Questions About Death

Life and death are two sides of the same coin that have puzzled humans since the beginning of time. While science has made incredible progress in understanding how the body works and what happens during death from a biological perspective, there are deeper questions that remain beyond the reach of microscopes and lab experiments.

Everyone thinks about death at some point, and these thoughts often lead to profound questions about existence, consciousness, and what might happen after our final breath. 

Modern science gives detailed explanations about the physical process of dying, but just like ancient philosophers, today’s brightest minds still grapple with the mysterious and philosophical aspects of death that seem impossible to solve through scientific methods alone.  READ MORE...

Our Hiding Consciousness

The neuron, the specialized cell type that makes up much of our brains, is at the center of today’s neuroscience. Neuroscientists explain perception, memory, cognition and even consciousness itself as products of billions of these tiny neurons busily firing their tiny “spikes” of voltage inside our brain.

These energetic spikes not only convey things like pain and other sensory information to our conscious mind, but they are also in theory able to explain every detail of our complex consciousness.

At least in principle. The details of this “neural code” have yet to be worked out.

While neuroscientists have long focused on spikes travelling throughout brain cells, “ephaptic” field effects may really be the primary mechanism for consciousness and cognition. These effects, resulting from the electric fields produced by neurons rather than their synaptic firings, may play a leading role in our mind’s workings.

In 1943 American scientists first described what is known today as the neural code, or spike code. They fleshed out a detailed map of how logical operations can be completed with the “all or none” nature of neural firing—similar to how today’s computers work. Since then neuroscientists around the world have engaged in a vast endeavor to crack the neural code in order to understand the specifics of cognition and consciousness—to little avail.     READ MORE...

Quantum Basis for Conciousness

A groundbreaking study has provided experimental evidence suggesting a quantum basis for consciousness.

By demonstrating that drugs affecting microtubules within neurons delay the onset of unconsciousness caused by anesthetic gases, the study supports the quantum model over traditional classical physics theories. 

This quantum perspective could revolutionize our understanding of consciousness and its broader implications, potentially impacting the treatment of mental illnesses and our understanding of human connection to the universe.

Exploring the Quantum Basis of Consciousness
For decades, one of the most fundamental and vexing questions in neuroscience has been: what is the physical basis of consciousness in the brain? Most researchers favor classical models, based on classical physics, while a minority have argued that consciousness must be quantum in nature, and that its brain basis is a collective quantum vibration of “microtubule” proteins inside neurons.

New research by Wellesley College professor Mike Wiest and a group of Wellesley College undergraduate students has yielded important experimental results relevant to this debate, by examining how anesthesia affects the brain. 

Wiest and his research team found that when they gave rats a drug that binds to microtubules, it took the rats significantly longer to fall unconscious under an anesthetic gas. 

The research team’s microtubule-binding drug interfered with the anesthetic action, thus supporting the idea that the anesthetic acts on microtubules to cause unconsciousness.      READ MORE...

Our Social Survival was Consciousness

Key Facts:

• Social Purpose: Consciousness evolved to facilitate social interactions and communication.
• Intuition’s Role: Intuitive beliefs shape our understanding of consciousness, often complicating scientific explanations.
• Species Benefit: Subjective awareness helps broadcast ideas and emotions, benefiting species survival and wellbeing.

Source: The Conversation

Why did the experience of consciousness evolve from our underlying brain physiology? Despite being a vibrant area of neuroscience, current research on consciousness is characterised by disagreement and controversy – with several rival theories in contention.

A recent scoping review of over 1,000 articles identified over 20 different theoretical accounts. Philosophers like David Chalmers argue that no single scientific theory can truly explain consciousness.

We define consciousness as embodied subjective awareness, including self awareness. In a recent article published in Interalia (which is not peer reviewed), we argue that one reason for this predicament is the powerful role played by intuition.


We are not alone. Social scientist Jacy Reese Anthis writes “much of the debate on the fundamental nature of consciousness takes the form of intuition jousting, in which the different parties each report their own strong intuitions and joust them against each other”.         READ MORE...

Altered States of Consciousness

Recent research has uncovered that altered states of consciousness are much more common
among those who practice meditation and mindfulness than previously thought. While many individuals report positive and even transformational outcomes, a significant minority experience negative effects that can range from moderate to severe. The findings have been published in the journal Mindfulness.

