By: Susan Blackmore 2019

14 Gerald Edleman's "Neural Darwinism". Sounds like the competition among reporters at an event (say sporting or political) and they vie for who can call in first and scoop the others. In my theory the patches of neurons compete for a clear channel to the claustrum.
34 Ned Block "Tom Nagel...in his famous paper...used the analogy to a caveman: you tell a caveman that matter is energy, but the caveman doesn't have the concepts that would be required to understand that; and I think that we don't have the concepts required to understand how the mind-body problem could be solved." But we do, as I explain in TDB/SG.
34 "Ned But nobody believes in Cartesian materialism, the idea that there's one place in the brain where consciousness happens; it was a straw man when he attacked it and it's still a straw man." Wrong! If it is Cartesian, then there is more than material; there is also that "mind stuff". So "that place" is not "in the brain". It is in "the mind stuff". And Descartes mis-identified the transponder in the brain with the pineal gland when it is more likely to be the claustrum.
36 David Chalmers "The heart of the science of consciousness is trying to understand the first person perspective."
37 "My own attitude is that consciousness is data." That seems surprisingly strange to me.
39 "There's my behaviour and my responses and my reports, sure. And let's all concede, at least for the sake of argument, that science might be able to explain those. The trouble is that we haven't exhausted what needs to be explained. We've left out the central datum; the datum of subjective experience. And that seems to have no analogy in the life case." I think that the vitalists, too, grappled with a problem of "something more" that was ignored later by objective science. That was the seeming ability of organisms to know facts about their environment. The analogy needs to be extended in both cases. I suggest the Rover analogy.
47 "'Why is there consciousness?' You might say that consciousness is a thing which gives our lives meaning. It makes our lives comprehensible and interesting and a locus of value." Yes, the locus of value is Stylus Guy.
47 "One basic problem is this. In classical neuroscience you may have 40-Hz oscillations in the brain, or various interactions, but why should any of that give you consciousness? People can't see how. So they say, 'Ah—we need something new. Something extra. An extra ingredient. Let's say it's a collapsing quantum wave function in our microtubules.' But now the question comes up again. But why should collapsing wave functions in microtubules give you consciousness? You're not really any closer." Yes, you are. It could explain how traffic on the Mind/Brain link is coded and decoded.
47 "I don't know what it means to have free will."
72 Francis Crick "...the NCCs depend on a minority of neurons at any one moment. It's a subset: a relatively small number of neurons. We wouldn't like to say what percentage it is, but one percent, ten percent, or, some numbers like that...The point is, I want a small number of neurons that is firing away at any particular moment and corresponding to the NCC. But how many neurons is that connected to?" I'd suggest you consider the claustrum.
74 "If you ask how many cases in the past has a philosopher been successful at solving a problem, as far as we can say there are no such cases."
102 Susan Greenfield "I get more impatient with what I call science accountancy, and the i-dotting and t-crossing, and the almost anal attitude to some ways of doing science, when life is so short; it's like rearranging the chairs on the deck of the Titanic when the big questions are sliding past—sorry to mix metaphors—while people are fretting about a receptor sub-type."
103 "...no one has done what they've done for physical sciences: come up with a proper framework that everyone buys into, with laws and rules and principles and so on, that successfully brings together the different levels of working on the brain. So in that sense I feel a frustration when people are so complacent and pleased with themselves, and go to big meetings on the brain, where everyone pats each other on the back because they've done so well, when really, I think, we're at the very very beginning."
103 "Sue ...what's the really big question for you?
Susan Well, how the brain generates consciousness." How about considering the idea that consciousness uses the brain as an instrument, like JPL scientists use a Mars Rover as an instrument? The brain may not generate consciousness any more than the Rover generates JPL.
104 Richard Gregory "...how the hell does physics produce something which is so totally unphysical?" Maybe it doesn't. Maybe Dualism is true.
