Today's Adventures into Neurology

 

See  Assessing correspondence between subjective reports and visual targets during attempted out-of-body experiences by Marina Weiler, Damon Abraham, David J. P. Acunzo and Niffe Hermansson.

My comment:

That was really interesting, thank you. I had an out-of-body experience once. I was travelling in a taxi on a long dirt road and it was as if "I" had jumped out of my body into the body of the guy sitting in the front seat who was looking back at "me" and shouting at "me" except it was I who was desperately trying to say something but I couldn't and the "me" in the back seat was wearing a green t-shirt, whereas I was wearing a red one. It was a pretty complicated situation but it all sorted itself out and I apologised to everyone else in the taxi. They didn't seem too phased. But testing people with random images displayed on a laptop screen sounds incredibly unlikely to work because the whole setup is just meaningless representation. If there is anything real about this then it is to do with shared human experience, you wouldn't expect to find it coupled to a digital computer and a random number generator.

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My comment:

I don't understand him because he seems to be talking about information we have about the world yet he doesn't say where this comes from. So he talks about Markov blankets like they're strips of bacon or something. (Sorry, for some reason I think of "Pigs in Blankets" whenever I hear the phrase Markov Blanket, I don' know why.) A Markov blanket for a random variable Y is a subset of a set of random variables conditioned on the other random variables [with respect to which Y is assumed independent]. So a Markov blanket only exists with respect to some set of random variables you have defined, and it sounds like these hidden variables Y in the blankets are just inferred to be extant. So it is a hidden stochastic model. The question to ask is "where do you get the data to test that model, and how do you test it?" but all he seems to say is that this is somehow the scientific definition of existence and isn't it wonderful?!  My question is "Isn't what wonderful?" You haven't said anything about anything, have you? cf 6:10 where he says "the only reason it is not dispersing is that all of it's internal states and its Markov blanket that is separating it from the rest of the water, ...." That's nonsense. He is hypostatizing his stochastic model. 

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38:47 He thinks of this as a physical theory, but talks as if it is nothing to do with empiricism.

This must be the same place this semantic closure bullshit came from. 

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A week or so ago I asked Peter Tse about this, but he hasn't replied yet. See James Cussen interviewing Cognitive Neuroscientist Peter Tse.

I have just heard the interview you did with James Cussen. It was really interesting. I then went and listened to your "MOOC talk" 2.14 Information as Pattern Decoding. Why do you think that it is only after animal brains evolved that pattern became causally efficient in physics? We have many many examples in ordinary physics where macroscopic conditions are causally effective. Clouds seeded by smoke from fires and phase changes in crystalline materials as they freeze for example (it happens only when there is a nucleation point and it's coherence spreads faster than the speed of sound in the liquid), or even "chemical clocks" like the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reactions. It seems to me that there is some physics of time going on in these systems that may be explicable entirely by thermodynamics.

The way these effects disappear from physical models is usually to do with the way we assume reducibility in our models, for example that the behaviour of a system of particles is determined by central forces acting pairwise between them, then we see gravitational clumping and the appearance of solid bodies, but that changes when the particles are metal-rich ore and ice with dissolved gases and they are heated by sunlight and the whole thing is moving through a magnetic field. Then the particular arrangement of the mass makes a difference and it no longer behaves like a linear superposition of point masses. See Collaborative Mathematics.