Results and experiments on consciousness


According to the online edition of Haaretz Newspaper, researchers from Tel Aviv University say they have outlined unconscious thought and can even characterize the cerebral activity behind it.

Salti (2009) has apparently found that stimuli of threshold strength that do not affect performance undergo considerable processing and that subjective awareness is associated with a late wave of activation with widely distributed topography.

There is believed to be a tiny period of time (often considered to be 100-500 msecs) between the registration of a visual stimulus by the unconscious mind and our conscious recognition of it. Estimates suggested by Salti's work are of the order of 500msecs.

The experiments exposed participants to visual stimulation in the form of a square shape on a computer screen. The researchers tried to identify when the participants saw the square, even as they continued not to be consciously aware of it. Asked to guess where the square might have appeared, the participants were nonetheless able in about 50% of cases to point to the exact spot, seemingly similar to the well known phenomenon of 'blindsight'.

Salti also compared the ERPs when participants were subjectively unaware of the target's presence and localized it correctly versus incorrectly, thereby isolating the neural correlates of unconscious perception. All conditions involved stimuli that were physically identical and were presented for the same duration. Both behavioral measures were associated with modulation of the amplitude of the P3 component of the ERP. This modulation was widely spread across all scalp locations for subjective awareness, but was restricted to the parietal electrodes for unconscious perception.

Salti is reported to have said "On a philosophical level, it raises questions about the concept of volition. It's disturbing on a personal level." Yes, but such a result is inevitable in the B series.

One is immediately minded of the 'decision time' W in the Libet experiments I recently referred to (Yates, 2009) which Banks has shown to vary with relatively extraneous factors like deceptive audio cues, where variation may be of the order of at least 100msec and presumably possibly much larger.

Ben Goertzel (2009) and Chen Suo point out that, combined with information about the timing of neural firing, Salti (2009) lets us estimate how much neural processing is needed to produce conscious perception. The firing of a single neuron's action potential takes around 5 milliseconds . It takes maybe another 10-20 milliseconds after that for the neuron to be able to fire again (that's the "refractory period"). So, the very rough estimate is 100 cycles in the neural net before consciousness. This fits with the view of consciousness in terms of strange attractors. 100 cycles is often enough time for a recurrent net to converge to into an attractor basin . But of course the dynamics during those ~100 cycles is the more interesting story, and it's still obscure. Is it really an attractor we have here, or "just" a nicely patterned transient? A terminal attractor (which stays around for awhile then disappears) perhaps? These attractors are almost certainly related to consciousness, but there has to be a reluctance to set precise parameters in such a simplistic way. The analogy might be to create an extremely complex steampunk style mechanical man using watchmaker's equipment and then expect that to come to life.

However the field for psychological experimentation must be immense.

Previous workers have often enough suggested (Wikibook, 2009) such explanations that the mind creates a waking dream, a structured set of events that accounts for the activity. In fact virtual worlds of the mind, or Revonsuo style constructions (Yates, 2009a), or some Hobson like alternative are nowadays a commonly acceptable feature of many ideas on consciousness, whatever the underlying philosophical implications. That fact is mentioned simply as something which is a current idea, not to imply particular innate status to it. Hobson and many others are now even considering waking dreams, protoconscious states, lucid dreams and the like. However one helpful experiment which simply uses ordinary dreams is that of Rudoy (2009), who actually cues a set of objects at chosen locations with sounds (which occur as the object appears) and then plays back the sounds to the subjects during their sleep. This actually enhances the memory of object location. The researchers repeated the noise cueing exercise with twelve participants who remained awake. In their case, sounds presented after learning made no difference to subsequent memory performance. My own earlier work (Yates, 2007) suggests further experimentation along somewhat similar lines.


References

Goertzel B., (2009), http://multiverseaccordingtoben.blogspot.com/2009/12/100-neural-net-cycles-to-produce.html

Haaritz (2009), www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1117286.html

Rudoy, J., Voss, J., Westerberg, C., & Paller, K. (2009). Strengthening Individual Memories by Reactivating Them During Sleep. Science, 326 (5956), 1079-1079 DOI: 10.1126/science.1179013 at http://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/~paller/Brevia+SOM.pdf

Salti M., Lamy D., Bar-Haim Y.,(2009) , Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Volume 21, Issue 7, 1435-1446, ISSN:0898-929X

Wikibook, (2009), "Consciousness Studies", http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Consciousness_studies, page184

Yates J., (2009), http://ttjohn.blogspot.com/2009/09/new-cross-over-from-mactaggart-series.html

Yates J., (2009a), http://ttjohn.blogspot.com/2009/11/dreams-royal-road-to-consciousness-j.html

Yates J., (2007), "Work in Progress on application of dynamic systems theory to the A series (2)" May 28, 2007 at http://ttjohn.blogspot.com/2007_05_01_archive.html , and elsewhere in http://ttjohn.blogspot.com/

Dreams - "A Royal Road to Consciousness"?

J. Allan Hobson suggests that "dream consciousness is ontogenetically prior to waking consciousness and that it serves a foundational function in preparing the brain-mind for its highest evolutionary achievement, waking consciousness in human animals. REM sleep may constitute a protoconscious state, providing a virtual reality model of the world that is of functional use to the development and maintenance of waking consciousness". (Hobson, 2009)

And more importantly "what (Hobson) suggests is that dreaming may be a royal road to consciousness itself.” Merriman (2009) describes Hobson's theory and some of its advantages in a simple way which, to me, seems excellent. It also has the advantage of an element of generality, a point I refer to later. Hobson's AIM model was already outlined in Hobson (2000).

In my opinion, this seems like a workable model - among several possible contenders - within the B series, as a more detailed frame of reference for a model of the A series within the B series. (See Yates, (2007) et al for earlier such models which could probably reasonably readily undergo appropriate modification). An important difference between Hobson's model (H, say) and such a model as suggested here (H1, say) could be that H1 is likely to contain features specifying a particular H likely to be within but not necessarily specifically interacting with a group of H1 models.

