Field Theories of Consciousness

The following video is a lecture delivered by Michael Persinger, a cognitive neuroscience researcher at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario. It details some of his research on remote viewing and telepathy. Persinger has published over 200 peer-reviewed articles in academic journals.

Two links:

First, Field Theories of Consciousness at Scholarpedia

Second, Field Theories of Global Consciousness at Scholarpedia


"...the idea of a universal consciousness also resonates with notions such as Bohm’s implicate order, Jung’s collective unconscious, Radin’s conscious universe and the Gaia mind."

"Is this life real?" - Aeon Magazine

 By Matthew Francis, Aeon magazine

Philosophers and physicists say we might be living in a computer simulation, but how can we tell? And does it matter?

Our species is not going to last forever. One way or another, humanity will vanish from the Universe, but before it does, it might summon together sufficient computing power to emulate human experience, in all of its rich detail. Some philosophers and physicists have begun to wonder if we’re already there. Maybe we are in a computer simulation, and the reality we experience is just part of the program.

Modern computer technology is extremely sophisticated, and with the advent of quantum computing, it’s likely to become more so. With these more powerful machines, we’ll be able to perform large-scale simulations of more complex physical systems, including, possibly, complete living organisms, maybe even humans. But why stop there?

The idea isn’t as crazy as it sounds. A pair of philosophers recently argued that if we accept the eventual complexity of computer hardware, it’s quite probable we’re already part of an ‘ancestor simulation’, a virtual recreation of humanity’s past. Meanwhile, a trio of nuclear physicists has proposed a way to test this hypothesis, based on the notion that every scientific programme makes simplifying assumptions. If we live in a simulation, the thinking goes, we might be able to use experiments to detect these assumptions.

However, both of these perspectives, logical and empirical, leave open the possibility that we could be living in a simulation without being able to tell the difference. Indeed, the results of the proposed simulation experiment could potentially be explained without us living in a simulated world. And so, the question remains: is there a way to know whether we live a simulated life or not?

At some point in the future, humans as we know ourselves will cease to exist. Whether we become extinct with no evolutionary descendants, or leave one or more post-human species as our inheritance, we humans will eventually be gone. But if we do leave futuristic descendants, those descendants might be quite interested in creating ancestor simulations, virtual universes populated by conscious humans. And if the technology to craft such simulations was sufficiently popular, they could proliferate so widely that the first-person experience of such simulations would outnumber the first-person experiences of humans who have actually existed in fundamental reality.

This presents an interesting problem if you happen to find yourself having a first-person conscious experience: how do you know whether you are one of the original humans, or an ancestor simulation, especially when there are many more of the latter? The philosopher Nick Bostrom has provided a framework for thinking about this problem. He argues that we have to conclude one of three things is true. Either humans or human-like species become extinct before they achieve simulation-producing technology, or ‘post-human’ civilisations have little interest in making or using this technology, or we ourselves are probably part of a simulation. I say probably because, all things being equal, the odds would be greater that a conscious experience is a simulated experience. There would just be way more of them around if the other two conditions (extinction or lack of interest) fail.

Bostrom is certainly not the first to examine the possibility that our perceived reality is virtual, though the proposed nature of the simulator varies a lot. In addition to philosophical and scientific ruminations, the idea that human consciousness is simulated is a staple of science fiction. In the movie trilogy beginning with The Matrix (1999), the world we know is a computer simulation to keep humans’ brains busy while their body chemistry was harvested for energy. In The Matrix, humans experience the world as avatars in a fully immersive virtual reality environment. However, the simulation was sufficiently flawed that some prepared minds could see its glitches, and people from the ‘real world’ could hack into the Matrix.

