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Collection of Links relating to areas of CONSCIOUSNESS STUDIES. |
This is a collection of links that I am gathering to use in the forums and to help anybody
using these pages to track down articles of interest in the following areas:
Neuro-physiology
Philosophy of mind
Quantum consciousness
Neural nets and computational brain
etc
The list will grow and be updated regularly. Any comments will be welcome.
Please send messages to Stephen Jones
email: sjones@real.com.au
CONFERENCE REPORT An edited version of the daily reports by Keith Sutherland (and on Saturday by Jean Burns), made throughout the conference to JCS-online.
New York Times coverage: April 16, 1996. "Arizona Conference Grapples With Mysteries of Human Consciousness." By Sandra Blakeslee.
New Scientist coverage of the conference.
JCS Consciousness Research Abstracts of the conference proceedings.
Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) mirror site for abstracts of papers presented at Tucson II.
Interdisciplinary Developments Towards a Science of Consciousness Report, Summary and InformationSpringBoard concerning the developments epitomised at the Tucson 'Towards a Science of Consciousness' Conferences.
Journal of Consciousness
Studies
JCS is a British print journal which publishes refereed articles in wide
areas of consciousness studies.
Conscious Experience Edited by Thomas Metzinger, this is an important collection of new papers on the problem of consciousness in science and philosophy. Published by JCS.
Psyche. An Interdisciplinary Journal of
Research on Consciousness
Psyche is an electronic journal published by
Patrick Wilken at Monash University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia; with a print version
published by MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
selection of articles previously published in the THES to coincide with the Tucson II conference, including features on consciousness and the mind, profiles of conference speakers, and reviews of relevant books.
Howard Gardner on his theory of human intelligence interviewed by John Davies. The THES, January 19 1996
Journal of Mind and Behavior JMB is dedicated to the interdisciplinary approach within psychology and related fields.
Glimpses of the Mind. TIME Magazine. July 17, 1995 Volume 146, No. 3. Cover Story. "GLIMPSES OF THE MIND". What is consciousness? Memory? Emotion? Science unravels the best-kept secrets of the... [SLOW......]
Commentary on "The Mystery of Consciousness" This is a commentary written by Walter Freeman of the Department of Molecular & Cell Biology, University of California at Berkeley, and Hubert Dreyfus of the Department of Philosophy, University of California at Berkeley, on the two-part multibook review published by John Searle, in the New York Review of Books 2-18 November, entitled "The Mystery of Consciousness".
Mind over matter Stuart Derbyshire examines the latest debate about what shapes human consciousness. Reproduced from Living Marxism, 72, October 1994. Reviews of Francis Crick: The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul, Simon & Schuster; Gerald Edelman, Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind, Penguin; John Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind, MIT Press; Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained, Penguin; John C Eccles, How the Self Controls its Brain, Springer Verlag.
Epistemology, Consciousness, and the
Mind:
Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer by John Lilly
[this is a very SLOW connection]
How the Brain Works Introducing the idea that human mentation can be understood in terms of the fundamental operations of a small number of brain regions.
Explaining Consciousness: The Hard Problem Special Issue: Journal of Consciousness Studies Special Issue: Introduction. One of the reasons for the current explosion of interest in the study..
The New Manhattan Project. by Jack Sarfatti. The study of consciousness used to be untenable:
"In the past few years much of this has changed. Scientists with unimpeachable credentials in a wide range of fields, from psychology to molecular biology to mathematical physics, have begun to assert that understanding the nature of consciousness is an important scientific goal, perhaps the most important question that science faces at the present time." [Stuart Hameroff].
On a Confusion about a
Function of Consciousness by Ned Block, Department of Linguistics and Philosophy,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
A pre-publication Draft of the paper.
Abstract: Consciousness is a mongrel concept: there are a number of very different "consciousnesses." Phenomenal consciousness is experience; the phenomenally conscious aspect of a state is what it is like to be in that state. The mark of access-consciousness, by contrast, is availability for use in reasoning and rationally guiding speech and action. These concepts are often partly or totally conflated, with bad results. This target article uses as an example a form of reasoning about a function of "consciousness" based on the phenomenon of blindsight. Some information about stimuli in the blind field is represented in the brains of blindsight patients, as shown by their correct "guesses," but they cannot harness this information in the service of action, and this is said to show that a function of phenomenal consciousness is somehow to enable information represented in the brain to guide action. But stimuli in the blind field are BOTH access-unconscious and phenomenally unconscious. The fallacy is: an obvious function of the machinery of access-consciousness is illicitly transferred to phenomenal consciousness.
