confidence reigns anything is possible. Unfortunately, there are circumstances in which limitation is quite real, and emerges in a physical form independent of human confidence.

We will examine the case of a young prospective medical student determined to embark on the ravaging adventure of an MSTP dual degree. Wide eyed, and naive of the particular tolls this endeavor will take on her body and mind, she allows herself to be swept into a realm of fantasy in which all the agonizing training is over. She is the proud and excited principle investigator of a neurodegenerative diseases laboratory where multiple studies are undertaken based on the peculiarities she sees in her diagnostically impossible patients. It was all very well worth it, she thinks - now being in her mid-thirties and about to spring a small family into operation, Boxer puppy and all. The limitations were nowhere to be seen; simple incorrigible self-motivation drove her through eight years of MSTP and three more of residency with but a few bouts of fatigue and scratches to her otherwise-intact ego. She got through it all believing that her only limitations were those she imposed on herself through doubt, self-degradation and fear of incompetence. All of these were easily over-ridden by stepping aside to remind herself of her dreams and her ability to see their fruition. ...right?

Well, sadly there are several real limitations to ones ability to succeed in such endeavors. It is not always the case that young prospectives like our optimistic case study can nullify the limitations of their minds with pep-talks and meditation. There are cases where limitation is not illusion, but reality. Our young prospective MSTP student neglected to inform you that she suffers from Crohn's disease and IBS, two conditions which render her indisposed for up to two days at a time at unpredictable frequency. She did not mention that the numbers by which she was to be assessed in qualification for the MSTP dual degree were unformidable, and by no means set her application aglow. She refused to admit to herself that her intelligence was an obstacle, and she refused to resign to her health as a legitimate hole in her stairway to paradise. These, however, were real limitations. It was, in fact, their neglect that was the self-imposed illusion. And so, the young prospective MSTP student was forced to re-enter the present time and condition in order to assess on a more grounded level whether her limitations were real or surmountable.

She remains in limbo, ruminating over and over the possible outcomes of strength of spirit versus strength of body and intellect. It is here where limitation becomes real and must be faced with the understanding that a different stairway may need to be built in order to ascend to that golden future amongst glowing MD-PhDs and their radiating achievements.

Writing Sample #1
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the aquarian conspiracy

"in our need to cope with everyday concerns, we forfeit awareness of the miracle of awareness"
-Marylin Ferguson

[disclaimer: everything i think about this is based on gatherings from Huxley's biography and Ferguson's A.C. theory. please, please please, you guys... hook me up with the rest of it.]

the Aquarian Conspiracy, so dubbed by Marylin Ferguson, is generally misconstrued as yet another mysterious and frightening undertaking by the CIA to flood the U.S. with psychedelics, and control subliminal brainwashing. being called a "conspiracy" doesn't really do much to battle this assumption. in actuality, the word "conspiracy" is used in a much less menacing regard, namely, its literal sense; to conspire means to breathe together. this was a movement of social synthesis in the "consciousness revolution" of the 1960-70's. "aquarian" refers to the aquarian age - following the current (violent Piscean) into one of love, light and liberation of mind [sidenote: this is the most flower-childesque thing you will ever catch me saying - please note that these are not my words and i say them with a healthy ( or unhealthy) degree of cynicism toward blind love and spiritual enlightenment]. in other words, the aquarian conspiracy is not a governmental heist. rather, it's a social paradigm shift resulting from the slow exposure of individual awareness. it just so happens that conspirators, being everywhere, were also staked in the CIA and could bring in Aldous Huxley and Humphrey Osmond to spike the revolution with psychedelics. it's just too bad that the drug was given to the blind and dumb (yes, Hippies) who brought the revolution into the open carelessly and flippantly.

there was, of course, a CIA operation involved under Allen Dulles (a Rockafeller cousin, go figure). in the late 50's, an investigation began into the utility of LSD (developed by Swiss chemist, Albert Hoffman) as a military weapon. oddly enough, Aldous Huxley's personal physician was recruited by Dulles to lead these investigations. as a side project, Humphrey Osmond (the physician), Huxley and some other dude with funding connections began investigating LSD as a therapeutic tool for mental disorders under the guise that mescaline (a similar alkaloid to LSD) produced a Schizophrenic model. this West Coast project resulted in Huxley recruiting his own cult of experimenters; one of these spiked the Zen Buddhism cult, another, the Hippie cult.

having jump-started the West Coast movement, Huxley went back to Boston to teach at MIT and birthed a similar team on the East Coast. during this time, he started another project with Sandoz Pharmaceuticals (Albert Hoffman's company in Switzerland) to contract the mass production of LSD under the CIA's chemical warfare investigation. and by the 60's, Dulles had made the purchase orders.

the reason for the bad rep of the Aquarian Conspiracy is that it emerged at the same time as the anti-war movement, the "flower child" cult of San Francisco and the manifested inundation of LSD, which was introduced by Huxley in his MIT courses as the window to consciousness.

i think we're on the verge of its second wave.

empty thoughts IX

incidentally, all this time that i've been drooling over the products of the gods of neurophilosophy, i've never really condoned or disputed any of their arguments. rather, i more or less take them in stride and create something new out of them. sometimes, arguments are that badass, what can you do? at the moment, however, i say "incidentally" because i happen to have come upon a precarious internal consensus about individuality.

i like the way Lewis Thomas puts it: multiple personalities is not a pathology - it's when they all clamor for conscious attention at once that they become a problematic condition.

nice, right? here's where it gets tricky for me. it is conceivable to me to believe in the capacity of a body to merge multiple selves, but i also favor the holism in collective consciousness of the universe. so what is it? are we all of the same energy using not only various bodies differently, but various circuits of each body differently? or are we denying the strength of fragmentation in assuming holism is the healthier, safer and more sane alternative?

selective attention vs psychokinesis

do we see red coats worn everywhere because, coincidentally, an epidemic of red coats was brought to explicit consciousness by selective attention? or do we see them everywhere, psychokinetically, to prove to our inner thinker that they are truly everywhere?

and what's more, which is evolutionarily beneficial?