107 "So how do you locate the present moment? I suggest that this is tagged, or flagged if you like, by consciousness. You've got this extraordinary sense of vividness, of qualia which always applies to the present moment." Stylus Guy.
112 "Sue ...I think the only way forward is to throw out all kinds of dualism, because of the classic problem of the interaction between two different kinds of things."
118 Stuart Hameroff "This is the view that Dave Chalmers took in his book, which followed the talk I mentioned. He said that consciousness must involve something fundamental, something that's intrinsic to the universe, and I agree with that." I agree with that too, but I think it is a parochial view. It's like saying a carrier EM wave is fundamental to the operation of a radio. Well, yes, it is. But only in the parochial sense of our modern environment of radio stations, electronic circuits, and our 4D universe expressing Maxwell's equations. The EM carrier is contrived to be used by invented and deliberately fabricated systems. In a similar way, in a much larger and expanded paradigm, consciousness could be an artefact of a contrived system which is used to transmit and receive information between living organisms and whomever, or whatever contrived them: TDB/SG.
119 "The boundary between the quantum world and the everyday world—quantum state reduction, or the so-called collapse of the wave function—is a big question in physics and seems to have something to do with consciousness." Yes indeed. Here's how it might be: Our 4D universe seems to be causally closed until you get down to the Planck scale. There indeterminacy "emerges". The outcomes of quantum interactions seem to be probabilistic, just as the information modulating our EM carrier waves would seem to be "probabilistic" or even random to an observer oblivious to how a radio works. In an expanded paradigm, there is a place for consciousness in hyperspace and the information traffic between structures in higher-D could be carried in the patterns of quantum outcomes. You have provided explanations for how those patterns could be encoded on output and decoded on input between brain and mind.
123 "I saw microtubules pulling chromosomes apart in dividing cells. I became fascinated, and even obsessed, by how these little devices seemed to know where to go, and what to do—what their intelligence was, and what was running the show at this cytoplasmic level." I had exactly the same experience!
123 "I can have academic freedom because I earn my keep as an anaesthesiologist at the University Medical Centre."
123 "I became interested in the mystical Kabbalah which describes a world of materialistic strife and chaos, and another world of wisdom and enlightenment. According to the Kabbalah, consciousness 'dances on the edge' between the two worlds. I think this is exactly what is happening, consciousness 'dances on the edge between the quantum world and the classical world. And the more we are influenced and in touch with the quantum subconscious world of enlightenment, the happier we can be." Wouldn't it make more sense if this "world of wisdom and enlightenment" were more robust? Instead of a flurry of pico-scope particles and their interactions, how about a "real" world of big structures and sentient beings?
129 Kristof Koch " I can go back to Plato, or to Descartes, and for the past 2,300 years we've not made any progress on the philosophical aspects of consciousness. Philosophers have been profoundly wrong in almost every question under the sun over the last 2000 years. You should never listen to the answers of philosophers, but you should listen to their questions."
138 Stephen LaBerge "...the world remains a mystery. But I soon found out that drugs were not useful for more than giving one a glimpse of what the possibilities are."
138 "[Lucid dreaming is] like saying there's another dimension that I'm in contact with. That sounds kind of crazy, but that's what it's like to be in a dream, in the laboratory, hooked up in the physical world, with these wires on you, talking to a dream character and saying 'Excuse me a minute, I have to do this experiment.'" I suggest we take that notion seriously. Ask the character to help with the experiment.
139 "'How can you be conscious while you're asleep?' Framed that way it sounds paradoxical; but if you frame it as, 'How can you be conscious of the fact that you're dreaming while you are unconscious of sensory input from the environment?', there's not so much of a problem."
140 "I thought that in a lucid dream I could look to the left and right, left and right, and thus make a unique and easily identifiable signal that would be a symbol meaning 'I now know I'm dreaming'. If I could do that in the laboratory, then we could see, by the physiological data, whether or not I was awake, or in REM sleep, or in some other state or mixture of states. It turned out that signal-verified lucid dreams occurred almost without exception in unequivocal REM sleep, not a partially awake state, but the most intense form called 'phasic'." Fascinating!
