It's Day 2 of the Year 2019 CE, 1st Wednesday of the year January 2, 2019, FWIW
"What's matter? Never mind. What's mind? No matter." Old when I was a kid, a change on the "mind-body problem". The problem is probably as old as consciousness and is arguably multiple interwoven problems. There is no definitive solution. In my teens I opted for believing that mind was a manifestation of matter, specifically neuronal activity within the brain and nervous system. I couldn't prove that, but could find no evidence really supportive of any other solution. In college I came to declare it a "non-problem" because of "el's rules of relevance" and moved on with my life. There was always a little twitch there because, unlike "das ding an sich" and similar issues, there was some potential for an empirical approach, but I had no plans to willingly shut down the brain in order to determine if the mind carried on or not. That, I figured, could wait. (This essay, btw, is something of an unplanned extension of this prior essay pair: https://caucus99percent.com/content/wednesday-open-thread-models-maps-reality-and-relevance | https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/9/19/1794563/-Wednesday-Open-Thread-Models-Maps-Reality-and-Relevance , which, in turn back references this older material https://caucus99percent.com/content/separate-reality-kossack-way-knowledge-republished-gos ; original: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2011/1/25/938809/- .) OK, so this was occasioned by an article entitled The Hippies Were Right: It's All about Vibrations, Man! and subtitled A new theory of consciousness. The artile was in the December 12, 2018 Scientific American Weekly Review and can be read separately here: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/the-hippies-were-right-its-all-about-vibrations-man/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=weekly-review&utm_content=link&utm_term=2018-12-12_top-stories . In it the authors propose something of a fundamental or universal theory of consciousness, with implications of panpsychism, wide spread "consciousness" of at least some sort adhering in all matter. We get to the crux of the matter and the hook embedded in the title in the following two paragraphs:
Fast forward to the present era and we can ask ourselves now: Did the hippies actually solve this problem? My colleague Jonathan Schooler (University of California, Santa Barbara) and I think they effectively did, with the radical intuition that it’s all about vibrations … man. Over the past decade, we have developed a “resonance theory of consciousness” that suggests that resonance—another word for synchronized vibrations—is at the heart of not only human consciousness but of physical reality more generally. So how were the hippies right? Well, we agree that vibrations, resonance, are the key mechanism behind human consciousness, as well as animal consciousness more generally. And, as I’ll discuss below, that they are the basic mechanism for all physical interactions to occur.The idea or argument presented has a certain coherence and attractiveness given modern physics and the evolution thereof, the wave theory of matter and Schroedinger's wave equation, Huygens synchronization and a lot of other phenomena such as in an included list from Stephen Strogatz's book Sync. The author also points to neurophysicist Pascal Fries' work and his concept of “communication through coherence” or CTC. The author continues to asseert that insofar as everything vibrates, everything has some modicum of consciousness. (It can be argued that not only does everything vibrate, but that everything is simply vibrations and nothing more but that's a whole other box of cats.) The consciousness inherent in an electron or rock is, however negligible, except for the famous talking rock quoted below. Aggregates, however, ae a different matter, which depends upon coherence, integration, communication and resonance. Ah, resonance. Does that resonate with ya? In conclusion (more or less) he states:
Our resonance theory of consciousness attempts to provide a unified framework that includes neuroscience and the study of human consciousness, but also more fundamental questions of neurobiology and biophysics. It gets to the heart of the differences that matter when it comes to consciousness and the evolution of physical systems. It is all about vibrations, but it’s also about the type of vibrations and, most importantly, about shared vibrations.It is an interesting read and poorly summarized here and perhaps contains even a grain or wavelength of truth and inspiration. If nothing else, it permits we aging hippies to revisit some concepts and misconceptions from our youth as well as some common misinformation (The Beach Boys were never hip nor hippie just as they were never surf nor surfer. They were Jan and Dean in striped shirts.) For what it's worth, it's short, so maybe give it a read, it can't hurt ya. <
x YouTube VideoBut what if something's rhythm is "offbeat"?
x YouTube VideoAnd, lastly, what, when you get down to it, is a vibration in space time other than a ripple in the fabric of reality?
x YouTube VideoImage is: Image from page 36 of "Principles of electro-medicine, electrosurgery and radiology" Its an open thread so have at it. The floor is yours . Crossposted from caucus99percent.com