Feb 28, 2010 -- 3:41PM, Jcarlinbn wrote:

So, materialists how did Tsujii sync the brain waves of 4 other people?   

Practice and skill are sufficient for an explanation.  It isn't as if the musicians have no idea what they are supposed to be doing from one moment to the next. 

As far as materialism explaining cognition, that isn't what materialism does, since it is merely an ontology which claims that everything in the universe is composed of events, entities, processes, and forces composed of elements which are addressed and explained by physics.  More detailed claims about biology or cognition are for specialists in those fields to explain.  The materialist will only say that any successful models they create will have elements which are composed of the sort of stuff or activities addressed by physics.

The global neuronal workspace model is currently the consensus model among cognitive neuroscientists for explaining cognition and consciousness.  Most all work in various branches of the field assume the model implicitly or explicitly.

The following is a summary of the model by a paper written by Dehaene and Naccache, with friendly amendments and elaboration provided by Dennett, the points he address itemized in bold in the text of the abstract:

“At any given time, many modular (1) cerebral networks are active in parallel and process information in an unconscious manner. An information (2) becomes conscious, however, if the neural population that represents it is mobilized by top-down (3) attentional amplification into a brain-scale state of coherent activity that involves many neurons distributed throughout the brain. The long distance connectivity of these "workplace neurons" can, when they are active for a minimal duration (4), make the information available to a variety of processes including perceptual categorization, long-term memorization, evaluation, and intentional action. We postulate that this global availability of information through the workplace is (5) what we subjectively experience as a conscious state.”

Dennett’s remarks:

(1)  Modularity comes in degrees and kinds; what is being stressed here is only that these are specialist networks with limited powers of information processing.

(2) There is no standard term for an event in the brain that carries information or content on some topic (e.g., information about color at a retinal location, information about a phoneme heard, information about the familiarity or novelty of other information currently being carried, etc.). Whenever some specialist network or smaller structure makes a discrimination, fixes some element of content, "an information" in their sense comes into existence. "Signal," "content-fixation," (Dennett, 1991), "micro-taking," (Dennett and Kinsbourne, 1992) "wordless narrative" (Damasio 1999), and "representation" (Jack and Shallice) are among the near-synonyms in use.

(3) We should be careful not to take the term "top-down" too literally. Since there is no single organizational summit to the brain, it means only that such attentional amplification is not just modulated "bottom-up" by features internal to the processing stream in which it rides, but also by sideways influences, from competitive, cooperative, collateral activities whose emergent net result is what we may lump together and call top-down influence. In an arena of opponent processes (as in a democracy) the "top" is distributed, not localized. Nevertheless, among the various competitive processes, there are important bifurcations or thresholds that can lead to strikingly different sequels, and it is these differences that best account for our pretheoretical intuitions about the difference between conscious and unconscious events in the mind. If we are careful, we can use "top-down" as an innocent allusion, exploiting a vivid fossil trace of a discarded Cartesian theory to mark the real differences that that theory misdescribed.

(4) How long must this minimal duration be? Long enough to make the information available to a variety of processes-that's all. One should resist the temptation to imagine some other effect that needs to build up over time, because . . .

(5) The proposed consensual thesis is not that this global availability causes some further effect or a different sort altogether-igniting the glow of conscious qualia, gaining entrance to the Cartesian Theater, or something like that-but that it is, all by itself, a conscious state. This is the hardest part of the thesis to understand and embrace. In fact, some who favor the rest of the consensus balk at this point and want to suppose that global availability must somehow kindle some special effect over and above the merely computational or functional competences such global availability ensures. Those who harbor this hunch are surrendering just when victory is at hand, I will argue, for these "merely functional" competences are the very competences that consciousness was supposed to enable.

The “global availability” of information in the workspace model can be understood as a sort of competition for cerebral “clout” or “fame” as networks of neurons representing the circulating “drafts” have increasing or decreasing mobilization of resources in the brain.

When processes compete for ongoing control of the body, the one with the greatest clout dominates the scene until a process with even greater clout displaces it. In some oligarchies, perhaps, the only way to have clout is to be known by the King, dispenser of all powers and privileges. Our brains are more democratic, indeed somewhat anarchic. In the brain there is no King, no Official Viewer of the State Television Program, no Cartesian Theater, but there are still plenty of quite sharp differences in political clout exercised by contents over time. In Dehaene and Naccache's terms, this political difference is achieved by "reverberation" in a "sustained amplification loop", while the losing competitors soon fade into oblivion, unable to recruit enough specialist attention to achieve self-sustaining reverberation.”

Feb 28, 2010 -- 7:48PM, Jcarlinbn wrote:

 Sure. They are supposed to get the bow on the string moving at just the right speed with just the right pressure at exactly the same time as several other people are doing the same extremely difficult activity.  Practice and skill helps, but Tsujii and the quartet had a couple of hours to get it all together, exactly at the same instant.   Not about the same time.  It is the exactly where materialism fails.  Brain waves even of strangers are measurably in sync. What does it?  

Do you have a citation from a mainstream,  scientific, peer-reviewed source which expresses any serious suggestion that something psychic is going on?  If not, I still rest my case on practice and skill.  Breathless science journalism has rep for getting science horribly wrong and engaging in unjustified hyperbole.

Mar 4, 2010 -- 7:23AM, Faustus5 wrote:

In other words, you do not have a peer reviewed scientific source expressing the slightest notion that this result is remarkable enough that a paradigm shift in the mind sciences is required to explain it.  Case closed.

Case closed?   Just a little over reaction.

This is interesting data, from most reputable institutions.  As they conclude, further research and analysis is warranted.

Pardigm shifts occur under the weight of a multitude of data points.

j'carlin

mirror neurons, musical synchrony,  religious perceptions of God, and mental influence on the minds of  others

What's to explain about mirror neurons, religious perceptions of supernatural beings or mental influence on others?  At least in the sense that you have a better explanation for us?  (I omit musical synchrony from the list only out of politeness.)