Network theory sheds new light on origins of consciousness

[Jim__]

From MedicalXpress

[center][/center]

[center]The black dots correspond to the 264 areas of the cerebral cortex that the researchers probed, and the lines correspond to the increased strength of the functional connections between each of these brain areas when subjects consciously perceive the target. The "hotter" colors are associated with stronger connections. This figure illustrates that awareness of the target corresponds to widespread increase in the strength of functional connections (Credit: Marois / Godwin). [/center]

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"Identifying the fingerprints of consciousness in humans would be a significant advancement for basic and medical research, let alone its philosophical implications on the underpinnings of the human experience," said René Marois, professor and chair of psychology at Vanderbilt University and senior author of the study. "Many of the cognitive deficits observed in various neurological diseases may ultimately stem from changes in how information is communicated throughout the brain."

Using graph theory, a branch of mathematics concerned with explaining the interactive links between members of a complex network, such as social networks or flight routes, the researchers aimed to characterize how connections between the various parts of the brain were related to awareness.

"With graph theory, one can ask questions about how efficiently the transportation networks in the United States and Europe are connected via transportation hubs like LaGuardia Airport in New York," Douglass Godwin, graduate student and lead author on the research, said. "We can ask those same questions about brain networks and hubs of neural communication."

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[Warren Stupidity]

1. The functional mechanics of consciousness are the relatively "easy" problem.

The hard problem is the nature of experience itself, what it means to be conscious.

[roguevalley]

2. I agree. I am also wondering where consciousness

is stored. Consider that we lose and replace our brain cells what? 16 times in a lifetime? If our memories are stored in our brains, how do they survive death and replacement of cells? I doubt that there is a mechanism that transfers memories to new cells. I also wonder how people can remember after huge brain injuries? Where do memories, personality and consciousness reside then? Some neurosurgeons are beginning to believe they reside outside of the body with the brain as the interface for their retrieval. I love science.

Uh, the last time I reported this, I got ground sluiced. Fire away, gridley.

[Warren Stupidity]

4. "I doubt that there is a mechanism that transfers memories to new cells."

is a sentence with a lot of assumptions. One being that memory is a property of a cell, when instead it could be a state of a network of neurons, with each cell in the network responsible for the equivalent of a "bit" of information. Replacing individual cells seems easy in such a scenario.

[Binkie The Clown]

3. My hypothesis is this...

There are three fundamental elements making up the universe: space/time, matter/energy, and information/consciousness. This hypothesis suggests that consciousness is not an emergent property of matter any more than matter is an emergent property of space/time, or any more than space/time is an emergent property of information/consciousness. Those three exist eternally. Matter can encode information in space/time, but information is not matter, or energy, or space, or time. It is something quite different from all of those other things, and elemental in and of itself.

That the collapse of the quantum wave function requires an observer seems to imply that "observer" is something other than space/time or matter/energy, otherwise the wave function could collapse in the presence of matter, or energy, or space, or time, which is clearly does not do. So if consciousness is an emergent property of matter then at what point does organized matter achieve the ability to collapse the wave function? There is a discontinuity there, so that consciousness has to be something other than an epiphenomenon of matter/energy in space/time. Hence, it must be elemental.

This is merely an unsupported philosophical conjecture, and not intended to be a falsifiable scientific hypothesis. But it is an interesting idea to entertain. And perhaps by exploring the ramifications I can some day come up with a way to make it falsifiable.