I read your responses to my latest posts, and have thought about how best to reply all day. I realize that I have fenced myself into the position of having to provide explanations to a non-specialist concerning the nuances of and regarding the experimental methodologies and issues confronting the study of consciousness, the brain, and quantum physics. In short, to provide explanations regarding the least understood and most complicated fields of study that exist.
It is precisely this complicated nature, however (at least concerning cognition and the brain), that makes such a simplification somewhat possible. I can easily explain how the research on the neural correlates of consciousness (or any other attempts to reduce the “mind” or consciousness to neurophysiology) is plagued by fundamental issues in general and suffers from severe limitations in the extreme cases of the careful application of current experimental capacities to well-designed experiments and their subsequent analyses.
First, current brain-imaging technologies are fairly unproblematic (extremely so, actually) from a technical, engineering perspective. MRI, fMRI, and some other technologies are so exact they are used in experiments in fields like quantum computing, nanotechnology, and quantum control. However, very few scientists using these technologies to study cognition/consciousness/the “mind” are able to understand the nature of (or mathematical analysis of) the signal data generated, let along the fundamentals of the physics exploited by these instruments. Most cognitive neuroscientists lack an understanding of mathematics necessary to really understand the statistical methods they employ, and are almost completely ignorant of any physics or chemistry.
Second, even if we consider the relatively sophisticated applications of neuroimaging technologies in order to reduce the “mind” to correlated neurophysiological activity, we immediately encounter serious problems:
“Brain imaging, as the newest tool in our attempts to solve the mind-brain problem, has garnered most of the attention in this field in recent years. Unfortunately, much of the newly forthcoming body of knowledge highlights our inability to resolve certain of the most fundamental scientific controversies. The problem is that imaging techniques such as the fMRI are gradually demonstrating that however useful they are in studying neuroanatomy and neurophysiology, they are not as useful as was originally hoped in the search for brain correlates of cognitive activity. Indeed, it may not be an exaggeration to assert that the most robust conclusion to be drawn from this work is that specifically with regard to its application to the study of cognitive processes brain imaging has demonstrated that it is not doing what it is supposed to do — that is, localize modular cognitive processes in a particular place or a number of particular places on or in the brain. Furthermore, every day we learn more about potential artifacts, statistical misdirections, and other confounds that raise fundamental questions about this approach to solving the mind-brain problem.”
Uttal, W. R. (2011). Mind and Brain: A Critical Appraisal of Cognitive Neuroscience. MIT Press.
Third, neuroscience research rests upon the assumption that the mind can be reducible to the brain (or that cognition more generally can be), although this is seldom expressed (there is generally no need; the evidence that there exists a clear, causal relationship between cognition and neural activity is overwhelming and there is no evidence that the former does not depend upon the latter). That this assumption is made is unproblematic; the issue with the assumption emerges when our current inability to connect neurophysiological/computational models of neural activity with anything more than basic cognitive processes. Cognitive neuroscience research (including all fMRI and other functional neuroimaging research) depends upon the use of statistical analyses of signals (usually with various poor assumptions that plague the sciences thanks to the widespread use of NHST) to analyze proxies of neural activity far too vast for our most complicated neural population models (which are theoretical anyway, and rely upon imaging and various assumptions as well as some properties of information theory and other mathematical fields for their very existence).
In other words, mental/cognitive states/processes are defined operationally and then attempts are made to determine if a suitably unique region of the brain across subjects shows a suitably high level of activation during these predefined states/processes. No mental state or cognitive process has ever been shown to correlate consistently with ANY unique brain state, and likely will never be. Cognitive processes relate to neural processes that are constantly in flux. Also, as we lack a rather basic understanding of “the neural code”, we can’t even in principle produce models of neural activity which could be used to compare neuroimaging data to so as to allow for a kind of “idealistic” reductionism of brain activity to idealized mathematical models.
Fourth, the “consistent histories” approach to quantum theory at best excludes the necessity of a conscious observer from quantum mechanics. It is, however, fundamentally rooted in the expression of systems in terms of probabilities and thus does nothing to rid us of the correlations between measurements of systems which demonstrate (in principle 100%) correlations that satisfy your 1-4 requirements.
Fifth, I have included a bibliography I have made extremely brief so as not to overwhelm. Because my central field has been neuroscience, I have started with brain studies rather than quantum physics or the status of materialism in contemporary physics. I have tried to limit myself to one or two sources that are freely available and recent for a variety of important issues in the field. I have, with one exception, not included any books, volumes, dissertations, etc. I have tried to refer only to easily accessible material (i.e., no studies which depend crucially upon an ability to understand and/or a familiarity with the technical aspects of neuroimaging, neurodynamics, etc.).
