What is the best approach to study the Problem of Consciousness?

Yes there are other approaches, My own work has been in the Neural Correlates to consciousness approach.

What we do in NCC is look for evidence of neural mechanisms in consciousness for instance we may note that consciousness disappears (Coma) when certain signals in the roof of the midbrain are blocked. (Optic Tectum) this can be determined by lesion studies.

We might also note that removal of the hippocampus does not affect consciousness in a noticeable manner. From this we might come to the controversial assumption that the hippocampus is not involved in consciousness. However at a later point in our work, we may find that evidence for the hippocampus involvement still remains.

We are still doing research on NCC and the results are not complete. However, some preliminary models are beginning to come out.

Anil Seth made a good review of models of consciousness (see link below), but the best approach is described in the attached paper.

http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Models_of_consciousness

Of especial interest to NCC researchers, is the new techniques in MRI such as DTI, Resting State fMRI, and so on. For instance the work on Internal trains of thought, and Mind Wandering, has completely changed the way we look at the Neuronal Workspace Model.

Wow you aren't thinking small, projecting a project in the billions of dollars to grow, a brain.

What do you mean by evolving the brain when you are starting out with evolved material. Plus how are you going to monitor all the changes in the new brain so that you can tell how it evolved. What you end up with is an approximation of a human brain.

The Ethical problems are staggering, you will not get permission even if you can find the funding.

While I may agree with you that current techniques are not likely to end up with a conscious machine, it is because I feel they have failed to come up with a viable theory of what the machine does, not because I think you need something other than neuron analogs to create it.

Your wireless signals have not yet reached scientific consensus.

There are different forms of consciousness, the brains of dogs and humans are very similar - dogs are as conscious as our children

http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822%2814%2900123-7

Sometimes private approaches work faster and cheaper than the public ones, see the Human Genome Project, Craig Venter and Celera

While "ethical problems are staggering" in some parts of the world many other developed countries can move forward, they have the required potential to build the first conscious machine

Dorian,

While there are countries where human ethics are not an issue, are you sure you want to work in them?

You still haven't explained what you plan to do to "Evolve" a brain when you are starting with evolved pluripotential stem cells. If you start with another type of animal then "Evolution" has already taken another path, how are you planning on directing it?

I think this project is not nearly as promising as you would like to think.

Our brain is a formidable computing machine highly misunderstood today; the “evolution” or “ethical issues” can be easily solved.

Once Bill Gates said: “If you invent a breakthrough in artificial intelligence, so machines can learn, that is worth 10 Microsofts”. Building intelligent (conscious) systems that can talk, move and solve problems like us will be the goal of many companies in the future. Such machine would be "laughing of the mechanic aspects of its being" .

That’s the machine that is worth far more than 10 Microsofts . It is not science fiction

Whenever there has been progress, there have been influential thinkers who denied that it was genuine, that it was desirable, or even that the concept was meaningful.- David Deutsch

Dorian: "Whenever there has been progress, there have been influential thinkers who denied that it was genuine, that it was desirable, or even that the concept was meaningful.- David Deutsch"

Interestingly Dorian you qualify as such yourself, because you are denying that neurons work by action potentials. Whether you are right or not remains to be proven so that scientists in general will agree.

You are not ready for that level of funding yet. When you can answer how you will evolve the organism under control, you will have solved a major question in biosciences that has plagued scientists since evolution was discovered. Before you apply for billions in funding you should consider the nature of evolution more closely.

All you have shown by passing off the question as if it will be trivial is that you don't understand evolution at all. This would be a deal breaker when you try to show how you evolved a brain that was conscious.

"because you are denying that neurons work by action potentials" ?

