It gives a possible answer to consciousness as a holonomic experience inside the brain.
Holographic storage network
The holonomic brain theory or model, developed by neuroscientist Karl Pribram initially in collaboration with physicist David Bohm, is a model of human cognition that describes the brain as a holographic storage network .
And that directly addresses your questions about sense of self and relationship to the universe.
There is no real divide. It’s all contained in the Wholeness.
And that is a mathematically logical hypothesis.
I believe I am using your parameters, wherever they may lie. Ideally, there are no parameters and the wholeness is a smooth plenum (Bohm)
Copilot:
In mathematics and philosophy, the term plenum refers to a space that is completely filled, with no gaps or voids. It is often used in discussions about the nature of reality, set theory, and ontology.
IOW, there is no divide and we are just an extension of the greater wholeness that is self-referential, but not necessarily sentient, which seems to be an emergent property of biochemistry and biology, beginning at very small complex organisms such as single celled organisms like bacteria. Perhaps cells are tiny antennas.
p.s. Modern multi-purpose antennas used fractal configurations, as they seem to respond to all frequencies if properly patterned.
Which coincides with my previous mention of CDT (Causal Dynamical Triangulation) as a fundamental property of a fractally “unfolding” universal reality.
Rather than looking for what separates us from everything else, I always try to look for what connects us to everything else. Common universal denominators will eventually lead us to a TOE by general concensus.
Fractals seem to be one common denominator of everything we currently know about the universe.
And fractals look like they evolve mathematically via a very simple equation.
I don’t understand how the following formulation can be confused - unless there is a deliberate effort to confuse and misunderstand.
Body + Brain + interacting with exterior and interior reality = Mind.
Damned straight there.
Without a deeper understanding of one’s own body, and where it came from, and the various forces that drive its emotions, most of life can’t make sense.
I don’t see how that inner-city kid can come to understand and get a handle on his demons, without appreciating the interaction of the kaleidoscope of emotions within oneself. Especially the little secret of how some of our worst impulses are tied together with some of our best emotions/impulses. Realizing that on a visceral level, hands one a means of facing, recognizing and moderating those counterproductive impulses and enhancing our productive behaviors, that in turn produces positive results that can lead for further productive interactions.
Focus on living today as best one can, and tomorrow has a way of taking care of itself. At least I’ve found it so in my own life time.
As for dealing with today’s insane world, where the cards are increasingly stacked against regular people, and that odds are the future holds nothing but more difficulty, fear, heartbreak, and catastrophes small and big - the need for a firm foundation to carry us through is more important than ever.
There is God, seems to be very popular again. Believe as hard as one can, and heaven will be there for us after our living heck-on-Earth is over. But that envelopes us in a bubble of disconnect from the real world, and forces one into one’s imagination and an existence of endless dog-chasing-tail.
I found my salvation in embracing Earth’s reality, understanding some of the countless amazing intricacies that came together over the past four and half billion years to create me, and this amazing Earth - that humanity is heck-bent on destroying just as fast as we can - those evolutionary intricacies were recapitulated during my gestation, and went into the body I inhabit, being aware of that empowers the mind with useful information.
Such as appreciating the partnership between your body-brain and mind - especially the part where one appreciates one’s own body has agendas and knowledge beyond our mind’s ability to touch - and that being more receptive to the way your body communicates with your mind, makes a real world difference in one’s behavior,
state of mind, and health.
I could go on for pages on how that makes a real world difference, but you won’t even get the formulation straight, because you seem too busy pulling out your hair over how all this irritates you. Which I don’t understand, since it’s fascinating, with way the heck more to learn about and discuss, with knowledge we can utilize in our day to day world.
What does the sub-atomic mathematical realm offer a living breathing human trying to deal with a challenging life? Beyond idealistic notions, there’s nothing to point to. Or?
So why get pissed off if someone wants to dig into the substance?