The popularity of meditation, mindfulness, yoga, and similar practices has surged due to their potential health benefits. However, the experiences and effects of these practices, particularly the altered states of consciousness they can induce, remain underexplored. Researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital sought to investigate how common these altered states are and their impact on well-being, given the rising number of people engaging in these practices.

To achieve this, they developed a detailed questionnaire in collaboration with a team of experts in psychiatry, neuroscience, meditation, and survey design. The survey was designed to capture the diverse range of experiences associated with these practices and their impact on well-being.     READ MORE...

Altered States of Consciousness

Summary: A new study finds that altered states of consciousness (ASCs), like those experienced during meditation, are more common than previously thought. 45% of respondents reported experiencing ASCs at least once, often leading to positive outcomes.

However, a significant minority also reported negative or even life-threatening suffering, highlighting the need for better support and understanding of these experiences.

Key Facts:

• 45% of respondents reported experiencing non-pharmacologically induced ASCs.
• ASCs are associated with both positive and negative well-being outcomes.
• Many who experience negative outcomes do not seek help.

Yoga, mindfulness, meditation, breathwork, and other practices are gaining in popularity due to their potential to improve health and well-being. The effects of these practices are mostly positive and occasionally transformational, yet they are known to sometimes be associated with challenging altered states of consciousness.

New research by a team including investigators from Massachusetts General Hospital, a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, reveals that altered states of consciousness associated with meditation practice are far more common than expected.    READ MORE...

Our Consciousness

How Vast Is Consciousness?

Recent neuroscience recognizes two basic forms of consciousness. It all starts with the divisions we make: "Two broad types of consciousness must be distinguished" based on the neurobiological domain (LeDoux, 2023, 219). Creature consciousness is attributed to all organisms with a nervous system. 

The other form of consciousness, associated with more complex nervous systems, is mental state consciousness. It is "the ability to experience the world and one's relationship to it" (LeDoux, 219).

Recently, another category of consciousness has been added: existential consciousness. (Reber, Baluska and Miller, 2024). Here, consciousness is rooted in cellular intelligence as an expression of a living, self-organizing order.

This view of the cellular basis of cognition offers a promising new perspective on the vastness of consciousness in life. Is it necessary to stop seeing the possibility of consciousness as a form of sentience based on the presence of a nervous system?  READ MORE...

Mind Bending Theories of Reality

ARE there vastly many near-duplicates of you reading vastly many near-duplicates of this article in vastly many parallel universes? Is consciousness a fundamental property of all matter? Could reality be a computer simulation? Reader, I can hear your groans from here in California.

We are inclined to reject ideas like these on the grounds that they sound preposterous. And yet some of the world’s leading scientists and philosophers advocate for them. Why? And how should you, assuming you aren’t an expert, react to these sorts of hypotheses?

When we confront fundamental questions about the nature of reality, things quickly get weird. As a philosopher specializing in metaphysics, I submit that weirdness is inevitable, and that something radically bizarre will turn out to be true.     READ MORE...

About Consciousness

The Philosophical Hard Problem
Some say consciousness is mysterious. But there are two ways to think about this. One is that consciousness is mysterious in the way that the idea of a soul that survives death is, and the other is in the way that the mechanism of evolutionary inheritance was before DNA was discovered.


Today, the mystery of consciousness is often discussed in terms of a special quality—the way it feels to be consciousness. This phenomenal feeling is to be what makes red seem red, and fear feel fearful. Unconscious states come with no such feelings. Philosopher Thomas Nagel refers to these feelings as “qualia," and David Chalmers, another philosopher, has argued that qualia constitute the “hard problem” of consciousness.     READ MORE...

Consciousness

Even among non-neuroscientists, determining the origin and purpose of consciousness is widely known as “the hard problem.” Since its coinage by philosopher David Chalmers thirty years ago, that label has worked its way into a variety of contexts; about a decade ago, Tom Stoppard even used it for the title of a play. Unsurprisingly, it’s also referenced in the episode of Big Think’s Dispatches from the Well above, which presents discussions of the nature of consciousness with neuroscientist Christof Koch, Vedanta Society of New York minister Swami Sarvapriyananda, technology entrepreneur Reid Hoffman, Santa Fe Institute Davis Professor of Complexity Melanie Mitchell, and mathematical physicist Roger Penrose.

Koch describes consciousness as “what you see, it’s what you hear, it’s the pains you have, the love you have, the fear, the passion.” It is, in other words, “the experience of anything,” and for all their sophistication, our modern inquiries into it descend from René Descartes’ proposition, “Cogito, ergo sum.” Sarvapriyananda, too, makes reference to Descartes in explaining his own conception of consciousness as “the light of lights,” by which “everything here is lit up.”  READ MORE...

