Does Science Need Metaphysics?

Posted on April 5, 2020 by James Cross

I’m going to say no, but let me explain before any philosophers (armchair or otherwise) jump on my answer.

Metaphysics is philosophy.  Science is, well, science. At one time, these two fields were not far apart. It could be argued that the divide between them didn’t really come until the last few hundred years. In ancient times, knowledge was knowledge. Knowledge might be about different things but there was a sort of seamless blending of knowledge about one thing with knowledge about other things. Aristotle, the father of philosophy  who wrote on almost everything, is sometimes cited as the “last person to know everything”. This was possible not only because the amount of knowledge was more limited but also because the methods and domains of knowledge were not distinct. The same methods used to address problems in philosophy could be used in biology or physics. If one understood the methods, one could apply them to any field.

Metaphysics itself is a branch of philosophy . It “is the branch of philosophy that examines the fundamental nature of reality, including the relationship between mind and matter, between substance and attribute, and between potentiality and actuality”. Metaphysics works using logic and reasoning to deduct an understanding of the world. In Aristotle’s time, this was the method of philosophy and it was the method of science.

Science in our time, of course, needs to use logic and reasoning too, but it works primarily by measuring relationships in the world and inducing an understanding of the world from the relationships. Let me repeat this again. Science measures and discovers relationships. It creates models to understand the world through induction with the relationships it discovers. The measurements and relationships are not subjective but are shared within a community of other scientists that are theoretically able to make the same measurements and discover the same relationships because common measuring techniques are used.

Where is science on the question of the  “fundamental nature of reality”? Most people without hesitation would say science is materialistic or physicalistic. Many scientists would say they are materialists. For most of them, materialism is the opposite of the supernaturalism, the opposite of believing in things that can’t be measured. Most idealists think modern science is materialistic. Bernardo Kastrup, probably one of the leading idealist of this time, sees the connection.

The popularity of materialism is founded on a confusion: somehow, our culture has come to associate it with science and technology, both of which have been stupendously successful over the past three centuries. But that success isn’t attributable to materialism; it is attributable, instead, to our ability to inquire into, model and then predict nature’s behavior.

Kastrup has this much right. What contemporary science is about isn’t the fundamental nature of reality. It is about measuring and predicting. Calls for a post-materialist science, such the The Manifesto for Post-Materialist Science, or Phillip Goff’s calls for new scientific methods, as in Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness, are off the mark. But so is any scientist who think that a materialistic worldview is the only possible scientific worldview.

Science is anti-metaphysical. It doesn’t care about the ultimate nature of what it is observing and measuring. Its models, its particles, forces, and fields, are not models of fundamental reality. They are useful abstractions that provide a common language for discussing relationships and measurements nothing more. They are useful until better ones come along but they are not descriptions of the reality.

Some may object that a sort of anti-metaphysical, pragmatism is a form of metaphysics. Well, perhaps, it is. But, if it is, it is a metaphysics that doesn’t care about the fundamental nature of reality, that maybe considers it a pointless question.

Posted in Consciousness, Philosophy | 38 Comments

COVID-19 Alternatives

Posted on April 3, 2020 by James Cross

Perhaps needless to say, I am not a doctor or a medical professional so do not accept anything I write here as professional medical advice. Use your own judgment and advice of your doctors if you become ill.

Like most people, I am sheltering in place (or whatever your preferred term is for staying away from people) while the virus runs rampant through the United States. I doubt anything the current incompetent administration could have done would have prevented some severe disruption, but it seems to me clear that probably thousands of additional lives will be lost due to the missed opportunities to mobilize an effective response to this disease.

Until a vaccine is produced, I think the odds are good that you and I will get COVID-19 in one or more of waves that probably will pass through the population. If we are lucky, we will be ones with minor symptoms. If we are not, we will become seriously ill. One of the things I’ve been doing is looking at various alternatives for minimizing the effect of the virus.

First, regarding chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine. There’s a lot of attention on this drug because Dear Leader touted it at a news conference. So you will certainly hear a lot more about it. For the moment, I have this view:

“Whether hydroxychloroquine works in vivo is not proven for any virus, and in fact in randomised controlled trials against a number of viruses, including influenza, it doesn’t work at all,” says Douglas Richman, a virologist and infectious disease physician at the University of California, San Diego. “It’s my personal prejudice that this is also going to be the case with coronavirus.”