Please read the paper:

"Always in the brain the electric field penetrates biological structure and during an action potential this variable electric field carries molecular vibrations (Fraser & Frey 1968, Martí & Bishop, 1993, Park and Boxer, 2002). Higher wave frequencies are generated by smaller structures embedded inside cells. Experimentally, these micron wavelengths are part of a large electromagnetic spectrum generated during action potential propagation (Fraser & Frey, 1968). Since meaningful information is stored at a molecular (protein) level in neurons and synapses, these terahertz waves are highly important (Born et al., 2009; Cifra et al., 2011). In this case, the carrier frequency can have a much lower frequency than the ‘modulating’ waveform. As a result, meaningful information embedded within molecular structure (e.g. proteins) is carried out by electrical waves. An action potential represents the moment of “reading out” meaningful information from molecular structures. During a spike event, meaningful information can also be “written” at a molecular scale in neurons and synapses since subcellular changes in the pattern of gene expression can be easily triggered by external events (Ivanova et al., 2011).A similar phenomenon occurs during synaptic activities when a flow of ions generate molecular vibrations and electric waves. The smaller the structure, the higher the generated rhythm of transformation can be. Therefore, meaningful information that was encoded (written) within neurons and synapses at a molecular level is transmitted synaptically and non-synaptically (wirelessly in both cases) during action potential propagation and all this meaningful information is electrically integrated in the brain (Aur, 2012b; Nunez & Srinivasan, 2006; Cifra et al., 2011; Landfield & Thibault, 2001; Aur and Jog, 2010;).

Contextual wave interference explains the presence of stronger nonlinear vibrations within certain parts of recorded cells that provide fragments of the engram (Aur, 2012b).

Dorian, while you are paying lip service to Action Potentials, you are also talking about signals that transmit "Wirelessly" in a non-synaptic manner, further you are talking about meaningful information that is encoded at a molecular level. I cannot comment on that, but it is not my understanding of the current state of the science.

Please, comment on:

"Experimentally, these micron wavelengths are part of a large electromagnetic spectrum generated during action potential propagation (Fraser & Frey, 1968)"

Dear Dorian,

I share Graeme's scepticism. More than that, the long passage you quoted seems to contain a large number of basic errors in biophysics. An electric field does not penetrate anything. It is just an array of potentials - it does not 'go' anywhere. Electromagnetic radiation in brains occurs as a power spectrum across a vast range of 'wavelengths' with radio frequency photons travelling in all directions in an incoherent fashion. That should not be confused with alternating fluctuations in field potentials like gamma patterns, which are not actually waves or even oscillations at all. I cannot really make head or tail of most of the stuff you quote and wonder where it actually comes from.

Please, see cited references in the manuscript http://dx.doi.org/10.13140/2.1.2286.5608

The expression "electric-field penetration" is widely used even in case of metals (see Black, & Welser, 1999). Indeed it's a broad spectrum that include micron wavelengths.... "An incoherent fashion" or "noise" is just for us when we do not understand the "language".

Black, C. T., & Welser, J. J. (1999). Electric-field penetration into metals: consequences for high-dielectric-constant capacitors. Electron Devices, IEEE Transactions on, 46(4), 776-780.

"An array of potentials - it does not 'go' anywhere??" That's a very old perception of action potentials, stereotyped signals, that don't go anywhere.Please, read Nunez especially the part regarding traveling waves.

Nunez, P. L., & Srinivasan, R. (2006). A theoretical basis for standing and traveling brain waves measured with human EEG with implications for an integrated consciousness. Clinical Neurophysiology, 117(11), 2424-2435.

And I would like to know more about your hypothesis - gamma patterns that are not actually waves or even oscillations at all, not the waves described http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma_wave ?

The problem is, I think, Dorian, that although physicists think very precise thoughts much of the time they talk in a very sloppy fashion, and admit it. 'Field' for a physicist is a shorthand term for a whole lot of related but quite distinct concepts. 'The EM field' can be the universal EM field. It can be the contribution to the universal field made by the presence of some specified event, or dynamic unit, or convenient chunking of dynamic units (e.g. the earth) made clear earlier in the conversation. It can be a subdomain of the universal field defined by its domain of interaction with some coupled dynamic unit such as a dipolar structure.

This sort of sloppiness happens in medicine. I can say to a colleague 'osteoarthritis causes knee damage'. I can also say 'knee damage causes osteoarthritis'. My colleague will subconsciously change the meaning of the terms when hearing the two sentences and be happy with both. The real problem we have in studying consciousness is that, as in many branches of biomedicine, we have to import concepts from physics which we are not that familiar with using in a physics context and are likely to misinterpret, and therefore misuse words, in a biological context. In the 1980s I got involved in osmotic forces and convection and diffusion equations in connective tissue. It became clear to the community involved that a large body of work had been done based on a misconception of how osmotic forces behave in solid colloids. Similarly we discovered that the convective and diffusional elements in the equations had to be considered in parallel rather than in series in a particular context.