Consciousness

A study reveals that experienced meditators are able to voluntarily modulate their state of consciousness during meditation. In other words, they have the unusual ability, without the use of drugs, to induce a momentary void of consciousness during cessations through large-scale modulation of brain activity.

In what situations can a human being lose consciousness? An anesthetization, brain concussion, intoxication, epilepsy, seizure, or other fainting/syncopal episode caused by a lack of blood flow to the brain can cause total loss of consciousness. But can unconsciousness be induced without the use of drugs?  READ MORE...

Krebs and Consciousness

IF WE need to perceive the character of life, we have now to consider the circulation of power and matter. So argues biochemist and author Nick Lane in his new e book Transformer. Quoting the poem Like Most Revelations by Richard Howard, he writes that “it’s the motion that creates the shape”.

Lane’s concentrate on power and the important dynamism of life has been an vital thread operating via his analysis. Some of the inventive of immediately’s biologists, his work ranges from the evolution of intercourse and the rise of planetary oxygen to the origin of complicated cells and the primary life on Earth.

In his final e book, The Very important Query, he argued that many of those seemingly disparate mysteries may very well be defined by life’s reliance on electrically charged particles to energy itself.

Transformer isn’t any much less bold. Its focus is a biochemical course of referred to as the Krebs cycle: a whirlwind of chemistry that spins round in all our cells many instances a second. It’s named for biochemist Hans Krebs, who described many particulars of the way it works.

Lane’s thesis is that biochemists have misunderstood the cycle and due to this fact underestimated it. Textbooks, he says, primarily deal with it as a mechanism for acquiring power from meals. However Krebs can also be a chemical manufacturing unit, manufacturing key elements of cells. And cells can run it in numerous methods, so there isn’t a one Krebs cycle. Lane compares it to a furiously busy roundabout, with totally different automobiles always whizzing in from totally different junctions and hurtling out on others.  READ MORE...

Filters of Consciousness

In addition to the basic capacity for sense perception, the Unified Theory of Knowledge (UTOK) identifies three primary domains of human consciousness. The first is the experiential or primate self, which includes both the capacity for subjective experience and the manner in which perceptions become referenced against motives and emotions that are relevant to one's self. The basic features of this domain of consciousness is shared with other mammals. The second domain is the ego, which refers to the language-based narrating capacity of your interpreter system. It is the “I” that describes, evaluates, and explains the “me” when you are engaged in explicit self-conscious reflection. Finally, your persona refers to the way you project your identity out into the social world to manage impressions and regulate your role and place in the social field.


These domains are specified in UTOK via Justification Systems Theory (JUST)2. In particular, JUST argues that we can understand the evolution of the human ego and persona as arising out of the fact that with propositional language came the problem of having to justify one’s self to others. UTOK proclaims this is a central problem that shapes the structural and functional arrangement of our language-based propositional thought. It also makes very clear predictions regarding the relationship between the domains of consciousness. Specifically, JUST posits that there should be specific kinds of filtering processes that should be present between both the experiential self and the ego and the ego and the persona. These dynamic processes are where we find two of the three filters of consciousness.


According to JUST, the ego must narrate what is happening to the primate experiential self and do so with the task of developing a justifiable narrative of events. This means that there should be filters associated with how the ego construes the experiential self. Specifically, it should work to filter out impulses, images, ideas, and feelings that are unjustifiable. And it should then work to develop justifiable narratives for those experiences, drives, and images that are acknowledged. In addition, powerful thoughts and feelings that the ego cannot control or deny should be experienced as alien and “ego-dystonic.”


Of course, therapists of a psychodynamic orientation have long identified precisely these kinds of processes and dynamic relations between self-consciousness and subconscious processes. Indeed, the idea that the ego sits atop the more animalistic portions of our mental lives and filters out undesirable processes via repression or suppression and then rationalizes those portions to manage our sense of self in the relational world is a basic set of insights from the Freudian tradition. It is because of this set of insights from psychodynamic theory that UTOK labels the filter between the primate-experiential self and the ego the "Freudian Filter." It operates between nonverbal images, drives, and impulses and verbal narration and, at this interface, the primary dynamic this filter is attempting is to translate the experiential self into a justified narrative and also regulate it so that it conforms.  READ MORE...

