Hi Dorian (am a proud owner of your NED book!) and Mike, I believe that ‘NED’ will ultimately be able to be couched as a subset of the full picture shown in the Journal of Integrative Neuroscience paper (previous post). Indeed there are a whole raft of EM field theoretic approaches to consciousness that are unified by the paper (this will only be seen in time). Lots of different folk all get to be ‘right’ in slightly different ways for historians to sort out!
Hales, Colin G. 2014: 'The origins of the brain’s endogenous electromagnetic field and its relationship to provision of consciousness'. Journal of Integrative Neuroscience, Vol 13, Issue 2, pp. 1-49. http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S0219635214400056?queryID=%24{resultBean.queryID}<http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S0219635214400056?queryID=%24%7bresultBean.queryID%7d> (again... ask me for preprint and you will receive). Happenstance has book & paper happening at once! ---------------------- OK, so what’s on for practical implementation of computer-free AGI/Artificial brain tissue/actual conscious machines? As I said in Chapter 14 of the book: I am prototyping the basis for a new kind of neuromorphic chip: a new ‘logic element’. It is, in essence, just a capacitor! The difference is that its dielectric ’breaks down’ in the manner that an ion channel ‘breaks down’ the membrane, causing a massive modulation and spatial extension of massive transmembrane EM field (10^7 V/m!) into space. The capacitor dielectric stands in for the membrane. The transmembrane charge is in thick ‘plates’ that stand in for the ECS/ICS (intra/extracellular space). There’s some electronics surrounding the device that can be located _inside_ the device. Logically, compared to computers, the new device is, to the artificial brain tissue, what a ‘flip-flop’ single-bit storage/memory is to a traditional computer. The difference is that this basic device has an essentially unlimited number of ‘states’, (not just 0/1). 1 device , N states. MASSIVE increase in complexity right there, before you even start using it. No computing. Just physics. (1): Line up 2 of them, say A and B, side by side and watch A trigger B. What do you have? ACTION POTENTIAL travelling in the plane of the membrane: LONGITUDINAL COUPLING. OR (2): Place A _facing_ B and watch A trigger B. What do you have? EM-FIELD TRANSVERSE COUPLING. Sometimes called ‘ephaptic’ coupling in the literature. These are the 2 fundamental signalling mechanisms in the brain. Both actually REPLICATED by the device. No models. No computing. Just physics. Next: ARRAY (1) get the equivalent to a cortical ‘layer’. Do (2), except place an entire array parallel to another array: Cortical tissue. Place arrays of arrays next to each other... (EM COUPLE) and wire them to each other (ACTION POTENTIAL COUPLE) and on and on and on.. You end up with an arbitrarily scalable bionic brain. Hook it up to sensors and actuators = A robot. The whole thing is intrinsically dynamic and information is intrinsic to the EM field itself. Dynamic modulation of the field system. Consciousness is delivered by the EM field, just like it is in the brain, vuia the mechanism in section 6 of the paper (above). These chips will have an EEG and MEG signature like we do. This is real replication. Chapter 14 is my attempt to show the cultural strangeness that is the total lack of any attempt to do this before. This is the reason why AGI is failing and (I predict) always will: Because we have been using computers without knowing what we lose when we do that. To find out what you lose? You REPLICATE and compare/contrast with computation. Then you learn. Then you have done actual empirical science. Then you know what pure computing can do/not do .... and you have a scientific basis for that knowledge. Ironic huh? Anyway. Have a think about it. It’s not such a big deal. Not even that hard. So I’m kind of an Orville Wright in my wind tunnel doing for AGI what the Wright Bros did for flight. You think we’d have done that already, huh. Nope. Cheers Colin From: Dorian Aur [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Saturday, 28 June 2014 5:48 AM To: [email protected]; Colin Geoffrey Hales Subject: Re: [agi] New consciousness paper Hi Colin, Well, it's good to see something new. Three years ago from Arizona to Caltech and back to Leicester in UK some pillars of the neuroscience community laughed at me regarding “concept cells” - at that time a very revolutionary idea for which they strongly advertised http://neuroelectrodynamics.blogspot.com/p/concept-cells.html Was it so revolutionary? No, not at all. They repackaged the old grandmother concept and they lied to everybody pretending they didn't get NED -neuroelectrodynamics. After three years no one's laughing now. Modha has failed to deliver the *cat* with 1 billion neurons and 10 trillion synapses and Gerstner’s and Izhikevich spiking neurons do not provide more than previous generations (sigmoidal neurons) either at . In addition, Markham's repeated attempts to create the human conscious brain by reverse-engineering are no better than Modha’s projects. I hope that scientists in Australia have more honesty, teach less lies, old myths about the real brain http://neuroelectrodynamics.blogspot.com/p/myths-about-brain.html and fund more realistic projects..... There are a lot of ways to succeed where so many pillars of the neuroscience community have failed. Any practical approaches of how consciousness can be engineered? Dorian On Tue, Jun 24, 2014 at 11:25 PM, Colin Geoffrey Hales via AGI <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Dear Folk, I thought you might be interested in the following paper, which is essentially my PhD outcome packaged into a journal paper (49 pages!), contextualised with respect to consciousness, and now finally published in a special journal issue on the ‘Hard problem of Consciousness’. Online-ready only at this point. Came out yesterday. Hales, Colin G. 2014: 'The origins of the brain’s endogenous electromagnetic field and its relationship to provision of consciousness'. Journal of Integrative Neuroscience, Vol 13 Issue 2, pp. 1-49. http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S0219635214400056?queryID=%24{resultBean.queryID}<http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S0219635214400056?queryID=%24%7bresultBean.queryID%7d> ABSTRACT As a potential source of consciousness, the brain's endogenous electromagnetic (EM) field has much to commend it. Difficulties connecting EM phenomena and consciousness have been exacerbated by the lack of a specific conclusive biophysically realistic mechanism originating the EM field, its form and dynamics. This work explores a potential mechanism: the spatial and temporal coherent action of transmembrane ion channel currents which simultaneously produce electric and magnetic fields that dominate all other field sources. Ion channels, as tiny current filaments, express, at a distance, the electric and magnetic fields akin to those of a short (transmembrane) copper wire. Following assembly of appropriate formalisms from EM field theory, the paper computationally explores the scalar electric potential produced by the current filaments responsible for an action potential (AP) in a realistic hippocampus CA1 pyramidal neuron. It reveals that AP signaling can impress a highly structured, focused and directed "sweeping-lighthouse beam" that "illuminates" neighbors at mm scales. Ion channel currents thereby provide a possible explanation for both EEG/MEG origins and recently confirmed functional EM coupling effects. Finally, a physically plausible EM field decomposition is posited. It reveals objective and subjective perspectives intrinsic to the membrane-centric field dynamics. Perceptual "fields" can be seen to operate as the collective action of virtual EM-boson composites (called qualeons) visible only by "being" the fields, yet objectively appear as the familiar EM field activity. This explains the problematic evidence presentation and offers a physically plausible route to a solution to the "hard problem". For those impoverished and for those without institutional access I do have the preprint. Just email me. cheers Colin Hales, PhD Researcher NeuroEngineering Laboratory, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering University of Melbourne, Australia AGI | Archives<https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now> [https://www.listbox.com/images/feed-icon-10x10.jpg] <https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/17795807-366cfa2a> | Modify<https://www.listbox.com/member/?&;> Your Subscription [https://www.listbox.com/images/listbox-logo-small.png]<http://www.listbox.com> ------------------------------------------- AGI Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/21088071-f452e424 Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21088071&id_secret=21088071-58d57657 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
