Please Help Me Understand Consciousness

[Mudhammam]

I don't know enough about quantum mechanics to answer your questions, but you may find the following article helpful in placing his comments on Bell.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/media/...1_0158.pdf

As regards "actual information" traveling, a common example involves a huge pair of scissors. If you imagine a pair of scissors several hundred miles long, the point at which the scissors blades meet, when closing the scissors, may move faster than the speed of light. However, that point isn't an actual thing or quantum of information that's moving, the idea of where the scissors meet is the only place where the speed of light is being violated, not in actuality.

As to the question of a conscious observer or an inanimate object collapsing the waveform, it's possible Stenger overstates things. The question of exactly what causes the wave form to collapse is an open question in physics, leading to theories like decoherence, but overall, I think the trend has been to try to get away from the idea that a consciousness must be involved in order for the wave form to collapse.

I was surprised that Stenger took the approach that he did, and am unsure whether it is an effective critique of the work of people like Crick and Penrose and et al. The most common criticism of such models is that, from the perspective of traditional neuroscience, the important events in the brain happen at too large a scale and in too noisy an environment for quantum effects not to be "drowned out" in the operation of the more macroscopic processes of neurons and neural tissue. Another common criticism is that quantum theoretical models add indeterminacy and randomness, but neither of these additions lead directly to an explanation of the unique abilities and properties of consciousness. Much like in the free will debate, adding randomness doesn't yield an ordered process; many QM consciousness advocates seem to suggest that if you can just make consciousness dependent on quantum level events, you'll have explained consciousness. I don't think that's true.

A couple of google terms you might find helpful in organizing your search are "David Chalmers" and "the hard problem" (of consciousness).

Thanks a lot. I actually just ordered Chalmer's book The Conscious Mind a few days ago, along with Explaining Consciousness: The Hard Problem, a collection of essays from viewpoints as vastly different from Dan Dennett to Roger Penrose, all of which take issue with Chalmer's approach. Should be fun!

Also, what do you make of this? http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/201...085105.htm
I can't locate anything about it that Penrose and Hameroff aren't cited in, causing me to wonder if they're just overstating the findings here or not.