140 "It was very hard for people to accept. Indeed, the significance of these experiments hasn't yet sunk in for most researchers." Most unfortunately.
141 "The Tibetan Buddhists who have been practising the yoga of the dream state for 1000 years claim that you can change dream content in any imaginable way: that if its single you can make it multiple, if it's hot you can make it cold, small, large, and so on. They believe that it's possible to change it all in any way you like."
145 "Yes, the world is an illusion, but, as some mystical traditions claim, the truth is always being shown there."
146 "...that's the point. To really feel that identity is something like the difference between snowflakes...So this metaphor of substance is another level that is simultaneously present with the form; the separation doesn't disappear: it's just that it's only the form; the substance is unity."
146 "There are many kinds of knowledge which we have to distinguish. Certainly scientific knowledge is exceedingly important, and if I can have scientific knowledge of something then I greatly prefer it to any kind of, let's say, lesser knowledge, certainly to anything like hearsay. But when I talk about my own experience, that is something of a similar value as scientific knowledge. I didn't need to prove to myself that lucid dreaming was real; you didn't need to prove it because you had the experience; so the third person scientific proof was only necessary for people who didn't have it."
146 "I think that we in the West have the unique opportunity of benefiting from an interaction with that Eastern tradition, bringing in the Western scientific perspective. I think the collaboration of these perspectives is what will give us the potential to understand consciousness in a new way"
147 "We need to have scientists who understand the brain but also have their own experiences. The problem to be explained is experience" E.g. Eben Alexander
148 "The problem here is, what do you mean by me? When I've got free will, what's the "I" that's got it?" Yes. Good question. A more general question would be to suppose I say, "I know fact A." Then you say, "I know that I know fact A". What exactly is the I that knows? Are the two I's the same?
151 Thomas Metzinger "It is certainly true that conscious experiences take place in individual models of reality, in individual brains, and from an individual first person perspective." Not "certainly true"; it may not "take place in" individual brains.
151 "It may be that even if we have a satisfactory theory of consciousness, this theory is not intuitively plausible to us, and we cannot consciously experience the truth of that theory." OTOH it might be intuitively plausible. My theory is.
177 Roger Penrose "Sue...I want to understand why you feel it necessary to go beyond computation.
Roger It's the understanding which is the other side of it, which needs to be conscious, that's what I'm saying. And that's really the Gödel theory...Understanding requires awareness; there's consciousness involved in understanding—that's one leg of the argument.
Sue How can you defend that? How can you support that?
Roger Well, just in normal usage of the word—an entity which is not aware of something, you wouldn't normally say it understands something if it wasn't actually aware of it, would you?"
179 "Now, let me finish the Gödel thing, because this is the crucial argument...So how do you know that those things are true, that you don't obtain using the rules? Well, how do you know anything that you obtain using the rules is true, you see? But you can trust the rules only if your understanding tells you these rules are good rules, that they won't give you nonsense. That understanding which tells you they don't give you nonsense gives you something beyond the rules. So it's the understanding that is not constrained by any system of rules, because you make those rules try to imitate what the understanding is doing, and your understanding immediately leaps outside it." I think that our insistence on consistency is what understanding is all about. It is why we reject an axiomatic system that implies 1=2. And I think that accepted mathematics has exactly this flaw. The Banach-Tarski Theorem is just such a result. I'd say consistency is what makes sense. So, a dog can understand some novel stimulus if it makes sense in the context of whatever else the dog knows.
180 "Well, the real thing involves awareness. You see, I think the Gödel argument is actually extremely rigorous, although most people attack me and say, 'Well, Roger's arguments, they're interesting, but they're basically flawed.' I say, 'Oh, well tell me where the mistake is.' Nobody has done that. I've waited. They can be rude to me, but they haven't pointed out a mistake." IMHO the mistake is Cantor's in assuming the infinitude of the integers.