You even admitted that in focusing on the tiny, we achieve a point of diminishing returns. I suggest with the biological advances of the past couple decades, we’re well past that point of diminishing returns.
We are the problem, and without some serious uncomfortable reexamination, inner growth is impossible.
It’s time to redirect attention to what’s going on inside of us.
(Okay, only in a pretend world. In this world we inhabit, our free fall will simply continue, because, as a pal of mine pointed out to me a couple days ago, serious thinking is too much of a bother - comfort level is all most want. Accept and give up.)
Then you’ve never actually paid attention to what I’ve written regarding Sapolsky! Because his work places a sharpie underline, supporting my outlook and conception of the body/brain interacting with physical reality (interior and exterior) producing our mind.
That’s the problem. You don’t see it, so you don’t engage with my comment. That wouldn’t be a problem if you didn’t instead write 200 words about how wrong I am. Is it so hard to say, “well, that’s interesting, but I’m not getting it” or my favorite “please clarify”.
But you don’t demonstrate how it makes a difference. You just say it does, then demand that I “get the formulation straight”. I’ve seen the thing you put in big bold letters here. I get it. I’ve reflected it back to you. Move on already. Show us what you do with it.
Like that. I answered that. Did you respond to what I said, or did you just ask the question again?
If you dug into the substance, I wouldn’t have the critique that are NOT DIGGING INTO THE SUBSTANCE. Dig in already, instead of telling me I haven’t got the formulation right.
This is the opposite of dialog. You found the sentence that you agree with and said, “Ah-HA! See!”.
Do you understand the difference between “rarely” and “never”? When you’ve talked about him, I’ve engaged that. But those have been short and rare conversations.
Your comment was about people living in difficult places.
My response was about getting to know our insides. I don’t think you see that.
I my most recent walk with Maddy I realized another layer of this.
I fully accept and taken on the ownership of being an evolved animal, a mammal, in a body through which all I experience and know must be processed. I see myself through those kinds of lens and it’s done nothing but be of benefit my entire life.
There is nothing more important to a whole life, then getting to know oneself, etc.
That is our relationship with the body we possess, our relationship with the knowledge we possess. That’s real down to earth living stuff.
That’s what you refuse to grasp.
You hold on that Abrahamic hubris, that human specialness/godgiveness/whateverTF-itedness the imagination will allow.
We must have our sense of superior, but that superiority has created this social reality that’s destroying itself - and you get frustrated with me. You can’t imagine what frustration feels like.
We became Gods, but didn’t learn an iota of wisdom. Why?
and now we’re on the fast tract to destroying our society, there after, the current biosphere itself.
You get mad at me, but are oblivious to what I mean with being an Earth Centrist, it’s not just some cute little jingle - or appreciating the Physical Reality ~ Human Mind divide. Instead you toss up your favorites, that to me in 2025, simply seem like enablers to our American self destruction.
When someone asks me that, I feel honor bound to response and try to clarify, you get insulted. Why, you think you are so correct, it brooks no examination?
Look at the acid test of this half century of self indulgence - look at what is happening to America right now, don’t tell me I’m the disrespectful one; or being unreasonable; or out of line . . . .
I said that you don’t ask that. I am not insulted by questions of clarification. I’m annoyed by comments that state that I am having trouble grasping what you’re saying.
I’m addressing how you engage in these conversations. That is out of line. It is unrelated to all the out-of-line self-indulgent people out there.
One bridge too far.
That still leaves the key point.
Back to what this thread is about Bohm’s key to Infinite Potential.
We keep getting told in a hundred different forms that seeking the Truth out there in the quantum realm is about understanding our consciousness.
But that is wrong. It cannot. If anything all this self-indulgence leads us away from the understandable facts of our humanity and better understanding our human condition and dealing with our challenging short finite life for that matter.