Hobson indicated that astronauts should dream much more in space than they do on Earth simply because there's more motion for them to cope with. Weightlessness takes away up and down as references. So if REM sleep promotes changes in the brain that help astronauts adapt their motor system, particularly balance, to the near absence of gravity, there is likely to be a need for more REM sleep.

Hobson and his colleagues at the Laboratory of Neurophysiology had fitted astronauts and cosmonauts with the usual "Nightcaps" (Stickgold, 1996) to record their dreams while they lived aboard the Russian space station Mir. However, NASA data collected over 6 months of flight indicated that extended space flight leads to a consistent and pronounced decrease in sleep efficiency, time spent in REM sleep, and the percent of total sleep time spent in REM sleep as measured by the Nightcap (Stickgold, 1996). As far as I am aware, that is how it still stands, whatever proferred reasons may exist.

So Hobson's theories are far from proven. Revonsuo, and others like him, claim that dreaming is not simply a random by-product of REM sleep physiology. Revonsuo claims that the form and content of dreams is not random but organized and selective: during dreaming, the brain constructs a complex model of the world in which certain types of elements, when compared to waking life, are underrepresented whereas others are over represented. All this sounds as if it could be roughly in accord with fact - which is all we need at this juncture to help model-refinement. Wargo's (2009) adversely contrarian comments on Hobson's theories do sound like reasonable folk psychology even though he says "At least Freud was on the right track. The newest theory, by J. Allen Hobson, is about as off the mark as most of the recent ideas I’ve read." Even bearing Wargo's comments in mind, we can come closer to Revonsuo's views and at the same time use an infrastructure somewhat like that of Hobson. Its probably not at all necessary to accept at this stage Revonsuo's evolutionary theories as this could clearly move needlessly far from Hobson.

But it may be worth pointing out that some of the views of Allan Hobson, in a similar way to those of Patricia Churchland, can present a rather dry, abstract scene, somewhat barren of humanity, which does seem rather characteristic of the intensely mathematical approach of Sir Isaac Newton and his many successors. This is a view which has been very successful in some ways, but, rather like an old plaster wall stripped of wallpaper, by its meticulous bareness and the necessary attention to often unwelcome detail, may also present us with nooks, peepholes and crannies through which we may be able to gaze on fairy seas of the soul, or on cool meadows and pastures, with a sweet flowing stream and placid cows grazing if you like... In short there may be a partly simplistic version of the A series available to us within the B series as long as we do not take there to be a precise one to one mapping of either. Whilst excessive mathematization at an early stage may not allow a comprehension or a mapping of the soul, it may nonetheless allow at least a partial representation of the soul (or of consciousness), if not in the precise terms of either A series or B series. Scarone (2009) and perhaps Sutton (2008) and Rauch (2009) may help to define the way. Clearly, too, there are great possibilities in the X-phi direction.

More may be added to the model in due course.

References

Hobson, J. Allan, Pace-Schott, E. and Stickgold, R. (2000), "Dreaming and the Brain: Toward a Cognitive Neuroscience of Conscious States", Behavioral and Brain Sciences 23 (6): 793-842

Hobson J.A., (2009) Nat Rev Neurosci. 2009 Nov;10(11):803-13. Epub 2009 Oct 1.
REM sleep and dreaming: towards a theory of protoconsciousness. . PMID: 19794431

Merriman J., (2009) http://www.neurologyreviews.com/08%20aug/AlteredDreaming.html

McNamara P., McLaren D., Durso K., (2007), "Representation of the Self in REM and NREM Dreams", Dreaming, June ; 17(2): 113–126. doi:10.1037/1053-0797.17.2.113 ; and at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2629609/pdf/nihms53729.pdf

Rauch B., (2009), "‘Natural’ and Digital Virtual Realities", Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Vol 16 Issue 4 – 5 , http://www.leonardo.info/LEA/DispersiveAnatomies/DA_rauch.pdf

Scarone S., (2009) http://www.esf.org/activities/exploratory-workshops/news/ext-news-singleview/article/new-links-between-dreams-and-psychosis-could-revive-dream-therapy-in-psychiatry-585.html

Stickgold R.A., Hobson J.A., (1996), "On-line vigilance monitoring with the Nightcap",
http://www.websciences.org/cftemplate/NAPS/archives/indiv.cfm?ID=19960547 or any improved version. Other interesting work using the Nightcap possibly relevant to a useful model for our present research occurs in McNamara (2007) ; NASA results referred to in the main text above are given at http://lsda.jsc.nasa.gov/scripts/experiment/exper.cfm?exp_index=846

Sutton J., (2008), "Dreaming", http://philpapers.org/rec/SUTD

Wargo E., (2009), http://thenightshirt.com/?p=115

Yates J. (2007) http://ttjohn.blogspot.com/2007_05_01_archive.html , and elsewhere in http://ttjohn.blogspot.com/

A new cross-over from McTaggart A-series to B-series

A new cross-over from McTaggart A-series to B-series

Abstract

An attempt is made to find sources of new parameters whereby an essentially B-series model of A-series matters can be more accurately obtained. These matters will, it is hoped, allow specific physical parameters to be applied to a study of human consciousness. To do this, the experiment of Libet (1985) has had to be re-examined.

Introduction

A new - quite possibly the first - clear cross-over from McTaggart A-series to B-series is being considered. This may give some new parameters to work with in the studies of consciousness.

The large amount of dreamwork available today claims to refer mainly to effects in the part of the mind considered during dreams (Yates, 2009a etc) and dream results have traditionally seemed inchoate, often contradictory and hard to fathom. Nonetheless they are observable phenomena and should therefore be regarded as such. Stickgold and others have found correlations between dreams and waking states so a full description of "consciousness" should involve them.

In the present note,we go on to consider what could be regarded as more tangible or concrete results, namely regarding the Libet experiment or so-called "Libet half-second" matter.