Bostrom’s idea is somewhat different: in his picture of things, the whole Universe is a simulation, not just humanity. Every aspect of human life is part of the code, including our minds and interactions with the non-sentient parts of the program. However, Bostrom recognises that a complete emulation of reality on every level is likely to be impractical, even for powerful computing systems. Just as our scientific simulations involve levels of abstraction where excess detail isn’t required, simulations would probably make use of certain rules and assumptions, so that not every detail would have to be simulated. These would come into play when we performed experiments: for example, ‘when it saw that a human was about to make an observation of the microscopic world, [the simulation] could fill in sufficient detail in the [appropriate domain of the simulation] on an as-needed basis,’ Bostrom writes in the paper ‘Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?’ (2003). That way, the program wouldn’t need to track every particle or galaxy in every detail, but when those data are called for, enough of the cosmos is in the program to provide a completely consistent reality. Even humans need not be emulated in every detail at all times; our subjective awareness of ‘self’ varies depending on circumstances. Unlike Linus in the cartoon strip Peanuts, we are not always aware of our tongues, so the simulation need not keep the ‘tongue’ subroutines operating in the foreground.

    It could be the case that one planetary civilisation is all that can be simulated, without running into computational capacity issues

Beyond these philosophical implications, the simulation hypothesis could help answer some scientific problems. Since Earth-like planets are not terribly rare, it’s possible enough civilisations have arisen in the Universe that they would be able to communicate or travel between stars. Yet we have not seen any so far, leaving us to wonder: where are the aliens? However, if we live in a simulation, aliens might simply not be part of the program. In fact, it could be the case that one planetary civilisation is all that can be simulated, without running into computational capacity issues.

Similarly, the failure of physicists to find unified theories of all the forces could be due to an inadequacy in the simulation. The simulation hypothesis could even resolve the ‘fine-tuning’ problem: that the parameters of our Universe allow for life, but changing them might result in a lifeless cosmos. A simulated Universe could be designed for the eventual rise of life, or alternatively could be the outcome of a successful experiment in which many possible parameters were tested before life was possible. Cosmologists perform similar (albeit simpler) simulations now to see how likely our particular cosmos is from random starting conditions.

Bostrom goes a step further in his simulation argument: ‘Should any error [in the program] occur, the director could easily edit the states of any brains that have become aware of an anomaly before it spoils the simulation. Alternatively, the director could skip back a few seconds and rerun the experiment in a way that avoids the problem.’ However, if the simulation in which we live has real-time error correction, it’s troubling from several points of view. Indeed, it could potentially throw the whole enterprise of science into question. What would prevent the simulator from changing the laws of physics on a whim, to test parameters or simply to mess with our heads? In that scheme, the programmer becomes a capricious and possibly malicious god, whose presence can never be detected.

While Bostrom is interested primarily in showing that we’re more likely than not to dwell in a simulation, scientists who confront this problem have a different set of questions to answer. The primary contrast derives from the fact that science is concerned with what can be tested by experiment or observation. And, as it turns out, there are a few things we can infer from any simulation we might inhabit.

First, if we live in a simulation, it obeys a set of well-defined laws, and any dynamic changes to those laws are relatively small. That’s based on the overwhelming success of the scientific approach over centuries. In fact, the simulation hypothesis has some potential explanatory power: the reason our Universe obeys relatively simple laws is because it was programmed to do so. As for changes the simulator makes as the program runs, that was one proposed solution to the ‘faster-than-light’ neutrino results from 2011: the program contained an error, and we measured something based on that error, and the bug was subsequently fixed. (There’s currently no reason to think the faster-than-light result was real, since the anomaly has a prosaic explanation, requiring no dramatic alternative ideas.)

    The truth of the matter might be that we dwell in a simulation but, like the existence of an impersonal god, this fact has no bearing on how we conduct our lives

However, there’s nothing in this cosmic lawfulness to tell us whether we’re in a simulation or not. If the program is good enough with no obvious ‘Easter eggs’ or hidden messages left by its designers, then any experiment we perform will return the same results whether we’re in a simulated cosmos or not. In this scenario, there’s no way we can ever tell we’re in a virtual world, no matter how convincing our favourite philosophers are on the matter. The big-T Truth of the matter might be that we dwell in a simulation but, like the existence of an impersonal god, this fact has no bearing on how we conduct our lives.