So when we come to brains there is total confusion because the basic physics of oscillatory phenomena is not understood by almost everyone - up to the top level. I mentioned in another thread that Buzsáki cautions his readers that physicists and neurologists mean different things by 'field' - and then when he explains the difference he gets it back to front! There are no standing and travelling brain waves. There is no medium to support these.

I have raised the issue of gamma patterns not being waves on another thread but I can explain it here. Gamma patterns are due to alternating potentials mostly in dendrites and somata. Both sides of the alternation, from depolarised to repolarised, are downhill thermodynamic processes using ATP. There is no restorative force that conserves energy by exchanging it from e.g. kinetic to potential and back, as in a pendulum, within this system, so it is not actually an oscillation, merely an alternating fluctuation. Moreover, the effect on the surrounding brain is not propagated by a wave. It is like a pendulum weight being attached by a thread to a chair. The effect on the chair does not involve a wave, just a force - for the brain an electrical force.

To have a real wave in brain you need to have a true oscillatory process that can propagate through a medium that has a degree of freedom that allows exchange of energy from one form to another, with conservation, at every point in the propagation path. In air the degree of freedom is compression, in sea it is surface height. There is no such parameter in brain tissue that propagates oscillation. If there was, there would be phase progression at a fixed rate through the medium but there is no phase progression between some alternating cells and the EEG voltmeter - it is just like the thread on the chair.

So there are no waves in brains. Buzsáki is right that there are rhythms, and these are very interesting and important in signal triage for inference selection, but they are not waves. They were originally called waves probably because the man who found them was looking for telepathy (again according to Buzsáki).

While I do agree that some metaphors (rythms) used in neuroscience do not exactly reflect the language from physics in this case I feel that Nunez ( a physicist by background) is right regarding standing and traveling waves

Dear Dorian,

If you can indicate where I have gone wrong in my analysis I would be only too pleased to learn something new. But you have not raised a counterargument yet. Without that I remain confident that Nunez is wrong, as so many eminent neurobiologists are wrong in this area. I repeat that there is no parameter in brain tissue that takes the role of compression in air and so there are no waves. Nunez seems to make this mistake a few pages into his introduction. It is 'wave' that is metaphor. 'Rhythm' is correct because it simply implies regular repetition. Persuade me otherwise if you can.

No need to have "the role of compression in air" electromagnetic waves travel through the vacuum, the analogy with acoustic waves is an issue. Nunez is right. You assimilate easily what Buzsaki is telling, probably a far closer background.There are standing and travelling waves as Nunez describes and far more other complex phenomena since excitable structures are inside.

Please, notice that I only reply since you strongly insisted.

My view in no different than Max Planck quote" A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light...."

and also that "we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve"

But Dorian, electromagnetic radiation is not a wave in any sense that is relevant to neurophysiology. Photons have a 'wavelike' aspect in the sense of giving interference but this relates to a complex harmonic oscillation of a probability value for an ensemble described using Hilbert space (a very long way from the intuitive concept of a wave) and in reality has nothing to do with physiology. The angular frequencies involved are up in the 10^10Hertz range, nothing to do with gamma alternations. To have anything of physiological relevance you need some basis for phase progression linked to a property of the medium. If the medium is not involved then we are talking of radiofrequency photons just going straight through and out the other side to an EEG machine - of no interest to anybody.

As far as I can see Buszaki never actually makes any specific claims that are inconsistent with physics. He gives broad mission statements but then reins back when talking specifics. I have not looked at the Nunez text in detail but I cannot see how the quasi wavelike nature of individual radiophotons has anything to do with how brains work. If there is any interference it is each photon interfering with itself at a level that would have no physiological consequences at all. This to me confirms that Nunez is off target.