181 "I'm saying that the Gödel argument tells us that we are not simply computational entities; that our understanding is something outside computation. It doesn't tell us it's something unphysical, but there's a crucial thing that's missing, which has to do with quantum mechanics. Mine is a version of the Sherlock Holmes argument, which I admit is a weak argument—that to say once you've eliminated everything else, then what remains must be the truth, no matter how improbable. Quantum mechanics is the most obvious place where we don't know enough about physics. Where do you see non-computability in physics? You don't seem to see it anywhere else. So this, therefore, is presumably where it is."
183 "Sue...Presumably you are saying something very different—that what will happen in the future is we'll learn more about all these different chemical and physical structures, and eventually—wow—we'll see this entirely new process and that will be what explains human understanding and human consciousness?
Roger Yes, that's very fair. But I would say that our understanding of the physical world is much more limited than people think. Physicists are usually very arrogant people so they'll claim almost everything; but my view is that there's this physical world out there that we know and awful lot about, but that there are big things we don't understand yet; and I'm claiming that non-computationalism is one, but it's for most purposes a tiny minor thing which you don't even notice."
187 Vilayanur Ramachandran "...if there were no such thing as the self, then there'd be no qualia—because, to put it very crudely, you wouldn't know. You can't have free-floating qualia without an observer who experiences the qualia, so the concept of self is implicit in the concept of qualia. Nor can you have a self without any qualia—any emotions or bodily sensations of any kind."
189 "I'm saying the description [of qualia] in mechanistic terms...does not contain within it the experience of qualia. To explain that you need to take an extra step; and I think that extra step is that at some point in evolution the sense of self emerged, and that requires this meta-representation."
194 "What I'm saying is you need to pay your dues, and so long as you're doing that, then in parallel you can say outlandish things, and be speculative—like when I'm talking about meta-representation, it's only speculation, but people are more forgiving of it." Gulp! I haven't paid my dues.
195 "Free will. So what is required is to create a meta-representation of a volitional action. In other words, you create a representation of your intention and your desire to perform the action, which comes in the anterior cingulate, along with the limbic structures. So you need to desire and to anticipate, and then you need to decide, and then you call it a volitional action, OK? If that's uncoupled, then the subject has apraxia. It's a classic example; it's all about free will caused by an uncoupling of the meta-representation from the representation. So an animal has a representation of the action, but it does not have a meta-representation, which is unique to humans with the emergence of sophisticated new circuits in the supramarginal gyrus and anterior cingulate."
197 "Sue Do you do any first person practice of any kind; do you meditate, for example?
Rama No, I don't, and I'm ashamed of that, because, you know, everybody asks me that. I have an open mind about it; but I think sometimes there's a little bit of what Freud would call reaction formation: you come from a tradition and you deliberately stay away from it, because you say, 'What has this really resulted in?" But now I'm much more open to such ideas, and it's worth exploring scientifically. The trouble is, the people who study these things are very often on the fringe; and the studies are often not properly controlled."
200 John Searle "...we know the damn brain does it. Here we have three pounds of this gooky stuff in our skull, a kilogram and a half; and we know some processes in there are causing consciousness. We start with that fact, we take it as a given, now then let's figure out exactly how it works." Pretty dogmatic I'd say—and wrong! That isn't a "fact" If you figure out how a radio works, you will find that an outside source is necessary.
226 Francisco Varela "The study of consciousness is a kind of singularity in science, because you're studying precisely the most cherished quality of what it is to be alive. So the second bit has to do with how to account for that intimacy. Now that's a different problem and I think that progress in doing that has to come by understanding how the brain works; how it can differentiate colours and forms, and have motor programming, and have different kinds of emotions. All that machinery is not just like in a computer, where it has to produce some result. It is a device that evolved over a long period of history, both phylogenetic and ontogenetic. It only makes sense in the context of being active in the world, and that embodiment is precisely what we experience." This is an excellent expression of the need to posit SG.