reproduction used to be the name of the game; now, those of us who have developed higher intelligence are interrupting the expression of our survival traits with a panoply of stimuli over which to ruminate. numerous strains of fly - mayfly, cattle grub, Bembix - have only one objective upon maturity: propagation. they have no mouth. when you live for sex alone you do not need to be attentive to anything else, and, as such, there is no call for your mind to be selective. this works for such creatures, evolutionarily speaking. they fertilize, lay parasitic nests and call it good. there's no hierarchical categorization of voluntary or involuntary attention, and there's certainly no psychokenesis... right?

here's what i think is interesting about the concept of mind over matter: there is no trace of the more basic mechanism from which it evolved that is given any regard in evolutionary biology. whyyy?! because it doesn't appeal to congenital impulses? that's complete crap. psychokenesis is just as relevant to survival as inhibition of return (a cohort of attention which keeps a creature from re-attending to an object), it's just shoved into the corner there is no observable suggestive behavior in lower animals. personally (and also, reluctantly), i think it's a concept just as observable in the morphogenetic fields of an amoeba as in the wannabe-telekinetic demonstrations of humans who think that bending a spoon by exerting more force than you convince yourself to be necessary is proof of internal electromagnetic command (no, not Sheldrake's concept of MF, the Gurwitsch original).

selective attention. psychokenesis.

i'm chewing.

microtubules and intelligence

beginning with a personal aside, i love microtubules. remember in elementary school when we learned how to draw a little ovoid bubble with various organelles scattered haphazardly inside? my teacher pulled me aside to ask why in the world my bubble's organelles were surrounded and overwhelmed with what looked to her like chicken scribbles. and i said, those are the microtubules. she looked at me as if i were retarded, but i knew i was accurate enough in my depiction and she just didn't know what to make of it. i knew they were important... i just didn't bother to explore how important they were until neurochemistry class last year. you don't notice at the time when you're taught about basic cell structure and mitosis that microtubules, which compose the cytoskeleton and radiate from the centrioles, are really performing the most exquisite of tasks. this is my mental escapade into microtubules as they might pertain to that most elusive phenomenon, intelligence.

...

microtubules (MT) are constructed of thousands of tubulin proteins, which are dimeric proteins which orient into helical tubes held together at the seems by MT-associated proteins (MAPs). the MT of any system - amoeba or neuron - make up a network which is generally acknowledged as being the skeleton of the cell, and is, in my opinion, extraordinarily underrated in that role.



in the 1980's, Stuart Hameroff proposed that MT also compute. this was based on both the predisposition of MT to self-assemble and disassemble via the aid of MAPs, and collective network oscillation based solely on nearest neighbor interactions (these being the swapping of a free electron between alpha and beta subunits of the tubulin dimers). Hameroff's theory is primarily dependent on nearest neighbor interaction. to be brief, this interaction refers to the electric dipole created between the alpha and beta monomers of each tubulin protein: this is created by the 18 calcium ions bound to the beta subunit, creating a slightly negative orientation toward the alpha monomer. namely, as an energetic wave passes through a given MT region it would excite the free electron on the beta subunit and shift it toward the alpha, thereby changing the molecular conformation of the dimer. this change in conformation would subsequently excite all its neighbor tubulins to exercise the same behavior, resulting in an electric wave being propagated down the length of the MT. and they did some badass computational modeling of this theory which showed that by said rules, MT could indeed be stable, signal-perpetuating structures...

one of the immediate problems with the Hameroff model is that it was designed at a temperature of zero... such that signal propagation was an artifact of design, and not explicitly reminiscent of those rules governing biological signals. [to note, this actually doesn't seem problematic to me because it just implies even a the level of the zero point field this mechanism is probable, but...] because physiological conditions are what they are, and due to the patterns governing tubulin subunit interaction as well as the helical nature of the MT themselves, a new theory of signal propagation potential was proposed by Jack Tuszynski (Canada gets a brownie for that one). the stipulation was that MT could be electromechanical signal transmitters only helically about their circumference... in the manner of a spin glass.

the spin glass behavior, put simply means that because of its geometrical orientation a system can't minimize interaction energies across its area simultaneously (a.k.a. magnetic frustration). so for MT, that means propagating a signal in somewhat of a spiral manner along its length which yields a similarly patterned signal transmission between neighboring MT. because they are hexagonal sheets rolled into tubes, MT have a seam - this is where magnetic frustration occurs as the propagating signal tries to navigate the tubule circumference. despite this obstacle, the tubule length allows for propagation. the equations for this type of system are exceedingly complex and just glancing at them makes my heart sink in defeat... but i trust Dmitri Nanopoulos (who is my superhero of the day) and the modeling enough to be profoundly inspired by the idea that my poor neglected, favorite organelle might have such a role in intelligence (i'll get there...)...

so what does this model mean to the microtubule network as a transmitter of signals?

this is bitchin - hang onto your pants. the spin glass model allows MT networks the capacity to adapt to the demands of neuronal signaling.


if MT are in and of themselves an adaptive network, as suggested by Nanopoulos' and the nature of spin glass perpetuation, that potentially translates to every individual neuron being an adaptive network. during the process of neuronal plasticity, such as learning and memory, this is a conceivable explanation of how particular proteins are recruited to synapses to strengthen them after a particular pattern of neurotransmitter activity (an otherwise mechanistically elusive characteristic of long term potentiation).

let's take a step back and see if i can do this anywhere near coherently... i know i'm verbose as hell, bear with me.

i think... that when Daniel Dennet and David Chalmers look for physical structures on which consciousness and intelligence might supervene, they are not looking small enough. namely, the structures they are looking for (as well as Francis Crick with the claustrum and everyone else with the pineal gland) are neural pathways and specific brain regions. it makes little to no sense to me to suspect that such a comprehensive force as consciousness would supervene on a single structure or originate from a single neural circuit. i like the notion that said phenomena arise from the translation of electromagnetic wave collapse by microtubules... which are everywhere.


in addition to all the computer modeling and quantum computational theory, there are the correlational studies. colchicine, a tubulin binding inhibitor, causes retrograde amnesia in goldfish. tubulin production skyrockets as soon as baby rats first open their eyes to EM radiation, and correlates with peak learning and memory in chicks. on the human level, there is Alzheimer's disease, in which the most prominent biochemical and physiological markers are amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles - the latter being comprised of MT stripped of MAPs and left to aggregate into useless clumps. so here we have examples of the effects of dysfunctional MT on multiple levels of evolutionary development and cognitive function.