Searle on the Brink by Selmer Bringsjord, Department of Philosophy, Psychology and Cognitive Science, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY 12180. USA. Published in PSYCHE: an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness 1(5), August 1994.
Abstract: In his recent book The Rediscovery of the Mind John Searle tries to destroy cognitive science and preserve a future in which a "perfect science of the brain'' (1992, p. 235) arrives. I show that Searle can't accomplish both objectives. The ammunition he uses to realise the first stirs up a maelstrom of consciousness so wild it precludes securing the second.
Electric
Writing: Stone age babies in cyberspace by George McMurdo, Queen Margaret College,
Edinburgh, Scotland, UK.
Abstract: The increasing use of computers and robots at the workplace and in peoples' personal lives, paralleled with their portrayal, interpretation, and representation in the media and popular culture, has in recent years raised general awareness of some issues previously of interest mainly to philosophers of mind and consciousness. Various issues of Artificial Intelligence and its computational metaphors are also of more specialised relevance for information scientists due to their bases in such things as: languages and vocabularies; categorization and classification; and the logic of information acquisition, storage and retrieval. It may be the case that the more general acceptance of some of these ideas about human consciousness may be part of a shift in world view comparable to long-term historical precedents such as heliocentrism and natural evolution, both in the way they were initially seen to lessen humanity, and in the ways they were initially opposed and resisted.
The 3rd European Congress of Psychophysiology will be hosted by the University of Konstanz, Germany, from May 29-31, 1997. Conference topics will include all areas of research concerned with psychophysiology and its applications to General and Clinical Psychology, Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience, Psychiatry and Behavioral Medicine. Emphasis will be devoted to new methodological developments such as ambulatory monitoring, functional imaging techniques, and high-resolution EEG and MEG.4.1. The Cortex
Lateral Interactions in
the Cortex: Structure and Function.
Joseph Sirosh, Risto Miikkulainen, and
Yoonsuck Choe (editors) Austin, TX: The Univ. of Texas CS Neural Network Research
Group. A hypertext book which grew out of the Neural Information Processing
Systems (NIPS) post-conference workshop "Computational Roles of Lateral Connections
in the Cortex," organized on 12/2/1994 in Vail, Colorado, by Joseph Sirosh and Risto
Miikkulainen. See also: NIPS list of
papers
Gerfen C.R., The neostriatal mosaic: striatal patch-matrix organization is related to cortical lamination, Science, 246 (1989) 385-388.
The basal ganglia, of which the striatum is the major component, process inputs from virtually all cerebral cortical areas to affect motor, emotional, and cognitive behaviors. Insights into how these seemingly disparate functions may be integrated have emerged from studies that have demonstrated that the mammalian striatum is composed of two compartments arranged as a mosaic, the patches and the matrix, which differ in their neurochemical and neuroanatomical properties.
Modelling the Cerebellar Purkinje Cell. by Erik De Schutter. Division of Biology, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA. Published in Progress in Brain Research 102: 417-431 (1994).
Summary:Detailed compartmental models of neurons are useful tools to investigate neuronal properties and mechanisms that are not accessible to experimental procedures. If a rigorous approach is used in building the model, simulation studies can be as valuable as laboratory experimentation. As such, modelling becomes an additional method to explore the function of neurons and nervous systems.
4.2. Visual Systems
"Towards the Neuronal
Substrate of Visual Consciousness" by Christof Koch. This article is adapted from the
chapter by C. Koch, entitled "Towards the neuronal substrate of visual consciousness". This
chapter appears in Towards a Science of Consciousness:
Abstract: What is the relationship between a visual percept and the underlying neuronal activity in parts of the brain? This manifesto reviews the theoretical framework of Crick and Kochfor answering these questions based on the neuroanatomy and physiology of mammalian cortex and associated subcortical structures. This evidence suggests that primates are not directly aware of neural activity in primary visual cortex, although they may be aware of such activity in extrastriate cortical areas. Psychophysical evidence in humans supporting this hypothesis is discussed.