Another promising prescription drug is losartan.  Losartan is an anti-hypertensive drug that has been in use for many years.  There is conflicting information about whether potentially this drug could help or exacerbate the lung damage caused by the disease. The University of Minnesota is currently tied up in red tape trying to get a clinical trial underway.  Chris Tignanelli is leading the clinical trials.

A study Inhibition of Viral Macrodomain of COVID-19 and Human TRPM2 by losartan discusses something that seems like a simulation but suggests: ” The inhibitory effect of losartan on PARP has been shown and it could interfere positively in several points (PARP, PARG- macrodomain and TRPM2) and decreases oxidative stress and apoptosis in COVID-19″.

Another article also discusses losartan and adds a number of supplements which are usually available over the counter. I say “usually” because I’ve noticed a run on vitamins and supplements in some stores since the virus has hit. These supplements include:

  • Vitamin D 
  • N-acetylcysteine (NAC)
  • NAD+ and niacin (+ L tryptophan)

An older review study on the SARS coronavirus finds potentially effective antiviral properties from curcumin: “The authors do present some evidence suggesting that the observed effect was due to binding of these compounds to the spike protein of SARS. In addition, some test phytochemicals mentioned in the paper inhibited SARS 3CL protease activity in enzyme assays”. Curcumin is found in the spice turmeric.

Finally, the jury seems to be out on whether NSAIDs, such as ibuprofen or naproxen, exacerbate lung damage. Some European countries were finding that people with the most severe symptoms had NSAIDs in their systems.

 

Posted in Human Evolution, Uncategorized | 6 Comments

McFadden’s EM Field Theory: Part II

Posted on February 27, 2020 by James Cross

This is the second part of two posts on a paper by Johnjoe McFadden Synchronous Firing and Its Influence on the Brain’s Electromagnetic Field Evidence for an Electromagnetic Field Theory of Consciousness.

The paper provides an overview of McFadden’s EM field theory of consciousness (cemi). In the first post, I focused mainly on eight predictions his theory makes. In this post, I want to focus on the parts of his argument about how EM field theory helps to answer some of the difficult problems in consciousness research.

McFadden begins with a discussion about various ways EM fields might be related to consciousness. McFadden takes what he calls a strong interpretation approach:

I propose here that our thoughts are similarly electromagnetic representations of neuronal information in the brain, and that information is in turn decoded by neurons to generate what we experience as purposeful actions or free will. This circular exchange of information between the neurons and the surrounding em field provides the ‘self-referring loop’ that many cognitive scientists have argued to be an essential feature of consciousness.

A strong interpretation can be contrasted with a weak interpretation that EM fields provide a sort of portal to view the brain’s internal operations or the epiphenomenal view that EM fields are present in the brain but are mostly side-effects of neurons firing that contribute little to consciousness.

McFadden also contrasts his approach also with Susan Pockett’s in his emphasis on informational aspects of EM waves and fields. In this regard he is careful to distinguish between synchrony of firing neurons that transmit information and excessive synchrony that transmits little information, such as the case of epileptic seizures.

Next he tackles five problems of consciousness research that he believes his theory helps to resolve. As before, the selected content below is quoted directly from paper. Highlights in bold are mine. I would especially like to call out his critique of the neural identity theory in the binding problem section.

1. The difference between conscious and unconscious information processing

In the cemi field theory, the neural circuits involved in conscious and unconscious actions are proposed to differ in their sensitivity to the brain’s em field. During unconscious driving, the sensory and motor activity responsible for the driving the car would have been performed by neurons with membrane potentials far from the critical threshold for firing (either positively or negatively) and thereby insensitive to the brain’s em field. When new or unusual stimuli reach the brain (presence of child on road) the consequent synchronous firing of neurons involved in processing that new information would transmit the information to the brain’s em field, allowing it to reach our conscious awareness. This additional sensory input may shift the membrane potential of some of the neurons involved to near the firing threshold and thereby make the whole neuronal pathway sensitive to augmentation by the brain’s em field. Our conscious mind — the cemi field — does indeed take over.