Work relating to the Libet (1985) experiment has often traditionally been regarded as relating directly to the 'conscious person', such as he may be. This is because in this experiment, individuals have to determine or estimate mentally when they decided on a particular task. The recent work of Banks (2008), though not necessarily being used exactly in the way Banks (2009) intended, can help to show how these results might actually be used. However we care to look at it, these results are interesting in my opinion.

First a brief survey of some aspects of the Libet experiment is perhaps due, as any parameters referring directly to the mind may be of use in these lucubrations (Yates, 2009).

Brief survey of some aspects of the Libet experiment

In the important blog "Conscious Entities" (2009) the question has been posed "Libet was wrong ?" and that blog suggests that in some respects Libet may have been wrong over the "Libet half-second" matter. Largely it is suggested and explained briefly but fully, that the work of Trevena, mentioned in this blog (Yates, 2009) and referred to in "Conscious Entities" (2009) is significant in that regard. In effect the EMG measurements are just manifestations of neural activity and provide no totally complete neural markers. But in considering Trevena, the free will enthusiasts are trying to recover the free will concept within the B-series. It seems to me that to try to recover the free will concept inside a block time model is a far fetched idea.

The block time model was developed on the basis of the calculus of Newton and Leibniz who both seemed to believe (or to pretend to believe) in some sort of all-powerful God, and whilst their beliefs ran in somewhat different directions, most of modern physics (including general relativity and quantum mechanics) seem to include an essential ingredient which gives us this block time model (however varied and tortured), without the possibility of free will in the sense accepted in what is now termed 'folk psychology' and is the subject of (often very desultory) surveys by the X-phi community. Block time is more like a map of a country showing say "past" as the south and "future" as the north with effectively only one way traffic from South to North. As Feynman (1970) for example illustrated, there may well be nothing wrong with that one way street. Nonetheless - even if it is not a bug - the one way street is only a B-series feature. It is not necessarily an A-series feature, in fact it probably isn't. And that is independent of whether most proposed B-series time travel supposed thought experiments - of which by now there are many, usually involving wormholes and the like - actually work in practice.

Anyway the Trevena tests should have been done long ago. For the moment we can possibly just assume from them that EMG evidence for an earlier unconscious intention is not supplied in enough detail to make totally adequate assumptions from.

Now referring to Bank's work. Banks has of course provided us with a detailed book (Pockett, 2006) which cantains much work on the human aspect of the matter. The more recent work (Banks, 2008, 2009) implies considerable variations in the 'decision time' W.

In private communication with us Banks mentioned the following "Meanwhile, it's not the case that W is always about -200 ms. The values in the literature range from about -100 ms to -1.42 seconds by Matsuhashi & Hallett, 2008. Soon, et al (Soon, C.S., Brass, M., Heinze, H., & Haynes, J. 2008. Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain. Nature Neuroscience, 11, 543-545) found the RP to begin very early (up to 7 seconds before the response), and the estimated W inn their study to be about -600 ms. My article with Isham makes a qualitative point that should not be confused in any way with the precise number of milliseconds W is shifted by the deceptive auditory cue. The point is that W is affected by an event that comes after the response. This finding is evidence that the W people report is a retrospective inference from their observation of when they respond. I am writing up a more elaborated theory of the response and the estimate of W that I can send when it is ready. The point is that the action being judged for W in the Libet paradigm is at the level of intention-in-action (in Searle's terms), and it has been recognized at least since Lashley that we have no conscious access to our behavior at this level."

Now it remains to be seen that W is actually obtained from 'retrospective inference' within the B-series. If Banks is correct as I assume pro tem, it is very likely to be considered as such..

I would have expected on the face of it that W should be about equal to the human reaction time in the B-series if decisions were intended to be followed immediately by keypresses. In the Libet experiment when actually carried out in the way that it usually is, the subject seems to be rather dragooned into pressing the key right way, and this is almost an experimenter's command. The whole matter needs to be a lot more thought out, "First awareness of a wish to act" are the specific words used by Libet in his 1985 experiment as apparently part of a definition of W, which places W clearly as a marker which should at the very least be within the bailiwick of any consciousness theory and more specifically could be an actual measurement of an A-series result. (One is reminded that the A-series does have 'actual' past, present, and future by definition and may not be one to one mappable to a B-series time model).

Conclusion

The variations in W and also in any timings concerning the keypress we hope to be able to investigate for a number of subjects over a period of time, also using various audiovisual distractions, possibly including some of a so-called 'subliminal' nature, bearing in mind such matters as the work of Phil Merikle and of Nilli Lavie. We also do not know that the B-series is not fundamentally flawed per se . So a good A-series model (even in crude B-series representation) may also be better than a simple traditional B-series model, though there are no current hopes in that regard.

We also hope that Professor Banks may be able to describe his experiments and his own views in detail at our conference next year, as he has kindly agreed to do.

References

Banks W.P., Isham E.A., (2008) "We Infer Rather Than Perceive the Moment We Decided to Act", Psychological Science,Vol 20, Issue 1, Pages 17 - 21

Banks W.P., Isham E.A., (2009) "Do we really know what we are doing? Implications of reported time of decision for theories of volition". In: Nadel L., Sinnott-Armstrong W. P.. "Conscious Will and Responsibility: A Tribute to Benjamin Libet". Oxford University Press, in press

Conscious Entities (2009) September 26, 2009, "Libet was wrong ?" , http://www.consciousentities.com/?p=233

Feynman R.P., (1970), "Feynman lectures in Physics", especially near end of chapter on Entropy.

Libet B., (1985), “Unconscious Cerebral Initiative and the Role of Conscious Will in Voluntary
Action.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 8: 529-66 ; enormous amount of other work such as Libet, B. 2004. Mind Time. Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press.