this organelle, to my thinking, is the most beautiful candidate for housing intelligence. it is the beginning and the end of life, from mitosis to decay - defining nucleation of a cell by aligning and separating chromosomes, propagating EM signals, responding to IR light and dissociating upon cell death. they are intrinsic and critical to the very existence of every cell.

okay. if you've made it this far, prepare to be rewarded by my coming around to making a fucking point.

take, for instance, a paramecium - a single cell with no nervous system, only MT networks. a paramecium, if sucked into a capillary tube, will find an escape route... and when sucked up again, will find its way out quicker and quicker with each subsequent trial. this study, lead by Joseph Huber in the 1970's describes a mechanism for learning and memory in this single cell system with no neurons. intelligence without a brain [or... the brain of single cell systems is represented by the centrosome! but we won't go there yet...]

if learning can be achieved in a paramecium, what sense is there in attributing intelligence in more complex organisms to solely the strengthening of synapses?

what is to say that intelligence doesn't supervene on MT networks and that consciousness is a separate beast emerging from the larger complication of neural networks?

[on which note, this is why i don't think computers will achieve consciousness in the near future - or i hope not, rather - because neurons are so very much more complex than on-and-off switches, or binary decoders, or all-or-noners as implied by the direction of A.I. research]

to wrap this up... and in the interest of circulating back to not only intelligence and possibly consciousness but the evolution of these phenomena (as well as others), i think of this: microtubules bind to DNA - regardless of chromatin and histone orientation, which has profound implications for the quantum processes of epigenetics - through MT associated proteins, and affects its synthesis by facilitation or inhibition.

whaa?!

through MT perpetuation of EM signaling, or whatever the hell wave collapse results in, DNA may have an intelligence of its own. screw morphogenetic fields... evolutionary process may very well be directed by the very biophysical matter that also genetically codes for it all. what if it's really all in the DNA?

it's entirely conceivable to me that DNA contains the code and the energetic blueprint - that its interaction with microtubules allows it to translate this into initial interaction with the explicate world - that this explicate interaction subsequently feeds back through the nervous system into MT networks which then propagate new signals from which intelligence and consciousness emerge.

i love microtubules.

dimethyltryptamine

this is a drug synthesized by the pineal gland during REM stages of sleep. it's said to have something to do with the vivid and sometimes euphoric contents of dreams, which also occur during REM. due to its otherwise elusive function in the brain/body and association with the oddball region (pineal) it has, therefore, been postulated as the chemical substance of consciousness.

"Hallucinogenic effects were seen after 0.2 and 0.4 mg/kg of dimethyltryptamine fumarate, and included a rapidly moving, brightly colored visual display of images. Auditory effects were less common. "Loss of control," associated with a brief, but overwhelming "rush," led to a dissociated state, where euphoria alternated or coexisted with anxiety. These effects completely replaced subjects' previously ongoing mental experience and were more vivid and compelling than dreams or waking awareness." (Strassman et al. 2003)

Strassman, a psychopharmacologist at U. New Mexico is one of the first to postulate that DMT is in fact synthesized in the pineal gland. although it seems to be produced in other regions of the body as well, as it has been found in urine, blood and cerebrospinal fluid (Jacob and Presti 2004), although thought to be an insignificant metabolic byproduct. i guess because DMT is synthesized from a serotonin intermediate it followed, for Strassman, that this particular tryptamine could be produced by and secreted from the pineal gland. but nobody really knows where endogenous DMT comes from, suffice if to say, the body uses a pretty wide array of tryptamines (these are primarily monoamine neurotransmitters and hallucinogens), including the melatonin and serotonin produced in the pineal.

serotonin is supposedly converted into DMT by the pineal during REM sleep, playing a role in dream activation (Callaway 1988). Strassman thinks that when these levels get too high persons experience "mystical/spiritual consciousness." he thinks - and as of yet he has no chromatographic/spectrophotometric data to suggest this - that DMT over-synthesis occurs during birth, before death, near-death experiences and deep meditation. in the 1970's, it was speculated that DMT levels might have something to do with Schizophrenia... but the results of these studies were inconclusive (Angrist et al. 1975, and others which escape me...). what i would like to see is a correlational study comparing systemic and cerebrospinal DMT in healthy control subjects to those exercising deep meditation.

in the Strassman study cited above (2003), it becomes suggested that endogenous DMT may function as did trace amounts of DMT; namely, the chemical would be a non-hallucinogenic. returning to the Calloway proposal that DMT participates in dream activation, it would seem like the job of endogenous DMT would be to do activate hallucination, not suppress it. but that's only if you're of the opinion that dreams are hallucinations...

okay, so we have an idea of how DMT acts in the brain... sort of. both DMT and it's precursor, tryptamine act through a recently identified trace amine receptor (TA, localization unidentified but interacting with the dopamine reward pathway). but since i'm mostly curious about it's production in the brain as relevant to the pineal gland and consciousness, we're going to move in that direction instead...

as noted in the Schizophrenic studies, DMT can also be found in the peripheral nervous system and systemically. this would imply that it can be synthesized outside of the brain, and this idea is supported by the systemic localization of indolethylamine-N-transferase (IMNT). IMNT is the enzyme that tryptophan to make methyltryptamine, which is methylated again to yield dimethyltryptamine. this implies two things:

1) DMT can be synthesized in peripheral tissue, and subsequently cross the blood brain barrier... which is uncharacteristic of most neurotransmitters.
2) since during the stress response the body produces excessive amounts of tryptophan, DMT has implications as a non-hallucinogenic, as proposed by Calloway...

so why does Strassman insist that endogenous DMT is produced in the pineal gland, and is a propagator of the hallucinations that deem it worth of sustaining the weight of consciousness? let's explore...

well... so aside from IMNT being part of the peripheral system, the pineal gland is home to quite a few other methyltransferases.