The cemi field theory also provides a natural explanation for how, in the words of Bernard J. Baars (1993), ‘a serial, integrated and very limited stream of consciousness emerge from a nervous system that is mostly unconscious, distributed, parallel and of enormous capacity’.

2. The role of consciousness in memory

If the target neurons for em augmentation are connected by Hebbian synapses then the influence of the brain’s em field will tend to become hard-wired into either increased (long-term potentiation, LTP) or decreased (long-term depression, LTD) neural connectivity. After repeated augmentation by the brain’s em field, conscious motor actions will become increasingly independent of em field influences.

Similarly, in the absence of any motor output, the cemi field may be involved in strengthening synapses to ‘hard-wire’ neurons and thereby lay down long-term memories.

3. The nature of free will

Therefore, whereas in agreement with most modern cognitive theory, the cemi theory views conscious will as a deterministic influence on our actions, in contrast to most cognitive theories it does at least provide a physically active role for ‘will’ in driving our conscious actions. In the cemi field theory, we are not simply automatons that happen to be aware of our actions. Our awareness (the global cemi field) plays a causal role in determining our conscious actions.

4. The nature of qualia

However, awareness per se, without any causal influence on the world, cannot have any scientific meaning since it cannot be the cause of any observable effects. In the cemi field theory, consciousness — the cemi field — is distinct from mere awareness in having a causal influence on the world by virtue of its ability to ‘download’ its informational content into motor neurons. It therefore corresponds quite closely to what Ned Block terms (Block, 1995) ‘access consciousness’. How far animals or inanimate informational systems are conscious will depend on whether they possess complex information fields that are capable of having a causal influence on the world. This may well be amenable to experimental testing.

Since, in the cemi field theory, a conscious being is aware of the information contained within the cemi field, qualia — the subjective feel of particular mind states — must correspond to particular configurations of the cemi field. The qualia for the color red will thereby correspond to the em field perturbations that are generated whenever our neurons are responding to red light in our visual field. However, since at the level of the brain’s em field, sensory information may be combined with neuronal information acquired through learning, the ensuing field modulations would be expected to correlate not with the sensory stimuli alone, but with the meaning of particular stimuli. This was indeed what Freeman discovered in his classic experiments on rabbit olfaction (Freeman, 1991).

5. The binding problem

To illustrate the problem, consider two entirely independent neural networks (either biological or artificial): the first is able to recognize green objects, and the second is able to identify round objects. If an apple is presented to both networks then, in a neural identity theory of consciousness, each network would (if sufficiently complex) experience their own particular qualia for roundness or greenness. But now we add a wire (or neuron) that connects the two networks so that the combined assembly is able to recognize objects that are both round and green. A neural identity theory would then predict that the enlarged network should experience qualia in which roundness and greenness are somehow bound together in a way analogous to our own conscious perception of an apple. Yet the only additional input that either network would have received is a single binary digit travelling down the connecting wire from the adjacent network. Neither ‘roundness’ nor ‘greenness’ could be fully described by a single binary digit. To account for the existence of unified qualia that includes the information coming from both networks, the neural identity theory must propose some overarching reality that connects and unifies the two networks. But no such overarching reality exists — at least at the level of matter

But in the human brain, there is an overarching reality that connects neural networks: the brain’s electromagnetic field. At the field level, and in contrast to the neuronal level, all aspects of the information representing the apple (colour, shape, texture etc.) are physically linked to generate a single physically unified and coherent modulation of cemi field that represents conscious perception.

The cemi field theory is compatible with many contemporary theories of consciousness. The cemi field can be considered to be a global workspace (Baars, 1988) that distributes information to the huge number of parallel unconscious neural processors that form the rest of the brain. Similarly, the brain’s em field may be considered to be the substrate for Dennett’s multiple drafts model (Dennett, 1991) since its informational content will be continually updated by neuronal input until a field configuration is reached that is capable of generating ‘output’ that is downloaded as motor actions or the laying down of memories. The theory also has much in common with quantum models of consciousness (Penrose, 1995) since both propose a field-level description of consciousness. However in contrast to quantum consciousness models that must propose a physically unrealistic level of quantum coherence between neurons or microtubules within neurons, the cemi field theory has no such requirement.

 

Posted in Consciousness, Waves | 16 Comments