Pockett S., Banks W.P., Gallagher S., (2006), "Does Consciousness Cause Behavior?", MIT Press, ISBN: 978-0-262-16237-1

Yates J., (2009) http://ttjohn.blogspot.com/2009/09/new-look-at-fitzhugh-nagumo-method-in.html#links

Yates J., (2009a), http://ttjohn.blogspot.com/2009/05/many-bubble-interpretation-externalism.html#links , http://philpapers.org/archive/YATTMB

A new look at the Fitzhugh-Nagumo method in McTaggart A-series simulation, together with the use of solitons or chaos theory

In our dynamical systems models (1) for the waking and sleeping brain, we used Berkeley Madonna for the simulations and after exploring a very wide number of possibilities and many parameter values. The Fithugh-Nagumo (FHN) model is discussed briefly in Section E of that paper. The conclusion was come to in that paper that "In common with results for many cases where modelling is made slightly more complicated but requires more parameters, so far (the FHN) does not seem to have really paid off at this level of model making. It might be a way forward at a later date however." However some quite satisfactory results were obtained with slightly simpler models, such as the one referred to as N003b.

I had in mind numerous previous instances such as the great initial effectiveness of the Kuramoto model, its obvious applicability to many systems and yet the extremely difficult process of refining it much further in specific cases. The Kuramoto model seems to have been useful in a general way in areas as varied as descriptions of neural processes and the London Millenium Bridge.

Solitons

Since we are working in reference (1) in the region of models like the FHN model it seemed reasonable to consider whether any alternative or sufficiently differing brain models might produce better results. The Soliton Model (2) in neuroscience is justified as follows: "The model starts with the observation that cell membranes always have a freezing point (the temperature below which the consistency changes from fluid to gel-like) only slightly below the organism's body temperature, and this allows for the propagation of solitons. It has been known for several decades that an action potential traveling along a neuron results in a slight increase in temperature followed by a decrease in temperature. The decrease is not explained by the Hodgkin-Huxley model (electrical charges traveling through a resistor always produce heat), but traveling solitons do not lose energy in this way and the observed temperature profile is consistent with the Soliton model. Further, it has been observed that a signal traveling along a neuron results in a slight local thickening of the membrane and a force acting outwards; this effect is not explained by the Hodgkin-Huxley model but is clearly consistent with the Soliton model. It is undeniable that an electrical signal can be observed when an action potential propagates along a neuron. The Soliton model explains this as follows: the traveling soliton locally changes density and thickness of the membrane, and since the membrane contains many charged and polar substances, this will result in an electrical effect, akin to piezoelectricity."

Now this is a new model and differs in very significant ways from the FHN model and similar models, and whilst it is claimed to have many advantages, such as in an understanding of the Meyer-Overton observation, this attempt to explain nerve transmission by sound impulses rather than simply electrical impulses certainly has not replaced the conventional model. At the same time, the model we were trying to use is basically an interpretation of the A series using B series mathematics. It is only a model not an elixir, and the position is very like that of the traditional John Godfrey Saxe description of the blind man describing an elephant - it will not be right in every detail. David Corfield's general suggestion (3) involving the use of vector solitons, as has been already used in somewhat similar cases, could well be a further way forward.

And this is not a walk in complete darkness - consciousness has frequently been described as an emergent phenomenon in a collection of neurons, as indeed have matter wave solitons and optical solitons been described as emergent and placed in the same category. Filamentation is a related phenomenon as exemplified by meandering rivers and lightning bolts.

And, just as consciousness can clearly be said to presumably relate to the P=NP? problem, in 2002 I had considered looking at soliton theory and the Backlund transformation, in the hope that Mielnik's idea could be extended.

Further, it has even been suggested by Hameroff and Penrose (4), that quantum computation in the brain works by solitons. Both Hameroff and Penrose have produced many interesting ideas, though this one has encountered much opposition, so it is mentioned here although we do not propose to use it at this time.

So as distinct from simple philosophical argumentation and questioning - still important tools - we can do the calculations in Berkeley Madonna, without - and this is a key and important point - losing important philosophical stringency in the way that seemingly began in quantum physics on the introduction of the Copenhagen Interpretation and then got to the point where a dog can now seem to be able to understand quantum mechanics better than a human can.

But we already have the added problem in X-phi (experimental philosophy) of a trend to mathematical oversimplification and a rush to philosophical relativism almost like a Hollywood star might run to a Dr. Feelgood with dire consequences, so a lot more work needs to be done steadily and carefully in X-phi also.

I do not yet know if the soliton approximation will help, but it is a matter of trying it for various cases without seeking a mental Theory of Everything, and solitons could be said to be more physically realistic than FHN though for the moment model N003b is still the top priority.


Chaos Theory

Another important model is described in a video (5). This can possibly correspond to the sandpile effect we have been mentioning in this blog for some time now.

The effect is now discussed in the eminent and well recognised Conscious Entities blog (6), which particularly states "One claim not made in the article, but one which could well be made, is that all this might account for the sensation of free will."

I have to agree with that possibility and reference (1) of course remains open to that effect and indeed briefly discusses it as the "butterfly effect". You would expect a chaos effect to arise in any model which allows for the so-called 'unconscious mind' as its existence is what might be called a 'brute fact' as clearly the conscious mind is not capable at this time of fathoming the hidden realms of day to day consciousness. Hence there is scope in our present models for both dreams and chaos. Furthermore there is certainly no immediate requirement for 'pure chance' or 'god' or some sort of 'blind watchmaker' or indeed a 'homunculus', because of where our theory has come from.

Conclusion

So the next step is possibly to consider the recent work of Banks (7), which may have produced a live psychological experiment, not involving brain tampering, which provides a clear physical example of the Libet and Haynes effects.

Provided we realise that any instances of our brain model are merely partial mappings of the A series to the B series, there should be no conflict with free will concepts, and further progress may be becoming clearer.