The analogy of the quantum realm being to an atom, as a tree is to the known Universe - drives home that point of how utterly disconnected that realm is from our biological Earthly realm
Bohm’s quantum mysteries holds no information for the difficult intellectual endeavor of understanding our selves, and it’s a travesty that the evolution and biology of our selves has been so sidelined in our society. Furthermore, I believe that it is worth being witness to it and mourning it loss, because of how this general disconnect from our selves has allowed us to get transformed into these Consumer Units we’ve become, while our humanity got buried under stuff. Even if it makes people unconformable. Heck we don’t have a clue how uncomfortable things will become for us, thanks to our collective failure to reckon with ourselves and this life nurturing Earth of ours.
That’s not baiting, or leading, or trolling, that is about adding some perspective to the discussion.
A tree may be insignificant to the universe, but I still plant trees. By the same logic, I still have interest in quantum physics. How it relates to consciousness or how it compares to an atom is not really something I think about much.
So it is actually not about appreciating the physical connections - it’s about our imagination?
Leaving us with the conclusion that this quantum consciousness and “Infinite Potential” - is just words for getting attention, and that it actually has nothing to do with any of the biological realm, of the reality of our lives?
Yeah, that could be seen as a leading question.
Leading back to my difficulty with the magical notions of Self only existing within one’s Mind.
How does that work?
Have you been reading too much inthedarkness? It’s physics. The other disciplines build on physics, but quantum biology is very new so I don’t know much about it. The early thought on how quantum related to neurons was more or less abandoned. If something new is discovered, I’ll read it.
I don’t need to know every connection to know that physics tells us about the formation of the physical universe as we know it and duh we’re in it.
Why would I find that interesting?
What I read there is self-indulgent clap-trap. (excuse my French) Especially considering it was writing in the '90s - it’s another example of Us going way beyond what the evidence justifies. While ignoring the obvious in front off us. He used his name to get a free ride with his philosophizing (it sure wasn’t science), that a lesser known personality would not have received. Also, keep in mind, Penrose has said an awful lot of things
I can’t for the life of me understand why people believe it’s “scientific” to totally skip over the biology and instead run to the unimaginable quantum realm for our answers. The hubristic arrogance is beyond me.
I found some learned fellows that pretty well represent my feelings in a more thoughtful format than my 2nd sentence.
Roger Penrose is a mathematician, and a brilliant one. His contributions to the field of mathematics are significant enough to have won him many awards, including an award he shared with Stephen Hawking.
Unfortunately, like many brilliant people, he has never quite realized that brilliance in one field doesn’t automatically make him brilliant in all fields. He’s a smart guy. He is also a raving loon.
For example, he’s written a great deal about how consciousness must somehow be a quantum mechanics phenomenon, in spite of the fact that he knows little about biology and less about brains.
Here’s the thing about science: Science doesn’t care how many awards you’ve won or how brilliant you are.
Science does not operate on Revealed Insight. Science isn’t religion.
Any person’s ideas are only as good as the evidence that supports them. If Albert Einstein tells you something that isn’t supported by evidence, it matters not how well-respected or famous he is; you should not believe him.
(I use Einstein deliberately; despite how brilliant he was, he refused to accept plate tectonics; in fact, the last paid professional job he did as a scientist was to write the foreword for a book about how plate tectonics must be nonsense. Evidence says he was wrong.)
No, you should not believe his ideas about an oscillating universe, because the best available evidence suggests that isn’t how the universe works.
What is that saying people keep using?
Facts don’t care about your feelings.
Well, facts also don’t care how famous you are.
Now here are a couple of examples of, what seems to me, sober examinations of quantum realm, as it relates to our bodies. This is where real evidence and answers are to be found.
And this one really ought to float your boat - it’s amazing.
0:00 Gut microbiome updates 0:54 Basics of microbiome in the human body 2:10 Circadian rhythm and microbes 3:25 Autism connection to microbes in our guts 4:40 Anxiety and bacteria - poop study 6:10 Did they help develop our intelligence? 8:50 More poop experiments 10:10 Conclusions and what’s next?