...that's it.

there's also the theory that DMT must be produced in the pineal because it has something to do with calcification of the gland, but that is not Strassman's theory, and even if DMT does play a role in calcification, that isn't sufficient to conclude that the tryptamine is produced there.

so you've got your aging pathology studies that note pineal calcification in response to abnormal secretion of melatonin (Sandyk and Awerbuch 1992), and your pineal calcification in response to excessive calcium influx and significantly decreased metabolic activity that would otherwise regulate calcium levels - characteristic of aging and essentially all aging pathologies (Krstic 1986).

link between calcification and melatonin? fine, i'll take it. link to dimethyltryptamine.................... come on, really? there's nothing? there gots to be something...

meat machines

"we are automata entirely controlled by the forces of the medium, being tossed about like corks on the surface of the water, but mistaking the resultant of the impulses from the outside for free will" - Nikola Tesla

i'm about to disagree with my hero - my high school english teacher would shit himself in exaltation right now.

i agree that we are - because we are meat machines built of subatomic wave-particles - automata in the mechanical sense, our medium being the zero point field, i will also agree that we are tossed around on it like corks. however. i will firmly stand that this does not eradicate free will.

so here's why this works. and it only works under the pretenses of a monist world - one in which there is only one substance that makes up reality, which is to say, mind substance and matter substance are really both one energy substance [and yes, in terms of being corks, monism requires Bohm's gnosis: in order to bobble on the surface of the implicate zero point field, our meat machines need be explicate... elsewise, gamush] . this eliminates the fragmented and confused amalgam of the Western worldview. which is fine with me, because on the quantum level the monist view is the only one that really makes sense anyway. matter is wavelike; it is waves of possibility which can be in two or more places at once as it emerges from the superposition of quantum possibilities.

quantum objects, then, exist as the superposition of these possibilities until our observation collapses them into an actuality, or a single localized event. this is to say that observation alone transforms existent possibility into an actual event - causation. this is how the mind exercises free will.

Newtonianly speaking (muddled laugh...), the theory of causation is an upward theory: causal interaction moves from the micro-level quantum particles up to the macro-level brain and consciousness. this ordains causal power to none other than interaction between quantum waves. the problem here [keeping in mind the monist idea that matter and consciousness are both comprised of wavelike possibilities] is that if there were only upward causation in the world, our persons, as nothing more than material possibility, would not feasibly be able to cause the collapse of other waves of possibility into actuality.

ergo, downward causation gives consciousness the power to choose between material waves of possibility provided by quantum objects.

there is, of course, a paradox here. downward causation is discontinuous... mostly in the sense that it is circular: the observer is essential for the collapse of possibility into actuality, however, the observer in itself is merely a possibility before the collapse has taken place. so... there's something that needs to be algorithmically defined in the distinction of a monist world...

nonetheless, monism is how i've rationalized free will. sorry Tesla.

we are all of he same electromagnetic field energy (which arises from zero point). it is the fuel on which everything physical - animate and inanimate - runs. in the body, the field moves through subatomic processes, molecular reactivity, tissue function and organ cooperation. as it moves... as it interacts with the meat machine, two things occur (obviously more than two things occur, but for the sake of coherency...). first, the matter itself is altered with each interaction - this is upward causation. as in the brain, when you learn something new the biochemical feedback cascade mechanisms in the synapses at work are changed such that the next time the learned issue is encountered, the brain responds with increased sensitivity, or biochemical familiarity. second, as the field moves through the meat machine, the wavelengths produced in the zero point field interact with each other to produce interference patterns which (along with Gibbs free energy which i haven't fully reasoned yet but have insisted is involved) produce consciousness. mind is, then, a byproduct.

this is why free will still works. if mind is an emergent property, then we can all be explicately run by the same electromagnetic field, but as it interacts differently over space/time with our differently sensitive meat machines, different minds are produced. and because mind then has some control over the guiding of subsequent energy through the machine - downward causation - there develops a level of free control over the ultimate behavior.

i'm still working this out... it's entirely fractured thought at this point.

survival

“Relation-R, unlike identity, is a relation we can bear to more than one person. If this is what is important, what matters to me in my survival is not whether “I” survive, but whether someone who is sufficiently R-related to me does. …Although others will not directly remember events because they happened to me, they may certainly know of events because they happened to me. To the extent that such connectedness, and not identity, is what matters to us in our survival, the second kind of connection may be nearly as good as the first.” – C. Korsgaard

Onely, relation-R is the Parfitian term for psychological connectedness and continuity... which is to say, cross-person connectedness of memory and character. Twoly, Korsgaard is suggesting that if the psychological continuity and connectedness between persons is what constitutes survival, then one person’s mere knowledge of an event happening to another person is enough to conclude that the second person is surviving within the first. When I wrote a paper on this a few years ago, my stance was to disagree with this notion of sharing relation-R in parallel because I decided that it was the nature of survival to occur in a chronological fashion. I argued that relation-R could not be shared in parallel because continuity between a person’s psychological state at one instant could only be continuous if it is shared with another person at a later instant.

My thought process at the time was this: my neighbor may know a great deal about me, but it cannot be said that I survive within my neighbor simply because they know a great deal about the nature of my present perceptions and decisions. There is no descendant association between us, therefore there is no continuity. If there is no continuity, then relation-R cannot be said to be shared between us because relation-R is dependent on both connectedness and continuity. Therefore, I cannot be said to survive in my neighbor because we cannot be sufficiently R-related. In this way, contrary to Korsgaard’s statement, knowing of the events that happen to someone is not sufficient to conclude the survival of the first person within the second; two persons must be both psychologically connected and continuous.

For example, something along the lines of... my neighbor may know a great deal about me, but it cannot be said that I survive within my neighbor simply because they know a great deal about my present perceptions and decisions. There is no descendant association between us, therefore there is no continuity of person because the nature of my person must be passed directly from my body to another through replication of the meat machine. Following then, that if there is no continuity relation-R cannot be said to be shared between us because relation-R is dependent on both connectedness and continuity. Therefore, I cannot be said to survive in my neighbor because we cannot be sufficiently R-related. In this way, contrary to Korsgaard’s statement, knowing of the events that happen to someone is not sufficient to conclude the survival of the first person within the second; two persons must be both psychologically connected and continuous.

Why I was convinced that psychological survival was a chronological endeavor... I don't remember. It's entirely possible that it was pulled straight out of the ass crack of neverland. Because of late, I'm almost convinced that any person can survive within any other. Perhaps the biologist in me... sees survival implicitly containing the notion of passing on pieces in the manner of replication. Survival is all about the nature of the replicator. Survival of a person seemed like it would have the same type of rule... but if all persons emerge from the filtering of energy through differently sensitive meat machines, that rule disappears. If our persons - our minds - are superimposed on zero point energy, this novel form of energy spread out over the entire concept of space/time then overlaps with the energy fields of all other persons.