References


1. http://ttjohn.blogspot.com/2007/05/work-in-progress-on-application-of.html#links

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soliton_model

3. Corfield D., (2009) http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2009/09/where_have_all_the_solitons_go.html#c026247

4. Hagan S., Hameroff S.R., Tuszynski J.A., (2000), Decoherence and Biological Feasibility, arXiv:quant-ph/0005025v1

5. Video, in "Disorderly genius: How chaos drives the brain", New Scientist, 29 June 2009, http://brightcove.vo.llnwd.net/d7/unsecured/media/981571807/981571807_27451004001_chaotic-brain.flv?videoId=27532501001&lineUpId=&pubId=981571807&playerId=1873822884&playerTag=&affiliateId=

6. http://www.consciousentities.com/?p=202

7. Banks W.P., Isham E.A., (2009), Psychol Sci. 2009 Jan;20(1):17-21, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19152537

Submissions invited - Philosophy and neuroscience conference, and "Burning Armchair" Medal competition


Current neuroscience results and experimental philosophy both illustrate current developments in mind sciences, ethics and allied disciplines.

The Institute for Fundamental Studies is therefore organising a conference and a call for experiments in experimental philosophy. We're having an international conference in Goa in December 2010. Even if you currently cannot come, please spread the information about our work and conferences.

Email: uvscience [AT] gmail.com Details: http://ttjohn.blogspot.com/

Joshua Knobe says that this conference "looks like it has potential to be an important new direction for work in this area".

Scientists today are beginning to recognise the need for more philosophical discussions to further all scientific research. For example, a new book "How to Teach Physics to Your Dog" (by Physics Professor Chad Orzel) points out that a dog now has a better folk philosophy for understanding quantum theory than a human being does ! For instance, one extract, relating to current quantum mechanics, goes "If a great big steak were to suddenly appear on your dining room table, you'd probably be a little perturbed. The dog, on the other hand, would feel it was nothing more than her due". Now Orzel is clearly trying to popularise quantum theory but many general questions which may involve experience, morality and other factors more familiar to the experimental philosopher than the theoretical physicist immediately arise, and I cover some of these in a little more detail in my resume, attached and on our website, of some of the Institute's work "Explorations of available philosophical ideas using modern observations".

Clearly experiments can include, as well as the work currently under consideration at the Institute (as attached and at http://ttjohn.blogspot.com/), many other topics like surveys of personal views on variations of the Newcomb Problem and its multicultural freewill ramifications, and discussions on such work as that of Beggs and its neural interpretations of phenomena like self-organised criticality and the sandpile model. All contributions will be considered and highly appreciated, not just the specific topics above.

It has been found that some of these experiments need queries put to persons of non English origin, because of possible differences in mindset due to differing ethnic origins.

Simple queries like those in the video, URL below, seem to have produced excellent results in the past. A new experiment as simple as that could prove very worthwhile. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHoyMfHudaE&feature=channel

Anyway general results from different countries will add to the literature.

We will do these X-phi queries for you in India, for Hindi, Marathi, Tamil and Konkani subjects. Your query will probably be in English. Most of our subjects speak enough English for English to be an acceptable language for your query but the subjects come from the cultures and backgrounds above. All correspondence is in English only.

Details of the queries you want to ask should be emailed to us as soon as possible.

An embossed gold plated certificate from the Institute for Fundamental Studies will be given to each applicant who submits an acceptable entry. The experiment which turns out the best results will be given the much coveted "Burning Armchair" Medal. This in turn can lead to publicity, publication and fame. We do have a printing firm working for us.

Usually applicants will be expected to be existing members of a qualified professional body of good standing, such as for example the Experimental Philosophy Society or the American Institute of Physics. But this opportunity is open to all people, including for example members of informed lay bodies like the Sceptics Society. All queries regarding the above matter will be answered.

Explorations of available philosophical ideas using modern observations

Abstract
For nearly a century, since the discovery of wave/particle duality, physics has not been a description of the world as we know it. With the event of QED and particle physics, even dogs seem to have more gut comprehension of physics than humans. Worse, for half a century, important descriptions of the mind using physics have seemingly not adequately represented ideas like freewill, and these have largely been effectively ignored or devolved in some sense to the 'folk psychology' and 'folk philosophy' realm. Current philosophical ideas must resolve this matter, and here we have begun an attempt to do so.


The work of Cleeremans (1999) and Haynes (2008) stress the importance of the so called NCCs or "Neural Correlates of Consciousness" in studying mental activity. Haynes (2008) provides physical results which some would say raise questions about free will.

In fact Cleeremans (1999) goes so far as to say specifically "philosophy of science may help and provide a metatheoretical framework for the current interdisciplinary project.... Indeed, the only assumption such an approach requires is that of a lawful covariance between cerebral and phenomenal processes"

This assumption in itself seems to presuppose a sound superstructure of theoretical physics, as the phenomenal processes are traditionally described in terms of current physics.

I remark in a current paper (Yates, 2009a) "free will philosophers either ignore Haynes's work, or deny free will already, or are seeking a work round. Fortunately I do not seem to need a work round as Haynes's work seems to provide simply more evidence that the McTaggart B series is insufficient and we need the A series as well." So, I am satisfied with Haynes's (2008) results and (generally speaking and contrary argumentation aside) with free will also.

In my view, philosophy can provide additional questioning which may be able to add further parameters to my mathematical dynamical systems model (which incorporates both the McTaggart A and B series) as well as the current fMRI results and so on whose value must be subsumed to philosophical considerations. This model is discussed in Yates (2008).

I believe my present model may ultimately solve many problems relevant to philosophy, in subjects like time and freewill. And I think it is already doing so. So the right philosophical queries to subjects and many other philosophical matters are of great importance to me.

I have been well aware of the work of Kornhuber, Libet etc., more or less since it was published, as founder and editor of the "International Journal of Theoretical Physics" (1), for which I personally attracted many years ago the usual array of specialists and Nobel prizewinners. People like David Bohm, Roger Penrose, George Gamow and Louis de Broglie were on my editorial board. The journal is referred to occasionally in my websites, in particular http://ttjohn.blogspot.com/ . I needed to know of the Libet, Kornhuber etc. work for my fundamental studies.

