RE: Consciousness causes higher entropy compared to unconscious states in the human brain
January 31, 2018 at 11:08 am
(January 31, 2018 at 10:55 am)polymath257 Wrote: OK, I looked at the original article (in arxiv.org) and there is even less there than I expected. MANY basic problems in this article.
First, there were only *9* people tested. There is NOTHING that can be done statistically with a study of 9 people. I could stop there, but the problems keep going.
They determined if different channels on EEGs were 'connected' by whether the correlations met a certain 'threshold', but that threshold was never given explicitly. Then, if the values exceeded that threshold, they were set to 1 and otherwise set to 0.
Next, they use an *incredibly* simplistic model for the 'complexity', essentially that of a binomial distribution. The problem is that such a distribution has only one parameter (in this case the number of correlated channels) and the characteristics are such that 'more entropy' simply means 'more connections active' (unless more than half of the channels are correlated).
So, their ultimate 'result' is that there are more active connections when someone is awake than when they are asleep or in a coma.
Since they use Shannon entropy instead of thermodynamic entropy, and since their actual model is so simplistic, the claim that entropy 'causes higher consciousness' is just not supported by this study.
TL;DR: Their experiment uses too few people, is based on a model that simply states people that are awake have more active brains.
The connection to entropy is, truthfully, completely bogus.
Y'know, I'm glad you're around, Polymath. Otherwise we couldn't tell a legitimate scientific study from the babbling of nine undergrads with an EEG. A completely naturalistic explanation for consciousness/qualia is such a holy grail that I can't help entertaining a possible explanation of it.
