/ ======================== / sat.sep.20050924 / ======================== /
The scientific search for the foundations of consciousness has become acceptable , verging on fashionable . Following a wandering path starting with a post I made to the J Language forum , recounting that "Donald T
Campbell did me the disservice of introducing me to some of Yilmaz's
work when I was on the cusp of being ostracized from the Experiment
Psych department in part because no one else could understand APL ."
As I mention in my note 990522 , Yilmaz provided some very crucial observations
about the nature of time within a system of information flow , but the diversion sure didn't help with the likelihood of receiving my PhD .
My wandering led me from Donald T. Campbell's Evolving Influence on Organization Science to Joel A.C. Baum's Home Page to Daniel C. Dennett's page to browsing Amazon.com to , in particular , John R. Searle  and Gerald Edelman , now with the Scripps Research Institute and the associated Neurosciences Institute across the street . Edelman seems to me to be the most on the right path , but all seem weak on math . Of course this is just based on their Amazon reviews .
I'm tempted to buy Edelman's book , but if I ever get back to the attacking how consciousness arises in this universe , it will probably be at least 5 years from now - AFTER I have gotten 4th.CoSy fairly well developed both on Windows and Linux ( personal devices and web servers ) , and using that as my executable notation , written a web and print book on "political econometrics" .
I ended my browsing at Peter Hankins's Conscious Entities . Which has summaries and links to much of the recent work on the problem . I believe the few paragraphs on my couple of pages here contain as much insight into the dilemma as any I've seen in my browsing . But , of course , I essentially spent more than a decade from 1967 to 1979 seeking insights in whatever departments I might find them across the university ending deeply in math assisted in my understanding by APL experiments on the MainFrame . I didn't turn to this problem only after a career , stellar as it may be , focused on some other problem . So it's not so hard to understand how I could reach an understanding a generation ago that more standard academia is only approaching now .
Such is life .
/ ======================== / mon.may.20050523 / ======================== /
Posted to Geekinformed.com
following up a Google news item :
Digital Immortality - Download the Mind by 2050
Contributed by Ryan -- Monday, 23 May 2005
The wealthy will be able to download their consciousness into computers by
2050 - the not so well off by "2075 or 2080", claims futurologist Dr. Ian
Pearson, head of the Futurology unit at BT.
--
I spent the '70s in grad school at Northwestern trying to understand how
brains work . The point I reached in understanding the singuarity in space-
time which fills our meat with consciousness may be seen at
cosy.com/views/sycofiz .
Even understanding what's going on , non-distructively extracting the state
of tera-ble numbers of synapes from a 3-D volume seems far more remote than
just another academic's career .
bob@cosy.com
============================: SAT.MAY,990522 :============================
The talk I attended yesterday at the New York Academy of Sciences ,
Fred Alan Wolf : Quantum Model of Timing of Conscious Experience
prompts me to split this Job from CoSy/Views/PsychoPhysics .
990524|
In the question period after the talk , I commented that I had spent the
`70s working on this problem , and thought he was on the right track looking
towards a singularity in time and space .
Wolf took exception to my use of "singularity" and proceeded to repeat his
exposition of the quantum notion of psi and psi - conjugate wave fns
canceling outside of the interval of simultanaity of the event . That sounds
like ( the complement of ) a singularity to me .
Singularity : locus on which a function goes to 0 .
In my `92 letter I fail to mention the important notion from Huseyin
Yilmaz that within any information transmition system , the speed of
transmission plays the role of the speed of light as the only reference in
terms of which time and space have meaning . Many of the observations of
Special Relativity hold within that metric space .
E.G.: in the nervous system , where the speed of conduction of the fastest
axons is on the order of 200 Meter%Second , the Interval of Simultanaity of
events is much more on the order of .1 seconds across the volume of the
brain .
This is much more on the time scale of the effects Wolf uses as data than
his strained efforts to build on nanosecond x micrometer quantal events at
individual synaptic vesicles .
I tried to point out these ideas to him after the talk , but he seemed sure
he knew more than I did .
Below are notes for an unfinished letter to Francis Crick about his book :
\The Astonishing Hypothesis : The Scientific Search for the Soul
; by Francis Crick ; Paperback List: $14.00 -- www.Amazon.com Price:
$12.60 / Touchstone Books Publication date ( PPBk ) : July 1, 1995 /
ISBN: 0684801582
My mother passed away shortly after that time , so I never got back to the
letter . The work below trails off into notes to be fleshed out , but , in
the context of some of the other information here , I think give useful
hints of the larger scope of my thought on the topic .
=HP=======================ø WED.JAN,1994ë1ë26 ø===========================
|19:58|
Dear Dr. Crick ,
We met after a lecture of yours in the Tech Inst @ Northwestern University
in the late `70s . I don`t remember what the topic of your talk was ,
but I remember in our conversation you felt Rene Thom was too 'mystic' .
In the early `80s , I met your son Michael when he was being one of the most
clear-visioned voices in the APL community .*
I happened to be in a discount book store 1/19 seeking SalmanRushdee`s '
Satanic Verses ' for insight into Islamic soul when I saw your book on the
quest which occupied more than a decade of my life .
There is a contradiction in your a priori rejection (p: xiii-xiv ) of input
from undocumented individuals and JohnSearle`s quote on the frontis piece .
28 to 15 years ago , driven by a desire to understand how my elder brother`s
brain was damaged at birth so that he is spending his life at Little City ,
Palatine IL , my pursuit of this grail ended in ostracism not publication .
| * i x X | complex exponential |
That consciousness exists in the physical universe .
The fundamental problem of consciousness is conceptual - whatever we find
about the details of organic brain activity , how can the magic of
consciousness concieveably occur ?
After Robert Sekuler who was over his head  with my masters - a much more
exact statistic for what is known as Fisher`s Exact Test ,
I applaud the eclectic precision and licidity of your review of the current
state of our knowledge .
never deviating from the sensible .
necessity of theory to be abstracted from the instance of evolved brains
simplex
breaking the female monopoly on creating new consciousnesses
Your doubt about the reality of the 'binding' problem expressed in a foot
note on page 208 is well founded . The topology of the input is very
difficult to destroy .
homunculus platoons - Consciousness slipping elsewhere
Couple of years for emergence of LTM -
one of the things in training eg dogs is how much they learn in a short life
time .
Hippocampus : connects consciousness to long term memory . disconnection
radically shrinks ball .
Wave breaking catastrophic not just non-linear .
So far as correcting factual mistakes , Willshaw (p185) is just plain
shallow in failing to see the essential commonality between all forms of
associative memory whether neural nets or holograms . I strongly recomend a
one column paper by Dennis Gabor in IBM Systems Journal around `68 (**)
reacting to the many shallow and silly papers and thesai coming
out back then looking for light-like coherence in neural systems . He goes
straight to the correlational core common to all associative memory . I
worked a week to grok his one equation in the paper - an integral over a
'trapazoidial region of products' . I would think Tomaso Poggio would also
take exception to the denial of a relationship . Historically , the
understanding of holograms was a very rewarding step towards understanding
the essential nature of memory .
* I`ve included a recent 'Manifesto' stating my current linguistic goals
which Michael may find interesting . Now days I am demonstrating the
evolutionary advantage of symbiosis between man and his notebook with my
CoSy which I have written in APL .
** sorry I don`t have the time to burrow deeply enough into that past to get
the exact reference
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