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Article 1840 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: weemba@libra.wistar.upenn.edu (Matthew P Wiener)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Marshall's version of Froehlich's theory
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Date: 4 Dec 91 02:23:24 GMT
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Searching through the library, I came across a very curious paper,
with an !EXPERIMENTALLY TESTABLE! quantum pretheory of consciousness:
I N Marshall "Consciousness and Bose-Einstein Condensates" NEW IDEAS
IN PSYCHOLOGY,v7,n1,pp73-83,1989.  (This journal was easy to find.
It's down and to the right of THE JOURNAL OF MATHEMATICAL PSYCHOLOGY.)  

His work is based on the Froehlich pumped phonon high temperature
Bose-Einstein condensation model that I mentioned in a previous post.
One of the features of the model is that there is a cutoff parameter
for energy input below which the condensate dissolves.  Marshall
proposes that anesthetics work by blocking this energy source, and
argues that if our consciousness is dependent on this condensate,
a definite prediction of how much anesthetic to use can follow from
the detailed biochemophysics of each relevant anesthetic.

Whatever the eventual relevance for AI, science fiction can use this
today.  What other Bose-Einstein condensations come to, uh, mind?
Let's see... superconductors, superfluids, the interiors of neutron
stars, laser light, Carl Sagan's brain.  You know, the usual.
-- 
-Matthew P Wiener (weemba@libra.wistar.upenn.edu)


