IFSA news

I have recently submitted the final version of my abstract "The A series, time and free will" to the "Towards a Science of Consciousness" Conference, 2010, Tucson, Arizona (April 13-17, 2010). The abstract is given below at the bottom of this entry.

A poster has been prepared to go with it also, we were given poster acceptance and expect publication of the abstract in the citable TSC Conference publication to be produced in due course.

An abstract of a new paper involving about half the content of this paper, given below, is entitled "Not Even Wrong - a view of current science of the mind". The paper will fill out some of the poster details even further. To enliven the abstract, I also enclose quotations from Voltaire and Orwell. Voltaire's implied criticisms of Leibniz I consider relevant to the text of the article, but I cannot put the article online yet as the experiments, involving some 32,000 X-phi queries, have not yet been completed. The whole article should go online here within a few months, when the X-phi queries are sufficiently processed.

We are also proceeding with the establishment of the Goa 'Institute for Fundamental Studies'. Unfortunately the Assonora project has to be discontinued due to problems with the vendor (someone else offered more money once we had done all the paper work) but we still have several promising sites in mind, with even further opportunities available. The smaller Mumbai site is of course very much still operative and is using some 25 voluntary unpaid assistants here in Mumbai to keep it running. Congratulations, team !

Current paper

" Not Even Wrong - a view of current science of the mind"

Abstract: Present progress in mind science is racing away in the direction of denying the existence of human freewill and animal and human sentience. This brief paper attempts to summarise a few brief reasons why areas of present work by prominent authors have departed from fact to the realms of folk psychology and summarises some of the ways in which present work can be put right. An experiment is described and carried out in an attempt to breach a little more of the present gap between experimental fact and the outmoded theory which others have tried to apply blindly.

"We, the Party, control all records, and therefore we control all memories. Then we control the past, do we not ?" Big Brother (from George Orwell, "1984"). "Myths which are believed in tend to become true", George Orwell.

“ Think for yourselves and ensure others enjoy the privilege to do so, too”, Voltaire.

Tucson paper

Abstract Title: The A series, time and free will

Primary Topic Area: [01.01]........The concept of consciousness

Secondary Topic Area: [02.01]........Neural correlates of consciousness (general)

Abstract: Present progress in mind science is racing away in the direction of denying the existence of human free will and animal and human sentience. This brief paper attempts to summarise a few brief reasons why areas of present work by prominent authors have departed from fact to the realms of folk psychology and summarises some of the ways in which present work can be put right. An experiment is described and carried out in an attempt to breach a little more of the present gap between experimental fact and the outmoded theory which others have tried to apply blindly. In important recent work such as that of Salti (2009) and of Banks and Isham (2009) we could be left with a source for an outline of conscious thought and the cerebral activity behind it. There is believed by some people 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. However, such current work as this seems to dispense with the idea of freewill in the McTaggart B series and if the possibility of freewill is to be retained we need an additional description of time involving the A series, which is believed to be not completely mappable to the B series. Modern physics uses the B series but some partial B series approximations to the A series have been made by the present author. The implications are briefly discussed in this presentation and the complete article will be presented at ttjohn.blogspot.com . Yates (2008) (at Philica.com, rnArticle 146) has also produced promising experiments along these lines and further experiments are in progress, which will be discussed.

Key words: qualia; brain; consciousness; McTaggart; dreams;

Publishing Email: uvscience@gmail.com

Publishing Organization: Institute for Fundamental Studies, Mumbai & London