Stephen Wright
New
Thanks for the links. I believe I see "post-selection" is the root-cause for prehension, as an overview of what I read of your thesis. Paul Davies is a leading figure in exploring ideas such as this and I will start to do more homework to understand how his analysis of the process can fit into a bigger picture.I've outlined the proposed mechanism in a few recent articles, especially these two: http://thenightshirt.com/?p=3441, http://thenightshirt.com/?p=3519 . Stringing a number of "precognitive neurons" together would create circuits that tended (on aggregate) to fire milliseconds or even seconds in the advance of a stimulus. The exact mechanism is speculative, but it would explain not only psi anomalies but also the various timing shenanigans that Libet discovered in the late 1970s, not to mention "mirror neurons," etc. The hypothesis that precognitive neurons exist is based on a helping of "if it can happen in nature, life will find a way,"
(Paul Davies has already argued that post-selection explains the arising of life in the universe). "Post-selection" is the quantum computing parameter that prevents any retrocausal influence from being paradoxical; transferred to philosophy/metaphysics, it's just a statement of the truism that we live in a possible universe.
I’d bet money that select neurons deep within specific circuits of the brain are going to turn out to be finely tuned time machines that fire before they are stimulated. - E. Wargo
While trying very hard to hang-on to my personal physical/digital tokens that represent value in a trading exchanges, I would not deter your enthusiasm for the above risk proposition. I agree that there must be a corresponding physical activity to how we plan for and affect the future. Looking into the future for possible information objects that one desires - is the basic stuff in all literature about the human condition.
It is the organization of planning, designing and desiring that is the focus of living thing's mental activity. "Its" (as in its from bits) come from these informational activities; and not the reverse case, where physical activity is the sole cause of information bits toward an end. The hallmark of life is the mental activity in the structuring of bits connecting them to perceived affordances. I am wondering that the "post-selection" -- which is of interest to P. C. Davies and yourself -- is just our mind's ability to perceive information objects, which have standing that spans physical space/time.
I think very highly of Orch-Or research and of G. Tononi's Integrated Information hypothesis.