Monday, November 20, 2017

Consciousness is more like sequence of flashes than continuous stream

It has become clear that brain consciousness is not a continuous stream but more like a sequence of flashes (see this). This is one of the basic predictions of TGD inspired theory of consciousness based on what I call zero energy ontology (ZEO). One can say that the subself (mental image) is a life-cycle of a conscious entity and that one has sequences of this kind of periods with opposite arrows of time: self dies and reincarnates with opposite arrow of time. Consciousness would have sleep-awake cycles in all time scales. This would give rise to various bio-rhythms. In EEG this would show itself as a decomposition to portions of duration of order .3 seconds.

In ZEO this could be interpreted in terms of a sequence of lifecycles in which time increases in opposite directions: first at (call it) "upper" boundary of CD, which shifts towards geometric future, then at "lower" boundary, which shifts to geometric past, and so on... . Note that the birth at given boundary is only slightly later than the latest death at it so that also our wake-up period at level to which EEG is associated could be repeated births and reincarnations forming an approximate continuum at given boundary of CD. Also wake-up-sleep cycle could be like this. Strobing character is predicted to be a universal feature of consciousness.

In TGD inspired quantum biology the strobing character of consciousness can be related to the nature of metabolism, which does not take place as continuous feed of energy but as doses with some average rate.

An extremely simple example of strobing character corresponds to a recently discovered system of charged plastic balls in plasma of Argon ions exhibing life-like properties for critical values of parameters (see this) (I tend to see this accidental discovery as one of the epoch changing experimental findings). The system makes transitions crystal-like → gas-like → crystal-like →... . This is like breathing or sleep-awake cycle. On basis of standard physics one would expect only single transition and stable state after that and this is what indeed happens outside criticality.

There must be a source of metabolic energy feeding the plastic balls system and located in the system itself. TGD suggests dark nucleosynthesis explaining also "cold fusion" (see this). The metabolic events occur randomly with some average frequency (rate). Crystal-like state has larger value of heff/h= n and emerges, when the system has received a dose of metabolic energy. Gas-like like state with smaller value of n corresponds to the sleep period. In living matter gel-sol phase transition and protein folding would be analogous fundamental processes. I have called protein unfolding period induced by energy feed as "cellular summer" and folding period "cellular winter".

Dark nucleosynthesis would serve as source of metabolic energy during the pre-biotic period when bio-chemical energy was not yet available and solve the hen-egg problem about which came first, metabolism or genes. The sequences of dark protons at magnetic flux tubes would give rise to analogs of DNA, RNA, tRNA, and amino-acids with degeneracies of vertebrate genetic code (see this). Genes are dark nuclei, whose transformations to ordinary nuclei liberate nuclear binding energy as metabolic energy. Hen= egg!

See the chapter Life-like properties observed in a very simple system or the article with the same title.

For a summary of earlier postings see Latest progress in TGD.

Articles and other material related to TGD.

4 comments:

Stephen A. Crowley said...

This is a really interesting , in my empirical studies of the US stock market indicies, I've found that the average time between transactions of the SPY (an aggregate of the 500 largest companies) is.. around 180 milliseconds.. very close in line with these estimates.. how strange... in empirical studies of the stock market they've found that the vast majority of price variation is caused by endogenous feedback mechanisms and not related to any exogenous shocks/whatever.. my plain is to write a computer program that adapts to these random variations .. it's kind of like predicting the flow of a turbulent river.. there are so many components to it, that it can't just change all its parameters so fast.. it's quasi-stationary, in some sense.. also, one volatilte trader I worked with at one point would fly into hysterics yelling about the "front page of the wall st journal" and things like that.. maybe he was seeing *his* perceived life as a mental image onto the surrounding society

Stephen A. Crowley said...

Oh yeah, not only is the time between transactions ~180ms but the integral of the autocorrelation diverges, meaning that the process is one of long-range dependency such that it is exactly poised at criticality, on the edge of order and chaos..

I've thought that perhaps the Riemann zeros could be considered to be the "times" of a point process and looking for a kernel such that its compensator would be Poissonian.. I wonder what sort of kernel function would possibly give good fits? the existence of a stable parameter set could be proven by maximizing the likelihood with Newtons method.. if the kernel was such that the parmeter space is convex then the fixed-point would be guaranteed to be unique...


Matti Pitkänen said...


I understand that this scale has nothing to do with markets as such. 180 ms brings in mind 300 ms time scale in EEG. EEG consists of pieces of roughly this duration and according to other source they split to two pieces: coherent and chaotic.

In TGD inspired theory of consciousnes this period would correspond to life cycle of mental image.

In TGD inspired quantum biology this period would split to two pieces corresponding to two phases: strongly coherent phase in which objects are connected by a connected network of flux tubes and phase in which network has split into pieces. Like solid and gas. Metabolic energy does would feed in energy and generate solid phase, which would eventually split to gas as oscillations split the flux tubes pairs connecting the objects by reversal of reconnection so that they become pairs of loops associated with the ends.

To your question I cannot answer. In my interpretation the argument of zeta is complexified conformal weight, which is analog of momentum associated with scalings rather than translations as momentum is. Second interpretation for zeros would be as values of coupling constant strength.

Stephen A. Crowley said...

I just thought it might be a reason why the time-scales are similar... I just noticed something rather uncanncy...take the Riemann-Siegel vartheta function. by replacing the lnΓ functions with their Stirling expansions we get vta=-(1/2)*t*ln(t/(2*Pi*exp(1)))-(1/8)*Pi if you integrate the exponential of this, you get a value very near the fine structure constant.. strange, evalf(int(exp(vta(t)), t = 0 .. inf))=136.39146706199227394 which is only off by about −0.64453207700772606