Dear Alfredo,

We are not talking of Feynman's concept of waves but the classical mechanical concept of a wave as defined by the classical wave equation. A sea wave is a classical wave of transverse type. Whether or not something is strictly a classical wave may not be important per se but it has implications for interference effects. As indicated to Dorian, the wavelike aspect of photons produces an interference effect that happens to have the same maths as a classical sea wave (as Feynman explains) but it is not a classical wave. The important point is that this interference effect will have no relevance whatever to brain function because it is at entirely the wrong temporal and spatial scale. Although gamma alternations are electromagnetic field alternations they will not have a wavelike interference effect because the gamma cycle has nothing to do with the quantum mechanical cycle.

Dear Jonathan, it seems you have a point in regard to photons, but brain waves are not photonic fields as far as I understand. In my naive view, brain waves are like sea waves, being composed of charged particles (ions) displaying interference effects based on the interaction of charges. Possibly sea waves also have interference effects related to charge, since sea water is salty.

But this is the problem Alfredo. Brain 'waves' in the sense of gamma or theta ARE fluctuations in EM (photonic) fields but since they are not waves they will not interfere in a wavelike fashion.

As I understand it the EEG measures net shifts in charge in a direction perpendicular to the cortical surface or scalp. If electron mostly move towards the surface there is a negative shift in potential, if away, positive. There is no measuring of anything travelling sideways across the cortical sheet.

If areas adjacent to an area fluctuating in potential perpendicular to the surface are in synchrony then there will be no effect from one area to the other since their EM fields would shift in parallel, like oarsmen rowing in synchrony. If they were not synchronised then the shift in potentials in the first area would 'drag' on the second area rather in the manner of the string attached to a swinging pendulum would drag on a chair attached to the other end. But this is not a wavelike effect. It is not as if the string was a whip being cracked with a transverse wave propagating down it. Nor is it like a seawave so there would be no interference 'fringes' anywhere, just damping of local fluctuations.

Moreover, these net perpendicular fluctuations are only an artefactual effect of adding all the vectors involved pointing in all directions in relation to complex dendritic manifolds.

If I am making an important mistake in my analysis I would like to know but so far nobody has given any counter-response to my basic point that there are no relevant waves that might have relevant interference effects or propagate information in a useful way. The suggestions raised, if I may say so, are clearly out of context. Ionic charge in sea waves is not going to be relevant to interference phenomena, except in the very distant sense that Coulomb force is the classical basis for intermolecular forces involved in compression.

Dear Jonathan "the role of compression in air" was written somewhere in the paragraph " If you can indicate where I have gone wrong in my analysis I would be only too pleased to learn something new. But you have not raised a counterargument yet. "

Have you deleted it?

Please do not think that I am trying to score points here, Dorian. I am simply trying to work out what the physics really is. I find it hugely confusing reading these neurophysiological accounts and from time to time I grasp the significance of something that previously seemed opaque. I am trying to read Nunez and Srinivasan now and am finding it very difficult to work out exactly what they are proposing. Some of the time they seem to write very like Buzsáki, with broad statements that I find ill-grounded interweaved with perfectly sound physics. One passage I have just noted is this:

'We again caution readers about our use of the word field in this context. OUr usage is conventional terminology in the physical sciences but it is confusing to biological scientists. The synaptic action fields are distinct from the electric and magnetic fields that they generate. While controversial reports of small electric field actions on nervous tissue have been published, we do not consider the possibility of such interaction in this book.'

It seems that they discard any ephaptic effects and build there theory entirely on action potentials and synapses. But, as for Buszáki, one then wonders why all the talk of electric fields? It is very peculiar.

Dear Jonathan, I will reply to your substantial post below:

"Brain 'waves' in the sense of gamma or theta ARE fluctuations in EM (photonic) fields but since they are not waves they will not interfere in a wavelike fashion."

Alfredo: Here is the crux of the problem. In bioelectric ionic activity, the electrons (and the photons they emit when receiving or releasing energy) do not interact by themselves in air or in vacumm, BUT they are tied to the nucleus of the atoms. The brain wave is composed of moving ions that interact as material particles, generating a collective phenomenon with properties emerging from the phase, frequency and amplitude variations of the ionic population. The interactions are between whole charged atoms obeying Coulomb's law. This is very different from a EM wave in the air or vacuum. More important, the brain has compartments and channels that direct the movements of the ions. The waves are therefore orchestrated by the brain structure. There are forced intecractions, vibrational patterns that appear as standing waves as well as ionic fluxes that appear as travelling waves. The EEG captures the EM patterns generated by the waves, but the waves themselves are not EM waves!

