Tricky methods of BBC Science

[suchandra]

BBC SCIENCE obviously mastered the art how to present scientific content that makes people convinced for the rest of live.

Their magic word is Nano-technology, using a tiny, little Nano-camera which travels through the speech-center within the brain, watch the functioning of a living eye inside the optical nerve, how visual content is being processed and transported to the brain, travel through the inside ear and watch how sound is send to the brain where we become conscious about what just having heard and where in our brain all this is being stored, either in short- or long-term memory. How major parts of our brain actually never sleep but manage all the 120 trillions cells of our body day and night which all are linked and interact and are constantly replaced in such a way that even old people's body cells, even bone cells are only a few years old but are put on in such way to make the person look and feel old. Then travel inside a single body cell which is more complex than a city and consists of 300,000 different proteins which all are linked with each other and receive information from the brain.

Then of course the tiny little Nano-camera shows how our complete genetic material is copied and saved millions of times upon mini hard-disks, how food is being digested 24h daily and transported to each and every of the 120 trillions body cells, the body temperature being kept continual, hostile cells from the outside are averted and when the end comes the brain pours out hormons what prevents the feeling of too much pain when dying.

By now the viewer almost bows down of getting so much overhelming inside live recording from this tiny little Nano-camera travelling within a living body and finally they present their conclusion:

Consciousness is being generated by all the brain cells together - something like a huge orchestra, "a soul was not detected". And why the human brain started to develop to become special among all species? In the human evolution the first humans were vegetarians but then “they jumped out of the trees and started to eat red meat and only these natural proteins helped our brain to grow and develop to what it is right now”.

Question, where to find vedic scientific information how to rebut the argument consciousness is generated by all the brain cells in total, but is in fact coming soley from the soul?

Obviously their trick is to use scientific content to make people impressed and pliable and then seduce unsuspecting people to sinful activity under the disguise of this being scientific and of course present evolution as scientific.

[Guest guest]

"Consciousness is being generated by all the brain cells together - something like a huge orchestra, "a soul was not detected". And why the human brain started to develop to become special among all species? In the human evolution the first humans were vegetarians but then “they jumped out of the trees and started to eat red meat and only these natural proteins helped our brain to grow and develop to what it is right now”. "

 

There are a lot of conflicts between Vedic science and science as we know it. For instance, scientists today deny the presence of an ether, an all-pervading material throughout the universe.

 

As for consciousness being generated by all the brain cells together, well, that is one possibility. Could also be that consciousness influences the functioning of brain cells as well so as to express that consciousness in the physical realm. Your definition of soul is vague, but my belief is that the soul is really just a parcel of consciousness that is unique and comes from the Source of consciousness which is God. In other words, soul=consciousness. However, I think the true point of contention would be that consciousness is "generated" by the body at all. Perhaps it seems that way, but it's somewhat like the perennial chicken or the egg conundrum. There doesn't really seem to be a way to truly sort out which came first. It's true that as humans mature their brain develops and they express more sophisticated aspects of their consciousness. It's also possible though that the "soul" or consciousness itself is directing the way the brain develops and the way the human matures, and the ultimate instructions come from God.

 

I just don't think it's necessary to challenge what is evident by scientific means just to perpetuate our belief systems. In fact, science should help us develop a better understanding of the soul, or at least push us in thinking more about what exactly is meant by the soul or God, or whatever.

[Guest guest]

This assumption, that the brain produces consciousness, “the head doctrine,” seems most reasonable and few scientists question it – despite the fact that they are completely unable to establish how or where the brain produces consciousness, or what exactly this consciousness is. Nevertheless, putting aside these uncertainties, most researchers and theorists share the views of Roger Sperry, a prominent neurologist, who remarked: “I don’t see any way for consciousness to emerge or be generated apart from a functioning brain.” The theorists then give us “a promissory note” that they are on the verge of solving these elusive mysteries.

But since they cant produce evidence they should admit that they dont know and not pretending speculations and theories as scientific proof. This is fair swindle.

Proofing that consciousness is not created by the brain cells, science came so far:

 

Scientist Says Mind Continues After Brain Dies

 

By Sarah Tippit

 

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A British scientist studying heart attack patients

says he is finding evidence that suggests that consciousness may continue

after the brain has stopped functioning and a patient is clinically dead.

The research, presented to scientists last week at the California Institute

of Technology (Caltech), resurrects the debate over whether there is life

after death and whether there is such a thing as the human soul.