Bennett, C. M., & Miller, M. B. (2010). How reliable are the results from functional magnetic resonance imaging?. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1191(1), 133-155.
Brett, M., Johnsrude, I. S., & Owen, A. M. (2002). The problem of functional localization in the human brain. Nature reviews neuroscience, 3(3), 243-249.
Carp, J. (2012). On the plurality of (methodological) worlds: estimating the analytic flexibility of fMRI experiments. Frontiers in neuroscience, 6, 149.
Carp, J. (2012). The secret lives of experiments: methods reporting in the fMRI literature. Neuroimage, 63(1), 289-300.
Del Pinal, G., & Nathan, M. J. (2013). There and up again: on the uses and misuses of neuroimaging in psychology. Cognitive neuropsychology, 30(4), 233-252.
Eklund, A., Nichols, T. E., & Knutsson, H. (2016). Cluster failure: Why fMRI inferences for spatial extent have inflated false-positive rates. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 201602413.
Fiedler, K. (2011). Voodoo correlations are everywhere—not only in neuroscience. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6(2), 163-171.
Haig, B. D. (2013). Detecting psychological phenomena: Taking bottom-up research seriously. The American journal of psychology, 126(2), 135-153.
Hanson, S. J., & Bunzl, M. (Eds.). (2010). Foundational Issues in Human Brain Mapping. MIT Press.
Kievit, R. A., Romeijn, J. W., Waldorp, L. J., Wicherts, J. M., Scholte, H. S., & Borsboom, D. (2011). Modeling mind and matter: Reductionism and psychological measurement in cognitive neuroscience. Psychological Inquiry, 22(2), 139-157.
Klein, C. (2010). Images are not the evidence in neuroimaging. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 61(2), 265-278.
Lavazza, A., & De Caro, M. (2010). Not so fast. On some bold neuroscientific claims concerning human agency. Neuroethics, 3(1), 23-41.
Parens, E., & Johnston, J. (2014). Neuroimaging: Beginning to appreciate its complexities. Hastings Center Report, 44(s2), S2-S7.
Petersson, K. M., Nichols, T. E., Poline, J. B., & Holmes, A. P. (1999). Statistical limitations in functional neuroimaging II. Signal detection and statistical inference. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences, 354(1387), 1261-1281.
Poldrack, R. A. (2008). The role of fMRI in cognitive neuroscience: where do we stand?. Current opinion in neurobiology, 18(2), 223-227.
Raemaekers, M., Du Plessis, S., Ramsey, N. F., Weusten, J. M. H., & Vink, M. (2012). Test–retest variability underlying fMRI measurements. Neuroimage, 60(1), 717-727.
Ramsey, J. D., Hanson, S. J., Hanson, C., Halchenko, Y. O., Poldrack, R. A., & Glymour, C. (2010). Six problems for causal inference from fMRI. neuroimage, 49(2), 1545-1558.
Rigoni, D., Kühn, S., Sartori, G., & Brass, M. (2011). Inducing disbelief in free will alters brain correlates of preconscious motor preparation the brain minds whether we believe in free will or not. Psychological science, 22(5), 613-618.
Schwartzman, A., Dougherty, R. F., Lee, J., Ghahremani, D., & Taylor, J. E. (2009). Empirical null and false discovery rate analysis in neuroimaging. Neuroimage, 44(1), 71-82.
Turkheimer, F. E., Aston, J. A., & Cunningham, V. J. (2004). On the logic of hypothesis testing in functional imaging. European journal of nuclear medicine and molecular imaging, 31(5), 725-732.
Van Horn, J. D., & Poldrack, R. A. (2009). Functional MRI at the crossroads. International Journal of Psychophysiology, 73(1), 3-9.
Vul, E., Harris, C., Winkielman, P., & Pashler, H. (2009). Puzzlingly high correlations in fMRI studies of emotion, personality, and social cognition. Perspectives on psychological science, 4(3), 274-290.
Vul, E., & Pashler, H. (2012). Voodoo and circularity errors. Neuroimage, 62(2), 945-948.
Wardlaw, J. M., O'Connell, G., Shuler, K., DeWilde, J., Haley, J., Escobar, O., ... & Schafer, B. (2011). “Can it read my mind?”–What do the public and experts think of the current (mis) uses of neuroimaging?. PloS one, 6(10), e25829.
If you can't find any copy of any of these, I'll provide them
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