The Koch Lab. Research in the laboratory of Professor Christof Koch focuses on several areas: Biophysics of Computation in Single Neurons. Cortical Circuits Underlying Motion and Visual Attention...
Koch lab publications since 1990.
4.3. Thalamo-cortical systems
James Newman's e-seminars on Thalamo-Cortical Systems. Thalamo-Cortical Foundations of Conscious Experience led by James Newman, Colorado Neurological Institute. Includes a lot of links and papers, including Bernard Baars.
4.4. Microtubules
Orchestrated reduction of quantum coherence in brain microtubules: a model for consciousness. by Hameroff, S. & Penrose, R. (1996) In: Toward a Science of Consciousness - The First Tucson Discussions and Debates. eds S Hameroff, A Kaszniak, A Scott, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA (April, 1996).
Abstract: Features of consciousness difficult to understand in terms of conventional neuroscience have evoked application of quantum theory, which describes the fundamental behavior of matter and energy. In this paper we propose that aspects of quantum theory (e.g. quantum coherence) and of a newly proposed physical phenomenon of quantum wave function "self-collapse" (objective reduction: OR - Penrose, 1994) are essential for consciousness, and occur in cytoskeletal microtubules and other structures within each of the brain's neurons. The particular characteristics of microtubules suitable for quantum effects include their crystal-like lattice structure, hollow inner core, organization of cell function and capacity for information processing. We envisage that conformational states of microtubule subunits (tubulins) are coupled to internal quantum events, and cooperatively interact (compute) with other tubulins. We further assume that macroscopic coherent superposition of quantum-coupled tubulin conformational states occurs throughout significant brain volumes and provides the global binding essential to consciousness. We equate the emergence of the microtubule quantum coherence with pre-conscious processing which grows (for up to 500 milliseconds) until the mass-energy difference among the separated states of tubulins reaches a threshold related to quantum gravity. According to the arguments for OR put forth in Penrose (1994), superpositioned states each have their own space-time geometries. When the degree of coherent mass-energy difference leads to sufficient separation of space-time geometry, the system must choose and decay (reduce, collapse) to a single universe state. In this way, a transient superposition of slightly differing space- time geometries persists until an abrupt quantum classical reduction occurs. Unlike the random, "subjective reduction" (SR, or R) of standard quantum theory caused by observation or environmental entanglement, the OR we propose in microtubules is a self- collapse and it results in particular patterns of microtubule-tubulin conformational states that regulate neuronal activities including synaptic functions. Possibilities and probabilities for post-reduction tubulin states are influenced by factors including attachments of microtubule-associated proteins (MAPs) acting as "nodes" which tune and "orchestrate" the quantum oscillations. We thus term the self-tuning OR process in microtubules "orchestrated objective reduction" ("Orch OR"), and calculate an estimate for the number of tubulins (and neurons) whose coherence for relevant time periods (e.g. 500 milliseconds) will elicit Orch OR. In providing a connection among 1) pre-conscious to conscious transition, 2) fundamental space-time notions, 3) non-computability, and 4) binding of various (time scale and spatial) reductions into an instantaneous event ("conscious now"), we believe Orch OR in brain microtubules is the most specific and plausible model for consciousness yet proposed.
Microtubules on the web A very useful reference is Dimitri Nanopoulos's paper "Theory of Brain Function, Quantum Mechanics and Superstrings"
A book review of Shadows of the
Mind by Roger Penrose (Oxford, 1994) written by Jack Sarfatti.
What is "Orchestrated Objective
Reduction"? This has to do with Penrose physics, with the idea that wavefunction
reduction takes place automatically, or...
"2-Vector Quantum Mechanics of
Mind" Reviewed and discussed by Jack Sarfatti. "Warning this is difficult reading in
places. It requires math which I have put in the footnotes. But try anyway..."
"Is Quantum Mechanics Relevant To Understanding Consciousness?" A Review of
Shadows of the Mind by Roger Penrose by Stanley A. Klein, Department of Vision Sciences,
University of California, Berkeley, CA. in PSYCHE 2(3), April 1995.
