Of Consciousness, the Brain, and the Soul

(Image from scitechdaily)

Much as UFO skeptics claim that there is no definitive evidence of alien life, so do most scientists believe that consciousness does not exist outside the human brain. Another way of framing the latter proposition is that there is no proof that the soul exists.

American Enterprise Institute scholar Charles Murray thinks that enough evidence has accumulated to question the brain-only view of human consciousness. [bold added]

the most robust, hardest-to-ignore evidence comes from a phenomenon called terminal lucidity: a sudden, temporary return to self-awareness, memory and lucid communication by a person whose brain is no longer functional usually because of advanced dementia but occasionally because of meningitis, brain tumors, strokes or chronic psychiatric disorders.

Terminal lucidity can last from a few minutes to a few hours. In the most dramatic cases, people who have been unable to communicate or even recognize their spouses or children for years suddenly become alert and exhibit their former personalities, complete with reminiscences and incisive questions. It is almost always followed by complete mental relapse and death within a day or two.

The phenomenon didn’t have a name until 2009, but case studies reach back to detailed clinical descriptions from the 19th century. Hospices, palliative-care centers, and long-term care wards for dementia patients continued to observe the condition during the 20th century but usually treated it as a curious episode that didn’t warrant a write-up. With the advent of social media, reports began to accumulate. We now have a growing technical literature and a large, systematic sample compiled by Austrian psychologist Alexander Batthyány.

Two features of the best-documented cases combine to meet Sagan’s standard: The subjects suffered from medically verified disorders that made their brains incapable of organized mental activity; and multiple observers, including medical personnel, recorded the lucidity.

A strict materialist explanation must posit a so-far-unknown capability of the brain. But the brain has been mapped for years, and a great deal is known about the functions of its regions. Discovering this new feature would be akin to finding a way that blood can circulate when the heart stops pumping.

Charles Murray analogizes the current state of consciousness science to the late 19th century problems with Newton's physics that required the creation of a new theoretical model:

I see the strict materialistic view of consciousness as being in roughly the same fix as Newtonian physics was in 1887, when the Michelson-Morley experiment proved that the speed of light doesn’t behave as Newton’s laws said it should. It took 18 years before Einstein’s theory of special relativity accommodated the anomaly.

We are identifying anomalies in the materialist position that must eventually lead to a paradigm shift. Science will have to acknowledge that even though conventional neuroscience explains much about consciousness under ordinary circumstances, something else can come into play under the extreme conditions of imminent death.

The implications are momentous. Astrophysicist Robert Jastrow observed that for a scientist trying to explain creation, the verification of the big-bang theory “ends like a bad dream”: “As he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.” Neuroscientists who have been trying to explain consciousness may have to face their own bad dream: coming to terms with evidence for the human soul.

The 21st century was predicted to be the century of the Brain or when the war on cancer would be won. But the century of "soul science"? That wasn't on my bingo card.

Asteroids

Asteroid 2023 BU’s trajectory is in red (WSJ illustration)

An asteroid flew by earth today, missing it by a mere 2,200 miles:

An asteroid the size of a big truck will fly by Earth on Thursday just 2,200 miles above the planet’s surface in one of the closest approaches ever recorded, scientists said.

The asteroid, named 2023 BU, will travel over the Pacific Ocean west of southern Chile, Thursday afternoon Pacific time, according to Davide Farnocchia, a navigation engineer at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The near-Earth object poses no danger, and there is no expected impact...

Had it entered Earth’s orbit, the asteroid would have burned upon entry and, at its small size, turned into a fireball. “It’s not going to get close enough for that,” said Dr. Farnocchia.

What's alarming to this non-astronomer is that the object was detected on January 21st, less than a week ago.

I hope that larger asteroids that could possibly cross earth's path are being tracked, but experience tells us that we don't know about all of them.

The late Stephen Hawking's principal worry was that an asteroid strike would end life on earth:

“There are thousands of really large asteroids, some are over ten miles long – the size of Manhattan.

“An asteroid this size hits the Earth [every] 100,000,000 years.

“The last one struck the Earth 65,000,000 years ago, and probably was responsible for wiping out the dinosaurs.

“We don’t know when the next asteroid will strike, but if it’s big enough, it could sterilise our planet.

“That would be the end of the five billion year story of life on Earth.”

Sweet dreams!

Thinking Like a Greek

We live in an age of specialization and compartmentalization. Science, religion, mathematics, politics, philosophy, and literature are separate fields of study. Each of these has dozens of sub-categories with their own terminologies and modes of thinking.

However, the ancient Greeks

didn't make a distinction between philosophy and science, nor did they recognize the range of disciplines such as physics, chemistry, mathematics, astronomy, etc. that we do today. There simply wasn't the depth of knowledge and range of information that later made separate disciplines practical. In the Greek era, one individual could be an expert in several fields.

The splintering of knowledge makes it difficult to recognize patterns that may cross knowledge silos. More importantly, some believe that there is a deeper underlying reality to the universe that is understood only piecemeal by experts in their respective specialties. No human being has yet fully grasped, much less been able to explain to his fellow creatures, such a reality.

In a book to be released this Tuesday, Professor of theoretical physics Heinrich Päs ponders the "One."

his book proposes, rather than a definitive answer, an exploration of both the mind-bending conclusions of modern physics and the long history of the beguiling notion of a unifying, universal fabric. His book proves a heady mix of history, philosophy and cutting-edge theory that is fascinating, provocative and at times infuriating.

I'm a sucker for these books that explain the nature of the universe, where it came from and where it's going. If the writer presumes to discuss the nature of man, then I must resist the temptation to tell him to stay in his lane, which in this case is theoretical physics. He's thinking like an ancient Greek.

