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NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF ADVANCED STUDIES
Indian Institute of Science campus, Bangalore, India

NIAS Consciousness Studies Programme
Email: niasconsciousnessprogramme@gmail.com
Facebook: NIAS-Consciousness-Studies-Programme/1529879760626616
Website: www.niasconsciousnesscentre.com
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NIAS Consciousness Studies Programme  Invites you to a  PUBLIC LECTURE   on   “Does consciousness depend on quantum brain biology?”   by   Prof Stuart Hameroff MD Professor, Anesthesiology and Psychology, Director, Center for Consciousness Studies Banner-University Medical Center The University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona   Date : Tuesday, 14th November, 2017 Time : 5.00 PM (Coffee/Tea-4.30 PM) Venue: Lecture Hall, NIAS, IISc Campus, Bengaluru 560012
Abstract: Efforts to understand consciousness have evolved in three directions: 1) Consciousness emerges from complex computation among ‘simple’ brain neurons, 2) Consciousness resonates in a multi-scale brain hierarchy extending inside neurons, more like music than computation, and 3) Consciousness depends on a fundamental property of the universe, e.g. in panpsychism, Eastern philosophy, and relativistic quantum physics. The Penrose-Hameroff ‘Orch OR’ theory spans these 3 approaches, ascribing consciousness to ‘orchestrated’ quantum computations in dendritic-somatic microtubules inside brain neurons (e.g. layer 5 cortical pyramidal cells). The quantum computations are proposed to ‘halt’ by Penrose objective reduction (‘OR’), a property of fundamental spacetime geometry and solution to the quantum ‘measurement problem’, selecting discrete moments of conscious experience and/or choice, and regulating membrane and synaptic functions. Some aspects of Orch OR have been verified, for example microtubules have been shown to have cascades of quantum resonances in terahertz, gigahertz, megahertz and kilohertz frequencies (which may extend to EEG in hertz). And anesthetic gases (which selectively erase consciousness) appear to act by dampening microtubule quantum terahertz oscillations. Orch OR also provides brain mechanisms for advances in artificial intelligence including back-propagation, and hidden layer convolutional networks (‘deep learning’). Orch OR has more explanatory power, experimental verification and practical implications (e.g. treatment of mental and cognitive disorders) than other theories of consciousness.
 
References:
(1) Craddock et al (2017) Anesthetic alterations of collective terahertz oscillations in tubulin correlate with clinical potency. Nature – Scientific Reports 7(1):9877. doi:10.1038/s41598-017-09992-7,
(2) Hameroff S, Penrose R (2014) Consciousness in the universe: A review of the Orch OR theory. Phys Life Rev 11(1):39-78. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1571064513001188?via%3Dihub
 

MINDS AND MACHINES: DEBATES ON THE NATURE OF INTELLIGENCE AND EXPERIENCE

 Register Now & Reserve Your Seat! 

A One Day Workshop with Experts from Machine Intelligence, Big Data, Philosophy of Science, Information Theory, Brain Imaging Technologies, Social Cognition & Consciousness Studies. 
 

27 December 2017 - National Institute of Advanced Studies 


What is “Intelligence”? What is “Experience”? Is intelligence the power to compute, to be logical, to make rational decisions, to perform, to be successful, and to learn from “experiences”? Experience might sound an anathema in the discussion on “intelligence” since it brings the classical debates on subject vs data, subjectivity vs objectivity, and also functional success vs ethics. Can a machine have experience? Is human intelligence or machine intelligence possible without the richness presented by the frailties and intensity of personal experiences? Can one have self-consciousness without having an experience or being an “experiencer” and the agent of action? What is intelligence? How is intelligence understood in various disciplines like computer science, philosophy, psychology and the arts? What does it mean for an entity to be an agent and perform an act? Is it possible for a machine to ‘think’ and ‘act’ the way humans do? What is the place of aesthetic, creative and profound experiences in deciding and influencing “intelligence”, behaviour and value systems?

This one day Workshop organised by NIAS Consciousness Studies Programme aims at fostering discussions across disciplines around experiential traditions on the nature of intelligence and experience. The Resource persons for the Workshop will present, and contextualise perspectives from the fields of computer science, information theory, neuroscience and brain imaging, performance arts, and philosophy to engage with the frontier questions concerning intelligence and the limits of human experience.

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