We should also consider the possibility that we live in a simulation, but that the laws governing it are different to those of the world of the programmers. After all, scientists generate models all the time that don’t correspond directly to the real world but help refine our theories. And if such a simulation is an imperfect emulation, there might be places where the computer code shows its presence. If the Universe is a numerical simulation similar to those run by modern nuclear physicists, then there might be a point where the program’s necessary simplifications are at odds with the predictions of fundamental physics.

Consider atomic nuclei, which are made of protons and neutrons that are themselves made of quarks. The whole mess requires understanding the nuclear strong force that binds everything together, but the complex interactions have no consistent treatment of the kind for free particles such as electrons. However, it’s often difficult for physicists to calculate interactions between more than two particles at a time, especially at the high energies involved inside nuclei.

Instead of allowing them to move just anywhere, nuclear physicists act as though the particles reside on a three-dimensional lattice, like atoms in a solid crystal. Because energy increases as the quarks get closer together, forcing them to stay apart by a fixed distance keeps the numbers manageable — and still reproduces the behaviours we see experimentally. This type of numerical calculation is known as lattice quantum chromodynamics (LQCD).

While the simplifying principle in LQCD is the only consistent way they’ve figured out how to describe quarks, it violates the principle of relativity as set out by Albert Einstein. Spacetime in relativity is a continuum, with no special directions defined. On the other hand, a lattice such as the one in LQCD has special points and special directions (along the connections between the nodes). If high-energy collisions such as those produced by cosmic rays exhibited behaviour more like LQCD than like the predictions of relativity, it could be a sign we’re in a simulation where the programmers cut the same corners as modern nuclear physicists do.

Silas Beane and colleagues at the University of Bonn in Germany considered other testable deviations along these lines (including some anomalous behaviour by the electron’s heavier cousin, the muon). However, there are several possible ways their scheme won’t work. Whoever wrote the simulation might not use the same type of code nuclear physicists do, meaning that the predicted deviations won’t show up. The deviation might also happen at such high energies that we won’t discover them in the foreseeable future. Lastly, spacetime might behave like a lattice for reasons other than living in a simulation, a possibility seriously considered by a number of physicists.

In fairness, Beane, Davoudi and Savage, the nuclear physicists who proposed a way to test the simulation hypothesis, know all this, and it would be a mistake to think that this is the focus of their life work. If you look at Beane’s bibliography page on the INSPIRE repository (the high energy physics information system), you’ll see that this paper is the only one he has yet written on the subject; the rest involve standard LQCD research. While I’m sure he and his colleagues take the cosmic simulation work they did seriously, they’re likely typical of most researchers: they might find these questions interesting, but they won’t devote their lives to investigating the answers.

Partly that’s pragmatic: you can get funds for working within the standard paradigms of modern physics, but it’s harder to pay for research into what could be construed as open-ended philosophical questions. However, the problem itself is far too slippery to offer a tangible pay-off. Despite the impression one can often receive from reading popular science accounts, there’s little chance of success in devoting your life to the biggest questions about life, the Universe, and everything. The reason major breakthroughs (like the quantum mechanics revolution of the 1920s) are rare is because they’re hard. Science is mostly incremental progress, and that’s not a bad thing, even if it might seem unglamorous.

The difficulty with probing into the cosmos-as-simulation is finding the right scientific questions to ask: the ones that lead to testable consequences. In a hypothetical simulated Universe where the program manager can step in and fix problems in real time, we might not be able to distinguish between a real cosmos and an emulated one. The same applies to a simulation without any detectable imperfections. Even a compelling philosophical argument in favour of us living inside a computer program seems empty if we can’t obtain experimental evidence to back it up.