 

"The studies are very significant in that we have a group of people with no

brain function ... who have well-structured, lucid thought processes with

reasoning and memory formation at a time when their brains are shown not to

function," Sam Parnia, one of two doctors from Southampton General Hospital

in England who have been studying so-called near-death experiences (NDEs),

told Reuters in an interview.

 

"We need to do much larger-scale studies, but the possibility is certainly

there" to suggest that consciousness, or the soul, keeps thinking and

reasoning even if a person's heart has stopped, he is not breathing and his

brain activity is nil, Parnia said.

 

He said he and colleagues conducted an initial yearlong study, the results

of which appeared in the February issue of the journal Resuscitation. The

study was so promising the doctors formed a foundation to fund further

research and continue collecting data.

 

During the initial study, Parnia said, 63 heart attack patients who were

deemed clinically dead but were later revived were interviewed within a week

of their experiences.

 

Of those, 56 said they had no recollection of the time they were unconscious

and seven reported having memories. Of those, four were labeled NDEs in that

they reported lucid memories of thinking, reasoning, moving about and

communicating with others after doctors determined their brains were not

functioning.

 

FEELINGS OF PEACE

Among other things, the patients reported remembering feelings of peace, joy

and harmony. For some, time sped up, senses heightened and they lost

awareness of their bodies.

 

The patients also reported seeing a bright light, entering another realm and

communicating with dead relatives. One, who called himself a lapsed Catholic

and Pagan, reported a close encounter with a mystical being.

 

Near-death experiences have been reported for centuries but in Parnia's

study none of the patients were found to have received low oxygen levels,

which some skeptics believe may contribute to the phenomenon.

When the brain is deprived of oxygen people become totally confused, thrash

around and usually have no memories at all, Parnia said. "Here you have a

severe insult to the brain but perfect memory."

 

Skeptics have also suggested that patients' memories occurred in the moments

they were leaving or returning to consciousness. But Parnia said when a

brain is traumatized by a seizure or car wreck a patient generally does not

remember moments just before or after losing consciousness. Rather, there is

usually a memory lapse of hours or days. "Talk to them. They'll tell you

something like: 'I just remember seeing the car and the next thing I knew I

was in the hospital,"' he said.

 

"With cardiac arrest, the insult to the brain is so severe it stops the

brain completely. Therefore, I would expect profound memory loss before and

after the incident," he added.

 

Since the initial experiment, Parnia and his colleagues have found more than

3,500 people with lucid memories that apparently occurred at times they were

thought to be clinically dead. Many of the patients, he said, were reluctant

to share their experiences fearing they would be thought crazy.

 

A TODDLER'S TALE

One patient was 2-1/2 years old when he had a seizure and his heart stopped.

His parents contacted Parnia after the boy "drew a picture of himself as if

out of his body looking down at himself. It was drawn like there was a

balloon stuck to him. When they asked what the balloon was he said, 'When

you die you see a bright light and you are connected to a cord.' He wasn't

even 3 when he had the experience," Parnia said.

 

"What his parents noticed was that after he had been discharged from

hospital, six months after the incident, he kept drawing the same scene."

The brain function these patients were found to have while unconscious is

commonly believed to be incapable of sustaining lucid thought processes or

allowing lasting memories to form, Parnia said-pointing to the fact that

nobody fully grasps how the brain generates thoughts.

 

The brain itself is made up of cells, like all the body's organs, and is not

really capable of producing the subjective phenomenon of thought that people

have, he said.

 

He speculated that human consciousness may work independently of the brain,

using the gray matter as a mechanism to manifest the thoughts, just as a

television set translates waves in the air into picture and sound. "When you

damage the brain or lose some of the aspects of mind or personality, that

doesn't necessarily mean the mind is being produced by the brain. All it

shows is that the apparatus is damaged," Parnia said, adding that further

research might reveal the existence of a soul.

 

"When these people are having experiences they say, 'I had this intense pain

in my chest and suddenly I was drifting in the corner of my room and I was

so happy, so comfortable. I looked down and realized I was seeing my body

and doctors all around me trying to save me and I didn't want to go back.

"The point is they are describing seeing this thing in the room, which is

their body. Nobody ever says, 'I had this pain and the next thing I knew mysoul left me."'