Jonathan: As I understand it the EEG measures net shifts in charge in a direction perpendicular to the cortical surface or scalp. If electron mostly move towards the surface there is a negative shift in potential, if away, positive. There is no measuring of anything travelling sideways across the cortical sheet.

Alfredo: The ionic waves travel sideways. This movement is essential for their putative function of informationally binding local cortical circuits.

Jonathan: If areas adjacent to an area fluctuating in potential perpendicular to the surface are in synchrony then there will be no effect from one area to the other since their EM fields would shift in parallel, like oarsmen rowing in synchrony. If they were not synchronised then the shift in potentials in the first area would 'drag' on the second area rather in the manner of the string attached to a swinging pendulum would drag on a chair attached to the other end. But this is not a wavelike effect. It is not as if the string was a whip being cracked with a transverse wave propagating down it. Nor is it like a seawave so there would be no interference 'fringes' anywhere, just damping of local fluctuations.

Alfredo: Yes, you are completely right about thisaspect. This is why Walter Freeman (and myself with Rocha in a 1999 chapter) have argued that oscillatory synchrony generates carrier waves (see illustration attached). The relevant information for conscious states and the relevant construtctive interferences are between the amplitude modulating signals.

Jonathan: Moreover, these net perpendicular fluctuations are only an artefactual effect of adding all the vectors involved pointing in all directions in relation to complex dendritic manifolds.

Alfredo: In agreement.

Jonathan: If I am making an important mistake in my analysis I would like to know but so far nobody has given any counter-response to my basic point that there are no relevant waves that might have relevant interference effects or propagate information in a useful way. The suggestions raised, if I may say so, are clearly out of context. Ionic charge in sea waves is not going to be relevant to interference phenomena, except in the very distant sense that Coulomb force is the classical basis for intermolecular forces involved in compression.

Alfredo: You are not making a mistake, but IMHO you are confusing the artifact (perpendicular EM fields generated by ionic waves) with the real thing (ionic waves). The real ionic waves are ruled by Coulomb forces and interact according to the molecular structure of brain cells and tissues (ions are compressed in the endoplasmatic reticulum, transported in microtubules, diffuse in extracellular fluid, cross membrane channels, gap junctions and hemichannels, etc.). The molecular structure of the brain directs ionic movements to generate coherent waveforms, and these waveforms produce orthogonal EM fields registered by EEG.

But that would not seem to be the case Alfredo. The alternating voltages seen on EEG reflect the anisotropic nature of cortex in an axis perpendicular to the surface. But it is reasonable to assume that in a plane parallel to the surface cortex is more or less isotropic at a mm scale in terms of ion flux. If we assume a pyramidal cell has its dendrites (d) arranged symmetrically (on average) around the axis of the soma/axon then the net ion flux during a period of depolarisation, in a plane parallel to the surface will be given by:

∑ Jd = 0

If we then sum over all the cells in a small volume we of course have:

∑ ∑ Jd = 0

So there seems to be no net ion flux with which to propagate an electrical signal laterally, even if there was a waveform to do that, which there is not. Any tiny local values for ∑ Jd will only influence other areas of brain by propagation of radio frequency photons. These are not constrained in any way and since cortex is so convoluted there is no means of propagating a signal transversely in cortex rather than out into the CSF or down into white matter.

There is also the problem of where the epicentre of the wave is supposed to be if the whole cortex is active. The calcium flux propagation you have noted in tissue cultures can propagate from an epicentre but only if all cells except the one at the epicentre are in a 'resting' metastable state with an ionic gradient that can fall on channel opening. There is no reason to think there is any such preferred epicentre in the cortex of a brain.

In order to have a viable theory we need to be able to write some equations. I cannot see what sort of equations can be written for cortex that would allow transmission of information in an AM modulated waveform. And the EEG does not register a waveform, it registers an alternating potential that is generated locally, not propagated from somewhere else.