Basically current physics is unfortunately completely quite inadequate. Dogs understand physics better than people (Orzel, 2009), and that gives no kudos to dogs but at a basic level may simply indicate that people are smarter than dogs and more reflective. Physics was accurate enough for purpose in the days of Newton and Einstein but today we live in a different world. For example, it is only weeks ago (Cubrovic, Zaanen, and Schalm) that the current very basic B-series string theory in physics may have been given a firmer foothold. A-series is mainly overlooked in practice.

Haynes's (2008) work obviously moves the work of Kornhuber, Libet, etc. forward another step. And to omit a proper consideration of the A series at this point is rather like trying to do timekeeping at relativistic speeds without special relativity theory. Timekeeping at speeds much slower than relativistic speeds clearly works well enough for its own purposes, but special relativity is obviously needed for the higher speeds. In the case of studies involving mental processes at the level of abstraction of say freewill or (if postulated) qualia, the A series, not just the B series, is needed.

I am hoping for some help in this regard. I am really trying to get some important new work done and I wonder how best to get this across to the philosophical community, and also to get more feedback for my own work.

Simple exposition of what we have done so far: The brain is treated not in a totally simplistic way as a wired up and complex computer or a bunch of neurons, but like a mind battling between objectives. For the moment 'conscious' mind is taken as 'Juliet' and 'unconscious' mind as 'Romeo'. Using Gottman's mathematical theory of marriage guidance counselling and attractor theory after considerations like those of Winfree and Strogatz, equations arise, as given in Yates (2008) and on the website. Further references are in Yates (2008, 2009) and on the website.

More complex brain models are of course possible and are welcome additions to any discussion. Primarily, just as marriage counselling requires actual discussions as well as measurements, the present approach requires experimental philosophy as well as fMRI readings.

Already we (Yates, 2008) have discovered the Reverse Stickgold Effect, which seems to mean that we may dream about what we are going to do, as well as what we have done. In a way this sounds obvious, but the details are not so obvious as sometimes people seem to have no advance idea as to what they will do. More and more this may be coming into phase with current physics experiments such as the Haynes work (which tends to verify/extend Libet), and philosophy owes it to all not to allow scientists to throw out the ideas like free will without thinking it through, as they tend to be prone to do.

We had posters at three consciousness conferences recently, in Budapest, Salzburg and Tuscon but putting across useful work at such places is not easy. My website http://ttjohn.blogspot.com/ contains many of my current thoughts.

References

Baez J., (2007), "What We Can Do About Science Journals", especially 'Sneaky Tricks' section, http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/journals.html ; and elsewhere e.g. http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2009/07/elsevier_pays_for_favorable_bo.html

Cleeremans A., Haynes (1999) J-D., "Correlating Consciousness: A View from Empirical Science" , Revue Internationale de Philosophie 3 (209):387-420 http://srsc.ulb.ac.be/axcWWW/papers/pdf/98-NCC.pdf

Haynes J-D., (2008), http://medgadget.com/archives/2008/04/not_a_free_will_after_all.html

Orzel C., (2009), "How to teach Physics to your Dog", Simon & Schuster, ISBN-13: 9781416572282.

Yates J. (2008), "Category theory applied to a radically new but logically essential description of time and space", http://cogprints.org/6176/

Yates J., (2009), "A study of attempts at precognition, particularly in dreams, using some of the methods of experimental philosophy", http://philpapers.org/archive/YATASO.1.pdf

Yates J., (2009a), "Do Intuitions about Reference Really Vary across Cultures?", on my website http://ttjohn.blogspot.com/ at http://ttjohn.blogspot.com/2009/06/do-intuitions-about-reference-really.html

1 The journal (initially distributed by Plenum) which I ran for many years is now probably hived off to Elsevier or somewhere - to get the gist of how such things happen read Baez (2007), and of course Paul Dirac warned me about how such a thing can happen.

Dr. John Yates, M.Sc., Ph.D.
Institute for Fundamental Studies,
Vasai, Mumbai, India & Fulham, London, England
Institute address: Goa Campus (Assonora, provisional), Institute for Fundamental Studies, Goa ; Vasant Nagri, Vasai
E, Mumbai, India ; Fulham, London, England
Correspondence address: email: uvscience[AT]gmail.com

Do Intuitions about Reference Really Vary across Cultures?

Dr. John Yates, M.Sc., Ph.D.
Institute for Fundamental Studies,
Vasai, Mumbai, India & Fulham, London, England
Institute address: Goa Campus (Assonora, provisional), Institute for Fundamental Studies,
Goa ; Vasant Nagri, Vasai E, Mumbai, India ; Fulham, London, England
Correspondence address: email: uvscience[AT]gmail.com

Abstract

We discuss whether intuitions about reference really vary across cultures and how these variations relate ultimately to the McTaggart A-series. We conclude that much more work needs to be done, and suggest how it can.

Introduction

In the present note we seek to establish and promote new results, in some cases using experimental philosophy (a subject which we have considered for many years (Yates, 2008b)) where it becomes necessary. These new results at present usually relate to the McTaggart A and B series and to the study of time (Yates, 2008, 2008a). So the aim is not to criticise existing X-phi results - I am truly pleased and glad that the field is obtaining a foothold - but in order to obtain practical results it is necessary to point out when or where more work needs to be done, to establish usable answers to existing problems, whilst still keeping research not too lengthy.

Details

Questions like the one of the current heading query above (Machery, 2009) have been repeatedly raised. Of course they go right back to Mill, Kripke, and more recently Machery (2004), Sytsma (2009), Lam (2009), and now yet again Machery (2009).