This overlap would seem to have some level of implication for continuity in the Parfitian sense...

Parfit describes survival based on the continuity between being A and beings B1 and B2 (the products of, for example, the fission of being A's brain... or asexual reproduction if you prefer so think of persons as amoebas). That is to say, when being A splits into beings B1 and B2, being A ceases to exist because even though being A survives in both B1 and B2, it does not survive in whole and thus cannot maintain an identity. And if all persons are connected on the level of the zero point field, and the nature of the universe is to function under the laws of the holomovement (or something like it) it stands to reason that survival of being A within both B1 and B2 would be conceivable. If every element and waveform carries within it information about every other element and waveform, then the transfer of these from one omega 6 machine (yes, i have given the brain a term of endearment...) to another, if only in halves, seems as though it would carry enough information from one to the other to constitute a complete continuity between beings A, B1 and B2.

So even in the Korsgaardian profile, the implication is that even though identity probably isn't retained, the continuity that is there is sufficient to constitute survival: "although others will not directly remember events because they happened to me, they may certainly know of events because they happened to me."

Alright Rambler McGee, point of order.

So. I'm airing on the side of relation-R being sufficiently shared such that it is possible for any person to survive in any other. In what capacity, I'm not yet decided (surprise!?). However, it does begin to hold implications for the nature of recurring or past life experiences. Do our persons survive through fission (death) and fusion (reproduction) to retain continuity across lines of space/time? In denial of the Cartesian Order, probably. But do persons survive through parallel continuity to other people in the immediate space/time schema? I'm still not convinced. I still have some grounding in the energy being passed through the meat machine in a more chronological fashion. My neighbor's person isn't necessarily a shared part of my person just because we know some things about each other's physical lives. On the other hand, I do fancy the notion of parallel connectedness in terms of influencing energy flow, or "sending good vibes," or what have you... just not in terms of survival of character identity.

Tesla

from "Man's Greatest Achievement" - would could I have but known this man...

There manifests itself in the fully developed being - Man - a desire mysterious, inscrutable and irresistible: to imitate nature, to create, to work himself the wonders he perceives. Inspired to this task he searches, discovers and invents, designs and constructs, and covers with monuments of beauty, grandeur and awe, the star of his birth. He descends into the bowels of he globe to bring forth its hidden treasures and to unlock its immense imprisoned energies for his use. He invades the dark depths of the ocean and the azure regions of the sky. He peers into the innermost nooks and recesses of molecular structure and lays bare to his gaze worlds infinitely remote. He subdues and puts to his serves the fierce, devastating spark of Prometheus, the titanic forces of the waterfall, the wind and the tide. He tames the thundering bolt of Jove and annihilates time and space. He makes the great Sun itself his obedient toiling slave. Such is his power and might that the heavens reverberate and the whole earth trembles by the mere sound of his voice.

What has the future in store for this strange being, born of a breath, of perishable tissue, yet immortal, with his powers fearful and divine? What magic will be wrought by him in the end? What is to be his greatest deed, his crowning achievement?

Long ago he recognized that all perceptible matter comes from a primary substance, or a tenuity beyond conception, filling all space, the Akasa or luminiferous ether, which is acted upon by the life-giving Prana or creative force, calling into existence, in never ending cycles, all things and phenomena. The primary substance, thrown into infinitesimal whirls of prodigious velocity, becomes gross matter; the force subsiding, the motion creases and matter disappears, reverting to the primary substance.

Can Man control this grandest, most awe-inspiring of all processes in nature? Can he harness her inexhaustible energies to perform all their functions at his bidding, more still cause them to operate simply by the force of his will?

If he could do this, he would have powers almost unlimited and supernatural. At his command, with but a slight effort on his part, old worlds would disappear and new ones of his planning would spring into being. he could fix, solidify and preserve the ethereal shapes of his imagining, the fleeting visions of his dreams. He could express all the creations of his mind on any scale, in forms concrete and imperishable. he could alter the size of this planet, control its seasons, guide it along any path he might choose through the depths of the Universe he could cause planets to collide and produce his suns and stars, his heat and light. He could originate and develop life in all its infinite forms.

To create and to annihilate material substance, cause it to aggregate in forms according to his desire, would be the supreme manifestation of the power of Man's mind, his most complete triumph over the physical world, his crowning achievement, which would place him beside his Creator, make him fulfill his ultimate destiny.

ADHD

[disclaimer: incoherent thoughts brought on by benadryl and prednisone.. may or may not be refined at a later date]

this is my biff with amphetamines.

if the role of the 7R variation in the DRD4 allele is significant enough to be the primary candidate for insatiable novelty-seeking behavior characteristic of ADHD... why was Ritalin a good idea?

the idea is this. 7R variation in this particular dopamine receptor changes the metabotropic receptor's ability to control intracellular cAMP levels (cyclic adenosine monophosphate, which activates the membrane protein PKC (protein kinase C) releasing it from the membrane and allowing it to open potassium channels which then alter the electric potential of the cell which is what allows for DA release....for those who care). this means that cAMP is turned on constitutively, and as a result its cascade which eventually leads to the release of the cell's neurotransmitter (DA, in this case) is also kept running. so we've got the 7R mutation which is mostly responsible for overload of DA in several reward pathways. okay, so this addresses hyperactivity and abrupt and aberrant mood changes. why are we controlling this by introducing more amphetamine? this is not a neurotransmitter that is known to have a strong compensatory mechanism! introducing a consistent exogenous dose of amphetamine to try to control the amount of DA pumped into synapses does not work the same way as it does with steroids. your body takes longer to respond (namely, by reducing the amount of DA it is producing itself thereby reducing signal frequency)... and while it's trying to do so, the side effects of amphetamine take their toll. if the problem is the metabotropic DRD4 receptor, and the incessant activity of cAMP and its subsequent protein kinase cascade, altering DA levels exogenously is not going to cut it. right?

but here's my other objection. why do we need to cut it? why can't we accept it as a mutation and change our behavior to accommodate? step outside of the meme of conventional education and manipulate the outcome of this condition from the outside. this was, once upon a time, a beneficial characteristic, this insatiable novelty-seeking. can we look over our culture (particularly multi-nationally) and observe what its evolution has done to the minds of children and their capacity to explore? what were we meant to do if not explore? how does growth of any kind occur without exploration? how do we survive? okay enough with the annihilation of what are otherwise perfectly decent thoughts...

fragmentation

David Bohm is a deity.

i am completely and utterly overwhelmed by this tidal wave of a theory into which i've recently dove.