Do we live in a simulation? My gut feeling is no, and not just because I don’t want to believe in the existence of an intelligence who is either indifferent or who programmes beings to suffer needlessly. (Why not simulate a paradise?)

The power of science often lies in its generalisations, its abstractions, and even its simplifications. Simulating an entire Universe with sufficient detail to include conscious minds will be complex, even if the fundamental rules underlying the program are simple. It seems needlessly baroque to programme something as complicated as that, when you can learn just as much from something simpler.

However, those are intuitive musings, which might or might not prove valid. A better refuge is empiricism, unromantic as it is. From a scientific point of view, if we cannot distinguish between a simulated and real Universe, then the question of living in a simulation is moot: this reality is ours, and it’s all we have.

Why is Consciousness so Mysterious? - David Chalmers

David John Chalmers (/ˈtʃælmərz/; born 20 April 1966) is an Australian philosopher and cognitive scientist specializing in the area of philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. He is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Consciousness at the Australian National University. He is also Professor of Philosophy at New York University. In 2013, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Superdeterminism

From Wikipedia:

In the context of quantum mechanics, superdeterminism is a term that has been used to describe a hypothetical class of theories that evade Bell's theorem by virtue of being completely deterministic. Bell's theorem depends on the assumption of "free will", which does not apply to deterministic theories. It is conceivable, but arguably unlikely, that someone could exploit this loophole to construct a local hidden variable theory that reproduces the predictions of quantum mechanics. Superdeterminists do not recognize the existence of genuine chances or possibilities anywhere in the cosmos.

Bell's theorem assumes that the types of measurements performed at each detector can be chosen independently of each other and of the hidden variable being measured. In order for the argument for Bell's inequality to follow, it is necessary to be able to speak meaningfully of what the result of the experiment would have been, had different choices been made. This assumption is called counterfactual definiteness. But in a deterministic theory, the measurements the experimenters choose at each detector are predetermined by the laws of physics. It can therefore be argued that it is erroneous to speak of what would have happened had different measurements been chosen; no other measurement choices were physically possible. Since the chosen measurements can be determined in advance, the results at one detector can be affected by the type of measurement done at the other without any need for information to travel faster than the speed of light.

In the 1980s, John Bell discussed superdeterminism in a BBC interview:

    There is a way to escape the inference of superluminal speeds and spooky action at a distance. But it involves absolute determinism in the universe, the complete absence of free will. Suppose the world is super-deterministic, with not just inanimate nature running on behind-the-scenes clockwork, but with our behavior, including our belief that we are free to choose to do one experiment rather than another, absolutely predetermined, including the "decision" by the experimenter to carry out one set of measurements rather than another, the difficulty disappears. There is no need for a faster than light signal to tell particle A what measurement has been carried out on particle B, because the universe, including particle A, already "knows" what that measurement, and its outcome, will be.

Although he acknowledged the loophole, he also argued that it was implausible. Even if the measurements performed are chosen by deterministic random number generators, the choices can be assumed to be "effectively free for the purpose at hand," because the machine's choice is altered by a large number of very small effects. It is unlikely for the hidden variable to be sensitive to all of the same small influences that the random number generator was.

Superdeterminism has also been criticized because of its implications regarding the validity of science itself. For example, Anton Zeilinger has commented:

    [W]e always implicitly assume the freedom of the experimentalist... This fundamental assumption is essential to doing science. If this were not true, then, I suggest, it would make no sense at all to ask nature questions in an experiment, since then nature could determine what our questions are, and that could guide our questions such that we arrive at a false picture of nature.

Quantum Mechanics for Dummies

This excellent series of videos by 'Looking Glass Universe' lucidly explains the ins and outs of Quantum Mechanics in simple language. Great for meatheads like myself whose brains hurt when math is involved.

Introduction to Quantum Mechanics:

The Wave Function:

Quantum Randomness:

Quantum Eraser:

Quantum Eraser Explained:

Causes after effects?

Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle:

EPR Paradox and Entanglement

Is Quantum Mechanics True? Bell's Theorem Explained

Proof of Bell's Theorem

Bohmian Mechanics: An Alternative to Quantum




A problem with Bohmian mechanics? Contextuality.

Committee for Surrealist Investigation of Claims of the Normal

     Dublin, 1986.

I had given a talk to the Irish Science-Fiction Society and the question period began.

"Do you believe in UFOs?" somebody asked.

"Yes, of course," I answered.

The questioner, who looked quite young, then burst into a long speech, "proving" at least to his own satisfaction that all UFOs "really are" sun-dogs or heat inversions. When he finally ran down I simply replied,

"Well, we both agree that UFOs exist. Our only difference is that you think you know what they are and I'm still puzzled."

An elderly gentleman with blonde-white hair and a florid complexion cried out in great enthusiasm, "By God, sir, you're right. I myself am still puzzled about everything!"

And thus I met Timothy F.X. Finnegan, Dean of the Royal Sir Myles na gCopaleen Astro-Anomalistic Society, Dalkey, sometime lecturer at Trinity College, Dublin, and founder of the Committee for Surrealist Investigation of Claims of the Normal.

In fact, Prof. Finnegan signed me up as a member of CSICON that very night, in the Plough and Stars pub over our ninth or tenth pint of Ireland's most glorious product, linn dubh, known as Guiness to the ungodly.

Now I hear that Prof. Finnegan has died, or at least they took the liberty of burying him, and I feel that the world has lost a great man.

The Commitee for Surrealist Investigation of Claims of the Normal (CSICON) , however, lives on and deserves more attention than it has received hitherto. Prof. Finnegan always asserted that the idea for CSICON derived from a remark passed by an old Dalkey character named Sean Murphy, in the Goat and Compasses pub shortly before closing time on 23 July 1973.

Actually, it started with two old codgers named O'Brian and Nolan discussing the weather. "Terrible rain and wind for this time of year," O'Brian ventured.

"Ah, faith," Nolan replied, "I do not believe it is this time of year at all, at all."

At this, Murphy spoke up. "Ah, Jaysus," he said, "I've never seen a boogerin' normal day." He paused to set down his pint, then added thoughtfully, "And I never met a fookin' average man neither"

(About Sean Murphy nothing else appears in the record except a remark gleaned by Prof. LaPuta from one Nora Dolan, a housewife of the vicinity: "Sure, that Murphy lad never did any hard work except for getting up off the floor and navigating himself back onto the bar-stool, after he fell off, and he only did that twice a night.")

But Murphy's simple words lit a fire in the subtle and intricate brain of Timothy F.X. Finnegan, who had just finished his own fourteenth pint (de Selby says his fifteenth pint). The next day the aging Finnegan wrote the first two-page outline of the new science he called patapsychology, a term coined in salute to Alfred Jarry's invention of pataphysics.

Finnegan's paper began with the electrifying sentence, "The average Canadian has one testicle, just like Adolph Hitler -- or, more precisely, the average Canadian has 0.96 testicles, an even sadder plight than Hitler's, if the average Anything actually existed." He then went on to demonstrate that the normal or average human lives in substandard housing in Asia, has 1.04 vaginas, cannot read or write, suffers from malnutrition and never heard of Silken Thomas Fitzgerald or Brian Boru. "The normal," he concluded "consists of a null set which nobody and nothing really fits."

Thus began the science of Patapsychology, Prof. Finnegan's most enduring, and endearing, contribution to the world -- aside from the computer-enhanced photos of the Face on Mars with which he endeavored to prove that the Face depicted Moishe Horwitz, his lifelong mentor and idol. This, of course, remains highly controversial, especially among disciples of Richard Hoagland, who believe the Face looks more like the Sphinx, those who insist it looks like Elvis to them, and the dullards who only see it as a bunch of rocks.