[Guest guest]

"This assumption, that the brain produces consciousness, “the head doctrine,” seems most reasonable and few scientists question it – despite the fact that they are completely unable to establish how or where the brain produces consciousness, or what exactly this consciousness is. Nevertheless, putting aside these uncertainties, most researchers and theorists share the views of Roger Sperry, a prominent neurologist, who remarked: “I don’t see any way for consciousness to emerge or be generated apart from a functioning brain.” The theorists then give us “a promissory note” that they are on the verge of solving these elusive mysteries. "

 

The most plausible or reasonable theory does not mean necessarily that it's the truth. Given what we know and experience in everyday life, for the most part, yes that is the theory that makes the most sense. But I don't believe that the phenomenon of consciousness and NDE's are subject to the rules that govern normal macroscopic events.

 

In any case, my real point was that science cannot really answer the question that the brain produces consciousness or consciousness produces the brain.

 

The brain can interpret consciousness, like a computer interprets data it gets, but I don't believe it can create consciousness of its own accord. Naturally, the problem then would become where is consciousness from and how can we identify its location? Until we have a breakthrough in physics (hopefully in string theory, which I think is the closest paradigm yet to bridge the gap between mysticism and physics), I don't think we'll be able to even come to terms with this idea let alone try to solve this new riddle.

[Guest guest]

 

Until we have a breakthrough in physics (hopefully in string theory, which I think is the closest paradigm yet to bridge the gap between mysticism and physics), I don't think we'll be able to even come to terms with this idea let alone try to solve this new riddle.

 

Same with Ayurveda, vedic astrology, vedic cooking, again it will be probably the case that the none-Vaishnava make the breakthrough to even ask the right questions in that context: "Besides, if consciousness were no more than a program--even a horrendously complex one--why wouldn't artificial-life researchers or neuroscientists have gained at least a tiny insight into its nature?"

 

Penrose started to write about consciousness in his book "The Emperor's New Mind" and the more he got into it he couldnt stop and wanted to find out more.

 

 

Penrose first advanced the argument for a deep, if somewhat vague, connection between the mind and physics in his best- seller, The Emperor's New Mind. In that book he suggested that consciousness is created by some mysterious quantum mechanical phenomenon that takes place in brain cells. Unfortunately, brain cells seem an improbable locale for quantum mechanical antics. The well-known weirdness of quantum behavior appears almost exclusively in isolated subatomic particles, and it easily becomes masked in large and crowded systems of atoms, such as exist in ordinary matter--and cells. At the time, Penrose was unable to provide any hints as to how that conflict might be resolved. But during the past year he has found a way. Penrose can now point to a component of brain cells that appears to be an ideal conduit for quantum mechanical phenomena. That component, known as a microtubule, is Penrose's nominee for the physical root of consciousness.

Along the way Penrose came to think about the mind. In particular, he wondered whether or not a computer could be programmed to acquire something akin to consciousness. Artificial-intelligence researchers have already created programs that seem to capture at least the flavor of all of the mind's unconscious activities, including the work of the five senses, muscle control, and instinct. Such programs allow robots to find and pick up blocks, computers to answer questions about auto repair, and cartoonlike "artificial life" creatures to mate, find food, and otherwise live out their lives on a video screen.

But Penrose finds this explanation unsatisfactory. For one thing, research suggests that most brain cells are preoccupied with such unconscious tasks as processing and storing images and controlling muscles, and that only relatively small portions of the brain are dedicated to the sorts of tasks we associate with conscious thought. Such evidence runs counter to the notion that consciousness emerges from a more complex version of the same sorts of brain processes that give rise to unconscious thought; if it did, one might expect it to account for the lion's share of brain matter.

 

Besides, if consciousness were no more than a program--even a horrendously complex one--why wouldn't artificial-life researchers or neuroscientists have gained at least a tiny insight into its nature? The reason, Penrose concluded, is that the "quality of understanding and feeling possessed by human beings is not something that can be simulated computationally"; that is, it simply cannot be broken down into a series of steps, a sort of recipe, that when followed on a computer will result in a reasonable imitation of the real thing.

 

If the question of whether certain tiles can cover a floor is noncomputable, then might not the task of evaluating an object's beauty as well as any other chore of consciousness be the same? Penrose was sure they were. But if consciousness is noncomputable, then whatever process in the brain that gives rise to consciousness must also be noncomputable. This conclusion has an unsettling and inevitable implication: presumably, whatever happens in the brain obeys the laws of physics, and if one is going to keep religion and metaphysics out of the picture, all the known laws of physics are computable. According to these laws, every physical process in the universe--from atomic collisions to galactic collisions--can be flawlessly simulated, at least in principle, on a computer. That being the case, Penrose decided the brain must incorporate a physical process that simply isn't covered by the known laws of physics. Consciousness, he concluded, is rooted in new physics--that is, in laws not yet discovered or formulated. Furthermore, he thought he knew where to look for them: in the weird underworld of quantum mechanics.

