I've read a lot about consciousness but this theory is new to me. It opens up a new way to think about the hard problem of consciousness.

A New Theory in Physics Claims to Solve the Mystery of Consciousness

... As strange as it sounds, the conscious experience in our brain, cannot be found or reduced to some neural activity.

"Think about it this way," says Dr. Zakaria Neemeh, a philosopher from the University of Memphis, "when I feel happiness, my brain will create a distinctive pattern of complex neural activity. This neural pattern will perfectly correlate with my conscious feeling of happiness, but it is not my actual feeling. It is just a neural pattern that represents my happiness. That's why a scientist looking at my brain and seeing this pattern should ask me what I feel, because the pattern is not the feeling itself, just a representation of it."

As a result, we can't reduce the conscious experience of what we sense, feel and think to any brain activity. We can just find correlations to these experiences.

As a result, we can't reduce the conscious experience of what we sense, feel and think to any brain activity. We can just find correlations to these experiences.

After more than 100 years of neuroscience we have very good evidence that the brain is responsible for the creation of our conscious abilities.  So how could it be that these conscious experiences can't be found anywhere in the brain (or in the body) and can't be reduced to any neural complex activity?

This mystery is known as the hard problem of consciousness. It is such a difficult problem that until a couple of decades ago only philosophers discussed it and even today, although we have made huge progress in our understanding of the neuroscientific basis of consciousness, still there is no adequate theory that explains what consciousness is and how to solve this hard problem.

Dr. Lahav and Dr. Neemeh recently published a new physical theory in the journal Frontiers in Psychology that claims to solve the hard problem of consciousness in a purely physical way.

According to the authors, when we change our assumption about consciousness and assume that it is a relativistic phenomenon, the mystery of consciousness naturally dissolves. In the paper the researchers developed a conceptual and mathematical framework to understand consciousness from a relativistic point of view.

According to Dr. Lahav, the lead author of the paper, "consciousness should be investigated with the same mathematical tools that physicists use for other known relativistic phenomena." ...

The fact that we cannot find the actual conscious experience while measuring brain activity is because we're measuring from the wrong cognitive frame of reference.

According to the new theory, the brain doesn't create our conscious experience, at least not through computations. The reason that we have conscious experience is because of the process of physical measurement.

In a nutshell, different physical measurements in different frames of reference manifest different physical properties in these frames of reference although these frames measure the same phenomenon.

For example, suppose that Bob measures Alice's brain in the lab while she's feeling happiness. Although they observe different properties, they actually measure the same phenomenon from different points of view. Because of their different kinds of measurements, different kinds of properties have been manifested in their cognitive frames of reference.

For Bob to observe brain activity in the lab, he needs to use measurements of his sensory organs like his eyes. This kind of sensory measurement manifests the substrate that causes brain activity – the neurons.

Consequently, in his cognitive frame Alice has only neural activity that represents her consciousness, but no sign of her actual conscious experience itself. But, for Alice to measure her own neural activity as happiness, she uses different kind of measurements. She doesn't use sensory organs, she measures her neural representations directly by interaction between one part of her brain with other parts. She measures her neural representations according to their relations to other neural representations.

This is a completely different measurement than what our sensory system does and, as a result, this kind of direct measurement manifests a different kind of physical property. We call this property conscious experience.

As a result, from her cognitive frame of reference, Alice measures her neural activity as conscious experience.

Using the mathematical tools that describe relativistic phenomena in physics, the theory shows that if the dynamics of Bob's neural activity could be changed to be like the dynamics of Alice's neural activity, then both will be in the same cognitive frame of reference and would have the exact same conscious experience as the other.

Now the authors want to continue to examine the exact minimal measurements that any cognitive system needs in order to create consciousness.

The implications of such a theory are huge. It can be applied to determine which animal was the first animal in the evolutionary process to have consciousness, when a fetus or baby begins to be conscious, which patients with consciousness disorders are conscious, and which AI systems already today have a low degree (if any) of consciousness.

I recently read a book called Galileo's Error: Foundation's for a New Science of Consciousness, by Philip Goff. I can highly recommend it!

Quote"... That's why a scientist looking at my brain and seeing this pattern should ask me what I feel, because the pattern is not the feeling itself, just a representation of it."

Maybe the air is thinner here in the cheap seats, but this is just so much word salad to me.

The neural pattern isn't a representation because that term impies an abstraction, like how the letters of the alphabet represent vocal sound. But they aren't vocal sounds and, in fact, make no noise. But the neural pattern is the brain in question experiencing the emotion. We don't know what emotions make what patterns any more than the layperson could tell you what all the bits do if you showed them the inside of a computer.

I really disliked the end of the quote where the author made a number of empty promises reminiscent of a cryto bro trying to sell you an NFT of their nan's left tit for $40,000.

In fact this is a lot like the substance dualism arguments theist tend to make, only without really saying what the alternative is. "Physical measurement?" What the hell are they even talking about? How does Alice measure her happiness? Is it like that "rate your pain from one to ten" bullshit? Because that is maddeningly imprecise. (Although it's not meant to be precise, just to give the healthcare giver a mean to determine if pain medication is necessary)

Quote from: the_antithesis on August 31, 2022, 12:15:01 AMMaybe the air is thinner here in the cheap seats, but this is just so much word salad to me.

Yeah, I didn't get that either.  Definitely got a "there's no forest here, just a bunch of individual trees" vibe from that part.  Yes, no particular cell is a mind in the same way that no particular drop of water is a rainstorm (brainstorm?).  That doesn't tell us much.

I found it sort of fascinating to look at it from a relativistic (aka probabilistic) vantage point (I have a 20% chance to go to bed before finishing this post and 80% chance to finish this post then go to bed, but what this means I couldn't

I think consciousness stems from neural activity in the brain, we just don't yet know exactly how. To try to claim anything else is an argument from ignorance: "Well, we don't know how it happens so it must be this spooky other thing."