Science Forums 2

[Thunderbird]

Originally Posted by Pyrotex

Okay, what Korzybski (and I) was trying to do was make sense of the world, in the simplest possible way with the fewest assumptions. He assumed there was no mystic solution, no supernatural solution. Your explanation is quite complicated and gives definitions to Map and Territory that Korzybski did not intend.
See? All these extra layers and entities are not necessary. Additionally, I haven't said much about the Mind, except to say that it exists within the brain -- as dynamic patterns -- that from one POV are electro-chemical signals, and from another POV is a self-organizing semantic structure.

"Quantum" doesn't come into this at all.

Again, from Korzybski, there is just ONE reality. He calls it the Territory. What the human brain does is to build a replica, a simulacrum of the Territory. This replica is constructed of memories and semantic structures (think of Lego structures, only the Lego blocks are "words"). This replica of reality, he calls the Map. Ideally, the Map should match the Territory, point for point. But it doesn't and it can't. The brain is just not big enough to to model the whole world, not even the parts we can see. But for our purposes, we can say that the Map corresponds to the Territory pretty damn well.

If you start putting Consciousness (self-awareness) outside the Map, then you might as well put it physically outside the brain. This leads nowhere. DeCartes made the same mistake. The Mind, all parts of the Mind, are physically in the brain, and therefore, they MUST be part of the Map. The very concept of "I", aware of itself, is not a physical object, not even an invisible physical object. The "I" in our Minds is a logical construct, a semantic construct. And the individual Lego blocks, are the atomic elements of Languaging itself. And Languaging is the concept and process of storing, retrieving, communicating, evaluating, and assigning meaning to Information. The Mind, the "I", is built out of Languaging.

So, we don't have to get supernatural here, or propose multiple Territories or multiple Maps.

We don't have to bring in the Id, the Conscious, the Subconscious, or intelligence. These are all just made-up words attempting to give labels to different aspects of the Mind.

Finally, we can speak of "exists" versus "is real". Let's define "is real" as the fundemental property of anything that has mass, physical size, energy, form or substance.

The Territory is real and it exists. The Map exists, but it is not real. Just as the letters "book" are NOT really a book, so is any simulacrum constructed entirely out of logical/semantic Lego blocks NOT the thing that is simulated. But the simulacrum exists, and it can be compared to the real thing it simulates.

The Mind, imprisoned within the skull, is totally cut off from all contact with the Territory. The Mind only has access to the Map. This is where the Mind exists, lives, loves, laughs, has sex, learns to read and write, wonders at the stars in the sky, goes to work every day, understands gravity and how to make cornbread, and carries on deep involved discussions about the Nature of Reality. Your entire subjective world is the Map. And you are an element of that Map.

Does that make more sense?

In quantum mechanics when we perceive “quanta” it's still within the realm of the mind and subject to perception and visa versa. Theses underling pulses could in fact represent the origin of consciousness. A basic binary code that all complexity is built upon. Utilizing the water analogy once more think of converging wave pulses that overlap each other curling around each other and collapsing to a point. This interaction resulting in a oscillation point, a clock constructed by time itself.

A self-organizing quantum process operating at the interface between quantum and macroscopic states, objective reduction (OR) is Penrose's (1989; 1994; 1996) quantum gravity solution to the problem of wave function collapse in quantum mechanics. According to quantum theory (and repeatedly verified experimentally), small scale quantum systems described by a wave function may be "superposed" in different states and/or places simultaneously. Large scale "macroscopic systems," however, always appear in definite "classical" states and/or places. The problem is that there is no apparent reason for this "collapse of the wave function," no obvious border between microscopic quantum and macroscopic classical conditions. The conventional explanation (the "Copenhagen interpretation") is that measurement or observation by a conscious observer collapses the wave function. To illustrate the apparent absurdity of this notion, Schrodinger (1935) described a now-famous thought experiment in which a cat is placed in a box into which poison is released when triggered by a particular quantum event. Schrodinger pointed out that according to the Copenhagen interpretation, the cat would be both dead and alive until the box was opened and the cat observed by a conscious human.

To explain this conundrum, many physicists now believe that intermediate between tiny quantum-scale systems and "large" cat-size systems some objective factor disturbs the superposition causing collapse, or reduction to classical, definite states and locations. This putative process is called objective reduction (OR). One increasingly popular OR viewpoint (initiated by Karolyhazy in 1966 Karolyhazy, et al., 1986) suggests this "largeness" is to be gauged in terms of gravitational effects and in Einstein's general relativity, gravity is spacetime curvature. According to Penrose (1989; 1994; 1996), quantum superposition actual separation (displacement) of mass from itself causes underlying spacetime to also separate at the Planck scale due to simultaneous curvatures in opposite directions. Such separations are unstable and a critical degree of separation (related to quantum gravity) results in spontaneous self-collapse (OR) to particular states chosen non-computably.

In Penrose's OR the size of an isolated superposed system (gravitational self-energy E of a separated mass) is inversely related to the coherence time T according to the uncertainty principle E=h /T, where h (actually "hbar") is Planck's constant over 2 pi. T is the duration of time for which the mass must be superposed to reach quantum gravity threshold for self-collapse. Large systems (e.g. Schrodinger's 1 kg cat) would self-collapse (OR) very quickly, in only 10-37 seconds. An isolated superposed single atom would not OR for 106 years. Somewhere between those extremes are brain events in the range of tens to hundreds of milliseconds. A 25 millisecond brain event (i.e. occurring in coherent 40 Hz oscillations) would require nanogram (10-9 gram) amounts of superposed neural mass.

In the Penrose-Hameroff "Orch OR" model (e.g. Penrose and Hameroff, 1995; Hameroff and Penrose, 1996a; 1996b), quantum coherent superposition develops in microtubule subunit proteins ("tubulins") within brain neurons and glia. The quantum state is isolated from environmental decoherence by cycles of actin gelation, and connected among neural and glial cells by quantum tunneling across gap junctions (Hameroff, 1996). When the quantum gravity threshold is reached according to E=h/T, self-collapse (objective reduction) abruptly occurs. The pre-reduction, coherent superposition ("quantum computing") phase is equated with pre-conscious processes, and each instantaneous OR, or self-collapse, corresponds with a discrete conscious event. Sequences of events give rise to a "stream" of consciousness. Microtubule-associated-proteins "tune" the quantum oscillations and the OR is thus self-organized, or "orchestrated" ("Orch OR"). Each Orch OR event selects microtubule subunit states non-computably which classically regulate synaptic/neural functions. Because the superposed protein mass separation is also a separation in underlying spacetime geometry, each Orch OR event selects a particular "funda-mental' experience http://www.hameroff.com/penrose-hameroff/cambrian.html