 

[Guest guest]

I think the mistake here is that just because everything might be computable, that doesn't necessarily take religion, metaphysics and God out of the equation. The more answers we have the more questions we have, really. Who's to say that the new, undiscovered as of yet laws of physics aren't really related to metaphysics, God, and in essence religion? Didn't the Vedic rishis formulate a system of understanding for everything, down to even a person's future? The language may be different, but the end result or at least the implication is the same: everything is computable, everything is calculabe, even a person's fate. Of course, the one variable that will always remain the X factor is God, who can change things in an instant and throw a wrench into the works.

[Guest guest]

However, if we support the hypothesis of consciousness as a physical property of the brain, the question becomes: when will a computer become self-aware?

 

This precondition derives from the assertion that to develop self-awareness, a neural network must be at least as complex as the human brain.

 

Why this assertion? Because it appears that less-complex brains cannot produce conscious thought.

 

 

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How much memory would a computer require to replicate the human brain's complexity? The human brain has about 10<sup>12 neurons, and each neuron makes about 10<sup>3 synaptic connections with other neurons, on average, for a total of 10<sup>15 synapses. Artificial neural netWorks can simulate synapses using a floating-point number that requires 4 bytes of memory to be represented in a computer. As a consequence, simulating 10<sup>15 synapses requires a total of 4 million Gbytes. Simulating the human brain requires 5 million Gbytes, including the auxiliary variables for storing neuron outputs and other internal brain states.

 

When will such a memory be available in a computer? During the past 20 years, random-access memory capacity increased exponentially by a factor of 10 every four years.

To calculate the year in which computers will have 5 million Gbytes of RAM, we substitute that number in the equation above. This gives us the year 2029. Ray Kurzweil, Gregory S Paul and Earl Cox, and Hans Moravec derived similar predictions.

 

The existence of a powerful computer equipped with millions of gigabytes of RAM is not in itself sufficient to guarantee that the machine will become self-aware.

 

Other important factors influence this process, such as the progress of theories on artificial neural networks and the basic biological mechanisms of mind, for which it is impossible to attempt precise estimates. Further, some could argue that the presented computation was done on personal computers, which do not represent top-of-the-line technology. Others could object that the same amount of RAM could be available using a computer network or virtual-memory management mechanisms to exploit hard-disk space. In any case, even if we adopt different numbers, the computation's basic principle remains the same, and we could advance the date by only a few years.

 

Conversely, how would we feel with a faster brain? Today a logic port is six orders of magnitude faster than a neuron. Biological neurons respond within a few milliseconds, but electronic circuits can respond within a few nanoseconds. This observation leads to an interesting question: If consciousness emerges in an artificial machine, what will time perception be like to a simulated brain that thinks millions of times faster than a human brain?

 

It is possible that, for conscious machines, the world around them will seem to move slower. Perhaps insects view the world this way, so that, to a fly, a swatting human hand looks like it is moving in slow motion, thus giving the fly plenty of time to glide leisurely out of the way.

 

Further, developing an artificial brain based on the same principles as in the biological brain would provide a means for transferring the human mind to faster and more robust support, opening the door to immortality. Freed from a fragile and degradable body, a human being with synthetic organs, including an artificial brain, could represent humanity's next evolutionary step.

 

Such a new species - a natural result of human technological progress - could quickly colonise the universe, search for alien civilisations, survive to the death of the solar system, control the energy of black holes, and move at the speed of light by transmitting the information necessary for replication to other planets. As has proven the case with all important human discoveries - from nuclear energy to the atomic bomb, from genetic engineering to human cloning - the real problem will be keeping technology under control. Should self-aware computers become possible, we must ensure that we use them for human progress and not for catastrophic aims.

 

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Giorgio Buttazzo is a professor of computer engineering at the University of Pavia, Pavia, Italy. His research interests include real-time systems, advanced robotics, and neural networks. Buttazzo received a PhD in computer engineering from the Scuola Superiore Sant' Anna of Pisa. He is a member of the IEEE. Contact him at buttazzo@unipv.it.

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