And at what level do you think bacteria use “information”?
Remember “quorum sensing” (Bassler)?
All this is at nano scale and the processing network in all Eukaryote is made up from microtubules. And microtubules work at quantum level. Which is perfectly logical.
Everything else is BS.
Do revisit Bonnie Bassler and refresh …
p.s. electrochemistry works at quantum (molecular) level.
Copilot: Molecules share information at quantum levels
Molecules share information at quantum levels12345. Chemists use quantum numbers to predict energy levels and shapes of orbitals, which are fundamental in understanding molecular geometry and chemical reactions1. Quantum information science explores the nature of information at the quantum level, where bits can be both zero and one at the same time3. Quantum information theory provides novel concepts and techniques for understanding how matter behaves at the most microscopic levels4.
Bassler gave a great talk and I buy what she said.
But that was ground breaking work, I can bet there have been surprises and advances.
You make it sound like the two notions are at odds.
Regarding, microtubules, yes, they are an element in this, that’s why I was sharing, I figured you’d love the new info. Possibly even one step closer to the promise you see.
But you keep wanting to declare a home run, when there’s still more bases left to tap.
To my knowledge there is no alternate “systemic network” that is capable of processing information at the scale that is required. You need trillions of processors to process trillions of bits of informaton streaming through that network and being “reduced” against trillions of bits of memory in order to orchestrate an objective reduction that is cognizable as a “focused thought” process.
No matter what or how these processes occur, the biological equipment needed can only be found in the microtubule network. There is nothing else that is as complex as the microtubule network.
The human brain contains approximately 86 billion neurons 2. These neurons are responsible for transmitting information throughout the nervous system, enabling everything from thought and memory to movement and sensation.
For a long time, scientists believed the number was 100 billion, but a more precise counting method developed by neuroscientist Suzana Herculano-Houzel led to the revised estimate of 86 billion.
Please stop. We are talking way beyond our pay grade.
Of course microtubules are a part of it.
I don’t think we know enough to state what you do.
You’re drifting into absolutes, our bodies are so amazingly complex, on so many different levels, we can only stand back in awe, happy with the beautiful outlines that the known evidence is presenting to us, and am unconcerned about some ultimate absolute truth.
You are telling me, you understand microtubules.
Let’s agree to disagree.
I would say we know about them,
but we don’t understand them,
there’s much more still to learn about all that is going on down in that neighborhood before we will be close to that.
We know the vast number of microtubules and their synaptic connections to know that they are the only “common denominator” in all Eukaryotes worldwide.
Those simple facts are sufficient to make an educated proposition that establishes functionality and the emergent result of consciousness at levels of increased complexity and sophistication, depending on the evolution of all species on earth.
Note that microtubules form the mitotic spindle that performs the exact copying of DNA chromosomes during mitosis.
Consider the implication of that “known” fact.
The mitotic spindle is a crucial structure involved in cell division, specifically during mitosis and meiosis. It is primarily composed of microtubules and associated proteins that facilitate the separation of chromosomes
CC, there is nothing else remotely near it in the human and all other living biomes. Even some of our symbiont bacteria have microtubules and most bacteria are Prokaryotes that came before the Eukaryotes.
If we consider that all living organisms are types of biological computers (information processing machines), and MT are present in all different species and share this as a common denominator, it is pretty safe to assume that the common denominator is responsible for the “information processes” in all these separate species.
It is known that MT are responsible for both inter and intra-cellular information processing and defective MT cause mental degradation such as Alzheimers, what more evidence is necessary to conclude MT are “involved”?
The reason why we have so little information on MT is due to size at nanoscale which makes observation at quantum levels very difficult.
And Roger Penrose may be a littl crazy, but he isn’t stupid!
I don’t understand microtubules, but when I see a “variable dipolar coil”, I see a variable resistor or amplifier, else natual selection would not have found it useful for continued existence and procreation of all living species.
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