Nobody should confuse Patapsychology with parapsychology, although this precise misunderstanding evidently inspired the long and venomous diatribes against Finnegan by Prof. Sheissenhosen of Heidelberg. (We need not credit the allegations of Herr Doktor Hamburger that Sheissenhosen also dispatched the three separate letter-bombs sent to Finnegan in 1982, '83 and '87. Even in the most heated academic debate some limits of decorem should remain, one would hope.)

Sheissenhosen evidently believed that "parapsychology" represented an unprovoked attack on his language and thought, and that Finnegan often leaped from shadows; he even suspected the Dalkey sage of slinking and of hiding behind a belly laugh, although the latter seems physiologically impossible. (I tried it once and found it made me more visible, not less.) In fact, Sheissenhosen never did correct his original error of misreading patapsycholgy as parapsychology. You will find more about the Sheissenhosen-Finnegan-LaPuta-Hamburger controversy in deSelby's Finnegan: Enigma of the Occident, Tourneur's Finnegan: Homme ou Dieu? and/or Sheissenhosen's own Finneganismus und Dummheit (6 volumes).

Patapsychology begins from Murphy's Law, as Finnegan called the First Axiom, adopted from Sean Murphy. This says,and I quote,"The normal does not exist. The average does not exist. We know only a very large but probably finite phalanx of discrete space-time events encountered and endured." In less technical language, the Board of the College of Patapsychology offers one million Irish punds [around $700,000 American] to any "normalist" who can exhibit "a normal sunset, an average Beethoven sonata, an ordinary Playmate of the Month, or any thing or event in space-time that qualifies as normal, average or ordinary."

In a world where no two fingerprints appear identical, and no two brains appear identical, and an electron does not even seem identical to itself from one nanosecond to another, patapsychology seems on safe ground here.

No normalist has yet produced even a totally normal dog, an average cat, or even an ordinary chickadee. Attempts to find an average Bird of Paradise, an ordinary haiku or even a normal cardiologist have floundered pathetically. The normal, the average, the ordinary, even the typical, exist only in statistics, i.e. the human mathematical mindscape. They never appear in external space-time, which consists only and always of nonnormal events in nonnormal series.

Thus, unless you're an illiterate and malnourished Asian with exactly 1.04 vaginas and 0.96 testicles, living in substandard housing, you do not qualify as normal but as abnormal, subnormal, supernormal, paranormal or some variety of nonnormal.

The canny will detect here the usual Celtic impulse to make hash out of everything that seems obvious and incontrovertable to Saxons, grocers and other Fundamentalist Materialists. Patapsychology follows in the great tradition of Swift, who once proved with a horoscope that an astrologer named Partridge had died, even though Partridge continued to deny this in print; Bishop Berkeley, who proved that the universe doesn't exist but God has a persistent delusion that it does; William Rowan Hamilton, who invented the noncommutative algebra in which p times q does not equal q times p; Wilde, who asked if the academic commentators on Hamlet had really gone mad or only pretended to have gone mad; John S. Bell, who proved mathematically that if any universe corresponds to the equations of quantum mathematics that universe must have nonlocal correlations similar to Jungian synchronicities; etc.

In the patapsychological model, the normal having vanished, most generalizations, especially about nonmathematical groups, disappear along with it. The monorchoid Mr. Hitler, for instance, could not generalize about "the Jews" within the patapsychological model, because first he would have to find a normal or average Jew, which appears as intracible to demonstration as exhibitting the Ideal Platonic Jew (or the Ideal Platonic Chicken Farm complete with Ideal Platonic Chickenshit.)

