Author Topic: Consciousness Cannot Have Evolved  (Read 1084 times)

guest55

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Re: Consciousness Cannot Have Evolved
« Reply #15 on: December 24, 2021, 04:19:49 pm »
A ‘Self-Aware’ Fish Raises Doubts About a Cognitive Test
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A report that a fish can pass the “mirror test” for self-awareness reignites debates about how to define and measure that elusive quality.
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Very few animals have ever passed the mirror test for self-recognition — even most primates fail it. The news that a fish seemed to recognize itself in one recent study has made psychologists and animal behaviorists wonder anew what (if anything) the mirror test proves. Photo by Jiro Morita / EyeEm / Getty Images.
Entire article: https://getpocket.com/explore/item/a-self-aware-fish-raises-doubts-about-a-cognitive-test?utm_source=pocket-newtab


guest55

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What a trip: research suggests mushrooms talk to each other with a vocabulary of 50 words
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You might have stepped and (mentally) tripped on some, but you would’ve never considered that mushrooms could be terribly talkative in the forest. Now, a new study suggests that fungi in general are always communicating with each other. In fact, they have even been recorded having conversations in a language similar to human speech.

But before we regret all our shroom hunting trips, let’s analyse how individual fungi, even after being separated from each other, are capable of interactions in the first place. Well, their secret to communication lies in electrical impulses—which are conducted by fungi through long, underground filamentous structures called hyphae, similar to how nerve cells transmit information in us humans. Call hyphae the internet of the woods, if you may.

In fact, previous research has shown that the firing rate of these impulses increase when the hyphae of wood-digesting fungi come into contact with wooden blocks. This has raised questions if fungi use this electrical language to share information about food and warn parts of themselves—or other hyphae-connected partners like trees—about potential threats. But does this communication pattern have anything in common with human speech?
Entire article: https://screenshot-media.com/the-future/science/mushrooms-can-talk/

guest78

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Re: Western civilization is a health hazard
« Reply #17 on: June 17, 2022, 09:39:08 pm »
The Empty Brain
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Your brain does not process information, retrieve knowledge, or store memories. In short: Your brain is not a computer.
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No matter how hard they try, brain scientists and cognitive psychologists will never find a copy of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony in the brain – or copies of words, pictures, grammatical rules or any other kinds of environmental stimuli. The human brain isn’t really empty, of course. But it does not contain most of the things people think it does – not even simple things such as ‘memories’.

Our shoddy thinking about the brain has deep historical roots, but the invention of computers in the 1940s got us especially confused. For more than half a century now, psychologists, linguists, neuroscientists and other experts on human behaviour have been asserting that the human brain works like a computer.
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But here is what we are not born with: information, data, rules, software, knowledge, lexicons, representations, algorithms, programs, models, memories, images, processors, subroutines, encoders, decoders, symbols, or buffers – design elements that allow digital computers to behave somewhat intelligently. Not only are we not born with such things, we also don’t develop them – ever.

We don’t store words or the rules that tell us how to manipulate them. We don’t create representations of visual stimuli, store them in a short-term memory buffer, and then transfer the representation into a long-term memory device. We don’t retrieve information or images or words from memory registers. Computers do all of these things, but organisms do not.
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Forgive me for this introduction to computing, but I need to be clear: computers really do operate on symbolic representations of the world. They really store and retrieve. They really process. They really have physical memories. They really are guided in everything they do, without exception, by algorithms.

Humans, on the other hand, do not – never did, never will. Given this reality, why do so many scientists talk about our mental life as if we were computers?

Because of the industrial revolution, the rise of machinists, hence the rise of Western civilization and homo-hubris!

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The invention of hydraulic engineering in the 3rd century BCE led to the popularity of a hydraulic model of human intelligence, the idea that the flow of different fluids in the body – the ‘humours’ – accounted for both our physical and mental functioning. The hydraulic metaphor persisted for more than 1,600 years, handicapping medical practice all the while.

By the 1500s, automata powered by springs and gears had been devised, eventually inspiring leading thinkers such as René Descartes to assert that humans are complex machines. In the 1600s, the British philosopher Thomas Hobbes suggested that thinking arose from small mechanical motions in the brain. By the 1700s, discoveries about electricity and chemistry led to new theories of human intelligence – again, largely metaphorical in nature. In the mid-1800s, inspired by recent advances in communications, the German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz compared the brain to a telegraph.
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Propelled by subsequent advances in both computer technology and brain research, an ambitious multidisciplinary effort to understand human intelligence gradually developed, firmly rooted in the idea that humans are, like computers, information processors. This effort now involves thousands of researchers, consumes billions of dollars in funding, and has generated a vast literature consisting of both technical and mainstream articles and books. Ray Kurzweil’s book How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed (2013), exemplifies this perspective, speculating about the ‘algorithms’ of the brain, how the brain ‘processes data’, and even how it superficially resembles integrated circuits in its structure.
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Just over a year ago, on a visit to one of the world’s most prestigious research institutes, I challenged researchers there to account for intelligent human behaviour without reference to any aspect of the IP metaphor. They couldn’t do it, and when I politely raised the issue in subsequent email communications, they still had nothing to offer months later. They saw the problem. They didn’t dismiss the challenge as trivial. But they couldn’t offer an alternative. In other words, the IP metaphor is ‘sticky’. It encumbers our thinking with language and ideas that are so powerful we have trouble thinking around them.
Entire article: https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-empty-brain?utm_source=pocket-newtab

See also: https://trueleft.createaforum.com/human-evolution/consciousness-cannot-have-evolved/

guest78

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Re: Consciousness Cannot Have Evolved
« Reply #18 on: September 23, 2022, 11:22:55 pm »
What a fucken nightmare....