Consciousness Understood by Dreaming

The ability to control our dreams is a skill that more of us are seeking to acquire for sheer pleasure. But if taken seriously, scientists believe it could unlock new secrets of the mind.

Michelle Carr is frequently plagued by tidal waves in her dreams. What should be a terrifying nightmare, however, can quickly turn into a whimsical adventure – thanks to her ability to control her dreams. She can transform herself into a dolphin and swim into the water. Once, she transformed the wave itself, turning it into a giant snail with a huge shell. “It came right up to me – it was a really beautiful moment.”

There’s a thriving online community of people who are now trying to learn how to lucid dream. (A single subreddit devoted to the phenomenon has more than 400,000 members.) Many are simply looking for entertainment. “It’s just so exciting and unbelievable to be in a lucid dream and to witness your mind creating this completely vivid simulation,” says Carr, who is a sleep researcher at the University of Rochester in New York state. Others hope that exercising skills in their dreams will increase their real-life abilities. “A lot of elite athletes use lucid dreams to practise their sport.”

Sleep researcher Michelle Carr says she can tranform herself into a dolphin during her lucid dreams. 

“It’s just so exciting and unbelievable,” she says. Photograph: TEDX/YouTube

And there are more profound reasons to exploit this sleep state, besides personal improvement. By identifying the brain activity that gives rise to the heightened awareness and sense of agency in lucid dreams, neuroscientists and psychologists hope to answer fundamental questions about the nature of human consciousness, including our apparently unique capacity for self-awareness. “More and more researchers, from many different fields, have started to incorporate lucid dreams in their research,” says Carr.

This interest in lucid dreaming has been growing in fits and starts for more than a century. Despite his fascination with the interaction between the conscious and subconscious minds, Sigmund Freud barely mentioned lucid dreams in his writings. Instead, it was an English aristocrat and writer, Mary Arnold-Forster, who provided one of the earliest and most detailed descriptions in the English language in her book Studies in Dreams.  TO READ MORE ABOUT THIS, CLICK HERE...

Consciousness

Explaining how something as complex as consciousness can emerge from a grey, jelly-like lump of tissue in the head is arguably the greatest scientific challenge of our time. 

The brain is an extraordinarily complex organ, consisting of almost 100 billion cells – known as neurons – each connected to 10,000 others, yielding some ten trillion nerve connections.

We have made a great deal of progress in understanding brain activity, and how it contributes to human behaviour. But what no one has so far managed to explain is how all of this results in feelings, emotions and experiences. 

How does the passing around of electrical and chemical signals between neurons result in a feeling of pain or an experience of red?

There is growing suspicion that conventional scientific methods will never be able answer these questions. Luckily, there is an alternative approach that may ultimately be able to crack the mystery.

For much of the 20th century, there was a great taboo against querying the mysterious inner world of consciousness – it was not taken to be a fitting topic for “serious science”. Things have changed a lot, and there is now broad agreement that the problem of consciousness is a serious scientific issue. 

But many consciousness researchers underestimate the depth of the challenge, believing that we just need to continue examining the physical structures of the brain to work out how they produce consciousness.  READ MORE...

Metaphysical Mysteries

In my 20s, I had a friend who was brilliant, charming, Ivy-educated and rich, heir to a family fortune. I’ll call him Gallagher. He could do anything he wanted. He experimented, dabbling in neuroscience, law, philosophy and other fields. 

But he was so critical, so picky, that he never settled on a career. Nothing was good enough for him. He never found love for the same reason. He also disparaged his friends’ choices, so much so that he alienated us. He ended up bitter and alone. At least that’s my guess. I haven’t spoken to Gallagher in decades.

There is such a thing as being too picky, especially when it comes to things like work, love and nourishment (even the pickiest eater has to eat something). That’s the lesson I gleaned from Gallagher. But when it comes to answers to big mysteries, most of us aren’t picky enough. 

We settle on answers for bad reasons, for example, because our parents, priests or professors believe it. We think we need to believe something, but actually we don’t. We can, and should, decide that no answers are good enough. We should be agnostics.

Some people confuse agnosticism (not knowing) with apathy (not caring). Take Francis Collins, a geneticist who directs the National Institutes of Health. He is a devout Christian, who believes that Jesus performed miracles, died for our sins and rose from the dead. In his 2006 bestseller The Language of God, 

Collins calls agnosticism a “cop-out.” When I interviewed him, I told him I am an agnostic and objected to “cop-out.”  READ MORE

What We Are

“We’ve barely begun to understand our place in the cosmos. As we continue to look out from our planet and contemplate the nature of reality, we should remember that there is a mystery right here where we stand.”