226 "This is the reason I call it neurophenomenology. The neuro- part gives you a fundamental insight into how the brain works, but it won't give you the –pheno part. The -pheno part requires both putting it into this embodiment and having the first personal access to report what it is like. And it is the combination of these two that will do it. In other words, my claim is that you cannot do without one or the other. The whole point is to get used to thinking and doing science in a different way, by combining these two things." SG again.
235 Max Velmans "Let's talk about the relationship between electricity and magnetism. As far as we know, electricity is produced by electrons flowing down wires; but magnetism is represented as a field around the wire. You might say, 'That's very odd! How could something going down a wire, which we think of in terms of electrons, produce something which is actually outside the wire and described as a field? The fact that things seem in the first instance to be different kinds of thing [sic] doesn't mean that if you understand them more deeply there might not be an understandable and deep causal interaction between them." Good example and good question. The answer in the case of electro-magnetism is that the "deep causal interaction between them" requires a 3D space which allows for mutually orthogonal directions for the electric force, the magnetic force, and the direction of movement of the electrons. I suggest that, in a similar way, additional spatial dimensions are necessary not only to couple the orthogonal forces involved in mind/brain interactions, but also to house the mind mechanism itself.
237 "The position I want to defend would be called, within philosophy, critical realism. In spite of the fact that I would regard the world that I experience around me as my experience, and also call it my physical world, I nevertheless agree with you that the sensible position to take is that that phenomenal representation which I'm the focus of, which is all seen from my perspective, is a representation of something which is autonomously existing." TDB/SG Theory makes this sensible by separating the knower from the known. The objective world is at a lower hierarchical level than the subjective observer. Which implies that in order to observe consciousness objectively, you have to go up another level yet, e.g. you know that you know that...
237 "OK, let's say that you go with a big-bang theory of the universe: in the beginning all of us, all our bodies, all our matter, all our potential experiences, all our potential thoughts, everything that could possibly exist about us is packed into this tiny, tiny mass of infinite density, and it explodes." That is an extremely improbable starting point.
240 "Sue All right, I want to understand whether you think that subjective experiences and objective brain activity are just two aspects of the same thing, and that they depend on where you're looking from. Is that what you're saying?
Max Yes, the two aspects of this information are being displayed, if you like, in two different ways. The claim that I'm making is that you could have identical information, which depending on how you display it or view it or hook into it, might actually be manifested in completely different apparent forms." You can make sense of this problem by using the radio analogy. Suppose you were examining the voltages and currents in the radio's components looking for the music and its source. The voltages in the audio output circuits would definitely be correlated with features of the music but that would shed no light on the origin of the music. To understand the origin, you would have to "display or view" the voltage patterns in two different ways, one is the analog patterns that get detected, amplified, and routed to the speakers, and the other is the encoded information present in the modulated RF voltage patterns that first appear in the antenna circuits. And then you have to acknowledge that that information has a source completely outside of the radio. I suggest that if you want to understand the relationship between subjective experiences and objective brain activity, you need to look at the claustrum as an antenna circuit.
242 "I can do what I want. But I can't want what I want, so there are deep inbuilt constraints. Yet there is a range of activity within which I can do the things that any cognitive psychologist would accept I can do: we can attend to certain things rather than others depending on what interests us or is important to us; we can make decisions about what we're going to do on the basis of the things we attend to."
246 Daniel Wegner "You need somehow to be objective about subjectivity, which in a way is the deepest conundrum we can think of." Rosenberg's structure and Grim's conclusion show us how. The subject is always one level up from the object and it can neither know nor say anything about itself itself without going up yet another level.
247 "...we have to build an overall idea of what our body is and what it's doing. Somehow there's a way that all this gets projected into consciousness; there has to be a mechanism...there doesn't have to be a place in the brain where this projection occurs. The experience doesn't need to map perfectly onto an array of spots in the brain which is the projection area. This is, I think, one of the big puzzles that people are working with in this field—how the projection takes place" Most true!