As Korzybski the semanticist said, all we can ever find in space-time consists of Jew-1, Jew-2, Jew-3 etc. to Jew-n. (For the nonmathematical, that means a list comprising Abraham, Sarah, Moses, Ruth, Jesus, Woody Allen, Richard Bandler, Felix Mendelsohn, Sigmund Freud, Paulette Goddard, Betty Grable, Noam Chomsky, Bernard Baruch, Paul Newman, the Virgin Mary, Albert Einstein, Lillian Hellman, Baron Rothschild, Ayn Rand, Max Epstein, Emma Goldman, Saul Bellow, etc. etc. etc. to the final enumeration of all Jews alive or dead.) Each of these, on inspection, will have different fingerprints, different brains, different neuro-immunological systems, different eyes, ears, noses etc. different life histories, different conditioning and learning etc. and different personalities, hobbies, passions etc... and none will serve as a norm or Ideal Form for all the others.

To say it otherwise, world Jewish population stood at about 10 million when Hitler formed his generalizations. He could not possibly have known more than at maximum about 500 of them well enough to generalize about them; considering his early prejudices, he probably knew a lot less than that. But taking 500 as a high estimate, we find he generalized about 10 million individual persons on the basis of knowledge limited to around 1/20,000 or 0.00005 % of them.

It seems, then, that Naziism could not have existed, if Hitler knew the difference between norms or averages (internal estimates, subject to error due to incomplete research or personal prejudice) and the phalanx of discrete nonnormal events and things (including persons) that we find in the sensory space-time continuum outside.

Similarly, the male human population currently stands at 3 billion 3 million 129 thousand, more or less (3, 004, 129, 976, the last time I checked the World Game Website a while ago). Of these 3 billion+ discrete individuals, Robin Morgan, Andrea Dworkin and other Radical Feminists probably have not known more than about 500 to generalize from. This means that Rad Fem dogma consists of propositions about 3 billion critters based on examination of less than 0.00000001 per cent of them. This ammounts to a much more reckless use of generalization than Hitler's thoughts on Judaism. You can no more find the male norm from Gandhi, Gen George Custer, Buddha, Bill Clinton, Louis Pasteur, Kung fu tzu, Bruno, Father Damien, Ted Bundy etc. than you can find the Jewish norm from Emma Goldman, Harpo Marx, Felix Mendelsohn, Spinoza, Barbra Streisand, Nathaniel Branden, Emma Lazarus, Jerry Seinfeld etc.

Now you know how the word "feminazi" got into the language. The two ideologies have a strong isomorphism. They both confuse the theoretical norm with a vast array of different individuals -- and they both have no idea how to create even a tolerably scientific norm (which will still differ in many respects from the actual series of individuals the norm allegedly covers).

CSICON applies the same Deconstructive logic all across the board.

For instance, to return to our starting point, whatever your idea of the "normal" UFO -- whether you consider it a spaceship, a secret US government weapon, a hoax, or a hallucination etc. -- such a general idea will render you incapable of forming a truly objective view of the next UFO that comes along. The only way to cancel such pre-judgement lies in patapsychology (and in general semantics). You must remember the difference between the individual and unpredictible event that gets called a UFO and your past generalizations about "the UFO" or the "normal" UFO."

Otherwise you will only note how this UFO fits your Ideal UFO and will unconciously ignore how it differs therefrom. This mechanical reflex will please your ego, if you like to feel you know more than most people, but it will prove hazardous to your ability to observe and think carefully.

People who think they know all about Jews or males or UFOs never see a real Jew or male or UFO. They see the generalized norm that exists only in their own brains. We never know "all" -- we only know what I call sombunall, some-but-not-all. This applies also to dogs (the patapsychologist will not say "I love them," "I hate them," "I fear them" etc.), and to plumbers, bosses, right-wingers, left-wingers, cats, lizards, sitcoms, houses, nails, Senators, waterfalls and all other miscellaneous sets or groups.