Bohm's premise for the ideology of a new order of physics is that we - as humanity and as scientists - define the universe in terms of the Cartesian definitions of matter. that is to say, our perceived reality exists as a one-to-one correlation between the space/time coordinates of all matter. what Bohm suggests (and this is from 1980 so it's by no means a hot new thing) is that our reality is skewed by the fact that we perceive it in terms of fragments, or individual chunks of matter. namely, individual objects are the primary products of existence, and their continuity is secondary if regarded as important at all. to remove this fragmentation - which is implicated as paramount to reality being an illusion instead of, well, a reality - Bohm introduces the idea of Implicate and Explicate order.


Assumptions:

1. quantum particles are amplifiers of information contained in the quantum wave

2. two subatomic particles once interacted can respond to each others' motions thousands of years later, light years apart

3. space and time are derived from the Implicate Order; everything is connected such that any individual element can reveal information about any other element in the universe

The Holomovement:

a hologram is created when two interfering wavelengths collide, id est, information about the entire holograph is revealed by a single frequency of the film because every point is completely determined by the overall configuration of the interference patterns. the whole is implicit in each part. the holomovement, then, is essentially the feedback mechanisms between implicate and explicate orders.

Consciousness:
one moment gives rise to another in which the context that was previously implicate is now explicate, and explicate context has reverted to being implicate. is consciousness an interchanging feedback where implicate information forms the explicate world which then reverts to the implicate world and portrays to it new information? can we accumulate perception in such a way as to develop a self in this kind of fashion? what explains the exchange of information between implicate and explicate worlds? well, subalgebra. the superposition of series such that one enfolds into a transformation of the former. so an element undergoes a set of Euclidean metamorphic operations which can be used to describe the quantum content of an object. if two elements are similar in a set of operations, then there are a superimposed set of elements that describe the metamorphoses in a similar way. namely, Euclidean systems exercise superposition such that there will always be a system, E', enfolded relative to a previous system E. how the subsequent unfolding occurs such that E is mapped back onto E'... i have no idea. i'm getting there. for now i'm just blown away. phoosh.

But as an introduction to what i'm sure will be a series of flabbergasted nonsense regarding, i feel that i should state that my primary interest at this point relative to the Implicate Order is that each individual participates in the content of the explicate world as points in a holograph... without one, the explicate world is incomplete. we are fragmented by individual avoidance of dissonance and cultural memes. and we are whole as the exchange of implicit and perceived waveforms and interference patterns.

the longevity meme

Calling aging research the quest for immortality trivializes so much of what's actually being speculated. Yes, there is a disturbing chunk of aging and longevity labs that is attempting to reorganize the biochemical processes of living, and not even necessarily the ones that disrupt living. They are fuckers. And because they get all the media's attention for being radical, many of them are excruciatingly misrepresented for what they're really up to... as is usually the case.

[Before I begin ranting, my disclaimer is to clarify that I am about to talk about longevity research as it pertains to the systemic processes of the body and not the decline of cognitive function. My opinion concerning cognition is that there is a disconnect between neural function and the ability of consciousness to hold its baring when that function is impaired, and that everything within reach should continue to be done to bridge that gap to prevent cognitive decline during aging. However it is also my biggest fear that bridging that gap will allow robotics to ascend to a new level which obliterates what it means to have a human mind... I'll shimmy across that bridge when it comes down to it. Lose a bit of physical functionality, fine - be slightly less active for the final decade of your life. Take on dementia in that decade... well to come to a point, it's the one thing in life I am determined to avoid.]

Aubrey de Grey is one of those particular fuckers who seems like he's in it with the right direction, and then he goes and says something like, "this is bona fide rejuvenation therapy for the sake of prolonging life-span." [but then he'll also go and say shit like, "I don't blame the journalists in question, you understand - they're just doing what they're paid to do. Ultimately, the reason why calling my goal 'immortality' sells papers is because it trivializes it - it confuses my work with something that we all know is impossible; the technological elimination of any risk of death."] Damn him and his perfectly directed Strategies for Engineering Negligible Senescence... which is probably the hottest title he could have given to his little proposal. He's essentially promoting modified gerontology to combat those biochemical mechanisms that accelerate the physical aging process, and to manipulate the nature of those mechanisms which are otherwise meant to be senescent. So here's what we're looking at. Geriatrics aims to stop biochemical damage from progressing into pathology, whereas it is gerontology's goal to stop metabolism from causing damage in the first place. were de Grey to base his SENS protocol off of gerontological approaches, he would immediately be dismissed as trying to override natural progression of biological processes. However, since he has disguised his proposal as more similar to the practice of geriatrics, he is facing controversy instead of socioeconomic heresy. The idea of SENS is to keep maintenance of damage that occurs as a byproduct of living/aging to prevent its exacerbation into pathology. Making only enough adjustment of systems to prevent transition of damage into pathology is where aging research should be directed. The objective to not inevitably die pathologically doesn't seem too unreasonable to me.

Sounds perfect, right? Don't stop life from happening, just keep the damage under control. I like the ideology because stopping damage entirely fights senescence on every level which, in turn, prevents the growth/development that occurs as a byproduct of living/aging. Ultimately, this screws with the natural progression of an organism's energy efficiency. I'm not a fan. Probably because I am more resistant to invasively altering energy fluctuation on a metabolic and molecular level. I'm partial to energy flux by non-invasive means, which allow only for changes in metabolism as can be controlled by organisms' behavior... on a quantum level [follow-up note to Buettner and blue zones]. Invasive techniques tend to have less catastrophic results if they don't venture beyond changes in the observable activity on a cytological level. Particularly in the name of intervening on the functionality of systems. Help them do their job correctly to improve the time we have and side-step pathological decline, don't make them do things they have never been known to do in order to extend life-span. Use RNAi to silence a genetic mutation in the mitochondria so that it more efficiently pumps electrons and doesn't leak quite so many extra protons and cause free radical formation... or combat the mutation by consuming fewer calories, eh? Increase expression of apolipoprotein E. But don't fucking stop the electron transport chain from producing a proton gradient... old people need to be able to keep themselves warm too. The goal of aging medicine should be to stave off diseases fostered by age, and let people die healthily exhausted from living, not from fighting death.