Of course, others, in particular Frances (1998) and Sosa (1996), have worked to resolve Kripke's puzzle. In fact on the face of it, the exposition of Frances (1998) on Millian theories sounds fine to me, up to a point. For present purposes, perhaps in the exercise in Machery (2004), there are at least two issues, as many philosophers might say. One is whether or not the name "Godel" in Kripke's fictional scenario has to have the same meaning as the actual name. The second issue is whether acceptance of the coherence of the fictional scenario already commits us to Millianism.

At this point we need to consider Machery (2004) which plainly states that two views, the descriptivist view of reference and the causal-historical view of reference, have dominated the field. In any case, certainly the work of Machery et al becomes important if we are to consider the latter classification. At this very point the power of X-phi arises, whether or not Machery's eventual conclusions are correct.

In this connection Sytsma (2009) points out an objection raised by Sosa (2007). In fact in footnote 5 of Sytsma (2009), Systma points out he considers that " “defense against experimentalist objections to armchair intuitions is anchored in the fact that verbal disagreement need not be substantive”. In this context, if the results of Machery (2004) reflect divergent interpretations of the probe, then it is not clear that the variability shown reflects differences in the semantic intuitions at issue for the philosophical debate. One issue such an objection raises is how to decide where the burden of proof lies. Sosa continues: “The experimentalists have, so as to show that supposedly commonsense intuitive belief is really not as widely shared as philosophers have assumed it to be. Nor has it been shown beyond reasonable doubt that there really are philosophically important disagreements rooted in cultural or socio-economic differences”. Although we cannot argue the point here ......". Sytsma thus admits that they are not arguing with Sosa but goes on to claim roughly that Sosa is seeking too high standards of proof. Now I would say the problem may be more that X-phi practitioners need to actually reach believable standards of proof with economic amounts of data.

The problems with Kripke have frequently been discussed by the aforenamed experimental philosophers. (Machery (2004, 2009), Sytsma (2009), Lam (2009)) actually seem to be in essence doing armchair work, once the formality of doing brief surveys has been met. In short, the armchairs remain (at least partly) unburnt !



To give a related example of what I am saying, Knobe et al (2009) says of compatibilism and incompatibilism "In our view, the data presently available is not sufficient to decide between these contrasting hypotheses. In short, there is still much work to be done. And while the problem of free will has historically been the prerogative of philosophers, the current study suggests that researchers everywhere who investigate folk psychology, folk physics, and moral cognition have contributions to make in solving this particular puzzle". Now Knobe's work was carried out in United States, Hong Kong, India and Colombia and the authors still have that view. As far as I know only domesticated American and Hong Kong cases were dealt with by Sytsma and Cantonese diaspora cases by Lam and Machery. And Hong Kong is compact, developed, relatively modernised (with a better modern skyline than Manhattan) and not typically Chinese as much of mainland China is.

Of all the above cases, diaspora cases do not sound the best cases to use to attack Kripke's argumentation, as the cultural references presumably refer partly and possibly primarily to the host country, normally the USA for these diaspora studies. It is all very well to effectively go to the local fish and chip shop or deli to make your foreign language queries and in fact Knobe's early work (in English) was done by asking questions in Central Park, NY., and this is a very legitimate way to get a general local feeling, but world anthropology and evolutionary psychology and its conclusions at Tooby and Cosmides level really are another matter. It is far better and often essential to go back to source. At the "Institute for Fundamental Studies" (which at present has main headquarters in UK, Maharashtra (India), and Goa) we normally deal with non-diaspora Hindi, Marathi, Konkani, Tamil and English speaking cases, and we get gratifying results.

Machery (2009) says "So, what's going on?". Well, the above is some of what's going on.

But there is much much more !

I am saying that in a further three ways at least - and simply as a beginning - that more care must be taken.

Firstly I mention Vul (2009) and Haynes (2008). On comments on Haynes' work on free will, for example, Auburn University Professor Roderick T. Long (2009) says "This is a hopelessly bad argument; the results of this study have nothing to do with the free will issue at all. This is simply a case of experts in one field (neurophysiology) thinking they are experts in another field (philosophy ) that they seem to know very little about." To be fair, Haynes himself did start his career briefly in philosophy but most free will philosophers either ignore Haynes's work, or deny free will already, or are seeking a work round.

Fortunately I do not seem to need a work round as Haynes's work seems to provide simply more evidence that the McTaggart B series is insufficient and we need the A series as well. Perhaps more details later (Yates, 2008, 2008a, 2008b, 2009).

But my opinion aside, Long's general position (though not necessarily his views on politics or economics) is quite widely held. Professor Colin Blakemore, a neuroscientist and director of the Medical Research Council, apparently said (Guardian, 2009) : "We shouldn't go overboard about the power of these techniques at the moment". I certainly agree ! It seems that X-phi has still largely to come to terms with Haynes' work, but the eager assumption of a very simple interpretation of results such as those of Haynes, should certainly not be made. I refer to particularly to the recent work of Vul (2009) concerning MRI interpretations and also to the implications of the work of Hacker (2003) but detailed discussions on both could add considerable additional material to the above.

Secondly I mention the important work that has recently been done in behavioural economics, and in particular the work of Ariely (2009). This helps to bring yet more clarity to the view that the old idea that market approach which presumes that “the common people know what they want" is actually quite wrong. Ariely (2009), who is Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Behavioural Economics at M.I.T. has written many papers to this effect. This work undoubtedly affects questionnaire design and we all need to consider these angles. This sort of matter goes well beyond minor details of presentation. Most Westerners do not know or care, for example that the colour "white" is a colour for weddings and the like in the West, but anyone who lives in India can hardly miss that in India, "white" is the colour for funerals and "red" is the colour for weddings ! But Ariely's work, which is not per se given cross-cultural connotations in his experiments, must have its conclusions considered in such ways in each and every local context - when we are considering reinterpretations of philosophers like Kripke.