What could the equations possibly look like, Alfredo?

Dear Jonathan, I am not so good with integrals and differentials, but provided an analog model of calcium wave generation and propagation in the attached paper (please see the "domino"and "carousel" effects, in case you did not before). Mathematical calculations using the Nunez cortical column model was made by Lester Ingber and colleagues n the paper linked below. Lester and colleagues calculate the influence of dendritic fields on the momentum of calcium ion waves in astrocytes

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=ingber+firing+theoretical+biology

Unfortunately I cannot access the full text of the Ingber paper. The abstract does not indicate how they deal with the geometry - which is the real problem. Propagation by induction, which seems to be the idea, is plausible as a component of a linear action potential in an axon but I cannot yet see how it would work in the complex geometry of grey matter.

Dear Jonathan, you will find several of his papers in the link below. The Jnl. Theoretical Biology paper I mentioned is under copyright, but I can send a private copy to you from my university computer on Monday.

In any case, I wonder if you can you fight against EEG registers. For instance, evoked potentials of reported conscious processing (P300, N400, etc.) imply the existence of cognitive neocortical "horizontal" waves. Several papers of Ingber with Nunez formalize this kind of process using standard statistical mechanics methods.

http://www.ingber.com/#NEOCORTEX

Dear Alfredo,

I looked at a mathematical analysis of cortical activity by Ingber (under Neocortex) but it completely fails to address geometry. As far as I can see this is a mass of irrelevant obscure mathematics that cannot possibly bear any useful relation to how brains work. There were no intelligible (or even unintelligible) predictions as far as I could see. I cannot work out what his 'minicolumn' i supposed to be. You could not predict an EEG trace from this in the way H and H predicted the behaviour of a squid axon.

I am not clear what there is to fight against in EEG registers. Why do evoked potentials imply horizontal waves? They imply horizontal connections, based on individual axons and, as I have said, action potentials are nonlinear quasi-solitonic events that probably do have a wave component based on induction (this was as Andrew Huxley explained it to me) rather than being just a domino effect. It may have got lost in the discussion but I have been assuming that it is understood that when I say there are no waves in brains I mean no waves other than of course individual action potentials, insofar as these are wavelike. And I suppose I should add that, as you know, I think there may be acoustic waves within individual cells, but my argument is against waves travelling across brain structure en masse mediated by electric fields. And Nunez denies that he is considering anything other than action potentials and synapses so I become more and more puzzled what anybody is talking about.

The traditional description in terms of action potentials would seem to be enough. Since we know that every post synaptic integration event is local and highly complex I see no prospect of describing thinking function at a more spread out level. It would be a bit like trying to describe the operation of a pentium chip in terms of waves - it would be completely hopeless. Such an approach for brains is a complete dead end.

Dear Jonathan, I think you are posing some good questions, but still failing to understand what I am talking about. Of course there are action potentials, but the timing of these potentials do not correspond to the timing of conscious ERPs.

What I have been proposing since at least 2008 is that your neuron acoustic modes (which are not propagated by means of action potentials) induce calcium waves in astrocytes, and that the latter are spatiotemporal waves that slowly move across the brain, generating the conscious ERPs. This is similar to the He and Raichle concept of the Slow Cortical Potential (SCP; papers attached). My conception is that the SCP is mediated by the astroglial calcium wave. As explained before, this is a moving charged particle wave ruled by Coulomb forces of attraction and repulsion and shaped by brain tissue structures. The combination of single neuron activity and the astroglial calcium wave would account for conscious ERPs.

Contrary to what you wrote in a previous post, I do not think that single neuron dendritic acoustic patterns are random. I think they encode conscious patterns, but they are confined to the single neuron. The astroglial calcium wave connects these acoustic patterns, providing both the binding of conscious activity and the emergence of a feeling attached to the conscious content instantiated in a distributed population of dendritic trees.

Lester Ingber demonstrated how neuron dendritic EM fields induce these calcium waves. Other studies have shown how these waves modulate synaptic activity of other neurons. Therefore, the picture is clear for those who would like to understand and properly criticize.