Personally, I see two or three UFOs every week. This does not astonish me, or convince me of the spaceship theory, because I also see about 2 or 3 UNFOs every week -- Unidentified Non-Flying Objects. These remain unidentified (by me) because they go by too fast or look so weird that I never know whether to classify them as hedgehogs, hobgoblins or helicopters -- or as stars or satellites or spaceships -- or as pookahs or pizza-trucks or probability waves. Of course, I also see things that I feel fairly safe in identifying as hedgehogs or stars or pizza trucks, but the world contains more and more events that I cannot identify fully and dogmatically with any norm or generalization. I live in a spectrum of probabilities, uncertainties and wonderments.

Perhaps I got this way by studying Finnegan's work. Or maybe I just drank too much linn dubh during my years in Ireland.

O rare, Tim Finnegan!

- R A Wilson, http://www.rawilson.com/csicon.html

Eight weeks to a better brain

Participating in an eight-week mindfulness meditation program appears to make measurable changes in brain regions associated with memory, sense of self, empathy, and stress. In a study that will appear in the Jan. 30 issue of Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, a team led by Harvard-affiliated researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) reported the results of their study, the first to document meditation-produced changes over time in the brain’s gray matter.

“Although the practice of meditation is associated with a sense of peacefulness and physical relaxation, practitioners have long claimed that meditation also provides cognitive and psychological benefits that persist throughout the day,” says study senior author Sara Lazar of the MGH Psychiatric Neuroimaging Research Program and a Harvard Medical School instructor in psychology. “This study demonstrates that changes in brain structure may underlie some of these reported improvements and that people are not just feeling better because they are spending time relaxing.”

Previous studies from Lazar’s group and others found structural differences between the brains of experienced meditation practitioners and individuals with no history of meditation, observing thickening of the cerebral cortex in areas associated with attention and emotional integration. But those investigations could not document that those differences were actually produced by meditation.

For the current study, magnetic resonance (MR) images were taken of the brain structure of 16 study participants two weeks before and after they took part in the eight-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) Program at the University of Massachusetts Center for Mindfulness. In addition to weekly meetings that included practice of mindfulness meditation — which focuses on nonjudgmental awareness of sensations, feelings, and state of mind — participants received audio recordings for guided meditation practice and were asked to keep track of how much time they practiced each day. A set of MR brain images was also taken of a control group of nonmeditators over a similar time interval.

Meditation group participants reported spending an average of 27 minutes each day practicing mindfulness exercises, and their responses to a mindfulness questionnaire indicated significant improvements compared with pre-participation responses. The analysis of MR images, which focused on areas where meditation-associated differences were seen in earlier studies, found increased gray-matter density in the hippocampus, known to be important for learning and memory, and in structures associated with self-awareness, compassion, and introspection.

Participant-reported reductions in stress also were correlated with decreased gray-matter density in the amygdala, which is known to play an important role in anxiety and stress. Although no change was seen in a self-awareness-associated structure called the insula, which had been identified in earlier studies, the authors suggest that longer-term meditation practice might be needed to produce changes in that area. None of these changes were seen in the control group, indicating that they had not resulted merely from the passage of time.

“It is fascinating to see the brain’s plasticity and that, by practicing meditation, we can play an active role in changing the brain and can increase our well-being and quality of life,” says Britta Hölzel, first author of the paper and a research fellow at MGH and Giessen University in Germany. “Other studies in different patient populations have shown that meditation can make significant improvements in a variety of symptoms, and we are now investigating the underlying mechanisms in the brain that facilitate this change.”

Amishi Jha, a University of Miami neuroscientist who investigates mindfulness-training’s effects on individuals in high-stress situations, says, “These results shed light on the mechanisms of action of mindfulness-based training. They demonstrate that the first-person experience of stress can not only be reduced with an eight-week mindfulness training program but that this experiential change corresponds with structural changes in the amygdala, a finding that opens doors to many possibilities for further research on MBSR’s potential to protect against stress-related disorders, such as post-traumatic stress disorder.” Jha was not one of the study investigators.

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2011/01/eight-weeks-to-a-better-brain/