Here's the general problem. It's one thing to prolong health and quite another to prolong life-span. The idea of prolonging health is to allow people more time to do things with their existence (like redefine the pompously blind greed of government and societal consumption...ahem). Prolonging life-span increases the problem of overpopulation... why on Earth would you want to exacerbate that particular problem when it's already putting so much weight on the world that the sociological controversy isn't about whether we can, but whether we should give medical/financial support to AIDS/poverty stricken places whose governments are too dysfunctional to address the problem? Overpopulation, of course, is also controversial in terms of consumption. It just seems so insatiably and unforgivably greedy to me that people actually want to take away from the lives that their offspring might have by staying alive for so long that they're consuming resources that should be given to those who haven't already had 100 years to pursue what the world has to offer. What can you possibly have achieved in your natural lifetime to deserve the luxury of stealing from someone else's basic sustenance? [Besides curing AIDS, cancer and restructuring the American government?] But I'm getting off-topic...

So here's my wish. The romantic pragmatic approach: don't fucking delay or reverse aging, just guide it.

Eat fewer calories or take caloric restriction mimetics to decrease free radical production and stave off oxidative stress which is the staple of almost every age-related pathology.

Get enough sun to produce vitamin D but not so much as to cause DNA double strand breaks and cancer. Human skin is lighter in the North because when our ancestors migrated it was detrimental to have too much melanin blocking absorption of solar radiation to which we are exposed... and strong eumelanin with less intense exposure leads to deficits in vit. D synthesis. ["Why do we still have black people in the north?" Soo many reasons... including... thanks to human exacerbated climate change and particularly altered levels of ozone in the stratosphere we experience higher levels of exposure than thousands of years ago... it's also why there's a higher rate of skin cancer in "white folks"...]

Use stem cells to contribute to immune response to cytological damage so the white blood cells don't have to do quite so much work under otherwise catastrophic conditions... like multiple sclerosis.

Support decrepit and declining bone mineral density with nanotube structure to colonize and foster growth of new cartilage, just don't give people symptoms of asbestos...

Don't fuck with the cytokines. Development is development - aid its function, don't prevent it. [although if we must press forward with this commonsense idiocy of allowing people to live indefinitely, it wouldn't be so terrible if their offspring happened to be infertile...]

Buettner says he has identified four things people can do that can potentially increase a healthy life, and specifically, live healthier into your late years: create an environment that encourages physical activity, set up your kitchen in a way that you're not overeating, cultivate a sense of purpose... and surround yourself with the right people. This is the dude who defined "blue zones," those regions on earth where particular groups of people have mastered healthy longevity. Not immortality. Not reversing the biochemistry of aging. Living.

that's my wrap.

cosmological natural selection

so i have a question.

if universes are created by the collapse, matter compression and explosion into a new layer of universe, where are the replicators? the black holes themselves, yes, but where on the microcosmic scale of creating the sentient characteristics of the new universe? why, oh mighty hawking (and everyone else who has addressed this theory including lee smolin for whom i have a great deal of respect), do you not address the necessity of replicators in the atomic binding and splitting that gives birth to stars, black holes and life as we understand it? you can't just spill matter into a gravitational vacuum and watch it go, something has to be introduced to use the matter to make its copies.

and aligning with the heavily reliable proposition that matter is neither created nor destroyed but recycled and re-synthesized, why do particular minds who recall living past lives never recall living those lives in past universes? as a chemist, it seems a little obscure that the first thing my brain averts to with regard to the big bang as a child of black hole implosion is christine korsgaard and the continuity and connectedness of minds. nonetheless, that's where i go.

my romantic side wants to believe that if matter is neither created nor destroyed in the recycling of universes (so to speak; and yes, i regard replication of life on earth as biochemical recycling), then the minds that accompany and/or exist in association with that matter are of no less substance and should be recycled as well. so i feel as though if you've got access to your past selves, that has to include the self of a past universe. right? why does nobody recollect their alien or other creaturely self? maybe it's an artifact of universe replication via the black hole replicator. no copying process is perfect, errors are wont to crop up. maybe the lost connectedness of selves and minds was lost in the spitting out of our universe. a macromutation, if you will.

autonoetic awareness and episodic memory

Much of the human experience – the way we characterize ourselves as persons – can be attributed to our episodic memory. This is the ability to travel through time, in the form of recollection, to past experiences in order to know how and why we acquired certain knowledge. Episodic memory is characterized by Endel Tulving by three qualities: sense of time, self, and autonoetic awareness. He describes it as a phenomenological quality distinct to humans, and not experienced by non-human animals. But here's where it gets hazy... it is difficult to assess whether non-human animals exercise episodic memory because they can't linguistically report their personal experiences. As such, our best shot at at studying episodic memory in non-human animal models is to assess the animal’s memory of what happened, where it happened and when it happened. Because such tests do not require a consciously directed inference to memory, they are said to assess episodic-like memory.

This consciously directed inference is what Tulving called autonoetic awareness... being the directed retrieval of a specific object of memory. This is distinct from autonoetic consciousness, which Tulving does not reference in describing episodic memory, but which is important to defining the phenomenon in non-human animals. Autonoetic consciousness has no object; rather, it is the fluid link throughout one’s past memories, present, and future projections.

Autonoetic awareness requires the use of mental time travel: reliving a targeted event of the past and using it to consider possible future scenarios. Autonoetic consciousness, because it does not require identifying the context of a specific event, does not imply mental time travel. One can conceivably travel back in time along a conscious continuum without targeting a specific time and place for an event, but knowing that it occurred somewhere in the past. For example, a person knows when and where they were born without remembering the experience. It becomes difficult to assess which of the two phenomena occurs in non-human animals because they can't declare thoughts about specific events of the past. We can't assume that because non-human animals can’t verbalize mental time travel that they do not have it, and therefore do not have autonoetic awareness. This confound requires the development of tests that allow non-human animals to declare their thoughts not with verbalization, but gesture or other physical expression.

