Fido the Yak

Mariela Szirko writes (in Effects of Relativistic Motions in the Brain and Their Physiological Relevance):

Every mind is found to be primarily an unconnected, and unmergeable, eclosion or “pop-out” of “existential finitude.” Although rare, the word “eclosion” will nevertheless appear often in this article. The phrase “existential finitude” denotes for natural scientists every reality able to sense and move a portion of nature while altering herself by sedimenting those causal involvements away from temporality – this refers to an “instant” and not a time sequence. The designation “away from temporality” thus means “not on a time course but inside the instant,” specifying where such reality occurs and simultaneizes the sedimented sequences (“memories”) of her reactions to her causal interactions. This is why any reality that knows itself ought to possess memory: since nature vacates itself outside actuality and consequently every thing in nature, including each mind, exists only within the physical instant, the preservation of memories is an effect due to absence of time course rather than the presence of brain engrams.

The abstract:

On scales small enough, cerebral biophysics is not an exception to established laws of physics applicable to all other occurrences of condensed matter: brains, too, include microphysical components in their tissue that move close to light-speed. The critical question, if and how such motions bring about physiological effects and how this relates to psychological realms, has come to noteworthy results: extended research in our neurobiological tradition suggests an affirmative answer and also describes the formation of psychological features. Neurobiology in Argentine has started in the second half of the eighteenth century and specially focused on electroneurobiology. The angle has proven to be specially suitable for revealing any such effects and, along with older results, this tradition developed more than three decades ago a scientific view about brain-mind issues involved in recovery from swoon, coma, vegetative states, hibernation, general anesthesia, or ordinary sleep. This view assumes that the uncoupling pathologies which disconnect persons from their circumstances share with sleep and the variations of inattention a common mechanism, namely changes in a physiological time-dilation, which is a relativistic effect of motions from the tissue’s microphysical components, and is physiologically operated through coupling with the electroneurobiological states of that tissue. This explanatory model from neurobiology is also of special interest to physicists, since the coupling that operates such a mechanism instances a dynamical mass-variation in some action carriers of a force-field brought forth by way of overlapping variation in the intensity of another force-field. Supported by clinical and neurobiological facts, research related to these findings has been taught in Argentine for many decades; it is only recently that this research comes to the attention of the international scientific community. Valuable for neurobiologists, psychophysiologists, and humanists working on brain-mind issues, also scientists investigating biological dynamical systems, biophysics, mathematical biology, computer biology, or molecular biology can recognize these findings and their clinical applications as relevant data for comprehensive research in their area of specialization.

I was led to Szirko's paper by following the discussion over at Conscious Entities of neuropsychologist Maurits van den Noort, in particular his Human Unconscious Information Processing: The Missing Link between Physics and Consciousness?. Van den Noort's experimental research points to a phenomenon he calls "unconscious non-linear information processing," i.e., having an emotional reaction to a stimulus before the stimulus occurs. Here is his abstract:

The nature of consciousness remains a great mystery. On the one hand, classical models view consciousness as computation among the brain's neurons but fail to address its enigmatic features. On the other hand, quantum processes (superposition of states, nonlocality, entanglement,) also remain mysterious, yet are being harnessed in revolutionary information technologies. In this paper, I would like to discuss several experiments that suggest a special role for unconscious human information processing in the observation process. Could this be the missing link between physics and consciousness?

Because the results of van den Noort's experiments are so surprising, and because they have not been replicated, it seems probable that the experiments may have been seriously flawed. But dang.

posted by Fido the Yak at 8:43 PM.