findingblanks wrote: ↑Wed Mar 31, 2021 8:30 pm
Oh, I realize that even if we find a correlation between brain activity and psychedelics that materialists still can't tell any story about how consciousness arises from arrangments of matter. But I'm curious if Bernardo would agree that it is probably just a matter of time until we can provoke a physical image of such experiences.
The question is what do we imply with 'physical image'? Bernardo's statement is very broad. Neural firings are just one form of physical image.
Let's consider the following. What if consciousness experiences the
state of entanglement within the body and even beyond the body? Today's theory claims that entanglement can't hold longer than very short time and quickly decoheres. But how do we know that? Only because of specially contrived experiments in very controlled environments. We repeat the same experiment over and over again so that we build statistical data which confirms Bell's inequalities and thus the reality of entanglement. Since we are at great pains to support such a state of entanglement (as it can be seen in the current struggles in quantum computing) we assume that it's absurd that such a phenomenon could exist by any practical means at levels above the very tiny - such as biology. Yet at the same time even physicists admit that if the Big Bang is true, all fields existed in a singularity and thus now every particle is somewhat entangled with every other particle in the Universe, even though in largely decohered state.
The thing is that we build the theory only based on what we can experiment with and that's the highly controlled environments with handful of particles. There's
no way to measure if some particles not prepared by us are entangled. For example, we measure the state of a particle in the toe and one in the brain and we get some result. How can we ever tell if these particles were in entangled state? We can't. We need to be able to measure both particles over and over again to build statistics that would confirm results different from complete randomness. But we can't do that. In the lab we can prepare the experiment in the same initial conditions every time but we can't return the biological system in the same state and measure it multiple times.
Anyone with experience in psychedelics beyond a head trip knows that bodily awareness is just as real. We can experience imagery in our whole body, not only in the head. Of course scientists will say that the experience is really only in the head and the brain simply "imagines" the bodily awareness. But this is a strong claim that expresses only a particular scientific position, it's not some hard fact. If we consider the possibility that consciousness expands as far as it is possible to reflect itself in the coherence of entanglement, then naturally every part of the wave function can reflect consciousness, even beyond the body - after all we're entangled with the environment too. Please note that coherence of the wave function doesn't mean that all parts should act the same. That is, synchronous oscillations is just a special case. As in regular entanglement, one particle is spin up, the other is spin down - they are parts of coherent state, yet are measured as opposite. In this sense if we focus on the search of synchronous oscillations within parts of the body we may never find what we're looking for. The whole conscious state could be fully coherent while at the same time the entangled particles can be seen as random. We simply have no means to tell if this randomness is actually result of entangled state and all particles are like communicating vessels.
In short, if we take a broader view, we can see that it can still be true that consciousness has direct physical image in the way everything is entangled together, while we can never build a physical tool that can measure this entanglement. Thus we should really focus on what conscious experience itself can provide and not wait for
physical 'proof' that consciousness is more than firing neurons.
