Quantum Approaches to Consciousness (2015)
wow, working in the field, i must say this is the best written piece of bs I have ever encountered.<p>&quot;The most discussed counterarguments against the validity of such strong reductionist approaches are qualia arguments, which emphasize the impossibility for materialist accounts to properly incorporate the quality of the subjective experience of a mental state, the “what it is like” (Nagel 1974) to be in that state&quot;<p>If that is the most discussed counterargument you probably could have stopped there, it is not a counter argument at all. The apparent immediateness and reflexive nature of consciousness is in no way proof of its immaterial or &quot;quantic&quot; nature. Consciousness is a seemingly unitary process, a monade, an indivisible phenomena, but it is not. It is partial, biased, composed of continuous unconscious preprocessing steps, of attentional, memory retrieval, reflective post-processing that can be measured, deconstructed, and tempered with through experimentation. Their argument is that a qualia appears to be more than the sum of its parts. All evidences would actually favor the opposite, consciousness, and the information it holds is less than the sum of its part. I will not delve into the details, because I am depressed&#x2F;frustrated by the fact HN comments disappear so fast in the abyss, and time is precious, but i will give an example.<p>Taking a simple psychophysical GO task, let&#x27;s say click on a button every time you see a dog in a series of fast pace images appearing on the screen. While performing the task sometime a dog will appear and not produce a conscious recognition nor a motor response, but recording the brain using EEG, you would usually be able on those trial to detect error signals. Those signal appears for rare events of interest -here the dog. Although this error information is present at a subconscious level, and implied already a load of preprocessing steps (proportional of the delay between stimulus and the error signal), it did not reach full consciousness to produce the motor response. A machine then, trained to recognize such error signals on both correct trials and errors of omission will be able to detect the dog, when the human did not, using the signal of the human&#x27;s brain. This is proof that consciousness is less than the sum of its part, it is using a final filtered hyper relevant representation of your inner and environmental reality. 
Not to talk about the monadic indivisible view of consciousness which is even more absurd: just look at heminegligence. Functions is lost, but the brain even forgets it had ever access to this function, it forgets it had a left side, that there is a side side in the room. This is not an isolated syndrome, focal neurological deficits are often associated with some degree of negligence of the loss functions. Wernicke&#x27;s Aphasia for example produce a syndrome in which patient do not realize they are saying or hearing non-sense, what could be there qualia then ?
If you believe your consciousness is more that the sum of its part, and monadic, just take an LSD trip and you will see what your brain has in store for you, what it filters out, what it can enhance or produce by itself - but also what is your consciousness then, is it not different above and beyond any information processing? But maybe then you will say LSD molecules are in resonance with a central string of the universe, it is the gateway to the quantic perception !<p>The brain has nothing to do with qualia, it works at the opposite of what a monade or a qualia is supposed to represent. The brain use distributed computation, distributed representation, multiple neurons for one concept, and each neurons participating in various concepts. Multiple brain regions for a function, and each brain region participating to a function. Conscious experience arise from these distributed networks interaction, make the mental experiment of killing one neuron one by one (leave the pons and medulla alone) and you will not see the qualia disappear abruptly, but you will see part of the experience, part of the function, of what constitute the notion of self first slightly disfunction then progressively disappear at different unpredictable pace with complex interactions between functions.<p>&quot;As a consequence, it is inessential whether a detector or the human brain is ultimately referred to as the “observer”&quot;<p>From a dualistic view arise false premises. The brain is not an observer, you are not observing the state of your brain, or collapsing any function. You are your brain, living in an illusion created by the interaction of systems inside your brain. It is all well packaged with your sense of self, which is an illusion, a function that can be altered: depersonalization, derealization.<p>And I wonder, in their view, which animal nervous networks have access to such quantic wonders? The worm ? the ant ? The squid ? The dog ? The chimp ? Or just us ?<p>You do not need anything but distributed computation to explain everything about the brain.<p>But I guess everybody needs to believe in something, at least he is not teaching creationism, and seems open to debate.