Mohtalim

http://arxiv.org/abs/0907.2494

1. how does mind act on matter?
2. If mind does not act on matter is mind a mere epiphenomenon?
3. What might be the source of free will?
4. What might be the source of a responsible free will?
5. Why might it have been selectively advantageous to evolve consciousness?
6. What is consciousness?

To Read Later.

An interesting approach to consciousness.

http://www.psy.cmu.edu/~davia/mbc/

I've only read the first few "chapters" so far. I think the gist of what he's leading up to has to do with the fact that the brain is really good at identifying patterns, both coincidental and real. It evolved that way to be a better and faster version of the mutation process or other processes that encode relationships the way the bacterium eventually mutated to incorporate a relationship between substances A and B in the example. I guess he's laying out a framework that might explain this evolution?

What the first guy is saying is, for all practical purposes, the same as what I naively believe about the nature of consciousness. That is, the mind is the one and the same as your brain's quantum state. His ideas are not without problems.

The Turing-Church-Deutsch thesis is very strongly weakened.

The Church-Turing-Deutsch Principle, as it is usually called, I don't think is subject to the kinds of holes the author is attempting to poke in it. I need to think about that more. This point, to me, seems to weaken his argument for responsible free will.

My own view of [a quantum coherent-decohering-recohering model of the mind brain system] is that it remains scientifically unlikely, but given the chlorophyll results and quantum chemistry calculations on electron transport, not impossible at all.

This is shaky ground, but I am sure everyone is excited about room temperature entanglement and we'll see some results supporting or disproving this in short order.

Incidentally, his discussion of efficient causes as not the be-all-and-end-all of explanations tracks closely with Wolfram's thinking in A New Kind of Science. Wolfram is kind of a crazy idiot, but that also doesn't mean he's wrong.

I need to reread Alan's guy. He's got so much analogy in that article it's a bit of a chore to piece together what he is actually driving at. I think, though both articles are on the question of mind and its relation to brain, they exhibit approaches which are orthogonal (not opposing).

Huh, I wonder if we'll ever hear, "Your Honor, his consciousness quantumly entangled with mine and made me do it!" and not have the dude laughed out of court.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1202.6433

Discovery of room temperature quantum coherence in
the avian compass[1] of birds, in the olfactory receptors[2]
and in light harvesting complexes[3{6] in the last few
years indicate that quantum eects might be ubiquitous
in biological systems. While the quantum chemical un-
derstanding of the details of light harvesting systems is
almost complete, no organizing principle has been found
which could explain why quantum coherence is main-
tained in these systems for much longer than the char-
acteristic decoherence time imposed by their room tem-
perature environment. Here we propose that at the crit-
ical edge of quantum chaos coherence and transport can
coexist for several orders of magnitudes longer than in
simple quantum systems.