Dark Beginnings

(Illustration from EarthSky)

One question I have zero expertise in answering:

Black holes and dark matter — are they one and the same? [bold added]

If most of the primordial black holes were “born” [after the Big Bang] at a size roughly 1.4 times the mass of Earth’s sun, they could potentially account for all dark matter, said Yale professor of astronomy and physics Priyamvada Natarajan, the paper’s theorist.

Natarajan and her colleagues say their new model shows that the first stars and galaxies would have formed around black holes in the early universe. Also, she said, primordial black holes would have had the ability to grow into supermassive black holes by feasting on gas and stars in their vicinity, or by merging with other black holes...

“Our study shows that without introducing new particles or new physics, we can solve mysteries of modern cosmology from the nature of dark matter itself to the origin of super-massive black holes,” [Miami physics professor Nico] Cappelluti said.

Primordial black holes also may resolve another cosmological puzzle: the excess of infra-red radiation, synced with X-ray radiation, that has been detected from distant, dim sources scattered around the universe. Natarajan and her colleagues said growing, primordial black holes would present “exactly” the same radiation signature.

Best of all, the existence of primordial black holes can be proven — or disproven — in the near future, courtesy of the James Webb Space Telescope and ESA’s Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) mission announced for the 2030s.

Major discoveries are occurring in every field of science at a rapid rate, thanks to the development of tools like the Webb Space Telescope. That's a good reason for us Boomers to stay sentient as long as possible, just to see what happens.

In the Book of Genesis readers rush past the beginning where everything is formless, void, and dark in order to get to the light and the creation of the world. It appears that the study of darkness would be very much worth our while.

Archimedes Would Have Approved

Physics prof. Tim Gay

Physicists who are obsessed with American football have puzzled over the mystery of a perfectly thrown pass: [bold added]

The start of a football pass exhibits the properties of “angular momentum”—once launched, it spins away, nose upward, maintaining much of its rotation, but then, after reaching its apex, it falls to earth (and hopefully, into the hands of a wide receiver) nose down, still spinning, still symmetrical.

To [Nebraska professor Tim] Gay, this flight pattern didn’t add up. Physics told him that the ball, at a certain point in its trajectory, should start wobbling and tumbling, counter-clockwise. Gravity alone couldn’t explain why a pass could begin as a beautiful spiral and also finish as a beautiful spiral.

Something else had to be going on.

After years of study they figured it out:

We have shown that the paradox is simply resolved by focusing on the gyroscopic precession driven by the torque that results from the ball’s nonzero angle of attack and by the interaction of that torque with the ball’s angular momentum.

That's all very enlightening---and I'm sure the discovery will help in the development of football-playing robots--but I, as well as 99.99% of the population, prefer to learn how to throw a football from coaches and players.

Heavy Prediction

(WSJ art by Ryan Inzana)

Space archaeologist Alice Gorman says that gravity will be "the most precious commodity of the next space age." [bold added]

To maintain their bone density and muscle mass, crew members must exercise for over two hours each day. Without this discipline, the astronauts could end up with osteoporosis. Living in gravity so different from Earth’s has consequences, including vision impairment and diminished organ function...

Living in variable gravity environments makes gravity a commodity that it simply isn’t on Earth; it becomes foreground rather than background. Power may be determined by whomever controls access to specially designed, high-gravity environments where people can maintain their strength. Gravity may indeed be rationed, and depriving people of access could have serious health (and even legal) consequences.

Dr. Gorman quickly dispenses with the spinning-spaceship solution to artificial gravity:

The earliest space stations, such as the rotating wheel conceived by the Viennese engineer Hermann Noordung in 1929, were designed to produce “artificial” gravity by spinning, like the centrifuge astronauts train in.....In the 1960s, NASA considered spinning space stations, but decided that astronauts might not enjoy being spun like a sock in a washing machine. Having been in a gravity rotor in an amusement park, I can categorically say that I did not enjoy it.

I applaud Alice Gorman for thinking outside the capsule, but it seems that there are many features of earthly life--oxygen, natural food, copious running water, convenient sanitation, privacy, pets--that will be in short supply in space. I doubt gravity will be "the most precious", but then again she's the expert.

It's All Connected

James Peebles, 2019 Physics Nobel laureate, discusses his work in cosmology: [bold added]

Michel Mayor, Didier Queloz, and James Peebles (WSJ)

“We have very clear evidence that our universe did expand from a hot, dense state, but although the theory is thoroughly tested, we still must admit that dark matter and dark energy are mysterious,” Dr. Peebles said. “Although we have made great advances in understanding the nature and evolution of our universe, there are still many open questions.”

Lyrics from the first verse of the theme song of the hit series The Big Bang Theory:

Our whole universe was in a hot dense state
Then nearly fourteen billion years ago expansion started. Wait...
The Earth began to cool
The autotrophs began to drool
Neanderthals developed tools
We built a wall (we built the pyramids)
Math, science, history, unraveling the mystery
That all started with the big bang!

In the series finale of the Big Bang Theory Sheldon and Amy win the Nobel Prize in Physics.

In the real-life presentation of the Physics award to Dr. Peebles, Swiss astronomer Michel Mayor, and Swiss astrophysicist Didier Queloz, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences member Ulf Danielsson quoted,

"Our whole universe was in a hot, dense state, then nearly 14 billion years ago expansion started.'

Historians of the distant future may well be perplexed by this melding together of music, television entertainment, and theoretical physics in a hot dense state. And note the coincidence of the fictional culmination of the 12-year TV show in Stockholm with the actual Physics award going to someone who studied the Big Bang as his life's work.

The (inter) action is spooky.