“Meditate often on the interconnectedness and mutual interdependence of all things in the universe,” the aging Marcus Aurelius instructed.

“Any live mind today is of the very same stuff as Plato’s & Euripides,” the young Virginia Woolf meditated in her diary two millennia later. “It is this common mind that binds the whole world together; & all the world is mind.”

Two years earlier, in the first year of the twentieth century and the final year of his life, the uncommonly minded Canadian psychiatrist Maurice Bucke had formalized this notion in his visionary, controversial book Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind, which influenced generations of thinkers ranging from Albert Einstein to Abraham Maslow to Steve Jobs.

Bucke himself had been greatly influenced by, then befriended and in turn influenced, Walt Whitman — a poet enraptured by how science illuminates the interconnectedness of life, who contemplated the strangest and most paradoxical byproduct of consciousness “lifted out from all else, calm, like the stars, shining eternal”: our sense of self.

Science was young then — it still is — and the world was old, and the mind was old, its dwelling-place practically unchanged since the cranium of early Homo sapiens began accommodating a brain comparable to our own some three hundred thousand years ago. 

With neuroscience yet to be born, it fell on the poets and the philosophers to meditate on the complexities of consciousness — the sole valve between reality and our experience, made of the same matter as the stars. Today, neuroscience remains a young and insecure science, as crude as Galilean astronomy — and as revolutionary in the revelations it has already contoured, yet to be shaded in with the nuances of understanding that might, just might, one day illuminate the fundaments of consciousness.  READ MORE

Underpinnings of Consciousness

Consciousness is arguably the most important scientific topic there is. Without consciousness, there would after all be no science. 

But while we all know what it is like to be conscious – meaning that we have personal awareness and respond to the world around us – it has turned out to be near impossible to explain exactly how it arises from the hardware of the brain. 

This is dubbed the “hard” problem of consciousness.

Solving the hard problem is a matter of great scientific curiosity. But so far, we haven’t even solved the “easy” problems of explaining which brain systems give rise to conscious experiences in general – in humans or other animals.

This is of huge clinical importance. Disorders of consciousness are a common consequence of severe brain injury and include comas and vegetative states. And we all experience temporary loss of awareness when under anaesthesia during an operation.

In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, we have now shown that conscious brain activity seems to be linked to the brain’s “pleasure chemical”, dopamine.  READ MORE

Quantum Physics and Consciousness

One of the most important open questions in science is how our consciousness is established. 

In the 1990s, long before winning the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for his prediction of black holes, physicist Roger Penrose teamed up with anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff to propose an ambitious answer.

They claimed that the brain’s neuronal system forms an intricate network and that the consciousness this produces should obey the rules of quantum mechanics – the theory that determines how tiny particles like electrons move around. 

This, they argue, could explain the mysterious complexity of human consciousness.

Penrose and Hameroff were met with incredulity. Quantum mechanical laws are usually only found to apply at very low temperatures. 

Quantum computers, for example, currently operate at around -272°C. At higher temperatures, classical mechanics takes over. Since our body works at room temperature, you would expect it to be governed by the classical laws of physics. 

For this reason, the quantum consciousness theory has been dismissed outright by many scientists – though others are persuaded supporters.

Instead of entering into this debate, I decided to join forces with colleagues from China, led by Professor Xian-Min Jin at Shanghai Jiaotong University, to test some of the principles underpinning the quantum theory of consciousness.  READ MORE

Brains and Consciousness

PLANET EARTH

MIND
Brains Might Sync As People Interact — and That Could Upend Consciousness Research
When we cooperate on certain tasks, our brainwaves might synchronize. This finding could upend the current understanding of consciousness.
By Conor FeehlyJul 26, 2021 7:00 PM


(Credit: Katya Kovarzh/Shutterstock


People synchronize in various ways when we interact with one another. We subconsciously match our footsteps when we walk. During conversations, we mirror each other's postures and gestures.

To that end, studies have shown that people synchronize heart rates and breathing when watching emotional films together. The same happens when romantic partners share a bed. Some scientists think we do this to build trust and perceive people as similar to ourselves, which encourages us to behave compassionately.

Surprisingly, people synchronize their neural rhythms, too. Researchers like Tom Froese, a cognitive scientist from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Japan, think that these findings could upend our current models of consciousness.  READ MORE