"Language & Quantum
Physics: Crossing Boundaries and Limitations" by Ovid Jacob & Mira Zussman.
Sarfatti Commentary on "Theory of Brain
Quantum Mechanics and Superstrings" by D.V.Nanopoulos of the Center for Theoretical
Physics, Department of Physics Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA; and
Astroparticle Physics Group, Houston Advanced Research Center (HARC), The Mitchell
Campus, The Woodlands, TX, USA; and CERN Theory Division, 1211 Geneva 23,
Switzerland. Recent developments/efforts to understand aspects of the brain function at the
sub-neural level are discussed.
Quantum Quackery by Victor
J. Stenger of the Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Hawaii, (Version of
May 7, 1996). Commentaries by Jack Sarfatti with Vic's responses indicated by "vic>"
The quantum brain page: The
Quantum Brain. Stapp's quantum paradigm. Bose-Einstein condensates. Quantum Brain
Dynamics. Microtubules and the mind. Quantum computation. etc...
5.2. Quantum Computing
5.3. Quantum Communication
The UTCS Neural Nets research group is supervised by Prof. Risto Miikkulainen. The group is part of the Artificial Intelligence Lab and the Computer Science Department, at the University of Texas at Austin. Our research concentrates on artificial intelligence and cognitive science, including natural language processing, schema-based vision, cortical self-organization, episodic memory, decision making, and evolving neural networks with genetic algorithms.
Neural Signal Processing Group's Human Brain Project home page on functional neuroimaging activities.
The Laboratory for Computational and Biological Vision at University of Southern California The research activities of the CVL divide roughly into three main areas:
Also at The Laboratory for Computational and Biological Vision at University of Southern California Face Recognition Project We are developing a face recognition system called Eidos (Gk. "essence" or "form"), which uses an elastic graph matching algorithm.
Institute for NeuroInformatik at Ruhr University of Bochum International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks, July, 1996. Sponsored by the European Neural Network Society, continues the successful series begun in Helsinki (1991), which has become the premier meeting of the European scientific community interested in the design, development and application of natural and artificial neural networks. In 1996, the venue will be at the University of Bochum, Germany and the conference will be hosted by the Institut fnr Neuroinformatik.
An Active Membrane Model of the Cerebellar Purkinje Cell Erik de Schutter and James M. Bower. Division of Biology 216-76, California Institute of Technology, Pasedena, California 91125. in Journal of Neurophysiology, 71, 1, pp375-400, 1994,
Publications from the Antwerp Theoretical Neurobiology group: Theoretical Neurobiology
Publications The Theoretical Neurobiology unit (principal investigator: Erik De Schutter) is part of the Born-Bunge Foundation, a research institute affiliated with the University of Antwerp, (Belgium). "We use realistic models of neurons and neural networks to explore the function of the nervous system. We also develop neural simulation software."
links on AI
Notes from the Emergent Computation '89 conference
Intro: "Language and quantum physics are thought to be non-problematic,
stemming primarily from an unexamined acceptance in Physics of the "naturalness" of
language, a certain Positivism quite popular in the 1920's. (By "language" we mean here
both the language used in communicating physics as well as the language used in
developing and constructing physics.)
Abstract: A new mysticism has appeared that claims
twentieth century physics as its authority. Quantum mechanics is said to place human
consciousness in control of reality. However, this radical claim is not required by scientific
observations, which remain consistent with conventional reductionist quantum physics,
interpreted in terms of particles following definite paths in spacetime.
Quantum computation: a tutorial by Samuel L. Braunstein
Abstract: Imagine a computer whose memory is exponentially larger than its apparent physical size; a computer that can manipulate an exponential set of inputs simultaneously; a computer that computes in the twilight zone of Hilbert space. You would be thinking of a quantum computer. Relatively few and simple concepts from quantum mechanics are needed to make quantum computers a possibility. The subtlety has been in learning to manipulate these concepts. Is such a computer an inevitability or will it be too difficult to build?
Quantum communication moves into the unknown By David Deutsch and Artur Ekert
Information is physical and any processing of information is always performed by physical means - an innocent-sounding statement, but its consequences are anything but trivial, In the last few years there has been an explosion of theoretical and experimental innovations which, their discoverers claim, are creating a fundamental new discipline: a distinctively quantum theory of information.