The Boltzmann brain paradox - Fabio Pacucci


If true, why was Yahweh's brain the decided original worth replication? Or, is Yahweh's brain just a nightmare in Allah's dreaming?

2ThaSun

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Re: Consciousness Cannot Have Evolved
« Reply #19 on: May 08, 2023, 01:57:41 pm »
Animal Magic: Why Intelligence Isn’t Just for Humans
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Meet the footballing bees, optimistic pigs and alien-like octopuses that are shaking up how we think about minds.
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How do you spot an optimistic pig? This isn’t the setup for a punchline; the question is genuine, and in the answer lies much that is revealing about our attitudes to other minds – to minds, that is, that are not human. If the notion of an optimistic (or for that matter a pessimistic) pig sounds vaguely comical, it is because we scarcely know how to think about other minds except in relation to our own.

The optimistic pig says: The human-beings put me in this pig pen because they love me.
The pessimistic pig says: The human-beings put me in this pig pen so that I cannot escape and then they can slaughter me at their convenience.

Back to the article:

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Here is how you spot an optimistic pig: you train the pig to associate a particular sound – a note played on a glockenspiel, say – with a treat, such as an apple. When the note sounds, an apple falls through a hatch so the pig can eat it. But another sound – a dog-clicker, say – signals nothing so nice. If the pig approaches the hatch on hearing the clicker, all it gets is a plastic bag rustled in its face.

Human-beings are attempting to turn optimistic pigs into westerners...  ;)

Continuing:

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What happens now if the pig hears neither of these sounds, but instead a squeak from a dog toy? An optimistic pig might think there’s a chance that this, too, signals delivery of an apple. A pessimistic pig figures it will just get the plastic bag treatment. But what makes a pig optimistic? In 2010, researchers at Newcastle University showed that pigs reared in a pleasant, stimulating environment, with room to roam, plenty of straw, and “pig toys” to explore, show the optimistic response to the squeak significantly more often than pigs raised in a small, bleak, boring enclosure. In other words, if you want an optimistic pig, you must treat it not as pork but as a being with a mind, deserving the resources for a cognitively rich life...
Entire article: https://getpocket.com/explore/item/animal-magic-why-intelligence-isn-t-just-for-humans?utm_source=pocket-newtab

Leave the glockenspiel alone young pig...

2ThaSun

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Re: Consciousness Cannot Have Evolved
« Reply #20 on: May 22, 2023, 02:32:19 pm »
Scientists observe a surge of activity correlated with consciousness in the dying brain
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A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has presented preliminary findings suggesting there can be a surge of brain activity linked to consciousness during the dying process.

The new study aimed to investigate the brain activity of patients during the dying process, particularly focusing on whether there are any neural correlates of consciousness. Near-death experiences (NDEs) have been reported by some cardiac arrest survivors and are described as highly vivid and real-like experiences. These experiences challenge our understanding of brain function during cardiac arrest when consciousness is believed to be absent.

Previous research has shown that high-frequency brain oscillations, specifically gamma activities, are associated with consciousness. In animal studies, sudden termination of cardiac function or acute asphyxia has been found to stimulate gamma activities. However, no studies have examined the neural correlates of dying humans that could explain the subjective experiences reported in NDEs.

“My lab has been studying the dying brain since 2013 and was the first to discover the surge of gamma oscillations in the dying process, in rats (Borjigin et al., 2013; Li et al., 2015), as I was shocked to realize that the science/medicine knows little about the brain during the dying process,” said study author Jimo Borjigin, an associate professor in the department of Molecular and Integrative Physiology with a joint appointment in Neurology at University of Michigan Medical School...
Entire article: https://www.psypost.org/2023/05/scientists-observe-a-surge-of-activity-correlated-with-consciousness-in-the-dying-brain-163532

2ThaSun

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Re: Consciousness Cannot Have Evolved
« Reply #21 on: June 20, 2023, 05:16:04 pm »
Mysterious spiral signals in the human brain could be key to our cognition
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Scientists suggest strange swirls across the outer layer of the brain might be used to link different parts of it together and help process information faster.
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Mysterious, spiral signals have been discovered in the human brain, and the scientists who found the swirls think they could help to organize complex brain activity.

The signals, which appeared as swirling spirals of brain waves across the outer layer of the brain, were discovered in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scans of 100 young adults, and appeared both when they were resting and working on tasks.

The exact purpose of these vortices is unknown, but their discoverers think the spiral signals might be used to link different parts of the brain and help process information faster. These vortices may even be impaired by brain diseases such as dementia, and could serve as inspiration for advanced computers that emulate the complex processes of the human mind. The researchers published their findings June 15 in the journal Nature Human Behaviour...
Entire article: https://www.livescience.com/health/neuroscience/mysterious-spiral-signals-in-the-human-brain-could-be-key-to-our-cognition

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