Rhesus monkeys can appropriately refuse to submit to a visual image test when they do not think they will choose the correct answers. This test design successfully demonstrates that monkeys know when they remember a learning event or not. However, it does not directly implicate mental time travel, or presume autonoetic awareness. More likely, it suggests autonoetic consciousness - knowing that a particular piece of information is lodged somewhere in memory, but not necessarily targeting it on the streamline of consciousness. Because studies like this one more closely imply autonoetic consciousness, they support the theory of episodic-like memory, and not human-like episodic memory.

Clayton and Dickinson are pretty famous for their studies on Scrub jays argue, again, that non-human animals exhibit episodic-like memory based on an experimental design which targeted two of the three qualities of episodic memory: sense of time, and self. Clayton and Dickinson designed a caching apparatus in which scrub jays could store both preferred perishable (worms), and less preferred non-perishable (peanuts) foods. After a short period away from the caching apparatus, Scrub jays preferred to recover the worms. But... after a longer delay, they chose to recover the non-perishable although less preferred food. This fairly ingeniusly exemplifies the use of autonoetic consciousness in the birds... but in spite of its brilliant layout does not speak to autonoetic awareness.

It's worth noting that an argument could be made for the presence of autonoetic awareness in scrub jays based on their ability to distinguish between a 4hr and 124hr time period. This observation (part of the Clayton/Dickinson study) suggests that the jays were able to target a general place in time when they cached both foods so as to be able to discern that the preferred food (worm) had likely decayed since. Inferring this kind of targeting argues for autonoetic awareness... However!, it may also be the case that as with the Rhesus monkeys, the 124hr delay may have allowed scrub jays simply to forget when they cached an item. It has been shown to be the case in both rat and primates modeled in similar tasks that the memory of “when” was poorer than “what,” and “where." So... if this was the case with the scrub jays, then not being able to recall exactly when they cached the food stuff, they may have recovered the less-perishable but less preferable food simply to avoid the risk that the preferred food may have decayed. The propensity of risk averse behavior in scrub jays may give stronger baring to the argument for autonoetic consciousness than autonoetic awareness... eh?


So my last blip of this rant is this: there has been insight into the anatomical component of episodic memory in humans that may provide a link between behavioral demonstrations in humans and non-human animals. In humans, the right prefrontal cortex has been identified as a key brain region in the recall of episodic memories. Given that Clayton/Dickinson claim that their experimental design targets episodic-like memory retrieval, it would be a valuable experiment to investigate the prefrontal cortex activity in these birds as they are retrieving cached food. If the same region of the prefrontal cortex is activated during this activity, it suggests the biochemical validity of the Scrub jay findings. However, the Scrub jay is evolutionarily several orders of phylogeny removed from humans... this presents the confound of their significantly less developed prefrontal cortex. In the primate and rat models of episodic-like memory, it would be invaluable to compare a PET assessment of right prefrontal cortex activity during memory tasks. If, in the primate model, there were both a behavioral correlate in episodic-like memory tasks and activity in the right prefrontal cortex, we might be able to definitively say that animals experience episodic memory in the same way that humans do. That is, that they exercise sense of self, time and autonoetic awareness.

For now, we are only able to infer that non-human animals exhibit episodic-like memory. It remains to be concluded whether non-human animals exercise autonoetic consciousness or awareness. Determining which phenomenon is occuring will give greater insight into the behavior of non-human animals, and better address the question of whether episodic-like memory is as close to episodic memory as non-human animals get. It is entirely possible that non-human animals have only episodic-like memory because they have autonoetic consciousness, and not autonoetic awareness. However, it may also be the case that we have not found a way to enable non-human animals to declare their past experiences in a suitable way...

empty thoughts II

2. “The ability to categorize is what makes it possible to use previous experience to guide the interpretation of new experience, for without categorization, memory is virtually useless” (Jackendoff 1987).

What kind of function would memory have if it were not categorized? Would memory be retrievable, and in what form? There must be some evolutionary reason to have uncategorized memory, because before memory could become associative, it makes sense that it would have begun with a single category with all information lumped together…

supervenience of subconsciousness

“It is clear that there is no more of a conceptual entailment from biochemistry to consciousness than there is from silicon of from a group of homunculi…. So consciousness fails to logically supervene on the physical.”

Chalmers is suggesting that consciousness can't be reduced to a physical structure or property because the silicon model of neural circuitry is functionally identical to biochemical neural circuitry, yet the silicon model can't exhibit consciousness. This is an assumption that silicon and neural circuits are identical... but I would contend that there is a “conceptual entailment from biochemistry” that provides a physical property on which consciousness may very well supervene.

The difference between a silicon and neural circuit is plainly that the former is closed and the latter is open... such that the electrical flow of messages through each respective circuit may occur in the same phenomenological fashion, but not the same physical fashion. Namely, when circulating an electrical signal, a closed circuit releases energy only in the form of heat, whereas an open circuit releases energy as mostly Gibbs free energy with the ability to do work, and very little heat. A silicon circuit is not self propagating, namely, through its path it meets only with resistors and inductors which cause it to dissipate heat. However, a neuronal signal is self propagating, and free energy in its environment is both consumed and produced by that process. This, of course, is assuming that energy and heat are physical properties on which consciousness might supervene. Since the free energy has the capacity to perform work, and heat does not, the neural circuit is the one with the ability to support consciousness.
Because free energy is undefined aside from its ability to do work, it is possible that this particular physical property is the medium through which neural structure and consciousness are connected. Therefore, I propose that the changes in free energy that occur during electrical signal propagation in a neural circuit may be the physical cause of consciousness. Free energy, being the physical difference between a neural and silicon circuit, would explain consciousness arising in one and not the other, and provide a physical property to which consciousness might be reduced.

But all this... is written out of fear. If humans manage during my lifetime to find the physical matter of consciousness such that we can replicate it... my soul will crumble, and my fascination with the human condition will suffer a dreadful, murderous demise. As a neurochemist, I need for there to be some manner of correlation between biochemistry and consciousness. As a mind, I need for that matter to be untouchable, and irreplicable.