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>That seems outright impossible.

Why? It sounds like you're more or less restating the hard problem of consciousness in the context of machines, but I'm not sure I'm following you to your claim of impossibility.

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/mobile/w/story-of-psychology-morton-hunt/1100619956?ean=9780307568304

The Story of Psychology. I read this book in a History and Principles class. I can't recommend this enough, it's so easy to read and covers a great deal of what exactly the science of the mind is about.

The speaker in that video and his wife recently visited the authors of this paper: Reduced functional connectivity between cortical sources in five meditation traditions detected with lagged coherence using EEG tomography and gave a live EEG demo similar to what is shown in the video.

The team is now redoing that study using experienced TM subjects and I understand that the results are interesting enough that they are redoing all the other EEG studies on meditation they have published over the past decade using TM subjects instead.

This includes EEG microstate studies on TM and hopefully on the "pure consciousness" state, and even on "enlightenment."

THOSE will be really interesting, I'm hoping.

This is the topic of Guilio Tononi's latest book, out in a few weeks, "Sizing Up Consciousness: Towards an Objective Measure of the Capacity for Experience." It's available for pre-order on Amazon.

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/sizing-up-consciousness-9780198728443

This reminds me of Dennett's Multiple Draft. IIRC, in his model the brain maintains multiple 'drafts' of explanations/narratives that explain recent experience. Periodically one of these drafts is selected as 'the right one' and that is the conscious experience.

This article is taken from the latest issue of Consciousness and Cognition, which has the neuroscience of the self as its topic. Pretty fascinating read for anyone interested in the cognitive and neural science behind personal identity.

I haven't been able to read the full text.

I was asking specifically about the author's concept of functional connectivity microstates (FCμstates) which I take to be directly analogous to the normal EEG microstate concept invented by Lehmann and friends at the Key-Institute, but rather than looking at global patterns of EEG power, the author is attempting to examine functional connectivity at the same time-scale (using xLORETA or other analysis perhaps?).

On its face, what little I can grasp from the abstract, it seems a kool idea: creating a sub-second-scale connectivity map of the brain. But the article isn't cited by anyone, according to scholar.google.com, so I was wondering if it wasn't terribly well thought out, or if its one of those ideas that should be famous and widely accepted, but isn't, "just because."

>but I find it to be more convincing than experiments on rats or other animals, who don't even have a language like humans do

Let's not be too hasty.

Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings by David Chalmers

(On Librarything)

Amazon product description: >Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings is a grand tour of writings on these and other perplexing questions about the nature of the mind. The most comprehensive collection of its kind, the book includes sixty-three selections that range from the classical contributions of Descartes to the leading edge of contemporary debates. Extensive sections cover foundational issues, the nature of consciousness, and the nature of mental content. Three of the selections are published here for the first time, while many other articles have been revised especially for this volume. Each section opens with an introduction by the editor. Philosophy of Mind is suitable for students at all levels and also for general readers.

> PKD was insane, schizophrenic. And like this essay, we can't generalize from abnormal experiences to explain normal functioning.

From the TM perspective, everyone is abnormal until they are at least in the first stage of enlightenment, so ALL our science is questionable.

This research review discusses the physiological and psychological correlates of 17 people showing signs of normality: Transcendental experiences during meditation (pdf)

the TL;DR: our sense of self is tied to how stressed-out we are. High-stressed people identify as the traumatic past events that caused their PTSD. More normally stressed people identify with generic task-positive-network stuff like thoughts, actions, desires, memories, intentions, etc. Low-stress people just identify with "I am" without any specific "thing" that goes along with that sense-of-self. This last is considered the beginning of enlightenment, or "merely normal."

Given the above, it shouldn't be surprising that TM is effective at resolving PTSD in US veterans under expensive medical care, and overwhelmingly effective in resolving PTSD in war refugees living under bushes in Uganda -the higher the ongoing stress-levels, the more dramatic the change once TM practice starts.

I am not sure how much of your interest is in neural handling of time, per se, but I am currently reading:

https://www.amazon.com.au/Your-Brain-Time-Machine-Neuroscience/dp/1543619517

Your Brain is a Time Machine

It is somewhat dry, but it is an accessible introduction to neural correlates of time sense. No mention of language so far; I doubt it plays a huge direct role in time sense, as such.

> emergent and therefore epiphenomenal I'm sorry, but that doesn't follow.

It follows given physical causal closure

Dr. Jaegwon Kim on the causal efficacy of consciousness

> That doesn't follow either 1) this is an apple 2) This is just a collection of atoms 3) All collections of atoms are apples ?

Fine.

1) There are such a thing as emergence laws, that describe how the phenomenal arises from the physical (essentially emergentism)

2) When these postulated emergence laws are applied to matter that we refer to as humans, the result will be qualia. (again, really just emergentism)

3) If i choose a different set of matter to apply these laws to, say an apple, there should also be a result.

My point is there is no evidence and could never be evidence that there is a set of non-physical laws apply uniquely to what we decide is conscious and not to anything else

Wow, thanks for the comment and that great quote. I read it 5 times and I still don't fully understand it. Could you point me in the direction of where I can read more of this in context? It made me think of this TED talk about this neuroscientist that had a stroke and lost the ability to think in language. She describes losing the ability to discern her body from her environment, and essentially feels completely at peace and one with everything. This ego death is often described by meditators and psychonauts who basically say that when your inner voice falls silent, your ego disappears and you experience absolute liberation. Check out the video though, I think you'd find it interesting.

Brain function is a flow of forces and field excitations. When things just touch, there is a force and thus a feeling, but not a particularly complicated one.

>Maybe not necessarily touching directly, because apparently the qualia in the brain can be caused by synchronous firing

I don't have any good answers for the binding/combimation problem - other than I expect cognitive science to sort it out.

The unitary experience of a moment - even if we acknowledge a moment is smeared across a couple milliseconds - IMO that requies a unified, spatial instantiation of consciousness, which leads me towards something like CEMI - which is out there, worth considering seriously. But I'm not the expert, I just trust whatever the answer is it'll be wild.

The question makes sense. IMO the "hologram" is "rendered" via the qualitative aspect of reality, but is "structured" by the quantitative aspect. It is being like itself, this is what it is like to be an active neuronal network.

'Neurophilosophy and the Healthy Mind: Learning from the Unwell Brain' was a fun read. Involved a lot of case studies and the conclusions we might could draw from those with unwell brains.

I just googled around and it looks like D2 probably sucks compared to D3

I got this stuff, I haven't had my levels checked or anything but it seems to get into your system faster, and people in the reviews were saying they got their levels tested and they increased a lot

https://www.amazon.com/Vitamin-Spray-5000-Misol-MICELLIZATION/dp/B00S1QNMLE/ref=sr_1_4_a_it?ie=UTF8&qid=1519464250&sr=8-4&keywords=d3+spray

Anthologies are a good resource because if you read a book by one author you'll get a slanted picture of the field. A new edition of a good Blackwell companion just came out, with leading philosophers, neuroscientists, and psychologists all weighing in on issues related to consciousness and cognition. Here is a link: https://www.amazon.com/Blackwell-Companion-Consciousness-Susan-Schneider/dp/0470674075

Function, Selection, and Design is where I got most of my (half-remembered :)) exposure to the idea. There's a very unfortunate terminological issue here, since it seems really easy to conflate with functionalism as a theory of mind.

http://www.amazon.com/Function-Selection-Design-Philosophy-Biology/dp/079144211X