6. References and Links on NEURAL NETWORKS
Self-organization of neural networks in ontogenesis
Understanding how brain circuits process information
Application of neural computing to applied problems, especially in computer vision.
Introduction: "The cerebellar Purkinje cell is one of the largest and most complex neurons in the mammalian nervous system...(its) activity also constitutes the sole output of the cerebellar cortex. While the precise computational role of the cerebellum is not yet known, it is clear that understanding the physiology of the Purkinje cell will be an essential part in unraveling the function of the cerebellar cortex as a whole. Given the complexity of this cell, we believe that computer modeling techniques are necessary to explore and analyze completely the properties of Purkinje cells."
Thinking in a Chinese Room by John Searle. "...he rejects strong AI, in which he sees that the computer is not merely a tool in the study of the mind, but that the appropriately programmed computer really is a mind, in the sense that computers given the right programs can be literally said to understand and have cognitive states."
The theme of the conference was, predictably, emergent computations; i.e., highly complex processes arising from the cooperation of many simple processes. This type of phenomenon - the emergence of complexity from repeated simplicity - is at the heart of many of the front-most fields of scientific endeavor today. Many people are familiar with the computer-graphic paisley of the Mandelbrot set, whose complex form arises from the repeated application of an extremely simple rule, such as z(t+1) = z(t)^2+c. Despite the simplicity of this rule, the boundary between those points in the complex plane that do and that do not go to infinity when repeatedly subjected to this rule is essentially infinitely complex. This emergent computation principal is also at the heart of the current field of Neural Networks (or Connectionism), which finds its inspiration in the human brain's ability to perform complex computation (reasoning) while it appears to be composed of many (very many) fairly simple computational elements (neurons). Cellular Automata (CA's) provide another good example of complex behavior deriving from simple rules. Then there are classifier systems, biological immune systems, neurophysiological simulations, autocatalytic networks, adaptive game theory, choas theory, nonlinear systems, artificial life, and so on. (See? A simple concept like Emergent Computation gives rise to quite a complex list of topics!)
7. References and Links on Systems Theory, Cybernetics and Dynamical Systems
Quantum Consciousness is Cybernetic by Gordon Globus. in PSYCHE: an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness 2(21), January, 1996.
Abstract: Classical mechanics cannot naturally accommodate consciousness, whereas quantum mechanics can, but the Heisenberg/Stapp (H/S) approach, in which consciousness randomly collapses the neural wave function, leaves the conscious function unrestricted by known physical principles. The Umezawa/Yasue (U/Y) approach, in which consciousness offers superposed possibilities to the match with sensory input, is based in the first physical principles of quantum field theory. Stapp thinks of the brain as a measuring device, like a Geiger counter, and overlooks that the brain upholds second-order quantum fields that are symmetry-conserving with respect to reality. Consciousness is cybernetic rather than having a random function.
University of Minnesota - Institute for Mathematics and its Applications Emerging Applications of Dynamical Systems. Dynamical systems theory describes general patterns found in the solutions of systems of nonlinear differential equations. The theory focuses upon those equations representing the change of processes in time. Geometric and analytic study of simple examples has led to tremendous insight into universal aspects of nonlinear dynamics. Experimental studies in diverse areas ranging from fluid flows to chemical reactions to laser dynamics to cardiac rhythms to neural output have confirmed the ubiquity of these dynamical patterns.
Also from the IMA. Announcement of Computational Neuroscience Workshop January 13-24, 1998 Of primary interest to neuroscientists are the roles of the highly nonlinear intrinsic properties of individual neurons and coupling properties between cells that determine the dynamical activity of neuronal networks. Unique mathematical features of neuronal models that underlie complex spatio-temporal patterns include the explicit multiple time scales of ionic currents (from milliseconds to seconds, and longer), and coupling which might be local as well as long range (say, via widespread axons), possibly with random connectivity, and with kinetic aspects (time constants for decay of synaptic variables).
I'm looking for a copy of LaBerge's (1995) book Attentional Processing: The Brain's Art of Mindfulness for my library