Finally we have prejudice.... Unfortunately it does not begin and end with Engine Charlie Wilson's dictum "What's good for General Motors is good for the USA". The Implicit Association Test (Nosik, 2009) has its most surprising and controversial finding as its indication that about 70 percent of those who took a version of the test that measures racial attitudes have an unconscious, or implicit, preference for white people compared to blacks. This contrasts with figures generally under 20 percent for self report, or survey, measures of race bias. Current studies in the research came from a number of countries including Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Poland and the United States. They looked at such topics as attitudes of undecided voters one-month prior to an Italian election; treatment recommendations by physicians for black and white heart attack victims; and reactions to spiders before and after treatment for arachnophobia, or spider phobia.

Obviously the IAT does not apply to white people only. One might apply it to Iranians living in Iran, for example, and their views on non-Iranians. Most certainly it will influence all who give or take such tests, to a greater or lesser degree. I think it was Joshua Knobe who did somewhat similar tests on philosophers as compared to lay people, and found such a bias there, but in his tests it acted as a reverse bias. At this point we could well become worried about relativism and hermeneutics in the sense of Heidegger and Gadamer.

A further brief point I'd like to make is the question as to whether this approach to Kripke involves modern semiotics quite directly rather than simply semantics. I hesitate to mention Barthes, Saussure, Lacan and so on but their conceivable relevance seems obvious. David Sless (1986) remarks, 'semiotics is far too important an enterprise to be left to semioticians' and it may well be true.

Conclusion:

This note is not to be in denial of progress, just to say progress may be difficult and when back at the "Institute for Fundamental Studies" in Mumbai after the monsoon I intend to do some investigations myself, bearing in mind the earlier work of Kripke, parallel universe ideas like those of Deutsch, Parfit etc., and the approach of Noe and of Clark and Chalmers. Naturally all this may ultimately give further evidence for the Many Bubble Interpretation, involving the A series of McTaggart.

References

Ariely D., (2009), http://web.mit.edu/ariely/www/MIT/papers.shtml ; e.g. "Tom Sawyer and the construction of value", Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Vol. 60 (2006) 1–10 ; popular book: "Predictably Irrational", Harper Collins, (2008), etc.

Frances B., (1998), Mind 107, 703-727.

Haynes J-D., (2008), http://medgadget.com/archives/2008/04/not_a_free_will_after_all.html

Hacker P., Bennett M., (2003), "Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience", Wiley-Blackwell, ISBN-10: 140510838X, ISBN-13: 978-1405108386

Lam B., (2009), http://philpapers.org/rec/LAMACS ; http://faculty.vassar.edu/balam/arecantonesespeakersreallydescriptivists.pdf

Long R.T., (2008), http://medgadget.com/archives/2008/04/not_a_free_will_after_all.html

Knobe, J., Sarkissian, H., Chatterjee, A., De Brigard, F., Nichols, S. & Sirker, S. (forthcoming). Is Belief in Free Will a Cultural Universal? Mind & Language ; http://www.unc.edu/~knobe/cultural-universal.pdf

Machery, E., Mallon, R., Nichols, S., & Stich, S. (2004). Semantics, Cross-cultural Style.
Cognition, 92, B1–B12.

Machery E., (2009), http://experimentalphilosophy.typepad.com/experimental_philosophy/2009/06/do-intuitions-about-reference-really-vary-across-cultures.html

Nosek, B. A., Smyth, F. L., Sriram, N., Lindner, N. M., Devos, T., Ayala, A., Bar-Anan, Y., Bergh, R., Cai, H., Gonsalkorale, K., Kesebir, S., Maliszewski, N., Neto, F., Olli, E., Park, J., Schnabel, K., Shiomura, K., Tulbure, B., Wiers, R. W., Somogyi, M., Akrami, N., Ekehammar, B., Vianello, M., Banaji, M. R., & Greenwald, A. G., (2009), "National differences in gender-science stereotypes predict national sex differences in science and math achievement", PNAS published online before print June 22, 2009, doi:10.1073/pnas.0809921106; Greenwald https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/research/ ; Sriram N, Greenwald A.G., (2009), "The brief implicit association test", Exp Psychol. 2009;56(4):283-94 ; http://faculty.washington.edu/agg/pdf/BriefIAT.26Jan09.pdf

Sless, D. (1986), In Search of Semiotics. London: Croom Helm

Sosa, D. (1996), “The Import of the Puzzle About Belief,” The Philosophical Review, 105, 373-402.

Sosa, E. (2007), "Experimental Philosophy and Philosophical Intuition", Philosophical Studies, 132, 99–107.

Sytsma, Justin and Livengood, Jonathan (2009) A New Perspective concerning Experiments on Semantic Intuitions. In [2009] Society for Philosophy and Psychology, 35th Annual Meeting (Bloomington, IN; June 12-14).

The Guardian, Friday 9 February 2007, Colin Blakemore as quoted therein: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2007/feb/09/neuroscience.ethicsofscience

Vul E., Harris C., Winkielman P., Pashler H., (2009). Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience. Perspectives on Psychological Science, in press ; Vul E, Kanwisher N. (in press). "Begging the question: The non-independence error in fMRI data analysis". To appear in Hanson, S. & Bunzl, M (Eds.), Foundations and Philosophy for Neuroimaging.

Yates, J. (2008a). http://cogprints.org/6176/ , "Category theory applied to a radically new but
logically essential description of time and space",PHILICA.COM, Article number 135.

Yates, J. (2008b), http://cogprints.org/6232/ , "Experimental philosophy and the MBI",
PHILICA.COM, Article number 139.

Yates, J. (2008), "A study of attempts at precognition, particularly in dreams, using some of the
methods of experimental philosophy." , Philica.com , Article number 146.

Yates, J. (2009), "The Many Bubble Interpretation, externalism, the extended mind of David Chalmers and Andy Clark, and the work of Alva Noe in connection with Experimental Philosophy and Dreamwork", http://ttjohn.blogspot.com/2009/05/many-bubble-interpretation-externalism.html